This almost magisterial overview by Bill Weinberg is mandatory reading for anybody with any counter-cultural aspiration at all. Or anybody, for that matter.

A healthy re-examination of some stuff taken for granted, as USDA fitfully formulates rules, and state ag departments formulate their rules, on top of USDA’s.

All obviously ridiculous, but we continue to live with the legacy of prohibition, which now translates to an almost hopeless tangle of ever-changing rules & regulations, state by state. An endless series of hurdles and roadblocks to growing a simple, hardy plant.

Bravos to ProjectCBD for publishing this.

HEMP: FROM MYTHOS TO MONOCULTURE — The Curious Cultural Trajectory of Industrial Cannabis

The essay begins:

Now that hemp has finally arrived at its long-sought status as a legal crop and commodity, to what extent will it deviate from the utopian vision that animated the advocates who fought for it a generation ago?

A tension that has always existed between two currents in the subculture of hemp advocacy is increasingly weighted toward the more mundane — activists versus entrepreneurs, idealism versus pragmatism, agrarianism versus agribusiness. And finally the original paradigm of a crop with multitudinous uses as “food, fuel and fiber” versus the hegemony of CBD.

Can a capitalist commodity live up to the promise of hemp’s early promoters and zealots? How real was that promise to begin with? A generation later, how do we parse the exuberant claims of the “hempsters” — including their conspiratorial interpretations of the history of prohibition?

https://www.projectcbd.org/culture/hemp-mythos-monoculture

Art by @BrummbaerNA