REEFER MADNESS REMAINS by Trisha Flynn
Copyright (c) 1997, The Denver Post Corporation

Growing up in a big Irish family means you start hearing
about the evils of alcohol from the time you can crawl.
Curse of the Irish," claimed my grandmother, who had a
story about every family with a drinker (which in our case
amounted to almost every family). "Uncle Liam would have
been president were it not for the curse "

The curse, not the English, she believed, is what would
do the Irish in! During the '60s, when marijuana replaced
booze as the "in" thing and most parents, including mine,
were scared out of their minds, my grandmother was the calm
one. She had lived through the Roaring '20s, when
marijuana was legal, when tons of young adults smoked it
on weekends yet still managed to move on and settle down.
She considered it a fad of sorts "in" one decade, out the
next, and unlike alcohol, with no lasting effects. She also
maintained that because the Creator saw fit to let the weed
grow wild over most of the world, it must have some
purpose, probably more than one.

Although many of us who came of age in the '60s quoted
her opinions to anybody and everybody who would listen, we
didn't believe her any more than we believed the government
that claimed we would become addicted, suicidal sex maniacs
after one puff. I thought of my grandmother last winter
when one of my Environmentally Correct kids paid a small
fortune for a shirt made of hemp. The "industrial hemp"
plant is essentially a marijuana plant without THC, the
hallucinogen.

According to a January U.S. News & World Report article,
"As a source of fiber, hemp is the strongest and easiest
to grow, with the broadest geographical range." Because
it's grown without pesticides and irrigation needed to
raise cotton, it's good for the environment. The price is
high because it's illegal to grow it in the U.S., so the
clothes, which feel like linen and "breathe" like cotton,
are all imported. Adidas, Armani and Calvin Klein are now
the chief suppliers.

I thought of my grandmother again when I saw last
month's Denver Post headline "World's original forests 80
percent gone." And what's left will soon be gone if we
don't change our ways. Again, industrial hemp offers an
alternative, as it produces four times as much pulp per
acre as trees and at a fraction of the price.

My grandmother was onto something all right. Hemp not
only has dozens of uses, but also virtually every part of
the plant can be used: The stalk provides fiber for
clothing and rope; the pulp is used for paper products and
fiberboard. Oil from the seeds contain eight essential
proteins and is low in saturated fats. The seedcake (what's
left after oil removal) can be ground into flour containing
25 percent protein. The remaining vegetation can be
fermented into methanol, ethanol or alcohol fuel.

But legalizing industrial hemp isn't what worries most
of us. Legalizing hemp with THC, the smokable,
psychoactive variety, is what worries parents. Since the
'70s, when I became a parent, I've read that marijuana is
responsible for everything from brain and chromosome damage
to infertility and birth defects to addiction, which leads
to crime to pay for the addiction and subsequent health
problems that are often lifelong. I didn't believe
everything I read. But I believed enough to be more like my
parents than my grandmother. So imagine my surprise when I
read about the recent editorial in the British medical
journal Lancet, which declares: "The smoking of cannabis,
even longterm, is not harmful to health."

"How Marijuana Causes Insanity," in the April issue of
The Atlantic Monthly, is about the insanity of our drug
laws, which have been based on scare tactics, irrational
fears and lies. In 1970, the National Commission on
Marijuana and Drug Abuse, appointed by President Nixon,
unanimously agreed that the possession of small amounts of
marijuana in the home should no longer be a crime. Nixon
rejected the findings.

A decade later, under President Reagan, the National
Academy of Sciences studied the health effects of
marijuana and concluded that it should be decriminalized.
Like Nixon before him, Reagan rejected the findings. And
now there's Clinton.

That's the thing about grandmoms. When we're young,
they're funny old ladies; when we're closer to the age they
were then, they become wise women. Trisha Flynn is a
middleaged married mother who lives in Denver.