Pubdate: Sun, 17 Jun 2012
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.utsandiego.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386
Note: Seldom prints LTEs from outside it's circulation area.
Author: Logan Jenkins
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hemp.htm (Hemp)

SOAP SCION'S LATHER OVER HEMP IS NOT GOOFY

I'm no psychiatrist, but I've interviewed David Bronner, as well as 
his younger brother Michael, and I can say with certainty that 
they're not at all crazy.

I couldn't, however, say as much about their grandfather, Emanuel 
Bronner, Escondido's mega-messianic soapmaker who escaped from an 
insane asylum in the late '40s, fled to California and created an 
iconic countercultural product that spread, through 3,000-word bottle 
labels, the gospel that organic cleanliness is a booster rocket to 
universal oneness.

Dr. Bronner, as he was called, preached super-cosmic IDEAS to SAVE 
the WORLD! His "All-One-God-Faith" blended radical politics, science 
fiction and rabbinical mysticism into part ecological tract, part cabala.

Weird? Beyond weird.

The only Escondido savant near Dr. Bronner's equal was Dr. David 
Graham, the creator of the globally notorious Repository for Germinal 
Choice, a sperm bank supposedly supplied by Nobel Prize winners. (The 
real semen donors weren't such prizes.)

Coincidentally, both of these bizarre cultural lightning rods, who 
apparently never met, died within a month of each other, in 1997.

The repository limped along for a while and then expired, flushing 
its deposits down the drain, so to speak. Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, 
on the other hand, has thrived under the culturally hip leadership of 
the patriarch's Ivy League-educated grandsons. (David graduated from 
Harvard; Michael, Brown.)

It was David, the private company's president, who was arrested 
Monday after he'd locked himself (and 12 hemp plants) into a 
jail-like cage in front of the White House.

Taking a page out of PETA's provocative playbook, David went to jail 
to publicize the stupidity of outlawing hemp farming in this country.

 From inside his cage, David called the federal government's rap on 
hemp - the oil from the nonintoxicating relative of marijuana is 
legal to import but not to grow - "Orwellian, Bush-era rhetoric" 
that's "incredibly disappointing."

For David, the hemp crusade isn't theoretical. It's practical. Dr. 
Bronner's Magic Soaps, still headquartered in Escondido, imports more 
than 20 tons of hemp oil from Canadian farms each year. To David, 
this makes as much sense as importing alfalfa from Argentina.

It strikes the young Bronner brothers - and, I should say, it strikes 
this graying Boomer - as brain-dead to conflate hemp with the illegal 
species of cannabis that makes most people act goofy and get hungry 
and/or sleepy.

First World countries around the world realize that hemp is a cash 
crop that bears pretty much the same relationship to pot as the 
California poppy does to opium. Why don't we?

Some states - North Dakota, for instance - have passed laws to permit 
hemp cultivation (as President George Washington did) but Washington 
D.C. has refused to decouple harmless hemp from the weed of reefer 
madness fame.

Only two explanations make sense: First, hemp, which has myriad 
commercial uses, including as fiber for clothes, could threaten other 
crops (as well as their lobbyists); and second, drug puritans could 
actually believe that the legalization of hemp will put the nation on 
a slippery slope toward the legalization of marijuana.

"Everyone is sick and tired of America's bankrupt policy on hemp that 
forces our company to send well over a hundred thousand dollars every 
year to Canadian farmers," David has said. "I had hoped that 
President Obama would not succumb to drug warriors' hysteria regarding hemp."

The flamboyant cage match in Washington, it should be noted, is not 
David's acting debut in political theater.

Several years ago, for example, he and a couple of farmers were 
arrested for planting hemp seeds in front of the DEA's museum in Washington.

During his long, strange trip on this planet, Dr. Bronner, a blind 
seer of cosmic unity, ventured far out into the space between his ears.

His activist grandson, however, is much harder headed. His hemp shoes 
are firmly planted on the ground.

More akin to a jail-ready Thoreau than a mystic, David Bronner is 
well on his way to becoming North County's most interesting, and most 
intelligent, provocateur.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom