IN CANADA, HEMP HASN'T LIVED UP TO THE HYPE

During the summer just past, the tabletop-flat countryside of southern
Ontario was bursting with towering, spike-leafed plants, making it look for
all the world like the biggest, most brazen pot farm in North America.

It's the second year of Canada's pioneering attempt to see whether
industrial hemp -- marijuana's genetic cousin -- can become a lucrative new
crop for its struggling farmers. And if Gov. Jesse Ventura gets his way,
that scene will be re-created in Minnesota. Ventura has asked the federal
government to give Minnesota the green light to become the first state
where industrial hemp could be legally grown.

"It's ridiculous that we're not expanding something that could be of
tremendous value to society," Ventura said in an interview. "It's a great
alternative product that can do things so much better than what we use now."

But an examination of the Canadian hemp industry's brief record reveals the
fact that the experience hasn't lived up to the hype that preceded
legalization.

Despite opponents' warnings that growing hemp would spark an explosion in
growing still-illegal marijuana, Canadian officials say that simply hasn't
happened. And even though hemp's advocates predicted the new crop could
become the economic salvation for farmers, that also hasn't happened. Not
yet, anyway.

"Everyone thought this would be a godsend, but it hasn't worked out that
way," said Bob L'Ecuyer, general manager of Kenex Ltd., the Chatham,
Ontario, firm that is Canada's biggest hemp operation. "People go into this
thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread, but if you've got no one
to sell to, it's not worth anything."

Hemp farmers quickly discovered it's not enough to grow a new crop that has
remarkably diverse uses if markets and a processing infrastructure don't
exist -- a reality that has not been lost on Minnesota officials.

"Once you grow it, where is it going to go?" asked Kevin Edberg, head of
marketing for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. "The processing
infrastructure all has to be built from scratch. That's its Achilles' heel,
but also an opportunity."

Markets for hemp don't exist for the simple reason that during most of the
20th century, it was illegal to grow, sell or even possess it in Canada and
the United States.

In the grip of the "reefer madness" days of the Depression, the U.S.
government banned the cultivation of cannabis in 1937; Canadian officials
followed suit a year later.

But neither country made a distinction between marijuana and industrial
hemp. They are virtually indistinguishable varieties of cannabis -- except
for their tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content, the component that produces a
dope smoker's high.

While marijuana contains THC levels as high as 20 percent, industrial hemp
normally has far less than 1 percent. A person is as likely to get high by
smoking hemp as by smoking the newsprint this story is printed on.

In other words, rope -- not dope, as hemp advocates are fond of saying.

Many Uses

Hemp has a storied history, going back more than 8,000 years, when it was
first cultivated. It has been used to make as many as 25,000 products,
turned into everything from rope and ships' sails to painters' canvasses
and paper. The first pair of Levi's jeans was made from hemp; so was
(apocryphally) the first U.S. flag sewn by Betsy Ross and the parchment on
which the U.S. Constitution was printed.

Hemp has been legally grown throughout Europe for years, and Canadian
agricultural officials estimate the world market to be as much as $200
million a year. Contemporary uses include everything from cosmetics to car
door panels.

The push to legalize the plant developed during the '70s as something of a
sideline to the push to legalize smokable marijuana, but in recent years
the effort has been pushed hardest by farm advocates seeking to diversify
farmers' crop mixes -- which has made legislators in both Canada and the
United States more receptive to the idea.

Ventura said he became interested in hemp during his days as a talk-radio
host, when hemp advocates made their pitch to him, filling his mailbox with
such hemp-based products as paper and clothing. He endorsed the plant's
legalization during his gubernatorial campaign last year and kept pushing
once in office.

"Once I was governor, I looked at the state's agricultural situation and
all the problems farmers are having," he said. "With production going down
the tubes, they need the ability to diversify the crops they plant."

That was the rationale offered by Canadian farmers when they began their
campaign on behalf of hemp in the early 1990s. The effort was pioneered by
Geof Kime, an Ontario farmer who wrangled permission from the government to
plant test plots starting in 1994 with the hope of "reviving a sustainable,
job-creating crop that could be grown without pesticides."

He did exactly that, although it took four years of lobbying to persuade
federal officials to legalize hemp. When they did so, they erected a dense
regulatory web to ensure that hemp growing didn't spawn an illicit
marijuana industry.

All hemp farmers are required to undergo a criminal-records check, and
officials of Health Canada, the federal health department, decided that the
maximum allowable THC concentration in hemp would be 0.3 percent. Anything
above that is illegal; the department conducts random checks of THC levels,
as do Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers.

"Occasionally people have tried to get around the THC levels, but it hasn't
been a huge problem," said Health Canada spokesman Eric Morin. During the
first two growing seasons, there have been so few busts for growing
marijuana that "it's a problem that's statistically insignificant," he said.

Meanwhile, production has exploded. In 1998, 259 farmers harvested about
6,175 acres of hemp, mostly in Ontario and Manitoba. This year, 674 farmers
harvested more than 35,000 acres, a nearly sixfold increase.

"It's given us one hell of a glut of grain and fiber," said L'Ecuyer, whose
firm harvested nearly 2,200 acres of hemp this year. "There's been a major
overestimation of the market that's out there."

L'Ecuyer's firm has set up its own processing facility because of the void
that existed when the crop was legalized. It is selling fiber to auto
manufacturers, who use hemp fiber as a replacement for fiberglass.

"We're starting to make decent inroads into a lot of different markets," he
said. "Realize when we started, there was nothing at all in North America
- -- no harvesting equipment, no markets."

Government red tape remains a headache for hemp farmers, "but that's more a
glut of paperwork than anything," L'Ecuyer said.

Yet for all the problems, "it's a great rotation crop," he said. "You can
substitute it for practically any crop. You don't need chemicals, you don't
get weeds, it does a great job of aerating the soil." On a per-acre basis,
it nets farmers more income than either corn or soybeans, traditional
staple crops.

Waiting To Hear

That's music to the ears of hemp's advocates in Minnesota, who are waiting
to hear from federal drug officials whether they can undertake test
plantings as early as next year. "This is not a panacea for farmers, but
it's not a wild-eyed hairy idea either," Edberg said. Department officials
have no idea how many farmers might undertake hemp farming if it becomes
legal, he said.

"It's not going to be the salvation of all farmers, but it should be an
alternative that's available to them," Ventura said.

With the Legislature's blessing, Ventura last month asked the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) to allow hemp cultivation -- something the
agency has consistently refused to do because officials have called it a
subterfuge for efforts to legalize marijuana.

DEA officials have not responded to Ventura's request that would-be hemp
farmers apply for permits through the state Board of Pharmacy and the DEA.

Last month, a DEA official said that if the agency changes its policy, it
probably would require farmers to post bonds of as much as $1,000 an acre
to pay for government seizure and burning of hemp that crosses the 0.3
percent THC threshold. As in Canada, hemp growers probably would have to
pay license fees for criminal-background checks and government inspections.

Pressure on the DEA to alter its prohibition of hemp isn't only coming from
Minnesota; pro-hemp laws also were enacted this year in North Dakota,
Nebraska and Hawaii.

"We need to expand the use of this instead of the DEA running its
unwinnable war on drugs," Ventura said. "We're trying to create a viable
product here -- what's the Constitution written on? Hemp. It was a viable
product in this country for 200 years, but no longer. That's ridiculous."

But DEA officials' actions show they remain wary of hemp. A few weeks ago,
they seized 40,000 pounds of birdseed at a border crossing in Detroit --
birdseed produced by Kenex that consisted of processed hemp.

"We haven't gotten the seed back," L'Ecuyer said. "But that put us in the
news all over the world."