The Women Saving the Voices of Hemp
Preserving Cannabis History For Generations To Come
Linda Meyer and Helen Baer are making sure a remarkable chapter in hemp and cannabis history doesn’t disappear. History has a way of making important moments look inevitable. Colorado is widely recognized as a pioneer in cannabis legalization. But before the laws changed, before the businesses opened and before the political arguments became part of mainstream conversation, there were people working to change minds and challenge the status quo. Many of their stories were recorded by Time 4 Hemp, a long-running television, radio and podcast series devoted to hemp and cannabis. Time 4 Hemp developed into a broadcasting network that, at one time, was producing over 20 different pro-cannabis series each week. Each of those series, along with Time 4 Hemp, produced a large archive of information.
Now, those voices are being given a permanent home at Colorado State University. At the center of that effort are two people whose work happens largely out of public view: Linda Meyer, an archivist in CSU Libraries' Archives and Special Collections, and Helen Baer, a digital archivist responsible for helping preserve the growing world of electronic records.
Together, they are tackling the enormous task of turning thousands of old digital files into a usable historical archive. It is painstaking work. It is technical work. And, perhaps most importantly, it is work that ensures the people who helped shape the hemp and cannabis movement will still be heard long after the original broadcasts have faded from memory.
The scale of the collection is impressive. Nearly 9,000 digital files from Time 4 Hemp have been transferred to Colorado State University, including more than 5,000 audio and visual recordings. The collection includes interviews with well-known figures such as Willie Nelson, Jack Herer, Gatewood Galbraith, Dr Tim Leary, Tommy Chong and Gov Gary Johnson. It also contains conversations with farmers, patients, veterans, attorneys, activists and others whose experiences help tell the story from the ground up. Some of those people are no longer alive. Their voices are.
That gives Meyer and Baer an unusual responsibility. They aren't simply storing old recordings. They are preserving firsthand accounts of a period when America and the world was undergoing a major change in how cannabis and hemp were understood.
For Meyer, the collection also fits naturally into CSU's larger historical mission. Meyer's background in agricultural and natural-resources collections makes the hemp archive a particularly good fit for Colorado State University. CSU began as the State Agricultural College of Colorado, and agriculture has been part of the institution's identity from the beginning. Its archives document generations of farmers, crops, livestock, water resources and agricultural research. Hemp belongs in that story. Meyer sees the collection as more than an agricultural record. She sees it as also being a record of America's political and cultural history.
The state's transformation began in earnest with Amendment 20 in 2000, which established constitutional protections for medical marijuana. In 2012, voters approved Amendment 64, legalizing recreational marijuana for adults and addressing industrial hemp. Those laws did not simply appear. They were the result of years of debate and organizing. Meyer has helped recognize that those efforts themselves are worthy of preservation.
The CSU archives have collected oral histories from people connected to the campaign surrounding Amendment 64. Those interviews offer something that official documents cannot. They provide the voices of people who were actually there. A law can tell us what happened. An oral history can help explain why.
That distinction is at the heart of Meyer's work. A newspaper might report that Colorado voters approved legalization. A government document can preserve the language of a law. But an interview with someone who worked on the campaign can reveal the arguments, fears and hopes that surrounded the vote. It can show how advocates tried to persuade people who had never supported legalization. It can capture the uncertainty of a moment that now seems, in hindsight, much more certain than it really was.
That is one reason Meyer is interested in collecting oral histories. She is preserving not just events, but people's experiences of those events. The archive also documents a broader hemp movement that cannot be reduced to marijuana legalization. Early advocates such as Linda Parker were interested in industrial hemp as an agricultural crop, emphasizing possibilities involving food, fiber, fuel and manufacturing. Those voices are important because they show that the history of hemp in America has always been bigger than drug policy. It is also a story about farming, industry, environmental questions and economic opportunity.
Meyer's work has also revealed how much of that history is still missing. While the modern cannabis and hemp movement is relatively well documented in some areas, earlier records are harder to find. Important materials may be sitting in state archives, private collections, family homes or forgotten boxes. Some people who participated in the early movement may have photographs or papers they never thought would interest a historian. That is one of the challenges of archival work. You have to recognize the historical value of something before it disappears. Meyer is therefore not simply organizing the material that has already arrived at CSU. She is also helping identify what is still needed to tell a more complete story. Her work is, in many ways, detective work. She is looking for the missing pieces.
If Meyer is helping determine what stories belong in the historical record, Helen Baer is confronting another question: How do you make sure those stories survive in a digital world?
The Time 4 Hemp collection contains thousands of electronic files. That sounds convenient until you consider how quickly digital technology changes. File formats become obsolete. Storage devices fail. Software disappears. Websites go offline. A digital archivist cannot simply save a file and assume the job is finished. Baer's work involves identifying file formats, organizing material, applying metadata and preserving files in ways that will allow future researchers to access them. It is a technical process, but it is ultimately about people. Imagine a researcher fifty years from now looking for an interview with a particular hemp farmer or cannabis activist. That researcher needs to be able to find the recording. Baer's job is to help make that possible.
Turning Thousands of Files Into an Archive
The difference between a collection and an archive is organization. Without context, thousands of files can become nearly impossible to navigate. Baer and the CSU team have to determine what each file is, where it belongs and how it relates to the other material. Who was interviewed? When did the interview take place? Which Time 4 Hemp program was it part of? What subjects were discussed?
Those details become metadata, the information that helps researchers discover and understand the material. It may not sound exciting, but metadata is what can turn a digital mountain into a searchable historical resource. Baer's work is essentially building a map through that mountain.
And there is another enormous task waiting at the end of that map: transcription. Listening to an hour-long interview can be a rewarding experience. It can also be a frustrating way to find one sentence. Transcripts could change that.
If the Time 4 Hemp recordings are accurately transcribed and indexed, a researcher could search the archive for a person's name, a particular agricultural technique, a political issue or a reference to hemp and immediately locate relevant sections. Transcripts also make the collection more accessible to people who cannot hear the original recordings.
Artificial intelligence can help create preliminary transcripts, but Baer's work demonstrates why preservation still requires human judgment. Automated transcription systems can misunderstand names, organizations and specialized terminology. A computer may produce a transcript that looks perfectly polished while quietly changing the meaning of an important passage.
Reviewing thousands of hours of recordings and transcripts takes time. It also takes money. The cost of fully preparing the collection for research could ultimately reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is one of the major challenges facing the project.
Why Their Work Matters
The easiest way to understand the importance of Meyer and Baer's work is to imagine the alternative. Imagine these recordings sitting on an old computer. The computer eventually fails. The files are copied, but nobody remembers what some of them contain. The software needed to open them disappears. The people whose voices are recorded pass away. Eventually, the history is still technically there, but practically lost. That happens all the time. Archives exist to prevent it.
Meyer and Baer are building a bridge between the people who lived through this history and the people who will study it in the future. Their work is especially important because the history of hemp and cannabis has often been politically charged. Different people have very different interpretations of what happened and why. An archive does not settle those arguments. It provides evidence. Future researchers will be able to listen to the people involved and make their own judgments.
There is another reason this work matters: the hemp and cannabis story isn't over. Universities are conducting research. Farmers are experimenting with hemp. Businesses are developing new products. Researchers are studying agricultural and other potential applications. The work being done today will eventually become history. Meyer understands that preserving the past also means documenting the present.
The challenge is to collect important material while it still exists, rather than waiting until future historians have to reconstruct it from scraps. That can include interviews and digital files, but it can also mean physical objects. Artifacts connected to medical cannabis, hemp agriculture and the movement's history can provide another dimension to the story. A recording tells us what someone said. A document tells us what someone wrote. An object can tell us what people actually used, produced or encountered. Together, those pieces create something much more complete.
Two Archivists, One Larger Mission
Meyer and Baer perform different jobs, but their goals are closely connected. Meyer helps identify and understand the historical record. Baer helps ensure that the digital pieces of that record survive and remain accessible. One is concerned with historical context. The other is deeply involved in the technology of preservation. Both are ultimately doing the same thing: making sure today's voices are not lost to tomorrow.
Their work is rarely dramatic. There are no cheering crowds when a file is correctly cataloged. No cameras gather when an obsolete format is converted. Nobody applauds when metadata is added to a recording. But these quiet tasks determine whether history will remain available. And sometimes the most important work in preserving history is the work nobody sees.
The people who created Time 4 Hemp could not have known exactly what their recordings would become. They were making radio. They were talking about current events. They were interviewing people about issues that mattered to them at the time. But time changes the meaning of a recording. A conversation that once seemed like a routine broadcast can become a primary historical source. A person who once sounded like an activist speaking about the future can become, years later, a witness to a transformation that actually happened. That is the gift of the archive. It allows us to hear people before they became history. Linda Meyer and Helen Baer are helping make sure those voices survive that transformation.
The nearly 9,000 Time 4 Hemp files now being preserved at Colorado State University represent years of work by countless people. But preservation is another kind of work; quiet, patient and often invisible. Meyer and Baer are taking those voices and giving them a future.
Years from now, a student may search the CSU archives for the history of hemp. A researcher may want to understand the political journey the plant encumbered. A journalist may want to hear how legalization advocates explained their ideas before legalization became reality. They will be able to find more than a date in a textbook. They will hear a human being speak. And that is perhaps the most important thing an archive can preserve. Not simply what happened. But who was there to say it happened.
