The Brave Green World
Prohibition lasted a hundred years. Cannabis has been healing and helping for 5,000.
A year ago at this time, I was in Weekapaug, RI, for a memorial to the matriarch of a fine old New England family. She had been an advocate and activist for our big green planet, and was mourned accordingly. Many generations were present for the event, hosted at her rambling beach house, including a granddaughter blown north by Hurricane Florence.
Imagine her surprise when, the evening after the service, the emotionally spent older generation began comparing notes on cannabis. As a resident of Colorado, it happens to me wherever I go, and that’s doubly so because before I moved to hemp heaven, I spent twenty years tracking health trends for Men’s Health magazine. By virtue of past work experience and current geography, I must be an expert, right? But it turns out my fellow mourners were no slouches either, as they trotted out their vexing symptoms and cannabinoid salvations, plus a stunning variety of pipes, vape pens, tinctures, teas, edibles, and supplements.
I myself first entered a Colorado dispensary in search of a good night’s sleep and experimented my way to bliss. Collectively, we adult users were the embodiment of the tag line for this new magazine: better living through cannabis. We were exploring THC for pain relief, CBD for calm, and combinations of the two for a long list of symptoms. It’s one of the reasons the young person in the room grew wide-eyed: She and her friends were ingesting as a Saturday-night lark. The rest of us had embraced it as a path toward health and happiness.
That’s the quest we’ve launched in NatuRx (pronounced Nature RX) magazine and website: to explore the many ways that cannabis sativa—a plant with a 5,000-year-old record as a healer and helper—can improve life. In this issue, we explore CBD in particular. The second most famous cannabinoid won’t get anybody high, but it can help people cope with pain, anxiety, and (for their pets) the 4th of July fireworks. It’s a balm for better living, and I wonder now how I ever got along without it. Sadly, the departed matriarch didn’t live to benefit from the Green Revolution. But as a natural-cure fanatic, she must be smiling down from on high. Maybe they have cannabis clouds in heaven? It would make the harp music sound so much better.
—Peter Moore, Editor-in-Chief, NatuRx