THE DOPE ON HEMP

The General Assembly is weighing a sensible proposal to study whether
industrial hemp could be a profitable alternative crop for the state's
struggling farmers.

Now that prices have plummeted for corn and soybeans, lawmakers should go
ahead with this study despite opposition from federal drug czar Barry
McCaffrey.

"The federal government is concerned that hemp cultivation may be a stalking
horse for the legalization of marijuana," McCaffrey wrote to House Speaker
Michael Madigan (D-Chicago). That is typical overreaction from McCaffrey,
commander in chief of the nation's costly but largely ineffective war on
drugs.

McCaffrey fired off his letter of opposition after a 49-9 vote in the Senate
to authorize Southern Illinois University and the University of Illinois to
begin research on hemp. The schools' agriculture departments would obtain
seeds and do tests to determine if it can be profitably mass-produced here.
Hawaii, where pineapple and sugar cane crops are depressed, already has been
authorized to study hemp as an alternative crop.

The plant is in the same family as marijuana, but years of studies show it
lacks enough of the psychoactive component THC that gets marijuana smokers
high. Typically, a marijuana leaf has 4 percent to 20 percent of THC, while
hemp has less than 1 percent.

Hemp seeds have even less than that. As one pundit put it, one would have to
smoke a hemp joint the size of a telephone pole to get high. Even so,
opposition from the federal government persists, with the Drug Enforcement
Administration saying that hemp looks so much like marijuana that allowing
farmers to grow them would complicate drug-fighting efforts.

The fear is that illegal growers could use hemp to conceal illegal marijuana
plants.

Those objections are far outweighed by farmers and environmentalists in the
North American Industrial Hemp Council, which says hemp could become a
billion-dollar-a-year crop. For hundreds of years, hemp grew like weeds all
over the United States. It was widely used to make clothing, paper and
cosmetics. The plant was banned in 1972 under the Controlled Substances Act,
but it still is profitably grown in Europe and Australia, and new uses are
being discovered. State Rep. Judy Erwin (D-Chicago), a sponsor of the bill,
says it will take years of experimentation with test plots growing various
varieties to determine which plants are best to grow in Illinois.
McCaffrey's unfounded fears aside, now is the time to start the research.