notes...

Thus, the author argues, the exercise of power by covert means, or parapolitics, often metastasizes into deep politics - the interplay of unacknowledged forces that spin out of the control of the original policy initiators.

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Kimberly Miller, who points out that "Americans have been consuming, growing and distributing pot from the time settlers set foot on this land, with or without the approval or guidance of anyone else but themselves. ... And those who don't understand or care about the remedies marijuana has to offer, guess what? "You don't have to use it." —Amsterdam, Jan. 13, 2011

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Recent years have been good to hemp foods, which have gonemainstream, sitting alongside flax and soy in health food stores and appearing in the form of hemp oil, hemp milk and hemp butter, as well as in salad dressings, nutrition bars, breads, cookies, waffles and frozen desserts. It's also in personal care products like soaps, shampoos and lotions.

Sales of hemp grocery and body care products in the U.S. were $37.9 million in 2009, up 11 percent from the previous year, according to market research company Spins Inc., which specializes in the natural products industry (hemp grocery sales surged 42 percent between 2007 and 2008). Those figures exclude data from Whole Foods Market and several other large stores, so the Hemp Industries Association estimates sales are closer to $113 million to $129 million.


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Here's another reader, Justin Kline: "I recently had a friend serve up the idea that 'prohibition' was due to Henry Ford manufacturing cars with newer engines that ran on corn liquor (ethanol). Prohibition was contrived to force the farmers to keep using the output of the fledgling oil industry. i.e., protecting a special-interest group [that] was an entire industry.

"Next, my friend claimed that marijuana was declared illegal nearly to the day that nylon was invented. The grand obfuscation was to word the law with the name 'hemp' as the general scheme of the scam, which is a general category that merely includes marijuana. Almost nobody knows, even now, that the law reads 'hemp.'
"Thus, the true mission was cloaked right from the beginning, i.e., protecting a special-interest group — nowhere close to the claims of health or morals. ... Let me know if this starts to look like something worthy of your time and not just another rant from the 'conspiracy theory squad.'"


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Cannabis seeds were brought to the New World on board the Mayflower and also to America by African slaves.