WHAT IS THE RIGHT TO GROW?
hus·band·ry
ˈhəzbəndrē/
noun
1. the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals. “crop husbandry”
synonyms:farm management, land management, farming, agriculture, agronomy
2. management and conservation of resources.
synonyms:conservation, management
Recently, with an Altruistic StrainHunter in another state, we discussed at length the major contemporary differences between a “production state” and a “non-production state”. This relates to medical cannabis regulation as it applies to individuals’ right to cultivate cannabis in their own residence, for their private usage (or delegate it to another private party). We discussed various ecosystem differences that include market pressures, outside influences, climatic challenges and benefits, and access to natural resources and electricity that go into assessing the contrast between “right-to-grow” ecosystems and “right-to-buy” ecosystems.
We boiled down our commonalities to be many, but we also came to some similar conclusions about what is fully implicated in terms of liberty when right-to-grow freedoms are upheld and individuals are given the greatest deference as opposed to businesses, state agencies, or state actors.
WHAT IS THE RIGHT TO GROW?
It’s a simple answer. It’s a right to husbandry and a right to self agency. This is what is implied in the liberty of emancipated horticulture and the notion that we collectively and individually are undeniably more self-empowered when producing raw material that is integral to our health and wellbeing. Cannabis, now known to contain over 60 phyto-cannabinoids has cohabited with humans to provide a co-evolutionary relationship that allows us to provide for our material, medicinal, and nutritional sustenance and prosperity. This knowledge that is relatively new, stacks on top of the knowledge we already possessed when the framers of the Constitution wrote to each other about the inherent liberty and freedom within husbandry and ideology that we; “need not want from others in that we maintain to produce for ourselves and reserve the inherent right to do so”.
Thomas Paine in Common Sense gives us some understanding of our historical relationship to cannabis and it’s inherent support to our self agency as a flourishing American economy and military…..:
“In almost every article of defense we abound. Hemp flourishes even to rankness, so that we need not want cordage.”
This is a quote that perhaps has an inside context to it that relates to a personal understanding of the cannabis plant that is grown “for cordage”. It is generally processed before full maturity for optimal attributes and processing and allowing a field to “flourish to rankness” may imply that too much was seeded and the ability to process it was mis-assessed. Female plants begin to give off a rank smell when allowed to grow to maturity and this is generally not part of the formula when growing cordage-based cannabis. Thomas Paine was intimately familiar with cultivation of hemp for various needs and may have implied many things with the above quote.
Thomas Paine spoke about self agency at length within the context of the need for government but with a balance of individual freedom that comes from a inborn need for self agency and the common humanistic tendency and drive to prosper by one’s own hand.
Another person who wrote on many subjects related to self agency and individual liberty was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was known as having an extensive relationship with cannabis and had an enduring understanding that cultivation of cannabis was inherent in American sovereignty and inherent in personal liberty. Thomas wrote extensively on the subject of “husbandry” as opposed to “handicrafters” and “manufacturers” and made distinctions in his time between the contrast between continental production and quality of life vs european manufacture and the “locking up” of the land from the cultivator to create “mobs of great cities [that] add just so much support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”
In states where outright prohibition against cannabis is preserved, and in states where medical laws have been enacted but right-to-grow legislation was left out, individuals are feeling directly, in their own pocket-books, and in the cells of their bodies the consequence of creating restrictions to self-agency. People are forced to be customers in a closed monopoly within the medical states, and forced to be complicit to fully illegal activity within prohibition states.
Using our critical thinking skills, taking into account the following quote by Thomas Jefferson, and the known scientific fact that we, as mammals, have endogenous endo-cannabinoid receptor system within our bodies and we the people have the full legal right to indict the US Federal Government of entrapment of the American citizen through the Controlled Substances Act and the mass-fluoridation of our socialized water purification systems – the simple restriction of husbandry is an entrapment that no constitutional framer would allow in our contemporary time.
“In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be resorted to of necessity not of choice, to support the surplus of their people. But we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the other? Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to the heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers.
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. “
“The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”
Thomas Jefferson said with all seriousness that a dependable barometer for which to measure the soundness vs unsound-ness of any state in regards to corruption is the aggregate proportion of classes of citizens of all kinds in relation to its husbandmen.
When you apply Thomas Jefferson’s barometer to the many states who have legalized cannabis use for medicinal purposes, you would never want to see “right-to-grow” restrictions be put on individuals that keep them from self agency that is inherent in husbandry and is clearly inherent in the husbandry of cannabis for personal management of one’s own health.
When you apply Thomas Jefferson’s barometer to the whole of our American economy, you have to marvel at the way we’ve shifted our value system and orientation of self agency as it applies to urban ecosystems and “mobs of cities” that created powerless customers and indentured workers. We’ve lost our connection to husbandry in it’s most general sense, but with regards to cannabis specifically, we’ve never misunderstood the inherent individual power-loss that is achieved when creating supply-chain legislation that restricts personal cultivation. Clearly, individual sovereignty is eroded when people are neglected the ability to create something for themselves.
No cannabis is as pure and inexpensive as the cannabis you grow for yourself. This historical truth is why in colonial America, it was stressed at every moment that we must keep producing cannabis, and improving our means to processing it, if we hope to ever be truly sovereign and capable of defending our sovereign lands. No colonial framer had any confusions or moral complexes with utilizing cannabis for it’s many fundamental benefits. It was a part of our society and husbandry was regarded as one of the most noble undertakings.
The right to grow is a contemporary civil rights issue. As we make our collective shift towards realizing we’ve created “mobs of cities” who’s citizens cannot help but become customers of the industrial complex that has marched from Europe, to America, and on to China, we’ll see a slow trend of “non-participation” and new consumer trends. This complex consists of so many industries and interests that it cannot easily be discerned from our capitalistic economy. The subversion of the nuclear family, the subversion of the inherent nobility in the activity of husbandry, and the simple “locking up” of the means of production by states and state actors through corporations has fully eroded our economy into a state of entropy and artificial production and consumption that we will require a mass-exodus and diaspora of people from our urban centers and re-allocation of personal land rights and land access across our whole continental economy. Permaculture enthusiasts know very well that the future economy will include access to natural resources and the ability to create abundance through your own means and that this individual right to husbandry is the fulcrum for which self agency and consumerism as contrasting economic ecosystems, pivot.
People first have to wake up to the inherent importance of our right to access and cultivate cannabis freely as a horticultural and agricultural resource. Secondly, Americans have to wake up to the inherent importance of personal husbandry and the self agency that is offered in creating raw materials by your own hand through natural resources you have direct access to. This is the same process of understanding that Thomas Jefferson pressured people to have when he defined the maladies of a “industrial economy” and what it did to erode self agency. He wanted Americans to consider being producers and allowing exports to be crafted abroad so that we may not suffer the social and cultural consequences of not “letting our workshops remain in Europe” as Thomas Jefferson so directly instructed us to consider.
Observing the historical context of the industrial revolution, we certainly saw the benefits and sufferings of mass-industrialization and urbanization of our American economy. We literally took electricity and petroleum and gave ourselves the means to create a quality of life that was unmatched in recent history. This was done without adhering to the original notion that we must always keep a large portion of our economy directed towards individual husbandry and must collectively carry on the torch that bares so much importance to our individual self agency and to our collective sovereignty. This neglect has led to corporate farming, speculation on agricultural commodities, mass cultivation, government subsidy, and fully artificial markets of production and consumption created to subvert supply and demand for commodity speculation. Supra-national governments and non-governmental agencies have concerted their efforts in creating a mass-entropy and artificial economic systems that are easily subverted leading to direct suffering through miss-allocation of raw natural resources and the reparations they should provide to less developed countries they have been extracted from.
Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine would want individuals to ideologically value two simple things – personal property rights and access to natural resources – and the simple right to cultivate raw semi-raw materials and raw resources. These two values are completely lost to anyone living in an urban center and supported through the industrial complex that has been, for now, labeled as “globalism”. These urbanites do not respect the self agency that they have given away and do respect the general notion that “husbandmen do not, for their subsistence, depend for it [their soil and industry] on the casualties and caprice of customers.” They do not respect that “dependence begets subservience and venality”.
Our state and federal government actors and corporate entities understand this very well and use dependence in its most raw form by creating emotional vulnerability in individuals through fear so as to necessitate a “nanny government” that is deemed capable of fixing that which is mis-identified as the source of fear. This is where propaganda and deliberate misinformation of many kinds has worked to disenfranchise several American generations of people so that no philosophical pillars are collectively acknowledged and “mobs of cities” have been realized and an economy based on services and perpetual expansion through quantitative easing has been established.
Mass miss-characterization of cannabis through propaganda has created a contemporary dynamic for which individuals deem it ethical to allow the state to prohibit, tax, regulate, or somehow profit from the production of raw materials. This ideology of reefer madness is slowly distilling out of our mass-consciousness and the new generation of Americans are standing up for the civil disobedience that is required within our subverted contemporary system and are willing to make fundamental changes to our government and economic systems to reflect personal value systems instead of collective distortions that are ruining our environment and creating widespread disease and famine across the globe under the guise of “globalization”. Cannabis and husbandry proves to us, as does history, that globalization of the economy is the road to disaster if the philosophy of self agency through the soil and self industry is not upheld throughout the course of technological advancement and utilization of technology through the maturation of a civilization. May we collectively realize that nothing changes the individual human’s connection to the earth – before it is too late to do so.
May all the entheogens, including cannabis, help us as humans, realize this in time.
