FARMERS ASK FEDERAL COURT TO DISSOCIATE HEMP AND POT

Wayne Hauge grows grains, chickpeas and some lentils on 2,000 acres
in northern North Dakota. Business is up and down, as the farming
trade tends to be, and he is always on the lookout for a new crop. He
tried sunflowers and safflowers and black beans. Now he has set his
sights on hemp.

Hemp, a strait-laced cousin of marijuana, is an ingredient in
products from fabric and food to carpet backing and car door panels.
Farmers in 30 countries grow it. But it is illegal to cultivate the
plant in the United States without federal approval, to the
frustration of Hauge and many boosters of North Dakota agriculture.

On Wednesday, Hauge and David C. Monson, a fellow aspiring hemp
farmer, will ask a federal judge in Bismarck to force the Drug
Enforcement Administration to yield to a state law that would license
them to become hemp growers.

"I'm looking forward to the court battle," said Hauge, a 49-year-old
father of three. "I don't know why the DEA is so afraid of this."

The law is the law and it treats all varieties of Cannabis sativa L.
the same, Bush administration lawyers argue in asking U.S. District
Judge Daniel L. Hovland to throw out the case. The DEA says a review
of the farmers' applications is underway.

To clear up the popular confusion about the properties of what is
sometimes called industrial hemp, the crop's prospective purveyors
explain that hemp and smokable marijuana share a genus and a species
but are about as similar as rope and dope.

The active ingredient in marijuana is tetrahydrocannabinol, better
known as THC. While hemp typically contains 0.3 percent THC, the
leaves and flowers coveted by pot smokers have 5 percent or more,
sometimes up to 30 percent.

"You could smoke a joint the size of a telephone pole," Hague said of
hemp, "and it's not going to provide you with a high."

Experts on the subject say a headache is far more likely than a buzz.

In the small town of Ray, N.D., Hauge said people -- his friends,
mostly -- make cracks.

"Usually it's something about whether or not the DEA is going to
arrest me or if my phone is being tapped," Hauge said. "It's kind of
difficult to provoke me. I'm also a CPA, and I have had a tax
practice in Ray for 25 years. I was an EMT for 18 years. And I'm not
a person who smokes. I don't smoke anything. I exercise a lot and I'm
pretty healthy."

David Bronner is a vegan California businessman who uses hemp oil to
make his Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap richer and smoother. He touts hemp
milk as a challenger to soy and adds hemp seeds, full of Omega-3
fatty acids, to a snack bar called Alpsnack.

He says the hulled seeds look like sesame seeds and taste like pine nuts.

Bronner's company spends about $100,000 a year importing 10,000
pounds of hemp oil and 10,000 pounds of seeds from Canada. To do so,
he first had to win a federal court battle with the Justice
Department, which tried to ban the imports. One of his arguments was
the prevalence and popularity of the crop elsewhere.

"In Canada and Europe, where industrial hemp is grown, no one is
trying to smoke it and the sky is not falling," said Bronner,
president of the Hemp Industries Association, a trade group. Likening
hemp seeds to marijuana, he said, is like equating poppy seeds with opium.

Hauge is joined by Monson, a Republican state legislator who helped
pass a law in 1999 that would permit hemp cultivation and establish
limits to ease the federal government's worries. They have the
backing of Vote Hemp, an advocacy organization, and state Agriculture
Commissioner Roger Johnson, who personally delivered paperwork to the
DEA in February on the farmers' behalf.

In a lengthy March 5 letter to DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy,
Johnson quoted a university professor's conclusion that under "the
most fundamental principles of pharmacology, it can be shown that it
is absurd, in practical terms, to consider industrial hemp useful as a drug."

That's how Tim Purdon sees it. He is a Bismarck lawyer for Hauck and Monson.

"Some people call me up with the idea that my clients and myself are
some sort of marijuana legalization effort," Purdon said. "My clients
are farmers. They are looking for a crop they can make money on in
the tough business of being a family farmer."

Hauge is feeling optimistic. He has signed up for a hemp cultivation
seminar in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. It starts Friday.