America should be ashamed, chasing every distracting shiny object while ignoring the reality of a huge ready-made market just sitting there waiting to be grabbed. Ironically, that segment actually started in the U.S.

USDA has blood on its hands: there was an obvious path forward, already proven with a large established market in thousands of stores merely needing supply chain replacement from China and Canada to the US. Easiest way for any existing company to “get into hemp,” fast and 100% legal. USDA tracks prices of it weekly yet couldn’t be bothered to toss the hemp food industry a bone. A lack of vision and leadership on all levels, distraction from going after the low-hanging fruit certain of success is the downside of "25,000 uses for hemp."

It's ironic that most don't know a robust and large hemp industry existed decades before Farm Bill legalization allowed actual cultivation. And that we already created one billion-dollar hemp segment long before legalization, hemp grain for food. Nor do most realize that the people who did all that are still around but have been put out to pasture by the youngbloods and Dunning-Krugerites.

Why? Because no one has yet written the history of the modern North American hemp industry, so no one knows what worked before and why.

Conversely, no one knows what was an utter fiasco and why, or that the people doing it are still around mucking things up. If you don’t know anything, everything sounds plausible even ideas totally implausible to experts.

That's why so many were chasing shiny objects and hiring consultants only because they hollered the loudest. The associations are as guilty of all this as any, the blind leading the blond. And they all gather at the Expos, even the ones those of us doing this a long while avoid.

Success required that in which Americans are weak: cooperation. A thousand CBD farmers with no market all selling to the same broker hammering them on price because someone told them they would be millionaires.

What is even more concerning is the lack of inclusive gatherings for those in the space, studies show that results in a significant reduction in innovation in the industry and boy, does it show in hemp. The lack of curiosity on how we got here and how to fix hemp's ills is notable.

Explaining how to move the industry forward from one who already did it before is not a 15-minute lecture, or a 45-minute 5-person panel. It’s a process with many variables to consider at each step of the way, but it can be replicated for others. As such, it doesn’t lend itself to a breezy monologue like we see at expos.

That’s why we need a deeper event, a technical gathering by those who have accomplished much in the space featuring education by those who have accomplished much in the space. This pay-to-play policy for speakers has to end, it’s nothing but one big infomercial and a waste of everyone’s time, hurting not helping the industry.

At this point it’s obvious y'all aren't serious and it's all just one big Cosplay. Therefore, we should just play and have HempCon in San Diego and you can dress up as Jack Herer or Lyster Dewey or Matt Rens.

Then have seminars like "Enzyme vs Sonication: Best Decortication?" and "Lipid Extraction with CO2 for Fun and Profit" and "Delta-6a10a-tetrahydrocannabinol: Deadly Toxin or Sexy New Stone?"

Panels with Gencanna execs and the Stanley Brothers, ask them esoteric questions like why they chose that one shade of blue for that one product that one time.

Since you only listen to whom someone paid to tell you to listen to, maybe Snoop Dogg can sponsor it?