DUMB AS A POTTED PLANT

Why Is Someone As Smart As Mark Leno Sponsoring Genuinely Stupid
Legislation to Legalize Hemp Cultivation

I like Mark Leno. He has the straight-laced disposition of a
mortician, which juxtaposes nicely with his role as one of the
California Assembly's maverick legislators. He's the governmental
champion of underdogs, tenants, orphans, parolees, recovering heroin
addicts, artists, foster children, and gay rights, to name a few.

Even though his issues resonate in San Francisco, like so many local
officials who leave for Sacramento, Leno has been largely ignored by
constituents.

He deserves a higher profile. And in San Francisco there's apparently
no more direct route to public acclaim than aligning oneself with
potheads. Last week, for example, members of the Board of Supervisors
struggled to outstoner one another, even while they testified on
behalf of a 45-day moratorium on new "medical marijuana" stores, a
move designed to fend off law enforcement as supervisors write new
regulations to protect these pot clubs from federal and state
prosecution. During the 1990s, San Francisco's stunningly inept
district attorney, Terence Hallinan, managed to stay in office for
eight years in large part on the basis of his reputation as a
marijuana fan.

In San Francisco, a city whose political culture still receives far
too much guidance from 1970s potheads, you can't go wrong by carrying
the ball for reefer freaks, no matter how absurd the cause, no matter
how disastrous the results. As a journalist, I know the best way of
pushing Leno toward local sainthood is to criticize him for advancing
an especially idiotic item on the pothead agenda.

So -- because I like Leno and want to make sure his political career
prospers -- I've decided to point out that he is sponsoring a truly
stupid and specious bill that would create special agricultural
licenses allowing farmers to grow industrial hemp that no one really
needs.

In his previous job as a San Francisco supervisor, Leno was the city's
go-to politician for medical marijuana.

Since then, medicinal-pot clubs -- which in practice sell to potheads
and street dealers of pot, along with the occasional legitimate
patient -- have sprouted across the city like Starbucks, to the point
that even our pot-addled city fathers feared for marijuana purveyors'
reputation a month ago when a pot shop nearly opened in a city-run
hotel inhabited by drug rehab patients. The Board of Supervisors last
week passed a 45-day moratorium on new pot-club licenses, as it
considers a way to regulate this scourge.

Leno has moved on to Prong 2 of the potheads' dream of advancing the
cannabis cause: legalized hemp.

As with medical marijuana, there is a legitimate, if limited, use for
the hemp plant. But the most ardent advocates of the claim that the
legalization of hemp cultivation is an "important issue" happen to be
people who also believe, passionately, that they should be free to
smoke pot recreationally. Although supporters often deny it, the
underlying idea of both the medical pot and cultivated hemp movements
is that incremental steps to make marijuana -- the plant and the
product -- accepted within society will, one day, lead to the full
legalization of recreational pot.

I sympathize with the logic of the potheads' arguments: If marijuana
were legal, those who grow and sell the stuff would be identified,
audited, and regulated just like any other corporate profiteer, a far
better situation than the criminal marijuana underground currently
fostered by prohibition.

The logic of the reefer freaks' unspoken cause, however, doesn't hide
a couple of unfortunate facts: Long-term pot users wind up, by and
large, as memory-impaired losers. And the rhetoric that potheads spew
around foot-in-the-door issues like industrial hemp is easily
disproved bullshit.

Industrial hemp is an ordinary cash crop that, if grown using the
proper strains, can't get you high, no matter how many bales you
smoke. The plant simply does not contain enough of the psychoactive
drug tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, to get a human being off. And the
plant has a number of uses that have nothing to do with altering the
mind.

Just the same, growing the stuff is illegal in the United States
because of fears that farmers might secretly mix intoxicating pot
plants in with identical-looking industrial hemp varieties. I agree
with the potheads when they say this prohibition is silly. I part
ways, however, when they claim this is an important issue. And
potheads, along with their political hangers-on, make the mind-blowing
claim that hemp is a really, really important issue.

Changing the status of nonsmokable industrial hemp could change the
world, Leno and his fellow reefer freaks say. "There's great potential
for an economic bonanza as a result of this new crop," Leno said
during a recent conversation. "It's a remarkable plant. And it's time
to reintroduce it to the local economy."

To this end, Leno last month sponsored a press conference during which
people such as David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps
(you know, the ones with the 3,000-word "the whole world is our
Fatherland" inscriptions on the bottle), repeated the false pothead
claim that there's a chronic shortage of industrial hemp in America,
and that we therefore have a need to create special licenses for
California farmers to grow the stuff.

Manufacturers of hemp products "can't guarantee the needed raw
materials for requests they already have for their products," said
Leno, who insists his hemp bill, his first-ever political foray into
agricultural law, has nothing at all to do with medical-marijuana activism.

"They're different issues, and I'm a multifaceted person, and I
recognize medicinal benefits of medical marijuana and the potential of
industrial hemp," Leno said. "We have a growing trade deficit, and our
farmers are in great need of a new crop right now. I can't tell you
how many thousands of jobs this is going to create."

These are clearly the words of a man under the delusional influence of
marijuana.

In 1998, Canada passed a law similar to Leno's; it allowed farmers to
apply for licenses to grow industrial hemp as long as they submitted
to inspections to make sure they only grew the nonintoxicating variety
of cannabis. Since then, Canadian farmers have learned that the
utopian claims of hemp advocates are false, that growing hemp is a
great way to lose lots of money, and that -- after decades of blather
from new-hope-for-dope types to the effect that hemp would
revolutionize the motor fuel, textiles, and paper pulp industries --
the most lucrative markets for the world's legal hemp crop remain
birdseed and horse bedding.

"The market is so small for hemp products that it is not going to be a
bonanza for a large group of individuals," says hemp grower Lorne
Hulme, owner of Agra Products Inc. in MacGregor, Manitoba. Hulme has
spent the past six years leading a local farm co-op in its efforts to
empty its silos of a 1999 glut of Canadian hemp seed.

It seems that in 1998, Canadian farmers were hearing the same line of
hype Leno's now mouthing. To make matters worse, this was the middle
of the dot-com craze, when hype was king in North America. A
California-based, venture capital-funded start-up sought to ride
pothead-inspired hemp hype to dot-com-style riches.

"They had growers all hyped up," recalls Nabi Chaudhary, senior
economic analyst for crops with Alberta's provincial government.
"Their main thing was they were going to separate fiber from the hemp
stem and then also use the rest of the plant for making strawboards,
wood panels for construction purposes."

The company, called Consolidated Growers and Producers, or CGP,
persuaded Canadian farmers to plant some 35,000 acres of hemp plants.
It hired Gero Leson, a Berkeley-based environmental scientist, as
president of the firm. The next step, presumably, was to change the
nature of American commerce a la Pets com -- and make a fortune in the
process.

"It was the worst time of my life," Leson recalls. "I only talk about
CGP with friends that lived through it with me."

Leson, a specialist in technological uses for natural fibers, lent a
touch of legitimacy to the CGP enterprise. To his dismay, however, he
soon learned that the company's backers were more interested in the
pothead's version of hemp's prospects -- that it'll make the world an
ecotopia by replacing everything we touch, burn, or eat -- than the
industrial horticulturist's, which recognizes hemp's potential as a
niche product with applications in foodstuffs, textiles, structural
materials, and paper. And specialists with a real technical and
economic expertise about the crop see many of these uses as uncertain,
and at best years from economic viability.

"As you know, there's a lot of hype in the U.S. to save the world
through hemp," Leson notes. "Like the dot-commers did, CGP tried to
show they had capacity. They did this by putting a crop in the ground
for which they had no market. They made farmers believe there would be
buyers for that crop, which wasn't the case."

Leson quit after nine months, sick of the hype and the lies, he says.
The company went bust within a year, leaving Canadian farmers holding
the bag. Canadian growers only last year finished selling their 1999
crop of hemp seed, mostly as bird food, Leson says.

Some Canadian farmers still plant hemp -- Canada, after all, is where
U.S. manufacturers of hemp clothing and hemp granola bars currently
get their seeds and fiber. Last year's crop was 8,800 acres, about a
quarter of the acreage of hemp's 1999 Canadian heyday. In 2000, U.S.
Department of Agriculture economists estimated the total U.S. demand
for hemp fiber could be satisfied by four average-size, 500-acre
farms. Even if hemp were to live out its promise better than the USDA
predicted, the potential market for the crop would only be enough to
sustain about a dozen average farms.

Because of this market reality, farmers in Canada won't put seeds into
the ground unless money first crosses their palms.

"There are plenty of farmers who don't want to touch it. Others will
plant if they are paid up front, or if they have contracts that are
enforceable," Leson notes. "Nobody's dumb enough to grow hemp on spec
and hope it will sell."

So when people at Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, or at Nutiva, a brand of
hemp-based food, lined up at Leno's recent hemp press conference to
say an industrial cannabis shortage is limiting their production, what
they were really saying was that they don't want the expense of
guaranteeing payment in advance to Canadian farmers.

Would they instead like to dupe and burn California planters, a la
CGP, ensuring years of dirt-cheap hemp?

When Mark Leno says passing a Canadian-style hemp bill will create an
economic revolution in California, he's either high, or blowing smoke
for the benefit of voters back home.

As a fan of Leno's work -- the work that steers clear of marijuana,
that is -- I wish him the very best by insisting that his hemp bill is
so lame, it could have been designed by a stoner.