Word: hemp
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...crowd is young, hip and thirsty. But there is plenty of cold beer around and the spirits are, um, high, especially when the word gets out that the brew is made with hemp - marijuana's non- psychoactive cousin. Despite the rowdy comments about getting stoned, this is not a seedy bar in a back alley, but the respected Salon of Taste in Turin, a gourmet fest organized last October by Slow Food, a worldwide organization promoting healthy eating. Here the message in the bottle is that since hemp is rich in nutrients and essential fatty acids, beer containing this fibrous...
...Chaars is charas?hashish, pressed cannabis resin. Production is booming here in Afghanistan, aggravating a famine brought on by years of drought and war. A healthy field of hemp needs plenty of water. Dope growers in the mountains siphon off the streams that still flow, while hash farmers in the plains dig wells up to 100 meters deep to reach the water table. The combined effect of drought, reduced water from the hills and the cannabis cultivators' new boreholes is catastrophic, says Bertrand Brequeville of French aid group Action Contre la Faim. "It's only the rich drug producers...
...acre, neither Interpol, the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention nor the U.S.'s Drug Enforcement Agency can offer even rough estimates for how much hashish Afghanistan produces or what the trade is worth. But around Mazar it's almost impossible to find a field where hemp is not being grown, either openly or poorly hidden behind watermelons or knee-high cotton plants. "Everybody's farming chaars now," says former Taliban fighter Faizullah, 27, watering a verdant six-hectare oasis of hemp surrounded by desert. Cannabis used to be outlawed by the Taliban. "But now," says Faizullah...
...washing, cooking, farming and drinking and less than 250 people per water access point. That figure drops to 10% in large swaths of the north and even zero across the south. With dope growers exacerbating the shortage, centuries-old water holes and underground courses have evaporated. Crops downstream of hemp fields have withered and failed. With nothing to eat or drink and plagued by choking dust, entire villages and towns have emptied. "Whole parts of the country are turning into desert," says Brequeville. "And that's irreversible?there's no way back from the desert...
...hide and sleep." Shakur has given up blaming anyone for Deh Naw's troubles. He knows the landowners for whom he once worked the fields around Deh Naw are the same people who now deprive that land of water for the sake of greater profits in the hemp-rich hills. But after 23 years watching a succession of conquerors?the Soviets, the Taliban, and now the Northern Alliance and the Americans?come and go, he has learned to focus on survival. "I don't know about governments or armies or landowners or chaars," he says. "All I know is sand...