![]() Hemp had lived through eighty years of a very bad rap, but its time had come. Hemp had 25,000 uses, and CBD was a medical panacea. Hemp was new, hemp was cool, hemp was a disrupter, hemp had been unfairly vilified by the government. Few of these folks, especially the hemp apostles, viewed hemp’s resurgence as something so mundane as an industry. Still others believed in hemp and hemp oil with a religious fervor. Some wore the mantle of science others, like Pierce Grogan, my nephew and partner in this caper, were simply looking to make some coin. To be sure, there were still plenty of counterculture vestiges occupying the Hemp Space, but those gray ponytails in battered Subarus were not the majority. That sounds very familiar to a geezer like me, and hearkens back to different approaches to capitalism from the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the fact that the industrial hemp business was always called the Hemp Space by its practitioners reflected its origins in the New Economy, a term that connotes a different approach to capitalism. The hemp industry, as it unfolded here in Colorado, never viewed itself as simply a commercial proposition. My entry into hemp carried a good dollop of the dream but, to be fair to myself, I didn’t drink the kombucha all in one draught, nor did I swallow the hemp story in one bite like an avocado toast point. There’s a reason the word “dream” appears upon that mythic American pedestal. I liked the entrepreneurship piece a lot, but the Great American Dream ethos tends to overlook the vast quantity of business failures that ensue. Any business owner, large or small, has some prestige. ![]() Another status icon is to own your own ranch, tech company, craft brewery, defense contractor, rocket ship supplier, or yoga workshop. That’s hard to pull off, since fewer than half the folks in Colorado were born here. ![]() One of them is to establish your connection to the pioneer past. Out here in the West, status is conferred through a different set of cultural norms. In short, Yankee vernacular is the opposite of “Howdy folks.”Įach week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. ![]() It’s an easy vernacular to adopt, as I just did, especially if you’ve been bred to it, which I certainly was. It’s used to appear smarter than you are and to belittle those who don’t know the imperious rules and esoteric verbiage the craft requires. If you don’t quite know what I’m talking about, that’s my point-the New England art form in which vocabulary is a rapier that thrusts with cultural dominance. Like any acolyte of the Atlantic establishment, I could pun, palindrome, and concoct terms of venery with the best of the wags in my college dining hall. That took some getting used to for a guy like me, born and raised in Connecticut where greetings of sincerity and equality were often in short supply and irony carried a punch far beyond its weight. Rustic, sure, but the undertone was distinctly and sincerely egalitarian. It was conveyed without a trace of irony, in a low drawling cadence, not Southern and certainly not Eastern. I’d quickly learned that this was the standard greeting in rural Colorado. An Easterner moves west for a hemp-based "Rocky Mountain High" Close ![]()
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