BAN ON HEMP CROP MAKES YOU WONDER

For sheer absurdity, we assumed we'd never hear the like of a fellow
in Washington, D.C., losing his city job for using the word
"niggardly" and prompting an uproar among those who didn't know the
word means stingy.

But now we have the federal Drug Enforcement Administration refusing
to permit farmers in North Dakota to grow hemp. Because hemp looks
like its cousin, marijuana, it's a symbol in the nation's drug
culture. The nation's war on drugs doesn't abide even symbolic
approval of the counterculture.

Hemp is good for fiber, seed and oil -- good enough that such farmers
as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it for profit on their
plantations. But the hemp variety of cannabis sativa has almost no THC
(aka, tetrahydrocannabinol, the ingredient that makes marijuana
intoxicating). So it works as rope but not as dope.

The DEA does not want to issue permits to grow hemp to North Dakota
farmers who can't make a living growing wheat right now. (The farmers
look at the hemp crops thriving across the border in Canada and know
the hemp harvested there is imported legally into the United States.
They correctly think something is wrong with this picture.)

One of the reasons otherwise law-abiding citizens smoke marijuana even
though it is against the law is that they believe the ban on marijuana
is a baseless, stupid law.

Since the restriction on growing hemp comes from the same source, this
confusion of apples and oranges can't help change their minds.