Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Andrew made a go of it, but by the mid-'90s, it was clear to the son that tobacco was in trouble. Pushing 40, Andrew was wondering what to do with himself when local entrepreneurs suggested hemp. Products have been made from the versatile plant for thousands of years. Early American planters grew it widely; George Washington sowed it on four of his farms. But the cotton gin--and later nylon--all but killed the industry. Beginning in the late 1980s, hemp products enjoyed a renaissance, at first as novelty items for liberals. Greens love hemp because...
...smoke hemp. What's more, the U.S. government had been his biggest buyer of hemp in the '40s. Cannabis-growing permits were plentiful during World War II because imports of other fibers dried up. In 1942 the USDA even produced a film, Hemp for Victory, to encourage farmers to plant hemp to meet wartime demand for rope...
...even with the ex-Governor on board, the state is scarcely closer to cultivating the plant. It did enact a law last year requiring the state agriculture department to grow and study hemp, but DEA regulations treating hemp as marijuana make such work expensive--high security is required around research plots--and Kentucky's plan isn't funded. "I wouldn't expect us to grow any hemp this year or even next," sighs majority whip Joe Barrows, a Democrat in the Kentucky house who sponsored the bill. Hawaii has a small plot where hemp cultivation is allowed, but research...
...small one compared to that of manufacturing, the heart of the Japanese miracle. Yahaba, a town of 21,000 north of Tokyo, was once an electronics boomtown, home to an Aiwa compact-disc factory and six other manufacturers. In January, loss-making Aiwa shut down the plant - and all of its factories in Japan. "People working there, at first, said, oh, this won't affect us," says Genkichi Kon, who operated a snack shop inside the plant. "But gradually, one by one, people were restructured [translation: fired]." Two other factories have also closed. "People in our town are spending their...
...have, according to a tourist brochure, "mysteriously" disappeared. "One day they just stopped coming," says the temple's custodian. We are standing at the back of the shrine where the view, which once stretched over the vipers' nesting grounds to the mountains beyond, is now blocked by a semiconductor plant. "Yes, it's a mystery," he says, with a wink and a nod toward the factory...