Jacinda Ardern has shown great leadership over COVID-19, but we need to help her out. There is more we can do to protect our people, while also strengthening our economy.
That’s why, in the US, many Californian counties have recognised cannabis as an essential product for health and the sale of cannabis as an ‘essential service’ during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I think it is unacceptable (and anti-competitive) that our Ministry of Health makes Kiwi farmers compost their legally grown hemp flowers.
Because, used correctly as a food supplement, hemp/cannabis can improve our ability to maintain health, bone density, immune response, mental function, pain modulation and more. All without getting ‘high’.
But Jacinda doesn’t seem to know this, and our Government is building a private monopoly cannabis industry based on a pharmaceutical model. This means that private profits are being put ahead of the public’s health and our farming sector.
Hemp is massive competition to many standard, sometimes harmful, and expensive medicines. Italy is a great example – legal hemp cut pharmaceutical sales by 11% there, without education, subsidy or medical provision.
Is this why MedSafe refuses to abide by the 2006 Hemp Regulations?
Is this why MedSafe won’t let licensed farmers sell us ‘any product derived from industrial hemp’, despite the regulations that were so painfully crafted?
It’s a worry that MedSafe (our ‘health regulator’) is funded by levies on the industry it regulates. This potential conflict of interest might explain its anti-competitive position.
Iindustrial hemp and cannabis are perhaps the single most valuable plant medicine ever discovered. A fact recognised by the British Crown in its massive ‘Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report’ of 1893-94 (3281 pages).
Hemp flowers could replace over eight hundred billion dollars of Big Pharma’s annual profits. Is that why it’s forbidden to us? 5000 years of recorded history tell us that it is safe and valuable, while 100 years of lies have taught us that industrial hemp is a dangerous narcotic.
Is industrial hemp safe or dangerous? It is safe.
So, if it’s safe, why can’t you grow it and why can’t our legal licensed farmers sell it to you?
Who benefits?
Email Jacinda now (jacinda.ardern@parliament.govt.nz) and tell her to allow New Zealand’s hundreds of hemp farmers to sell their hemp flowers to you and me NOW.
We deserve access to all beneficial treatments, not just those that further enrich a $1.7 trillion industry. (Tadhg Stopford)