HEMP POLICY ABSURD

By any measure, Alex White Plume is a remarkable man. Now 49, he was raised in the unconscionable United States' ghetto called Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, surviving a typical reservation youth-hood of fighting, drinking and womanizing.

Undergoing a spiritual transition, White Plume initiated the annual Big Foot Ride in 1986. It commemorates the blizzard-lashed journey of Big Foot's band through the Badlands to their mass murder at Wounded Knee in December, 1890. For fifteen years, the Ride has offered opportunity for participants -- Indians and non-Indians -- to connect through shared experience with those who endured the journey, massacre, and aftermath.

Over the past two decades, Alex has searched for means to endow his tiospaye (extended family) with both meaning to their lives and ways to make a living. He raises and trains beautiful paint horses. He and his family have harvested and sold echynacea. The White Plumes raise buffalo and offer horseback tours. They are also the only farmers in the United States to grow and sell wahupta (hemp) since 1945.

The 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty, the document which defines the "sovereign" relationship between the Lakota people and the United States, provides that members of the tribe may produce food and fiber on the various reservations. The Pine Ridge Reservation did, in fact, produce hemp prior to and during World War II.

U.S. Indian Policy has given lip service to "empowerment", to "self-reliance", to development of industry on the various Indian reservations. It also administers the worst public schools on earth to Indians, and conducts law enforcement policies which put Indians in federal prisons at about 60 times the rate of white Americans.

In 1998, the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council resolved to again permit hemp production on Pine Ridge. In April of 2000, Alex White Plume and his family prayed together, then planted an acre of industrial hemp, from seeds obtained from Canada. He pre-sold his hemp to The Body Shop, an international hemp products retailer.

On August 24, 2000, in a dawn helicopter raid, Drug Enforcement Agency and other U.S. law-enforcement agencies stormed the White Plume field and held him and his family at gunpoint while they "confiscated" his hemp. They placed the green hemp in storage, where it rotted in a few days. No criminal charges were filed.

In November, the Kentucky Hemp Growers Association, an advocacy group, bought a load of bagged hemp from Canadian producers and trucked it to the Black Hills to present it to Alex.

The gesture was exquisite in its exposure of the absurdity of U.S. policy concerning hemp. Hemp is legally produced in 33 nations, including Canada. Much of Canada's crop is exported to the United States, which will import over $300 million in hemp products this year.

White Plume planted again in 2001. On July 30, U.S. agents again plundered his crop, which he had again pre-sold.

If a scenario had been written to illustrate the absolute (we ache for stronger adjectives) absurdity of U.S. policy concerning both Indians and hemp, it would have fallen short of the starkness of these events.

When cannabis was first banned in 1937, it was done so by calling it a name -- marijuana -- which was almost universally unknown to Americans. Even the American Medical Association, which opposed the ban, didn't know until the day of the congressional hearing on the bill that Congress was referring to the hemp plant.

U.S. hemp policy since 1937 has been laced with lies and misprision of the truth. That has coincided with the imprisonment of Americans for violation of "marijuana" law for a total of over 18 million years. That has coincided with government seizures of tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of dollars worth of private property. All this has coincided with an ever-steady rise of both marijuana use and violent crime.

No benefits from U.S. drug policy have ever been presented.

Alex White Plume, attempting to help his family survive with grace and spirituality, has twice been humiliated by agents of a foreign government (ours) while his crops were destroyed by those agents. To accomplish what? To set a good example for children?

U.S. government law enforcement agents twice recently invaded a sovereign nation and terrorized and stole from a farmer-citizen of that nation, then fled back across the border to the safety of their courts and armed services. They filed no charges. No crime has been formally alleged. In the context of a less absurd set of circumstances, such an action would be beyond outrageous. It would be in the realm of actions the U.S. regularly criticizes when performed by governments in "less free" nations.

Worldwide, Alex White Plume has become the symbol of the cynicism and hypocrisy exhibited by the United States government in its own treatment of "human rights" issues. It is probable that the government refuses to charge and try Alex because it knows it could not convict him in front of a jury of peers.

Alex White Plume says he will plant hemp again next spring. Can even the U.S. government be so arrogant as to again destroy the crop and flee without charging him? Will we let it be that arrogant?

Einstein said, "Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced." Except, maybe, enforcing laws which do not exist.