Hemp Can Do That: The Forgotten History of Hemp Cultivation

There is physiological evidence to support Pollan’s co-evolutionary theory. In 1992, the Israeli researcher Raphael Mechoulam discovered that we are all born with receptors for the compounds in cannabis flowers and some other plants (collectively called cannabinoids). Our built-in cannabinoid receptors constitute what is known as our endocannabinoid system.

Put simply, these receptors prepare our bodies to receive the properties of cannabinoids. You can think of them as Velcro, waiting for, say, the pain-relieving components of cannabis to be introduced when we bark our shin. All mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and fish have endocannabinoid systems. There’s preliminary research into whether some invertebrates also have them.³ If they do, that sure dates our relationship with the cannabis plant way back in history.

Modern farmers reveal their encoded love for hemp without always realizing why. When my Kentucky colleague Josh Hendrix took me to an antebellum barn that sported a World War II–era hemp brake used to prepare rope for navy rigging, he demonstrated the recently rediscovered, calf-sized wooden device as though he had been using it for years.

“Hemp is deeply rooted in rural Kentucky culture,” he told me.

“Most people would call this a tobacco barn. But before that it was a hemp barn.”

Seventy-seven years of cannabis prohibition, in other words, are a blip in humanity’s eight-millennia relationship with this plant.

From an economic standpoint, said Steve DeAngelo, a prominent cannabis activist since the 1970s, “the cannabis industry’s sustained double-digit growth curve is almost unprecedented in modern business history, and that’s before the whole plant is legalized federally.” The phenomenon he describes is not limited to North America—a Moroccan farmer named Adebibe Abdellatif flew halfway across the globe on his own dime to attend a 2017 United Nations cannabis session, where he told me his motivation was to ensure that the global hemp reemergence “is steered from the farm.”

DeAngelo cofounded the Harborside nonprofit dispensaries (originally Harborside Health Center) in California in 2006, and is in a unique position to characterize the industry’s growth curve. “Because of its breadth of applications, cannabis/hemp is the most disruptive economic development since Silicon Valley edged out blue chips,” he told me.

“To say we’re in our infancy is an understatement when it comes to this plant’s uses and markets.”

The biggest driver of hemp since (and only since) the first research only Farm Bill has been cannabidiol, popularly known as CBD. The market for this valuable, hemp-flower-derived nutritive supplement and topical application is growing 23 percent annually, and is on its way to being firmly established in the healthy person’s wellness lexicon, the way that omegas and aloe are.

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