CBD and the Fog of War
Cannabis, Legalization, and New Hampshire Part 5
July 28, 2019
Somewhere in the Low Country of South Carolina
Normally I begin my pieces with a little intro: where I am, what I’m doing, the music I’m listening to, and possibly a foreshadowing of where I’ll go in the piece.
Not this time.
What the fuck is going on with CBD products? Hemp — legal on the national level since the Farm Bill of 2018 — continues to be either in a sort of legal limbo in any given state, or is out-rightly treated as illegal. Old ladies at Disneyland, travelers with CBD in Texas, or truckers carrying legal hemp in Idaho have all been busted in recent months. Various states have enacted CBD edible bans and food additive bans.
It seems that as we step forward into the green future, the past keeps rearing its ugly and unwanted head. All of those points I’ve posited in this series: misinformation, gaffe, smoke and mirrors, fear, shaking the money tree are ringing out louder than ever.
I’ll start here at home in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire has been attempting to clarify its stance on legal hemp and CBD by starting work on a hemp bill, which has been sitting in a legislators desk since December 2018. Currently hemp has essentially had no guidelines other than it can’t be grown by anyone, or any institution aside from the University of New Hampshire. They did so in a pilot program, laid to rest after a two year trial run which essentially accomplished nothing of import. The goal of the bill is to make New Hampshire’s legal hemp landscape look a lot like Vermont’s, which is pretty damn inclusive. Hemp can be a real game changer for Americans on so many different levels. At the larger scale of farming and derivatives, at the small agricultural level of family farms and backyard plots, and at the local business side of retail mom and pop sales of hemp flower or CBD products.
Take CBD products, for instance. There is a huge, and growing CBD and hemp derivatives industry taking root here and across the country, but here in NH the DHHS came out in the spring of 2019 saying that essentially any CBD products you put in your mouth are illegal. Why?
In June 2019, NH DHHS confirmed that “edible” CBD is not approved for sale in the state. Following the guidelines set forth by the FDA, DHHS states as reported on NHPR:
“CBD is not a permitted additive in the state. This guidance has also been issued to self-inspecting municipalities to follow those regulations.”
The municipality of Rochseter was the first to go after CBD vendors, shocking retailers who had been offering various CBD products for months without problem. Such folly, considering that just about every corner news store, convenience mart, and health food store in the state sells some form of CBD — all of which can be deemed edible, as there are yet to be many vendors of whole dried hemp flower (as opposed to gummies, or candies, or tincture).
Are CBD products legal at all? God knows CBD products are everywhere from your local pharmacy, to the corner convenience store. Shop owners are living in a limbo of sales and fear — will jack boots sweep in, confiscate product, levy fines or take other punitive action? One just can’t be certain right now.
The 2018 Farm Bill clearly stipulates that on a national level, all hemp and its derivatives are legal, and “shall not be impeded.” However, the same federal government also clearly states that hemp and all its derivatives are still a Schedule 1 drug, being equally problematic, damaging, and a threat to the health of our nation as heroin. States are using this as fodder to breed the fog of war among the hemp enthusiasts and entrepreneurs.
There is a concerted effort both here and across this country to confuse the issues in both the case for legal hemp and for legal cannabis. Yes, there is a directed effort to instill “the fog of war” in the public venue.
Lena Bartula, a 71 year old woman travelling to Oregon to visit her grand-daughter had a simple stop over at Dallas/Fort Worth International. She was shocked as local police slapped handcuffs on her and arrested her after finding a small bottle of CBD oil in her bags, which she took — as millions of others across this country do daily — for relief from aches and pains of arthritis.
She says, “I think I almost laughed out loud, because I thought that couldn’t really be.”
But, it was to be. In fact the arrest was only the beginning of a harrowing two-day affair with the Dallas Texas legal system. Immediately she was taken to the DFW Airport jail, where she was forced to sleep on the floor of the facility, with her head rested next to the toilet. Can we revisit the fact that this is a 71 year old grandmother?
After her night on the concrete floor beside the toilet, day two got much worse. Upon waking her arms and legs were shackled, she was moved to the Fort Worth county jail, and slapped with felony drug charges. All for a small bottle of CBD oil, which has zero intoxication capacity, nor is a danger to most people in any way shape or form.
This case really highlights several obvious failings of our police state. First being the reliance on intimidation and humiliation in cases such as this, as well as in much broader terms like racial-, economic-, and gender-based profiling. Another point of failure is how the entire legal system is utterly reliant on misinformation and faulty science — such is the case with the DEA’s insistence that CBD is a dangerous Schedule 1 drug.
Director of DFW Customs and Border Protection, Cletus Hunt Jr states, “A year ago arrests for CBD oil were almost non-existent, but over the last year arrests have skyrocketed.”
I have a tendency to believe that in this age of diminishing returns for law enforcement, that this is a last minute flailing grasp at drug arrest revenue — and intimidation adding to “the fog of war”.
This case generated a wealth of national, and international news, and unsurprisingly, the state of Texas and border patrol dropped all charges against Ms Bartula.
Huh, it’s as if they knew they’d knowingly done wrong, isn’t it?
But this is not an isolated incident.
In May of 2019, a 69-year-old woman was arrested at Disney World in Florida after a police officer found a small bottle of CBD in her purse at a security checkpoint, as MSN reports. The great-grandmother was arrested and held for 12 hours before being released on a $2000 bond — even though she had a doctor’s recommendation that she use the CBD for her acute arthritis. Not surprisingly, as this story also generated national attention, local authorities dropped all charges.
More fog of war. Legal? Illegal? Safe? Dangerous? It’s a game being played with us to confuse and limit personal and commercial activity in the CBD market.
This goes all the way to the top as well.
In a piece from June 2019 from CNBC, they report on statements from Scott Gottleib former FDA chief, who makes such ridiculous statements as:
“CBD is not a “benign compound,” and regulations will be needed to protect people from possible unknown side effects”
and
“The idea that you can put it in dog food and it’s going to calm your dog as you go away to work during the day, or help them get through a lightning storm, I think that’s pretty hokey,” Gottlieb said in an interview on CNBC’s Fast Money. “There’s certainly no science to support that.”
But oh how wrong he is, the system is. There is copious science out there both in terms of human usage and in dogs and pets.
Gottlieb left the agency to go on to form a working group to evaluate CBD. To call it a “working group” is like referring to a pack of dogs running down a neighborhood deer as a group of “nice pups.” No, the working group is a further tool in the fog of war.
The study, reported nationally in Forbes, is a complete piece of scientific crap, with zero peer review, near to no clear facts, flawed scientific method, and clearly a desire to paint the CBD conversation in a very negative light. In fact this “study” is so flawed as to have zero scientific validity of all. For example,it claims CBD killed lab mice, though they were administered levels of the compound that would be literally impossible to ingest for a human. Yet it got published, re-run in multiple media venues, and quoted all over national news networks, only to have next to nothing reported on the flaws of the study.
Leafly, an online cannabis resource and news outlet, reported on the flawed study in this piece, referring to the study as “just bunk.”
Just as in previous “drug war” studies, the methodology is seriously fucked. For instance, the working group used methods of ingestion similar to this from a 1974 study of marijuana:
“Shackled in air-tight gas masks, Heath’s monkeys were [regularly] forced to inhale the equivalent of 63 high-potency marijuana cigarettes in five minutes. Lo and behold, the primates suffered brain damage from suffocation and carbon monoxide poisoning, but Heath attributed the results to marijuana toxicity.”
The fog of war. What a bitch.
To highlight another bit of data from said working group, and its tremendous flaws, obvious to anyone who has a brain:
“The breathless reporting in Forbes focuses on a single, flawed, pre-clinical study and exaggerates it to the point of falsehood… A close examination of the Molecules study reveals a Pandora’s box of strange statements, problematic publishing, and unreasonable experimental design. On the first page, the abstract makes a claim that is fundamentally impossible, stating that, with chronic administration of CBD, 75% of mice gavaged with 615 mg/kg developed a moribund condition.’ But there were only 6 animals that received this dose! One doesn’t need an advanced degree in science or math to recognize that something is amiss. Seventy-five percent of six equals 4.5.”
4.5 mice. Huh. How about those apples? Science, sure, right. Fog of war.
Growers and shippers are in an even riskier situation, even if they are in a hemp-friendly state. Take the case of the State of Idaho seizing 7.000 pounds of legal and compliant hemp farmed in Oregon and bound for Colorado. Not only did they interrupt the shipping of the product, they arrested the poor driver of the truck, then attempted to go after both the shippers, and receivers, under Idaho’s 0.00% THC laws. To be legal federally, hemp needs to have less than 0.03% THC by volume. In order to “get high” from any cannabis the THC levels generally need to be 5% or higher.
The little guys — the mom-and-pops, the small start ups, the working class in this country — need a break, they need a chance in the real economy where average wage earners have not seen more than 3 percent wage increase since 2000 according to an article by The Pew Research Center from August 2018 (let’s not forget that over this period beer has risen near to 100%, the cost of an average pick up by over 35%, and the list goes on, yielding ever less for the Johnny Paychecks of this country). Big pharma does not need a break as they enjoy record profits very much of which is totally untaxed. In a 2018 article from The Nation they explore an untaxed 2.3 Billion in profits, which may come as a surprise, or not, if you have an eye on the general trend regarding taxation on big business.
Locking the little guy out has happened in several states, with the big money lobby winning out over “we the people”. If this happens here in New Hampshire then it’s a failure, completely. But this is ultimately what I expect to happen in this state currently figurehead by Chris Sununu, a regressionist conservative beholden to the drug treatment industry and big pharma amongst others, as I examined in the second installment of this series, “Cannabis, Legalization, and New Hampshire.” I know a few of the hardcore hemp and cannabis activists in New Hampshire, and they have been fighting the good fight, trying to ensure fair access to both legal hemp and cannabis, and the industries they both could support in this state.
So the war on truth and efficacy moves forward, and the class warfare of keeping the little guy down moves in lock step. It is a war. And we WILL win, in the end. Fog of war or not, truth and reason will prevail.
July 29, 2019
11:50 A.M.
Edisto Beach, South Carolina — in a small breakfast shop, the Seacow.
I had waited on writing this last piece in my series Cannabis, Legalization, and New Hampshire since the end of May as the fog of war was heating up on CBD. Even at a personal level, myself and business partners are waiting to launch a CBD extraction company, and to break ground on a potential 100-acre hemp farm right here in the Granite State. We all are waiting. And while we do, hemp operations are springing up all over the rest of New England, as are full-fledged cannabis grows and extraction companies, with the home states reaping the financial benefit — from the tax rolls, to the small businesses and entrepreneurs.
How effective the fog of war is -any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
It is a hot and sunny day here in the Low Country of the South Carolina coast. Temps will reach well into the nineties today, the air is clear, and humidity to be expected. I’m here with my wife’s family celebrating the life of the matriarch of the family, who died of complications resulting from metastatic breast cancer ten years ago — a tragedy also of the fog of war, in my opinion; breast cancer is also highly treatable with cannabis oil. Sad.
The family is getting ready to hit the beach, and I’m ready to wrap this all up.
Over these pieces we’ve looked at various sides of the cannabis dilemma from political corruption and cronyism, to the bootlegging of Dr Ron, to the Rick Simpson cancer cure, the cure for Lyme Disease, CBD, and finally the fog of war.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this ride, and if I can take away a couple thoughts, it would be these:
First, that we live in a highly corrupt state and country run by big money donors and PACs, that care nothing at all of the plight of the regular people of our country, nor their health or wellness, nor the clear link between cannabis oil and curing cancer, nor fighting opiate addiction with cannabis products.
Second, that it is contingent upon us, the little people, the screwed, the struggling, the sick, the working class, and the more affluent members of our society to keep our eyes on the realities of what is laid out in front of us, and to question what is being force-fed to us. It has become painfully clear that we have been systematically lied to about cannabis for close to a hundred years — and it won’t stop unless we demand it.
“Government for the people, by the people”
WJM
[Author’s note:
In my piece regarding Chris Sununu and his campaign financiers, New Hampshire’s drug treatment industry was a major component on that list.
‘Industry,” think on that word for a moment . . .
Then read these words as reported in The Concord Monitor:
“A celebrated member of a New Hampshire drug recovery center has pleaded guilty to transporting fentanyl across state lines, court documents revealed this week.
Jeffrey Hatch, listed by his resume as the Chief Business Development Officer for Granite Recovery Centers, pleaded guilty on Friday to using a phone to facilitate the distribution of 1,500 grams of fentanyl, according to a plea agreement registered in the U.S. District Court in Concord”
But, be worried about CBD. What a fucking joke.]