ACROSS AMERICA BY HEMPMOBILE

Exhaust from a car that burns hemp oil doesn't have the smell of a
smouldering, fat-rolled joint. It has the greasy smell of cooking oil, to
be exact. And the Hemp Car purring its way down a District of Columbia
street smells like a small kitchen fire on wheels.

Grayson Sigler and his wife, Kellie, along with companions Scott Fur and
Charles Ruchalski, spent months travelling the United States in a
hemp-powered car, hoping to promote the use of the oil as alternative fuel.

The Siglers' 18-year-old Mercedes station wagon is covered bumper-to-bumper
with decals and stickers advertising its dozen or so sponsors. The word
"hemp" and the marijuana leaves are painted on it but there are no
'60s-style hippie hallucinogenic flowers, not one cosmically fantastic whorl.

The Siglers' hempmobile took the four travellers, all from Hampton,
Virginia, 20,300km. And no, they didn't do it by shoving stalks of hemp
into the fuel tank; they used hemp "biodiesel" - a thin, oily, bright green
liquid made from hemp seed oil in a process called trans-esterification.

Flies love it, says Mr Fur, the 27-year-old publicity person for the Hemp
Car. For the past three months, they have had swarms of them - they call
them Freds - following the sweet fuel from Washington to stops including
Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Grayson Sigler (33) and Kellie (24) came up with the idea for the trip a
year ago. Mr Fur and Charles "Chuck" Ruchalski (26), the crew's
photographer, came along.

They would like to see marijuana and hemp legalised in the United States.

Growing hemp, like marijuana, is illegal, though research has shown that
industrial hemp contains only tiny amounts of THC, the chemical that gives
marijuana its buzz.

Industrial hemp, says hemp scientist Dave West, is to marijuana what field
corn is to sweet corn. They may look alike but there is a difference
between the starchy field corn and the sugary sweet corn, and "never the
twain shall meet", says Mr West, a plant breeder who has headed the Hawaii
Industrial Hemp Research Project since its inception in 1999.

"There's no reasonable argument for the prohibition of hemp," says Grayson
Sigler.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) doesn't agree. "Hemp is
marijuana," says DEA spokeswoman Rogene Waite.

But grassroots hemp activists note the plant's seeds and fibre can be used
to make paper, building materials, food, cloth and rope.

"Is there one more thing about this plant that, if we discover it, they'll
say it's OK to grow it?" Mr West asks in exasperation. Hemp eventually
could be profitable for farmers, he adds.

There is a small US market for hemp-based cosmetics, food and clothing,
which the DEA says can be legally imported. And some US researchers have
permits to grow the plant - for research purposes only.

Mr Sigler is a farmer with 0.8ha in Hampton. The Siglers do research on
"how to grow food without depleting the soil, in the most efficient way
possible", Kellie says.

The couple hit upon the Hemp Car idea when they decided to visit a friend
in California. They wanted to travel "in some kind of way that doesn't
pollute" the environment as much as traditional fuels, Grayson Sigler says.
The Siglers financed the $US50,000 ($NZ120,000) project with their money
and sponsorship funding. They overhauled their Benz, figured out a route
and set up a network of supporters at stops nearly every other day along
the way. They set off on July 4.

The group used about 2270 litres of biodiesel-pure hemp fuel, not mixed
with petroleum diesel; most of it was brewed up by Todd Swearingen, whose
company, Appal Energy, was among the tour's sponsors. Mr Swearingen mailed
20-litre containers to stops along their route. The Hemp crew hauled the
fuel in the back of the car, along with promotional hemp T-shirts, hemp
baseball caps and hemp lip balm. - Los Angeles Times-Washington Post