Late last week, hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde made headlines in the financial community when he gave it all up and, in his letter of resignation, touted hemp as an ethically defensible pursuit. Well, of the many heads that he turned, Mr. Lahde turned that of the Hemp Industries Association (HIA). As a press release on MarketWatch.com states:

The Hemp Industries Association (HIA), a trade association made up of hundreds of hemp businesses meeting in Boston today, is appealing to millionaire retired hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde to use a portion of his recent windfall made betting against sub-prime mortgage-backed securities to help bring back hemp farming in the United States. Mr. Lahde garnered media attention for stating in a resignation letter that hemp is needed as an alternative food and energy source and should be grown again in the U.S.

The press release then goes into some interesting figures on the viability hemp-based market niches. For example:

[...] the HIA Food and Oil Committee now estimates that the total retail value of hemp foods sold over the past 12 months in North America grew from $20 million last year to approximately $33 million this year.

How accurate these market figures are, however, is not the most interesting point. Rather, it’s how effective of a marketing stunt was for the HIA. They manage to seize an opportunity and piggy-back on a stroy that was already making headlines. As a public relations professional by day (who himself is often tempted to write his boss an Andrew-Lahde-style letter), I know for a fact that PR know-how like that doesn’t come cheap. I’m left to believe, then, that either the HIA has a massive marketing budget, or the people behind it really are on top of their game as a lobby group.

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.