Wow! I'm still reeling from all that I learned the weekend of September 29th. I'll try to make sense of this as much as I can, but please bear in mind that I haven't quite sorted it all out myself.
The journey started with an invitation from a fellow minister on the cannabis churches google group. I just happened to glance over the post, and the invitation to commune with fellow ministers caught my eye. There was to be a celebration at the future site of an orthodox Ethiopian church in Atlanta, roughly 5-6 hours from our sanctuary here in Lower Alabama.
I felt a strong pull to attend this event. We started out on this journey even without the necessary funds to get home. There's a leap of faith for you! We headed out on our trek on Friday and stayed at a fellow minister's home overnight in Northern Alabama. This was a chance to fellowship and gain further spiritual insight on what our mission may be.
From The Hawai'i Tribune Herald by Gloria Baraquio
I thought I was tired of all this marijuana talk, and really, I was done writing about it. But then I checked my e-mail this week, and my inbox was filled with letters from people all over the world. I'm talking the Netherlands, Singapore, Canada, Washington, Texas and Louisiana. I don't even know how these readers found my column, but they were encouraged that somebody out there was talking about it.
As I opened one e-mail after another, it hit me that this marijuana thing is no small-town Hilo issue. It's a global debate that's really not about marijuana. It has to do with a much bigger picture that involves money and power, health and freedom.
By Gloria Baraquio Hawaii Tribune Herald September 12, 2007
When I first moved here, I thought marijuana was illegal. And then after living here a few years, I realized that everyone and their mom either smokes it, buys it, grows it, or sells it. So then I thought weed wasn't illegal. But then in the past few weeks, I've been hearing about these drug busts and house raids and farms getting shut down, which has made me start to think, once again, that marijuana is in fact illegal.
I grew up thinking weed was BAD. Just say no to drugs. Marijuana is a gateway drug. It's addictive, and it'll get you hooked on harder drugs like ice and cocaine. Somewhere, somehow this was ingrained in me.
This is an excerpt from Jack Herer's The Emperor Wears No Clothes
One more example of the importance of hemp: Five years after cannabis hemp was outlawed in 1937, it was promptly re-introduced for the World War II effort in 1942.
So, when the young pilot George Bush bailed out of his burning airplane after a battle over the Pacific, little did he know:
Parts of his aircraft engine were lubricated with cannabis hempseed oil;
100% of his life-saving parachute webbing was made from U.S. grown cannabis hemp;
Virtually all the rigging and ropes of the ship that pulled him in were made of cannabis hemp;
The firehoses on the ship (as were those in the schools he had attended) were woven from cannabis hemp; and,
Finally, as young George Bush stood safely on the deck, his shoes’ durable stitching was of cannabis hemp, as it is in all good leather and military shoes to this day.
Yet Bush spent a good deal of his career eradicating the cannabis plant and enforcing laws to make certain that no one will learn this information—possibly including himself.…
(USDA film, Hemp for Victory, 1942; U. of KY Agricultural Ext. Service Leaflet 25, March, 1943; Galbraith, Gatewood, Kentucky Marijuana Feasibility Study, 1977.)
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