3
DEAR MEMBERSHIP
It has been another exciting six
months in the world of Cannabis. Canada has normalized their industrial
hemp legislation and entered the ranks of commercial industrial hemp producers,
although complaints of bureaucratic permit delays have been widespread.
Australia has made substantial progress in normalizing hemp production and has
adopted the 50 mg/kg THC limit for the seed oil that is now the de facto international
standard supported by the IHA, the nova-Institute and the newly-formed Hemp
Foods Association. Canada must now take steps to amend both their arbitrary 10
mg/kg standard and their bizarre interpretation that products made from legal
hemp seed are not necessarily legal. New Zealand has shown early signs of
progress on hemp legislative reform and Australia's fine example should help.
On the medical Cannabis front,
there is good news from the United Kingdom. The Home Office has licensed GW
Pharmaceuticals, a medical research and development company, to cultivate
medical Cannabis, to develop natural extracts and to perform clinical
trials for the determination of their therapeutic efficacy. This is important,
because the only legal source of Cannabis materials for research purposes
has been the United States National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has refused
to provide research materials to any project aimed at validating the therapeutic
value of Cannabis or cannabinoids. Their monopoly on these materials is
now ended. Let us hope that the wider availability of well-defined Cannabis materials
will allow researchers to bypass this long-standing medical research bottleneck.
While all this comes as
welcome news, the European Union is seriously considering cutting the hemp
subsidy by 25 percent. This misguided movement is supposedly aimed at reducing
the misuse of the hemp subsidy by farmers who grow hemp simply for the subsidy
income, without the hemp fiber or seed finding an end use. Supporters of
reducing the subsidy state that Europe’s subsidized hemp production exceeds
European requirements for hemp products, so there is no need to encourage more
hemp growing. In light of the fact that the European hemp industry is currently
growing very quickly, this opinion seems unfounded. However, supporters of
subsidy cuts also claim that supposed industrial hemp growers are actually
growing marijuana. This outrageous claim has never been substantiated and
borders on the hysteria we have come to expect from those without industrial
hemp experience. Why would marijuana growers need an agricultural subsidy at
all, let alone suffer as the result of a 25% reduction?
The IHA-sponsored Cannabis Germplasm
Preservation Project at the Vavilov Research Institute (VIR) has been
temporarily suspended because of our lack of funding. The VIR is able to make
only a limited number of reproductions each year without additional funds from
the IHA. We hope to finish all of the reproductions in 1999, freeze samples of
each accession and perform evaluations of the accessions in common gardens at
several locations of differing latitudes and climates. If these rare Cannabis
accessions are not reproduced and correctly stored, then they will become
extinct, since the vast majority would be impossible to collect today. These
seeds are a living heritage, of which we are merely the custodians. Future
generations of plant breeders and farmers are sure to benefit from these nearly
500 accessions that harbor many potentially valuable agronomic and industrial
traits. Already, preliminary results have yielded extraordinary benefits: most
of the Canadian hemp seed oil market is poised to blossom on the basis of VIR
germplasm. In the past, companies and private individuals such as the
Agricultural Hemp Association, Joyce Donoghue, FNPC, Green Machine, Hemp Flax,
Hemptech, Matthijs Huijgen, Andrew Katelaris, J. Craig Melville, Naturetex
International, The Ohio Hempery, Rella Good Cheese Company, The South African
Hemp Company and others, have given us considerable financial support for the
VIR project. To continue these reproductions and evaluations, additional funding
is required. Please consider pledging a small percentage of your personal or
company income to this worthy cause.
Matthew Huijgen of HempWorld (not to
be confused with Mari Kane's magasine of the same name) will be distributing our
journal throughout North America. He keeps a complete inventory of back and
current issues, so North American customers should contact him directly (see
advertisement on p. 63 of this issue).
Conscientious readers of this journal
will realize that we have omitted the Cannabis archeology article
promised for this issue. The ancient Scythian textile samples recovered from the
Pazryk tombs are being further analyzed to determine their fiber identity and
these discoveries are tentatively scheduled for publication in December.
Simultaneously, we hope to publish a Cannabis archeological literature
review and interpretation. Our sincere apologies are offered for this delay.
Robert Clarke Projects Manager |
Janet Erisman Treasurer |
David Pate Secretary |
David Watson Chairman |
Hayo van der Werf Editor-in-Chief |