01
TODAY
MANY PRODUCTS FIT TODAY'S HEMP DEFINITION.
Adults buy hemp-derived drinks, gummies, tinctures and other products under the laws of some states.
SPIRITUAL PLANTS&PAST N9NE RECORDS
presentBILLYLOVESWILLIE
Asheville, NC · Current law: Nov 12
Board one goes live September 1
40 DAYS. 40 NIGHTS. ASHEVILLE.
Until the last legal night · Dec 11
Clock to current federal law
78
DAYS
10
HOURS
16
MIN
42
SEC
THE LEAD CAMPAIGN · ASHEVILLE, NC · A 40-DAY LOVE CRUSADE
BILLY LOVES
WILLIE.
Three words on a billboard in Billy Graham country, beside a picture of Willie Nelson singing with a joint in his hand. We mean it.
BILLY LOVES WILLIE ISN'T A PUNCHLINE.
IT'S A POSSIBILITY.
The board, exactly
BILLY LOVES WILLIE.
startwithiloveyou.com
That is the whole board. Three words and one URL — no product shot, no slogan, no sponsor logos. We took them off on purpose so nothing explains it away. The sponsors live on this site, not on the highway.
Not funded, directed or authorized by Billy Graham's family or ministries, or by Willie Nelson. No permission was asked. Craig Rose is a fan of both — and Franklin Graham is invited to come talk, listen and share his lens on any of the forty days.
We mean the man, the songs, and what he is smoking while he sings them. Willie's Remedy hemp is already sold all over this town — legally, today. On December 11 that ends. Which is why the billboard exists at all: this is a campaign to save hemp.
Starts
October 31
Ends
December 11
Nights
Forty
Voice
Start With I Love You
YES, THIS IS CONTROVERSIAL — ON PURPOSE
THE MOST BRANDED MAN
OF FAITH IN AMERICA.
AND THE WILDEST DISRUPTER OF IT JUST MOVED TO HIS TOWN.
That is the campaign. Not a slogan about weed — a collision between two names this country already has strong feelings about, happening on the same expressway.
Billy Graham is Asheville. His name is on the expressway, the training center, the parkway, the Cove. He was also the outlier of his own generation — integrating his crusades when it cost him money, going on television when the church called it vulgar, standing beside presidents and prisoners in the same week. He did not win people by agreeing with them. He filled rooms with people who hadn't decided yet.
Craig Rose — the name every Christian in America knows as Craig Gross — is the outlier of this generation. The pastor who took a booth at the porn convention, put Jesus Loves Porn Stars on a Bible cover, named actual human beings instead of categories, and has said the same five words the entire time: start with I love you. Now he lives here.
So we mean it exactly how it reads. Billy loved the people the world had written off, and Willie Nelson is the most beloved written-off man in America — the man, what he sings, and what he is smoking while he sings it. That is Craig's read on Billy, and it is the whole argument for saving this plant.
This is a campaign to save hemp, run with the playbook of the biggest evangelist who ever lived. Argue with it for forty days.
A 40-day cultural revival in the Blue Ridge · West Asheville, NC
The FinalCountdown
THE RULES ARE CHANGING. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
America built this marketplace in public. We are not going to let it disappear in private. Forty nights of music, mountains, plants and one honest question — then we keep going anyway.
LIVE CLOCK
40
Clock to current federal law
78
DAYS
10
HOURS
16
MIN
42
SEC
If Washington moves the deadline, we move the clock.
THIS IS NOT A PROTEST.
It is a 40-day receipt.
START WITH I LOVE YOU ✦THE PLANT DIDN'T CHANGE. THE RULES DID. ✦LIVE FROM WEST ASHEVILLE ✦MOUNTAINS IN THE MORNING. MUSIC AT NIGHT. ✦COME FOR THE MUSIC. STAY FOR THE QUESTION. ✦START WITH I LOVE YOU ✦THE PLANT DIDN'T CHANGE. THE RULES DID. ✦LIVE FROM WEST ASHEVILLE ✦MOUNTAINS IN THE MORNING. MUSIC AT NIGHT. ✦COME FOR THE MUSIC. STAY FOR THE QUESTION. ✦
Explain it like I'm tenOne plant.
One plant.
Three truths.
Congress already passed a law that narrows which products count as hemp. The Senate voted to delay most—but not all—of it. The House has not approved that proposal.
02
CHANGING
CONGRESS ALREADY CHANGED THE FEDERAL DEFINITION.
Under current law, the new definition begins November 12 and many products sold today would no longer count as hemp in their present form.
03
UNKNOWN
WASHINGTON MAY MOVE MOST OF THE DEADLINE.
The Senate voted for December 11. The House has not approved it. Congress may delay, rewrite, regulate—or let the current law take effect.
IMPORTANT: This is not “the day hemp dies.” Industrial hemp remains. Some compliant products remain. State law is separate. The focus is what happens to the current intoxicating-hemp marketplace—and the people who built it.
THE SOUL OF THE CAMPAIGN · NOT A SPONSOR
LOVE IS THE POSTURE.
THE PLANT IS THE QUESTION.
THE CLOCK IS RUNNING.
START WITH I LOVE YOU
The posture. How you walk into the room, and the URL printed on everything.
Visit →THE FINAL COUNTDOWN
The public clock. Forty days, forty nights, one changing law.
What we hand everyone
TAKE THE TRACT. PLAY THE TRACK.
An eight-page mini-zine folded from one 11 × 17 sheet — a Billy Graham tract designed by an underground record label. Everybody gets one, whether they consume cannabis or not. Alongside it: that day's question card, and a four-minute audio ritual with Craig, Kenny and rotating artists.
A scavenger hunt for the soulYou didn't find
You didn't find
a website.
You found the door.
Start With I Love You is the playful public door into all of this — carried by shirts, vans, secret shows, songs and plants. You never needed the whole map. You only needed one clue: love is a practice.
Clue 01
The van
If a van stopped you on the street and you scanned the code, you already found one door. This is the other side of it.
Clue 02
The shirt
Four words on a chest: WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE. Forty nights of people asking each other in person instead of online.
Clue 03
The song
Music reaches the feeling system before the explaining mind catches up. Every night here opens with the same eight notes.
Clue 04
The plant
Reverence, relationship, ritual. The plant was never the point. It was the excuse to gather.
Clue 05
The land
131 acres at Shope Creek. The website is the map. The land is the destination.
Clue 06 · Hidden
The one we won't print
There is a sixth clue. It isn't on a shirt and it isn't on the van. Curiosity is the whole qualification.
Credit Where It's Due · 1986–2026
WE DIDN'T NAME THIS.
EUROPE DID.
In 1986 a Swedish rock band wrote a song about leaving Earth and accidentally wrote the theme music for every deadline, every ninth inning, every last call in human history. This year it turns forty. Our countdown is forty days. We are not going to pretend that's nothing.
Europe · "The Final Countdown" · Forty years of that keyboard
1986
The song drops. Sweden. Big hair, bigger keys.
40 YRS
2026 is its fortieth year on this planet.
40 DAYS
Which is exactly how long we have left.
1 RIFF
Everybody on earth already knows the intro.
The Homage
"WE'RE LEAVING TOGETHER —
BUT STILL IT'S FAREWELL."
They sang about heading for Venus not knowing if anyone would miss them. Forty years later a federal rule is about to send an entire industry somewhere it's never been, and the same question applies: will anybody notice we're gone? So the riff opens every night. A local band covers it at least once. And on day forty it plays one last time, at volume, with the room singing the part nobody knows the words to.
Not affiliated with Europe. Enormously indebted to them.
THE ARTIST WE ARE ACTUALLY PROMOTING
KENNY McCORMICK IV.
THEY CALL ME TRINITY.
He came to Shope Creek the first time as a retreater. He came back as an artist, and said the sentence that named a whole documentary. Now he is launching a record across forty nights in Asheville. Everything else on this page is a room. Kenny is what happens inside it.
"The first time I came to this space, I was a retreater. This time, I felt like an artist."
— Kenny McCormick IV, final circle, Camp Mary
The through line
Kenny plays across the forty nights — not one slot, a residency. Songs from the album land in different rooms, in different orders, in front of different people.
The album
They Call Me Trinity launches inside the countdown. Three names, one man, a record about who you are allowed to become when nobody is asking you to pick a lane.
The film
He is the emotional spine of The Deer Trail — the retreater who came back an artist. The line the whole documentary turns on is his.
Night forty
Papa Roach is the ask for the last night. Kenny is the reason the last night means anything — forty nights of him building to it.
THE FILM WE'RE SCREENING · A FILM BY JACKSON AVERETT · A HOLLOW BONE INITIATIVE FILM
THE DEER TRAIL.
HE CAME AS A RETREATER.
HE RETURNED AS AN ARTIST.
A music documentary, spiritual road movie and origin story about following something before you understand where it leads. Kenny McCormick IV thought he was trying to become an artist. Instead he found himself on a trail — mushrooms in Denver, 5-MeO in Mexico, sleeping in cars in Sedona and building Past N9NE with Craig Rose and Patricc Reed, studios in Los Angeles, then the body's own reckoning in Orange County.
The trail ends where the campaign begins: Stephen Sedmak and Shope Creek Wilderness in Asheville, and Camp Mary — founders, artists, fathers, healers and elders all standing at the edge of an old identity asking the same question. Let go of what has been. Allow what can be.
Filmmaker Jackson Averett documented all of it. The film doesn't tell you what happens next, because what happens next is these forty days. The film becomes the invitation, the city becomes the theater, and the audience becomes part of what happens next — culminating in Asheville on December 11, 2026. Screening dates and venues are announced as the forty days approach.
"The first time I came to this space, I was a retreater. This time, I felt like an artist."
— Kenny McCormick IV, final circle, Camp Mary
The ASCENSION moveThe Department of
The Department of
What Happens Next
A fully functioning government office—except the desk is on the ceiling, the plants grow down, and the rules change while you are filling out the form.
NOW SERVINGNOBODYTICKET #000000
WINDOW 01
LEGALIZED IT
WINDOW 02
BUILT IT
WINDOW 03
CHANGED IT
FORM 40
What do you believe?
Art + satire · Not a government agency
The rough calendarForty days.
Forty days.
Every day alive.
The October 31 opening is the creative plan if Congress makes December 11 real. Until the House acts, the legal fallback begins October 2.
DAY 41SAT · OCT 31
THE NIGHT BEFORE
Halloween press preview, reveal and opening night. At midnight the clock flips to 40.
DAY 40SUN · NOV 1
START WITH I LOVE YOU
Official campaign opening: What do you believe?
DAY 20SAT · NOV 21
40 TABLES AT 4:20
The first synchronized national-city activation.
DAY 10TUE · DEC 1
THE FINAL PRESS PUSH
Ten days of consequences, daily national stories and official responses.
DAY 1THU · DEC 10
WHAT HAPPENS TOMORROW?
Final conversation, concert and national broadcast.
DAY 0FRI · DEC 11
THE PARTY IN HELL
Whatever Congress has done becomes the documentary ending.
THE WEEKLY RHYTHM
SUN
BELIEF
Spirit, recovery, meaning
MON
FIREPROOF
Facts, myths, evidence
TUE
BODY
Medicine, pets, science
WED
RULES
Lawyers, regulators, government
THU
PEOPLE
Farmers, workers, hospitality
FRI
VINYL
Full music night
SAT
AFTER DARK
Art, comedy, culture, 21+
Open call · West Asheville and beyondForty nights
Forty nights
needs a
whole town.
No curated lineup, no gatekeeper. Haywood Road built its reputation by letting weird, sincere people try things in public. That's the whole booking policy. Pick your lane below and email us.
Call for artists
MUSICIANS & MAKERS
Songwriters, bands, DJs, painters, potters, printmakers, dancers. Forty nights means forty slots and we'd rather fill them with West Asheville than with a booking agency.
Send two songs or five images and the night you want.
Count me inCall for speakers
TALKERS & TEACHERS
Farmers, nurses, pastors, chemists, lawyers, veterans, recovery folks. Twenty minutes, no slides required, disagreement welcome and encouraged.
Tell us your topic in one sentence.
Count me inCall for businesses
LIKE-MINDED SHOPS
Coffee roasters, breweries, kombucha, bakeries, bike shops, outfitters, record stores, tattoo shops. If you're a Haywood Road kind of business, there's room on the wall and in the room.
Cross-promo, pop-ups, window space, day-of catering.
Count me inCall for sponsors
PARTNERS & FUNDERS
Underwrite a night, a poster, the sound system, the shuttle, or the whole final show at the Orange Peel. Named credit, real audience, zero pretending.
Ask for the sponsorship tiers.
Count me inCall for storytellers
FILM & PHOTO CREW
Every night gets documented. Photographers, editors, doc filmmakers, podcasters — come take the footage and make it yours.
Send a reel or a link.
Count me inCall for the outdoors
GUIDES & LAND FOLKS
Sunrise hikes, river days, trail work at Shope Creek, foraging walks, plant ID, cold plunges. Half of this belongs outside the room.
Pitch a morning, we'll bring the people.
Count me inEverybody gets an answer · Rolling submissions until night forty
Attention becomes actionDon't just
Don't just
watch the clock.
Touch it.
The Edit Button is not a petition nobody reads. Learn the fact. Tell your story. Contact the actual people writing the rule. Then bring the question home.
The witness booth
YOUR 40-SECOND ANSWER
I BELIEVE THE PLANT DID NOT CHANGE—THE RULES DID. I'M WATCHING THE FINAL COUNTDOWN FROM MY CITY. WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE? #40Days40Nights
Your words stay in your browser unless you choose to share them.
The Edit Button
CALL THE PEOPLE WRITING IT
- 01Find your U.S. House member.
- 02Find your two U.S. senators.
- 03Use the script as a starting point—not a robot message.
- 04Ask for a reply and save the receipt.
Working call script
Hi, I'm [NAME], a constituent from [CITY]. I'm asking you to support delaying Section 781 while Congress creates clear, enforceable rules for adult hemp-derived cannabinoid products. Please bring farmers, workers, consumers, public-health experts and responsible businesses to the table. Build 21+ rules around testing, labeling, serving size, packaging and traceability. Regulate the market. Don't erase it.
Campaign language must be reviewed against the live bill status before public launch. No automated harassment. No fake signatures. No legal advice.
The whole argument, in six chapters
READ IT IN ORDER
OR PICK A FIGHT.
Forty days is a lot to explain on one page, so it isn't on one page anymore. Each chapter stands alone. Start at the law if you're a skeptic, start at the finale if you just want to know where the party is.
00
BILLY LOVES WILLIE
The man, the songs, and what he is smoking. A forty-day crusade in Billy Graham country
Four words on a billboard, the Jesus Loves Porn Stars lineage behind them, a campaign to save hemp run with the biggest evangelist's playbook, and one five-minute ask.
01
THE LAW IS A MOVING TARGET
Federal, North Carolina, Texas — three rulebooks, one plant
What Congress actually did, what is only proposed, and what consumers, workers and businesses need to understand right now.
02
FORTY DAYS IN ONE TOWN
The mothership, the rooms, the Haywood Road ecosystem
Two neighboring doors become one living cultural space: hemp, vinyl, music, education, hospitality and an open conversation.
03
FORTY NIGHTS OF PROGRAMMING
Every day, one understandable question
The working calendar, the forty questions, nightly programming and an installation that turns the paper trail into culture.
04
WHO CAN CARRY THE CLOCK
Farmers, artists, workers, witnesses and city hosts
The first four hundred carriers turn one Asheville clock into a network of local tables, stages and daily stories.
05
WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE?
Start with I love you
Billy preached. Bill presented. Willie smoked. Craig kept asking. Belief opens the room; agreement is not required.
06
HOW IT ENDS AND WHAT SPREADS
Every possible ending, then everywhere
Whatever government does becomes the documentary ending. The clock, the questions and the toolkit keep moving city to city.
07
DAY ZERO AT THE ORANGE PEEL
1,050 people, the last hour of the countdown, a benefit for the Hollow Bone Initiative
The proposed final night: the bill, the room, the run of show, forty nights of covers, and the wall of names asking to be there.
08
THE LIVE PAINTING EXPERIENCE
Patricc Reed paints all forty nights
Headphones on, brush moving, forty originals made in front of the room — plus the text message that started this whole thing.
09
THE PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release — copy it, print it, run it
The official announcement, the dates, the quotes and the media contact — in one page anyone can lift straight into a story.
Start with I love youThe wall goes up
The wall goes up
in Asheville.
Write on it from anywhere.
Every note left here gets printed and hung in the room during the forty days. Say it to someone you can't say it to in person. We'll put it on a wall in a mountain town and a stranger will read it out loud.
“Mom — I'm sober, I'm happy, and it wasn't the way anybody planned. Come to Asheville with me.”
Dani · Asheville, NC
“To the nurse on the third floor who held my hand at 4am. I never got your last name. I love you.”
R. · Knoxville, TN
“To the band that played that song in 1986 and had no idea it would be a countdown to this.”
Craig · Asheville, NC
“For my dad, who still calls it the devil's lettuce and still drove me to chemo every Tuesday.”
Marcus · Charlotte, NC
“For everybody who worked their whole life to build something legal and got told in one afternoon it wasn't.”
Anonymous · Austin, TX
“For the friend I lost arguing about politics. I'd rather have you back than be right.”
Tom · Greenville, SC
Wear what someone needs to seeSix drops.
Six drops.
Forty nights.
No restocks.
This is not a merch table. It's a delivery system. Every piece is a sentence somebody else gets to read on the street — no wellness vocabulary required, no argument attached, no explanation owed to anyone.
Drop 01 · Day one
THE MOVING MESSAGE TEE
Front: I LOVE YOU. Back: WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE? The oldest shirt in the catalog, reprinted for the last forty days of a legal era.
Heavyweight, garment dyed, printed in Asheville
Drop 02 · Nightly
THE 40 POSTER SERIES
One screen-printed poster per night, numbered 40 down to 01. Only printed the morning of. Only sold in the room. Never restocked.
18x24 · Signed by that night's artist
Drop 03 · Earned
DAY PATCHES
Show up, get the number. Collect all forty and the last one is a key — literal, brass, opens something at Shope Creek.
Embroidered · Not for sale, only for showing up
Drop 04 · Street
THE COUNTDOWN STICKER
A black-and-white countdown clock with no logo and no explanation. Goes on laptops, bumpers, bathroom stalls, guitar cases and gas pumps in every state.
Free by the fistful · Take 20, place 20
Drop 05 · The uniform
REVIVAL CREWNECK
Billy Graham Freeway on one sleeve, ASHEVILLE 40 on the other. Made to look like it was already yours for ten years.
Sand, forest, clay
Drop 06 · The artifact
HOLY WATER CLOSING CAN
A one-time can with the final night's date on it. Half the run gets drunk. Half of it sits on shelves forever as proof you were there.
Numbered run · Available final week only
Wear the wordsConcepts for the campaign · Final assortment may change
The part where you helpThis only works
This only works
if it travels.
No hashtag campaign, no influencer budget, no brand voice. Take a line, take it as your own, send it to one person. That's the whole media plan.
Steal these words
The day card
A black-and-white card for every one of the 40 days with that night's question on it. Post one a day. Nobody can tell if it's an ad or an art project.
Put your face in it
Upload a photo, get a countdown frame with your number on it. The whole feed becomes a wall of strangers holding the same clock.
The 8-note challenge
Play the first eight notes of the song any way you can — trumpet, kazoo, church organ, car horn. Tag it. We screen the best ones on the final night.
One clue, one friend
No mass tagging. Send the door to exactly one person who needs it. Forty days of that is 2 to the 40th power of nobody being lonely.
So what if nothing happens?Then we party
Then we party
on day one
anyway.
Let's be honest about what this is. If the deadline slips, gets rewritten, gets sued into a coma or quietly ignored — we don't cancel a single night. We show up and we keep talking about how to move forward.
Because keeping hemp alive was never the ceiling. It was the floor. We want the whole plant, in every state, for every adult who wants a relationship with it. And in time, the rest of the medicine cabinet the earth grew on its own — mushrooms and every other spiritual plant that got criminalized for being older than the paperwork.
So there is no version of the next forty days where we go quiet. Win, lose, or delay, we've got a room booked and a whole lot left to say.
Exhibit A: the track record
We're not asking anyone to distrust their doctor. We're pointing out something everybody already knows — the official answer has been confidently wrong before, and it gets corrected by people who wouldn't shut up.
1992
The food pyramid
Six to eleven servings of bread a day, fat is the enemy, margarine is health food. Replaced in 2005, replaced again in 2011. Trans fats were finally banned outright in 2018.
1970
Schedule I
Cannabis was placed in the same legal tier as heroin: 'no currently accepted medical use.' By 2023 the federal government's own health agency recommended moving it, while 38 states already ran medical programs.
2020
The moving guidance
Masks don't work, then masks are required. Six feet, then three feet. Surfaces, then aerosols. Guidance changing is how science is supposed to work — pretending it never changed is how trust dies.
1998
Eggs and cholesterol
Dietary cholesterol limits stood for decades, then quietly disappeared from the 2015 federal guidelines. Nobody apologized to the omelet.
How we hold the line
We roast the process, not the people.Absurd rules are hilarious. Nurses, farmers, cops and legislators' kids are not the joke.
We claim opinions as opinions.What's documented gets a date and a source. What we believe gets labeled as belief. No medical claims, ever.
We keep the door open.Anyone who disagrees can sit down, take a drink and say so out loud. That's the entire format.
Nothing here is medical advice. Historical items above reference publicly documented changes in federal guidance and are cited as history, not as an accusation against any individual.
Congress writes the endingEvery outcome
Every outcome
is an ending.
You do not need to know the ending to begin the story.
IF THEY EXTEND IT
THE EXTENDED MIX
Keep the doors open. Add tracks. Document the absurdity.
IF THEY REWRITE IT
THE GOVERNMENT FOUND THE EDIT BUTTON
Show exactly what changed and who changed it.
IF IT TAKES EFFECT
DAY ZERO
Capture the stores, workers, farmers, products and people as history changes.
The plant will
always grow here.
A law can narrow a definition. It cannot uninvent a plant, erase a culture or make millions of people forget what they already learned.
Facts with liner notesShow us
Show us
the receipts.
FIREPROOF is the editorial standard: every claim has to survive the source, the date, the jurisdiction and a person who disagrees.
Status checked August 23, 2026
FEDERAL · ENACTED
Public Law 119-37 · Section 781 text
FEDERAL · RECORD
Public Law 119-37 enactment record
FEDERAL · PASSED SENATE
H.R. 6500 Senate amendment · Section 2019
FEDERAL · VOTE
U.S. Senate roll call · August 8, 2026
NORTH CAROLINA · ENACTED
General Statutes · Chapter 90
NORTH CAROLINA · PROPOSED
H.B. 328 status and bill documents
TEXAS · CURRENT RULES
DSHS Consumable Hemp Program
TEXAS · COURT
DSHS v. Sky Marketing · May 1, 2026
ASHEVILLE · PLACE
Franny's Haywood Road location
ASHEVILLE · EVENTS
City private-property event planning
Fitting the federal definition of hemp is not blanket federal legality. FDA rules concerning THC or CBD in food and interstate commerce are separate.
The federal statute preserves industrial hemp and some compliant products. It may also affect some full-spectrum CBD products. “All hemp dies” is false.
Campaign information is educational, timestamped and not legal advice. Local hosts must verify their own state and municipal rules before activating.