Thursday 19 June 2008

HEMP for VICTORY!

...there's no debate on this one, the government denied all knowledge of this until Jack Herer personally found the gubby's own records of their making it in a complete aboutface urging farmers to grow the ever useful hemp for the war effort

...The film was made to encourage farmers to grow hemp for the war effort because the United States was facing a hemp shortage. The intended audience was probably corn farmers in Kentucky, since the narrator emphasizes that land used to grow corn could also grow hemp, and a segment from the song My Old Kentucky Home can be heard on the soundtrack. The film shows a history of hemp and hemp products, how hemp is grown, and how hemp processed into rope, cloth, cordage and other products.

Before 1989, the film was relatively unknown, and the United States Department of Agriculture library and the Library of Congress told all interested parties that no such movie was made by the USDA or any branch of the U.S. government. Two VHS copies were recovered and donated to the Library of Congress on May 19, 1989 by Maria Farrow, Carl Packard, and Jack Herer.

The only known copy, at the time 1976, was a 3/4" broadcast quality copy of the film that was originally obtained by William Conde in 1976 from a reporter for the Miami Herald and the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church of Jamaica. It was given in trust that it would be made available to as many as possible. It was put into the hands of Jack Herer by William Conde during the 1984 OMI (Oregon Marijuana Initiative). The film 20 years later is now available HERE on MojoTV

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