CANNABIS BUTTER IS A LEGAL SPREAD

Garlic butter. Peanut butter. Or just butter. All may be household
names. Now farmers in the Baltic state of Latvia want to introduce a
hitherto unknown butter, cannabis butter, to the world.

"I love it, especially like my grandma used to make," Latvian farmer
Dainis Lagzdins said as he invited AFP to taste the dark green butter,
a local specialty made of cannabis seed, which he calls a "miracle of
taste and flavor." "Mmm, the taste is heavenly," he said.

Latvian farmers use centuries-old recipes to make the butter or spread
at home, sometimes using only soaked, roasted and milled cannabis
seed, sometimes mixing it together with oil or butter.

Latvians love it. And unlike the soft drug cannabis, it's legal.
Latvians usually buy it from farmers or at farmers' markets. The
speciality also appears on the shelves of big supermarkets, but not so
regularly. Now Lagzdins, the director of the Iecavnieks company, has
ambitious plans from the tiny Latvian village of Iecava, 44km south of
the capital Riga, to introduce this hitherto unknown product to the
world. "Russian and Finnish salesmen have already shown an interest in
our cannabis spread," Lagzdins said, saying he was slightly concerned
about whether he would be able to supply the specialty in large
quantities. He is currently fine tuning his recipe, but swears by its
health qualities -- it does not contain milk proteins, or cholesterol,
while cannabis seeds are a natural antioxidant. Once prepared it can
be stored for half a year. Preparing good cannabis butter is not easy.
It is mainly done by hand in 18 different steps.

Although cannabis butter and the cannabis seeds used to make it are
legal, Latvia's cannabis fields are under strict controls, and farmers
have to get permission to grow cannabis and can only grow it in the
open air. Lagzdins started to grow cannabis in large quantities last
year, mixing the seeds with seeds brought from England.