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According to a recent DEA ruling,
hemp foods will fall under the
category of a Schedule I narcotic after a grace period ending on February 6th, 2002. By that time all retailers and manufacturers are to have disposed of any of their remaining supplies of hemp foods, and already any further manufacture of these products is to have ceased.
This ruling has come about as the DEA is trying to “clarify” the federal language regarding marijuana. Prior to this ruling, there was no official distinction between marijuana and hemp. Now that the DEA has taken care of this little snafu, in typical fashion, what we have left is the endangerment of the fledgling, yet flourishing, hemp industry here in the United States.
The U.S. government, the only government of an industrialized nation to have a ban on the production of industrial hemp, banned marijuana in 1937. However, to this day there are many Americans who do not realize that hemp, the very useful and now THC-free part of the cannabis sativa plant, played a large part in the colonists’ successful boycott of British goods, an act that made a successful American Revolution a reality.
Hemp is today a limitless resource for a variety of industries, being a functional, renewable, bio- degradable, and pesticide-free replacement for virtually any product that is today manufactured from trees or from petroleum. Hemp is also a great source of protein, rivaling the soybean in this regard, and has the added benefit of being a source of Omega-3 and -6 fatty acids, essential in the nutritional requirements for human health.
Thanks to careful crossbreeding, today’s industrial grade hemp is virtually THC-free. Further cleaning procedures are then applied to edible varieties of industrial hemp to render it less than 10 parts per million THC. THC is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. A synthetic variety of THC bearing the brand name Marinol is for some reason recognized as a Schedule III substance by our government. However, any THC coming from its natural source, even at 10 PPM or less in hemp foods, will soon become just as dangerous for anyone to possess as premium, high-grade bud.
That means the hemp industry stands a good chance of becoming America’s latest drug ring. Watch out, because the little market down the street that sells hemp granola is a dangerous neighborhood storehouse with pounds of the stuff. Your kids could get their hands on a big bag of nutritional, tasty, and very illegal drug- free contraband and bring it into your house. Remember, according to Ohio law, more than 100 grams of marijuana is a felony, so if you do decide to allow this risky behavior, make sure you weigh your supply very carefully. But wait, possessing scales and any amount of marijuana can make you a drug dealer too, in the watchful eyes of our American courts.
The distributors of one variety of hemp granola, Nature’s Path, in a recent statement to their retailers, have determined their products to contain less than 1 ppm of THC and are apparently going ahead with business as usual. They have also joined the coalition that is taking this latest DEA (draconian embargo agency) policy to court.
Another distributor of edible hemp products, Hemp Nut, is also saying that they plan to go right ahead and keep producing their own line of edible hemp products, and are boasting that their own products contain no THC whatsoever. They have also taken on a policy of quietly obeying the law rather than urging their government to reevaluate a policy that very well could end up affecting their business.
This ban on hemp foods is the latest in a series of policies in enacted by our government that reflects a heavy-handed and distrusting attitude towards a supposedly free citizenry. Rather than educating ourselves about the substances that surround us inevitably in this modern world, we are left in the dark, unable to make choices because of increasingly oppressive policies. Policies that are affecting issues having less to do with the illegal drugs they originally banned, and more to do with those issues ranging from voter rights (look to November 1997 when a voter initiative in D.C. regarding medical marijuana was overturned by the Senate) to socio-economic privilege (remember the Higher Education Act reform bill that continues to ban financial aid for students convicted of any drug offense? Of course kids not needing financial aid to get an education will not be affected by such a policy).
Perhaps we need to look deeper into America’s drug problem, and in particular, the problems of enforcing it. Flash back to 1937 when marijuana was banned in this country. The driving force behind its prohibition came not from marijuana, or the fear of marijuana, but rather fear of hemp, and that fear came not from the American people at large. Rather, those who had the most to fear from marijuana were already established industrialists that stood to lose from a growing hemp industry. Namely, Lamon Dupont and William Randolph Hearst, two wealthy names whose legacies still dominate the U.S. market. Now that we are seeing policies that are once again endangering true competition in the marketplace, we need to recognize this latest action by the DEA as a puerile policy that is blatantly out of line with a realistic and modem perception of industrial hemp and its place in American industry.
This ruling has come about as the DEA is trying to “clarify” the federal language regarding marijuana. Prior to this ruling, there was no official distinction between marijuana and hemp. Now that the DEA has taken care of this little snafu, in typical fashion, what we have left is the endangerment of the fledgling, yet flourishing, hemp industry here in the United States.
The U.S. government, the only government of an industrialized nation to have a ban on the production of industrial hemp, banned marijuana in 1937. However, to this day there are many Americans who do not realize that hemp, the very useful and now THC-free part of the cannabis sativa plant, played a large part in the colonists’ successful boycott of British goods, an act that made a successful American Revolution a reality.
Hemp is today a limitless resource for a variety of industries, being a functional, renewable, bio- degradable, and pesticide-free replacement for virtually any product that is today manufactured from trees or from petroleum. Hemp is also a great source of protein, rivaling the soybean in this regard, and has the added benefit of being a source of Omega-3 and -6 fatty acids, essential in the nutritional requirements for human health.
Thanks to careful crossbreeding, today’s industrial grade hemp is virtually THC-free. Further cleaning procedures are then applied to edible varieties of industrial hemp to render it less than 10 parts per million THC. THC is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. A synthetic variety of THC bearing the brand name Marinol is for some reason recognized as a Schedule III substance by our government. However, any THC coming from its natural source, even at 10 PPM or less in hemp foods, will soon become just as dangerous for anyone to possess as premium, high-grade bud.
That means the hemp industry stands a good chance of becoming America’s latest drug ring. Watch out, because the little market down the street that sells hemp granola is a dangerous neighborhood storehouse with pounds of the stuff. Your kids could get their hands on a big bag of nutritional, tasty, and very illegal drug- free contraband and bring it into your house. Remember, according to Ohio law, more than 100 grams of marijuana is a felony, so if you do decide to allow this risky behavior, make sure you weigh your supply very carefully. But wait, possessing scales and any amount of marijuana can make you a drug dealer too, in the watchful eyes of our American courts.
The distributors of one variety of hemp granola, Nature’s Path, in a recent statement to their retailers, have determined their products to contain less than 1 ppm of THC and are apparently going ahead with business as usual. They have also joined the coalition that is taking this latest DEA (draconian embargo agency) policy to court.
Another distributor of edible hemp products, Hemp Nut, is also saying that they plan to go right ahead and keep producing their own line of edible hemp products, and are boasting that their own products contain no THC whatsoever. They have also taken on a policy of quietly obeying the law rather than urging their government to reevaluate a policy that very well could end up affecting their business.
This ban on hemp foods is the latest in a series of policies in enacted by our government that reflects a heavy-handed and distrusting attitude towards a supposedly free citizenry. Rather than educating ourselves about the substances that surround us inevitably in this modern world, we are left in the dark, unable to make choices because of increasingly oppressive policies. Policies that are affecting issues having less to do with the illegal drugs they originally banned, and more to do with those issues ranging from voter rights (look to November 1997 when a voter initiative in D.C. regarding medical marijuana was overturned by the Senate) to socio-economic privilege (remember the Higher Education Act reform bill that continues to ban financial aid for students convicted of any drug offense? Of course kids not needing financial aid to get an education will not be affected by such a policy).
Perhaps we need to look deeper into America’s drug problem, and in particular, the problems of enforcing it. Flash back to 1937 when marijuana was banned in this country. The driving force behind its prohibition came not from marijuana, or the fear of marijuana, but rather fear of hemp, and that fear came not from the American people at large. Rather, those who had the most to fear from marijuana were already established industrialists that stood to lose from a growing hemp industry. Namely, Lamon Dupont and William Randolph Hearst, two wealthy names whose legacies still dominate the U.S. market. Now that we are seeing policies that are once again endangering true competition in the marketplace, we need to recognize this latest action by the DEA as a puerile policy that is blatantly out of line with a realistic and modem perception of industrial hemp and its place in American industry.