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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 5,147
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 King Hemp by Rand Clifford
#7488038 - 10/05/07 11:01 AM |
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King Hemp
By Rand Clifford
Part 1
From DEA Deadly Birdseed, Toward Power To The People
http://www.countercurrents.org/clifford200607.htm
America was just starting to crawl, and hemp was such an essential crop that farmers could be fined for not growing it—even jailed during periods of shortage in the mid 1760s. Hemp was legal tender in most of the country until the early 1800s. By 1850, over 8,000 farms of 2,000 acres or more were growing hemp, mostly where slave labor could satisfy the extreme labor-intensity of the hemp industry.
The slavery issue changed after 1865...but by the 1930s, hemp-harvesting machinery was coming out that drastically reduced labor demands. Popular Mechanics magazine ran a cover story, February, 1938, hailing hemp as "The New Billion-Dollar Crop". Imagine the wealth a billion dollars meant in 1938. Imagine the wealth William Randolph Hearst had amassed by 1938. Twenty years earlier, Hearst had seen hemp looming on the horizon as a threat to his paper-making empire. As soon as new machinery made superior hemp paper competitive, Hearst, as well as Pierre duPont, owner of patents for the sulfuric-acid process for making paper from wood pulp, both stood to loose vast profits to hemp. Through connections to the very core of American politics, their stealth campaign of sensational lies and propaganda, manipulation, racism and even terrorism, culminated with an illegal tax law essentially outlawing hemp in 1937—yes, the year before Popular Mechanics published their "New Billion-Dollar Crop" article lauding hemp. Talk about stealth! Imagine the chagrin of all the people involved in our domestic hemp industry in 1937 when they suddenly learned that hemp had been banned in America because of "The Killer Weed from Mexico". Except for during the reprieve of several years in WWII, under the government’s "Hemp For Victory!" campaign, not a single acre of hemp has been legally grown in America since 1937.
The sordid tale of hemp prohibition in America is a superlative example of power working against the population, of corporate profits trumping We The People. Today, if we follow the money, we quickly find the War On Drugs, and the kinds of insanity our various "Wars on Things" engender. For instance, during research for the novel, Castling, I found a most Twilight-Zonish story from Nebraska. A project to elevate a Boy Scout to an "Eagle" involved jerking 40,000 "marijuana" plants...though in fact they were "ditchweed"—wild remnants of industrial hemp varieties bred and cultivated by the Department of Agriculture from 1900 to 1935, and also during the "Hemp For Victory!" war campaign. Ditchweed grows wild across several states, and like all industrial hemp varieties, has no drug potential because of ultra-low THC levels. Undeterred by reality, the young Scout, aided by gung-ho! adults and supervised by police, jerked the 40,000 plants and saw to their entombment in a landfill. For the press, DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agents estimated the street value of the plants at over fifteen million dollars. That’s called blatant lying. The monetary value was zero—if those weeds were on the street, somebody would have to pay to have them hauled away. However, the weeds had plenty of value if they’d been left in the ditch where they belonged; migrating birds prefer hemp seed above all other foods. So in reality the whole farce simply wasted a lot of time and energy to rob migrating birds of a vital meal. To top that, the DEA pours tens of millions every year into state and local police forces to dig up ditchweed. What’s next, a DEA proclamation of America’s War On Birds...?
Industrial hemp IS NOT marijuana. Yet, unlike in countries advanced enough to farm the world’s most useful plant, where the issue of hemp is handled by agricultural, or food or health agencies, in the U.S., it’s the DEA standing in the way of hemp. Industrial hemp has nothing to do with drugs, yet the road to restoration of hemp farming goes straight through our drug enforcement bureaucracy. An end to hemp prohibition in this country is perhaps the DEA’s greatest fear because, they believe, decriminalization of marijuana would automatically follow, killing their ultimate cash cow.
Without marijuana, the War On Drugs might suffer an attack of peace—disaster for any war profiteer such as the DEA. Half of all drug arrests nationwide are for marijuana. Nearly 15% of America’s bloated prison population represents incarceration mostly for marijuana possession. Privatization of America’s prison industry is one of the country’s top growth industries, along with slave labor provided by prisoners. The statistics are as horrifying as primary testimony of high-ranking government official Harry Anslinger before Congress in 1937 regarding why America’s hemp industry should be killed: "If the monster Frankenstein should come face-to-face with the evil monster marijuana, he would surely die of fright...." Hey, that’s good enough for...ahem, good enough for seventy-years-and-counting of denying We The People all the benefits of the world’s most valuable crop, don’t you think?
Representative Ron Paul from Texas doesn’t think so. Dr. Paul certainly seems to have an affinity for truth. Even before he rattled the GOP presidential primary debates with the truth that "The Terrorists" hate us because we’ve been terrorizing them for decades, and not because we cherish apple pie...or certain other freedoms, Dr. Paul introduced H.R. 1009, the "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007". Obviously, the DEA is hissing and spitting about this, throwing heavy lobby lard against the bill. But the DEA has recently taken a big hit to their credibility (such a small target!), and they’ve been burping up a lot of crow.
It’s beyond another case of estimating the street value of a truckload of weeds at $15,000,000; that kind of insanity is so common it goes pretty much unnoticed anymore. This SNAFU actually exposed itself in that bastion of bastionism, the New York Times, and might be called: "DEA Saves Civilization By Seizing Deadly Granola Bars and Narcotic Birdseed." The real trouble started when Canada advanced as a nation and restored the Canadian hemp industry. This sets our DEA in even starker contrast to thoughtfulness, with Canada enjoying the benefits of again growing the world’s most valuable crop. Faced with appearing sillier, the DEA countered with authoritarian authoritarianism, circling the wagons in the maximized rigidity of Zero Tolerance! No amount of THC would be permitted to cross into this country—Repeat, ZERO!
Again, our DEA has had a bone to pick with Canada since 1998, when Canada looked that evil monster Frankenstein in the eyes, and declared: Industrial Hemp IS NOT Marijuana! Frankenstein broke into tears, blubbering about how it felt to be unloved—our DEA whisked him to Guantanamo, for a little playful and therapeutic waterboarding with Dick Cheney.... Canadian culture did not implode with the resumption of hemp farming, but rather, Canadian farmers and entrepreneurs demonstrated some modern potential of the world’s most valuable crop. So our DEA seized 40,000 pounds of hemp birdseed when it came across the border, impounding the seed in a Detroit warehouse. Also on the Zero Tolerance! Most Wanted List was Nutiva Granola Bars because they were made with the same sterilized hemp seed which tests had shown contain .0014% THC, picked up from contact with other parts of the hemp plant. Coincidentally, that percentage of THC is in the ballpark of the percentage of opiate alkaloids contained in iceberg lettuce. Our DEA isn’t seizing shipments of lettuce–HEY! Zero Tolerance means Zero Tolerance, doesn’t it? Could it be an international borders thing? Perhaps...but after exhaustive consideration of the data, and our DEA’s record, I’m ready to posit that they acted preemptively for the safety of any citizen who may recently have seen news of a man eating something like 52 hot dogs in 15 minutes to set a World Record. Should the desire to get high team up with determination to set a similar record (Guinness Book—the Real Thing!), an American citizen could attempt to eat 100 pounds of hemp seed in a sitting. The citizen might not get high (that’s a super-low THC concentration), but it’s possible they would establish themselves in the Guinness Book of World Records! Remember, though, our DEA is concerned, above all other considerations, with the safety of American Citizens. And of course, eating 100 pounds of hemp seed in a sitting—even though it is one of the healthiest foods on the planet—carries health risks. I mean, why would our DEA even be involved, if not to protect Americans from risk? And if this seems far-fetched, think about declaring the "street value" of a truckload of weeds at $15,000,000. Or, birdseed being yet another casualty of the War On Drugs.
Back to eating crow...our DEA has now reversed its Zero Tolerance dictum, allowing Canadian hemp seed to cross the border. No more seizing birdseed as a schedule I narcotic—a major victory for the birds! And no more "FREEZE! DROP THE GRANOLA BAR AND PUT YOUR HANDS UP"!!
And now, thanks to Rep. Ron Paul, we stand on the verge of joining the world’s advanced nations. The crucial text of H.R.1009, the "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007" is very simple, as truth usually is—it’s the lies that get so convoluted. The essentials of Ron Paul’s amendment to the Controlled Substances Act read:
`The term "marihuana" does not include industrial hemp. As used is the preceding sentence, the term "industrial hemp" means the plant Cannabis sativa L. and any part of such plant, whether growing or not, with a delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol concentration that does not exceed 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis.’.
Thank you very much, Dr. Paul, and Godspeed!
Part II
Battle Lines: Natural, Or Synthetic...Life, Or Death?
http://www.countercurrents.org/clifford270607.htm
Hemp is about life, renewal and future, power to The People...most everything America’s embedded fascist regime is not about. Government of, by and for corporations (CorpoGov) has us hogtied.
Corporate profits rule the priorities in a globalizing plutocracy (CorpoWorld) where the bottom line is...power to the bottom line. Corporate grip just keeps increasing, squeezing the life out of the biosphere—CorpoWorld truly is making a killing!
CorpoWorld lives by fossil energy, death and decay sucked and scoured from Earth’s burial grounds. Fossil fuels have already so poisoned the biosphere that canned tuna, healthy old protein standby, needs health warnings on the label. Banks of many rivers and lakes are sprinkled with signs reading: DO NOT EAT THE FISH! Common at others are diagrams detailing parts of fish where mercury, PCBs, dioxins, furans, lead and arsenic collect; anatomical maps posted to warn of where CorpoWorld’s toxic fingerprints are concentrating.... Mercury is the premier toxin, pervasive and potent, now piling up around the top of virtually every ocean food chain. The primary mercury dispensers are coal-fired power plants—China is building new ones as fast as they can, expecting to continue bringing another new plant on-line every few days.... And so it goes in the world of hidden costs keeping cheap imports "cheap". So goes the biocidal foundation of "cheapness". Nothing synthetic is cheap when all the real costs are accounted for.
Ironically, the most imminent threat to the biosphere has been set in motion by one of fossil fuel’s few "non-toxic" components. We keep pumping carbon dioxide sequestered from ancient atmospheres into our own atmosphere, where it retards infrared radiation from escaping into space—a life-supporting phenomenon in natural moderation, life-threatening in excess. Moderation, a weaker virtue of mankind, has been obliterated by CorpoWorld’s fundamental creed: More!
And of course, "Better"—remember DuPont’s slogan: "Better Things for Better Living...Through Chemistry"? Formerly DuPont Munitions, the world’s leading manufacturer of gunpowder and dynamite, DuPont Chemical wanted to change their image from "the powder people" to "peace-time manufacturer". Launched in 1935, the slogan persisted until the 1980s, when "through chemistry" was dropped. Word had gotten out that many of the chemicals for better living were accumulating in the biosphere with deadly effects, such as dioxin from pulp mills. Then in 1999, DuPont’s slogan became, "The Miracles of Science". Over the years, DuPont has gone from a company dealing explosive death and destruction...to one dealing slower death and destruction, accent on the insidious. In a different way, DuPont’s major role in robbing The People of hemp was no less insidious.
Back to the 1930s; DuPont held the patents for making plastics and synthetic fibers from petroleum, and patents for that environmentally-infamous sulfuric acid process for making paper from wood pulp. New machinery to unleash industrial hemp’s cornucopia of superior natural products suddenly made The King a serious threat to profits of the petroleum and timber industries—real Titans in terms of economic and political dominance. William Randolph Hearst had seen the looming threat of a modernized hemp industry deflating his paper-making empire, and had already conjured cannabis hemp into "marijuana", a Mexican slang term (or the Americanized, confusing and even slightly spookier? "marihuana"). Rattling his newspaper chains, Hearst had for years terrorized Americans with horrors of the "evil weed from Mexico"...truly a Greatest Hit in the art of propaganda (a certain "Stairway to Heaven" for the weed with roots in Hell!) Most people were familiar with the benefits of hemp, and cannabis, and were totally blindsided when DuPont and Hearst and their henchmen diddled Congress into strangling America’s hemp industry in 1937 with the illegal Marijuana Tax Act. Tax laws are for raising revenue, not for molding behavior. But....
1937...a year of remarkable infamy—in its annual report to stockholders, the DuPont company gloated over "radical changes" regarding the federal government’s conversion of taxation authority into a tool for forcing acceptance of "sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization". Whoa!...quite a malignancy here—the voice of CorpoWorld proclaiming that after massive farm foreclosures of the depression, farmers were inhibiting America’s industrial progress. They should move to industrial cities so farmland could be consolidated into huge agribusinesses controlled by corporations—along with all other means of industrial production. Farming should be primarily for food.... These biocidal design were taken further when DuPont’s president, Lammont DuPont, proclaimed: "Synthetic plastics find application in fabricating a wide variety of articles, many of which in the past were made from natural products. The chemist has aided in conserving natural resources by developing synthetic products to supplement or wholly replace natural products." You got it, Lammont, a world of synthetics...mother lode patents, petroleum alchemy, pollution, extinction, poverty and disease, deforestation, global warming; fascism, globalization, perpetual wars for dwindling resources; corporate centralization of all means of production—even global food supply. Concentration of money, of power, of control—power to the corporations, slavery to The People. Conversion of largely rural, agricultural America into an urban, industrial nation. Landfills brimming with immortal waste leaching death into our living systems, forever.... Amen.
Such is CorpoWorld’s bleak picture for living beings dependent upon a healthy biosphere—bleakest for those whose ultimate champion has been the same for over 6,000 years. Cannabis Hemp, The King. Consider globalization—unfettered corporations preying upon cheap labor, cashing in the biosphere’s life-support systems, spreading poverty and environmental disaster in the grossest pageant of greed in history, all powered by enormous consumption of fossil energy and armed with any necessary coercion, including war. Hemp is the ultimate antidote for the biocidal plague of globalization.
Whereas globalization is powered by the toxic waste of ancient life, hemp is powered by the sun. Hemp is the premier solar energy machine, something we sure would like to invent if nature hadn’t beat us to it (if hemp could be patented!) Few plants grow faster, are easier to grow, are better for the soil, and none are more useful. Land that has produced hemp exclusively for twenty years is in no way degraded. And no plant even comes close to turning sunlight, carbon dioxide, nutrients and water into so many products. No other plant can actually empower entire regional economies, the antithesis of globalization. Farmers could return to the status they deserve, growing the world’s most valuable crop and selling it to local markets that sell it to local processors that sell their products to locally-owned businesses that sell to local citizens that work in the hemp industry. All the wealth stays where it belongs—with the people that produce it. This could all be happening across America right now, if not for CorpGov.
Nothing is more environmentally-friendly than hemp. Any region with a hemp economy would remain a healthy place with clean air and wells, and waters with edible fish...any region not already smudged with the fingerprints of CorpoWorld. Plus, one of the few realistic ways we might mitigate global warming is to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Current CorpoWorld strategies are kind of like raiding the bar on the Titanic; lots of talk about reducing emissions, talks to make us feel better, temporarily, but such damage has been done. Rising temperatures have already sent many systems into positive feedback, as in Siberia, where melting permafrost is releasing greenhouse gases including methane in quantities that dwarf global releases of carbon from fossil fuels. Oceans are peaking out in their ability to absorb carbon. Forests, the planet’s lungs, are huge absorbers of carbon. But actual forests are getting rare fast, soon to disappear if we don’t shut down globalization. And proposed reductions in emissions translate directly into CorpoWorld profit reductions...let’s not hold our breath on that. Anyway, just this month, China actually passed the U.S. in carbon emissions to become the world’s leader. China doesn’t even want to talk about reductions in carbon emissions.
Vast fields of hemp could replace lung capacity lost to deforestation—the possibilities are limited only by our vision. Hemp gulps carbon dioxide like no other sink, and though biomass hemp fuels and other utilizations would return carbon to the atmosphere, it would be carbon taken from our atmosphere, not carbon from atmospheres of millions of years ago as is stored in fossil fuels.
Hemp will never be donated to The People, only seized. Anything that spreads wealth from the top, down through The People, will never be imposed from the top, only forced from below. So the question is not how good hemp is—one of hemp’s problems is that it sounds too good to be true. Well it is true, and until married to modern American technology we’ll never know the genuine potential of hemp. As is in more ways every day, our biggest problem is CorpoGov. Will We The People find the wisdom, coordination and motivation to take back what CorpoGov stole from us through lies and manipulation seventy years ago...lies and manipulation still robust today?
Part III
We Got Mugged, So Let’s Get Hemp Back
http://www.countercurrents.org/clifford030707.htm
Prohibition of cannabis hemp was a mugging, a twisted and diabolical assault on the rights, health and well-being of Americans unparalleled in our history for sheer scope of lasting impact. Never has brazen self interest cost so many people so much for so long. And the number of entrenched industries with profits threatened by hemp have greatly multiplied in number, and political influence.
You might say the assault was officially set in motion by BULLETIN No. 404, released by the United States Department of Agriculture on October 14, 1916, announcing the superiority of using hemp hurds for making paper of highest quality—and cheaply, once mechanization reduced the labor intensity of hemp harvesting. William Randolph Hearst knew the machinery might be at least 10 years away, knew that’s how much time he had to make sure hemp paper did not crush his paper-making empire. He got right to work.
Lies, propaganda and racism Hearst unleashed upon a gullible population with his chain of newspapers was phenomenally effective. The method was exquisitely simple: Because most people knew cannabis hemp as a wonderful resource, change the name of cannabis hemp to "marijuana" then terrorize relentlessly about this horrifying new threat, marijuana...and when the threat of hemp competition became imminent, kill the hemp industry by strangling marijuana. Phenomenally effective, 70 years and counting.
Other muggers joining Hearst on First String were:
Lammont DuPont, president of DuPont Chemical. Their petrochemical synthetics empire was seriously threatened by The King of natural products.
Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury under Hoover, as well as one of only two bankers DuPont has had since 1928.
Harry Anslinger, soon to be nephew-in-law of Mellon, appointed by Mellon to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (FBNDD). After 31 years in this post, Kennedy fired Anslinger for his racist remarks, which freed Anslinger to reminisce about the FBNDD being a place where young men were given a right to rape and steal. We now know the FBNDD as the DEA, one of the nations greatest threats to birds both wild and domestic (see King Hemp part 1), and us.
Instead of weighing the character of these legendary muggers, let’s use their own coveted trick of changing names to attack innocence. Merely substituting their names for their own operative term, marijuana, we find that:
Hearst goads users to blood lust...and makes fiends of young boys. Hearst is the most violence-causing thing known to man. Hearst makes black men look white men in the eyes, step on white man’s shadows, and look at white women twice!
DuPont is more dangerous than heroin or cocaine...adhering to his old-world traditions of murder, assault, rape, physical demoralization and mental breakdown. Users of DuPont become stimulated as they inhale him and are likely to do Anything. Dupont corrupts youth and turns even normal, mild mannered white people into superhuman, psychotic killers. Dupont’s effects on blacks and Latinos are particularly horrifying.
Mellon: Assassin of Youth. Mellon: The Devil’s Weed. Mellon begins his Deadly Work of arousing Sexual Passions...with no restraint as to Color or Race! Under Mellon’s influence, prison inmates fall desperately in love with each other—just as they would with women outside prison walls!
Anslinger makes "darkies" think they are as good as white men. Anslinger is highly intoxicating, and constitutes an ever recurring problem where there are Mexicans or Spanish-Americans of the lower classes. If the hideous monster Frankenstein ever came face to face with the monster Anslinger he would surely drop dead of fright.
Please seriously consider whether the above statements ring a bit more true than the original headlines—or at the very least, ring just as true.
We shouldn’t stoop to calling this team of muggers a bunch of ghouls, but...yes we should—look what they did. In raw self-interest they deprived every American for several generations of the most valuable natural resource on the planet. Take hemp seed for instance, the single finest food a human could eat. If the ghouls had merely robbed us of such an optimum source of nutrition, they should occupy a place of high infamy in The Ghoul Hall of Shame. But fuel, fiber, paper, medicine—we were robbed in countless ways, and the larceny continues....
Soon after the hemp mugging, Americans had The Big War to distract them—the war where hemp was desperately called back into service (CorpoGov’s Hemp For Victory! campaign). So hemp helped us win The War, then was switched back to The Killer Weed From Mexico while Americans dove into Baby Booming. Forest products, petroleum and synthetics kept us up to our eyeballs in consumer goods; there was always another forest over the next hill, another oil field to tap.... Massive industrial pollution?...we were too busy and ill-informed to worry about that. But the Timber Beast’s forest management began to glare, watersheds mangled, water supplies mudding up. And nasty chemicals for better living started getting right in our faces, and bodies. But this was still America, and any time enough injustice prevails, especially where ghouls and muggings cost The People so much, heroes rise.
Consciousness of The King started coming back, knowledge of industrial production built on quickly-renewable natural products—production methods squelched by the petrochemical alchemy now threatening the planet’s life-support systems, and killing us.
No person deserves more credit for reawakening people to what was stolen from them, and how it was stolen, than Jack Herer. Jack’s seminal masterpiece The Emperor Wears No Clothes came out in 1985, stimulating the modern hemp movement by getting the Great Information rooted in a new generation. More and more people all the time are helping it grow, but political influence of industries standing to lose market share to superior natural hemp products has grown so enormous that HEMP FARMING IS STILL BANNED IN THE U.S., and cannabis remains a schedule 1 narcotic. An insane situation, but again, this is still America, regardless of corporate influence making America harder to recognize all the time. Heroes keep stepping forth—like the latest farmers to sue CorpoGov for the "right" to grow hemp. Heroism goes automatically with independent farmers still surviving after decades of corporate onslaught—and if farmers once again are "allowed" to grow our most valuable crop, their status could again rise to where justice would have it.
The two North Dakota farmers that filed the federal lawsuit this June 27 challenge the DEA’s ban on hemp because it is the same species that produces marijuana. Hemp can be imported from Canada (with the occasional mindless and spiteful DEA tantrum about ZERO TOLERANCE! for THC), and also Europe and China, but, quoting DEA spokesman Garrison Courtney:
"Hemp is marijuana. There’s no distinguishing feature between marijuana and hemp."
Of course this is certified, standard-issue DEA pure bullshit. I could very quickly, with 100% accuracy, differentiate between low-THC cannabis hemp grown for industry, and cannabis hemp grown for higher THC—as most anyone could. Also, Mr. Courtney is implying that Canadians and Europeans and Chinese can tell the difference, but in America we’re not smart enough. Stupid posturing to protect corporate profits has become so standard for the DEA that it’s getting harder all the time to be sure if they’re faking it, or if they really are as stupid as they appear.
Get ready for flooding stupidity in terms of why we should not allow farmers to grow our most valuable crop. Not only has the U.S. National Congress of State Legislatures passed a sweeping pro-hemp resolution, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture support commercial production of hemp. So far 15 states have passed pro-hemp legislation. Topping that off, Congressman Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas, has introduced House Resolution 1009, the "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007". As stated, the bill is: "To amend the Controlled Substances Act to exclude industrial hemp from the definition of marijuana, and for other purposes." The eleven co-sponsors so far are:
Rep. Tammy Baldwin [D-WI]; Rep. Barney Frank [D-MA]; Rep. Raul Grijalva [D-AZ];Rep. Maurice Hinchey [D-NY]; Rep. Dennis Kucinich [D-OH]; Rep. James McDermott [D-WA]; Rep. George Miller [D-CA]; Rep. Dana Rohrabacher [R-CA]; Rep. Janice Schakowsky [D-IL]; Rep. Fortney Stark [D-CA]; Rep. Lynn Woolsey [D-CA].
The bill was introduced February 13, 2007. Right now it remains, "introduced", awaiting the committees where it will be deliberated, investigated, and possibly revised before undergoing general debate. Those scheduled committees are:
House Energy and Commerce
House Judiciary
House Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
The bill is so simple it’s hard to imagine much meaningful deliberation or investigation, only a fog lies. These committees are full of CorpoGov people, thus the most important issues will have nothing to do with benefits to The People. Protection of entrenched profits will override all consideration of giving back to The People nature’s most valuable resource, and the miasma of marijuana propaganda promises to be something like that which ushered in the original mugging. And if the bill lay dying in committee, who will be there to say, "What about all the other countries now growing hemp? What about the burgeoning market in the U.S. for imported hemp? What about a little common sense?
So much at stake—nothing less than The Future of the planet’s Life Support Systems. So many heroes like Jack Herer, and all the other leaders and ground troops of the Modern Hemp Movement; the farmers demanding the right to grow the plant humanity cannot survive without. Representative Dr. Ron Paul and his co-sponsors. All the people who know the truth about the mugging, and are finding ways to help, such as simply spreading the word....
The plant that helped make America great, most valuable crop that can be grown, our key to reversing damage to Earth’s life support systems wrought by petrochemical synthetics along with the gluttony of non-renewable resources—the profit-before-People paradigm. The plant taken away by a mugging of The People to protect profits of a few. And now it’s future lies in the hands of CorpoGov minions specializing in ripping off The People for the benefit of the ruling elite—who see hemp as nothing more than a menace to profits....
It all promises to remain interesting, educational but not pretty...and to show The People they must fight much, much harder to even effect the grip of CorpoGov and CorpoWorld that is strangling the planet’s life-support systems.
Part IV
Rope And Dope
http://www.countercurrents.org/clifford051007.htm
Imagine...YOU are the legend, William Randolph Hearst. You unleash an old Mexican slang term—an alien, scary and macabre-sounding word, then hype it relentlessly in your national chain of newspapers...creating a monster to threaten civilization with plagues of rape and murder, mass insanity and boundless violence! Domestic terrorism...you must kill competition, protect pretty profits standing in your vast acreage of Mexican timber, pulp the trees into paper with the new environmentally-obscene sulfuric acid process patented by DuPont. His tentacles diddle the very heart of American politics....
Your campaign of sensational disinformation—featuring hysteria spiced with racism—works so amazingly well that generations later, history’s King of crops remains exiled from the most influential nation on Earth. One might say you "ran the table" with your invasion of "marijuana"and "Refer Madness". You certainly made out like a bandit from the prohibition of cannabis hemp...wealthy industrialists still make out like bandits from the prohibition. You and DuPont blindsided The People, but did you ever really imagine the majority of Americans over seventy years later, when hearing the term "hemp", thinking typically and simply of rope, and dope?
Let’s all sing...
La cucaracha, la cucaracha
Ya no puede caminar
Porque no tiene, porque le falta
Marihuana que fumar.
(Translation)
The cockroach, the cockroach
Can't walk anymore
Because it lacks, because it doesn't have,
Marijuana to smoke.
Yes, The King, cannabis hemp, regal for many thousands of years and without peers, fell under siege just before the Roaring Twenties for threatening profits of rich and ravenous American industrialists with little in their hearts besides timber and petroleum profits. Exile came in 1937, when new machinery promised to free The King’s vast potential from fetters of manual labor.
Fast-forward to the 1970's, and what is known as "Reefer Madness II". High school texts were universally cleansed of the word "hemp". And at the Smithsonian Museum, Jack Herer, author of that touchstone of hemp truth The Emperor Wears No Clothes, asked a curator why "hemp" had been removed from all of the exhibits. The curator replied, "Children do not need to know about hemp anymore. It confuses them." SAY WHAT? One of the most important aspects of the history of civilization has been cleansed from the Smithsonian Museum so as not to confuse children? Someone decided simple omission was better than "embarrassing questions"? If the truth is embarrassing, doesn’t that imply profound systemic problems? Omission of important meaning is a cornerstone of our corporate-controlled media (CorpoMedia)...but the Smithsonian! Pulling hemp from history left a hole in the Smithsonian Museum big enough to drive cattle through. History is a tapestry of events, and if you pull a thread hooked to so many others it’s no longer a tapestry, but a bunch of threads dangling into a big hole. Omission for convenience changes history to propaganda. And the more we look at such a hole the bigger it gets....
Written language was developed 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, what is now Iraq. One of mankind’s oldest root words, K(a)N(a)B(a) is the Sumerian word for cannabis hemp. Writing made possible the intentional recording of history; by the time writing was invented, hemp husbandry had been around a very long time—the oldest relic of human industry is a scrap of hemp fabric 10,000 years old.
About 4,700 years ago, the first written record of cannabis use appeared in the pharmacopoeia of Shen Nung, a pioneer of Chinese medicine. 2,000 years later, the Persian prophet Zoroaster wrote the Avesta, a sacred text with cannabis hemp topping a list of more than 10,000 medicinal plants. Hemp was civilizations largest agricultural crop from over 3,000 years ago, until the late 1800s. The Chinese began making paper from hemp and mulberry about 2,000 years ago; their scholars gained a cheap means of preserving information, allowing Chinese knowledge and science to transcend that of the West for 1,400 years—partly because the Roman Catholic Church prohibited reading and writing for 1,200 years. Something to consider in terms of the Smithsonian Museum cleansing history to avoid "embarrassing questions"....
The oldest known doctor’s prescription is an Assyrian (also Mesopotamia) clay tablet dated around 2,700 years ago, a prescription for "medical marijuana".
1,200 years ago, Mohammed permitted cannabis use among Moslems, but forbid alcohol. 950 years ago, Moslems started Europe’s first paper mill, using cannabis hemp. Of course hemp paper is what originally led to The King’s exile from America, in the decade following those Roaring Twenties—but still long before:
The world’s first mandatory hemp cultivation laws were enacted at Jamestown Colony in Virginia, 1619, ordering all farmers to grow hemp or face penalties. Massachusetts passed similar laws in 1631, followed by Connecticut a year later. In 1776, patriot wives and mothers organized spinning bees to clothe Washington’s troops, spinning hemp fiber to save the Continental Army from freezing to death at Valley Forge. That same year, Thomas Paine, in "Common Sense", listed as America’s four essential natural resources: cordage, iron, timber and tar. "Hemp flourishes even to rankness," Paine wrote, "we do not want for cordage."
The first draft of the Declaration of Independence, June 28, 1776, was written on Dutch hemp paper; the version released on July 4 is also written on hemp paper. The War of 1812 was fought mainly because the United States had been cut off from most of its Russian hemp imports. In 1898, the Spanish American War got us to the threshold of American exile of The King when the "marijuana"-smoking army of Pancho Villa seized 800,000 acres of prime Mexican timberland from William Randolph Hearst. For The King, in America, it’s been a miasma of deceit ever since....
Today the themes are the same, but on a much grander scale. The King could be a fantastic boon for The People and the environment—similarly fantastic are his threats to status quo profits. The profit shift would typically be from elite corporations, to The People. Also, hemp being a natural plant rules out patents so coveted by the elite.
The conjuring of cannabis into marijuana made The King a magnet for mind-boggling hypocrisy. Perhaps there is no finer example of the hypocrisy than that of Dronabinol. Marketed under various names such as Marinol, Nabilone, Sativex...Dronabinol is a synthetic version of THC, the primary active ingredient of cannabis. The DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) lists cannabis as a Schedule 1 controlled substance. The three benchmarks for Schedule 1 listing:
A The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
B The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the U.S.
C There is lack of accepted safety for use of the drug under medical supervision.
So, why would Big Pharma spend untold millions of dollars developing a synthetic version of a drug that the DEA insists HAS NO CURRENTLY ACCEPTABLE MEDICAL USE? Money. Patents. Control. Dronabinol was extremely expensive to develop, is very expensive to make, and is very expensive to buy. It works nowhere near as good as raw cannabis, which contains many cannabinoids in addition to THC which contribute in various ways to the excellent effectiveness of cannabis. So the bottom line with synthetic THC: It’s a poor substitute for the real thing, which patients can easily grow themselves, but Big Pharma makes a lot of money at the expense of patients, peddling the patented synthetic of a drug the government classifies as having no currently accepted medical use. When it comes to virtually every aspect of The King, such hypocrisy rules. If a patient that needs cannabis were to simply grow their own, nobody would make any money (except the patient, by saving the astronomical cost of the synthetic), and the patient could not be controlled for profit—one of the modern essences of government under corporate control (CorpoGov).
Regarding LACK OF ACCEPTED SAFETY FOR USE OF THE DRUG UNDER MEDICAL SUPERVISION, cannabis has been for thousands of years one of the most common and effective of drugs, listed as a panacea (remedy for all ills or difficulties) more times, in more places, than anything else known to mankind.
A possible ray of hope for The King in America, and for Americans to make progress against CorpoGov tyranny such as displayed in the Dronabinol boondogle, is H.R. 1009, The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007. This bill, introduced by Rep. Ron Paul, would amend the Controlled Substances Act to exclude industrial hemp from the definition of "marihuana". The detailed summary reads:
"Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007 - Amends the Controlled Substances Act to exclude industrial hemp from the definition of "marihuana." Defines "industrial hemp" to mean the plant Cannabis sativa L. and any part of such plant with a delta-nine tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentration that does not exceed .3 percent on a dry weight basis. Grants a state regulating the growing and processing of industrial hemp exclusive authority, in any criminal or civil action or administrative proceeding, to determine whether any such plant meets that concentration limit."
As with all things CorpoGov involving The King, hypocrisy has descended upon H.R. 1009: Since 4/20/2007 the bill has been languishing in the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.
Hypocrisy rules.
*****
In King Hemp V, the lobby forces attacking H.R. 1009 as it mires in a committee that has nothing to do with industrial hemp farming present a crystalline portrait of hemp’s amazing usefulness to The People, and threat to status quo profits. Just how valuable is hemp? How might it mitigate our most serious problems? Modern forces arrayed against The King leave little to the imagination, and, they hope, even less to The People....
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