There are plenty of things that people make, manufacture and market to kids that make you wonder if maybe they weren’t a little bit high when they came up with the idea. Bunchems, for instance, as well as pretty much any one of these terrible shirts.
Then there are things like this My First Grow kit, which features a friendly pot leaf named Leafy, a plastic cup, a few stickers and everything children need to make their very first foray into the exciting world of marijuana farming. Well, hemp. And as long as those children are actually adults.
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If you’re confused, you’re not alone. First, let’s clear up that there’s a difference between hemp and weed. Hemp is what all of your totally awesome necklaces with polymer clay beads were made with in the ’90s (those still look totally awesome, by the way. Don’t ever stop believing that.), as well as tons of other products including soap and milk. It doesn’t have the THC that the image of a five-pointed pot leaf like Leafy conjures up.
Weed, by contrast, is the stuff that makes you think hemp necklaces with clay beads are a solid buy.
The kit, which you can get in the UK for a mere £4 (about $6), was conceived of by Greg Lonsdale, who told Broadly that he wanted to show kids that hemp is not a dangerous drug and told Leftlion that the product is for adult use only. He’s only marketing to kids because it creates a controversy.
We guess?
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On the website, there’s the very sad story of Leafy, the chipper little leaf that smiles up from all of the packaging:
“Once upon a time there was a wonderful plant called Cannabis. The plant had hundreds of brilliant uses and brought lots of joy and happiness to the millions of people who utilised it,” begins the woeful tale of Leafy, which soon gets so sad that you have to wonder if his smile is so wide because he maybe keeps his mood up with a little herbal assistance.
“One day, a gang of nasty businessmen with briefcases and big cigars began spreading naughty rumours about the plant. The nasty businessmen began to use their influential status to frighten the people of the world into thinking that using the wonderful plant was evil and wrong.”
There’s more, and you should all go read it and shed a tear for poor Leafy, but the point is that this type of storytelling certainly looks like a way to try and explain the widespread ban of hemp to a little kid. So, it is for kids, right?
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Nope. A little disclaimer on the site notes immediately that it is a novelty product for adults only, which is what Lonsdale told Leftlion in the first place. Of course, it’s reasonable to assume that a disclaimer like this is a lot like the charade you might act out when you go down to your local headshop and buy a $400 bong that you’ll — wink! — smoke tobacco out of.
And to be fair, the information that comes with the kit tells you that really, you can’t even use it at all, since it’s fine to possess hemp seeds in the UK but illegal to grow them. Which, come to think of it, is also very confusing and dumb.
So there you go, folks. A hemp grow kit that you can buy for your kids but not really so that they can grow a few hemp plants, except that they can’t.
We’d rather just have a storybook chronicling all of Leafy’s adventures, but maybe that’s just us.
Before you go, check out our slideshow below:
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