CKOAP group

I was at a meeting of our local post carbon institute group Chatham-Kent Oil Age Planning group.
There is a big push for re-localization of resources, namely food and water, being the top priorities. Other things the group talked about was something called Transition Towns, where the goal is to make our cities more user friendly, walkable,bikeable and trainable. (don't think those last two words are real words but you get the point I hope). We need to be able to walk to what we need bike to where we work and use the train or bus for long distance travel. For those people who have to commute everyday to work, there has to be a way of cutting down on the amount of travel and pooling of resources.

We also got to the topic of a Hemp based industrial plant opening up to the east of us in our province. Hemp was ready to make a comeback in this area a few years ago, but the border guards held up our shipments to the US and a bunch of farmers lost money on the whole deal, now they are soured to the entire idea. That is very sad for us locally, but the good news is that can change and if more of these plants start up, they will need local hemp to provide feedstock and a local economy in hemp is just the ticket we need. If we have the infrastructure to handle the hemp locally , those farmers in the past would have had alternative markets to sell to.

Part of the problem is political. We still have a government that is on a witch hunt for pot growers and users. The medical use of cannabis is in a quagmire of red tape and outdated morality. Our current government is doing the exact opposite to what is needed by wanting to put a bill through that punished a pot grower with 6 months in jail PER PLANT. I don't know about you, but I don't want my taxes used to build larger prisons and to police and jail a bunch of people who are growing their own medicine. They want to look like they are doing something about it meanwhile their very actions are going to push the cost of this plant up , which means more people are going to break the law to grow it and make a larger profit off of it. The government is taking steps that are counter-productive to their own aims. If they want to keep drugs away from children, the best thing they could do is legalize it, tax it and regulate it like alcohol and tobacco. I shake my head sometimes...

If medical Cannabis is legal then all the red tape around industrial hemp would disappear. We NEED the products the hemp plant can give us in abundance. The sooner we stop this farce the faster we can get on with creating a new economy based on hemp production.