Fundamental Relationships

Cannabis agriculture and the so-called "drug war" are fundamentally relevant to all of the global imbalances faced by mankind. Causal relationships between prohibition and climate change, the price and unavailability of biofuels, wars-for-oil, the black market, food insecurity, malnutrition, and essential resource disparity, form a complex tangle of problems that may be resolved with a relatively simple, common sense solution. "Freedom to Farm" is being demanded by ENCOD (www.encod.org) in Vienna this year at the United Nations UNGASS summit to review UN drug policies. Overlap between climate change, food security and nutrition, drug policy, biofuels production, and radical economic disparity must be considered at once if mankind is to be successful in addressing climate change in a timely way.

Based on the US model, these programs have failed miserably, inducing misery and eroding society in many ways in every country at every level. Prohibition has institutionalized harms far in excess of any that drugs themselves do. Perhaps the cruelest harm is to have induced essential resource scarcity, by criminalizing the world's most nutritious and potentially abundant food resource.

It seems obvious to allow Cannabis agriculture and manufacturing to participate ina rational strategy for global atmospheric carbon sequestration (1 ton per acre per year) and monoterpene production (to deflect solar radiation and seed cloud formation), for soil regeneration, expansion of the arable base, protein and essential fatty acids production, and as a globally distributed, alternative fuels feedstock.

Unless people overcome the knee-jerk reflex that often occurs when the subject of hemp is raised, then one of the most effective strategies for mitigating climate change will continue to be dismissed without the regard that such a magnificent, beneficial agricultural resource deserves.

How bad do things have to get
before all solutions are considered?

See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edZw3hXkGJo

for the REAL Question for Davos'07