My work took me this week to a place north of San Diego where they make Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap. It’s popular with the organic ingredients crowd, and one of the ingredients in it is hemp seed oil.
That is what caused the owner of the company to lock himself in a cage that was placed in front of the White House, where he was arrested by D.C. cops after they broke into his cage with a circular saw.
A little background.
Hemp is a fibrous plant that’s a close cousin of marijuana. Its fibers have been used for hundreds of years to make clothes, rope and ship sails. The owner of Dr. Bronner’s soap company told me the word “canvas” is derived from the word “cannabis.” I looked it up. He’s right.
He is David Bronner, a tall guy with a beard like Lenin who has a habit of snapping his fingers when he wants to emphasize a point he’s making. He’s a capitalist with a liberal political agenda. Buy a bottle of his soap and you’ll find it comes with lots of text that describes our spiritual unity.
Dr. Bronner Magic Soap is made with hemp seed oil, which you cannot produce in the U.S. because hemp is a cannabis plant that contains THC (the chemical that makes you high) therefore the oil has to be produced in and imported from Canada. Bronner thinks his cost of buying the oil would be 20 percent less if you could grow the stuff in the USA.
So his cause is part financial and part philosophical. Does he really need hemp seed oil to make his soap lathery and luxuriant? Maybe he does.
Bronner says you’d have to smoke an acre of hemp to get high. But marijuana activism has gotten so tied up with hemp it’s hard to know whether the two can every be twain
I asked him if he was in favor of the legalization of marijuana, and he said yes… for recreational, medicinal and spiritual purposes. It’s possible that smoking dope will get you closer to God but the recreational aspect of the stuff is what makes the whole issue suspicious
As far as the government is concerned, hemp and dope are the same thing. So the industrial and cosmetic uses of hemp and its seed oil will have to take a back seat, thanks to the tiny fraction of THC that cannabis always comes with. You’d never know the stuff you use for making clothes and rope would be so demonic to gain a government prohibition, or so angelic that Dr. Bronner would risk jail to set it free.
CUL-DE-SAC 