Pubdate: Sun, 07 Apr 2002
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2002 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Gwen Florio
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

INDIAN'S 'FIELD OF DREAMS' RUNS AFOUL OF DRUG LAWS

Sunday, April 07, 2002 - MANDERSON, S.D. - Twice, Alex White Plume planted 
his crop. Twice, despite the unforgiving conditions here on the edge of the 
Badlands, it grew green and lush and tall.

And twice, before he could harvest it, federal agents swooped in with guns 
and weed whackers, confiscating his plants and toting them away in U-Hauls.

White Plume grows hemp, marijuana's milder cousin, but still too closely 
related for comfort for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Plant again, they've told White Plume, and they'll be back with their lawn 
trimmers.

White Plume shrugs.

What the federal government sees as a drug war, he sees as a turf war - 
Indian reservations are sovereign nations - not to mention as part of his 
own war on poverty.

White Plume is 50 years old. His guide business catering mostly to foreign 
tourists has tanked since Sept. 11. And his income as a part- time college 
instructor, one of the few jobs available in a place where only two in 10 
adults work, doesn't pay the bills. Come warm weather, he's planting.

A reminder that his crop is illegal in the U.S. brings another shrug, and a 
reminder of his own.

"This," said White Plume, "is not part of the United States."

This is the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 7,000 square miles of canyon-cut 
prairie and pine and cedar forests between the Black Hills and Badlands 
National Park in southwestern South Dakota. The roughly 18,000 enrolled 
Oglala Lakota Indians who live here today are descendants of the people who 
were pushed out of the Black Hills and harassed unmercifully after gold was 
discovered there.

In 1890, Army soldiers killed between 150 and 300 Lakota men, women and 
children at Wounded Knee, about 10 miles south of White Plume's home. The 
dazed survivors found themselves living in a place with little game or 
tillable land. Life has improved little since.

Unemployment runs as high as 80 percent on the reservation, mainly because 
there's almost nowhere to work. Tribal offices, schools and the local 
hospital are the biggest employers. Beyond that, options are limited - 
several convenience stores, a couple of fast-food restaurants, a few small 
businesses.

"The poverty is even more devastating than the inner city," said South 
Dakota state Sen. Ron Volesky, a Democrat and member of the Standing Rock 
Sioux tribe, who is running for governor this year and who supports 
legislation that would allow all farmers in South Dakota to grow hemp. "At 
least, in the city, you're a cab ride away from something better. But when 
you're in Pine Ridge, there's nowhere to go."

Past job-creation projects - a hotel, a fish-lure factory, a meatpacking 
plant, an electronics firm - collapsed.

"Pine Ridge represents one of the worst cases of economic failure in the 
history of the world," said Tribal President John Yellow Bird Steele, who 
blames what he calls "inherent federal neglect" by a faraway government 
whose attitude, as he sees it, has alternated maddeningly between 
paternalism and indifference.

"The government owes the reservation a Marshall Plan," he said, referring 
to the program to rebuild Europe's economy after the devastation of World 
War II.

Steele, who said that creating jobs has been one of the major issues in 
every campaign in his quarter-century in tribal politics, strongly supports 
private enterprise as opposed to tribal-run businesses.

Enter White Plume, with a 50-pound bag of hemp seeds and a promise from a 
Kentucky hemp cooperative to buy his first harvest.

"I was going to be the first Indian millionaire," White Plume said wryly. 
That was before the feds arrived.

After the first crop was confiscated, White Plume said, he sold some of his 
70 horses to cover the financial loss. Last summer, after the DEA chopped 
down his second planting, he sold more horses, some traditional dance 
clothing and a pickup.

If they come back this year, he said, he's going to stand and fight.

Not with guns - although the federal agents who traveled here packed heat 
along with their weed whackers.

But with a lawsuit.

"To sue is really the American way," said White Plume. "Even though I'm not 
really a full-fledged American."

The federal government recognizes reservations as "domestic dependent nations."

In practical terms, that means they're sort of sovereign - witness their 
ability to run gambling casinos on reservations within states where gaming 
is illegal - and sort of not.

White Plume's hemp is a good example of the latter.

Although the tribal council in November authorized the production of 
industrial hemp (as have several states), the federal Drug Enforcement 
Administration bans it. In October, the DEA proposed outlawing hemp food 
products such as candy bars and potato chips made with hemp oil on the 
basis that they contain THC, the hallucinogenic ingredient in marijuana. 
But the amount of THC found in hemp is far lower than in marijuana.

"Smoke industrial hemp, and all you're going to get is a headache," said 
Eric Steenstra, president of VoteHemp, a nonprofit advocacy group. A 
research facility in Hawaii is the only place in the United States where 
industrial hemp grows legally, he said. It's grown elsewhere around the 
world, however, including in Canada. In January, a Canadian hemp grower 
announced intent to sue the U.S. government, claiming the proposed ban on 
hemp products violates provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Separate arguments against the ban on hemp food products, filed by the Hemp 
Industries Association and seven hemp food companies in the United States 
and Canada, will be heard Monday in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San 
Francisco. A far more informal event is occurring this weekend in Sturgis, 
S.D. The second annual Hemp Hoedown was held to benefit White Plume's 
efforts and those of the South Dakota Industrial Hemp Council.

The government is unlikely to relent on its regulations. The U.S. 
Attorney's Office in Rapid City, S.D., declined to comment about White 
Plume's case. John Walters, director of the White House Office of National 
Drug Control Policy, has said that he views the push to legalize industrial 
hemp as a way to weaken marijuana laws.

"You cannot pretend there is not a broader issue of legalization behind 
this," he said.

Meanwhile, the weather is warming and the field bordering Wounded Knee 
Creek is thawing. Soon, White Plume will plow the ground, and then he and 
his extended family will slowly walk the furrows, dropping hemp seeds into 
the damp earth. They will say Lakota planting prayers.

"I have such a beautiful place here," White Plume said, casting his gaze 
over the field, where meadowlarks sounded the first notes of spring. "This 
is my field of dreams."

But for the past two years, he said, the dream has been interrupted. "Our 
ceremonies have always been incomplete. We've said the planting prayers, 
but never the harvest prayers."

This year, vowed White Plume, his family will complete the ceremony.

"Before, I have always had to stand by helplessly" as the DEA destroyed his 
crop. "I felt like our grandfathers at Wounded Knee, watching helplessly 
while our people were killed. I do not want to be helpless anymore."

[SIDEBAR]

FACTS ABOUT HEMP

Hemp and marijuana are both derived from the cannabis plant. Hemp is grown 
for industrial use, while marijuana is grown for recreational and medicinal 
use. Marijuana has much higher levels of the hallucinogenic THC 
(tetrahydrocannabinol).

Hemp is grown around the world, but it is illegal to produce in the United 
States. Recently, the Drug Enforcement Administration also clarified a 
long-standing ban on hemp products. The ban, enforcement of which has been 
postponed, applies only to ingestible hemp products such as potato chips 
and candy bars made with hemp oil. Arguments against the ban will begin 
Monday in federal appeals court in San Francisco.

Several states, including Montana, North Dakota and Kentucky, have passed 
laws allowing farmers to grow hemp, but federal regulations supersede those 
laws. Hemp legalization in Colorado has failed.
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MAP posted-by: Alex