The “War on Drugs” comes to a health food store near you
You can breathe easier now. No more sleepless nights tossing and turning with worry. Tonight, you can rest well, knowing that the scourge has been eradiated from your life.
As of February 6, U.S. grocery stores are no longer permitted to carry any food product containing hemp.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll sleep better tonight.
Drug bust at the local grocery
Hemp is an age-old crop. Its fibers are used in textiles. Its seeds and seed meal are used in a variety of foods. Its oil is used for all sorts of things. Hemp is a good source of protein, vitamin E, valuable amino acids and essential fatty acids. So what’s the problem?
Hemp also happens to be part of the cannabis species, the same species as marijuana. And — because manufacturers can’t guarantee that food products containing hemp don’t contain trace amounts of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana — the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had to raid health food store shelves
According to the North American Industrial Hemp Council web site, hemp contains “virtually no THC” — less than one percent, while marijuana contains 5 to 20 percent. But that’s not low enough for the DEA. There is no “allowable limit” of THC in the U.S. – so even “virtually none” is too much. Unless the manufacturer could produce scientific evidence that their product contained absolutely no traces of THC, it had to go. There’s already been a ban against growing hemp in the U.S. for about 50 years, but now, food companies will not be able to import hemp seeds or products, either.
Last week, the Baltimore Sun ran a story about how the new ban was being carried out in the local Fresh Fields supermarket. Frozen waffles, cookies, cereals, salad dressings, tortilla chips, even ice cream – anything that contained hemp seeds, meal or oil was removed from the shelves on Tuesday night in preparation for Wednesday’s crackdown.
I can just imagine the scene at the store the next morning. A confused shopper innocently asks a Fresh Fields employee where she can find HempPlus frozen waffles. The clerk responds that the government has removed them from the shelves for her own protection. Later, a man in dark glasses and a trench coat jots down her license plate as she leaves the parking lot.
Just say no — to government interference
Really, it’s just so silly. Does anyone at the DEA really think that people are getting high off of frozen waffles? Do they really think the perceived “risk” from negligible amounts of THC in foods outweighs the ingredient’s health benefits? And don’t they have bigger, more important issues to deal with at the Drug Enforcement Agency?
I’ve had it up to here with the government trying to protect me from myself. I’m the best person to decide what’s right for me – particularly in areas where my choices impact no one but me. And I hardly think that I’m a liability to society if I eat hemp ice cream.
This is just one more example of the government thinking that they “know better,” that they are somehow more qualified to decide how we should live our lives than we are. We’ve seen it time and again as they try to limit our health care choices. Now apparently that isn’t enough for them – they have to tell us what kind of waffles we can eat, too.
Copyright 1997-2002 by Institute of Health Sciences, L.L.C.
