CelebStoner review of Woody Harrelson and Willie Nelson in ‘Hempsters’

CelebStoner review of Top CelebStoners Woody Harrelson and Willie Nelson in Hempsters: Plant The Seed.

Top CelebStoners Woody Harrelson and Willie Nelson make a strong case for legalizing the industrial cousin of cannabis in Hempsters. Director Michael Henning combines interviews and archival footage to tell the story of hemp’s continued prohibition.

The main focus is Harrelson and the Lakota Sioux, both of whom got into trouble for planting hemp in the ’90s. Harrelson’s case took place in his home state of Kentucky, where we meet perennial gubernatorial candidate Gatewood Galbraith and farmers like Joe Hickey and Craig Lee. Harrelson eventually wins his case. The Lakota of Pine Ridge in South Dakota are not so lucky. After deciding by tribal law to separate marijuana from hemp, Alex White Plume and others planted large fields of hemp on the rez, only to have them eradicated each time by the DEA. “The hemp plants are sort of like the Lakota,” he offers philosophically. “No matter how hard you try to kill them, the harder they come back.”

Nelson says about hemp: “There’s a reason that the powers that be put that plant here and to eradicate it from all over the plant is not exactly what the big guy had in mind, if you know what I mean. He put it in there and why should we take it out? It’s a useful crop that grows organically out of the soil. Check it out!”

The third compelling story in Hempsters is Julia Butterfly Hill’s. The redwoods activist who lived in a tree for two years in Humboldt County is seen in footage high atop the California old-growth forest – or what’s left of it anyway – and on the ground, where she insists, “Hemp isn’t the alternative, hemp is the solution.“