Alexandra Bruce – This new 10-minute documentary does an excellent job of educating us about the stunning amount of application that there are for hemp.
Hemp’s profusion of beneficial properties in so many fields of activity cannot be overstated. Hemp has been wrongfully maligned in recent history by the various interests that compete with hemp, usually with inferior products.
I didn’t trust the process when it first appeared, so I opted out and have been avoiding it ever since. Even when those around me, including my best friend embraced it; I kept my distance. For over five years I’ve refused to climb on the bandwagon; but recently the universal law of three caught up to me, and I finally went to get my medical marijuana card. Within less than two weeks, three different sources encouraged me to get the card, including my new primary care physician at the VA. Yup, the universe was speaking to me in no uncertain terms; time to change.
It isn’t that I thought the whole idea was wrong or anything, just the opposite; I’ve been a supporter of legalized marijuana for years, but I don’t feel like the government has any right to register me as a cannabis user, (considering how well that went for native Americans!) If I sound like a dinosaur it’s because I’ve been smoking the weed for almost fifty years, and for the majority of that time doing so illegally. Not only did many of America’s founding fathers grow hemp, for a time it citizens were required to grow hemp. You see, over the years the U.S. government has had a love/hate relationship with hemp; they want to tie up the ships without turning on the troops.
Cannabis has long been hailed as a medicinal healing herb, in fact the Sears catalog of 1853 carried several cannabis based medicines you could order. In 1937 the Marijuana Tax Act essentially made using the weed legal, if you had the right paperwork. This continued till 1969 when it was thrown out because it violated the fifth amendment. During WWII; American farmers received draft deferments for themselves and their sons; if they grew hemp. Henry Ford once designed and made a car out of hemp. It was 30% lighter and 10 times as strong as steel. It was never produced because of pressure from the competition, who couldn’t compete with it. For very similar reasoning, the AMA has led the charge against legalizing marijuana, despite evidence that hemp cures cancer. The pharmaceutical industry isn’t interested in a cure for cancer because their profits come from selling treatment, not cures. Continue reading
“Hemp is HOT!” So says Marji Graff, CEO of the Okemo Valley Chamber of Commerce in Central Vermont. And it is wonderful to hear her enthusiasm since hemp is sprouting in force within the state.
Vermont has an opportunity to help lead the way in the production of hemp in America, where it has been a Federal offense for the past 70 years.
Currently, the state has 12 registered growers and if American Seed and Oil Company has its way, there will be 1,000 acres in hemp production by the spring of 2015.
Growers are nervous. Despite the fact that it is legal to grow hemp in Vermont, it is still considered a crime in the United States of America. In fact, we are the only country in the world where it is illegal to grow hemp.
In connecting the dots in the history of hemp, it is easy to see that perhaps the number one reason for the prohibition on marijuana was to stop the production of hemp, and thus eliminate competition as corporate America rolled out synthetics and plastics.
The one word of advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s character in the 1967 film, The Graduate, was plastics. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it. Hemp was considered a staple crop on revolutionary farms, used for rope and various and sundry things including the making of sails for ships. Continue reading
Up until the late 1930s, industrial hemp agriculture thrived. Tinctures and tonics of medicinal hemp with the psychoactive ingredient THC were prescribed by AMA physicians and dispensed in pharmacies.
In 1937, Dr. William Woodward, AMA federal legislative counsel, discovered too late that Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) head and former prohibition enforcer Harry Anslinger was zealously pushing through legislation that would threaten the AMA’s use of cannabis called the Marijuana Tax Act.
Woodward protested that he didn’t have time to prepare a case against the legislation because he and his colleagues had no idea that marijuana meant cannabis at first. The term marijuana is a Mexican slang term for cannabis.
The medical professionals used the terms cannabis or hemp for their medicines. Dr. Woodward knew that cannabis was not the devil’s weed depicted by marijuana propaganda. He angrily asserted, “Marijuana is not the correct term… Yet the burden of this bill is placed heavily on the doctors and pharmacists of this country.”
The tax act was a serious tax and potential jail sentencing for anyone using, prescribing, manufacturing, or selling medical cannabis, or growing hemp.
The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed shortly after the magazine Popular Mechanics announced that industrial hemp was about to become the new billion dollar industry with the invention of the hemp decorticator. This was hemp’s equivalent to the cotton gin’s impact on cotton.
Hemp could be used for textile fibers, paper, and even plastics. But until the decorticator’s invention, extracting fibers was too slow and arduous to be competitive with wood pulp for paper and Dupont’s newly developed synthetic fibers.
The superfood tag is awarded to nutrient-dense foods, which pack more nutrients or antioxidants per bite than most other foods. Superfoods are food, not just nutritional extracts, minerals, or vitamins sold as supplements to food, such as B complex capsules, etc.
One may survive on a couple of superfoods, but as meals they aren’t very fulfilling. Nevertheless, as foods, the body accepts them more easily than most extracted supplements. So eat good food with added superfoods as well.
(1) Chlorella is treated by most as a supplement. But it is a food, actually. Around the end of WW II, it was considered as a solution for world hunger because it’s so easy to culture and harvest from fresh water ponds or man-made pools.
That idea was abandoned because chlorella cell walls were too tough to digest. But a technique has been developed to break the cell walls mechanically without damaging the algae.