Pubdate: Thu, 26 Mar 2009
Source: AlterNet (US Web)
Copyright: 2009 Independent Media Institute
Website: http://www.alternet.org/
Author: Dara Colwell
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hemp.htm (Hemp)

HEMP IS NOT POT: IT'S THE ECONOMIC STIMULUS AND GREEN JOBS SOLUTION WE NEED

We can make over 25,000 things with it. Farmers love it.
Environmentalists love it. You can't get high from it. So why is it
still illegal?

While Uncle Sam's scramble for new revenue sources has recently kicked
up the marijuana debate -- to legalize and tax, or not? --hemp's
feasibility as a stimulus plan has received less airtime.

But with a North American market that exceeds $300 million in annual
retail sales and continued rising demand, industrial hemp could
generate thousands of sustainable new jobs, helping America to get
back on track.

"We're in the midst of a dark economic transition, but I believe hemp
is an important facet and has tremendous economic potential," says
Patrick Goggin, a board member on the California Council for Vote
Hemp, the nation's leading industrial hemp-farming advocacy group.
"Economically and environmentally, industrial hemp is an important
part of the sustainability pie."

With 25,000 known applications from paper, clothing and food products
- -- which, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal this
January, is the fastest growing new food category in North America --
to construction and automotive materials, hemp could be just the crop
to jump-start America's green economy.

But growing hemp remains illegal in the U.S. The Drug Enforcement
Administration has lumped the low-THC plant together with its
psychoactive cousin, marijuana, making America the planet's only
industrialized nation to ban hemp production. We can import it from
Canada, which legalized it in 1997. But we can't grow it.

"It's a missed opportunity," says Goggin, who campaigned for
California farmers to grow industrial hemp two years ago, although the
bill was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, citing the measure
conflicted with federal law.

Considering California's position as an agricultural giant --
agriculture nets $36.6 billion dollars a year, according to the
California Department of Food and Agriculture -- Goggin's assessment
is an understatement. Especially if extended nationwide.

"Jobs require capital investment, which isn't easy to come by at the
moment, and we need hemp-processing facilities, because the
infrastructure here went to seed. But this is a profitable crop, and
the California farming community supports it."

Just how profitable? According to Chris Conrad, a respected authority
on cannabis and industrial hemp and who authored Hemp for Health and
Hemp, Lifeline to the Future, the industry would be regionally
sustainable, reviving the local economy wherever it was grown.

"Hemp will create jobs in some of the hardest-hit sectors of the
country -- rural agriculture, equipment manufacturing, transportable
processing equipment and crews -- and the products could serve and
develop the same community where the hemp is farmed: building
ecological new homes, producing value-added and finished products,
marketing and so forth," he writes in an e-mail from Amsterdam, where
he is doing research. "Add to that all the secondary jobs --
restaurants, health care, food products, community-support networks,
schools, etc., that will serve the workers. The Midwestern U.S. and
the more remote parts of California and other states would see a surge
of income, growth, jobs and consumer goods."

In America, industrial hemp has long been associated with marijuana,
although the plants are different breeds of Cannabis sativa, just as
poodles and Irish setters are different breeds of dog.

While hemp contains minute levels of THC, the psychoactive ingredient
in marijuana (compare 0.3 percent or less in Canadian industrial hemp
versus 3-20 percent for medical marijuana), to get high you'd have to
smoke a joint the size of a telephone pole.

Still, the historical hysteria caused by federal anti-marijuana
campaigns of the 1930s, which warned that marijuana caused insanity,
lust, addiction, violence and crime, have had a long-term impact on
its distant relative.

Doomed by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which in effect criminalized
cannabis and levied high taxes on medical marijuana and industrial
hemp, hemp cultivation wasn't technically disallowed.

However, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the DEA's predecessor, said
its agents couldn't differentiate between industrial hemp and
marijuana, a stance the DEA maintains today, so fewer farmers were
willing to grow it. The exception came during World War II, when the
armed forces experienced a severe fiber shortage and the government
launched an aggressive campaign to grow hemp.

But after the war, hemp production faded away, and the last legal crop
was harvested in 1957. Marijuana's propaganda-fuelled history, one
filled with lurid stories, one-sided information, slander and
corporate profiteerism, is too lengthy to address here, but hemp has
never managed to remain unscathed.

Considering today's economic crisis and the combined threats of peak
oil and global warming, there is increasing pressure to move toward
sustainable resources before everything goes up in smoke. If there was
any time to revisit hemp, it's now.

"Industrial hemp is the best gift a farmer could have. It's the ideal
alternative crop," says Gale Glenn, on the board of the North American
Industrial Hemp Council. Glenn, now retired, owned and managed a
300-acre Kentucky farm producing burley tobacco, and she immediately
launches into hemp's benefits: It's environmentally friendly,
requiring no pesticides or herbicides, it's the perfect rotation crop
because it detoxifies and regenerates the soil, and it's low labor.

"You just plant the seed, close the farm gate and four months later,
cut it and bale it," she says.

And there's more. As a food, hemp is rich in essential omega-3 fatty
acids; the plant's cellulose level, roughly three times that of wood,
creates paper that yields four times as much pulp as trees; hemp is an
ideal raw material for plant-based plastics, used to make everything
from diapers to dashboards.

In fact, Germany's DaimlerChrysler Corp. has equipped its
Mercedes-Benz C-class vehicles with natural-fiber-reinforced
materials, including hemp, for years. Even Henry Ford himself
manufactured a car from hemp-based plastic in 1941, archival footage
of which can be found on YouTube, and the car ran on clean-burning
hemp-based ethanol fuel.

This leads to the most compelling argument for hemp: fuel. Hemp seeds
are ideal for making ethanol, the cleanest-burning liquid
bio-alternative to gasoline, and when grown as an energy crop, hemp
actually offsets carbon emissions because it absorbs more carbon
dioxide than any other plant.

As the world rapidly depletes its reserves of petroleum, America needs
to create a renewable, homegrown energy source to become energy
independent. Luckily, unlike petrol, hemp is renewable, unless we run
out of soil.

"As a farmer, it's frustrating not being able to grow this incredible
crop," says Glenn. But if Glenn did try to grow it, the American
government would consider her a felon guilty of trafficking, and she
would face a fine of up to $4 million and a prison sentence of 5 to 40
years. Because no matter how low its THC content, hemp is still
considered a Schedule I substance, grouped alongside heroin.

It's exactly this war-on-drugs logic that has kept serious discussion
of hemp off the table.

"I've met with senators over the last 13 years, and I've been to the
USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) four times, and I'm
always amazed by what they tell us -- that industrial hemp is by far
one of the most superior fibers known to man, but since it's a green
plant with a five-point leaf, you'll never grow it in America," says
Bud Sholts chairman of the the North American Industrial Hemp Council
and former economist for Wisconsin's State Department of
Agriculture.

Sholts' research into sustainable agriculture convinced him of
industrial hemp's value, and he has been lobbying for it ever since.
"We're overlooking something huge."

Luckily, farmers are practical folk whose pragmatism ensures their
survival, and they have championed industrial hemp, which they see as
a potential economic boon, by pushing for it through their state
legislatures, where it has become a bipartisan issue.

To date, 28 states have introduced hemp legislation, including
Arkansas, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Maryland,
North Dakota, New Mexico, Virgina, Vermont and West Virginia. Fifteen
have passed it, and seven have legalized hemp production, according to
Vote Hemp.

Yet in cases like North Dakota, the DEA still insists that federal law
trumps the state's and farmers need a DEA-granted license before
growing. This is exactly what happened to David Monson and Wayne
Hauge, two North Dakota farmers given state permission to grow but who
have been waiting a while for their federal licenses -- in Monson's
case, since 1997.

"Here we are in 2009, and it seems like we're still taking baby steps.
We're a little closer, but I'm not making any predictions," says
Monson, who also happens to be a Republican state representative.

Monson lives only 20 miles from the Canadian border, where fields of
profitable industrial hemp have been growing since 1997, and he
believes it's a simple case of "if they can grow it, why can't we?"

"The profit potential is there. Practically and economically, it makes
sense to raise it," says Monson. "I truly believe as a farmer that
hemp is good for farmers, it's good for the environment and it's good
for state of North Dakota. And for that matter the whole nation."

As the law currently stands, to legalize hemp production, all the DEA
has to do is remove hemp from its Schedule I drug list, a process that
does not require a congressional vote.

Now that the Obama administration has announced an end to medical
marijuana raids, hemp advocates are hopeful the move could open the
door for hemp, because the president voted for a hemp bill while he
was in the Illinois legislature.

The DEA follows the government's lead, and the government, which does
not want to be seen as being soft on drugs, has been notoriously
skittish tackling drug policy reform. If Obama told the DEA to move
forward aggressively and issue all pending research, commercial and
agronomic licenses, farmers like Monson could grow hemp tomorrow.

"Politically, I liken the situation to pulling bricks out of a dam,"
says Vote Hemp's Goggin. "There are now so many leaks, the dam's
getting ready to burst. We're working hard for a shift in policy, but
at the moment, Washington doesn't consider this a top issue."

While industrial-hemp advocates are becoming hopeful that policy
change is in the winds, they caution that the industry still requires
a massive, coordinated effort to develop.

"I'm hesitant overselling hemp and touting it like the magic beans
that will save the economy or the planet," says Tom Murphy, national
outreach coordinator for Vote Hemp. "Industrial hemp is an answer but
not the answer. It has a great deal of potential -- but it doesn't
have any potential if you can't grow it."

Conrad, who believes in American ingenuity to find creative solutions
using hemp, says, "Only the scourge of prohibitionism can see to it
that our economy and environment rot into sewage. It is up to the
good, hard-working and honest people to end cannabis prohibition and
start the process of rebuilding the planet and our global and regional
economies."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin