HEMP'S BACKERS TRY FOR A COMEBACK

Legalization Sought For Cousin Of Pot

In California these days there is the hemp movement and the other hemp
movement -- this second one backing the kind you can't smoke or bake
into brownies for an altered state.

Its leader wants it known that he is a strait-laced Southern Baptist
"white-bread" guy from Orange County who doesn't smoke marijuana.
Though he's got support from some who do smoke openly and often, he
also has in his corner the former director of the CIA and agriculture
officials from such non-trendy states as Wisconsin who see the plant
as an ecological and economic bonanza.

"I'm a member of the NRA, I'm overweight, I'm a meat eater, I'm no
dope-smoking hippie," said Sam H. Clauder II, a political consultant
who's heading a campaign to get industrial hemp -- the unsmokable
cousin of marijuana -- legalized in California. "I wouldn't be near
the marijuana issue until a year and a half ago when a few key people
convinced me that marijuana and hemp are not the same thing."

The quiet political campaign to turn industrial hemp into a legal crop
is gaining support, an Examiner/KTVU Channel 2 report found, but big
obstacles remain.

There's the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, for one. All hemp
is listed as a controlled substance, regulated by the DEA, and is
therefore illegal to grow. Indeed, industrial hemp and marijuana are
part of the same species, Cannabis sativa. But there the similarity
ends, say industrial hemp activists.

Very little THC

The industrial variety has only a fraction of the psychoactive
chemical THC found in marijuana. The smokable drug commonly has as
much as 16 to 20 percent THC, compared with 0.3 percent in industrial
hemp, which can't be smoked to produce anything but a headache or sore
throat, activists say. And, they add, industrial hemp is tall and
gawky, better for harvesting the long fibers that make it valuable.
Marijuana is shorter and bushier, ideal for harvesting buds.

But the Office of National Drug Control Policy says the two are
look-alikes, distinguishable only by chemical analysis, and that would
make drug enforcement a nightmare.

"The government is messed up on this," said James Woolsey, former CIA
director, now a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for the North American
Industrial Hemp Council, an organization working to legalize the crop.

A DEA spokesman said the agency is considering whether to relax its
rules -- perhaps by licensing farmers or in other ways regulating the
crop -- but hasn't yet reached a decision. Six Kentucky farmers who
want the ban lifted sued the DEA last year.

Meanwhile, growing the plant remains a violation of federal law. But
that hasn't stopped more than 10 states from passing laws or
resolutions in the past few years calling for studying or growing
hemp, although the state decisions are largely symbolic.

California is important

Any legislation in California, a state that has been a hotbed of hemp
support, could be important, possibly influencing federal policy, says
Erwin Sholts, an official with the Wisconsin agriculture department
and head of the hemp council.

"Whatever California does impacts the entire nation to a degree," said
Sholts. "It's a huge state with huge agriculture."

So far, Clauder's gotten support from the California Democratic Party,
which in March passed a resolution calling for legalized growing of
industrial hemp. He now hopes to find a legislator willing to carry a
bill or attract enough public enthusiasm for a ballot measure.

Industrial hemp has no shortage of supporters in California. The
plant, which has been around thousands of years, has bred loyalists
who speak with an ardor unlike those who sing praises of, say, corn
and rice.

The reason? Hemp has lore and what Mari Kane, publisher of Hemp World,
a journal and directory for the hemp industry, calls "an archival
memory." It's "highly suspected" that Jesus wore hemp, she said.
Middle Eastern nomads planted it long ago and knew the value of its
long, sturdy fibers. So did Colonial Americans. Hemp was used in early
drafts of the Declaration of Independence. George Washington and
others after him grew it until the herb became associated with its pot
relative in the 1930's and the government banned farmers from planting
it.

In the 1990s, the hemp movement is growing as it appeals on a broad
level, Kane said. Environmentalists like it because it is
eco-friendly, requiring less water than conventional crops and no
pesticides or insecticides. Its high canopy also naturally controls
weeds. Supporters say its fibers can be used for paper, cardboard,
even building materials, auto parts and fuel, thereby saving trees and
relieving dependence on petroleum.

Counterculture support

Its eco-friendly reputation has made it popular with youth and
counterculture consumers, of which there are plenty in the Golden
State. The bulk of the nation's retail hemp stores are now on the West
Coast, primarily in California, Kane said.

Though they have to import the hemp from other nations -- China,
Canada and Switzerland, to name a few -- retailers here are making it
into everything from paper and clothes to soda pop and shampoo.

Berkeley's Two Star Dog store offers skirts, pants, shoes, purses,
backpacks and body lotion made of hemp. The clothes, in a variety of
styles, are sewn in the back of the store.

"I wear hemp all the time," said Charles Gary, a community activist in
Berkeley, who was first drawn to Two Star Dog for environmental and
political reasons but grew to appreciate the look. "It's reminiscent
of linen but with none of the drawbacks. You can throw it in the
washing machine and it dries very quickly in the air. I even have a
suit (made) out of it."

Willie Phalanger was interested in the nutritional properties of hemp
oil when he started making Willie's Hemp Soda in San Rafael last year.
Now, he said, he's selling 3,000 cases a month of root beer, ginger
beer and black cherry soda. The creator previously of Root Zing -- "a
really strong ginseng drink" -- is also readying what he believes is
the world's first butterscotch hemp soda.

Last year the first Santa Cruz Hemp Expo attracted 87 vendors, said
organizer Paul Gaylon. The event featured a hemp house, a fashion show
and food of every kind, said Gaylon, who runs an herbal nutritional
product company that works with hemp oil, and is making a video on
hemp entitled "Hemp Hemp Hurrah."

The need to lobby

Despite hemp's cachet with certain crowds, supporters in California
still have work to do to enlist support of farmers, many of whom have
not yet considered the possibilities of hemp. "I work with alternative
crops and it's tough working with farmers until a trust is developed
and you can present the options," said Gary Banuelos, a plant
nutritionist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Fresno. He
said he'd like to work with hemp if the law allowed it. "It's great to
have a plant, but you have to be able to present what you can do with
it. Finding the plant is just part one."

Banuelos also predicts that industrial hemp may run into the same
problems facing kenaf, another eco-friendly crop grown for its fiber.
Kenaf farmers must ship what they grow to a processing plant in Texas
because there are none in California. And then there are the poachers.
Like industrial hemp, kenaf looks a lot like pot.

"People were always stopping and ripping me off," said Banuelos, who
grew kenaf in a field off Interstate 5 and was once even questioned by
Highway Patrol officers who thought he was growing marijuana. "You'd
be surprised how many people had their cars break down beside my kenaf
field."

Woolsey said hemp would be most welcome in areas that grow rice, wheat
and corn, crops whose markets are "in the tank," which explains why
farmers in states like North Dakota already are interested. Farmers
there have watched as Canadian growers got higher prices for hemp than
they do for their conventional crops.

After piquing the interest of farmers, the hemp movement must also,
ironically, woo the original hemp movement, the one devoted to
removing all legal restrictions against any plant in the hemp family,
even the most potent cannabis, marijuana.

Jack Herer, for instance, is a hemp activist and founder of Help End
Marijuana Prohibition who said he can't support a movement or any law
that would lift restrictions from industrial hemp and keep them for
marijuana.

"If you grow this plant with restrictions the government will come in
and invite police in," he said. "The law would put growers under
threat of having police on their land."

But Woolsey, the former CIA director, said marijuana growers actually
have a reason to worry about industrial hemp. Its thick pollen can
cross-pollenate with pot plants and lower the THC in future
generations, meaning what's harvested would give less of a buzz.

"Industrial hemp in large quantities is a marijuana grower's nightmare
..." he said. "The only person stupid enough to plant marijuana plants
in hemp fields is Homer Simpson." See this story Sunday night on KTVU
Channel 2's "10 O'Clock News."