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Food Chain Radio Show #1227
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
The Hemp High Hurdle
Guest: Doug Fine – Farmer & Author American Hemp Farmer: Adventures and Misadventures in the Cannabis Trade
When we the people began planting seeds in the ground some ten thousand years ago, one of those seeds was likely that of the cannabis plant.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – The Hemp High Hurdle: Can a viable industry be grown from hemp?
The reason for our long, fruitful relationship with cannabis was, and is, the plant’s utility. Not only did its chemicals lift our spirits, but its fibers allowed us to harness the wind. And so wherever we went, cannabis went as well.
But then, the best part of a century ago, we decided that the cannabis plant was no longer useful, and so established laws that prohibited its existence. That prohibition, however, came with unintended consequences. Before prohibition, one could purchase all the cannabis one wanted for a few pennies per pound. After several decades of prohibition, the price of cannabis was thousands of dollars per pound. When something that can be grown for pennies per pound can be sold for thousands of dollars per pound, you end up with the intoxicating side of the cannabis story.
Then, somewhere along the line, we began changing our mind about prohibition. One of the things that helped change our mind was that we realized that we were missing out on the other gifts of cannabis. And when we began calling it “medicine,” the walls of prohibition began to crumble.
It is now legal to grow cannabis throughout the United States, provided one does not grow it for its intoxicating properties. That non-intoxicating variety of cannabis is called “hemp.” That farmers are now planting legal hemp cannabis again leads us to ask…
Leave a comment below: Can a viable industry be grown from hemp?
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