WHITE PLUME OBJECT OF GROSS INTERNATIONAL VIOLATIONS

Politics: The Ceaseless Argument Over Who Gets To Do What To Whom, For How
Long, And Against What Degree Of Dissent.

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.