HEMP ADVOCATES ASSAIL US REPORT

Kentucky advocates of industrial hemp, and their supporters elsewhere,
charged yesterday that a government report that sees little economic future
for marijuana's non-psychoactive cousin misses the point.

The report, released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday, said
there would only be a "small, thin market" for hemp products in the United
States if growing the crop were legalized, and that all of the hemp fiber,
yarn and fabric that the nation imports could be grown on less than 2,000
acres.

But Joe Hickey, executive director of the Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative
Association in Lexington, said a market for hemp products would grow in
Kentucky if the versatile fiber and seeds from hemp were readily and
reliably available.

In any case, Hickey said, the report mentions only textile uses of hemp -
which amount to only about 5 percent of hemp products produced in Canada,
where markets are developing.

"Textiles is just the tip of the iceberg," Hickey said.

Hemp, once Kentucky's leading cash crop, was outlawed in the 1930s because
it is genetically identical to the plant that produces marijuana. Unlike
marijuana, though, industrial hemp is grown for long stalks and not for the
leafy characteristics that produce the psychoactive ingredient THC sought by
- -pot smokers.

Drug enforcement officials concede that hemp doesn't have enough of that
ingredient to make it a problem, but they continue to oppose it on grounds
that its cultivation would make the job of controlling marijuana difficult
if not impossible.

However, farmers across the country, struggling in a sagging farm economy,
have become more interested in looking at the possibilities offered by hemp,
and 21 states have looked at legislation to permit its growth on an
experimental basis or at resolutions supporting such cultivation.

Canadian farmers fought and won the battle against a negative
law-enforcement attitude several years ago and have been growing hemp
commercially for two years.

"We've developed a good market for the fiber in a range of products," said
Geof Kime, president of Hempline Ltd., a Delaware, Ontario, hemp processor.
He said uses include composite products for the automotive industry, such as
pressed door panels.

"In fact," said Jean Laprise, a Chatham, Ontario, farmer who also is
involved in a processing company, "we've developed some markets in the U.S."
He said Americans might look in Ford automotive products for hemp panels.
And sterilized hemp seed from Canada is sold in U.S. bird-seed mixes.

Laprise said his company, Kenex Ltd., has supplied hemp meal for aquaculture
experiments at Kentucky State University and bedding for horses in the
Lexington area.

"There is a market," Kime said. "It just has to be developed."

Carl Webster, principal investigator and associate research investigator for
Aquaculture at KSU, said farmers trying make money raising freshwater fish
and shrimp depend heavily on fish meal to feed their livestock. But the
so-called ocean "trash" fish that make up most of fish meal are becoming
scarce, he said, and the price of that protein source is rising. He said
experiments with hemp meal obtained from Canada through Hickey"s co-op have
demonstrated it can be an ingredient of food on which crop fish thrive.

"If it were competitively priced, it would be a very good source of
protein," he said.

Curtis P. Koster, a consultant to the paper industry, said paper companies
know that hemp makes "excellent paper" - good enough to have been used in
the original Gutenberg Bible, for example, and the Declaration of
Independence.

And Koster, whose interest in hemp has made him a board member of the North
American Industrial Hemp Council, said paper companies are keeping a careful
eye on the possibility that hemp and similar fibers will once again be
viable as raw materials for paper. They were supplanted by wood in the 19th
century, when technology to make paper from wood was developed.

"It doesn't pay to make paper from hemp unless you want the very special
qualities hemp offers," Koster said. One of those is toughness, and much
paper currency is made of hemp paper, though Koster couldn't say whether
U.S. currency is.

Andy Graves, president of the Kentucky Hemp Growers Co-op, said horse farms
in the Lexington area have found hemp bedding superior to straw and other
materials for horse stalls in reducing the smell of ammonia, which affects
the animals' breathing. He said the co-op and a company he has set up called
Madison Hemp and Flax have imported about 10,000 pounds of bedding.

"People are demanding the product, even at a high price," he said. "It would
be cheaper if grown locally."

Federal offices in Washington were closed yesterday due to heavy snow, and
no one could be reached at the Agriculture Department's Economic Research
Service, which produced the study.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says there would only be a "small, thin
market" for hemp in the U.S.

1942 COURIER-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO

Caption: U.S. hemp production was outlawed in 1937, but during World War II
some Kentucky farmers were allowed to grow it under federal license.

COURIER-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO

Caption: Actor Woody Harrelson, left, and Kentucky Hemp Growers Co-op
President Andy Graves were in Louisville for a 1998 forum on hemp