This year has been dramatic for hemp awareness, and in the US many legal battles have been won. A petition is under way to the White House - www.minawear.com/about-us/ if you care to sign - and there is a good chance that hemp will ge cultivated again soon. Some setbacks have occured this year however, and the press as usual has ignored the story - but yesterday more good news pushed it back into the papers - see below:
An amendment to legalize industrial hemp for research purposes was included in the Farm Bill yesterday – and passed the United States House by a vote of 216 to 208.
Representatives Jared Polis, a Democrat from Colorado, Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky and Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon sponsored the amendment.
It allows colleges and universities to grow hemp for academic and agricultural research purposes, but applies only to states that have already legalized industrial hemp production. Colorado legalized industrial hemp in November, when it also legalized recreational use of marijuana.
And even the representatives who disagreed with the Republican version of the Farm Bill, were pleased that the industrial hemp amendment passed.
“This commonsense amendment will allow colleges and universities to grow and cultivate industrial hemp for academic and legal research purposes,” Polis said.
Industrial hemp legislation has been introduced in 20 states: Alabama, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia.
It’s estimated that the United States imports $500 million in industrial hemp products for food, hygiene products and clothing every year.
Two other stand-alone industrial hemp bills have been introduced in Congress as well – one in the House and Senate. If passed, the bills will removed feral restrictions on the domestic cultivation of industrial hemp, which has no THC, the chemical that induces the “high” in marijuana.
Colorado is one of nine states that have removed barriers to hemp production.
Showing posts with label Ron Wyden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ron Wyden. Show all posts
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Monday, June 10, 2013
Ron Wyden's comments on defeat of Hemp Farming Bill
The Hemp Farming bill failed to pass, and Senator Ron Wyden has made a statement about why; basically there is too much opposition about the dope issue, which is clearly a smoke screen, but he does have a point - the hemp issue ought to be distinct from any pot issue. The 420 movement supports but is not a part of the industrial hemp issue, and many of the pot smokers in the US are selfish drug addicts, child abusers, or worse. I speak from many years of writing about this and supporting both industrial hemp and the rigth to grow cannabis for other purposes - quite importantly, for medical purposes. But I have seen time wasted by selfish dope addicts who shout me down and have no care about anyone else in the world and have tarnished the image of hemp. The are NOT cool as they think they are, they are hurting the US economy and that is how they will be remembered.
Below is the report from the Huffington Post:
Below is the report from the Huffington Post:
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), following the demise of his effort to legalize industrial hemp production Thursday, pinned the failure on disorganized advocates who had not "clearly separated from advocacy for cannabis."
Finger-pointing after a legislative loss is not an uncommon feature of Congress, but Wyden wasted no time. "Between the generational misconceptions about hemp within the Congress, continued opposition from the Drug Enforcement Agency, [sic] and no clear opportunity to vote on further Farm Bill amendments, the time is not yet ripe for industrial hemp," he said in a public statement. "Better organized advocacy on behalf of hemp, clearly separated from advocacy for cannabis, is vital to overcoming these obstacles. As we continue to build support and look for other avenues, state agricultural commissioners, farmers and business that would benefit from this legislation need to help get the facts out there and push for Congress to pass this bill."
The main advocacy group working for the amendment was Vote Hemp, which Holly Harris, chief of staff to Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner James Comer (R) previously called "the greatest grassroots operation I've ever seen."
It may be the greatest, but it certainly isn't the largest. The group boasts a volunteer board and staff of two, Tom Murphy and Ben Droz, neither of whom is employed full time with the organization. Eric Steenstra, who worked regularly with Senate offices throughout the process, is a volunteer. The most recently available tax form on Guidestar.org from 2008 lists total revenue and contributions just north of $17,000.
What worked at the state level wasn't quite ready for Washington. Vote Hemp played a leading role in passing a law legalizing hemp in Kentucky this year, a state not known for embracing hippies. The bill became law despite the opposition of powerful leaders in the state. The Democratic governor let it become law without his signature, McConnell surprised the state by supporting it, and the Democratic House passed it despite opposition from key leaders.
Harris said she worked closely with Vote Hemp during the legislative fight in Kentucky and when members were wavering, the group could turn up persuasive farmers and businessmen quickly. Hemp advocates don't have such an infrastructure on the national level, owing in part to the simple fact that hemp is illegal to grow, and therefore there are no growers to defend it.
One Democratic aide who'd been involved in the Senate effort said that Wyden deserves "credit for admitting there needs to be work done and this issue can't just be slipped into a bill."
The failed hemp saga is a window as well into the limits of an individual senator's power, absent corporate or interest group support. And, as gun control advocates learned earlier, broad public support isn't enough. A HuffPost/YouGov poll recently found 2-1 support for legalizing industrial hemp growing. Senators are powerful in their ability to block legislation, but positively enacting it is more difficult. In those instances, they serve as the brokers of someone else's power, rather than holding power in their own right.
That was true even for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who worked hard behind the scenes to insert the hemp provision into the farm bill, first at the committee level and then later on the floor. The measure also had the active support of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a tea party favorite, as well as backing from Sens. Jeff Merkley and Wyden, both Democrats of Oregon.
HuffPost, in canvassing senators, found only one flatly opposed, while most were simply not familiar with the issue. Hemp is related to marijuana, but has such a small psychoactive ingredient that it is not possible to smoke enough to get high. Nevertheless, the perception that it is somehow drug related persists in the Senate.
Wyden's swipe at advocates, said Adam Eidinger, a former Vote Hemp spokesman who worked on the bill, is illogical and insulting. Hemp is only illegal because it is related to its psychoactive cousin, so it's not the advocates who need to separate the two, he argued.
"Senator Wyden makes a lame excuse for not getting the votes. Hemp is illegal because of marijuana prohibition that has overstepped, not because there is something wrong with hemp. I say, admit failure, bro, and blame your colleagues' narrow mindedness, not the hemp advocates," Eidinger told HuffPost. "His statement is insulting, yes."
Steenstra said that he takes no offense, however. "I was trying to read between the lines on that [statement]. I didn't take it that way," he said of Eidinger's reaction. "I think Senator Wyden is taking a long-term approach to this and maybe the rush to get this into the farm bill -- he thought we needed a little more time before we jumped into this."
The hemp sprint was still a valuable exercise. "It enabled us to engage in the dialogue with the staffs, because in the past they wouldn't want to meet with us because we didn't have anything pending," he said. "It's a process, sometimes these votes take awhile. We just have to keep coming back."
During the process, advocates won the support of Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of hemp policy, a major step forward, Steenstra noted. Advocates also bent the ear of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) after Comer lobbied him at the Kentucky Derby.
While the farm bill was being debated, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) approached Paul and offered to give Paul a vote on the amendment on the Senate floor, according to an aide to Agriculture Chairwoman Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), whose staff witnessed the exchange. Paul began canvassing his colleagues for support, and reported back that not enough existed to move forward yet.
Unable to get a voice vote or slip the provision into the underlying bill, the advocates weren't able to assure senators that they had the 60 votes needed for amendment passage. "We didn't actually know," said Steenstra. "We could not clearly count that we had the votes."
Eidinger said he hopes that Wyden will press for hearings "so the senators who need to learn a thing or two still about hemp can make inquiries. I hope Wyden will help make hearings the way forward, not a blame game."
Finger-pointing after a legislative loss is not an uncommon feature of Congress, but Wyden wasted no time. "Between the generational misconceptions about hemp within the Congress, continued opposition from the Drug Enforcement Agency, [sic] and no clear opportunity to vote on further Farm Bill amendments, the time is not yet ripe for industrial hemp," he said in a public statement. "Better organized advocacy on behalf of hemp, clearly separated from advocacy for cannabis, is vital to overcoming these obstacles. As we continue to build support and look for other avenues, state agricultural commissioners, farmers and business that would benefit from this legislation need to help get the facts out there and push for Congress to pass this bill."
The main advocacy group working for the amendment was Vote Hemp, which Holly Harris, chief of staff to Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner James Comer (R) previously called "the greatest grassroots operation I've ever seen."
It may be the greatest, but it certainly isn't the largest. The group boasts a volunteer board and staff of two, Tom Murphy and Ben Droz, neither of whom is employed full time with the organization. Eric Steenstra, who worked regularly with Senate offices throughout the process, is a volunteer. The most recently available tax form on Guidestar.org from 2008 lists total revenue and contributions just north of $17,000.
What worked at the state level wasn't quite ready for Washington. Vote Hemp played a leading role in passing a law legalizing hemp in Kentucky this year, a state not known for embracing hippies. The bill became law despite the opposition of powerful leaders in the state. The Democratic governor let it become law without his signature, McConnell surprised the state by supporting it, and the Democratic House passed it despite opposition from key leaders.
Harris said she worked closely with Vote Hemp during the legislative fight in Kentucky and when members were wavering, the group could turn up persuasive farmers and businessmen quickly. Hemp advocates don't have such an infrastructure on the national level, owing in part to the simple fact that hemp is illegal to grow, and therefore there are no growers to defend it.
One Democratic aide who'd been involved in the Senate effort said that Wyden deserves "credit for admitting there needs to be work done and this issue can't just be slipped into a bill."
That was true even for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who worked hard behind the scenes to insert the hemp provision into the farm bill, first at the committee level and then later on the floor. The measure also had the active support of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a tea party favorite, as well as backing from Sens. Jeff Merkley and Wyden, both Democrats of Oregon.
HuffPost, in canvassing senators, found only one flatly opposed, while most were simply not familiar with the issue. Hemp is related to marijuana, but has such a small psychoactive ingredient that it is not possible to smoke enough to get high. Nevertheless, the perception that it is somehow drug related persists in the Senate.
Wyden's swipe at advocates, said Adam Eidinger, a former Vote Hemp spokesman who worked on the bill, is illogical and insulting. Hemp is only illegal because it is related to its psychoactive cousin, so it's not the advocates who need to separate the two, he argued.
"Senator Wyden makes a lame excuse for not getting the votes. Hemp is illegal because of marijuana prohibition that has overstepped, not because there is something wrong with hemp. I say, admit failure, bro, and blame your colleagues' narrow mindedness, not the hemp advocates," Eidinger told HuffPost. "His statement is insulting, yes."
Steenstra said that he takes no offense, however. "I was trying to read between the lines on that [statement]. I didn't take it that way," he said of Eidinger's reaction. "I think Senator Wyden is taking a long-term approach to this and maybe the rush to get this into the farm bill -- he thought we needed a little more time before we jumped into this."
The hemp sprint was still a valuable exercise. "It enabled us to engage in the dialogue with the staffs, because in the past they wouldn't want to meet with us because we didn't have anything pending," he said. "It's a process, sometimes these votes take awhile. We just have to keep coming back."
During the process, advocates won the support of Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of hemp policy, a major step forward, Steenstra noted. Advocates also bent the ear of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) after Comer lobbied him at the Kentucky Derby.
While the farm bill was being debated, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) approached Paul and offered to give Paul a vote on the amendment on the Senate floor, according to an aide to Agriculture Chairwoman Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), whose staff witnessed the exchange. Paul began canvassing his colleagues for support, and reported back that not enough existed to move forward yet.
Unable to get a voice vote or slip the provision into the underlying bill, the advocates weren't able to assure senators that they had the 60 votes needed for amendment passage. "We didn't actually know," said Steenstra. "We could not clearly count that we had the votes."
Eidinger said he hopes that Wyden will press for hearings "so the senators who need to learn a thing or two still about hemp can make inquiries. I hope Wyden will help make hearings the way forward, not a blame game."
Saturday, June 08, 2013
Living Green Magazine article for Hemp History Week
By Richard Kujawski, Managing Editor
Thomas Jefferson once said, “Hemp is of greatest importance to our nation.” The Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper. American farmers were required by law in the 1700’s to grow hemp. More than 150,000 acres of hemp were cultivated as a part of the USDA’s “Hemp for Victory” program during World War II.Kentucky is the latest of 19 states to make industrial hemp legal. Why doesn’t the U.S. government understand the difference between the hemp that helped us win World War II—and marijuana joints?
This is Hemp History Week, and hundreds of events are occurring across the country to promote hemp products for our belly and our body—and the economy. Premiering this week is the documentary Bringing It Home, showing the benefits of industrial hemp—a variety of cannabis that does not contain psychoactive chemicals.
It’s legal to eat hemp seeds (full of Omega-3 and -6 essential fatty acids) in your salads, wear hemp woven into chic clothing, to rub it into your skin by using an organic body care product, and to use it in building materials.
But U.S. farmers are no longer able to grow industrial hemp. The1937 Marihuana Tax Act defined hemp as a narcotic drug, just like its cousin marijuana. Technically, this law and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA) do permit the growing of hemp, but place strict controls and taxes on the commodity. And the DEA has been turning down all permit requests to set up commercial production.
Documentary Film Premiere
Bringing It Home, a new hour-long documentary film about industrial hemp, explores the question of why a crop with so many widespread benefits cannot be farmed in the U.S. today. The film explores the history of hemp, its myriad industrial applications and legalization efforts. Through a grassroots audience engagement screening tour, the documentary aims to magnify dialogue about hemp in order to facilitate America’s transition to a more informed, sustainable and healthy future. The film will premiere in conjunction with Hemp History Week 2013 with screenings in major cities across the country.
Filmmakers Linda Booker and Blaire Johnson were inspired by environmentally conscious home designer Anthony Brenner’s story to find the healthiest building material available to build a safe indoor environment for his young daughter, Bailey, who has a sensitivity to synthetic chemicals. Brenner received national media attention when he and Hemp Technologies completed “America’s First Hemp House” for the former mayor of Asheville, North Carolina. Booker and Johnson tell the story of hemp through animation, archival images and footage of hemp business leaders and entrepreneurs like Brenner from England, Spain, Washington, D.C., California and North Carolina. For more information, go to: www.BringingItHomeMovie.com.
Even Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) Endorses Industrial Hemp
A grassroots movement (no pun intended) is underway to legalize hemp at the state and federal levels. An online letter-writing drive to encourage the Obama Administration and Congress to change federal law that currently prohibits American farmers from growing industrial hemp are all facets of the campaign to bring this environmentally sustainable and profitable crop back to American soil. More information and a promotional video for the campaign are available at: www.HempHistoryWeek.com.
This month, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013 (H.R. 525) was introduced in the House with twenty-eight original co-sponsors, and it was quickly joined by a companion bill in the Senate (S. 359) which was introduced by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), underscoring the bipartisan support around the hemp issue. If passed, the bills would remove federal restrictions on the domestic cultivation of industrial hemp, defined as the non?drug oilseed and fiber varieties of Cannabis. The full text of the bills, as well as status and co-sponsors, can be found at: www.VoteHemp.com/legislation.
Environmental News from Living Green Magazine – Where Green Is Read
Read more at http://livinggreenmag.com/2013/06/07/green-business/bringing-it-home-industrial-hemp-documentary-highlights-hemp-history-week/#XmJRRUcHOq303V9V.99
Thursday, June 06, 2013
Debate on hemp heats up in DC
This is from the Huffington Post, which follows this issue now that it is hot:
WASHINGTON -- The attempt to move industrial hemp legalization through the Senate as part of the farm bill is running into stiff resistance from law enforcement, threatening to derail the effort.
Hemp is a non-psychoactive relative of marijuana that is banned for its familial association. Hemp products are legal to import and sell in the United States, but the plant cannot be grown without a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration -- which, unsurprisingly, the agency rarely grants.
Legalizing hemp crops has the backing of two Kentucky Republicans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and tea party favorite Sen. Rand Paul, and two Oregon Democrats, Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. McConnell, taking the tactical lead, has been pressing either to simply insert the hemp language into the underlying farm bill or to specifically add it through a voice vote (rather than a recorded vote), according to multiple people involved in the negotiations. The Senate will return to debate on the farm bill Thursday morning.
The purpose of a voice vote would be twofold: First, it would give senators a low-profile way to support an issue still perceived as controversial and strongly opposed by police and prosecutors. "Law enforcement is very opposed," said one top Democratic aide, explaining the reluctance to hold a floor vote.
Second, because there has not been a hemp vote in modern memory, supporters are uncertain that they have the 60 votes needed to meet the threshold for farm bill amendments.
A voice vote would also require unanimous consent, which means that a single senator could object and force a roll call. On Tuesday, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) told HuffPost that he was a longtime hemp opponent. "I just have concerns about legalizing hemp production, and so I've never been a supporter of it," he said, citing "law enforcement concern." Johanns is retiring after the 2014 elections.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), according to three Senate aides involved with negotiations, told McConnell he would be willing to allow hemp to come up for a vote as a farm bill amendment. They say McConnell declined, insisting that he wanted it either made part of the base bill or added as a voice vote.
A McConnell aide disputed that Reid offered the minority leader a vote. Aides to Reid and to Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) insisted that such an offer was made. It was delivered in person to McConnell staff on the floor of the Senate by Reid's agriculture counsel, a Reid aide said.
A Stabenow aide said that Stabenow staff witnessed both Reid's aide making the offer on the floor to McConnell staff and Reid personally making the offer to Rand Paul on the Senate floor, after which Paul canvassed his colleagues on the floor for potential support.
The Republican side of the effort doesn't appear to be working in unison. On Tuesday, according to two Democratic aides involved with the talks, the Senate Republican Policy Committee insisted that hemp be included as one of the amendments to receive a vote or Republicans would not agree to a final list. But McConnell had already been offered and declined such a vote.
Moving to a voice vote traditionally requires sign-off from the bill's floor managers, as well as from the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate committee with jurisdiction. Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) has expressed support, and Stabenow, who is shepherding the farm bill, has said she's open to a vote.
But Stabenow's Republican counterpart told HuffPost Tuesday that he wasn't aware of having signed off on any hemp amendment. "I haven't had it brought to my attention," Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) said.
"We'll be disappointed if there's not a voice vote," said Holly Harris, chief of staff to Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, a Republican who ran on legalizing hemp and managed to push it through the state Legislature. He has been on Capitol Hill lobbying for it.
Wyden, who has introduced a hemp bill in successive Congresses, said Tuesday that he was planning to talk with Stabenow regarding a possible vote.
Hemp is not an issue that many senators have thought much about. HuffPost canvassed a wide swath from both parties and found most of them without enough information to form an opinion. Even those from farm states who have been supportive in the past were reluctant to take a stand on it -- with the exception of Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), who said she remains a longtime backer.
"We passed it in our state for our farmers, and what we ran into is the federal restriction and specifically the DEA, their concern," said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.). "So industrial hemp I think it's reasonable to grow, but we've got to work it out with law enforcement." After asking if McConnell was backing the amendment, Hoeven added that he plans to examine it with an open mind.
"I've been supportive of it, but I'd have to look at it," said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).
Even Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a tea party ally of Rand Paul's, told HuffPost that he hadn't made up his mind on Paul's amendment. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), another advocate of states' rights, said simply "no" when asked if he would back the McConnell-Paul effort. Asked why not, he added, "I haven't looked at the issue."
Wyden said that he is continuing to lobby his colleagues, frequently pointing out to them that if the finished product can be purchased at Costco, there's no reason farmers in the U.S. shouldn't be able to grow it. He's also working to convince them that nobody can get high by smoking hemp.
"The first challenge we have -- and suffice to say, this has been the case for some time -- is to make sure that people see the THC level, which of course is the active ingredient, is very different with hemp than it is with marijuana," Wyden said.
A recent HuffPost/YouGov poll found that, by a 56 percent to 24 percent margin, most Americans think it should be legal to grow hemp in the U.S.
Hemp is a non-psychoactive relative of marijuana that is banned for its familial association. Hemp products are legal to import and sell in the United States, but the plant cannot be grown without a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration -- which, unsurprisingly, the agency rarely grants.
Legalizing hemp crops has the backing of two Kentucky Republicans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and tea party favorite Sen. Rand Paul, and two Oregon Democrats, Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. McConnell, taking the tactical lead, has been pressing either to simply insert the hemp language into the underlying farm bill or to specifically add it through a voice vote (rather than a recorded vote), according to multiple people involved in the negotiations. The Senate will return to debate on the farm bill Thursday morning.
The purpose of a voice vote would be twofold: First, it would give senators a low-profile way to support an issue still perceived as controversial and strongly opposed by police and prosecutors. "Law enforcement is very opposed," said one top Democratic aide, explaining the reluctance to hold a floor vote.
Second, because there has not been a hemp vote in modern memory, supporters are uncertain that they have the 60 votes needed to meet the threshold for farm bill amendments.
A voice vote would also require unanimous consent, which means that a single senator could object and force a roll call. On Tuesday, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) told HuffPost that he was a longtime hemp opponent. "I just have concerns about legalizing hemp production, and so I've never been a supporter of it," he said, citing "law enforcement concern." Johanns is retiring after the 2014 elections.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), according to three Senate aides involved with negotiations, told McConnell he would be willing to allow hemp to come up for a vote as a farm bill amendment. They say McConnell declined, insisting that he wanted it either made part of the base bill or added as a voice vote.
A Stabenow aide said that Stabenow staff witnessed both Reid's aide making the offer on the floor to McConnell staff and Reid personally making the offer to Rand Paul on the Senate floor, after which Paul canvassed his colleagues on the floor for potential support.
The Republican side of the effort doesn't appear to be working in unison. On Tuesday, according to two Democratic aides involved with the talks, the Senate Republican Policy Committee insisted that hemp be included as one of the amendments to receive a vote or Republicans would not agree to a final list. But McConnell had already been offered and declined such a vote.
Moving to a voice vote traditionally requires sign-off from the bill's floor managers, as well as from the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate committee with jurisdiction. Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) has expressed support, and Stabenow, who is shepherding the farm bill, has said she's open to a vote.
But Stabenow's Republican counterpart told HuffPost Tuesday that he wasn't aware of having signed off on any hemp amendment. "I haven't had it brought to my attention," Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) said.
"We'll be disappointed if there's not a voice vote," said Holly Harris, chief of staff to Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, a Republican who ran on legalizing hemp and managed to push it through the state Legislature. He has been on Capitol Hill lobbying for it.
Wyden, who has introduced a hemp bill in successive Congresses, said Tuesday that he was planning to talk with Stabenow regarding a possible vote.
Hemp is not an issue that many senators have thought much about. HuffPost canvassed a wide swath from both parties and found most of them without enough information to form an opinion. Even those from farm states who have been supportive in the past were reluctant to take a stand on it -- with the exception of Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), who said she remains a longtime backer.
"We passed it in our state for our farmers, and what we ran into is the federal restriction and specifically the DEA, their concern," said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.). "So industrial hemp I think it's reasonable to grow, but we've got to work it out with law enforcement." After asking if McConnell was backing the amendment, Hoeven added that he plans to examine it with an open mind.
"I've been supportive of it, but I'd have to look at it," said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).
Even Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a tea party ally of Rand Paul's, told HuffPost that he hadn't made up his mind on Paul's amendment. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), another advocate of states' rights, said simply "no" when asked if he would back the McConnell-Paul effort. Asked why not, he added, "I haven't looked at the issue."
Wyden said that he is continuing to lobby his colleagues, frequently pointing out to them that if the finished product can be purchased at Costco, there's no reason farmers in the U.S. shouldn't be able to grow it. He's also working to convince them that nobody can get high by smoking hemp.
"The first challenge we have -- and suffice to say, this has been the case for some time -- is to make sure that people see the THC level, which of course is the active ingredient, is very different with hemp than it is with marijuana," Wyden said.
A recent HuffPost/YouGov poll found that, by a 56 percent to 24 percent margin, most Americans think it should be legal to grow hemp in the U.S.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Patrick Leahy supports ammendment to Farming Bill that would permit hemp
WASHINGTON -- Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on Tuesday signaled to advocates that he would support an amendment to the farm bill that will legalize industrial hemp production, according to Tom Murphy of Vote Hemp. Leahy's office, he said, told the group Rural Vermont that he'd be backing the effort, and a Leahy aide confirmed his support to HuffPost.
Leahy's backing is a major boost, because his committee oversees the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has jurisdiction over hemp, despite the fact that it's not a drug. His support is also a critical momentum swing because he had previously objected to inserting the provision into the farm bill based on jurisdictional concerns. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a hemp backer, requested late last Monday night, the day before the farm bill came up for consideration, that Leahy grant a waiver of his jurisdiction, a request he declined. It was tough timing for McConnell: Leahy was in the midst of marking-up the historic immigration reform bill working its way through his panel.
In January, however, Leahy sent a strongly worded letter to the DEA asking why it had not been granting permits in recent years to hemp producers, and citing increased state support for domestically grown hemp. The DEA, in its reply, pointedly refused to refer to the plant as hemp, preferring cannabis or marijuana instead.
“Under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), cannabis is a schedule I controlled substance regardless of its potency,” Eric J. Akers, the DEA’s deputy chief of congressional and public affairs, wrote in response, saying he believed the current regulations on hemp were adequate.
About eight people have applied to grow industrial hemp since 2000, he said, with half being approved and the rest denied because they had insufficient security.
The DEA is concerned that looser regulation of hemp would be “readily exploited by drug seekers,” including manufacturers of “hash oil,” Akers wrote.
The proposed amendment to the farm bill was introduced Monday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and would exclude industrial hemp from classification as “marihuana,” removing it from the DEA’s purview.
It is cosponsored by McConnell, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).
"For me, what's important is that people see, particularly in our state, there's someone buying it at Costco in Oregon," Wyden told HuffPost. "I adopted what I think is a modest position, which is if you can buy it at a store in Oregon, our farmers ought to be able to make some money growing it."
If the hemp measure can make it through the Senate, it stands a reasonable chance in the House, where Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has expressed openness to it.
Leahy's backing is a major boost, because his committee oversees the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has jurisdiction over hemp, despite the fact that it's not a drug. His support is also a critical momentum swing because he had previously objected to inserting the provision into the farm bill based on jurisdictional concerns. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a hemp backer, requested late last Monday night, the day before the farm bill came up for consideration, that Leahy grant a waiver of his jurisdiction, a request he declined. It was tough timing for McConnell: Leahy was in the midst of marking-up the historic immigration reform bill working its way through his panel.
In January, however, Leahy sent a strongly worded letter to the DEA asking why it had not been granting permits in recent years to hemp producers, and citing increased state support for domestically grown hemp. The DEA, in its reply, pointedly refused to refer to the plant as hemp, preferring cannabis or marijuana instead.
“Under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), cannabis is a schedule I controlled substance regardless of its potency,” Eric J. Akers, the DEA’s deputy chief of congressional and public affairs, wrote in response, saying he believed the current regulations on hemp were adequate.
About eight people have applied to grow industrial hemp since 2000, he said, with half being approved and the rest denied because they had insufficient security.
The DEA is concerned that looser regulation of hemp would be “readily exploited by drug seekers,” including manufacturers of “hash oil,” Akers wrote.
The proposed amendment to the farm bill was introduced Monday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and would exclude industrial hemp from classification as “marihuana,” removing it from the DEA’s purview.
It is cosponsored by McConnell, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).
"For me, what's important is that people see, particularly in our state, there's someone buying it at Costco in Oregon," Wyden told HuffPost. "I adopted what I think is a modest position, which is if you can buy it at a store in Oregon, our farmers ought to be able to make some money growing it."
If the hemp measure can make it through the Senate, it stands a reasonable chance in the House, where Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has expressed openness to it.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Building hemp bridges in Oregon
Oregon
State Representative Suzanne Bonamici has joined together with Senator Ron Wyden
and Governor John Kitzhaber to champion a new construction
project involving the use of hemp buiding materials.
Rep. Bonamici
Representative
Bonamici is an avid longtime lobbyist for the legalization of industrial hemp.
“It’s rope, not dope,” Bonamici proclaims.
Governor
Kitzhaber told reporters in a press conference he is fatigued with all of the
past Columbia River Crossing’s half-baked project ideas.
“If
we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it fully baked,” Governor Kitzhaber
declared.
And
as far as the governor’s interest in the project is concerned he is delighted at
the prospective jobs it will offer and the fact that going green by using hemp
building materials means they will be saving some “green” as well.
“It’s
eco-friendly, it will bring hundreds of green jobs to Oregon, and initial
projections are that building a hemp bridge will cut the costs in half,”
Kitzhaber explained.
The
project’s supporters have been busy recruiting celebrities with the intentions
of raising awareness and to help build further backing for the venture.
Their
most notable celebrity supporter to date is one Woody Harrelson, actor and
activist extraordinaire.
hemp field
Woody
expresses his feelings about the Columbia Reefer Crossing’s (recently adopted
title) efforts to build a pedestrian bridge using hemp construction
material.
“This
is very exciting. Washington has recently legalized marijuana, and Oregon is
looking at doing the same. The CRC would be a living symbol of the cannabis
bridge between the two states,” Harrelson asserted.
Stay
tuned to The 420 Times for any updates regarding the hemp pedestrian bridge
project’s progress and for all you cannabis community news.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Jim Hightower in the Boulder Weekly
Jim Hightower in the Boulder Weekly expresses more support for hemp. The press is starting to take on this issue, with the LA Times (see post on this blog) giving it weight in an editorial.
Can sanity finally conquer reefer madness?
Besides being founders of our Republic, what did Thomas Jefferson and George Washington have in common? Answer: Hemp.
America’s founders were strong promoters of this extraordinarily useful agricultural crop, and both Jefferson and Washington grew it. The first draft of our Constitution was written on hemp paper, and as late as World War II, the government urgently pushed farmers to grow the crop as part of a “Hemp for Victory” program.
So why are American farmers today prohibited from producing this patriotic, profitable, pesticide-free plant? Political nuttiness. Most recently, in a frenzy of reefer madness, U.S. drug police decided that President Nixon’s “Controlled Substance Act of 1970” not only outlawed marijuana, but also its non-narcotic cousin, industrial hemp. If ignorance is bliss, they must’ve been ecstatic, yet their nuttiness remains the law of our land.
The good news is that a wave of sanity is now wafting across America. In Colorado, for example, farmer Michael Bowman and Denver hemp advocate Lynda Parker helped pass Amendment 64 in last fall’s election. It legalizes personal pot use, which got all the media attention, but it also directs the legislature to set up a program for “the cultivation, processing and sale of industrial hemp.” Bowman now hopes to be the first American farmer in generations to plant a legal crop of it — hoping to do so on April 30, the 80th birthday of familyfarmer hero and hemp champion Willie Nelson.
The red state of Kentucky is also on the move. Its Republican ag commissioner, backed by its chamber of commerce, is campaigning to legalize hemp farming, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is co-sponsoring a national bill with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden to take hemp off the controlled substance list.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Steven Wishnia article on hemp movement in the US
An article by Steven Wishnia in Truthout.org says in the title that the tide is turning for hemp...what with the number of legislatures now supporting it and states making it legal, this is an understatement, although some major news outlets do not report truthfully on this at all. While much goes unreported, the petition at www.minawear.com/about-us is growing at a slow but steady rate, looking to really kick off in April when Mina goes on tour with the Kentucky Hemp Museum to 10 cities in southern and western states.
Steven Wishnia
Hemp Is Harmless, a Potential Economic Miracle, and Still Illegal in America, but the Tide Seems to Be Turning
Powerful politicians across the country are pushing to bring hemp back.
The American hemp industry, revived in the 1990s in a wave of cannabis-fueled environmentalism, now sells $450 million a year of products from hemp-oil soap to hemp-coned speakers for guitar amplifiers, according to an industry trade group. Yet all the raw material used for these products, from fiber to hempseed oil, has to be imported, as it’s still illegal to grow hemp in the United States.
The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013, introduced in the House on February 6 by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), would end that. It would amend federal drug law to legalize growing cannabis that contains less than 0.3% THC. Its 28 cosponsors include Kentucky Republican John Yarmuth and Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee. Mostly Democrats, they span a geographic and ideological spectrum from Dan Benishek, a conservative Republican from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to Barbara Lee of Oakland, California, former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
“Industrial hemp is a sustainable crop and could be a great economic opportunity for Kentucky farmers,” Massie said in a statement announcing the bill. “Tobacco is no longer a viable crop for many of us in Kentucky and we understand how hard it is for a family farm to turn a profit. Industrial hemp will give small farmers another opportunity to succeed.”
Similar legislation failed to get even a committee hearing in the 2011-12 session of Congress, but supporters are optimistic. On Feb. 14, four senators—Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky, along with Oregon Democrats Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley—introduced a companion bill.
McConnell also recently endorsed a Kentucky state bill to allow hemp farming if the federal law was changed to permit it. State Agriculture Commissioner James Comer is pushing that measure, against opposition from police groups who claim it would make it difficult to enforce the laws against growing marijuana. The Kentucky Senate’s agriculture committee approved it unanimously on Feb. 11.
“The utilization of hemp to produce everything from clothing to paper is real, and if there is a capacity to center a new domestic industry in Kentucky that will create jobs in these difficult economic times, that sounds like a good thing to me,” McConnell said in a statement issued January 31. Hemp Industries Association spokesperson Tom Murphy says the e-mail he got with that news had the subject line “Are you sitting down?”
Hemp plants grown to produce oil or fiber are of the same species as cannabis grown for marijuana, but their genetics and the way they are cultivated are as different as a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. Cannabis plants grown for marijuana are bred for high THC and given enough space to branch out so they can produce buds. Cannabis plants grown for hemp have much lower THC and are packed densely—typically 35 to 50 per square foot—because the stalks are the most valuable part.
Cannabis’ first known use for fiber, in Taiwan about 8000 BCE, predates its first known use as an intoxicant by thousands of years. In the 18th and 19th centuries, hemp was a significant crop in the U.S., with Kentucky the main producer and the fibers used to make rope, cloth and paper. The industry declined in the late 19th century, as technological advances made cotton easier to harvest and process, and sisal and jute imports from Asia provided cheaper materials for rope.
By 1937, when the federal Marihuana Tax Act levied a punitive $100-an-ounce tax on marijuana, hemp was not an important enough crop to be included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual “Farm Outlook” forecast. The 1937 law did not actually outlaw the cannabis plant, and it exempted hemp stalks and products such as fiber or oil, but it required growers to pay $1 to get a permit from the federal government—not an insignificant sum in the Depression, when millions of farmers made less than $12 a week. (No sustainable evidence supports the widespread belief that marijuana prohibition was pushed through by a Hearst-DuPont-governmental conspiracy to eliminate hemp as competition for wood-pulp paper, nylon, and polyester.)
Hemp farming revived briefly during World War II, after the Japanese occupation of the Philippines cut off the supply of sisal, but by the late 1950s, it was gone. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 defined growing any cannabis plant as cultivation of marijuana, a felony.
As federal drug law bases penalties on quantity, on the number of plants grown, the densely packed cultivation of hemp plants would thus bring harsher punishment than a marijuana plot of the same size. Growing hemp on a plot 100 by 10 feet—less than 1/40 of an acre—“is enough to get 20 to life,” says Murphy. Even if the federal government did not want to prosecute hemp farmers, he adds, it could seize their property and equipment as tools of crime. Under forfeiture law, the farmer would have to prove his or her innocence in court to get anything back.
From 2000 to 2002, an Oglala Sioux farm family tried to grow hemp on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, but Drug Enforcement Administration agents destroyed their crop each year. In 2006, the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Controlled Substances Act prohibited growing any kind of cannabis, and that federal law superseded the permission they’d received from the Oglala tribal government.
As with medical marijuana, state governments have been friendlier to hemp. Eight states (Colorado, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia) have enacted laws legalizing farming, using the 0.3 percent THC standard to distinguish it from marijuana. Colorado’s Amendment 64, the marijuana-legalization initiative passed by voters there last November, directs the state legislature to enact regulations for hemp farming by July 2014. Eleven more states have approved other pro-hemp measures, such as authorizing studies or passing resolutions urging the federal government to legalize it. California’s legislature voted to create a pilot hemp-farming project in several counties in 2011, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the bill, citing the federal ban.
North Dakota granted a hemp-farming license to state Rep. David Monson in 2007, but he was never legally able to grow any. He filed two lawsuits against the DEA challenging the prohibition, but in 2010, the Eighth Circuit turned him down, upholding a lower-court ruling that as hemp was cannabis sativa, it was legally the same as marijuana.
Canada, however, distinguishes between the two varieties of the plant. It legalized hemp cultivation in 1998. Farmers must be licensed and obtain approved low-THC seeds. Plants can be tested to ensure they contain less than 0.3 percent THC. Hemp is also legal in about 30 other countries, with China and France (where it was never outlawed) the leading producers. Eastern European countries like Romania and Hungary are trying to revive and modernize their hemp industries.
“You could outlaw heroin, but you don’t have to outlaw poppy seeds on your bagel or muffin,” says Eric Steenstra, head of the VoteHemp lobbying group. “It’s not like anybody’s going out to the Canadian hemp fields and stealing it and smoking it.”
The Kentucky bill would require hemp farms to have at least 10 acres.
Inside the Hemp Industry
Despite the federal ban on growing hemp, the industry has grown. In 2011, the Hemp Industries Association estimated U.S. hemp-product sales at $450 million, with about $130 million from food and body-care products such as Dr. Bronner’s hemp-oil soap and the Body Shop’s hemp hand lotion, and the rest from clothing, auto parts, building materials, and more. As no hemp is legally grown in the U.S., it has to be imported—and imports of hemp raw materials reached $11.5 million in 2011, more than quadruple what they were in 2000, according to federal trade statistics.
“Even after the Great Recession, the hemp industry continues to grow,” says the HIA’s Tom Murphy. Canada provides most of the seeds and oil used in food and body-care products, China most of the fiber used in textiles, and Europe a mixture of seeds, hurds, and fiber, he adds.
The industry hasn’t grown in the direction expected when it began. The original ’90s “hempsters” were mostly pot-legalization activists inspired by the hemp-can-save-the-world vision of the late Jack Herer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes. If we used hemp for paper and clothing, they believed, we wouldn’t have to clearcut forests for pulp or spray cotton fields with weed-killers and insecticide.
The problem, says Steenstra, was that many hempsters were motivated by “great love for the plant,” but “didn’t have any background in retail.” Imported hemp was expensive. There were practical obstacles to manufacturing and marketing hemp paper and fabrics. The result was a major shakeout of businesses in the late ’90s. Hemp Times magazine, a High Times spinoff covering the hemp trade, folded in 1999. Steenstra and his business partner, Steve DeAngelo, sold their hemp-clothing company, Ecolution. (DeAngelo now runs the massive Harborside medical-marijuana dispensary in Oakland, Calif.)
Instead, the main growth has been in food and body-care products, auto and airplane parts, and construction materials. The DEA attempted to ban food products made from hempseed meal or oil, but in 2004, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled it, saying hemp food contained a negligible amount of intoxicant. Since then, hemp food and body-care product sales have grown steadily, says Steenstra, rising by more than 16 percent from 2011 to 2012.
One new product is car-door liners. Manufacturers such as Flexform Technologies in Elkhart, Indiana, and Johnson Controls’ German plant take felt-like mats of non-woven hemp fibers, spray them with resin, and then press them into the appropriate shape. BMW and Ford use the light, strong material in their cars’ doors, and similar products are used in airplanes, says Steenstra.
“Hempcrete,” a lightweight concrete-like insulating material that can be poured into molds or used in blocks, is made by mixing the hurds, the woody core left after the fiber is stripped off the stalk, with lime and water. An English brewer and wine society have built warehouses with it. At Clay Fields, a green affordable-housing project in the English town of Elmswell that opened in 2008, the 26 houses are built from hempcrete surrounding a weight-bearing wood frame, protected on the outside by about an inch of lime-render cement.
Lime Technology, a British green-construction-products firm that supplied the hempcrete for Clay Fields, touts it as a much better insulator than conventional building materials, reducing the need for heating in winter and air-conditioning in the summer. It requires much less energy to produce than regular cement, it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it dries, and “site cleanup is easy. Simply till it into the soil.”
Going Legal
One problem for the industry is that hemp’s decades of illegality have left almost no infrastructure for growing, processing and selling it. As no hemp has been grown legally in the U.S. since 1957, says Murphy, many parts of the industry would have to be re-established virtually from scratch. To begin with, all the seed stock is gone, except for feral ditchweed.
“You’d have to breed again for varieties that work well here,” he says. Kentucky was once a major hemp producer, and it also provided seeds for strains better suited to different latitudes, such as Wisconsin. There were also strains bred for fiber or for larger seeds that yielded more oil. Currently, Murphy says, Canada uses mostly Russian and European stock. Those seeds could also be cross-bred with local feral strains.
This lack of infrastructure has been a major barrier to producing hemp clothing and paper. Building a new decorticator mill for hemp paper would cost more than $100 million, says Murphy.
Several small companies are using hemp for specialized products such as archival-quality, filter, or cigarette papers, but its most likely general use will be when mixed with recycled paper, says Steenstra. “Blend in 10 to 15 percent hemp, and it’s great for making better-quality recycled paper,” he says. When paper gets recycled, he explains, its fibers get shorter, and the long fibers of hemp strengthen it.
There are similar issues with clothing. Though Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, and several lesser-known manufacturers are using hemp in clothes, “the whole textile industry is built on short-fiber cotton and synthetics,” says Steenstra. “There’s no infrastructure for processing hemp fiber into textiles.”
Hemp oil for biofuel, another use dreamed of in the ‘90s, is unlikely to be practical. At 50 gallons per acre, even if every acre of U.S. cropland were used for hemp, it would supply current U.S. demand for oil for less than three weeks.
On the other hand, the hemp-food industry is “pretty well settled,” says Murphy. If hemp growing were legalized in the U.S., he adds, a lot of Canadian processors would probably open facilities here. Legalization would also help hemp food break out of its niche-market status. If it received “GRAS” (Generally Recognized As Safe) status from the Food and Drug Administration, major brands would be less reluctant to use it. Until then, he says, Coca-Cola won’t put hemp milk in Odwalla Future Shakes, and we’re not likely to see hempseed Clif Bars.
Canada’s experience illustrates the problems of developing a new industry, says Murphy. Hemp farming there has been through two boom-and-bust cycles since it was legalized in 1998. The nation’s production leaped to 35,000 acres in 1999 and plummeted to about 4,000 in 2001, according to a report by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in Alberta, Canada’s main hemp-producing province. It soared to 48,000 acres in 2006 and fell to less than 10,000 two years later.
Business factors explain those fluctuations, says Murphy. When hemp was legalized, more than 200 Canadian farmers signed contracts to grow it for an American outfit called Consolidated Growers and Processors. It went bankrupt in 2000 and stiffed them for more than $1 million.
Farmers got back into it after the hemp-food industry burgeoned, aided by the end of the U.S. ban and a German inventor modifying a buckwheat-shelling machine to process hempseed. But there were not enough buyers or processing facilities to handle the bumper crop of 2006. “They were growing on spec,” says Murphy. “You really have to have a good contract.”
Since then, production has been rising again. It reached almost 39,000 acres in 2011, according to the Alberta report. The Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance projects that the area planted will reach 100,000 acres by 2014.
In 2009, the most recent figures available from the European Industrial Hemp Association, about 45,000 acres (18,000 hectares) of hemp were planted in the European Union. More than half was in France, with the U.K. and Poland following.
In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 9,461,000 acres of cotton were harvested in the U.S. in 2011—a year in which more than one-third of the nation’s crop was wiped out by severe drought, with farmers in Texas and Oklahoma forced to abandon more than 5 million acres, more than half of what they planted. The amount of cotton harvested in the mostly desert state of New Mexico, 61,000 acres, was more than all the hemp planted in Canada.
Still, it wouldn’t take that much land for hemp to have a significant impact. In 1943, when the U.S. hemp industry was revived to make rope, twine and parachute webbing for the war effort, about 146,000 acres were harvested, with a yield of about 70,000 tons.
“It would be nice to have the hemp grown here,” says Murphy.
Steven Wishnia
Hemp Is Harmless, a Potential Economic Miracle, and Still Illegal in America, but the Tide Seems to Be Turning
Powerful politicians across the country are pushing to bring hemp back.
The American hemp industry, revived in the 1990s in a wave of cannabis-fueled environmentalism, now sells $450 million a year of products from hemp-oil soap to hemp-coned speakers for guitar amplifiers, according to an industry trade group. Yet all the raw material used for these products, from fiber to hempseed oil, has to be imported, as it’s still illegal to grow hemp in the United States.
The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013, introduced in the House on February 6 by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), would end that. It would amend federal drug law to legalize growing cannabis that contains less than 0.3% THC. Its 28 cosponsors include Kentucky Republican John Yarmuth and Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee. Mostly Democrats, they span a geographic and ideological spectrum from Dan Benishek, a conservative Republican from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to Barbara Lee of Oakland, California, former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
“Industrial hemp is a sustainable crop and could be a great economic opportunity for Kentucky farmers,” Massie said in a statement announcing the bill. “Tobacco is no longer a viable crop for many of us in Kentucky and we understand how hard it is for a family farm to turn a profit. Industrial hemp will give small farmers another opportunity to succeed.”
Similar legislation failed to get even a committee hearing in the 2011-12 session of Congress, but supporters are optimistic. On Feb. 14, four senators—Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky, along with Oregon Democrats Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley—introduced a companion bill.
McConnell also recently endorsed a Kentucky state bill to allow hemp farming if the federal law was changed to permit it. State Agriculture Commissioner James Comer is pushing that measure, against opposition from police groups who claim it would make it difficult to enforce the laws against growing marijuana. The Kentucky Senate’s agriculture committee approved it unanimously on Feb. 11.
“The utilization of hemp to produce everything from clothing to paper is real, and if there is a capacity to center a new domestic industry in Kentucky that will create jobs in these difficult economic times, that sounds like a good thing to me,” McConnell said in a statement issued January 31. Hemp Industries Association spokesperson Tom Murphy says the e-mail he got with that news had the subject line “Are you sitting down?”
Hemp plants grown to produce oil or fiber are of the same species as cannabis grown for marijuana, but their genetics and the way they are cultivated are as different as a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. Cannabis plants grown for marijuana are bred for high THC and given enough space to branch out so they can produce buds. Cannabis plants grown for hemp have much lower THC and are packed densely—typically 35 to 50 per square foot—because the stalks are the most valuable part.
Cannabis’ first known use for fiber, in Taiwan about 8000 BCE, predates its first known use as an intoxicant by thousands of years. In the 18th and 19th centuries, hemp was a significant crop in the U.S., with Kentucky the main producer and the fibers used to make rope, cloth and paper. The industry declined in the late 19th century, as technological advances made cotton easier to harvest and process, and sisal and jute imports from Asia provided cheaper materials for rope.
By 1937, when the federal Marihuana Tax Act levied a punitive $100-an-ounce tax on marijuana, hemp was not an important enough crop to be included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual “Farm Outlook” forecast. The 1937 law did not actually outlaw the cannabis plant, and it exempted hemp stalks and products such as fiber or oil, but it required growers to pay $1 to get a permit from the federal government—not an insignificant sum in the Depression, when millions of farmers made less than $12 a week. (No sustainable evidence supports the widespread belief that marijuana prohibition was pushed through by a Hearst-DuPont-governmental conspiracy to eliminate hemp as competition for wood-pulp paper, nylon, and polyester.)
Hemp farming revived briefly during World War II, after the Japanese occupation of the Philippines cut off the supply of sisal, but by the late 1950s, it was gone. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 defined growing any cannabis plant as cultivation of marijuana, a felony.
As federal drug law bases penalties on quantity, on the number of plants grown, the densely packed cultivation of hemp plants would thus bring harsher punishment than a marijuana plot of the same size. Growing hemp on a plot 100 by 10 feet—less than 1/40 of an acre—“is enough to get 20 to life,” says Murphy. Even if the federal government did not want to prosecute hemp farmers, he adds, it could seize their property and equipment as tools of crime. Under forfeiture law, the farmer would have to prove his or her innocence in court to get anything back.
From 2000 to 2002, an Oglala Sioux farm family tried to grow hemp on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, but Drug Enforcement Administration agents destroyed their crop each year. In 2006, the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Controlled Substances Act prohibited growing any kind of cannabis, and that federal law superseded the permission they’d received from the Oglala tribal government.
As with medical marijuana, state governments have been friendlier to hemp. Eight states (Colorado, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia) have enacted laws legalizing farming, using the 0.3 percent THC standard to distinguish it from marijuana. Colorado’s Amendment 64, the marijuana-legalization initiative passed by voters there last November, directs the state legislature to enact regulations for hemp farming by July 2014. Eleven more states have approved other pro-hemp measures, such as authorizing studies or passing resolutions urging the federal government to legalize it. California’s legislature voted to create a pilot hemp-farming project in several counties in 2011, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the bill, citing the federal ban.
North Dakota granted a hemp-farming license to state Rep. David Monson in 2007, but he was never legally able to grow any. He filed two lawsuits against the DEA challenging the prohibition, but in 2010, the Eighth Circuit turned him down, upholding a lower-court ruling that as hemp was cannabis sativa, it was legally the same as marijuana.
Canada, however, distinguishes between the two varieties of the plant. It legalized hemp cultivation in 1998. Farmers must be licensed and obtain approved low-THC seeds. Plants can be tested to ensure they contain less than 0.3 percent THC. Hemp is also legal in about 30 other countries, with China and France (where it was never outlawed) the leading producers. Eastern European countries like Romania and Hungary are trying to revive and modernize their hemp industries.
“You could outlaw heroin, but you don’t have to outlaw poppy seeds on your bagel or muffin,” says Eric Steenstra, head of the VoteHemp lobbying group. “It’s not like anybody’s going out to the Canadian hemp fields and stealing it and smoking it.”
The Kentucky bill would require hemp farms to have at least 10 acres.
Inside the Hemp Industry
Despite the federal ban on growing hemp, the industry has grown. In 2011, the Hemp Industries Association estimated U.S. hemp-product sales at $450 million, with about $130 million from food and body-care products such as Dr. Bronner’s hemp-oil soap and the Body Shop’s hemp hand lotion, and the rest from clothing, auto parts, building materials, and more. As no hemp is legally grown in the U.S., it has to be imported—and imports of hemp raw materials reached $11.5 million in 2011, more than quadruple what they were in 2000, according to federal trade statistics.
“Even after the Great Recession, the hemp industry continues to grow,” says the HIA’s Tom Murphy. Canada provides most of the seeds and oil used in food and body-care products, China most of the fiber used in textiles, and Europe a mixture of seeds, hurds, and fiber, he adds.
The industry hasn’t grown in the direction expected when it began. The original ’90s “hempsters” were mostly pot-legalization activists inspired by the hemp-can-save-the-world vision of the late Jack Herer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes. If we used hemp for paper and clothing, they believed, we wouldn’t have to clearcut forests for pulp or spray cotton fields with weed-killers and insecticide.
The problem, says Steenstra, was that many hempsters were motivated by “great love for the plant,” but “didn’t have any background in retail.” Imported hemp was expensive. There were practical obstacles to manufacturing and marketing hemp paper and fabrics. The result was a major shakeout of businesses in the late ’90s. Hemp Times magazine, a High Times spinoff covering the hemp trade, folded in 1999. Steenstra and his business partner, Steve DeAngelo, sold their hemp-clothing company, Ecolution. (DeAngelo now runs the massive Harborside medical-marijuana dispensary in Oakland, Calif.)
Instead, the main growth has been in food and body-care products, auto and airplane parts, and construction materials. The DEA attempted to ban food products made from hempseed meal or oil, but in 2004, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled it, saying hemp food contained a negligible amount of intoxicant. Since then, hemp food and body-care product sales have grown steadily, says Steenstra, rising by more than 16 percent from 2011 to 2012.
One new product is car-door liners. Manufacturers such as Flexform Technologies in Elkhart, Indiana, and Johnson Controls’ German plant take felt-like mats of non-woven hemp fibers, spray them with resin, and then press them into the appropriate shape. BMW and Ford use the light, strong material in their cars’ doors, and similar products are used in airplanes, says Steenstra.
“Hempcrete,” a lightweight concrete-like insulating material that can be poured into molds or used in blocks, is made by mixing the hurds, the woody core left after the fiber is stripped off the stalk, with lime and water. An English brewer and wine society have built warehouses with it. At Clay Fields, a green affordable-housing project in the English town of Elmswell that opened in 2008, the 26 houses are built from hempcrete surrounding a weight-bearing wood frame, protected on the outside by about an inch of lime-render cement.
Lime Technology, a British green-construction-products firm that supplied the hempcrete for Clay Fields, touts it as a much better insulator than conventional building materials, reducing the need for heating in winter and air-conditioning in the summer. It requires much less energy to produce than regular cement, it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it dries, and “site cleanup is easy. Simply till it into the soil.”
Going Legal
One problem for the industry is that hemp’s decades of illegality have left almost no infrastructure for growing, processing and selling it. As no hemp has been grown legally in the U.S. since 1957, says Murphy, many parts of the industry would have to be re-established virtually from scratch. To begin with, all the seed stock is gone, except for feral ditchweed.
“You’d have to breed again for varieties that work well here,” he says. Kentucky was once a major hemp producer, and it also provided seeds for strains better suited to different latitudes, such as Wisconsin. There were also strains bred for fiber or for larger seeds that yielded more oil. Currently, Murphy says, Canada uses mostly Russian and European stock. Those seeds could also be cross-bred with local feral strains.
This lack of infrastructure has been a major barrier to producing hemp clothing and paper. Building a new decorticator mill for hemp paper would cost more than $100 million, says Murphy.
Several small companies are using hemp for specialized products such as archival-quality, filter, or cigarette papers, but its most likely general use will be when mixed with recycled paper, says Steenstra. “Blend in 10 to 15 percent hemp, and it’s great for making better-quality recycled paper,” he says. When paper gets recycled, he explains, its fibers get shorter, and the long fibers of hemp strengthen it.
There are similar issues with clothing. Though Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, and several lesser-known manufacturers are using hemp in clothes, “the whole textile industry is built on short-fiber cotton and synthetics,” says Steenstra. “There’s no infrastructure for processing hemp fiber into textiles.”
Hemp oil for biofuel, another use dreamed of in the ‘90s, is unlikely to be practical. At 50 gallons per acre, even if every acre of U.S. cropland were used for hemp, it would supply current U.S. demand for oil for less than three weeks.
On the other hand, the hemp-food industry is “pretty well settled,” says Murphy. If hemp growing were legalized in the U.S., he adds, a lot of Canadian processors would probably open facilities here. Legalization would also help hemp food break out of its niche-market status. If it received “GRAS” (Generally Recognized As Safe) status from the Food and Drug Administration, major brands would be less reluctant to use it. Until then, he says, Coca-Cola won’t put hemp milk in Odwalla Future Shakes, and we’re not likely to see hempseed Clif Bars.
Canada’s experience illustrates the problems of developing a new industry, says Murphy. Hemp farming there has been through two boom-and-bust cycles since it was legalized in 1998. The nation’s production leaped to 35,000 acres in 1999 and plummeted to about 4,000 in 2001, according to a report by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in Alberta, Canada’s main hemp-producing province. It soared to 48,000 acres in 2006 and fell to less than 10,000 two years later.
Business factors explain those fluctuations, says Murphy. When hemp was legalized, more than 200 Canadian farmers signed contracts to grow it for an American outfit called Consolidated Growers and Processors. It went bankrupt in 2000 and stiffed them for more than $1 million.
Farmers got back into it after the hemp-food industry burgeoned, aided by the end of the U.S. ban and a German inventor modifying a buckwheat-shelling machine to process hempseed. But there were not enough buyers or processing facilities to handle the bumper crop of 2006. “They were growing on spec,” says Murphy. “You really have to have a good contract.”
Since then, production has been rising again. It reached almost 39,000 acres in 2011, according to the Alberta report. The Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance projects that the area planted will reach 100,000 acres by 2014.
In 2009, the most recent figures available from the European Industrial Hemp Association, about 45,000 acres (18,000 hectares) of hemp were planted in the European Union. More than half was in France, with the U.K. and Poland following.
In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 9,461,000 acres of cotton were harvested in the U.S. in 2011—a year in which more than one-third of the nation’s crop was wiped out by severe drought, with farmers in Texas and Oklahoma forced to abandon more than 5 million acres, more than half of what they planted. The amount of cotton harvested in the mostly desert state of New Mexico, 61,000 acres, was more than all the hemp planted in Canada.
Still, it wouldn’t take that much land for hemp to have a significant impact. In 1943, when the U.S. hemp industry was revived to make rope, twine and parachute webbing for the war effort, about 146,000 acres were harvested, with a yield of about 70,000 tons.
“It would be nice to have the hemp grown here,” says Murphy.
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Jim Hightower on hemp
The hemp issue is in the news more and more - now Jim Hightower is talking about it. The article below makes note of yet another petition, this one asking the president to mention industrial hemp in his 12 Feb State of the Nation speech. The first petition is one asking him to make hemp legal - this is at www.minawear.com/about-us/ - sign both! Then write your congressman. Let's make this happen!
Four years ago, first lady Michelle Obama picked up a shovel and made a powerful symbolic statement about America’s food and farm future: She turned a patch of White House lawn into a working organic garden.
That was a great move, earning kudos from just about everyone this side of Monsanto and the pesticide lobby. But now, as she begins another four years in the people’s mansion, the first lady is probably asking herself: “How can I top that? What can I do this time around to plant a crop of common sense in our country’s political soil that will link America’s farmers, consumers, environment and grassroots economy into one big harvest of common good?”
Thanks for asking, Ms. Obama, and please allow me to intrude into your thoughts with a one-word suggestion: hemp. Plant a good, healthy stand of industrial hemp next to your organic garden!
This would, of course, drive the anti-drug zealots up the wall (a good place for them, I think). “Holy J. Edgar Hoover,” they’d scream, “hemp is a distant cousin of marijuana!”
Well, yes, but the industrial variety of cannabis lacks the psychoactive aspects of pot, so their hysteria is misplaced. Industrial hemp won’t make anyone high, but it certainly can make us happy, because it would deliver a new economic and environmental high for America.
Plus, hemp production is firmly rooted in American history. Question: Besides being founders of our republic, what did Thomas Jefferson and George Washington have in common? Answer: Both farmed hemp. Most of America’s founders were strong promoters of this extraordinarily useful agricultural crop, with Jefferson declaring it to be “of first necessity ... to the wealth and protection of the country.”
The first draft of our Constitution was written on hemp paper. “Old Ironsides” was powered by sails of hemp cloth. As late as World War II, the government urgently pushed farmers to grow the crop as part of a “Hemp for Victory” program.
So why are American farmers today prohibited from producing this patriotic, profitable, pesticide-free plant? Political nuttiness. Most recently, in a frenzy of reefer madness, U.S. drug police decided that President Dick Nixon’s Controlled Substance Act of 1970 not only outlawed marijuana, but also its non-narcotic cousin, industrial hemp. If ignorance is bliss, they must’ve been ecstatic, yet their nuttiness remains the law of our land today.
While our nation is the world’s biggest consumer of hemp products (from rope to shampoo, building materials to food), the mad masters of our insane “drug war” have lumped hemp and marijuana together as “Schedule 1 controlled substances” — making our Land of the Free the world’s only industrialized country that bans farmers from growing this benign, profitable, job-creating and environmentally beneficial plant.
Thus, the U.S.A. is consuming millions of dollars’ worth of products made from hemp, that hemp comes from producers in other countries, because our farmers aren’t allowed to grow it in the U.S.A. and reap the economic benefits here at home.
The good news, though, is that a wave of sanity is now wafting across America. In Colorado, for example, farmer Michael Bowman and Denver hemp advocate Lynda Parker helped pass Amendment 64 in last fall’s election. While it legalizes personal pot use, which got all the media attention, it also directs the legislature to set up a program for “the cultivation, processing and sale of industrial hemp.”
Bowman now hopes to be the first American farmer in generations to plant a legal crop of it. Appropriately enough, he hopes to do so on April 30 — the 80th birthday of family-farmer hero and hemp champion Willie Nelson.
Even red states like Kentucky are on the move. Its Republican ag commissioner, backed by its Chamber of Commerce, is campaigning to legalize hemp farming there, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is co-sponsoring a national bill with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden to take hemp off the controlled substance list.
As Bowman puts it: “Can we just stop being stupid?” To help move us in that direction, he’s seeking 100,000 signatures on a online petition requesting that President Barack Obama include the words “industrial hemp” in his Feb. 12 State of the Union speech. I’m sure the president would appreciate my advice on this, so I suggest he say: “First thing tomorrow morning, Michelle and I are going to give a symbolic jumpstart to the development of a thriving hemp industry in America by planting a stand of it on the White House lawn.”
To sign Bowman’s petition, click here to go to the White House website.
— Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow. Click here to contact him, follow him on Twitter: @JimHightower, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
Four years ago, first lady Michelle Obama picked up a shovel and made a powerful symbolic statement about America’s food and farm future: She turned a patch of White House lawn into a working organic garden.
That was a great move, earning kudos from just about everyone this side of Monsanto and the pesticide lobby. But now, as she begins another four years in the people’s mansion, the first lady is probably asking herself: “How can I top that? What can I do this time around to plant a crop of common sense in our country’s political soil that will link America’s farmers, consumers, environment and grassroots economy into one big harvest of common good?”
Thanks for asking, Ms. Obama, and please allow me to intrude into your thoughts with a one-word suggestion: hemp. Plant a good, healthy stand of industrial hemp next to your organic garden!
This would, of course, drive the anti-drug zealots up the wall (a good place for them, I think). “Holy J. Edgar Hoover,” they’d scream, “hemp is a distant cousin of marijuana!”
Plus, hemp production is firmly rooted in American history. Question: Besides being founders of our republic, what did Thomas Jefferson and George Washington have in common? Answer: Both farmed hemp. Most of America’s founders were strong promoters of this extraordinarily useful agricultural crop, with Jefferson declaring it to be “of first necessity ... to the wealth and protection of the country.”
The first draft of our Constitution was written on hemp paper. “Old Ironsides” was powered by sails of hemp cloth. As late as World War II, the government urgently pushed farmers to grow the crop as part of a “Hemp for Victory” program.
So why are American farmers today prohibited from producing this patriotic, profitable, pesticide-free plant? Political nuttiness. Most recently, in a frenzy of reefer madness, U.S. drug police decided that President Dick Nixon’s Controlled Substance Act of 1970 not only outlawed marijuana, but also its non-narcotic cousin, industrial hemp. If ignorance is bliss, they must’ve been ecstatic, yet their nuttiness remains the law of our land today.
While our nation is the world’s biggest consumer of hemp products (from rope to shampoo, building materials to food), the mad masters of our insane “drug war” have lumped hemp and marijuana together as “Schedule 1 controlled substances” — making our Land of the Free the world’s only industrialized country that bans farmers from growing this benign, profitable, job-creating and environmentally beneficial plant.
Thus, the U.S.A. is consuming millions of dollars’ worth of products made from hemp, that hemp comes from producers in other countries, because our farmers aren’t allowed to grow it in the U.S.A. and reap the economic benefits here at home.
The good news, though, is that a wave of sanity is now wafting across America. In Colorado, for example, farmer Michael Bowman and Denver hemp advocate Lynda Parker helped pass Amendment 64 in last fall’s election. While it legalizes personal pot use, which got all the media attention, it also directs the legislature to set up a program for “the cultivation, processing and sale of industrial hemp.”
Bowman now hopes to be the first American farmer in generations to plant a legal crop of it. Appropriately enough, he hopes to do so on April 30 — the 80th birthday of family-farmer hero and hemp champion Willie Nelson.
Even red states like Kentucky are on the move. Its Republican ag commissioner, backed by its Chamber of Commerce, is campaigning to legalize hemp farming there, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is co-sponsoring a national bill with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden to take hemp off the controlled substance list.
As Bowman puts it: “Can we just stop being stupid?” To help move us in that direction, he’s seeking 100,000 signatures on a online petition requesting that President Barack Obama include the words “industrial hemp” in his Feb. 12 State of the Union speech. I’m sure the president would appreciate my advice on this, so I suggest he say: “First thing tomorrow morning, Michelle and I are going to give a symbolic jumpstart to the development of a thriving hemp industry in America by planting a stand of it on the White House lawn.”
To sign Bowman’s petition, click here to go to the White House website.
— Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow. Click here to contact him, follow him on Twitter: @JimHightower, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
North Carolina hemp activism
Southern states are starting to get very vocal over hemp, led of course by Kentucky. North Carolina would be just as ideal a place to cultivate hemp, replacing the ubiquitous tobacco and cotton, saving water and creating jobs to boot. All states will need the federal approval even if they do vote to make it legal, and that is in the works with the petition at www.minawear.com/about-us/ - please take a moment to sign so your state can profit!Jeff Danner of NC posted earlier this month on Common Science the following thoughts:"Hemp, George Washington Grew It" | |
 | |
| With all of the critical economic and environmental challenges we face in the world and in North Carolina today, we no longer have the luxury of tolerating the foolish, inefficient and unnecessary ban of growing industrial hemp. Before everyone gets all excited, this is not a marijuana legalization column. Hemp consists of a family of strains. Strains of hemp which are useful in industrial applications contain 30 to 50 times less of the “active” ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), than strains grown for “recreational” use. Hemp has a long and rather glorious history. Its cultivation began 12,000 years ago in China, making it among the first plants domesticated by humans. Hemp rope and sails were used in the great sailing vessels of the Age of Exploration of the 1500s. In 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a statute requiring all farms in the colony to plant hemp. George Washington grew hemp at Mount Vernon, and the original Levi’s blue jeans were made from hemp. North Carolina was once among the top hemp producing areas in the country. Hemp is a remarkable plant. It grows very rapidly. It enriches the soil it’s grown in with nitrogen making it an ideal plant for crop rotations. Hemp is also very effective in removing excess nutrients from the soil, which prevents them from reaching local waterways and causing damaging algae blooms. The soil cleaning properties of hemp could be of great use in remediating North Carolina’s hog waste lagoons. Almost every part of the hemp plant can be converted into useful products. The fibers in the stalks can be used to make rope, paper, and textiles. The oil in the seeds can be used to make biofuel, biodegradable plastics, and a variety of health foods. The remaining parts of the hemp plant can be tilled into the soil as compost. However, today there is no industrial hemp production in the U.S. What happened, you ask? The short answer is the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which imposed a tax on hemp products regardless of end use or THC content. The longer answer is complex and filled with intrigue involving two of the most famous families of the era, the Hearsts and the Mellons. By the mid 1930s, William Randolph Hearst had become fabulously wealthy through his newspaper empire. To maximize his profits and to secure his supply of newsprint, he invested in millions of acres of timber. At the same time, as I explained in “The Lesson of Nylon”, DuPont Chemical, in which the Mellon family where heavily invested, introduced synthetic fibers into the textile industry. Just about this time, several key advancements were made in both hemp farming and processing which may have allowed it to compete favorably with timber and nylon. As the legend goes, the Hearsts and Mellons felt sufficiently threatened by these developments to use their influence to “encourage” the U.S. congress to tax hemp. By the mid 1950’s industrial hemp production in the U.S. had ceased. All was quiet on the hemp front for a while until the counter culture movement of the 1960s brought about increased interest in the strains of hemp better suited to recreational use. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was thrown out by the Supreme Court in Leary. V. the U.S. in 1969. (Yes, that was Timothy Leary of “turn on, tune in, and drop out” fame.) Any sense of victory for Mr. Leary was to be short lived with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 which, rather than taxing hemp production, simply banned it outright. Absent a minor exception for medical marijuana, this ban is still in place today. Given all of the benefits and uses of hemp, you should not be surprised to know that it is grown all over the world. I suspect you will also not be taken aback to learn that the world’s largest grower of hemp and exporter of hemp-based products is China. So who do you think is the world’s largest importer of hemp-based products? Yep, it’s us, the U.S.A. This foolishness is almost certain to end soon. In August of 2012, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon introduced the Industrial Hemp Farming Act which is still working its way through the Congress. North Dakota, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, California, Montana, West Virginia, and Vermont have already passed legislation allowing for industrial hemp production as soon as the U.S. government relents. North Carolina should join this group of forward-thinking states. Growing hemp would benefit our farmers through increased revenues and improved soil productivity. Hemp could be deployed in cleaning our hog lagoons and other damaged agricultural areas, and our already-rebounding textile industry is perfectly positioned to start making high-quality hemp fabrics for the domestic and international markets. What do you say Governor McCrory? Have a comment or question. Please use the interface below or send me an e-mail to commonscience@chapelboro.com. |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
