This is a headline I saw recently: “Minnesota senator worries hemp would lead to legal marijuana.”
I have several thoughts regarding this.
Over the years when I was in the HVAC business, most of my skills seemed to involve not figuring out technical things, but figuring out what the person really wanted.
More often than not, they didn’t want what they told me they wanted, so it wasn’t simple. Basically, my strategy over the years condensed into this: keep them talking, because the more they talk, the easier it is to figure out what really want.
That strategy rapidly changed into this one: remember, half of the people in the world are on the wrong side of the (intelligence) Bell Curve, and the sooner you figure that out, the better off both of you are. You can figure that out by listening to them.
So, the first thought that headline produced was: At least I know what side of the Bell Curve this person is on.
Connecting hemp to marijuana is akin to connecting water to whiskey. If you believe that water is a stepping stone to alcoholism, then I will have a second conclusion, which will mainly involve putting you on the far side of the Bell Curve too.
Around Iowa State University, hemp was researched and grown in the years leading up to WW II. It had many uses, rope and cloth being the main ones. Farmers were encouraged to grow it, because we had lost our overseas supplies of it.
Nowadays it can be used for diesel (biofuel) fuel, plastics, building supplies, paper, clothing, beauty products and chemical cleanup.
It was used for cleanup at Chernobyl, the Russian reactor that melted down and contaminated so much ground. Hemp grows fast, and as it does, it draws chemicals up and out of the ground. Those chemicals can then be disposed of properly.
Hemp has only one negative attribute: It looks like marijuana. That leads to misconceptions. I have some experience with hemp.
While at ISU right after getting back from Vietnam, a young fraternity fellow made my acquaintance. He likely knew that, since I was a Vietnam vet, I knew something about marijuana.
Which was, technically, true.
However, due to his natural sense of gullibility, I sensed a great opportunity to experiment on him. Use him for research.
So, we went out to where the ISU test farms were and pulled some of the wild hemp, which was generally called “ditch weed,” and brought it back to the house I rented. All the while, I am assuring this nice young guy that, due to a secret process only I, a Vietnam vet, would know, I can get him high on this stuff. (Which, I know I cannot, but heck… opportunities like this don’t come along every day.)
In my junk, I had a small three-volt battery-powered blower (from a previous experiment with wind chimes), some plumbing fittings and the plastic bag that some dry cleaning had come in.
I arranged the blower to force air through a pipe nipple, which I packed with dried ditch weed and lit with a blow torch. I hung the whole thing on his belt, plugged in the blower, pulled the clear plastic sack over his head, tied a knot on top and bungee corded it around his waist.
It was, as my experiments go, quite dramatic. The blower poofed the plastic bag up tight with smoke, really tight. He had to lean forward to see anything, so all we on the outside saw was his nose poking at the bag.
I pushed him out the front door, headed him toward his fraternity, told him to hurry so they could all see how stoned you could get on ditch weed and hoped he would make it there before he suffocated.
In hindsight, it’s lucky I didn’t asphyxiate him.
As he hurried off, the top knot was blowing smoke like an old fashioned coal locomotive, and he was stumbling into and bouncing off trees planted along the boulevard.
The next day, in a smoke-burned voice, he claimed that he “was really stoned, man!”
Mostly, I think, he was short on oxygen and having visions, like those last visions you have as you’re dying.
What we should do is get every teenager to smoke some ditch weed. They’d likely never smoke pot again. While we’re at it, let’s toot up that senator, too.
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