We’re now in the Age of the Criminal where all traditions, manners, etiquette, policies, routines, rituals, protocols, customs, mores, norms, standards, ethics, and rules of law and civility are out the window, #nocrimesmatter and #anythinggoes.
For a generation raised on Participation Trophies, being half-assed at President by pretending to not know how anything works is apparently peak Alpha Male.
The once-revered Social Contract was used for toilet paper late one night and flushed away along with some official documents and love letters to Kim Jung Un.
In the current crisis, how could we use it as an opportunity to do what we couldn’t do before, like legalize? Since he’s in a treaty-abrogating mood, formerly unthinkable, let’s leverage it; what might that look like for ending Cannabis Prohibition?
After all, he’s just one bribe away from legalizing, but it won’t be deep-pocket Big Weed because they don’t want more competition that legalization will bring.
Altruism? From the world’s most transactional person ever? No, it’ll take cash or at least Stock Options in Eric’s name.
FDA
- The agency was started in part to regulate into oblivion the safe, popular, and efficacious Cannabis medicines dispensed by pharmacists and made by some of today’s drug companies. Today, its single-molecule dogma is diametrically opposed to the multi-molecule ethos of cannabinoid producer best practices. It’s a profound and peculiar philosophical and scientific dogma that FDA adheres to like a religion. To manage that conflict, FDA needs an Office of Plant Medicine with someone of the caliber of Dr Ethan Russo to run it.
- No safe and efficacious medicine belongs in Schedule 1, deschedule Cannabis, phytocannabinoids, and psychedelics. Schedule 1 was ruled a political not scientific classification, thus has no place in a science- and fact-based organization.
- Grandfather as GRAS all phytocannabinoids naturally found in the plant as humans have been consuming them for millennia, but not synthetics.
- Allow and regulate low-dose cannabinoid products like we do dietary supplements today.
- Allow cannabinoid medicines with more than one or two active compounds. There are over 550 chemicals in a Cannabis plant, such as terpenes and terpenoids, indols, cannabinoids, flavonoids, sterols, fatty acids, and many more. They often work together synergistically, therefore single-molecule meds would be less effective. There is a term for that synergy: the “Entourage Effect.”
- Eliminate the “preclusionary rule” which is used today against its original purpose and is used to block CBD, NAC, etc.
- Redirect a significant portion of DEA’s marijuana enforcement budget to the new FDA Office of Plant Medicine.
- Allow compliant hempseed foods to have front panel declaration: “THC-free,” much like we see for “fat-free” (<0.5g fat) and “alcohol-free” (<0.5% alcohol). Another is a standard of identity for shelled or hulled hempseed as “hempnut,” thereby reducing label space and clarifying the product’s standards.
- Direct AAFCO to allow one of mankind’s oldest animal feeds, hemp grain.
- Continue to stay away from plants, that’s USDA’s department. You do products, they do plants; ne’er the twain shall meet.
USDA
- Regulate by end-use, not THC content.
- Reclaim the legacy of Lyster Dewey and train a new generation of Cannabis agronomists, expand the seed bank, and offer technical assistance through local ag extension offices.
- Develop standards of identity for primary grain and fiber products.
- Mandate 0.1% of federal procurement for domestic hemp grain and fiber products.
- Fund three regional processing plants for primary fiber and grain processing.
- Expand NIFA grants. Expand other federal R&D grants and programs pertinent to hemp production and processing.
- Encourage farmers receiving payments to leave land fallow to grow hemp instead. Allow insurance, and climate mitigation and other subsidies to include hemp farming.
- Redirect a significant portion of DEA’s marijuana enforcement budget previously used to destroy stands of feral hemp to USDA’s hemp programs and grants. Call it hemp’s Marshall Plan, after decades of “regulatory bombing.”
- Note: hemp may not be in the next Farm Bill since it can replace timber, lumber, cement, cotton, soybean, corn, milk, meat, and more, thus it has many powerful natural enemies and they own Congress. If so, Colorado can’t just go back to how it was before federal legalization in the years 2013-2018, protected by the Tenth Amendment and the state’s 2012 Amendment 64. Colorado’s Amendment X (2018) took the THC cutoff of 0.3% out of the state Constitution and handed it to the feds. Oops.
Tax Policy
- No federal excise tax, as the feds raked in more than enough over the last 88 years from this plant while creating the modern civil liberties-infringing surveillance state. Be satisfied with law enforcement and criminal justice cost savings, and increased income tax revenues.
- Eliminate 280e, Reagan’s Laffer Curve says it’ll pay off and we created an entire tax policy shift around it.
True Legalization
- Withdraw from all U.N. drug control treaties.
- Free hemp: regulate as an ag not a drug crop; no fingerprinting or background checks, allow drug felons, no pre-harvest THC testing of fiber/grain crops. No state ag department fees unless real value is provided. No check-off programs until one million acres. Legalize hemp not via a Farm Bill needing re-approval (and Big Ag’s blessing) every five years, but real and permanent descheduling federally and in each state. Mandate that new large civic projects include 0.1% biomaterials such as hemp products.
- Allow free interstate commerce and use of the USPS, and imports but with hefty duties to protect domestic production.
- Pardon and expunge the records of anyone convicted of any marijuana or related offense, even by families posthumously.
- Mandate a payment system protecting the farmer, like California has for produce.
- Continue to ignore state-regulated marijuana businesses.
- Prohibit anti-science THC DUI laws, especially since they use a cut-off 10 times lower than employment testing. Measure performance, not molecules.
- Ban pre-employment tests for THC except for sensitive occupations, narrowly defined.