HIGH ON HEMP: DITCHWEED DIGS IN

Miracle crop? Dangerous drug? Political football? Exploring America's
on-again, off-again love affair with hemp

I confess that I am a user of hemp.

For example, I just quaffed a Hempen Ale and a Hempen Gold beer, shipped to
me by Frederick Brewing Company of Frederick, Maryland. Both beverages are
brewed with the seeds of hemp-Cannabis sativa-a plant native to central Asia
and grown all over the world as various selected strains, some of which are
known as marijuana. I'm feeling a faint buzz, but only from the alcohol.

Neither brew contains any of the narcotic delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol
(THC), which makes pot so popular. In fact, recent Pentagon tests invalidate
the "Hempen Ale defense" by showing the ale to be THC-free, so military
personnel can no longer claim it as the source of THC in their urine. But
some hemp products do contain trace amounts of THC-as intoxicating as the
opiates you get from a poppy seed bagel-so to make sure it knows where the
THC comes from, the Air Force in 1999 banned all foods and beverages made
with hemp. Somehow the news didn't make it to the commander in chief, who,
less than a month after the ruling, allowed Hempen Gold to be served on Air
Force One. According to one reporter, the president "tasted but didn't
swallow."

After I finished ingesting hemp, I slathered it on my hair-in shampoo made
with hemp seed oil, which, according to its producer, Alterna Applied
Research Laboratories of Los Angeles, restores dry and damaged (but,
unfortunately, not missing) hair. While perky hair is not something I
normally seek, the hair I have left definitely feels that way.

What I just indulged in-according to Glenn Levant, the nation's best-funded
and most-heeded marijuana educator-is an internal-external marijuana orgy.
Levant is president and founder of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), a
16-year-old program taught by local police in nearly 75 percent of the
nation's schools. "Hemp is marijuana," he informed me, ending the interview
when I cited sources that prove otherwise. Last year Levant was outraged to
see Alterna's hemp-leaf logo on shampoo ads at bus stops around Southern
California, and he mounted a successful crusade to get them removed. "My big
objection is that public property was being used to promote an illegal
substance," he told the Los Angeles Times. "The shampoo is a subterfuge to
promote marijuana." In July 1999, he paid Alterna an undisclosed sum to
settle a lawsuit it had filed against him for making what it called "false
and malicious public comments" about its product and motives.

Hemp and marijuana can cross-pollinate, but if one is the other, then a
Pekinese is a Doberman. Plant a hemp seed, and no substance or force on
earth can turn it into marijuana. If you smoke hemp, it will give you only a
headache; it doesn't contain enough THC to affect your brain. And unlike
marijuana, it is high in cannabidiol-an anti-psychoactive compound that
inhibits THC. Because of this, says David West, a plant breeder hired by the
University of Hawaii to grow an experimental plot of hemp under special
permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), hemp "could be called
anti-marijuana."

Hemp products are not illegal. In fact, the U.S. hemp-products industry
takes in $100 million to $125 million in retail sales a year. Not only is
hemp harmless, it has enormous versatility. Added to worthless fibers that
are currently burned-such as straw from oats, rice, and wheat-hemp can
produce superb paper and construction materials lighter and stronger than
lumber. American cropland, 60 to 65 percent of which is stuck on a
soil-depleting, chemical-dependent treadmill of corn, wheat, and soybean
production, could be released and renewed if hemp were used as a rotation
crop. In England and Hungary, hemp grown in rotation with wheat hiked the
wheat harvest 20 percent. Hemp seeds, better tasting and more digestible
than soy, could be rendered into hundreds of foods, thereby taking pressure
off America's bottomland hardwood forests, which are being replaced with
soybean plantations.

Hemp fibers can be woven into cloth more durable than and as comfortable as
cotton. Cotton is much more difficult to grow; it's addicted to chemical
elixirs, requiring massive fixes of artificial fertilizers, insecticides,
and herbicides. And when cotton ripens, the leaves have to be knocked off
with defoliants before the bolls can be harvested. Hemp, which outcompetes
weeds, requires no herbicides. In one study, hemp grown in rotation with
soybeans knocked down cyst nematodes by more than half.

Hemp paper is naturally bright, but wood-based paper pulp turns brown during
the cooking process. The pulp is then bleached with chlorine, which, when
released into the environment, produces dioxin and other nasty poisons. If
American farmers were allowed to grow hemp-which produces twice as much
fiber per acre as an average forest-the nation could reduce nonsustainable
logging, and the carbon tied up in the living timber would remain there
instead of contributing to global warming.

Practically anything we make from a polluting, nonrenewable hydrocarbon like
oil or coal can be made from a relatively clean, renewable carbohydrate like
hemp. Henry Ford used to preach this in the 1940s. "Why use up the forests,
which were centuries in the making, and the mines, which require ages to lay
down, if we can get the equivalent of forests and mineral products in the
annual growth of the fields?" he asked. Ford, who had a vision of "growing
automobiles from the soil," even produced a demonstration model with body
parts partially made with hemp.

So it should come as no surprise that hemp has enormous appeal to those
committed to protecting and restoring the planet. Three years ago Oregon
environmentalist Andy Kerr helped set up the North American Industrial Hemp
Council, an alliance of farmers, scientists, industrialists, and
environmentalists whose mission is decriminalizing hemp. Members who even
associate with advocates of marijuana decriminalization are summarily
dismissed. And no one can call the directors potheads: Two are consultants
for International Paper; one headed the board of Alternative Agricultural
Research and Commercialization Corporation, a research firm chartered by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture; and the chair is in charge of agricultural
development and diversification for the state of Wisconsin.

When Kerr was running the Oregon Natural Resources Council and agitating for
old-growth forests, the loggers kept getting in his face, shouting: "What
are you going to wipe your ass with?"

"What they meant," he says a bit more delicately, "was, 'With what are you
going to wipe your ass?' It's a legitimate question. So I kept searching for
alternatives to wood and kept coming back to hemp. 'God,' I said, 'because
of its association with marijuana, we don't need this. There's got to be a
better fiber.' Well, there isn't."

Hemp advocacy isn't new. Our first hemp law, enacted in Virginia, made it
illegal for farmers not to grow the stuff. That was in 1619. The same law
took effect in Massachusetts in 1631, Connecticut in 1632, and the
Chesapeake colonies in the mid-1700s, at which time hemp was the world's
leading crop. Legend has it that early drafts of the Declaration of
Independence and Constitution were written on hemp-based paper. (Final
versions were on animal parchment.) During the Revolutionary War, Old
Ironsides, our most formidable battleship, carried 60 tons of hempen sail
and rope. The first American flag was made out of hempen "canvas," a word
derived from cannabis. "Make the most of hemp seed and sow it everywhere,"
declared George Washington in 1794.

Never has there been a federal statute outlawing the cultivation of hemp,
just the DEA's insistence that hemp is an illegal drug. Law enforcement
officials in other countries harbor no such fantasies. Hemp is lawfully
grown in 32 nations, and in the European Union it's a subsidized crop. It is
not practical to distill hemp's THC or separate it from the cannabidiol that
neutralizes it, but Americans are so afraid of hemp that they even want to
prevent people from wearing it. Consider the case of Angela Guilford, who
sells hempen products in Hoover, Alabama, and who aroused the suspicions of
the community by carrying Grateful Dead memorabilia. In June 1997, when she
was eight months pregnant, police raided her shop, seizing 168 items and
charging her and her husband, Jeff Russell, with "felony marijuana
trafficking." Facing mandatory minimum jail terms of three years, the couple
spent a stressful, suspenseful summer. But in late September charges were
dropped when lab work failed to turn up THC in any of the shirts, bags, or
jewelry.

Why such paranoia? There's no smoking bong, but hemp may be the victim of a
conspiracy by special interests that stood to lose billions in the 1930s,
when hemp-fiber-stripping machines came on line. Among the suspects:
synthetic textile producer DuPont, which had just patented a process for
making plastics from oil and a more efficient process for making paper;
Hearst newspapers, which owned vast timberlands; and Andrew Mellon, an oil
and timber baron as well as partner and president of the Mellon Bank of
Pittsburgh, DuPont's chief financial backer.

In 1930, nine years after President Warren Harding made him treasury
secretary, Mellon created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (the DEA's
precursor) and ensconced Harry Anslinger, the future husband of his niece,
as its commissioner. Anslinger charged out after hemp, which he and the
Hearst papers defined as a drug, using it interchangeably with the more
sinister and less familiar term marihuana (the spelling changed later).
Anslinger and Hearst whipped each other, the public, and Congress into
prohibitionist frenzy. Anslinger testified before the Senate that no less an
authority than Homer had revealed that the plant "made men forget their
homes and turned them into swine" and that a single joint could induce
"homicidal mania" sufficient to cause a man "probably to kill his brother."
The Hearst papers claimed that under the influence of marihuana, "Negroes"
transmog-rified into crazed animals, playing anti-white, "voodoo-satanic"
music-jazz-and committing such crimes as stepping on white men's shadows.
The hype created an insatiable market for low-budget movies like Marihuana:
Weed with Roots in Hell. Posters for the film featured a man thrusting a
hypodermic needle into a woman in a low-cut dress and promised: "Weird
orgies. Daring drug exposÈ! Horror. Shame. Despair. Wild Parties. Unleashed
Passions! Lust. Crime. Hate. Misery."

Emerging from the hoopla was the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which made no
chemical distinction between hemp and marijuana. It was all "cannabis," but
the smokeable parts-the leaves and flowers-were taxed at $100 an ounce,
effectively outlawing them. Had marijuana been the real target, Anslinger
would have dispatched his agents to the border of New Mexico, where the drug
was coming in. Instead, he unleashed them on the newly expanded hemp fields
of the Midwest, swaddling farmers in red tape, busting them if a leaf
remained on a stalk, running them out of business.

Only five years later hemp farmers got a reprieve when Japan seized the
Philippines, cutting off America's supply of "Manila hemp"-not true hemp but
an excellent fiber for rope, boots, uniforms, and parachute cording. Now the
Feds executed a crisp about-face, encouraging Americans to be patriotic and
grow "hemp." (No longer did they call it "marijuana," except on the
"Producer of Marijuana" permits issued to farmers.) The Department of
Agriculture even produced a promotional film entitled Hemp for Victory,
featuring footage of workers harvesting pre-Anslinger hemp in Kentucky to a
maudlin rendition of "My Old Kentucky Home." With no change in federal law,
some 400,000 acres were planted to hemp, the stalks of which were processed
by 42 hemp mills built by the War Hemp Industries Corporation. After the
war, with the synthetic-fiber industry booming, Anslinger resumed his
witch-hunt virtually unopposed.

Now he dropped the allegation that hemp/marijuana inspired violent crimes
and asserted instead that it left its victims so dazed and passive that they
could be easily converted to communism. America's last hemp field was
planted in Wisconsin in 1957.

More recently, the problem has been a succession of rigid, frontal-assault
"drug czars." General Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy, appears to have learned everything he knows
about hemp from Anslinger. Two years ago, when a chemical engineer paid by
the University of Wisconsin but working at the Forest Service's lab in
Madison, Wisconsin, circulated a marketing analysis demonstrating that
Wisconsin farms could profitably produce hemp, and that they could meet the
entire demand for chlorine-bleached, wood-based writing paper in the state,
the Forest Service had the document withdrawn under pressure from the
Clinton administration. Since then the author's conclusions have been
confirmed by multiple independent review. The crusade to bring hemp back,
McCaffrey charges, is "a thinly disguised attempt to legalize the production
of pot." Moreover, "legalizing hemp production would send a confusing
message to our youth concerning marijuana." But the only confusing messages
about hemp issue from McCaffrey's office, the DEA, and their private-sector
drug-war constituency.

Because McCaffrey is the voice of the Clinton administration, the DEA
parrots him. The effort to decriminalize hemp is "no more than a shallow
ruse being advanced by those who seek to legalize marijuana," proclaims
Philip Perry, special agent in charge of the DEA's Rocky Mountain Field
Division. The DEA and the drug czar maintain that American law enforcement
agents can't tell the difference between marijuana and hemp; but the
Mounties, the gendarmes, the bobbies, and the police of 29 other nations
have no trouble at all. A Keystone Kop, boots in the air and helmet in the
mud, could tell the difference. Hemp, grown for stalks, is the spindly stuff
that towers over your head; marijuana, grown for flowers, is the bushy stuff
down below your knees. The drug czar and the DEA claim that pot producers
will use hemp fields to hide their illicit crops. If they do, their
marijuana will be ruined: Cannabis is one of the most prolific pollen
producers of all cultivated plants, and if the high-THC variety is planted
within seven and a half miles of a hemp field, the hemp pollen will render
the next generation of marijuana less potent. "Hemp is nature's own
marijuana-eradication system," declares James Woolsey, former director of
the CIA and now a lobbyist for the North American Industrial Hemp Council.

If the war on drugs were really about reducing supply, drug controllers
would be promoting hemp. But the war has taken on a life of its own, become
an industry unto itself. For example, DEA reports that it spends $13.5
million a year to eradicate marijuana, and it also ladles out millions more
for this purpose to local jurisdictions, including police departments and
National Guard units. According to some estimates, the entire effort costs
American taxpayers half a billion a year. But the DEA's own figures reveal
that 98 percent of the "marijuana" eradicated is hemp-the harmless, feral
stuff that escaped during Hemp for Victory days. "Ditchweed," it's called.
That's the "marijuana" you see getting burned in all the photos. If you're
caught with ditchweed, you're in big trouble, as Vernon McElroy discovered
in 1991 when he got convicted for possessing 10.9 pounds that he says a
friend picked and gave him as a joke. Now he's doing life without parole at
the overcrowded maximum-security penitentiary in Springville, Alabama. In
Oklahoma, ditchweed is sprayed with herbicides from helicopters. And in 1998
Congress authorized $23 million for research into a soilborne fungus that
attacks and kills marijuana, poppy, and coca plants. U.S. Senator Mike
DeWine, an Ohio Republican, calls it a "silver bullet" in the war on drugs,
but David Struhs, secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental
Protection, calls it a threat to the natural environment.

The only parties affected by ditchweed eradication are future hemp farmers
and birds. Ditchweed, warns hemp researcher David West, "represents the only
germ plasm remaining from the hemp bred over decades in this country to
achieve high yields and other important performance characteristics." And
while hemp is alien to the continent, wild birds have come to depend on it
as a major food source. Birds so relish hemp seed, in fact, that it is
sterilized and sold as commercial bird food. As Vermont state representative
Fred Maslack puts it, the DEA and its pork-addicted drug-war contractors
"would be better off pulling up goldenrod."

Consider also the self-perpetuation of hemp's facts-be-damned enemy-DARE.
That DARE is recognized as a failure in reducing drug use among adolescents
is not a consideration in the high-finance drug-war business. Virtually
every study ever undertaken reveals that DARE graduates are about as likely
to abuse drugs as kids who don't go through the program. Such were the
results of a two-year, $300,000 analysis by the Research Triangle Institute
of Durham, North Carolina, of eight studies involving 9,500 DARE students in
200 schools. The Justice Department commissioned the analysis, but after
intense lobbying by DARE, the agency invited the authors to "re-examine"
their conclusions, then declined to publish the full report, claiming it was
bowing to "concerns" of peer reviewers. Despite its known ineffectiveness,
DARE thrives because every year it gets about $212 million in government
grants and private donations (mostly the latter), which it ladles out to
ravenous communities. Millions more are donated by businesses and police
departments directly to local DARE programs.

Anti-hemp brainwashing by DARE works better on parents and school
bureaucrats than on kids. In 1996 Donna Cockrel invited hemp activist and
Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson to talk to her fifth graders in
Simpsonville, Kentucky. While Harrelson also advocates the legalization of
medicinal marijuana, he spoke only about hemp's history and potential.
Immediately Cockrel came under attack by the local DARE officer, who sounded
the alarm to school officials and television audiences, proclaiming that
hemp and marijuana were the same thing. Parents were apoplectic.
Cockrel-with past awards for excellence and called a "dynamo" by The New
York Times-was given an unsatisfactory performance report, investigated by
the state professional standards board (which dismissed the complaint), then
fired. "I believe that all children should say no to drugs," she says. "But
I want them to say yes to the truth."

Lately America's war on hemp seems to be flagging under a counterattack of
reason. Legislation to effect or encourage hemp's declassification as an
illegal drug has been introduced or attempted in Colorado, Hawaii, Iowa,
Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North
Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. In March 1999, under
growing political pressure, McCaffrey made the first conciliatory noise to
The New York Times about maybe working with hemp advocates. But in August
the DEA ordered the U.S. Customs Service to seize a Kenex trailer bringing
in 40,000 pounds of hemp birdseed from Canada, alleging it was a Schedule I
narcotic. Seventeen other loads of hemp products, including granola bars and
horse bedding, were recalled. After Kenex was threatened with a $500,000
fine, president Jean Laprise commented: "It seems the DEA could be spending
drug-war money in better ways than chasing after birdseed and horse
bedding." Now McCaffrey is saying hemp can't be grown economically.

It struck me as odd that the responsibilities of the drug czar have been
extended to protecting American agriculture from its own bad business
decisions, so I contacted a farmer, one David Monson, who works 1,050 acres
in Osnabrock, North Dakota, and who says he and his neighbors aren't even
breaking even on barley, wheat, and canola. "All the fungicides, herbicides,
and insecticides we have to use are pushing the cost out of sight," he told
me. "The bottom line is that we need to find some alternative crops that we
can make money on." Monson has been forced to work at other jobs-as
insurance agent and state representative, in which capacity he introduced
the nation's first bill to decriminalize the cultivation of hemp, signed by
the governor in April 1999.

Monson, a Republican, also serves as superintendent of schools for the
nearby community of Edinburg. Drug abuse isn't much of a problem in northern
North Dakota, but Monson works to discourage what little there may be by
arranging seminars for students and training for teachers. And despite the
drug czar's and the DEA's pronouncements, the people of North Dakota somehow
remain unconvinced that he's trying to legalize pot.

While hemp could make things lots easier for this tired old planet and the
farmers who till its soil, no one in North Dakota will be growing it anytime
soon, because anyone there or elsewhere who plants the seeds will get busted
by the DEA. Monson doesn't think that's fair, especially when hemp farmers
20 miles away in Manitoba are legally making $250 an acre. But until the
feds recognize hemp for what it is (a versatile crop) instead of what it
isn't (an illegal drug), McCaffrey will be correct when he warns that
growing hemp is not economical.