#legalise
by Chad Venture
Congratulations and hemp hemp hooray to California for finally re-legalizing hemp.. It’s about time !! It was almost exactly a year ago today that I laughed at myself loudly as I walked out of San Francisco airport terminal after my flight from London, having just almost had my life turned upside down on the conveyor belt by the customs oomph loompas. I could not tell a lie, I had declared that I had inadvertently packed some apples and pairs in my luggage that went into the cargo hold, having meant for it to be in my hand luggage so at to survive without the constipatory inflight fodder. What I failed to mention were the raw, living, sproutable, still in their shell, and contentiously illegal hemp seeds also in my luggage. Unbeknownst to customs, it was customary for me upon returning from Europe (where sprout able hemp seed is perfectly legal) to USA to bring a bag of hemp seeds. I would usually sprout them in cold water overnight, and throw them into the blender to make ‘living’ hemp milk in the morning. Sometimes I would throw some pomegranate seeds or a banana in to add a little extra something, and occasionally I would 'accidentally’ throw a few sprouted hemp seed into some nearby park or other patch of earth that I happened to be walking by, for a laugh.
On this particular occasion, as the customs oompah loompahs opened my luggage, hundreds of hemp seeds came cascaded out loose from a ruptured plastic bag they were in and noisily scattered and danced across the conveyor belt, where the customs had just re-X-rayed my luggage, and onto the airport floor.
Miraculously (or maybe it was the inner recital of Ganesha mantra) the customs oomph loompahs waved me on through the exit door, seemingly completely oblivious to the mess I had made with the seeds scattered everywhere, and what was more they did not notice the hemp seeds stuck all over the very mashed up pears as I handed them over.
Perhaps they were also oblivious to the fact that the law against raw, living sproutable hemp seed in the USA is a laugh-out-loudable absurdity, when the Constitution of the USA is written on hemp, when early Americans were required to each grow at least one acre of hemp, when Henry Ford built a car out of hemp, when growing hemp can help mitigate the effects of damaging radioactive fallout, when it can be used to construct buildings in the form of pressed bricks, when it can be planted in soil that is depleted as it doesn’t ask for much in return, when it can help feed, cloth, and give shelter to a people. Highly ironic that hemp has been made Iegal in these last few days, as our government shuts down and, it seems, the USA might be officially running out of money later this month.
Oh yes, some even say that the Buddha got through rough, austere times and attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree while surviving on one hemp seed a day.
Hemptiness is fullness, and fullness is hemptiness.
