Dalton Bennett / The Washington Post

At 84 years old, Willie Nelson still has a strong voice as one of America’s leading songwriters. He sat down in his tour bus with The Washington Post’s Libby Casey to talk politics, pot, and what Americans can do to come together. He even sang The Washington Post’s new motto.
 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/willie-nelson-on-america/2017/07/25/1cd58fd0-6e56-11e7-abbc-a53480672286_video.html?utm_term=.bee6ec905ec0

Andrew Simmons – Fox & Nug Magazine – Summer 2017
A rare interview with Jeannie Herer, plus, taste the hottest concentrates of the season in this issue with special exposes on Ambrosia Extracts, Half Full Glass and a blind taste test of the market’s hottest infused beverages.
 

BY MEGAN BARBER

 
Where Kondo really sets itself apart is its choice of building materials: a hemp biocomposite shell. According to the Stay Kondo website, hemp is a lightweight, strong material that can be sustainably grown in the United States without herbicides. It also grows to maturity in four months, compared with lumber which can take 20 years.
 
Full Article: 
https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/19/15998800/tiny-house-stay-kondo-hemp-modular

Don Basile

 

Marijuana is an ancient plant with borderline mystical properties — just ask the 266 million people who smoke it every year. Hemp, the industrial strain of Cannabis sativa, has been used for many purposes — food, fuel and textiles among them — for tens of thousands of years. Unlike its sister strain, hemp can’t get you high. But much like the drug, it has extraordinary qualities.

America is no stranger to hemp. In fact, Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag with hemp and George Washington farmed it at Mt. Vernon. Unfortunately, its full potential was never realized; drug restrictions that banned marijuana suppressed hemp, too. This spurious conflation quashed the industry for about 60 years, until a 2014 farm bill defined it as an agricultural crop, leaving the door ajar to American farmers.
 
Full Article: 
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/27/hemp-cant-get-you-high-but-it-can-get-high-tech/
 
 

 
For her capstone project in her Sustainability Technologies class, Cape Fear Community College student Leigh Humphries was inspired by nature. Humphries chose an environmentally responsible building material to construct a doghouse — hemp. The recent graduate sought hempcrete to “promote sustainable building techniques and materials through outreach and public awareness.”
Hempcrete is created by mixing the hemp core or “shiv” from the hemp plant with a lime-based binder. This substance not only creates a negative carbon footprint — removing more carbon CO2 from the atmosphere than it generates — but it is also easier and more versatile to work with than standard concrete. Noted as a very durable, lightweight, breathable material, hempcrete lets water in without rotting, and is fire-, pest- and mold-resistant.
 
Full Article: 
http://www.starnewsonline.com/entertainment/20170720/cfcc-student-uses-sustainable-hempcrete-for-doghouse

Jonathan Blumberg

 
On Wednesday’s episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage,” retired Dell executive Bruce Dietzen sells the host on his unconventional 2017 Renew, a car that was designed with the environment in mind. It was “carbon neutral” to produce and made from woven cannabis hemp.
Manufacturing the average car emits about ten tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “That’s before it even hits the road,” notes Leno, where it will release another six tons a year.
 
Full Article: 
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/19/jay-leno-drives-a-cannabis-car.html

BEN ADLIN

 
In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind ruling, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Monday said that employees can’t be fired simply for using medical cannabis. Such terminations, the court said, violate state antidiscrimination rules.
The opinion came as a shock to many, as every other state to consider the issue has decided that employers may indeed fire workers who test positive for cannabis—even if those employees are abiding by state law. In Colorado, for example, the state Supreme Court in 2015 held that a state law barring employers from firing workers for legal, off-duty behavior didn’t apply because cannabis is still illegal under federal law. California, Washington, Montana, and others have issued similar rulings.
 
Full Article: 
https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/cant-fire-cannabis-patients-just-using-cannabis-massachusetts-high-court-rules

Melia Robinson

 
A former Pepsi factory that sat vacant for a decade is being reincarnated as an indoor marijuana grow — one of the largest in the pot-friendly state of Colorado.
Doyen Elements, a holding company that leases real estate properties out to legal cannabis companies, bought an old bottling plant in Pueblo County. Upon completion in 2019, the facility could potentially produce up to 70,000 pounds of marijuana flower a year.
 
Full Article: 
http://www.businessinsider.com/abandoned-pepsi-factory-turned-marijuana-farm-2017-7/#for-many-years-the-104000-square-foot-plant-at-1900-south-freeway-was-used-for-bottling-pepsi-products-but-the-soda-company-like-the-steel-industry-left-pueblo-county-1

By Chloe Fox

 
There’s a new hemp trend sweeping the nation and it has nothing to do with those beaded friendship bracelets from the ‘90s.
Twenty-three states have now enacted pro-industrial hemp legislation (Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie signed the latest bill this past week), making the cousin crop to marijuana a national phenomenon. Since the beginning of the year, more than 70 bills related to hemp have been introduced in more than half of the country’s states. Passage of the recent Farm Bill, which legalized the crop for research purposes, further cleared the way for industrial hemp production.
Hemp, which is the same species as marijuana (Cannabis sativa) but contains little to no THC, was grown widely in America before anti-drug sentiment helped make it unpopular in the 1950s. Today, however, the nation’s turning tide on marijuana means its “sober cousin“ is also making a comeback.
Hemp policy is “not just turning a corner,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) told The Huffington Post earlier this year. “It’s turning a corner and running downhill.”
 
Full Article: 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/03/hemp-sustainable-crop_n_5243351.html

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