Hemp Shop News

Hemps shops are key to the hemp movement. Months ago we welcomed the new arrival, Houdek House, located at 201 W. College Avenue in Appleton, Wisconsin - and they are doing a brisk trade. This week Mina Hegaard of Minawear will be on hand personally to meet customers - her father was born in Appleton, and a sister still lives there.

 

And last month one of the longest serving hemp establishments in the hemp world changed their location - Still Eagle of Nelson, British Columbia. See notice below:

 

PLEASE NOTE: we have moved around the corner to a brighter, better, bigger, and more central location on Nelson's Baker Street.

Till June 30 visit our Final Clearance Sale at the old Ward St location.

Our new address:

Still Eagle

476 Baker st

Nelson BC

V1L 4H8

Phone, email and web are the same:

Phone: 250-352-3844
Web: stilleagle.com
E: orders@stilleagle.com

WHAT THE YANKS CAN'T DO,

THE CANADIANS CAN

Still illegal in the US is the crop that was once the most traded commodity in the world. Farmers are forced to grow more water intensive crops such as cotton and use lots of chemicals on it and other pesticide loving plants.

Cross the border and you will find lots of hemp, and plates like the one in the photo. Business is booming! For instance, Roger Snow of Rocky Mountain Grain Products is doing so much he sent me a whole box, with 7 bins of hemp hearts and 14 hemp chocolate bars. He has some 10,000 acres under cultivation. He and others, such as Nick Smirnow of Still Eagle, are also selling copies of Hemp for Victory, part of which is printed on hemp paper (with a nice hemp leaf watermark to boot, and a foreword by Woody Harrelson).

Cannabis sativa is legal all over the EU, and in Australia and New Zealand. In fact, just about all of the English speaking world! China has just about a monopoly on hemp textiles though, as it is where the infrastructure exists for retting and milling, but Canadians have been quietly researching a way to develop this for themselves in the future. If they do, they will join China, Romania, Italy, Korea and Nepal as hemp textile producers. Romanian and Nepalese hemp is usually rough in comparison to Chinese, but recently some Korean hemp was brought to the UK that was, as Bobby Pugh notes, as fine as silk. However, it is only exported in large quantities, and not made into clothing in Korea. Italian hemp may be the finest available, used by both Girgio Armani and Jilly Cholmondeley; the latter sells 100% hemp bedsheets, currently in stock at Eco in Chiswick. But even the Armani could be finer; hemp was once spun as fine lace.

The improvement in quality is a challenge to the hemp world, and it may well be the Canadians who crack it. Something for Bush to think about.

IS MY SHIRT STILL ILLEGAL?

In some countries, hemp is still an outlaw. Legalisation campaigns are going on where needed, including the US. North Dakota farmers received a boost of hope this week as the DEA is allowing the ND State University to grow it, although the paperwork is still not finalised. Click here for full story.

Even where it has been legal, there are problems. In Sweden, where it has been legal since1993, the police haev been confiscating the crop of farmer Ulf Hammarsten until this very year. He had to go to the EU courts to get his rights. In addition to his rights, he has received an environmental prize by Laholm officials. For full story click here.

Pictured above is a hemp shop in Canada, where hemp was legalised in 1996.

DAVE OLSON IN LONDON

Just got a visit from Dave Olson, pictured left. He was visiting from Vancouver, one of the hemp capitals of the world, where shops like Still Eagle have been going for years. He made his way to Brighton, famous for being the backdrop to the Who's Quadraphenia, but also famous in hemp circles for The Hemp Shop. Dave was impressed there, as Woody Harrelson had been last year - in fact Woody said it was the most well-stacked hemp store he'd ever seen, and I think Woody is quite a connaisseur of such outlets. Dave then made his way back to London to check out Braintree, an impressive showroom in the Camden Market complex, overlooking the Grand Union Canal.

We managed to meet up at my secret location and made a subversive tape which he will make into a podcast when he gets back to the land of the free (Canada). I was able to finally put a copy of Hemp for Victory in his hands, he has contributed images from his days in Japan, including the colour frontis piece, which is the oldest known depiction of hemp.

STILL ILLEGAL

To see hemp outlawed in the US is crazy, after all these years you'd think they would welcome a plant that can provide better ethanol than corn, which is now being grown ubiquitously but not quite as profitably as the farmers want. Yes, the price is going up to $4, but so are the expenses, land being one of them, and most farmers rent. Then the way the US government is involved is not quite healthy, and is it any surprise that the companies benefitting from Bush's ethanol initiative are all his buddies?

Could that be the reason that he is into ethanol all of a sudden, going green? Or is it because he is drinking again, and ETOH (what paramedics call it, a code word for 'drunk') is all of a sudden very cool. Rumour has it he was a bit smashed when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England came the the White House. And more than rumour has it that after her visit to Bushland she visited the Chelsea Flower Show in her own land, where she was given a private viewing of some hemp plants in pots at an eco stand.

So it's time for Americans to take Bush over to a flower show to do the same. Or, if they cannot find this species growing in the land of the brave, they have only to look north to see some 50,000 acres of it in full bloom, prospering under the sign of the maple leaf. Above is a logo of one of Canada's first hemp shops, where books, clothes and other hemp items are on sale. It may be a good place to take Bush when he visits Canada.