Hemp to the rescue-almost

Coal isn’t the only iconic Kentucky industry that is troubled by the way the Obama administration does business. State Rep. Wilson Stone, D-Scottsville, acting on rumors that the Obama administration is seeking to exclude tobacco in trade talks has introduced a non-binding resolution in the state Senate asking that tobacco be included along with other agricultural commodities in any future foreign trade agreements. He is joined in this effort by State Sen. Paul Hornback, R-Shelbyville. Both of these gentlemen are concerned that the state's tobacco farmers and the state itself would take a hit if tobacco is excluded.

With all due respect to both lawmakers, I think Kentucky’s tobacco has killed enough people. We certainly don’t need to be exporting death to other countries. And it’s plain enough that the era of tobacco as an acceptable crop has long since passed. I would like to suggest to these solons that if they really want to do something to help the state’s farmers, they join with Kentucky Commissioner of Agriculture James Comer as he and several of these gentlemen’s colleagues in the state assembly attempt to persuade the federal government to end its prohibition against industrial hemp.

There is another commodity that Kentucky exports, in a manner of speaking; it’s cast-off plastic. It isn’t sent to any particular country, and Kentucky isn’t alone in exporting it. But all the scrap plastic that doesn’t make its way into our landfills eventually makes its way into the waterways and then to one of two great floating garbage patches in either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

The first one of these was discovered in the Pacific by a yachtsman, Captain Charles Moore in 1997. His discovery has since been dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In 2010, its equivalent was found in the Atlantic, south of Bermuda. Not that you’d actually see much of either patch if you were right in them. They both consist of small bits of plastic debris that are suspended below the surface.

Not that all is lost, not by any means. As reported in the San Jose State University’s student newspaper, the SJSU Today, a junior business major, J.D. Leadam, may have come up with a solution to part of this problem. In the Silicon Valley Innovation Challenge held on December 12 of last year, Mr. Leadam won several awards, including the people’s choice award and an award for the most innovative idea for his suggestion to replace regular single use, non-biodegradable water bottles with biodegradable plastic water bottles made from hemp.

Well, you know, the sad part about this bright young man’s idea is, it isn’t workable in the U. S. Hemp, you know, is still illegal to produce here. After all, according to federal law, hemp is the same thing as marijuana, and marijuana is a schedule one drug, just like heroin. So you can only imagine that if farmers are allowed to grow industrial hemp, why, right away, you’d have young people everywhere shooting up hemp on the main streets.

Because of the ridiculousness of this reasoning, Mr. Leadam is going to have to look to the Chinese to make his idea work. China, you know, is one of several enlightened countries that still produces industrial hemp. We even import it from them.

Too bad, too; otherwise we might have profited from this idea here in Kentucky.