Monday, August 15, 2011

Natural Foods Retailer Nutiva Challenges DEA, Embraces Hemp

By Greg T. Spielberg - Mar 3, 2011 4:01 PM ET

Nutiva founder John Roulac poses in a hemp field in Southern Alberta, Canada. Source: Nutiva via Bloomberg

In August 1999, the U.S. Customs Service -- acting on a Drug Enforcement Administration order -- seized a Canadian hemp-food exporter’s truck with 20 tons of hemp seeds entering Detroit from Ontario. The nongerminating seeds, en route to U.S. natural food businesses, have always been legal to import, though illegal to grow without a DEA permit since the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. In addition to the truck seizure, the agency, which declines to comment on its then unprecedented move, ordered the exporter’s American customers to fork over previous orders of seed and other hemp-food products.
The demand put Sebastopol (Calif.) hemp-food retailer Nutiva in a tough spot. Founder John Roulac had launched the business earlier that month, investing $30,000 in two tons of seed and other hemp-food products with the goal of turning the legal, nonpyschoactive plant often confused with its illegal twin brother, marijuana, into a mainstream food product.
Confident the seizure was bogus, Roulac, a buoyant serial entrepreneur and bestselling author of such manuals as “Backyard Composting,” refused to capitulate. Instead of handing his hemp to the DEA, he helped launch a public relations campaign with all 200 members of the trade group Hemp Industries Assn. to turn popular opinion against the DEA’s move.

BAN IT, PERMIT IT, REPEAT

Over the next month, they tapped friends and customers to call the customs officers’ desk line and persuaded Pulitzer-winning newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to pen a syndicated piece lambasting the DEA. The move didn’t cost Roulac a dime. By the fall of 1999, newspapers in the U.S. and Canada quoted an unnamed DEA officer saying the agency would permit hemp exports into the States. In March 2000, the U.S. Justice Dept. issued a statement essentially saying the DEA couldn’t stop hemp-food imports.
Despite the statement, frustration reigned among hemp sellers and buyers for the next two years as the DEA’s stance on importing hemp switched six times, from banning it to permitting it and back again. Then, a few weeks after 9/11, the DEA published a rule that banned hemp-food imports and sales. Nutiva and 10 HIA members sued the DEA and won two consecutive cases -- the final one in early 2004. “I think the court recognized the law was clear, and there was no risk to public health or safety involved here,” says Joe Sandler, the trade group’s lawyer.
Roulac’s company gained traction shortly thereafter, reaching $2.7 million in revenue in 2005. At the time, it was one of roughly six companies in the U.S. selling hemp seed, protein powders, shakes, and energy bars to food stores and individuals. (Roulac, seeking to diversify, was also exploring other natural products, such as coconut oil and chia, a protein-rich Latin American seed.) Nutiva got another boost in 2008 when RSF Social Finance, a foundation in San Francisco that supports social entrepreneurs, began to extend credit lines worth $1.2 million, which Roulac used to increase inventory and, last year, move into a new warehouse six times larger than its previous space. Ted Levinson, a senior lending manager at RSF, says Roulac’s track record in increasing mainstream consumer awareness about natural food products impressed him. “John has a habit of being on the very early end of these things … and ultimately capturing the attention of millions of people,” Levinson says.

FOUNDING FATHERS GREW IT

The American hemp-food market is growing quickly, according to natural food market analyst SPINS, which pegged it at around $40 million in 2010 (not including sales at Whole Foods), up 10 percent from 2009, and reports that Nutiva leads its 26 U.S. competitors in hemp oil and seed sales. Errol Schweizer, Whole Foods’ global senior grocery coordinator, says hemp is “one of the fastest-growing [natural food] trends.” Nutiva had $12 million in revenue in 2010, Roulac says, and he projects $24 million this year for the 25-employee company. “You don’t have to be mainstream to do well,” says Harry Balzer, chief food analyst at market research firm NPD Group, adding that shoppers will have to view hemp as more than a novelty for the ingredient to gain significance in the $1 trillion U.S. food and drink market.
American presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp, and Virginia required all landowners to do the same. During World War II, the federal government spent more than $1 million to subsidize hemp farming in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Wisconsin to produce fibers for rope and uniforms. In 1943, some 146,000 acres were harvested, according to hemp historian John Dvorak. No farmers in the U.S. grow hemp commercially today -- the last was in Wisconsin in 1957. “I don’t know if the stigma will ever go away with hemp; if people will ever understand it’s not a THC product,” says Anna Soref, editor-in-chief of trade publication Natural Foods Merchandiser.
That’s one reason Roulac is glad he diversified into coconut and chia. Coconut oil now drives 60 percent of Nutiva’s sales, and Roulac recently bought more than 200 tons of chia seed. Still, hemp is Roulac’s first love, and despite lower profit margins and a tough supply chain, he has no plans to forsake it.
Neither, it seems, do policymakers. In mid-February, California’s Mark Leno, a Democratic state senator, introduced a bill that would once again allow commercial hemp farming -- a bill he plans to have on the governor’s desk by the end of August. “I have not yet spoken to the governor, but I am hopeful that he would understand the benefits California would experience allowing our farmers to grow industrial hemp,” Leno says. “It’s a safe, viable crop.” Roulac looks forward to when he can source hemp domestically and take advantage of lower production and transportation costs. Of course, that likely means more competition for Nutiva. “Bring it on,” he says with characteristic enthusiasm.
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg T. Spielberg at gregtspielberg@gmail.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Leiber at nleiber@bloomberg.net

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STICKY GREENS homepage

(watch this site for a link to the STICKY GREENS Platform Page as it develops.)

— by NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)
Announcing a new Green Party Caucus identity group working to Legalize Marijuana & end discrimination against its users, to promote the economic and environmental benefits of Cannabis Hemp, and to convince the Green Party of the United States to fully embrace and promote these priciples.

Today I renounce my lifelong membership in the Democratic Party, recognizing that what has been my Party increasingly panders to corporate elitists and, in serving as shill to those donors, works against the principles I hold dear. How much money would I need in order to have enough to bribe the Party leaders to turn honest? And even that wouldn’t work, because I don’t want Party leadership that responds so disgracefully to money. What I want politically is peace, freedom, human rights, economic justice, environmental protection, and honesty & accountability in Government. With the move I make today I hope to further these goals.
Here we stand at the precipice: Albert Camus’ existential dilemma as described in The Myth of Sisyphus: The most important philosophical question is Should I commit suicide? because, if the answer is Yes, then the other questions are irrelevant. Ignorance on climate issues is such a valued commodity that the US has advanced in this important field to Number One in the world. In many African countries and island nations, 90% of the populace knows how we get Global Warming. In the US, more than 100,000,000 people doubt the science. That confusion helps fossil fuel and chemical companies profiteer off pollution and market extinctions that will include our own, if we don’t stop climate change. The current Administration ignores the climate emergency: After promising responsible conscientious environmental stewardship, it has instead allowed increased emissions of every Greenhouse Gas, and has had its Environmental Protection Agency officially lie about Coal and Nuclear Power, reclassifying them as “Clean Energy.” President Obama this week endorsed corporate-sponsored superstition over science: He declared that he intends to fight Global Warming without limiting any Greenhouse Gases. But the fact is: Greenhouse Gases cause Global Warming: By increasing emissions of every Greenhouse Gas, we Cause Global Warming, not Fight it.
Sunday I attended the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party (GRP) Convention in Worcester. Because I was not a member of the Green Party, my name placard wasn’t colored green. GRP 2010 Gubernatorial nominee Jill Stein, co-chair of the state Party, asked me what she could do to change my placard to green. I do very much agree with Dr. Stein and Green Party concensus on issues. And during her campaign she spoke thoughtfully and forcefully about Legalization. Much more than other political candidates, she favors protecting my civil rights, as a medical user, as a religious user, and as a recreational user. In our informal group from Western Mass’s Pioneer Valley, I saw tireless hard-working dedicated activists in it for the long haul, committed to improving our country and our planet. I have long respected the work of a majority of individuals in the circle. These Are My People. I do belong.
100,000,000 US citizens have smoked Marijuana. The Democratic and Republican Parties do not want our votes. The Greens and Libertarians do want them, but no Party is doing what it takes to get them. Our campaign for Legalizing Marijuana carried 75% of the vote in Amherst, 65% statewide. Gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein only got 1.43% statewide. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties in Massachusetts are shedding members: Independents now outnumber both Parties in the state. 70% of people nationwide have said they don’t trust Democrats and 80% don’t trust Republicans. If only those two-thirds of Massachusetts citizens demanding Marijuana reform saw the Greens as allies, we’d control elections in this state. But people in the Marijuana/Cannabis/Hemp movement largely see the Greens as irrelevant, and are unaware of that plank in the Party’s official platform calling for Legalization of Medical Marijuana and protection of its patients.
Now, we the Green Party, stand at the precipice. Should we commit suicide? The Hemp movement is our natural constituency and its voters make up two-thirds of the state’s electorate. Most of us in the Hemp movement see the Greens as not caring about our rights or the rights of patients suffering and dying from lack of access to medicine. Greens are also seen as lacking important knowledge on the economic and environmental realities surrounding Cannabis Hemp, and in some cases are perceived as lacking working knowledge of Global Warming science needed to talk to certain voters. The Sticky Greens hope to correct these problems, by including on our homepage primers on the science, economics, and bigotry encountered by Hempsters.
At the Convention, our local Greens generated a list of concerns we can work on together locally that were cited in our circle. I made the first suggestion on the list, Legalilzing Marijuana. When emailed copies of the list of concerns arrived, I saw that Marijuana is included, at the end, separated from everything else, looking like an afterthought. This is the prescription for our Party’s extinction. The 20 items on the list above Marijuana all added together can get us 1.43% of the vote. Marijuana gets us 65% statewide and in Boston, 75% in Amherst, 82% nextdoor in Pelham, and 80% in nearby Wendell. I urge Pioneer Valley Greens, the entire Mass GRP, and Greens across the country to learn the language of Hemp activism immediately. And I urge the Green Party of the United States Accreditation Committee to quickly approve and accept our Caucus, as soon as we meet the requirements. We have a spectacular opportunity.
Shortly I’ll go downtown to re-register to vote, this time as a member of the Green-Rainbow Party. I’m posting these ideas to my firedoglake.com Diary blog The Daily Machine, and to MaMaMoJo, which is my partner Rachel Neulander’s non-commercial Massachusetts Marijuana Movement Journal. Beginning today, MaMaMoJournal’s left column is the Sticky Greens homepage. It will include political, historical, and scientific information about Cannabis and its integral relation to energy, climate, food production, health, human rights, and honesty in politics and business. We’ll note its relationship to LGBTIQ issues and racism. Most importantly, we’ll show how science can stop and reverse Global Warming using existing technology, and do it in time if we start right away.
I’m also sending it to our local Greens circle, to Jill Stein and her campaign staff with whom I worked, and to the Accreditation Committee of the Green Party of the United States. The Sticky Greens will quickly become an official local Green-Rainbow Party group when three of us agree to form it. To get Accreditted as a Green Caucus, better able to affect national Party policy, we’ll need 100 members spread throughout 15 states. Reaching 100 members seems easier than reaching 15 states. We’ll try.
To join the Sticky Greens just email shamanslibrary@yahoo.com & display “join” in the Subject window, and you will receive an email newsletter. But joining the Sticky Greens Caucus identity group of the Green Party of the United States requires a little more: (1) Email shamanslibrary@yahoo.com & display “caucus” in the Subject window; (2) if you are not a member of the GPUS, register to vote as a Green Party member within 7 days; and (3) in your email to shamanslibrary, include all of the following info that’s applicable: Your email address, your phone number, your name, your mailing address, and your voting address. Let's have a Party!
I have been a political activist fulltime without pay for decades, having consciously decided in 1978 to dedicate my life to the unending push for human rights, environmental integrity, economic equality, art, and culture. In the early 1990s I toured the country with the Cannabis Action Network at early Hemp Rallies on the early Hemp Tours. In that function I performed and spoke at rallies in 20 or more states, and at 30 or more colleges. Coming off tour, still in the early 1990s, I founded SPACE: The St. Petersburg [Florida] Alliance for Cannabis Emancipation. Two years and five Hemp Rallies later, we disbanded the group having achieved our objective: Educating the press and public on the issue: By our fifth Rally, both our local middle-of-the-road newspapers (the St. Petersburg Times & Tampa Tribune) published editorials favoring complete Legalization. That was in a Republican-majority city in conservative Florida. One of my fellow activists in the Massachusetts Hemp movement, John Leonard, did a study recently showing how Hemp voters can be influenced to vote for issues and Parties they knew little about. We saw how it worked at our state convention, where Katelyn Golsby was the first speaker of the Party’s Campus Leaders. I had met Katelyn and her friend Eric Cameron at the local busstop and invited them to the Rock Opera I wrote and was soon to perform at the University of Massachusetts in an event sponsored by the Cannabis Reform Coalition there. Jill Stein spoke to begin the event, then took questions. Katelyn and Eric left carrying Jill Stein campaign signs. The Rock Opera was the most attended Jill Stein event of the entire autumn campaign. And as one student activist pointed out, we’d have had ten times as many attendees if we’d had two weeks to promote it.

Our Story So Far:

Norman B writes a blog-diary on the Seminal page of firedoglake. He is a longtime political activist and bard poet-performance artist-hedge scholar. He is passionate about history and those ignorant people we are doomed to watch repeating it, classical literature, current affairs, human rights, ecology, greenhouse gases, global warming and other environmental crises and overthrowing multi-national authoritarianism with poetry. He fights the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the eradication of japanese knotweed and other invader plant species.

I, your humble correspondant and editor, Rachel N, am the doting mother of two well grown sons, a former professional fundraiser with The Share Group in Hadley, MA, a member of the International Union of Mail Artists and WORMOAK, Women Opposed To Regular Meetings Of Any Kind. I am passionate about my kids and about Norman, and my community, a loosely knit subcultural global continuum of die hard hippie treehugging seed saving pacifistic anarchistic street theatre performing gate storming video camcording witnesses, ethnomusicological preserving folkloric record keeping cultural archivists of our parlous times.

In our spare time we would like to save the world. We tried opening a channel on Youtube called medicinesocks hoping whatever memes we might emit therefrom to that effect would either immediately save the planet or immediately inspire other people to do so, or at the very least make us instant suddenly famous millionaires. We soon found that YouTube doesn't exactly work that way, or at least not yet. Saving the planet is going to be a real challenge and I don't mean to nag or sound like your mother but this mess isn't cleaning itself up, ya know?

Norman has been working on a book for years, a monster research project that keeps embiggening in scope and depth. It's about global warming and ways to stop promoting it and heal the damages which, in its development, has opened a can of worms most people can barely comprehend. It is hard to keep loving a man whose genius so often elicits blank stares or skeptical downturns of his listener's mouths but I do. I believe he's really onto something significant we all should understand about the problems of anthropogenic causes of pollution and climate change... if you thought the carbon footprint was bad, you ought to get a load of the Other Greenhouse Gases & further noxious poisons we're unleashing. We must be vigilant against the deliberate deceptions of corporate advertising campaigns which tout a new improved so-cheap-it'll-pay-for-itself nuclear industry, clean coal, "safe" fracking, off-shore drilling and the biggest pseudo-green deception of all, the so-called "Smart" Grid.

Norman's research keeps coming back around to HEMP, and the more he looks into it the more he is convinced that growing lots of hemp ASAP could be the greenest, cleanest key to recapturing excess carbon dioxide and getting it out of the atmosphere, and that an abundant, easy to extract hemp derived natural constituent, terpenine, can (and should!) be used to replace and abolish the fastest growing current industrial application of SF6. Sulfur hexaflouride, SF6, is a filthy greenhouse gas which is 34.500 times even more pernicious than carbon dioxide in its environmental impact. Can you guess who makes SF6 and what for? Can you imagine how much money there is to be made in the timely peddling of faux green poisonous solutions to real, global environmental crises? You've heard of the carbon footprint I presume. Pretty bad, that, huh. They tell us they're working on getting Beyond Petroleum (haha, joke) because they care, they *know* now that America can't help it, even Bush said we're all junkies, addicted to this bad druglike product from under the sea and Alaska and the mysterious Orient, called oil, which we need to get from or through domination of places like Iraq, and Afghanistan, where of late we've coincidentally been bombing to smithereens the 'enemy" we presume must be hiding among the veiled women, the poppy farmers in the pay of the CIA, the hungry kids, the goats and sheep and villages we're heroically raiding and razing, in a campaign to win hearts and minds and spread whatchamacallit... where was I?... oh yeah, oil, we're there for the oil, right? Confusing, rather, and that we know, too, how oil leaves that nasty honkin carbon footprint. Which nobody can deny. Make a chart. Depict the carbon footprint in actual relative scale to the giant Bigfoot Monster footprint of SF6, and you'll begin to see, I hope, what Norm's research has uncovered. It turns out SF6 is the chemical they just quietly put into a gazillion soon to be switched on leaky switchgear boxes for those big megalo windmill farms of the future (you've probably seen many slick oil company sponsored ads about them). DON'T BELIEVE WHAT THE ADS SAY, THE SMART GRID IS STUPID! Follow the Terpenine Station Segment of this new Blog for more details.

Personal Narrative:
Monday Morning, in the wee hours.

Pain is.... such a pain.
It feels like talons, or invisible welts left by a baseball bat, on my neck, shoulders, lower back and hips,
and to make matters worse my legs are all thick,puffed up and watery and they will not move at all without cramping, it's hard not to cry... my toes aren't working right, my eyes are all swollen and blurry, my forearms and hands are seizing up and stiffening like claws, my jaw aches, my face hurts.

This is AS, ankylosing spondylitis, with a concurrent flare up of what the rheumatologist calls fibromyalgia- god, I really didn't want that second diagnosis. That's another one of those diseases half the world thinks you're faking and even the believers, the doctor who diagnosed me, for example, can't do much for. Sure, there are pills (... no thank you!) And diets and excercises and theories up the yin yang and even superlative claims on the internet of total cures possible if only you purchase so & so's book.

I buy into the diet theory, believing that yes, you can make yourself feel better or worse depending on what and how you eat. And excercise.. well, that's a challenge when I'm feeling like pulverized crud but I move and stretch and breathe in ways I learned as a youngster practicing yoga and this also is helpful. Sometimes I just stay as still and calm and centered as I can and just focus on keeping breathing, like a zazen practitioner, and that's the only way through the worst moments. My mantram; Don't just do something, sit there!

Most people I know cannot sit still for long without feeling terribly guilty and remiss about the things they aren't getting to. Some people can't help but betray the subtle judgment they feel about inactivity, the suspicion that a person who hardly moves for days on end is really reprehensible... so many of my friends, no matter how exhausted they are will continue to push themselves through harrowing daily routines, complaining cheerfully and swilling coffee at regular intervals (with many wry, self-depracating references to their evil caffeine habits) in order to fuel and sustain the hectic pace of their lives. There is merit and self worth to be attained by pushing through one's tiredness and pain, none in attending to it, or in stopping when the body says to stop. You're never supposed to stop. Everyone I know has a personal narrative in which they heroically fight the overwhelming need for rest and soldier on through a tedious series of obligatory tasks, after all there's so much on the To Do list, so little time to do it all in.

The way I live around my pain is the mirror bizarro world image of that approach. In a world of pain, there is time, lots and lots of it, long elastic stretches of it, and veeeery very little to do in it. A vast stillness. So much time. But it's hard to think when you're in pain. it's hard to organize a thought, let alone a plan...

But I surprise myself, sometimes. If you can't exactly think, you intuit. And what you focus on grows, so I focus away from the pain and do what I love: examples: I talk to Norm, I rub his back, (this has helped him immeasurably and taught him how to massage me...) Intuition is contageous!

Sometimes when my hands free up I can play guitar: while playing, the music is everything, there's no pain.

I cook, I clean haphazardly, water the plants, play with the cats, I talk to one son on the phone and email the other, I make art (drawings, collage), & I made, until recently when the old Mac computer went pop! fizz...croak, videos. I've shot and edited more than two hundred short videos in the past three years...

A few times a year I get civic somehow and with the other volunteers or in whatever context I'm being active I complain cheerfully about how exhausting and daunting it is to do anything, and drink coffee and chime in along with everyone else about the terrible situation out there that we're trying to stop or change or at least wake other people up to that's so much more important than our insignificant (by comparison) aches and pains.

Why did I start this blog? What have I gotten myself into? It's too hard! I try to add more google gadgets, and dammit they aren't adding! Why??? HTML script? What tha heck is that... Wait... No! I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to give voice or fuel of any sort now to the inner saboteur. Shut up, inner sabo.

I started this blog, Dear Reader, because of the pain, mine and not just mine, yours, everybody's, and because of the one thing I know about getting anything done; that if I focus on this project, even a little bit each day, if I pace myself, and rest through the flares of illness, this project, this movement will grow. My little effort will grow it... I wish it were all spiffed up and beautiful already! I wish I had found a way to upload the articles that came in for today. John Dvorak has graciously contributed, Terry Franklin is on board and has promised to write, Norm, too says he'll write something... I wish the *other people* I've contacted would get back to me... (hint hint!)

This Saturday a local wizard who helps folks with disabilities with computer support will be reinstating my home video editing capability. That's good because there's already a whole hour of documented Massachusetts Hemp Historical Narrative sitting in my camera waiting to be edited into pithy zen koan highlights of the discussion and offered up for your perusal.

People, thanks for your attention. I am tired. The pain is huge and amorphous now, and very rude, clamoring for my attention, and I want to resist it and pay attention only to Project MaMaMoJo, but it's time to stop for now. I'm going to put the MaMa, and me, to bed for a while, and allow your kind attention to wander where it will.