DOUG FINE - WHY INDUSTRIAL HEMP IS ABOUT TO BECOME A BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY

ENVISION THIS: Hemp is the billion-dollar plant that’s going to change our diet and farms, help restore our soil, and wean us from petroleum.

Doug Fine is a comedic investigative journalist, bestselling author, and solar-powered goat herder.  His new book, Hemp Bound: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Next Agricultural Revolution explains his advocacy of commercial hemp. In his travels to meet the leading hemp growers and researchers worldwide, he has become an expert on sustainable applications—and the policies that are keeping this bountiful plant out of American farmers’ fields and the profit across international borders.

In Hemp Bound, Doug explains that “Hemp’s fibers are among the planet’s strongest, its seed oil the most nutritious, and its potential as an energy source vast and untapped.”  He also explains hemp’s one downside: “For nearly a century, it’s been effectively illegal to grow industrial cannabis in the United States—even though Betsy Ross wove the nation’s first flag out of hemp fabric.  Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence on it, and colonists could pay their taxes with it.  But as the prohibition on hemp’s psychoactive cousin winds down, one of humanity’s longest-utilized plants is about to be reincorporated into the American economy.”

Fine has reported for The Washington Post, Wired, Salon, The New York Times, Outside, National Public Radio, and U.S. News & World Report. He is the author of three previous books: Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution; Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living; and Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man.