A hummingbird was my alarm clock this morning, and this is part of my health maintenance plan. I gave special thanks upon waking today for the blessing of working to maintain health, rather than fix it.  Long, healthy life. If that’s part of your family’s game plan, I’ve got something for you to read.

As are many of us, I’m feeling grateful for a lot of things at the moment. In particular, I’m sure glad it struck the three-years-ago-version-of-me as a fun idea to write an optimistic, humorous book that also provides a blueprint for establishing food security in your backyard

Six years ago, a bear fleeing a wildfire in our New Mexico backyard killed nearly all of my family’s goats in front of our eyes. It wasn’t the bear’s fault: he was a climate refugee. It was June of 2013, and drought had weakened the ponderosa pines and Douglas fir surrounding our remote Funky Butte Ranch. Beetles took advantage, and all of southern New Mexico was a tinderbox. Ho hum, just another climate event that until recently would have been called a “millennial” fire.

Just before equinox in 2011, I wrote the Dispatch From the Funky Butte Ranch that follows with tongue, I thought, pretty solidly in cheek. I mean, it was ripped from the personal headlines. I really had been denied homeowner’s insurance for like the fourth time in as many months, but mostly I was just joking around about the insane illusion of “insurance” in an vast, multi-dimensional universe.

When you go from consumer to producer (of anything), your units of measure change. I spent much of the past three years investigating the reemergence of hemp agriculture from Oregon to Slovenia.

But in 2016, I became a hemp farmer too.

Which meant my shopping list grew from sixteen ounce bottles of Nutiva hemp seed oil to rodent-proof storage bins for two tons of hemp seeds.

It was when I saw the first hemp lingerie on the site that I knew, finally, that this Hemptsy dream had become reality.

Here’s the deal: Hemp commerce is exploding. Cultivated acreage is increasing tenfold in the U.S. for the third straight year, and the worldwide hemp boom is on. This is, of course, wonderful, a sooner-than-expected realization of the blueprint put forth in Hemp Bound.

This Dispatch comes in the form of the guest column I was asked to write for the European Coalition for Just and Effective Drug Policies (ENCOD)’s summer newsletter. This venerable and august group comprises the folks from twenty-three countries who brought me across the Pond last year to deliver a United Nations address we had collaboratively crafted.

AMERICAN HEMP SEEDS ARE GROWING, BUT…

Nothing like holding the Dutch hemp fiber that goes into Mercedes door panels (fresh off the factory floor, [above], they were silky soft yet stronger than steel) to make an investigative-minded fellow not just smile goofily but also wonder, “Why is the DEA seizing the seeds that will allow the U.S. to catch up with the rest of the world’s billion-dollar hemp industry?”

Best-selling author Doug Fine spreads his Drug Peace ideals each week via the Drug Peace Bumblebee. (Photo by Michael Bowman) I’m delighted to announce a new weekly column I’m writing for the National Cannabis Coalition which is being syndicated by Alternet. Here’s the premise, as reflected in the column bio. I welcome column suggestions from anywhere on the planet: About…