By Tom Van Dusen – AgriNews Staff Writer
It’s baaaaack! Industrial hemp, that is, the ancient crop which many conventional farmers love to snicker at has returned to Eastern Ontario.It’s pretty easy to poke fun considering hemp’s close association with marijuana. It’s actually the same plant minus significant levels of the hallucinogen THC. Under Health Canada regulations, hemp and its parts may not contain more than .3 per cent THC.
Banned in North America in the 1930s, Canada reintroduced controlled production, sale, movement, processing, exporting and importing of certain varieties in 1998.
Re-introduction caused a flurry of interest in growing and selling hemp in this country, but primarily as fibre, OMAFRA expert Gordon Scheifele told information sessions at Douglas and Galetta Jan. 31 and Feb. 1.
The meetings attracted 75 farmers potentially interested in trying out the crop on contract this season for Valley Bio Ltd. which grew and marketed 245 acres of food grade hemp last year.
Scheifele said the market wasn’t there 12 years ago. Now hemp is coming back, but almost exclusively on the food oil and meal processing side. Calling hemp “the most incredible plant God created,” he insisted hemp’s latest comeback in Ontario and across Canada is for real.
“This isn’t fly-by-night or boom-or-bust. The market still isn’t huge, but hemp is here to stay.”
At one time, the expert noted, it was more valuable than gold, providing man with food, clothing, ropes and sails. Today, it can’t be grown without a criminal record check and a license from Health Canada.
Read complete article here:

http://www.agrinewsinteractive.com/fullstory.htm?ArticleID=11436&ShowSection=News

By Evelyn Theiss

Hot Sauce Williams is known for its barbecue menu. The chain may be adding a special sauce with marijuana as one of the ingredients.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Clevelanders know about Hot Sauce Williams’ barbecue joints. Colorado is about to experience the restaurant’s famous sauce in a whole new way – with a whole new name.
Pot Sauce Williams.
That’s no joke.
“We hope to make it the Heinz of medical marijuana sauces,” said Norm Roulet, a Cleveland business consultant who got the idea off the ground.
Roulet is working with Greg Williams to turn out a high-test, marijuana-laced version of the rib coating. And Williams, special projects manager for the Cleveland-based restaurant chain, with help from a Denver lab, has created a prototype of a new version of the chain’s famous sauce. This one is infused with cannabis.
Read complete article here:
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/02/pot_sauce_williams_aiming_to_b.html#incart_hbx

By Chris Roberts

It’s not your landlord knocking

​On Jan. 11, someone knocked on the door of Bruce Rossignol’s 13th Street home. The investment banker turned medical cannabis cultivator, who, as SF Weekly reported in August wishes to someday open a cannabis club in North Beach, assumed it was his landlord.
He was wrong.
At the door were a dozen officers from the San Francisco Police Department, narcotics officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration, and officers with the San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force. They raided the sophisticated cultivation operation on which Rossignol had spent an ungodly sum of time and money.
Cops smashed his grow equipment and then seized cash and an unknown amount of marijuana.
That’s a bummer —  and one that could have been avoided with a single phone call.
Rossignol, a medical cannabis patient who says his operation was truly legal, has a dispensary permit application pending with the Department of Public Health. But the SFPD didn’t bother contacting regulators until the day after the raid, according to the police report.
Read complete article at:
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/02/cops_raided_first_asked_questi.php

Program thought to be first of kind in state

Desert Sun File Photo

Written by Blake Herzog

by Gary Johnson  – Former governor of New Mexico

The Web is humming with stories and discussion from the aftermath of President Obama’s response to questions about drug legalization during last Thursday’s YouTube forum. While his words this time around are a bit more encouraging than previous signals from the administration, I would strongly suggest that we all, including the president, cut through the platitudes and get to the truth about marijuana prohibition.
If, as the president suggests, it is time for a “serious debate” about legalization, let’s get to it, starting with a few questions that beg for truth:
Why, with record federal deficits and states teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, are we spending billions on yet another failed Prohibition that is accomplishing nothing other than making criminals out of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens and fueling drug cartels that threaten our fundamental national security? Is it not time to try something different?
Read complete article here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-johnson/yes-it-is-time-for-pot-le_1_b_816376.html

By Nadia Arandjelovic

Activist says marijuana should be classified as food.

A cannabis campaigner told MPs that marijuana should no longer be banned by law and instead be “reclassified as a food”.
Gershwyn Smith, of community activist group The Young Progressives, said the Island’s drug laws had increased the community’s problems and created “gang warfare and anarchy”.
During a presentation to the joint select committee on violent crime and gun violence on Friday, the 61-year-old said marijuana was a natural plant and used to heal certain ailments like paralysis.
He said: “God doesn’t make drugs,” adding that the ultimate solution was to change laws and policy and implement programmes that would remove hard drugs from the streets and away from the general community.
Mr Smith said other illegal substances like cocaine and heroine should be medicalised and placed in hospitals, clinics and public centres and totally controlled by Government.
He said this would get illegal substances out of the wrong hands by taking the profit away from drug dealers on the streets.
“Sick people or addicts or patients can register with the programme and get their medicine at a [reduced] price, which may be 60 cents a day instead of $50 to $500 a day at street level, depending on the extent of the individual’s addiction,” he said.
“Now we have the opportunity to encourage the addicts in their own time to try and clean up their addiction and other programmes made available.
“When there is no price in the street the product has lost its value and all crimes and social activity associated with illegal drugs comes to a stop.”
He said patients registered with the programme must be treated with respect and their identity protected.
Read complete article at:
http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20110131/NEWS03/701319981/0/business

 
Prague, Jan 30 (CTK) – The Czech Legalizace.cz (Legalisation) association has started offering free hemp seeds to people who want to grow marijuana for their own treatment, the association told CTK.
Within the “Seeds to Seniors” campaign, the NGO wants to highlight therapeutical effects of marijuana and call for the legalisation of this soft drug for medical purposes.
Marijuana has been applied experimentally, for instance, for the treatment of patients with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.
“We are fully aware of that unauthorised handling of hemp containing over 0.3 percent of THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol narcotic) is illegal at present. We inform all applicants about the risks connected with the cultivation and possession of curative hemp/cannabis,” said organiser Robert Veverka, from the association.
The organisation criticises the situation in the Czech Republic where hemp is unavailable for ill citizens who want to use it for medical purposes. It claims that this approach is at variance with citizens’ right to health.
Read complete article here:
http://praguemonitor.com/2011/01/31/czech-association-offers-hemp-seeds-therapeutic-purposes