PRO-HEMP CAMPAIGN IS BECOMING MAINSTREAM

MIDWAY, Ky.: The man handing out bumper stickers promoting
"Industrial Hemp for Farmers, Fiber and Food" was neither wild-eyed
radical nor aging flower child.

He was Jake Graves, 75, prominent Fayette County farmer,
conservative, solid and respectable. So was the man accepting a
bumper sticker -- Jim Bruce, also 75, who made his money in the
wholesale flooring business and now is trying to make a go of farming
in Anderson County.

Watching nearby was someone who has known both men for decades --
former Gov. Louie B. Nunn.

"You look at them," Nunn said, "and you can see real fast they're not
the hippie type."

Neither is Nunn. He was, and is, a law-and-order Republican whose
current advocacy of legal hemp production doubtless strikes some
people as curious.

But the legal-hemp campaign has gone mainstream, and in one sense,
Nunn's involvement makes perfect sense. One tenet of the pro-hemp
campaign is quintessentially Republican -- the idea that states, not
the federal government, should decide what crops their farmers can
produce.

Thus, Nunn, Graves and Bruce were among those at a hemp conference
last week at Midway College. The keynote speaker was Hawaii state
Rep. Cynthia Thielen, a Republican who last year sponsored
legislation enabling Hawaii to get a federal license to grow test
crops of hemp for ethanol production.

Hawaii was motivated by a recession caused by the loss of its
sugar-cane industry to Asian countries that had plentiful, cheap
labor. "I think it's time for the federal government -- excuse the
terminology -- to butt out," Thielen said.

Proponents of hemp as a source of food and fiber and as an option for
battered tobacco farmers are seeking federal deregulation. They
strive mightily to put distance between the (hemp) plant and
marijuana, its genetic, psychoactive cousin.

Hemp opponent No. 1 has been General Barry McCaffrey, who heads the
White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. McCaffrey
contends efforts to legalize hemp are a smoke screen to legalize
marijuana. Seedlings are the same and mature plants look the same,
making hemp production problematic for law-enforcement officers, the
argument goes.

Hemp proponents say that's absurd.

Nunn and other pro-hemp messengers say Mounties in Canada, Bobbies in
England and police in other countries where hemp is legal have been
able to tell the difference between hemp and marijuana.

To suggestions that pot growers would use hemp to mask their illicit
crop, the hemp campaign answers that cross-pollination would cause
marijuana to lose the chemical that produces its high.

Nunn said he, too, once equated hemp with marijuana. While he was
governor from 1967 to 1971, the state had a vigorous drug-eradication
program. He said his position on hemp changed as he learned more
about it.

Last summer Nunn successfully defended actor Woody Harrelson against
charges of marijuana cultivation in Lee County. Harrelson had
publicly planted four hemp seeds, provoking his own arrest so he
could challenge the constitutionality of Kentucky's hemp laws.

"Woody was trying to do something for the farmers," Nunn said. Nunn
said he took the case to carry the message of the distinction between
marijuana and hemp.

When economists say there is no ready market for a Kentucky hemp
industry, Nunn responds with an anecdote.

As governor, he was in an Eastern Kentucky county to promote
construction of a modest airport. There was a skeptic in the crowd,
Nunn's story goes. "I don't know what we need one for," the man said,
"because a plane has never lit here yet."