Read Online The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History by James Higdon - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: James Higdon
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only Kentucky for its seed, which it then planted in tropical places with longer growing seasons, like Brazil and Hawaii. In 1942, the US government asked Marion County to produce enough seed for five hundred thousand acres of hemp, roughly enough for 453,750 football fields.
Though they had never seen hemp grown before, young Marion County men not drafted into the war worked the fields, tending acres of hemp that towered over their heads with trunks as thick as bamboo. When they harvested it in the autumn, they ran the hemp stalks through a thresher, which separated the seeds from their husks. Because the government wanted only the seeds, the farmers burned everything else, sending big white clouds of hemp smoke wafting up from the barn lots-the tranquility of the quiet landscape interrupted only by the chugga-chuggachugga of the diesel-powered threshers.
Farmers caught on pretty quickly that this hemp crop made them feel a little funny. One boy, Al Brady, helped his family thresh its hemp seeds, and while walking home from the field one day, he told his friend that he felt dizzy.
"I think being up on top of that separator all day made me drunk," he said.
Advocates of industrial hemp often assert that hemp grown for fiber lacks enough tetrahydrocannabinol (commonly referred to as THC) to get a person "high," so why did the thresher make Al Brady feel drunk? Hemp, in common shorthand, refers to the male cannabis plant, whereas its female counterpart is called mar~uana. In a field grown for seed, both males and females would be present to ensure fertilization, and the females with their seeded flowers would be the ones run through the threshers to harvest the seeds. Although the flowers of the fertilized females would have dramatically lower THC levels than unfertilized flowers, there would still be enough present in a field's worth to perhaps cause the effect Brady described-not unlike a greenhorn tobacco farmhand contracting nicotine sickness by absorbing tobacco's active drug through his skin.
So, Brady brought an old medicine bottle down to the barn one day and scooped up some hemp seeds before they went off to the government. That night he hid them for safekeeping in a barn behind his parents' home.
Thirty-some years later in the 1970s, in the midst of the younger generation's cannabis bonanza, Brady went back to look for that medicine bottle of old seeds, thinking to himself how much money he could make from his heirloom hemp. He found it exactly where he left it, covered in cobwebs and three decades of barn dirt. Excited, he grabbed it, cleaned it off and opened it; but the seeds by then had turned to dust.
As Al Brady's medicine bottle full of hemp seeds slowly decomposed in the family barn, the farming folks went on trying to make a living growing burley tobacco and teaching their children to follow along. In April 1957, the state 4-H office in Lexington announced its annual awards for its youth farming program, presenting the district tobacco championship to a thirteen-year-old boy from Washington County named Johnny Boone.
Boone's family raised him on a Bloomfield Road farm that belonged to his mother's family. His father, the man who gave him the surname of Daniel Boone, gave Johnny little else besides the sorts of beatings that angry alcoholics administer to their children. A good day for Johnny and his siblings was when their father passed out before they came home from school; a bad day sent the Boone children diving under beds and out windows to escape their father's belt. Once, after their father had beaten their mother with a fishing pole, Johnny Boone, still a child, drove his mother to the doctor to remove the fishhook embedded in her cheek.
So, Johnny Boone looked elsewhere for a father figure and found it in his maternal grandfather, Poss Walker, the owner of the family's large tracts of farmland. Walker guided bright young Boone's development as a farmer, helping his grandson at eleven years old
Though they had never seen hemp grown before, young Marion County men not drafted into the war worked the fields, tending acres of hemp that towered over their heads with trunks as thick as bamboo. When they harvested it in the autumn, they ran the hemp stalks through a thresher, which separated the seeds from their husks. Because the government wanted only the seeds, the farmers burned everything else, sending big white clouds of hemp smoke wafting up from the barn lots-the tranquility of the quiet landscape interrupted only by the chugga-chuggachugga of the diesel-powered threshers.
Farmers caught on pretty quickly that this hemp crop made them feel a little funny. One boy, Al Brady, helped his family thresh its hemp seeds, and while walking home from the field one day, he told his friend that he felt dizzy.
"I think being up on top of that separator all day made me drunk," he said.
Advocates of industrial hemp often assert that hemp grown for fiber lacks enough tetrahydrocannabinol (commonly referred to as THC) to get a person "high," so why did the thresher make Al Brady feel drunk? Hemp, in common shorthand, refers to the male cannabis plant, whereas its female counterpart is called mar~uana. In a field grown for seed, both males and females would be present to ensure fertilization, and the females with their seeded flowers would be the ones run through the threshers to harvest the seeds. Although the flowers of the fertilized females would have dramatically lower THC levels than unfertilized flowers, there would still be enough present in a field's worth to perhaps cause the effect Brady described-not unlike a greenhorn tobacco farmhand contracting nicotine sickness by absorbing tobacco's active drug through his skin.
So, Brady brought an old medicine bottle down to the barn one day and scooped up some hemp seeds before they went off to the government. That night he hid them for safekeeping in a barn behind his parents' home.
Thirty-some years later in the 1970s, in the midst of the younger generation's cannabis bonanza, Brady went back to look for that medicine bottle of old seeds, thinking to himself how much money he could make from his heirloom hemp. He found it exactly where he left it, covered in cobwebs and three decades of barn dirt. Excited, he grabbed it, cleaned it off and opened it; but the seeds by then had turned to dust.
As Al Brady's medicine bottle full of hemp seeds slowly decomposed in the family barn, the farming folks went on trying to make a living growing burley tobacco and teaching their children to follow along. In April 1957, the state 4-H office in Lexington announced its annual awards for its youth farming program, presenting the district tobacco championship to a thirteen-year-old boy from Washington County named Johnny Boone.
Boone's family raised him on a Bloomfield Road farm that belonged to his mother's family. His father, the man who gave him the surname of Daniel Boone, gave Johnny little else besides the sorts of beatings that angry alcoholics administer to their children. A good day for Johnny and his siblings was when their father passed out before they came home from school; a bad day sent the Boone children diving under beds and out windows to escape their father's belt. Once, after their father had beaten their mother with a fishing pole, Johnny Boone, still a child, drove his mother to the doctor to remove the fishhook embedded in her cheek.
So, Johnny Boone looked elsewhere for a father figure and found it in his maternal grandfather, Poss Walker, the owner of the family's large tracts of farmland. Walker guided bright young Boone's development as a farmer, helping his grandson at eleven years old
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