DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Hemp is an amazing plant. As I’ve written before, it grows easily without pesticides and makes high-quality food, fiber, and pulp. Get the scoop from the Hemp Industries Association.

Just in case there’s a question of my motives: I don’t smoke pot. This isn’t about drugs; it’s about the health of the planet. Hemp grows like a weed and could revolutionize commercial agriculture, but the Bush administration wants to outlaw it because the plant contains traces of THC.

As an illustration of the wrong-headedness of the DEA’s unhealthy fixation on Cannabis, hemp advocates point out that poppy-seed bagels contain traces of opium. But nobody in the Bush administration is trying to legislate your bagels out of the market. Why? Because it would be ridiculous. About is ridiculous as classifying hemp granola bars as “controlled substances.”

Today, though, the news is good. For a change, common sense has won. As the AP reports,

Rejecting one front of the government’s drug war, a federal appeals court ruled Friday the United States cannot ban the sale of food made with natural hemp that contains only trace amounts of the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. The decision overturns the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ban on the domestic sale of hemp food products.

See more coverage in the Chronicle’s story, Bush push to expand drug wars shot down by Ninth Circuit ruling:

The court said the DEA had no authority to reclassify hemp as a dangerous drug without first showing that it has a “high potential for abuse.”