hemp was recognized as a schedule one drug without exception. That “bracelet material,” the DEA claimed, was some pretty dangerous stuff.
Beyond legal impediments, no infrastructure existed in the U.S. to process hemp into viable raw material for manufacturers. After seventy years of hemp prohibition, the powers that be were content subsisting on corn, soy, tobacco, and cotton. The hemp critics were quick to remind us of that fact too: “There’s no market for hemp! It’s safer for farmers to stick with the staples.” Yet, there was nothing going to prevent my peers and me from unleashing the next generation of green innovation. A more sustainable future driven by foods, composites, textiles, and fuels made with hemp. Wasn’t being an environmentalist and a capitalist the most American thing to do?
Here’s the point: if you don’t wake up and smell the roses—then they may take the roses from you too! Just like that. No more roses. Would you like that? Does this sound very democratic to you? True advocates lift their noses to smell a trail with bloodhound efficiency. They will exploit the entire flower supply chain to discover where, and at what exact point, the rose disruption occurred. No one has the right to take your roses. And no one has the right to take away the one crop I’ve spent a quarter century liberating.
The father of the modern hemp industry, Jack Herer, convinced me of the miraculous potential of a hemp-based economy. My aspiration is to convince the reader what Jack and I have already accepted as fact: hemp is a miracle that can save the world.
* * *
Craig Lee’s story begins in Campbellsville, Kentucky. The town resides in the middle of the state within a region known as moonshine country. Campbellsville was, and still is, a classical bluegrass town: anchored, unto itself, by its own ubiquitous Main Street. A historian would recognize the era as post-WW2—a period when Campbellsville experienced rapid industrial growth and middle-class prosperity.
Everyone was proud to be an American in those days. World War II veterans proudly marched down the street clad in pressed uniforms and stapled iridescent medals. The inglorious veterans—the farmers whom fed the war machine—routinely ebbed in and out of town for their odds and ends. Women and children frequented downtown for household things and gossip. The one occasion that united the region was Kentucky’s largest annual 4th of July parade which proceeded down Main Street.
Despite a good amount of hustle and bustle for a growing rural metropolitan, Main Street’s facades still faced each other with unconvincing importance. One step outside any backdoor brought one face-to-face with luscious countryside. That’s where my childhood friends and I spun our fun.
My upbringing was far from being all fun and games, though. My grandfather took me in after my mother died. He became my surrogate father figure. Our relationship was mired in tough love. He owned a coal-heated glass shop on the outskirts of Campbellsville and his large family lived above it. He expected that I earn my keep by working in his glass shop whenever I had free time. Sometimes he’d, begrudgingly, give me a quarter for my work. I spent many summer days grinding glass on his circle cutter. Work was a wrestle between my grandfather and me; I wanted to run the countryside while he expected me to stay put for hours on end.
In fact, working with glass was my first contact with industrial materials. I learned quickly the delicacy of different materials—especially glass. You might salvage a piece of wood after a bad cut, but glass never permitted such mistakes. Neither did my grandfather. He beat into me the importance of hard work.
Everything was a struggle in those days. Even during mealtimes I had to throw shoulders and elbows for my food. My grandfather fed his large family like an army from the blacktop stove: pinto beans, bologna, and cornbread. If I ever wanted something sweeter, I’d fetch myself a two-cent Cola from the local bottling plant. If I wanted more amenities, I’d have to fulfill my neighbor’s needs. I earned pocket cash cutting lawns, washing windows, and sweeping floors.
I was always motivated to make money, but never in my life could I maintain a nine to five job. It’s not that I was incompetent; maybe I was too capable. I knew my talents were implemented best when shared with the world. And that’s what I did.
When I completed my grandfather’s daily chores, I rushed out the shop like a coyote into the wild. My youthful instinct was to reunite with my pack of hooligans (the thirty local boys I ran with). We were the first of the baby-boomer generation and were encouraged to capitalize on the freedoms earned by those who fought abroad. The boys and I would convene at country stores—convenient stores for farmers—that were hidden between the rolling troughs and hilltops. These hubs were our watering holes: where we’d wet our throats, catch our breaths, and regroup for the next adventure.
Whatever the consensus was, reliably, there was no less than eight rag-tag boys in tow. We enjoyed playing baseball, basketball, and war. And we smoked anything we could get our hands on: cigarette butts, grape vines, corn silk, and fresh tobacco leaves. All of us knew how to roll joints before rolling was cool. We were ahead of our time. For security measures, our paraphernalia was hidden in crawl-spots throughout the meadow thicket. Like groundhogs, we would navigate through prickly brush—putting mother-scorning holes in our jeans—to reach our hideouts. It was a boy’s frontier. Middle-Kentucky was all that we knew.
Good or bad never presided over what we’d do next, as much as, would it be fun? The boys always agreed on one thing, though, and that one thing was fishing. I was one of the best fishers amongst the boys. I loved to fish and I still do. Fishing, more than anything, taught me patience. And, being a glass technician, I was already more patient than the other boys. When the pond was quiet, I’d always tell the others, “They may not be biting now, but give ‘em a few minutes.” More times than not, they’d begin biting again. Without a doubt, my reared patience assisted my later hemp endeavors—specifically with politicians.
Patience was never a priority, though, when the Campbellsville boys had a burning pang for a drag. My willpower vanished if someone left an unmanned pouch of tobacco. I’d take several pinches. Sometimes, regrettably, I’d take the entire pouch. If fresh product wasn’t available, I’d resort to scrounging for butts between porch cracks or ambushing the ash tray. That’s why, during another busy day in my grandfather’s glass shop, my attention became transfixed when a customer told my grandfather that the government was illegalizing hemp: “The feds are saying all the sailors are falling off the wharfs from smokin’ it.”
I remember my grandfather’s retort as if it were yesterday, “What about my hemp rope? What will I use if I don’t have my hemp rope? I swear up and down the Appalachia’ trail that if one grimy federal official tries to take my hemp rope, it’ll be the last damn thing he touches!”
My grandfather knew that illegalizing hemp was wrong, because hemp rope was useful. What he didn’t know was how useful industrial hemp actually was. During my grandfather’s lifetime, many people took cannabis oils for a handful of ailments. Despite its widespread usage, many people, including my grandfather, couldn’t connect the cannabis dots. Education was not sufficient enough to abridge all the benefits from every part of the cannabis plant (stalk, seed, fiber, root, and flower). Rope was rope. Medicine was medicine. And knowledge about the myriad uses of hemp were obscure during the 1950s and 60s. My grandfather’s generation never fully appreciated the miracle of cannabis. They never took into account that the fate of so many seemingly disparate products were doomed by one heavy hand: the federal government. Most folks didn’t have the moral temperament like my grandfather had either. Most adults, in those days, would have reacted incredulously if told that their government wasn’t acting in their best interest.
Besides, most Campbellsville residents were too busy farming the nation’s corn supply and producing t-shirts for the local Fruit of the Loom plant to have taken notice of this miniscule change
