Dee Dee’s Testimony

I started 502 Hemp in 2018. Opening the retail space felt like something that I had to do, but not quite like a mental compulsion or spiritual mandate. Instead, it was just the natural next step on the road life has been leading me on. It made sense. 

My husband, John, had his first grand mal seizure in 2007. Several followed. It was traumatic and frightening, as you can imagine. Those feelings were compounded when the medication prescribed didn’t help much, but came with a great many unsavory side effects. It felt like he was dying, like the medication was killing him. We wanted more life than it felt like fate and luck were allowing us to have. Things were dire.

In 2009, when we heard that hemp could be a source of relief, we didn’t try it with the thought that it would solve anything. Our expectations were low. When a person has a health challenge, and the physician’s prescribed medicine not only doesn’t work but seems to be making things worse, it doesn’t elicit a sense of hope. And we held the same soft biases many of us have about “alternative medicine.”

We were very, very pleasantly surprised. The effects were night and day. We had our lives returned to us. I had my husband back. Once we went a while with the coast clear, I started using cannabinoids to treat the PTSD and anxiety I had developed from this whole experience and a horrible childhood, and I, too, found relief. For something completely different from John. We both were helped so much because of a plant that grows from the ground. It started to occur to me: Who else could be helped like we were? What else was there to do but spread the word?

From the first day that I opened 502 Hemp, I was struck by the cross section of our community that came through our doors. All kinds of people across generations and every walk of life were coming in and receiving relief from injury, arthritis, anxiety, insomnia, seizures. Cancer patients reeling from chemo, veterans trying to just feel at home in their own lives again. My staff and I encounter people who never even thought to smoke a joint in their lives, but somewhere they heard that they could try something natural, and it would make things better. When it works, and I see them come back again doing so much better, it’s just the most incredible thing. A lot of happy tears are shed at our shops. And who am I kidding, they’re mostly mine.

There’s always a great deal of red tape and back and forth about the legality of the things we have. Old stigmas still plague us. Many corporations work against us and many are none too pleased that today’s young people of legal age prefer recreational cannabis to alcohol.

I’m a fortunate person in life in a lot of ways, but the fact that I get to do this for people is my greatest privilege. I really hope that I don’t have to start referring to that in the past tense come this year’s end.

On November 12th of this year, an extinction-level event is coming for the hemp industry. Remember last year when America experienced our longest government shutdown in history?

Well, the bill that passed and ended that stretch included new laws, spearheaded by Mitch McConnell, that stop the sale of anything that contains more than 0.4% THC per package, i.e., any amount that can affect the adult human body. Our store, and every one like it in America, will close. The people who rely upon what we provide will be deprived. This ban isn’t just for Kentucky, it is a nationwide ban.

I imagine you might have missed the story. It didn’t make as much news as more important items, like who kissed who at a Coldplay concert and the possible deeper meanings of double entendres about Sydney Sweeney’s pants. But now that you know, what are you going to do about it?

I invite you to join our fight: HelpSaveHemp.org

Sharing your story and contacting your federal legislators is how you can help me continue to offer quality products to those in need. While there are federal legislators that are working on trying to stop this ban, more of their constituents need to speak out and voice their concern on ending a safe alternative and walking back 12 years of progress on ending prohibition on a plant.

Hemp products can be regulated and laws put in place to leave them legal. Kentucky is just one state that has rules and regulations in place that every retailer, processor, and farmer must follow.

There is absolutely no basis for a nationwide ban. Please stand with me and everyone else in this industry on stopping this federal ban of hemp products.