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Dear Reader,
The documentary Standing
Silent Nation has generated a good bit of
news since its showing on
P.O.V. on PBS last Tuesday. After the television
premiere, there was also a lively discussion on
the PBS
Discussion Forums.
Chet Brokaw of the Associated Press (AP)
wrote our featured article this week. The AP
sent out an update of the story yesterday.
Here is the version that appeared in The Washington Post. Vote Hemp gets a
mention towards the end of the story, and it
was picked
up widely.
AB 684, the California Industrial Hemp Farming Act,
continues to wind its way through the
legislature. Please see our
California page for the latest updates
and bill versions. Some media outlets, like
the Chico Enterprise-Record, get
it. Others, like KNTV - NBC Channel 11, pass along
misinformation as
fact with a deceptive, underlying drug
storyline in a tongue-in-cheek
(foot-in-mouth?) manner.
On a lighter note, hemp mazes — hanf
labyrinths — have become quite popular
in Germany. A very elaborate example of one
can be seen below. Here is another one created by the
HanfLabyrinth
team. Soon, hopefully, we'll be able to do this here in
the U.S., too.
Please make a contribution to Vote Hemp today to help us
continue fixing the situation here in the U.S.
We need and truly appreciate your support!
Best Regards,
Tom Murphy
Weekly News Update Editor
| Wear It. Eat It. Drive It. Just Don't Grow It. |
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By Ann Woolner, Opinion
Bloomberg
July 6, 2007
You can buy it at any Whole Foods Market,
Trader Joe's or health food cooperative. Look
for it among the high-fiber cereal, the
Inulin, the flax seeds.
Pick up the powdered version to sprinkle
green protein on your salad. Buy the granola
and just try not to gobble it up immediately.
Hemp, or more specifically, its seed and oil,
tastes good (usually). It makes hemp butter,
hemp bread, hemp bars and hemp seeds, which
look like sesame. All of it is good for you,
though none of it will get you high.
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| The Battle over Hemp on an Indian Reservation |
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By Virginia Heffernan
The New York Times
July 3, 2007
The story of a dirt-poor but enterprising
family thwarted by shocking, stupid acts by
jerks armed with red tape and guns produces a
single effect: umbrage.
It's good umbrage, mostly, that surging,
almost euphoric response to a crusading
documentary that frees you from the duty to
be even-handed or hear out the other side.
The one side — the good guys, the
Oglala Lakotas, that is, in the perspective
of "Standing Silent Nation," tonight on
"P.O.V." on PBS — has done everything
so exactly right, so modestly and
appropriately and life-lovingly and hopefully
right. And the bad guys, the Drug Enforcement
Administration and eventually certain
quarters of the federal government, don't
only seem heartless, they also come across as
idiots. Even R. James Woolsey Jr., the former
director of the Central Intelligence Agency and no one's
pushover, says so.
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| Hemp Field Becomes a Folly in the Mad Spirit of King Ludwig |
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Times Online
July 2, 2007
UTTING, GERMANY — A picture of
Neuschwanstein
Castle, the retreat of King Ludwig II of
Bavaria, took 1,200 hours to plough in a hemp
field in Utting, Germany. The enterprise
celebrates a king who was a promoter of the
arts and architecture and littered Bavaria
with imaginative castles.
Bavarians revere the eccentric King. Musicals
and songs have been composed about him, and
Bavarian pubs still carry his portrait.
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Pine Ridge Farmer Struggles to Grow Hemp |
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By Chet Brokaw, AP
Indian Country Today
July 6, 2007
MANDERSON, SD (AP) — Alex White Plume
hoped
his extended family could make a good living
growing hemp when he first planted seeds on
the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in
southwest South Dakota, but years of fighting
with federal drug officials have left him in
financial trouble.
The White Plume family planted hemp for three
years from 2000 through 2002, but they never
harvested a crop. Federal agents conducted
raids and cut down the plants each year
because U.S. law considers hemp, a cousin of
marijuana, to be a drug even though it
contains only a trace of the drug in marijuana.
"We had all these plans of grandeur and
independence, to lead the way with industrial
hemp," White Plume said. "None of it worked out."
[More...]
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