The effort to legalize hemp farming in California is heating up again, and unfortunately, law enforcement interests are still doing everything in their power to stand in the way:
Last week the California Narcotics Officers' and Police Chiefs Associations announced that they oppose Senator Mark Leno's hemp farming bill, SB 676. Their opposition letters were sent less than 24 hours before the hearing in Agriculture Committee and featured incorrect and outdated arguments against the bill. (Vote Hemp [8])
There's nothing too surprising about that, but it continues to amaze me that opposing hemp – which is used to make just about anything besides drugs – would actually be considered a political priority for the law enforcement lobby. Who in their right mind would even bothering making a scene over something like this?
The answer is John Lovell, the Sacramento lobbyist for both law enforcement groups. Fortunately Vote Hemp attended the hearing in force, thanks to your support, and we were ready to counter his tired old claims that hemp farming was somehow going to make life difficult for law enforcement. In fact, Lovell was on the defensive and ended up being removed from the witness table by the Sergeant at Arms during the hearing due to repeatedly interrupting other witnesses!
Wow, that sounds like an instant classic. Let's please get this up on YouTube if anyone has it, because this guy has been a nuisance for quite some time and hasn't received the recognition he deserves for his deranged drug war demagoguery.
The bottom line is that hemp is food, not drugs. If you have a problem with hemp, you're anti-food, and the very notion of being anti-food is so staggeringly absurd, it could only emerge from the perverted fantasies of paranoid, overzealous drug warriors.
They are actually claiming that allowing hemp farming would complicate the ever-so-effective methods by which they've been stopping people from growing pot across California. And this is all based on the theory that people will hide marijuana plants in their hemp fields, which would almost makes sense except that cross pollination would turn their sour diesel into a granola bush.
Leaving aside all the other reasons that marijuana prohibition promotes widespread waste, suffering, and idiocy, the simple fact that a healthy food plant is banned because it looks like pot is so intellectually and economically devastating that undoing this one insane injustice would by itself constitute sufficient grounds for making marijuana legal.
