DEA NOT HEMP TO THE JIVE

When Minnesota National Guardsmen set fire to some 35,000 stalks of
wild-growing marijuana, seized in "Operation Emerald Harvest" last August,
they were highly excited with their accomplishment. "We're breaking some
hearts today," a staff sergeant joked to a St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter
on the beat.

Maybe so, but I'll bet most potheads weren't crying rivers.

Turns out that much of the marijuana seized in programs like "Operation
Emerald Harvest" is actually hemp, Mary Jane's nonintoxicant botanical
cousin. In fact, nearly 80 percent of marijuana destroyed in Virginia's
eradication programs in 1996, according to the state auditor's office, was
found to be hemp, sometimes called ditchweed.

Maybe the drug warriors need a botany lesson.

As it happens, the ingredient in marijuana that makes folks want to wear
Birkenstocks, drive old Volkswagens and listen to the Byrds' "Easy Rider,"
is delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, THC for short. And, while marijuana
contains about 5 percent THC by weight and is specifically cultivated for
it, hemp contains less than l percent. In other words, you could probably
get higher smoking a bale of straw than anything rolled from hemp.

Not that folks don't try. As Ananova.com reported Oct. 3, thieves recently
raided Kemptville College of Agricultural Technology in Ottawa, making off
with most of their cannabis crop. The only problem: The plunder was clearly
marked as hemp, having negligible THC content. Maybe once the thieves
discover they can't get any higher than a stunted hop on a broken toe,
they'll go into the textile business; hemp, after all, makes good cloth.

Unfortunately, dopey criminals are not the only ignorati when it comes to hemp.

According to a statement at the Demand Reduction Section of the DEA's
website, the agency's position "is unequivocally opposed to the
legalization of illicit drugs (including, marijuana, hemp, and hemp seed oil)."

The trouble is that hemp is not an illicit drug. "The term 'marihuana,'"
according to U.S. Code Title 21 Section 802 (16), "means all parts of the
plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not; the seeds thereof; the
resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every compound,
manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its
seeds or resin."

But, "Such term does not include the mature stalks of such plant, fiber
produced from such stalks, oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant,
any other compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation
of such mature stalks (except the resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil,
or cake, or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of
germination."

"Therefore," concluded the Justice Department's own chief of Narcotic and
Dangerous Drugs, John Roth, in a March 23 letter to DEA Acting
Administrator Donnie Marshall, "products derived from this portion of the
cannabis plant commonly referred to as 'hemp' are explicitly excluded from
regulation under the Controlled Substance Act."

That isn't stopping Drug Czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey from trying.

Citing fears that the growing use of hemp products are "confounding our
federal drug control testing programs," McCaffrey and the DEA are
considering banning food and personal-care products made from hemp.

If a June 10 letter from McCaffrey to Hawaiian Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink
is anything to go by, it seems McCaffrey and Co. are worried that the
growing trend of ingesting nonpsychoactive hemp seeds and hemp-seed oil,
along with using the various lotions, soaps and shampoos made from
marijuana's nonintoxicant relative is fouling up office-place drug testing.

Because these products "are of significant concern," explains McCaffrey,
"we are discussing an appropriate solution within the Departments of
Justice and Treasury."

The solution? Skirt Congress and ban safe and healthy hemp products by
bureaucratic fiat. While no action has yet been taken, "The agency is still
exploring the possibility of addressing the cannabis/hemp issue through
Administrative Rule," wrote DEA Congressional Affairs Chief Toni P. Teresi
in a Sept. 25 letter to Hemp Industries Association President Cindy Biggers.

But Barry's Heroes are more than a bit out of joint on this one.

First, there is little to back the constitutionality of the Controlled
Substances Act, since Congress is never granted the authority to dictate
what folks ingest in Article 1, Section 8 and are forbidden to go beyond
Section 8's limits by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. But since violating
the Constitution has been a growth enterprise for over a century now, I
guess that matters about as much as any other promise made by politicians.
Further, the Controlled Substances Act clearly delineates between marijuana
and hemp, as the U.S. government has ever since the Marijuana Tax Act of
1937, and, since Congress is the only federal body allowed to tweak with
the law by making or revising legislation, the DEA -- an executive branch
agency -- is clearly going out of bounds.

Beyond that, according to some, McCaffrey's drug-test scare is just a green
herring. Because hemp products contain, if any, only trace amounts of THC,
these products are about as psychoactive as a poppy-seed muffin and have
negligible effect in terms of drug testing. One study published this summer
by the North American Industrial Hemp Council, conducted by Leson
Environmental Consulting of Berkeley, Calif., had participants ingest some
6 tablespoons of hemp-seed oil or half a pound of commercial quality hulled
hemp seeds -- an amount so large researchers commented, "Even hemp food
connoisseurs rarely consume such quantities" -- and still fell under the
THC threshold that would trigger a positive.

So much for "confounding ... federal drug control testing programs."

Even if drug tests red flag hemp consumers because of trace levels of THC,
people should retain the choice to ingest. The federal government has no
legal warrant to step in and remove harmless products because they foul up
the results of its tests; as Lincoln reminded America in the Gettysburg
address, ours is a "government of the people, by the people, for the
people," not the other way around. Hemp consumers should tell McCaffrey to
get some more sophisticated tests.

Not that he'll listen. McCaffrey's push has little really to do with drug
testing. My suspicion is that the drug czar is simply extending a middle
finger in the direction of America's pot culture, which shares an affinity
for hemp and hemp products, regardless of any intoxicating qualities.

Concerned about state legislation pushing for hemp cultivation, McCaffrey
fired off a letter, quoted in the Feb. 29 Chicago Sun-Times, to an Illinois
state representative that more directly reveals the czar's motive. "The
federal government," he wrote, "is concerned that hemp cultivation may be a
stalking horse for the legalization of marijuana."

Ah, so that's it. Hemp cultivation might be the gateway crop to everybody's
most-feared gateway drug, marijuana.

Rather than risk that drug-control apocalypse, McCaffrey and the DEA are
going after a completely harmless substance and stepping up the war on the
Constitution by usurping the Congress' legislative authority and attempting
to ban hemp by bureaucratic rule. This only highlights what makes the
politicization of drug consumption so loathsome; we're going to go after
hemp for reason A, which is really a passable smokescreen for reason B.
Rather than deal with drugs on a medical and social level, we deal with
them on a legal and political level, opening it up to all the lies and
prevarication for which politics is best known. Given that, I think it's
safe to say that, while hemp is totally benign and possibly beneficial
substance for its consumers, it brings out the worst in its opponents.

Maybe we should ban them instead.

If the DEA decides to dodge Congress and rule against hemp by
administrative fiat, the new regulations will be published in the Federal
Register, which will open a 30-day comment period. Sites have been set up
to facilitate a massive response -- backlash in bulk, as it were. Go to
SaveHemp.org and HempEmbargo.com for the latest.