"One DEA
employee who was innocently enjoying her hemp bar, while
learning about the myriad food uses of the
hemp plant, was chastised by a fellow
employee screaming from her car:
Don't eat that food!"
Tuesday there
were Taste Tests in 76
cities: Arlington, Austin, Boulder,
Burlington, Chas, Chicago,
Columbia, Columbus, Delhi, Denton,
Denton, Detroit, Detroit, Dillon, Dover, Eau
Claire, Eugene, Fayetteville, Flagstaff, Folly Beach, Ft.
Collins, Hood River, Houston, Indianapolis, Ithaca,
Jupiter, La Crosse, Las Vegas, Little Rock, Los
Angeles, Louisville, Lubbock,
Manchester, Manitou Springs, Miami,
Middletown, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Missoula, New Paltz,
New York City, Norfolk, Oakland, Ogden, Oklahoma City,
Orlando, Paducah, Philadelphia, Phoenix,
Pittsburgh, Portland, Potosi,
Providence, Quad Cities, Richland,
Richmond, Roanoke, Sacramento, Saginaw,
Salem, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Santa
Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Seattle,
Sebastopol, Springfield, St.
Louis, Syracuse, Tallahassee, Tampa,
Templeton, Trinidad, Tucson, Tumwater, and West Palm
Beach
In Arlington,
VA, at the national DEA headquarters,
hemp industry representatives, John Roulac,
founder and president of Nutiva, David
Bronner, President of Dr. Bronner's Magic
Soaps, and Eric Steenstra, President of
VoteHemp.com, were joined by drug policy reformers (and
hemp enthusiasts!) from the
Drug Reform Coordination Network, the
Marijuana Policy Project,
Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and
Common Sense for Drug Policy, and members of the
Libertarian and Green
Parties.
We were initially met with
resistance from the building security staff which
deployed a ring of cops and barricades around the
building and
forbade us to set foot on the property (which
they insisted included the sidewalk and the
curb). After setting up shop in the street by a
traffic light, the local police came and
negotiated a spot for us on the sidewalk.
It was a gorgeous sunny
warm blue sky day, just like the end of summer.
A perfect kind of day for a picket/picnic!
There was a good deal of
foot traffic, DEA employees, and other working people on
their lunch breaks. It was easy to tell the DEAs from
people who aren't paid to believe that
banning hemp is an acceptable use of law
enforcement resources. Most of
the DEAs walked swiftly by,
pretending to have no interest in the free food or
why we were there.
Some claimed to have
no knowledge of the rules regulating hemp.
Other said they knew
everything about the subject but refused to comment on
it. One DEA employee who was innocently
enjoying her hemp bar, while learning about
the myriad food uses of the hemp plant, was chastised
by a fellow employee screaming
from her car, "Don't eat that food!"
"You're not allowed to
talk to them!" More honest than
most, but probably expressing a common internal
monologue, one DEA employee, at refused the
offer of a hemp bar by saying that he was going to
wait until old age before he tried what he'd been
missing all these years: "I know
I'm going to regret I didn't do it forty years
earlier!" We had to explain
that he'd have to go somewhere other than his local
health food store to get what he was talking about.
In contrast
to the DEAs, the average person was thrilled to
receive the free hemp bars, candies, salted
hempseeds, chips (with salsa and
guacamole), hot soft Hempzles,
pasta salad, poppy seed bagels, and orange
juice. They participated happily
in the taste test, were
eager to learn about the
nutritional value of hemp,
and were interested in sending comments to the DEA.
Our Taste Test was
well documented by the DC Independent Media Center
(video) and Doug McVay of Common Sense for Drug Policy
(photos). The IMC is making a newsreel on the
event that will be shown in a couple of weeks at an IMC
film showing, and will be posted on the http://dc.indymedia.org/ site.
There was
a decent media presence. The local ABC affiliate,
Channel 7, and a CNN cameraman
filmed the event. There were reporters from the City
Paper, High Times....
We hope
you'll stick with us as we continue to fight
for access to nutritious and delicious hemp food in the
face of the DEA's outrageous and
unreasonable regulation. As you know, the period
for public comment to the
DEA ends December 10th. We're currently in
federal court seeking an
injunction against implementation of the new
rule, but February 6th is
the date enforcement could begin.
Now is a
critical moment for public
education. Most people in America
don't even know what hemp is, let alone
how the DEA treats
it, but right now we still have the opportunity to
organize resistance and stop the
DEA's attempts to crush a
burgeoning natural foods industry.