Your Eyewitness has been noticing the daily reports of folks being busted with ganja – and even acres and acres of the stuff being discovered in remote areas and then destroyed. So, there’s no question we can grow the stuff; the question, then, is: why haven’t we even gotten into the business of “medical marijuana” – which he’s told is a booming business up north. Seems the stress of living in those developed countries is so great that they need help to relax!! Of course, there’s the LEGAL billion-dollar Opioid industry of Big Pharma valiantly doing its bit to help!!
But he also wonders whatever happened since Cabinet gave the long-sought-after permission for INDUSTRIAL hemp – a cousin of marijuana – to be cultivated in Guyana. Surely, you’ve heard about all the benefits hemp can bring to our country. The plant, we’re assured, can be used to create over 25,000 different products from each of its parts – leaves, bark, flowers, pith, etc!! Some of these products are textiles, rope, pharmaceuticals, food, concrete, car panels, and so on and so forth.
It’s also one of the fastest growing plants in the world, and can be reaped in just under three months…or give it another month if you want to harvest the seeds also. In this way, it acts as a much more efficient carbon sink than our forests, and can earn us carbon credits plus some “good name” to offset some of that natural gas that’s being flared! The plants are cultivated so closely together that their shade prevents grass from growing, and so weedicide isn’t needed. There aren’t any pests, and so no pesticide also isn’t needed. It does need water, but with at least 25 inches of rainfall being a minimum, that shouldn’t be a challenge for us!!
So, if industrial hemp is such a miracle plant, why was its cultivation banned? Back in the last century, when the US had gotten into a fit of morality and launched its war against liquor (Prohibition), it had broadened its ban to include “grass” and hemp in that first “war on drugs”. That’s when ganja got its “bad name” – even though it’s been used for thousands of years in places like India. For hemp – which India had used to produce millions of tons of rope for export – the ban was “guilt by association”, since the active ingredient in ganja – THC – at .003% is insignificant, and the CDB of hemp has many positive pharmaceutical effects.
Ironically, but predictably, now that the US has given permission for most of its farmers to grow hemp, the rest of the world’s going along. So, what’s holding us back?? The fear that our farmers will slip in some ganja??! Ha! Ha!!
…politics
It’s all so exciting to be living in Guyana right now. As a Star Wars buff, your Eyewitness can’t help noticing the opposition against Norton’s leadership modelling their activities on the rebels against the evil Emperor Palpatine. Right now, they aren’t attacking the Emperor’s home at Coruscant (East Coast?), but are mobilising in some of the smaller satellite planets -like Buxton, Brooklyn and Victoria. It’s a kind of guerrilla warfare by the several factions that crave the power of the Leadah!!
They also using social media in the same manner as the Star Wars’ Com-links to get their message at light speed across the world. In this way, they not only inform the faithful about their cause, but collect loot to fund their activities. Ahh…Paypal and MoneyGram are working overtime!! So, what are some of those activities?
As explained earlier, negatively, to delegitimize every initiative of “the illegally installed PPP regime”, that is so biased against African Guyanese, we are witnessing the formation of an “apartheid state”!!!
Oh dear!!
