CALIFORNIA SEEKS TO CLEAR HEMP OF A BAD NAME

STRATFORD, Calif. -- Charles Meyer's politics are as steady and
unswerving as the rows of pima cotton on his Central Valley farm.
With his work-shirt blue eyes and flinty Clint Eastwood demeanor, he
is staunchly in favor of the war in Iraq, against gun control and
believes people unwilling to recite the Pledge of Allegiance should
be kicked out of America, and fast.

But what gets him excited is the crop he sees as a potential windfall
for California farmers: industrial hemp, or Cannabis sativa. The
rapidly growing plant with a seemingly infinite variety of uses is
against federal law to grow because of its association with its evil
twin, marijuana.

"Industrial hemp is a wholesome product," said Mr. Meyer, 65, who
says he has never worn tie-dye and professes a deep disdain for "dope."

"The fact we're not growing it is asinine," Mr. Meyer said.

Things could change if a measure passed by legislators in Sacramento
and now on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk becomes law. [The bill
reached Mr. Schwarzenegger last week; he has 30 days to sign or veto it.]

Seven states have passed bills supporting the farming of industrial
hemp; their strategy has been to try to get permission from the Drug
Enforcement Administration to proceed.

But California is the first state that would directly challenge the
federal ban, arguing that it does not need a D.E.A. permit, echoing
the state's longstanding fight with the federal authorities over its
legalization of medicinal marijuana. The hemp bill would require
farmers who grow it to undergo crop testing to ensure their variety
of cannabis is nonhallucinogenic; its authors say it has been
carefully worded to avoid conflicting with the federal Controlled
Substances Act.

But those efforts have not satisfied federal and state drug
enforcement authorities, who argue that fields of industrial hemp
would only serve as hiding places for illicit cannabis. The
California Narcotic Officers Association opposes the bill, and a
spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy in
Washington said the measure was unworkable.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican running for re-election, has been
mum on his intentions, with the political calculus of hemp in
California difficult to decipher. The bill was the handiwork of two
very different lawmakers, Assemblyman Mark Leno, a San Francisco
Democrat best known for attempting to legalize same-sex marriage, and
Assemblyman Charles S. DeVore, an Orange County Republican who worked
in the Pentagon as a Reagan-era political appointee.

Their bipartisan communion underscores a deeper shift in hemp culture
that has evolved in recent years, from ragtag hempsters whose love of
plants with seven leaves ran mostly to marijuana, to today's savvy
coalition of organic farmers and health-food entrepreneurs working to
distance themselves from the drug.

Hundreds of hemp products, including energy bars and cold-pressed
hemp oil, are made in California, giving the banned plant a
capitalist aura. But manufacturers must import the raw material,
mostly from Canada, where hemp cultivation was legalized in 1998.

The new hemp entrepreneurs regard it as a sustainable crop, said John
Roulac, 47, a former campaigner against clear-cutting and a backyard
composter before founding Nutiva, a growing California hemp-foods
company. "They want to lump together all things cannabis," said David
Bronner, 33, whose family's squeeze-bottle Dr. Bronners Magic Soaps,
based in Escondido, Calif., are made with hemp oil. "You don't
associate a poppy seed bagel with opium."

The differences between hemp and its mind-altering cousin, however,
can be horticulturally challenging to grasp. The main one is that the
epidermal glands of marijuana secrete a resin of euphoria-inducing
delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or T.H.C., a substance all but lacking
in industrial hemp.

Ernest Small, a Canadian researcher who co-wrote a major hemp study
in 2002 for Purdue University, compared the genetic differences to
those that separate racehorses from plow horses. Evolution, Mr. Small
said, has almost completely bred T.H.C. out of industrial hemp, which
by law must have a concentration of no more than three-tenths of 1 percent.

To its supporters, industrial hemp is utopia in a crop. Prized not
only for its healthful seeds and oils, rich in omega-3 and -6 fatty
acids, but also its fast, bamboo-like growth that shades out weeds,
without pesticides.

"Simply put, you create a jungle in one year," said John LaBoyteaux,
who testified in Sacramento on behalf of the California Certified
Organic Farmers association. "There's a growing market out there, and
we can't tap it."

The bill before Governor Schwarzenegger is the latest installment in
a hemp debate that reached its height in 2004, when the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals said that federal antidrug laws did not apply to the
manufacturing or consumption of industrial hemp. The court ruled that
decades earlier, Congress had exempted from marijuana-control laws
the stalks, fibers, oils and seeds of industrial hemp, and that the
government had no right to ban hemp products.

That opened the floodgates for Patagonia hemp jeans and the Merry
Hempsters Zit Zapper (with hemp oil).

Patrick D. Goggin, a lawyer for the Hemp Industries Association and
Vote Hemp, said there would probably be legal snarls to work out with
the California legislation, assuming it is enacted, so that farmers
would not be placing their property in jeopardy if they chose to grow
industrial hemp. But if the federal government clamps down, Mr.
Goggin said, "we're prepared to raise the issue in court."

"Were trying to get an arcane vision of the law contemporized," he added.

Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration,
said the agency would not speculate about pending legislation.

The bill's adherents point to hemp's hallowed niche in American
history. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson cultivated hemp
(neither effort was profitable). Colonists' boats sailed the Atlantic
with hempen sails. Old Ironsides carried 60 tons of hempen sail and
rope. The word "canvas," in fact, is derived from cannabis, a
high-tensile fiber naturally resistant to decay.

Hemp flourished as an American crop from the end of the Civil War
until the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act ended production. During World War
II, when Japan seized the Philippines and cut off supplies of Manila
hemp, the crop got a brief reprieve in the United States, where
farmers were encouraged to grow "Hemp for Victory," for boots,
parachute cording and the like. But contrary to lore, most such hemp
was never harvested.

Today, China controls about 40 percent of the world's hemp fiber, and
its ability to flood the market "could result in price fluctuations
the American farmer would have to weather," said Valerie Vantreese,
an agricultural economist in Lexington, Ky. (Kentucky was once the
leading hemp-producing state).

Hemp is grown legally in about 30 countries, including many in the
European Union, where it is mixed with lime to make plaster and as a
"biocomposite" in the interior panels of Mercedes-Benzes.

In the United States, the chief argument against hemp has been made
by drug-control officials, who are concerned that vast acreages could
be used to conceal clandestine marijuana, which they say would be
impossible to detect.

"California is a great climate to grow pot in, and no one from law
enforcement is going through the fields to do a chemical analysis of
different plants," said Thomas A. Riley, a spokesman for the Office
of National Drug Control Policy in Washington.

To some people intimate with the nuances of marijuana, however, the
idea of hiding marijuana in a hemp field, where the plants would
cross-pollinate, provokes amusement.

"It would be the end of outdoors marijuana," said Jack Heber, 67, a
marijuana historian and author who runs a group called Help End
Marijuana Prohibition, or HEMP. "If it gets mixed with that crop,
it's a disaster."

In North Dakota, the state agricultural commissioner, Roger Johnson,
has proposed allowing hemp farming, and has been working with federal
drug regulators on stringent regulations that would include
fingerprinting farmers and requiring G.P.S. coordinates of hemp fields.

"We've done our level best to convince them we're not a bunch of
wackos," Mr. Johnson said.

Fifteen years ago, he noted, there was little market for canola,
which is now a major crop produced for its cooking oil. He sees hemp
in a similar vein and dismisses the fears that it would lead to criminality.

"It would take a joint the size of a telephone pole to have an
impact," he said.

But up north in Garberville, the Central Valley of marijuana, the
lines between hemp and marijuana are often a hazy blur, as they are
at a store called the Hemp Connection, where hemp hats and yoga
clothing are sold alongside manuals on pot botany and Stoneware
baking pans ("makes six groovy brownies per pan").

The proprietor, Marie Mills, who said she once crafted paper from
marijuana stalks, remains committed to cannabis in all its guises.

"We want to educate people and take away the stigma," Ms. Mills said.
"We want hemp without harassment."