DEA SET TO BATTLE POT ADVOCATES OVER HEMP USE IN FOOD

Consuming a chunk of organic health food is a act of drug abuse in the
eyes of the Drug Enforcement Administration -- if it contains, as some
snacks do, hemp as an ingredient. An appeals court in Alaska says
residents can possess up to a quarter-pound of pot for their own use.

In a Zogby poll conducted last month in New Hampshire, 84 percent of
voters said they supported changing federal law to allow patients to
use medicinal marijuana without fear of arrest.

Marijuana continues its beeline for the mainstream after years of
reefer madness. Federal officials are ready to do battle, with the
next target being hemp as food.

While it sounds simple enough -- one side of mostly pro-marijuana
advocates looking to climb another rung on the ladder toward pot
tolerance -- the fact that the hemp food case even has legs portrays
the continued move toward societal legitimacy of the illegal weed.

"There is a lot more tolerance for marijuana," said Bruce Mirken, a
spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which favors pot
legalization and most other liberalization of marijuana laws. "And it
appears that there are more people rallying around this issue."

What people are not seeing, said Ed Childress, a DEA spokesman in
Washington, "is the marijuana-legalization lobby at work behind the
scenes, with better resources."

Two years ago, DEA head Asa Hutchinson said that foods using seeds
from the hemp plant violated federal law. He ordered a crackdown on
the foods, but his dictate was stayed by a court order.

Courtroom wrangling has drawn out the battle. For now, purveyors of
the products are free to sell. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
will begin hearing arguments in the case next week.

"It was really a matter of hemp not existing as something that can be
consumed," said Richard Meyer, a DEA spokesman in San Francisco.

If the DEA gets its way, insisting that hemp-as-food violates federal
law, Lynn Gordon says, she stands to lose $800,000.

Miss Gordon's Minneapolis-based French Meadow Bakery produces, among
other things, bread with hemp seeds as a primary ingredient. She
distances herself from the pro-pot lobby.

"I don't advocate marijuana use, I don't smoke marijuana," Miss Gordon
said. But her multigrain Healthy Hemp bread uses hemp seeds that she
purchases legally from Canada, where hemp plants are grown for
industrial use and consumption. "This is not to get people high, it is
something that tastes good."

Hemp-food advocates say sterilized hemp seed and oil are exempt from
the Controlled Substances Act under the statutory definition of
marijuana, just as poppy seeds are exempted under the statutory
definition of the opium poppy.

The growing support for marijuana in all forms is at odds with a
federal government that has gone to great lengths to fight it.
Increasing leniency, such as that in Alaska, eventually could doom the
federal efforts.

"I do not believe in drugs," said Erwin A. Sholts, chairman of the
North American Industrial Hemp Council, which advocates the use of
hemp for both food and industrial use. "But if the DEA doesn't wake up
and smell the flowers, there may be something passed in Congress that
they can't live with."