LET FARMERS GROW HEMP

Name any crop grown by Wisconsin farmers and then check the prices
those same farmers are getting for their efforts. Nobody's putting
money in the bank.

And yet there is a cash crop that has the potential to be a
money-maker. Until now, it's been one that American farmers were not
legally allowed to grow -- industrial hemp.

When the former director of the CIA, James Woolsey, is hired by the
North American Industrial Hemp Council to lobby for repeal of the
federal ban on industrial hemp, something is in the air, and not what
you're thinking.

Now Wisconsin agricultural groups have joined state lawmakers from
both sides of the aisle who say this is the time to move forward on
the issue. The sticking point is the fact that federal law defines
hemp as a form of marijuana even though experts say the plant has less
than 1 percent of the psychoactive chemical that gets folks high.

Hemp was once grown commercially in the United States until federal
drug laws were changed. Today the United States allows hemp and hemp
products to be imported. In fact, we use 75 percent of the hemp
produced worldwide. Its fibers can be used in everything from auto
body parts to paper-making, and its root structure makes it a natural
herbicide and insecticide.

Paul Mahlberg, a professor of plant pathology at Indiana University,
says law enforcement officials should have no problem distinguishing
between legal and illegal marijuana because the two types of plants
look completely different. Identification has not been a problem in
Canada or Europe where hemp is grown legally, so that's an argument
that has no weight.

It's an ideal crop that the United States is forced to import because
of outdated drug policies. This is the ideal time for Congress to lift
the ban and let American farmers -- including those in Wisconsin --
grow hemp legally and profit from it.