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A hefty Kentucky
dinner of hemp-fed beef washed down with hemp-brewed beer will
in no wise endanger the diner's employment prospects, researchers
for the Kentucky Hemp Growers' Cooperative Association were delighted
to report recently. After all the urinalysis tests came back negative,
hempster Andy Graves exulted, "We dispelled a myth! We're glad
we can gloat."
The myth under investigation,
promulgated nationwide by the multi-billion-dollar drugtesting
industry, holds that just about any ingestible dietary item which
contains preparations from the dreaded cannabis plant will leave
incriminating "cannabinoid" traces in the ingester's urine, bound
to show up deceptively on their less-than-perfect urinalysis gimmicks
as "THC." Last year, after several professional chemistry journals
had published studies showing how this misidentification has occurred
in the past with people taking regular doses of concentrated hemp-oil
dietary supplements, industrial piss-testing lobbyists actually
demanded that Congress pass new laws making hemp-based foods (and
maybe textiles, too) as illegal as marijuana itself.
Though no one in Congress has
yet leapt at this chance to look eternally foolish, a nationwide
professional network of "Medical Review Officers"--people hired
by corporations to run their drug-testing programs--has kept the
scare alive by warning their members that employees cashiered
for hemp-food "positives" stand a good chance of successfully
suing for damages. Since the urinalysis industry depends entirely
on marijuana "positives" to justify its existence (other sorts
of drugs comprising less than five percent of the average quota
of "positives" recorded nationwide), a proliferation of hemp-test
lawsuits could conceivably kill the piss-testing racket forever.
So when the public employees
of Frankfort, KY were warned by a Tennessee urinalysis-consulting
firm last fall that hemp-based foods could "complicate" their
drug tests, the Hemp Growers' Cooperative refused to swallow this
insult to their own industry. They enticed six "local media and
civic leaders" (who shall obviously remain forever nameless) to
a multi-course banquet at the White Light Diner on Bridge Street,
where chef Rick Paul was careful to prepare and garnish all his
most celebrated hemp-based consumables: hemp-fed steak, hempen
brews and wines, hempseed sauce and salad dressings, ad gustatorum.
All the diners duly furnished
urine specimens before sitting down to eat, and then again two
evenings later. All the specimens were dispatched, with leak-proof
chain-of-custody documentation, to a professional Texas piss-test
lab, where every single one came up negative for THC, down to
the billionth of a gram per liter of urine.
Recapping the project for the
Lexington World-Leader, Graves emphasized, "This study
helps promote the product, and hopefully gives people some comfort."
Strictly cold comfort for the
piss-testing industry, though. For one thing, there's really no
conceivable way hemp-fed beef or hemp-brewed beer ought to contain
proto-THC traces anyway. All the professional chemistry reports
on the notorious "hempseed-oil glitch" derived exclusively from
individuals who were taking regular daily doses of concentrated
hempseed-oil preparations like Hemp Liquid GoldŽ--commercial formulations
merchandised to health-food fanciers and body-builders. For occasional
diners of hemp cuisine, the possibility of consuming enough proto-THC
material to cause a subsequent "marijuana positive" ought certainly
to be infinitely remote, even if one were to dine out nightly
in the White Light Diner in Frankfort.
However, since no urinalysis
instrument can prove whether a person's THC "positive" derived
from a slug of concentrated hemp oil, or a spoonful of hempseed
salad dressing, or a big fat smoking bong, the piss-test industry
still has reason to live in craven fear of lawsuit lawyers.
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