FIELD OF OPPORTUNITY
Hemp Resurgence Sows The Seeds For Legalization Of The Crop

A guy walks into Jeff DeFord's shop in Ocean Beach, sorts through
the racks for a minute, then asks with a giggle: "Hey, can you
smoke this shirt?"

It's a question DeFord gets all the time.

But the proprietor of High Grade Hemp, a retail outlet for hundreds of
hemp-based products from clothing to cosmetics and food, refrains from
groaning and rolling his eyes.

"I just take it as an opportunity to educate another person about
hemp," DeFord said.

Lesson number one: Hemp is not smokable marijuana.

It has virtually no THC, pot's psychoactive element (less than 1
percent compared with 20 percent or more with marijuana). Hemp
wouldn't get you high, DeFord said, if you smoked a boatload of the
stuff.

But "industrial" hemp comes from the same plant as marijuana, cannabis
sativa.

And therein lies the challenge for DeFord and hundreds of others
across the country who want to reintroduce a once viable and
ubiquitous crop that has been illegal to cultivate in the United
States for decades.

"We need to get past the Cheech and Chong attitude," said DeFord, who
has a poster in his store that reads: "Hemp is not a gateway fabric."

"Many people seem to feel that our movement to legalize industrial
hemp is nothing more than an end-run around the marijuana prohibition.
But in truth, it's more an environmental issue than anything."

When Albert Lewis, a hemp clothing manufacturer, explains to people
the benefits of industrial hemp, they invariably "get super excited."

"The fact is that this is an amazing crop. It can be grown without
pesticides, processed without noxious chemicals. It uses water far
more efficiently than cotton and other conventional crops and you
can't believe how many products can be made from it," said Lewis.

He owns Hempy's, a distribution center located near San Diego Bay that
wholesales backpacks, hats, jeans, shirts, surfing and snowboarding
wear and scores of other hemp-based products to about 400 retail
outlets nationwide and in Japan.

But because of the ban on hemp production in the United States, Lewis
imports all of his hemp fabric from China and Europe. "I just wrote a
check for $45,000 to a supplier (of hemp cloth) in Romania -- that
money could have gone to an American farmer.

"Hemp could be an agricultural boon in this country," continued Lewis,
who graduated from UC-Santa Barbara with a degree in environmental
science and whose masters thesis (in political science) at SDSU
focuses on the politics of hemp.

"People say that legalizing hemp will lead us closer to legalizing
marijuana, but that argument is bogus."

DEA Perspective
The Federal Government Doesn't Think So.

The Drug Enforcement Administration takes a dim view of allowing
American farmers to once again plant and harvest hemp. The agency,
convinced that the hemp movement is a thinly disguised
counter-offensive to the War on Drugs, refuses to distinguish between
hemp and marijuana in an official statement:

"The cultivation of the marijuana plant exclusively for
commercial/industrial purposes has many associated risks relating to
diversion in the illicit drug traffic."

Sweeping aside such bureaucratic chaff, Special Agent Vince Rice of
the DEA's San Diego office said, "If a guy mixes these plants in a
field, it's very hard to tell which one is hemp and which one is marijuana."

Rice scoffed at the idea that mainstream agricultural interests are
advocating the resurrection of hemp for food, clothing and other products.

"Most of these would-be hemp growers are hippies from the '60s," Rice
said. "If a legitimate farmer came to us and said he wanted to change
to hemp, we'd be more inclined to listen. But not some guy in a
ponytail and psychedelic pants."

Even in acreage in which a hemp farmer was properly registered and
monitored, Rice said he'd be surprised if marijuana of the
psychoactive variety didn't crop up.

"It's hard enough to detect marijuana from the air when it's growing
in the middle of a cornfield," he said. "I can see these guys growing
hemp on top and marijuana underneath.

"If I'm a marijuana grower, I definitely want to see hemp
legalized."

Hawaii eyes it Cynthia Thielen is not a marijuana grower, but she
wants to see hemp legalized.

She is a Republican representing Kailua on the island of Oahu, and
this summer she successfully championed a bill through the state
legislature making it legal to grow hemp in Hawaii.

The Aloha State now joins North Dakota and Minnesota in granting legal
status to hemp, allowing farmers to now petition the DEA for permits
to grow it.

Farmers in North Dakota and Minnesota stepped up their legalization
efforts, Thielen noted, after Canada lifted its ban on hemp last year
and took aim at the potentially lucrative North American hemp market.

A skeptic herself before "getting my facts straight," Thielen vowed in
an interview that Hawaii will "be the only state in the nation to have
hemp seeds in the ground by the new millennium."

Hawaii, she said, is looking for a crop to replace sugar cane. "The
cane fields here are fallow; sugar cane has gone to Third World countries.

"We're looking at industrial hemp as a replacement for three reasons:
It has, like soybeans, a high value as a seed and oil for food and
cosmetics; its strong fiber is a tremendously important source of
high-grade building materials, which we have to import; and it is an
excellent raw material to make methanol fuel."

Thielen, who became an authority on industrial hemp after a year spent
educating skeptical legislative colleagues, said the worries of DEA
officials are rooted in ignorance.

"Drug agents in Germany, France and the United Kingdom have no trouble
distinguishing hemp from marijuana. What's wrong with our DEA?"
Thielen said. "I've met with government people from the UK, and they
laugh at the DEA's argument; France can't understand it, either. They
think it's silly."

Once a staple David West holds a Ph.D. in plant breeding from the
University of Minnesota. He prefers discussing the challenges of
genetically selecting hemp seeds that will thrive in the United States
instead of drug-war politics.

But West, who spent 18 years as a commercial corn breeder and works
now as an agricultural geneticist in Wisconsin, is recognized as one
of the nation's foremost hemp historians.

In a research paper titled, "Hemp and Marijuana: Myths & Realities," West
notes that, "surely no member of the vegetable kingdom has ever been more
misunderstood than hemp. For too many years, emotion -- not reason -- has
guided our policy toward this crop."

Hemp, according to West, is a remarkably versatile agricultural
product used around the world for thousands of years. Archaeologists
have determined that hemp was grown in China at least as early as the
28th century B.C.

Grown today legally in 29 countries, hemp was a staple in America from
Revolutionary times until the Great Depression, West said.

George Washington was a hemp farmer, so was Thomas
Jefferson.

But in 1937, West noted, synthetic fiber was taking hold in the
American marketplace, and the hemp industry was rapidly dwindling. And
in that year of heightened concern over recreational drug use (as
depicted in the government film "Reefer Madness"), the Marihuana Tax
Act was passed, outlawing the psychoactive form of cannabis.

While industrial hemp was specifically protected by the 1937 act, the
industry itself gradually disappeared. (There was a flurry of hemp
production for soldiers' boots, backpacks and other necessities during
World War II, however, aided by the government film "Hemp for
Victory," aimed at American farmers.)

In 1970, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act
superseded the 1937 law, West said. But it made no provision
distinguishing hemp from marijuana, leaving all cultivation of
cannabis sativa illegal.

Cannabis, West notes, is "the only plant genus containing the unique
class of molecular compounds called cannabinoids." The two main
cannabinoids are the psychoactive THC and the anti-psychoactive CBD.

The type of cannabis that is high in THC and low in CBD is popularly
called marijuana, according to West, and the type low in THC and high
in CBD is called industrial hemp.

"Hemp, it turns out, is not only not marijuana; it could be called
'anti-marijuana,' " West notes, because CBD blocks the marijuana high.

West also says hemp, with its thin, bamboolike stalks, grows much
higher and more densely packed than marijuana. And it is harvested
much sooner (in 70 to 110 days) than pot plants, which must flower in
order to generate significant amounts of THC.

Growing in the same field, the taller hemp would block the sun from
lower, bushier marijuana, he said. And cross-pollination between the
hemp and marijuana plants would ruin the potency of the marijuana.

Poppy parallels West, who has been hired to provide the seeds for
Hawaii's fledgling hemp industry, said the legal situation involving
the cannabis sativa plant is analogous to that of the poppy, "the
popular garden flower of which there are dozens of variants."

While the DEA has recently cracked down on a specific poppy variety
grown in back yards for years because it fears opium may be extracted
from it, West said, gardeners can still cultivate "many other
varieties of Papaver somniferum, even though these are not botanically
distinct from the poppy variety that has been outlawed."

While West said he is confounded by the federal government's
intransigence regarding hemp, he concedes that DEA Agent Vince Rice
has a point when noting the "tie-dyed" shading of the hemp movement.

"It's true that many of the first hemp stores were started by people
also in favor of legalizing marijuana," West said. "But the hemp
industry has matured and today is dominated by those who see hemp as
the agricultural and industrial crop that it is."

West pointed out that the American Industrial Hemp Council is a kind
of Grange group of conservative farmers who recently kicked out a
board member for publicly favoring medical marijuana.

"These guys are about as far from tie-dyed as they come," West
said.

West said his immediate challenge regarding industrial hemp is
satisfying the DEA to get a federal permit for the initial plots in
Hawaii. Extraordinary measures, including tall fences, barbed wire,
alarms, surveillance cameras and other security measures, may be
required before the non-psychoactive cannabis can be planted.

"I'm involved in putting some seeds in the ground," West said. "Sounds
as simple as you can get. But when you start involving yourself with
the hemp issue, you think you're just sticking your toe in a puddle,
but it's really a well and you can get in over your head in a hurry.

"We're all waiting for the federal government to catch up with the
reality of this. We don't know how long it will take."