Four years ago, Michelle Obama picked up a shovel to make a powerful symbolic statement about America’s food and farm future: She turned a patch of White House lawn into a working organic garden.
I’m guessing that now, as she begins another four years in the people’s mansion, the First Lady is asking herself: “What’s next? 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?”
If she’s asking this question, I’m happy to offer a one-word answer: Hemp. How about planting a good healthy stand of industrial hemp next to your organic garden?
Yes, hemp is a distant cousin of marijuana. But the industrial variety of cannabis lacks pot’s psychoactive punch. 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.
Our nation is the world’s biggest consumer of hemp products (from rope to shampoo, building materials to food), yet the mad masters of our insane and protracted Drug War have lumped hemp and marijuana together as “Schedule 1 controlled substances.” Our Land of the Free is the world’s only industrialized country that bans farmers from growing this benign, profitable, job-creating, and environmentally beneficial plant.
As Michael Bowman, a Colorado farmer, so aptly asks: “Can we just stop being stupid?” He’s one of the leaders of a national, bipartisan movement to legalize hemp production. As one small step, he’s seeking 100,000 signatures on a White House petition that simply asks President Barack Obama to honor the legalization of industrial hemp as a states rights issue, and to end its classification as a controlled substance. To sign, go to this website: petitions.whitehouse.gov.
