Hemp support in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania back in the day was a hemp growing state; many Amish had their mills grinding it and the ropes were made of it, as was paper; Benjamin Franklin was a paper manufacturer and hemp advocate. Today the powers-that-hate-America seek to keep Pennsylvania poor with their stupid authorative sounding arguments about hemp looking like dope. Go arrest Ben Franklin you hapless idiots if that's what you believe, and take George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with you.
Crain Layne on Radio Pennsylvania tells us about the new movement for Common Sense in the Keystone State:

(Lancaster) -- A state senator's effort to legalize marijuana in Pennsylvania is being applauded by people who say it could be a valuable cash crop.
State Senator Daylin Leach has proposed legalizing marijuana for recreational use and regulating it much like the sale of alcohol through the state store system.
Advocates say legalizing pot and its relative, industrial hemp, could be an economic boon for the commonwealth.
Lancaster County-based hemp historian Les Stark says the plant has dozens of uses.
"It's a natural, non-toxic, non-lethal, renewable, sustainable resource for food, fuel, fiber, medicine, paper, plastics, fiberboard and thousands of other products," Stark says.
Governor Corbett calls marijuana a "gateway drug" and says he would veto any legalization bill.
The most recent Franklin and Marshall College poll shows 55 percent of respondents oppose legalization.
However, the same survey by the Lancaster-based college reveals 82 percent of those surveyed "strongly" or "somewhat" favor medical marijuana.

Qoutes on hemp from US presidents

I just looked at the petition at www.minawear.com/about-us and saw we had reached a milestone of 750 signatures, with a new goal of 1,000. The ulitmate goal is to get 25,000. The it goes to the President. Signer #750, Samsun from Berkeley CA, left 5 quotes from former presidents about hemp.

“Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.”
 – George Washington
“Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“We shall, by and by, want a world of hemp more for our own consumption.”
 – John Adams
“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is the add a useful plant to its culture!”
  -Thomas Jefferson

THE LAND OF LINCOLN SAYS NO TO HEMP

The GOP's first president came from a hemp growing state: Illinois. His father-in-law was a Southern plantation owner who grew hemp. The same party today is against hemp; it is not new information to most of you that the Founding Fathers grew hemp. The former president, what would he think? But more importantly, the present president, also from Illinois, what is he doing about it? Nothing. Both parties (the present POTUS is a Democrat) have little to offer the US, which is sowing more and more cotton which dries up the water supply.

And while they filibuster, we lose. Illinois last week voted against the legalisation of hemp, joining the ranks of South Dakota, California and Vermont. In contrast to this, Canada, China and all of the EU countries can grow it.

This week I got email from two people in Uganda about growing it, and they are now in touch. Hopefully they will be able to get the seeds they need, and line up a buyer - there are hemp shops in South Africa, where the legality of growing hemp is a grey area. It would be ironic if the next jar of hemp seed oil sold in Illinois is grown in Uganda...just now what they buy is mostly Canadian. But, if US legislators would act more like Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, whose faces are on the currency that is actually made with hemp - Illinois could be raising a cash crop. It's sad...what can we do?

A WEED GROWS IN BROOKLYN

Though I spent time in North Carolina, I never saw a tobacco plant up close up till I went to London, where my neighbours on Devonshire Road had one. It was about 4 feet high and rather pretty, it took pride of place in their front yard facing east. Nicotia is not usually grown along with nasturtiums and pansies...but this one featured nicely.

Yesterday I read about a woman in NYC who has dozens of them growing in her backyard, which she calls the Bloomberg Garden, in honour of the mayor who wants to take away the right to smoke just about anywhere in NYC...which may be dangerous, as then the only place left to smoke is in the flat, and that is where fires start...such as the one started yesterday by some voodoo priest getting into a sex act among the candles; somehow the clothes he had shed and left on the floor got hot. From what, we don't know. It may have been the candles.

Anyway, I am supporting the rights of smokers to smoke in parks etc. if for no other reason the safety issue. The Nicotia grower also supports smokers' rights, and she is using her green thumb to highlight the issue. Audrey Silk is a former NYC cop who grows her own; and dries, cuts and rolls it too. 25 plants made about 9 cartons for her last year, this year she has 100 plants and a house full of leaves hanging from the ceiling. The seeds cost her about $2, so she is one of the few smokers who is not giving her money to the tobacco industry, one which I truly loathe - note that Thomas Jefferson wrote against tobacco in favour of hemp. The former won out, and millions of Americans now pay through the nose for it, while they are not allowed to grow hemp.

And Americans may not be allowed to grow their own tobacco either, Silk fears; she told the New York Times: "We fear that the anti-smokers are so hysterical that if they start finding that people are doing this, they would craft a law to make it illegal. I'm waiting for the black helicopters to start flying over my yard." (Manny Fernandez. "Now in Brooklyn, Homegrown Tobacco: Local, Rebellious and Tax Free. 25 February, 2011, pp. A19/A25.)

Seeds can be purchased from Seedman.com, a company in Mississippi. The president, Jim Johnson, says tobacco grows anywhere there were about 100 frost free nights, and that he even had customers in Alaska, summing up that it was a "very tough, resilient plant."

Silk plants the seeds in trays indoors; weeks later, she transplants them to buckets outside. She waters daily until they are about five feet tall, with big leaves that droop from the stem. After harvesting she washes them, dries them, take out the middle vein, and then makes bricks of 15 leaves which she feeds to a shredder.

Selling them, however, would be illegal; she claims she does not. There must be a market for them, especially as they do not contain all the additives and pesticide residue that most cigarettes contain. Which are probably a main cause of pollution here in NYC - along with pesticides sprays, mercury used in Santerria rituals, lead and asbestos. This is one toxic city.

But speaking of tobacco, there is an event going on this week in Cuba, the XIII Festival del Habano which features tobacco, including that from the Pinar del Rio area, considered to produce the finest leaves in the world. But who knows, maybe the Brooklyn become the next Cuba.

NEW YORK TIMES STORY ON MEDICAL CANNABIS IN NEW JERSEY

A story on the front page of the NY Times, written by David Kocieniewski, ran on 12 January. It is on New Jersey's vote to allow medical cannabis, making it the 14th state in the union to do so. The outgoing governor, Jon S. Corzine, approved it days before leaving office. The incoming, a Republican, seemed to do everthing in his power to stop it. The vote, in both the General Assembly and the State Legislature, was unanimous: 48-14 and 25-13 respectively. Assemblyman Reed Guscriora, who sponsored the legislation, said his state's initiative would be the most restrictive of its kind, limiting the maladies for which cannabis, in quantities of up to 2 oz. per month, could be prescribed, were mainly serious or chronic illnesses. Insurance companies are not required to pay for it, which looks like a bit of crafing from the GOP. Hysterical rants were out there to be heard, with the likes of David G. Evans, executive director of the Drug-Free Schools Coalition, warning that dispensaries would lead to abuses. How? Do pharmacies lead to drug abuse? Well, let's leave that a rhetorical question. Common sense would show that people with a prescription for controlled amounts of cannabis are not going to bring the whole neighbourhood along to share their much needed medicine. The incoming governor, Christpopher J. Christie, kept pointing the finger at California, where he claimed is was "out of control." He cited a non-existent loophole. What a waste of time. In the end, sense prevailed, and a low cost, proven effective medicine is available to Americans in New Jersey. This was supported by some Republicans, such as Senator William Baroni. But sadly, most in the GOP are against all forms of cannabis, from hemp seeds to medicine. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been in jail with them in power!

LET THEM EAT CAKE

Have you heard the latest in humanitarian news? The starving are to be fed the left over pressing from cotton seeds, known as seed cake. This way the cotton industry can keep right on rolling, the biofuel idiots who do not know what they are doing can use food crops for fuel, instead of using exisiting waste parts, and Robert Mugabe can get the Noble Peace Prize. We thought that he was 86'd from Europe, but no, they let the beast in to a hunger summit, maybe just to strike a note of irony. Not that much was needed to strike such a note, as the delegates were already gulping down veal and white wine, along with prawns served in vol-au-vents stuffed with pumpkin puree. Wonder where all the food came from and what the farmers who produced it made, but that may not have been an issue on the table.

The UN delegates who attended heard from Ban Ki-Moon that we were about to face food riots worldwide. Production, Ki-Moon warned, needed to increase 50% by 2030 in order to feed everyone. Not sure Mugabe was keen to hear any of this. When his highness did speak, at least one person had the guts to do the right thing and snub his talk - International Secretary Douglas Alexander. Well done mate.

UK MP Gordon Brown and Spanish MP Jose Zapatero weighed in with a remark about how the "world cannot afford to fail" on increasing food production, but neither of them really made any difference by outlining what exactly was to be done.

Since they left that to others to do, let me take up the slack here. We need to appropriate more land to food production. On a planet where only 4.5% of the land is arable, this needs real effort - and chopping down forests is not my recommendation. If we look at the way we are using land, we can make some intelligent changes, and this is a simple exercise. What do we grow lots of but do not use for food? Cotton. This is one of the world's most damaging crops, especially waterwise, and we need to change - but we are hampered both by large companies and petty do-gooders who have fallen in love with cotton. From Robert Mugabe to Katherine Hamnett you will find a common denominator - they are both wearing cotton. Everyone seems to love cotton - and why not, when both the right wing and the left wing press promote this thing to death? For instance, the latest issue of the Observer Magazine hands out all kinds of ethical awards to cotton companies - mostly owned the rich and famous (who can in turn afford to advertise in the Observer)! Money runs things just as much in the left as in the right, and previous posts on this blog have made much mentions of who is advertising in the Guardian, Observer, Independent, etc. OK, a little noise was made by Media Watch and George Monbiot echoed the noise, but the game went on.

So when we are in desperate need, do not expect these papers to give a damn except anything other than their hip and trendy image. They print on the trees grown in the Third World, and exhort us to use cotton and lots of it. Getting mention of a real solution is just not happening. In the meantime, people starve while reporters get paid for worthless stories.

But let me not just pick on cotton, when other crops are just as vile - I turn my guns next on tobacco, a plant that Thomas Jefferson warned against. Jefferson, a farmer himself, advised that we grow hemp. Tobacco might be grown in limited quantities for real quality cigars, but to just raise a crop to burn here there and everywhere is criminal. Lots of people think they are cool if they waste their money on this, but in reality they are causing land that could be used for food to be used for greedy tobacco companies. And while they burn up this weed, they are causing a rise in food prices. But tobacco is one of America's four largest industries, right up there with the arms industry. No one would need to suffer if tobacco were phased down to a minimum, as then Americans, many of them poor Kentuckians who are abused by the tobacco companies, would then grow food, which is becoming so much more of a luxury.

Growing hemp and other plants which produce food and biomass for ethanol is the sensible way to go. It does not take a genuis to figure this out. It takes lots of peopke to take action though, maybe there is some journalists out there who wants to take a look at this and do some reporting?

Many things that seem like they are complex are in fact simple, but the press gives out so much misinformation and prints excuses. For instance, recently there seemed to be a 'breakthrough' here when it was reported that there was the possibility of phasing out the ubiquitous plastics milk container used in the UK. People in North and South America are probably laughing! Of course there is, you use a waxed card square container which is easy to fold up and recycle. Doh. But the UK press acted as if some genius inventor was thinking of this and it would be a packaging miracle. Then nothing happened. Since then, about 6 billion of these plastic containers have been used. The truth is the press ignores people like me when we show them prima facie evidence.

And I suspect that they will give lots more space to Robert Mugabe, Kate Moss, Katherine Hamnett and others who support cotton. For those of use with not such short memories, the press did in fact support Robert Mugabe - especially the left wing press - they thought that Ian Smith was a terrible fascist. But there are starving masses in Zimbabwe who would love to have him back. Unfortunately, all they can look forward to is some more noise and no action, and of course, lots of cotton seed cake.

NOTES ON HEMP FROM THE HEART

OF THE HOMELAND

Brandon Brown in the Appalachian wrote this month (13 Nov.) on the history of hemp in the US, where, sadly, some people confuse it with dope. Brown goes back to the founding of the US and quotes two presidents, Washington and Jefferson. Obviously, hemp was ubiquitous then; John Quincy Adams wrote about its cultivation and other politicians grew it. Quoting Jefferson, the article notes: "The greatest service which can be renderd by any country is to add a useful plant to its culture."

It seems George B. has not read the words of his predecessors. Other US politicians, such as Gov. Ryan of Illinois, who vetoed the 2 hemp bills in that state, might also take note. In Lincoln's time hemp was grown exensively (this first GOP president married into a hemp growing family) and one of Illinois' governors in his day was also a hemp farmer. Food for thought.