Crystal Peoples Stokes held a forum on Monday (November 19 2018) in Buffalo on the process forward for the legalization of marijuana. She was seeking input from interested parties on how NY should move forward with the process. Based on how I read the language, it's not a matter of "if" anymore. It's when. And NY can learn from the process that other states went through to make the development of policy easier and better.
And the discussion moved beyond the use of marijuana for recreational use, though many adults are interested in that. Also the issue of retroactively cleaning up records and convictions of those who were arrested in the past came up. That will be important. I understand people's concerns about it as a gateway drug, however if we treated it like the Europeans treat wine and alcohol, the "glory" of it would be gone. And we also need to see the drug problem as a symptom of the failure of capitalism to "satisfy peoples' souls" as frie d of mine puts it. (A digression that will be treated in a later post.)
We must become aware of other uses for the marijuana/hemp plant though that could help NY agricultural industry and be ome a major profit ce ter and spark new developments for farmers.
Beyond the use of THC to catch a buzz, is CBD. CBD is a naturally occurring pain killer in hemp that can be made available in a wide variety of strengths. I have a cream that has 150 MG of CBD and it works wonders on sprains. I have heard of it in concentrations of up to 2500 MG. The great part about CBD is that it is a non addicting pain killler that works as good or better tha the synthetic heroin known as opiods. It could be used to help people deal with opiod addiction at a much lower cost than other corporate pharmaceuticals.
Next comes the food properties. I have a quart of hemp milk in my refrigerator. And hemp seeds that i use in smoothies and snack bars that i make. Highly nutritious and full of fiber. Relatively inexpensive and tasty. And hemp oil has cooking uses and was used in industrial purposes before the Marijuana Laws of the 1930s. Want to get off of petroleum? This could be a way.
Then there are the fibers. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and for that matter pretty much anything written on paper in Colonial times, was written on hemp paper. It takes how many years to grow a tree for use in paper? Hemp grown in 5 months. Beyond paper, I have seen clothing made from hemp fibers. Not just the coarse Guatemalans that the so-called counterculture likes to wear. If you didn't know it was hemp, you'd swear it was cotton or silk. It just depends upon how it was processed.
And hemp does not need the chemical pesticides and fertilizers that cotton requires. That's a huge money saver for farmers that are losing money hand over fist to corporate America. All these farmers losing money on soy that we are not selling to China in this stupid trade war could go to hemp and grow a plant that has many uses beyond sitting back and getting stoned. (No different to me than a drink of beer, wine, or hard cider. Personally I like the hard cider, but that's a different post for another day.)
We need to move beyond marijuana and hemp as a drug and look at all possible uses and how it can (literally and pun intended) grow a new economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment