The American cannabis industry is rapidly growing and evolving with every passing year. With the increased popularity and policy changes surrounding the plant, a number of controversies have also arisen. How much testing do we need before legalizing each form of cannabis? What should the legal age be? Is state-by-state legalization enough, or is Federal legalization an essential step?
If you pay attention to Cannabis news you’ve probably noticed all of the excitement surrounding Mitch McConnell and the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill. As of this writing, the bill has yet to be signed, but all media accounts suggest no opposition and expect President Trump to push the new legislation into action within days. Similar or accompanying legislation, however, was passed in Colorado just months ago with Amendment X – that redefined Hemp back to its federal definition. Prior to that Colorado voters had redefined the industrial product with Amendment 64 just a few years prior.
Hemp: It’s Really Blowing Up These Days
Silk, engine fuel, cellophane and…dynamite! Surprisingly, all of these products can be derived from hemp, and arguably that’s just four examples of about 25,000 diverse commercial applications for the hemp plant. Frequenters of the blog (namely my mother) might be familiar with a 1936 article from Popular Mechanics that lauds the surprising prodigiousness of the hemp plant:
Updated on September 22nd 2023
While THC is by far the most commonly known cannabinoid, it’s far from the only variety on the rise in our modern culture. Cannabidiol – more popularly known by the abbreviation CBD – has several distinct possibilities for high-quality extracts. It’s easy to confuse the most common cannabinoid extracts for one another – but each respective variety has beneficial qualities that separate it from the rest. 710 Pipes is here to help you differentiate between the top varieties, so you’re ready to navigate the available options with ease.
In 1941, auto industry pioneer Henry Ford proposed a bold new concept: personal automobiles that everyday Americans can afford. Nearly eighty years later, his company Ford Motors is the fifth most popular auto brand worldwide – if you don’t drive a Ford yourself, you know someone who does. Many fans of Ford’s brand aren’t aware that his original vision for the personalized American automobile incorporated hemp products as a primary structural component. While his well-known Model-T wasn’t made from hemp products alone, they were incorporated into much of the car’s prototype. Ford’s original vision glistened with promise of a sustainable future.
The year was 1938 and a new contraption had just been patented that would remove months of dry rotting required to separate fiber from the hemp plant. What had, for millennia, been a seasonal process to rot the fiber out of the hemp stalks, had now become an afternoon of labor; a development that had huge implications for a number of already prosperous industries, from paper production to fuel.
The last few decades have seen an impressive rise in the investigation of cannabis’s potential for medicinal value as well as it’s suspected potential for abuse. Given the thousands of years that cannabis has been in the human pharmacopoeia, however, it isn’t surprising that the debate about the plant’s influence has been of major interest to politicians before. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission was set up by the British Empire over one hundred and twenty years ago to assess the then-popular concern about the herb’s proliferate use among all classes of Indian society, who’s ancient and wide-spread social incorporation of the plant seemed to pose a possible threat to the stability of British imperial rule.