VICTOR FOR HEMP?
The Wonder Plant That Works Wonders.
by Randall Lyman

August 20, 1997

Angela Guilford, eight months pregnant, was working alone in her Hoover,
Ala., clothing boutique on the evening of June 24 when it was raided by
nearly a dozen police officers. "The Hoover police does this drug bust
routine where they drive up in cars, with video cameras and guns," she told
the Bay Guardian. With no witnessess present, they made her lock the door
and then spent 90 minutes searching for the item on the warrant: marijuana.

Neither Guilford nor her employees smoke pot ("I don't care for it," she
said), nor does she sell smoking paraphernalia. What the police seized was
160 hats, bags and clothing items, all made from hemp.

Hemp is not marijuana; it's not even a drug. Both come from the Cannabis
sativa plant, but marijuana is the THICbearing female flower, while hemp
comes from the fibrous stalk of a different strain that contains little or no
THC. You'd have to powersmoke a pound of hemp to get the same buzz as from
one joint.

Hoover, a suburb of Birmingham, boasts hundreds of stores that have sold hemp
clothing and jewelry for years, including the WalMart. "It's popular now.
All the kids are wearing it," Guilford said, blaming local religious groups
for targeting her. "We were the last store to open selling hemp and the
first ones raided."

Even though no marijuana was found, Guilford and her husband (a computer
programmer who works at home) have been charged with sit down for this
"felony marijuana trafficking." Parents of a newborn and a twoyearold,
they each face mandatory minimum jail sentences of three years and fines of
$25,000. Their preliminary hearing his Aug. 26.

Most state laws distinguish between smokable pot and industrial hemp, but as
Guilford's case illustrates, the federal government, in its indiscriminate
war to protect its citizens from drugs, does not; and in the wake of such
developments as the passage of Proposition 215, the medical marijuana
initiative, hemp has increasingly become the front line in the "war against
the war on drugs." President Clinton personally blasted Adidas for "sending
the wrong message" with its hemp sneakers. Meanwhile, actor Woody Harrelson
sent a different message by planting four hemp seeds to test the
constitutionality of a Kentucky law that (like Alabama's) equated hemp with
marijuana. The law lost.

Filter out the political rhetoric and hemp sounds almost too good to be true.
More than 25,000 products can be made from hemp fiber and hemp seed oil,
including textiles, paper, rope, construction materials, paints, plastics,
fuels, food, even cars (Henry Ford experimented with it). Hemp's long fibers
are more durable than other natural fibers.

And more recyclable. Hemp is an ecological wonder. Its long roots aerate
and bind the soil, preventing the massive erosion caused by deforestation.
It produces four times more pulp per acre than timber and unlike timber, can
do so every year. It grows in most climates, is naturally pestresistant
(reducing the need for pesticides), chokes out weeds (ditto herbicides), and
requires less energy and fewer chemicals to process than wood. Because it
must be processed where it's harvested, hemp nourishes local economies.

"As soon as you start talking about the value of hemp, people say, "Well, why
aren't we doing it?' Well, because it's illegal. 'Why is it illegal?' Because
of marijuana," says Chris Contrad, who has been a Bay Area hemp activist for
10 years. Now managing editor of Hempworld magazine, Conrad has been
striving to break the link, "to separate marijuana out from the rest of the
drug war and to deal with it in three categories of interest groups":
industrial, medical and social.

The principle of "divide and conquer" works in reverse here: by dividing
itself, the cannabis movement has grown stronger. Separating cannabis from
the drug war means it can be considered on its own merits instead of being
lumped with heroin and crack. Further, each wing of the movement can form
alliances without the baggage of the other two: compassionateuse advocates,
for example, joined the medical community to push Prop. 215 without hemp
confusing the issue.

The result is that the relegalization of hemp is now being backed by an
unlikely alliance of cannabis reformers, environmentalists, and businessess
advancing economic and ecological arguments. "If we're ever going to get to
sustainability, we have to look at hemp," said Wisconsin Director of
Agricultrual Development and Diversification, Erwin "Bud" Sholts. "The world
is approaching a fiber crisis. Wood won't support fiber needs much longer."

In 1995, Sholts founded the North American Industrial Hemp Council, whose
membership includes the American Farm Bureau and 13 Fortune 500 companies, to
promote the reestablishment of America's hemp industry. With its farmers
clawing for survival, the United States is the only industrialized country
that forbids the cultivation of industrial hemp. Other countries, including
many in the European Union, even subsidize it. "This isn't a crop for which
a market needs to be found," Sholts said. "The market is already there."

Hemp was once a formidable industry in America. It's unclear whether
cannabis is native to North America or was introduced by Europeans in the
1500s, Jacques Cartier described Canada as "full of hempe which groweth of
itselfe" but hemp was a mainstay of the colonial economy and was even used
as currency because of its durability, value and steady, universal demand.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, prominent agriculturalists both,
waxed exuberant about it, and Ben Franklin made paper from it probably the
type of paper on which the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence
were drafted. By 1800, hemp was of such strategic value that Congress
considered protecting Kentucky's hemp industry to safeguard the country's
supply in case of war. Hemp spread westward atop pioneers' covered wagons
the word "canvas" comes from "cannabis."

A severe decline in the hemp industry following the Civil War was ended by a
dramatic resurgence 70 years later, prompting Popular Mechanics to hail hemp
in 1938 as the "New Billion Dollar Crop" that could lift America from the
Depression.

Not coincidentally, 1938 also saw the theatrical release of Reefer Madness.
Since the 1920s, prohibitionists had fulminated against a new drug called
"marihuana," which they claimed caused Mexicans and Negroes to go crazy,
become violent and rape white women. They found allies in hemp's rivals: the
tobacco, timber, alcohol, oil and newspaper (read: Hearst), and petrochemical
(read: Du Pont) industries. On Aug. 2, 1937, the Marihuana Tax Act was
ramrodded through Congress after "debate" in which prohibitionists and
federal officials openly perjured themselves and fabricated scare stories.
Ostensibly a revenueraising bill, the act criminalized only marijuana, but
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (the DEA's precursor) used it to crush the
hemp industry too.

In 1942, however, the Japanese invasion of the Phillipines cut off America's
supply of abaca ("Manila hemp"). In response the USDA produced a choice
propaganda film, Hemp for Victory, that urged farmers to plant hemp as their
patriotic duty. Filled with scenes of Americans farming to the sentimental
strains of "My Old Kentucky Home," the film reported a 1942 hemp harvest of
14,000 acres and a 1943 goal of 300,000 acres.

At war's end, the hemp effort was abandoned, and within a decade the
prohibitionistindustry alliance had eradicated hemp altogether. In 1971,
President Nixon launched the war on drugs as part of his reelection campaign.


Theoretically, the DEA can still grant permission to cultivate hemp, but
regulations require fields to be secured with fences, guard dogs, razor wire,
searchlights and watchtowers. It claims that marijuana is indistinguishable
from hemp and that growers will try to hide buds amid the stalks.

That's absurd, hemp advocates say. "A registered hemp field is the first
place the police would look," said David Frankel, coowner of Frankel
Brothers Hemp Outfitters, San Francisco's newest hemp clothing store.
Marijuana requires wide spacing to maximize leaves; hemp requires close
spacing to maximize stalk. Moreover, THC is a recessive trait, meaning that
a marijuana plant pollinated by hemp would always produce lowergrade pot.
And the two are clearly distinguishable, just "not from 2,000 feet up in an
airplane," Sholts said.

The clothing industry is another potential force behind hemp. Jennifer
Jensen, who designs, makes and sells her own lines of hemp styles through
boutiques nationwide, said business is booming. "We're reaching some really
wealthy people," she said. "These rich ladies go nuts over the stuff; they
find out it's hemp, and they tell their friends. All hemp needs is for some
senator's wife to like it."

Still, fashion and other industries remain cowed by the feds' iron fist. At
a recent fiber futures conference Conrad attended, particpants discussed the
uses of industrial hemp but refused to discuss its legalization because they
perceived it as a drug war issue.

To combat such confusion, on Aug. 23 at Crissy Field more than 70 hemp
companies and nonprofits are taking part in Hemptown a model town with a
city hall, a university, a "spirtual area," and even a pizza parlor and a
cafe, all featuring hemp products and educational events. The "Hempseed
Cafe" will serve a full menu of hemp seedbased food. "Hemptown is our
vision of what is to come," event spokesperson Debby Goldsberry said.

But Hemptown is a long way from Hoover, Ala., and the road between them is
forked in every state. This spring, for example, Iowa legislators killed a
bill authorizing Iowa State University to research hemp marketing and
production, whereas weeks earlier North Dakota had passed a bill REQUIRING
the state university to study it.

Meanwhile, the feds' zero tolerance policy dictates that hemp simply won't be
tolerated. "The way you end wars is with peace talks and negotiated
settlements," Conrad said. "How can we be criticizing China for locking up
its dissidents while we've got all these dissidents in the drug war who are
being rounded up in record numbers and locked away at a higher incarceration
rate than in China? But [the government] won't talk to them."

Hemptown takes place Sat, Aug. 23, 11 a.m. 6 p.m., Chrissy Field, Presidio
National Park, SF; Free; 1888420INFO.