SIUC CASH CROP COULD KEEP ECONOMY FROM GOING TO POT

My eyes fixed on Rodin's "The Thinker." Not the real bronze sculpture of
the hunched-over figure deep in thought, but the small knockoff decoration
on a shelf in a friend's dormitory room at SIU at Carbondale.

The friend had challenged me to locate her "stash" of marijuana in an
environment less neat than a Dumpster the night before pickup. "You'll
never find it," she said in almost a dare.

Ten seconds later, the baggie of what police like to call a leafy green
vegetable substance was in my hand, removed from the hollow under Mr.
Thinker's seat.

"First place the cops would look," I said, proud of my powers of
observation. I was much less proud of my acquiescence to the powers of peer
pressure. It turned into the one and only time I ever tried marijuana.

Unlike the young Bill Clinton, who was doing the same dumb thing at about
the same time, I did inhale. It reinforced my amazement that anybody would
smoke anything. I choked and wheezed and coughed as if I'd sucked soot
right off the end of a smoldering shred of rope, which is about what was
happening.

It was all the fun of an asthma attack, which I think it almost caused.

My mind buried that moment of stupidity for almost 31 years. But how could
I not remember it last week, when I was reading news linking marijuana and
SIUC. No, they didn't finally catch my friend, who graduated and went on to
what I think - I hope, anyway - is a drug-free life.

SIUC and the University of Illinois may end up, of all things, growing
marijuana as an experimental cash crop. Not exactly marijuana, but a cousin
called hemp. It contains a lesser quantity of the same intoxicating stuff
(THC) that still makes some silly people willing to suck on a burning rope.

Rope happens to be one of the products made from hemp, among many. Illinois
legislators want to lead the way in developing more.

Edwardsville's own state Sen. Evelyn Bowles, at 79, hardly a flower child
of the drug generation, was a leading proponent of the bill that passed
last week. She and a majority of other lawmakers have decided that going to
pot might provide some crop diversity to help keep the Illinois farm
economy from going to pot.

As I write this, Gov. George Ryan is believed to be leaning toward a veto.
But there's a chance that a grandfatherly anti-crime Republican broadminded
enough to put brakes on the death penalty might just look past the smoke
and consider this bill.

The anti-drug crusaders are in full wail, and as a parent I might join them
if I could be convinced that fields of low-potency weeds would matter much
in a world where high-potency abounds. One point of the college
experiments, in fact, would be to try to breed the last of the offending
THC right out of the commercial strain.

Most of the proposed cost of up to $1 million would be for security, like
fences, at participating universities.

I suppose the temptation for a little midnight harvest would be real
enough. But nobody is requiring fences to block the midnight harvests
already going on at farms and supply companies across Illinois almost every
night. Cookers of the far more insidious drug methamphetamine seek out
anhydrous ammonia from fertilizer tanks to complete their nasty brew.

The component is cheap, so dollar losses to the tank owners are too small
for them to justify much expenditure on anti-theft measures. Given the
dangerously erratic behavior and health risk among meth users, it may be
surprising that we hear no anti-drug cry for farmers to seek some other way
to replace nitrogen in their fields.

Maybe hemp and ammonia left together would provide one-stop shopping for
the after-dark scavengers of drug ingredients. Or maybe rules for hemp
farmers would force them to take security steps that could protect their
fertilizer tanks, too.

Surely, reasonable solutions to manage some of our drug woes can be found
by those who just concentrate with open minds. Maybe that's what "The
Thinker" was thinking about with his insides full of marijuana those many
years ago.