It’s not everyday that you hear about a yuppie turning hippy. In fact, when I think about my parents’ generation, it was pretty much the other way around. When all the free lovin’ left the flower children with children of their own, most of them sold-out and then bought-in to the very same materialistic suburban groove that they’d been resisting all along.
Well, there’s an exception to prove every rule, and last week saw a hedge fund manager buck the trend. That’s right: a hyper-capitalist gave it all up for something more wholesome, and part of that something was hemp. Portfolio.com had the story:
Andrew Lahde, manager of a small California hedge fund, Lahde Capital, burst into the spotlight last year after his one-year-old fund returned 866 percent betting against the subprime collapse.
What Porfolio.com didn’t emphasize, however, was how Lahde sees the future not in capitalism, but in hemp. The LA Times blog did pick up on that:
The letter to clients begins with a vicious attack on the hedge fund industry itself and the U.S. “aristocracy,” and ends with a plea for using hemp as an “alternative food and energy source.”
Well, without further ado, here’s the excerpt from the infamous letter that looks to hemp for a sustainable future.
Lastly, while I still have an audience, I would like to bring attention to an alternative food and energy source. You won’t see it included in BP’s, “Feel good. We are working on sustainable solutions,” television commercials, nor is it mentioned in ADM’s similar commercials. But hemp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products. Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term. The original American flag was made of hemp fiber and our Constitution was printed on paper made of hemp. It was used as recently as World War II by the U.S. Government, and then promptly made illegal after the war was won. At a time when rhetoric is flying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? [...] This policy is ludicrous. It has surely contributed to our dependency on foreign energy sources. Our policies have other countries literally laughing at our stupidity, most notably Canada, as well as several European nations (both Eastern and Western). You would not know this by paying attention to U.S. media sources though, as they tend not to elaborate on who is laughing at the United States this week. Please people, let’s stop the rhetoric and start thinking about how we can truly become self-sufficient.
The letter is printed in its entirety in the Portfolio.com article, and you can see an original copy the letter here.
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