LEGALIZE IT!

Cannabis sativa is a low-maintenance crop that can be used in paper,
clothing, rope - even cars. So why, when it's grown in 32 other countries, is
hemp still illegal in the United States?

I confess that I am a user of hemp. for example, I have 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 tests by the Pentagon
invalidate what it calls the "Hempen Ale defense" by showing the ale to be
THC-free. So military personnel can no longer claim it as the source of the
THC that shows up in their urine. But some hemp products do contain trace
amounts of THC - as intoxicating as, say, the opiates you get from a
poppy-seed bagel - so to make sure it knows where the THC is coming from, the
Air Force has 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
later, on February 15, 1999, 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 the form of a
shampoo made with hempseed oil, which, according to its producer, Alterna
Applied Research Laboratories of Beverly Hills, California, 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 have just indulged in - at least 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 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." On July
1, 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 pinscher. 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. This is because it doesn't contain enough THC to
affect your brain. And, unlike marijuana, it is high in cannabidiol - an
antipsychoactive 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 antimarijuana."

Hemp products are not illegal. In fact, the U.S. hemp-products industry
does about $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, 85 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. And 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 required 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 the protection and restoration of the planet. Three years ago
Andy Kerr (called Oregon's "leading environmentalist" by the New York City
newspaper The Village Voice) helped set up the North American Industrial
Hemp Council (NAIHC) - an alliance of farmers, scientists, industrialists,
and environmentalists whose mission is the decriminalization of 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 heads the board of a research
corporation 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 and 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."

This kind of hemp advocacy isn't all that 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. The Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution were drafted on hempen paper. During the Revolutionary War,
Old Ironsides, our most formidable battleship, carried 60 tons of hempen
sail and rope. Betsy Ross made the first American flag out of hempen
"canvas," a word derived from cannabis. "Make the most of hempseed 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. On June
24, 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:
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 (later spelled "marijuana").
Anslinger and Hearst whipped each other, the public, and Congress to
prohibitionist frenzy. Anslinger testified before the U.S. 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" transmogrified 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 which featured
a rendering of a man thrusting a hypodermic needle into a woman in a
low-cut dress and which promised: "Weird orgies. Daring drug expose!
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 Minnesota and Illinois, 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 they issued 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 entranced and pacifistic
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," such as General Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy, who appears to have learned
everything he knows about hemp from Anslinger. Two years ago, when the
Forest Service's lab in Madison, Wisconsin, published a marketing analysis
demonstrating not only that hemp could be profitable for farmers but also
that the state's entire demand for chlorine-bleached, wood-based writing
paper could be met with hemp, the government had it withdrawn. 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 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 Cop, 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; but 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, director of the CIA
under President George Bush and now a lobbyist for the NAIHC.

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, Congress gives the DEA half a billion
dollars a year to eradicate marijuana. But according to the DEA's own
figures, 98 percent of the "marijuana" eradicated by its agents or the
police departments and National Guard units it hires 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, 50,
discovered in 1991 when he got convicted for possessing 10.9 pounds that he
says a friend had picked and given him as a joke. Now he's doing life
without parole at the overcrowded maximum-security penitentiary in
Springville, Alabama. In Oklahoma, ditchweed is even sprayed with
herbicides from helicopters. And last year Congress authorized $23 million
for research into a soil-borne fungus that attacks and kills marijuana,
poppy, and coca plants. Mike DeWine (R-OH) 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. So relished is hempseed by birds, 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 had commissioned the analysis, but
after intense lobbying by DARE, the agency vainly 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. Last March, under growing
political pressure, McCaffrey made the first conciliatory noise to The New
York Times about maybe "working" with hemp advocates. But on August 9 the
DEA seized a Kenex trailer bringing in 40,000 pounds of hemp birdseed from
Canada, alleging it was a "Schedule 1 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 corn, wheat, and soybeans. "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-such as insurance underwriter and state representative,
in which capacity he introduced the nation's first bill to decriminalize
the cultivation of hemp, signed by the governor last April.

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 in that state 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 have it
right when he warns that it's not economical to grow.

Factoid: A crop of hemp, one study shows, could bring a return of $319 per
acre, compared with $135 for white corn.