HIGHLAND HEMP

This is sort of a celebratory post. For one thing, it is my 300th piece. For another, I just found that there is an article on hemp (click here to view) in the Scotland on Sunday for 16 March 2008. St. Andrew must have been guiding this one, because it not only mentioned Hemp for Victory, exhorting the reader to join the hemp revolution by getting a copy, but the journalist, God bless her, got the hemp story right! Older posts are rants against the Fourth Estate for not getting it right; from William Randolph Hearst to quite a number or today's journalists, they all seem to prove their malice or ineptitude when it comes to hemp. Not so with Louisa Pearson, who must have spent more than the usual 10 seconds on google. She goes so far as to talk about cotton, and how she has realised, despite all the hype about organic cotton, that we need to move away from cotton. How much easier to just write a smug piece about reefers and joint efforts and freeing the weed.

I will be sending up to Edinburgh a copy of a little pamphlet on hemp which I reprinted in that wee city some eight years back, which was originally published in 1750. Only 300 copies were made, all on Greenfield hemp paper and tied with hemp twine. Also some hemp paper, including the John Hanson treefree and some from the Hemp Paper Co., both of which milled their paper in Scotland. Not enough to publish their entire paper on, but who knows, it is in fact my hope that in Scotland the paper industry will be revived - partly so as to create jobs. Hemp used to be part of the Scottish ecomony, right up there with haggis. Time for a revival I say.