Pubdate: Mon, 28 Aug 2006
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2006 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Patricia Leigh Brown
Cited: Hemp Industries Association http://www.thehia.org
Cited: Vote Hemp http://www.votehemp.com
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/industrial+hemp

CALIFORNIA SEEKS TO CLEAR HEMP OF A BAD NAME

STRATFORD, Calif. -- Charles Meyer's politics are as steady and 
unswerving as the rows of pima cotton on his Central Valley farm. 
With his work-shirt blue eyes and flinty Clint Eastwood demeanor, he 
is staunchly in favor of the war in Iraq, against gun control and 
believes people unwilling to recite the Pledge of Allegiance should 
be kicked out of America, and fast.

But what gets him excited is the crop he sees as a potential windfall 
for California farmers: industrial hemp, or Cannabis sativa. The 
rapidly growing plant with a seemingly infinite variety of uses is 
against federal law to grow because of its association with its evil 
twin, marijuana.

"Industrial hemp is a wholesome product," said Mr. Meyer, 65, who 
says he has never worn tie-dye and professes a deep disdain for "dope."

"The fact we're not growing it is asinine," Mr. Meyer said.

Things could change if a measure passed by legislators in Sacramento 
and now on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk becomes law. [The bill 
reached Mr. Schwarzenegger last week; he has 30 days to sign or veto it.]

Seven states have passed bills supporting the farming of industrial 
hemp; their strategy has been to try to get permission from the Drug 
Enforcement Administration to proceed.

But California is the first state that would directly challenge the 
federal ban, arguing that it does not need a D.E.A. permit, echoing 
the state's longstanding fight with the federal authorities over its 
legalization of medicinal marijuana. The hemp bill would require 
farmers who grow it to undergo crop testing to ensure their variety 
of cannabis is nonhallucinogenic; its authors say it has been 
carefully worded to avoid conflicting with the federal Controlled 
Substances Act.

But those efforts have not satisfied federal and state drug 
enforcement authorities, who argue that fields of industrial hemp 
would only serve as hiding places for illicit cannabis. The 
California Narcotic Officers Association opposes the bill, and a 
spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 
Washington said the measure was unworkable.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican running for re-election, has been 
mum on his intentions, with the political calculus of hemp in 
California difficult to decipher. The bill was the handiwork of two 
very different lawmakers, Assemblyman Mark Leno, a San Francisco 
Democrat best known for attempting to legalize same-sex marriage, and 
Assemblyman Charles S. DeVore, an Orange County Republican who worked 
in the Pentagon as a Reagan-era political appointee.

Their bipartisan communion underscores a deeper shift in hemp culture 
that has evolved in recent years, from ragtag hempsters whose love of 
plants with seven leaves ran mostly to marijuana, to today's savvy 
coalition of organic farmers and health-food entrepreneurs working to 
distance themselves from the drug.

Hundreds of hemp products, including energy bars and cold-pressed 
hemp oil, are made in California, giving the banned plant a 
capitalist aura. But manufacturers must import the raw material, 
mostly from Canada, where hemp cultivation was legalized in 1998.

The new hemp entrepreneurs regard it as a sustainable crop, said John 
Roulac, 47, a former campaigner against clear-cutting and a backyard 
composter before founding Nutiva, a growing California hemp-foods 
company. "They want to lump together all things cannabis," said David 
Bronner, 33, whose family's squeeze-bottle Dr. Bronners Magic Soaps, 
based in Escondido, Calif., are made with hemp oil. "You don't 
associate a poppy seed bagel with opium."

The differences between hemp and its mind-altering cousin, however, 
can be horticulturally challenging to grasp. The main one is that the 
epidermal glands of marijuana secrete a resin of euphoria-inducing 
delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or T.H.C., a substance all but lacking 
in industrial hemp.

Ernest Small, a Canadian researcher who co-wrote a major hemp study 
in 2002 for Purdue University, compared the genetic differences to 
those that separate racehorses from plow horses. Evolution, Mr. Small 
said, has almost completely bred T.H.C. out of industrial hemp, which 
by law must have a concentration of no more than three-tenths of 1 percent.

To its supporters, industrial hemp is utopia in a crop. Prized not 
only for its healthful seeds and oils, rich in omega-3 and -6 fatty 
acids, but also its fast, bamboo-like growth that shades out weeds, 
without pesticides.

"Simply put, you create a jungle in one year," said John LaBoyteaux, 
who testified in Sacramento on behalf of the California Certified 
Organic Farmers association. "There's a growing market out there, and 
we can't tap it."

The bill before Governor Schwarzenegger is the latest installment in 
a hemp debate that reached its height in 2004, when the Ninth Circuit 
Court of Appeals said that federal antidrug laws did not apply to the 
manufacturing or consumption of industrial hemp. The court ruled that 
decades earlier, Congress had exempted from marijuana-control laws 
the stalks, fibers, oils and seeds of industrial hemp, and that the 
government had no right to ban hemp products.

That opened the floodgates for Patagonia hemp jeans and the Merry 
Hempsters Zit Zapper (with hemp oil).

Patrick D. Goggin, a lawyer for the Hemp Industries Association and 
Vote Hemp, said there would probably be legal snarls to work out with 
the California legislation, assuming it is enacted, so that farmers 
would not be placing their property in jeopardy if they chose to grow 
industrial hemp. But if the federal government clamps down, Mr. 
Goggin said, "we're prepared to raise the issue in court."

"Were trying to get an arcane vision of the law contemporized," he added.

Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, 
said the agency would not speculate about pending legislation.

The bill's adherents point to hemp's hallowed niche in American 
history. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson cultivated hemp 
(neither effort was profitable). Colonists' boats sailed the Atlantic 
with hempen sails. Old Ironsides carried 60 tons of hempen sail and 
rope. The word "canvas," in fact, is derived from cannabis, a 
high-tensile fiber naturally resistant to decay.

Hemp flourished as an American crop from the end of the Civil War 
until the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act ended production. During World War 
II, when Japan seized the Philippines and cut off supplies of Manila 
hemp, the crop got a brief reprieve in the United States, where 
farmers were encouraged to grow "Hemp for Victory," for boots, 
parachute cording and the like. But contrary to lore, most such hemp 
was never harvested.

Today, China controls about 40 percent of the world's hemp fiber, and 
its ability to flood the market "could result in price fluctuations 
the American farmer would have to weather," said Valerie Vantreese, 
an agricultural economist in Lexington, Ky. (Kentucky was once the 
leading hemp-producing state).

Hemp is grown legally in about 30 countries, including many in the 
European Union, where it is mixed with lime to make plaster and as a 
"biocomposite" in the interior panels of Mercedes-Benzes.

In the United States, the chief argument against hemp has been made 
by drug-control officials, who are concerned that vast acreages could 
be used to conceal clandestine marijuana, which they say would be 
impossible to detect.

"California is a great climate to grow pot in, and no one from law 
enforcement is going through the fields to do a chemical analysis of 
different plants," said Thomas A. Riley, a spokesman for the Office 
of National Drug Control Policy in Washington.

To some people intimate with the nuances of marijuana, however, the 
idea of hiding marijuana in a hemp field, where the plants would 
cross-pollinate, provokes amusement.

"It would be the end of outdoors marijuana," said Jack Heber, 67, a 
marijuana historian and author who runs a group called Help End 
Marijuana Prohibition, or HEMP. "If it gets mixed with that crop, 
it's a disaster."

In North Dakota, the state agricultural commissioner, Roger Johnson, 
has proposed allowing hemp farming, and has been working with federal 
drug regulators on stringent regulations that would include 
fingerprinting farmers and requiring G.P.S. coordinates of hemp fields.

"We've done our level best to convince them we're not a bunch of 
wackos," Mr. Johnson said.

Fifteen years ago, he noted, there was little market for canola, 
which is now a major crop produced for its cooking oil. He sees hemp 
in a similar vein and dismisses the fears that it would lead to criminality.

"It would take a joint the size of a telephone pole to have an 
impact," he said.

But up north in Garberville, the Central Valley of marijuana, the 
lines between hemp and marijuana are often a hazy blur, as they are 
at a store called the Hemp Connection, where hemp hats and yoga 
clothing are sold alongside manuals on pot botany and Stoneware 
baking pans ("makes six groovy brownies per pan").

The proprietor, Marie Mills, who said she once crafted paper from 
marijuana stalks, remains committed to cannabis in all its guises.

"We want to educate people and take away the stigma," Ms. Mills said. 
"We want hemp without harassment." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake