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>From: "Peter McWilliams" <peter@mcwilliams.com>
>Subject: Birds do it...
>Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 12:23:48 -0800
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>Pubdate: Nov.-Dec. 1999
>Source: Audubon Magazine
>Contact: editor@audubon.org
>Copyright: (c) 1999 National Audubon Society
>Website: http://www.audubon.com
>Author: Ted Williams
>
>LEGALIZE IT!
>
>Cannabis sativa is a low-maintenance crop that can be used in paper,
>clothing, rope-even cars. So why, when it's grown in 32 other countries, is
>hemp still illegal in the United States?
>
>I confess that i am a user of hemp. for example, i have just quaffed a
>Hempen Ale and a Hempen Gold beer, shipped to me by Frederick Brewing
>Company of Frederick, Maryland. Both beverages are brewed with the seeds of
>hemp-Cannabis sativa-a plant native to central Asia and grown all over the
>world as various selected strains, some of which are known as marijuana.
>I'm feeling a faint buzz, but only from the alcohol.
>
>Neither brew contains any of the narcotic delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol
>(THC), which makes pot so popular. In fact, recent tests by the Pentagon
>invalidate what it calls the "Hempen Ale defense" by showing the ale to be
>THC-free. So military personnel can no longer claim it as the source of the
>THC that shows up in their urine. But some hemp products do contain trace
>amounts of THC-as intoxicating as, say, the opiates you get from a
>poppy-seed bagel-so to make sure it knows where the THC is coming from, the
>Air Force has banned all foods and beverages made with hemp. Somehow the
>news didn't make it to the Commander in Chief, who, less than a month
>later, on February 15, 1999, allowed Hempen Gold to be served on Air Force
>One. According to one reporter, the President "tasted but didn't swallow."
>
>After I finished ingesting hemp I slathered it on my hair-in the form of a
>shampoo made with hempseed oil, which, according to its producer, Alterna
>Applied Research Laboratories of Beverly Hills, California, restores dry
>and damaged (but unfortunately not missing) hair. While perky hair is not
>something I normally seek, the hair I have left definitely feels that way.
>
>What I have just indulged in-at least according to Glenn Levant, the
>nation's best-funded and most heeded marijuana educator-is an
>internal-external marijuana orgy. Levant is president and founder of Drug
>Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), a 16-year-old program taught by local
>police in 75 percent of the nation's schools. "Hemp is marijuana," he
>informed me, ending the interview when I cited sources that prove
>otherwise. Last year Levant was outraged to see Alterna's hemp-leaf logo on
>shampoo ads at bus stops around southern California, and he mounted a
>successful crusade to get them removed. "My big objection is that public
>property was being used to promote an illegal substance," he told the Los
>Angeles Times. "The shampoo is a subterfuge to promote marijuana." On July
>1, 1999, he paid Alterna an undisclosed sum to settle a lawsuit it had
>filed against him for making what it called "false and malicious public
>comments" about its product and motives.
>
>Hemp and marijuana can cross-pollinate, but if one is the other, then a
>Pekinese is a Doberman pinscher. Plant a hemp seed, and no substance or
>force on earth can turn it into marijuana. If you smoke hemp, it will give
>you only a headache. This is because it doesn't contain enough THC to
>affect your brain. And, unlike marijuana, it is high in cannabidiol-an
>antipsychoactive compound that inhibits THC. Because of this, says David
>West, a plant breeder hired by the University of Hawaii to grow an
>experimental plot of hemp under special permit from the Drug Enforcement
>Administration (DEA), hemp "could be called antimarijuana."
>
>Hemp products are not illegal. In fact, the U.S. hemp-products industry
>does about $125 million in retail sales a year. Not only is hemp harmless,
>it has enormous versatility. Added to worthless fibers that are currently
>burned-such as straw from oats, rice, and wheat-hemp can produce superb
>paper and construction materials lighter and stronger than lumber. American
>cropland, 85 percent of which is stuck on a soil-depleting,
>chemical-dependent treadmill of corn, wheat, and soybean production, could
>be released and renewed if hemp were used as a rotation crop. In England
>and Hungary, hemp grown in rotation with wheat hiked the wheat harvest 20
>percent. Hemp seeds, better tasting and more digestible than soy, could be
>rendered into hundreds of foods, thereby taking pressure off America's
>bottomland hardwood forests, which are being replaced with soybean
>plantations.
>
>Hemp fibers can be woven into cloth more durable than and as comfortable as
>cotton. Cotton is much more difficult to grow; it's addicted to chemical
>elixirs, requiring massive fixes of artificial fertilizers, insecticides,
>and herbicides. And when cotton ripens, the leaves have to be knocked off
>with defoliants before the bolls can be harvested. Hemp, which outcompetes
>weeds, requires no herbicides. In one study, hemp grown in rotation with
>soybeans knocked down cyst nematodes by more than half.
>
>Hemp paper is naturally bright, but wood-based paper pulp turns brown
>during the cooking process. The pulp is then bleached with chlorine, which,
>when released into the environment, produces dioxin and other nasty
>poisons. And if American farmers were allowed to grow hemp-which produces
>twice as much fiber per acre as an average forest-the nation could reduce
>nonsustainable logging, and the carbon tied up in the living timber would
>remain there instead of contributing to global warming.
>
>Practically anything we make from a polluting, nonrenewable hydrocarbon
>like oil or coal can be made from a relatively clean, renewable
>carbohydrate like hemp. Henry Ford used to preach this in the 1940s. "Why
>use up the forests, which were centuries in the making, and the mines,
>which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forests
>and mineral products in the annual growth of the fields?" he asked. Ford,
>who had a vision of "growing automobiles from the soil," even produced a
>demonstration model with body parts partially made with hemp.
>
>So it should come as no surprise that hemp has enormous appeal to those
>committed to the protection and restoration of the planet. Three years ago
>Andy Kerr (called Oregon's "leading environmentalist" by the New York City
>newspaper The Village Voice) helped set up the North American Industrial
>Hemp Council (NAIHC)-an alliance of farmers, scientists, industrialists,
>and environmentalists whose mission is the decriminalization of hemp.
>Members who even associate with advocates of marijuana decriminalization
>are summarily dismissed. And no one can call the directors potheads: Two
>are consultants for International Paper; one heads the board of a research
>corporation chartered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and the chair
>is in charge of agricultural development and diversification for the state
>of Wisconsin.
>
>When Kerr was running the Oregon Natural Resources Council and agitating
>for old-growth forests, the loggers kept getting in his face and shouting:
>"What are you going to wipe your ass with?" "What they meant," he says a
>bit more delicately, "was: 'With what are you going to wipe your ass?' It's
>a legitimate question. So I kept searching for alternatives to wood and
>kept coming back to hemp. 'God,' I said, 'because of its association with
>marijuana, we don't need this. There's got to be a better fiber.' Well,
>there isn't."
>
>This kind of hemp advocacy isn't all that new. Our first hemp law, enacted
>in Virginia, made it illegal for farmers not to grow the stuff. That was in
>1619. The same law took effect in Massachusetts in 1631, Connecticut in
>1632, and the Chesapeake Colonies in the mid-1700s, at which time hemp was
>the world's leading crop. The Declaration of Independence and the
>Constitution were drafted on hempen paper. During the Revolutionary War,
>Old Ironsides, our most formidable battleship, carried 60 tons of hempen
>sail and rope. Betsy Ross made the first American flag out of hempen
>"canvas," a word derived from cannabis. "Make the most of hempseed and sow
>it everywhere," declared George Washington in 1794.
>
>Never has there been a federal statute outlawing the cultivation of hemp,
>just the DEA's insistence that hemp is an illegal drug. Law-enforcement
>officials in other countries harbor no such fantasies. Hemp is lawfully
>grown in 32 nations, and in the European Union it's a subsidized crop. It
>is not practical to distill hemp's THC or separate it from the cannabidiol
>that neutralizes it, but Americans are so afraid of hemp that they even
>want to prevent people from wearing it. Consider the case of Angela
>Guilford, who sells hempen products in Hoover, Alabama, and who aroused the
>suspicions of the community by carrying Grateful Dead memorabilia. On June
>24, 1997, when she was eight months pregnant, police raided her shop,
>seizing 168 items and charging her and her husband, Jeff Russell, with
>"felony marijuana trafficking." Facing mandatory minimum jail terms of
>three years, the couple spent a stressful, suspenseful summer. But in late
>September charges were dropped when lab work failed to turn up THC in any
>of the shirts, bags, or jewelry.
>
>Why such paranoia? There's no smoking bong, but hemp may be the victim of a
>conspiracy by special interests that stood to lose billions in the 1930s,
>when hemp-fiber-stripping machines came on line. Among the suspects:
>DuPont, which had just patented a process for making plastics from oil and
>a more efficient process for making paper; Hearst newspapers, which owned
>vast timberlands; and Andrew Mellon, an oil and timber baron as well as
>partner and president of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, DuPont's chief
>financial backer.
>
>In 1930, nine years after President Warren Harding made him treasury
>secretary, Mellon created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (the DEA's
>precursor) and ensconced Harry Anslinger, the future husband of his niece,
>as its commissioner. Anslinger charged out after hemp, which he and the
>Hearst papers defined as a drug, using it interchangeably with the more
>sinister and less familiar term marihuana (later spelled "marijuana").
>Anslinger and Hearst whipped each other, the public, and Congress to
>prohibitionist frenzy. Anslinger testified before the U.S. Senate that no
>less an authority than Homer had revealed that the plant "made men forget
>their homes and turned them into swine" and that a single joint could
>induce "homicidal mania" sufficient to cause a man "probably to kill his
>brother." The Hearst papers claimed that under the influence of marihuana,
>"Negroes" transmogrified into crazed animals, playing anti-white,
>"voodoo-satanic" music (jazz) and committing such crimes as stepping on
>white men's shadows. The hype created an insatiable market for low-budget
>movies like Marihuana: Weed With Roots in Hell, posters for which featured
>a rendering of a man thrusting a hypodermic needle into a woman in a
>low-cut dress and which promised: "Weird orgies. Daring drug expose!
>Horror. Shame. Despair. Wild Parties. Unleashed Passions! Lust. Crime.
>Hate. Misery."
>
>Emerging from the hoopla was the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which made no
>chemical distinction between hemp and marijuana. It was all "cannabis," but
>the smokeable parts-the leaves and flowers-were taxed at $100 an ounce,
>effectively outlawing them. Had mari-juana been the real target, Anslinger
>would have dispatched his agents to the border of New Mexico, where the
>drug was coming in. Instead, he unleashed them on the newly expanded hemp
>fields of Minnesota and Illinois, swaddling farmers in red tape, busting
>them if a leaf remained on a stalk, running them out of business.
>
>Only five years later hemp farmers got a reprieve when Japan seized the
>Philippines, cutting off America's supply of "Manila hemp"-not true hemp
>but an excellent fiber for rope, boots, uniforms, and parachute cording.
>Now the Feds executed a crisp about-face, encouraging Americans to be
>patriotic and grow "hemp." (No longer did they call it "marijuana, except
>on the "Producer of Marijuana" permits they issued farmers.) The Department
>of Agriculture even produced a promotional film entitled Hemp for Victory,
>featuring footage of workers harvesting pre-Anslinger hemp in Kentucky to a
>maudlin rendition of My Old Kentucky Home. With no change in federal law,
>some 400,000 acres were planted to hemp, the stalks of which were processed
>by 42 hemp mills built by the War Hemp Industries Corporation. After the
>war, with the synthetic-fiber industry booming, Anslinger resumed his
>witch-hunt virtually unopposed.
>
>Now he dropped the allegation that hemp/marijuana inspired violent crimes
>and asserted instead that it left its victims so entranced and pacifistic
>that they could be easily converted to communism. America's last hemp field
>was planted in Wisconsin in 1957.
>
>More recently the problem has been a succession of rigid, frontal-assault
>"drug czars," such as General Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House
>Office of National Drug Control Policy, who appears to have learned
>everything he knows about hemp from Anslinger. Two years ago, when the
>Forest Service's lab in Madison, Wisconsin, published a marketing analysis
>demonstrating not only that hemp could be profitable for farmers but also
>that the state's entire demand for chlorine-bleached, wood-based writing
>paper could be met with hemp, the government had it withdrawn. The crusade
>to bring hemp back, McCaffrey charges, is "a thinly disguised attempt to
>legalize the production of pot." Moreover, "legalizing hemp production
>would send a confusing message to our youth concerning marijuana." But the
>only confusing messages about hemp issue from McCaffrey's office, the DEA,
>and their private-sector drug-war constituency.
>
>Because McCaffrey is the voice of the Clinton administration, the DEA
>parrots him. The effort to decriminalize hemp is "no more than a shallow
>ruse being advanced by those who seek to legalize marijuana," proclaims
>Philip Perry, special agent in charge of the DEA's Rocky Mountain Division.
>The DEA and the drug czar maintain that American law-enforcement agents
>can't tell the difference between marijuana and hemp; but the Mounties, the
>Gendarmes, the Bobbies, and the police of 29 other nations have no trouble
>at all. A Keystone Cop, boots in the air and helmet in the mud, could tell
>the difference. Hemp, grown for stalks, is the spindly stuff that towers
>over your head; marijuana, grown for flowers, is the bushy stuff down below
>your knees. The drug czar and the DEA claim that pot producers will use
>hemp fields to hide their illicit crops; but if they do, their marijuana
>will be ruined. Cannabis is one of the most prolific pollen producers of
>all cultivated plants, and if the high-THC variety is planted within seven
>and a half miles of a hemp field, the hemp pollen will render the next
>generation of marijuana less potent. "Hemp is nature's own
>marijuana-eradication system," declares James Woolsey, director of the CIA
>under President George Bush and now a lobbyist for the NAIHC.
>
>If the war on drugs were really about reducing supply, drug controllers
>would be promoting hemp. But the war has taken on a life of its own, become
>an industry unto itself. For example, Congress gives the DEA half a billion
>dollars a year to eradicate marijuana. But according to the DEA's own
>figures, 98 percent of the "marijuana" eradicated by its agents or the
>police departments and National Guard units it hires is hemp-the harmless,
>feral stuff that escaped during Hemp for Victory days. "Ditchweed," it's
>called. That's the "marijuana" you see getting burned in all the photos. If
>you're caught with ditchweed, you're in big trouble, as Vernon McElroy, 50,
>discovered in 1991 when he got convicted for possessing 10.9 pounds that he
>says a friend had picked and given him as a joke. Now he's doing life
>without parole at the overcrowded maximum-security penitentiary in
>Springville, Alabama. In Oklahoma, ditchweed is even sprayed with
>herbicides from helicopters. And last year Congress authorized $23 million
>for research into a soil-borne fungus that attacks and kills marijuana,
>poppy, and coca plants. Mike DeWine (R-OH) calls it a "silver bullet" in
>the war on drugs, but David Struhs, secretary of the Florida Department of
>Environmental Protection, calls it a threat to the "natural environment."
>
>The only parties affected by ditchweed eradication are future hemp farmers
>and birds. Ditchweed, warns hemp researcher David West, "represents the
>only germ plasm remaining from the hemp bred over decades in this country
>to achieve high yields and other important performance characteristics."
>And while hemp is alien to the continent, wild birds have come to depend on
>it as a major food source. So relished is hempseed by birds, in fact, that
>it is sterilized and sold as commercial bird food. As Vermont state
>representative Fred Maslack puts it, the DEA and its pork-addicted drug-war
>contractors "would be better off pulling up goldenrod."
>
>Consider also the self-perpetuation of hemp's facts-be-damned enemy-DARE.
>That DARE is recognized as a failure in reducing drug use among adolescents
>is not a consideration in the high-finance drug-war business. Virtually
>every study ever undertaken reveals that DARE graduates are about as likely
>to abuse drugs as kids who don't go through the program. Such were the
>results of a two-year, $300,000 analysis by the Research Triangle Institute
>of Durham, North Carolina, of eight studies involving 9,500 DARE students
>in 200 schools. The Justice Department had commissioned the analysis, but
>after intense lobbying by DARE, the agency vainly invited the authors to
>"re-examine" their conclusions, then declined to publish the full report,
>claiming it was bowing to "concerns" of peer reviewers. Despite its known
>ineffectiveness, DARE thrives because every year it gets about $212 million
>in government grants and private donations (mostly the latter), which it
>ladles out to ravenous communities. Millions more are donated by businesses
>and police departments directly to local DARE programs.
>
>Anti-hemp brainwashing by DARE works better on parents and school
>bureaucrats than on kids. In 1996 Donna Cockrel invited hemp activist and
>Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson to talk to her fifth-graders in
>Simpsonville, Kentucky. While Harrelson also advocates the legalization of
>medicinal marijuana, he spoke only about hemp's history and potential.
>Immediately Cockrel came under attack by the local DARE officer, who
>sounded the alarm to school officials and television audiences, proclaiming
>that hemp and marijuana were the same thing. Parents were apoplectic.
>Cockrel-with past awards for excellence and called a "dynamo" by The New
>York Times-was given an unsatisfactory performance report, investigated by
>the state professional standards board (which dismissed the complaint),
>then fired. "I believe that all children should say no to drugs," she says.
>"But I want them to say yes to the truth."
>
>Lately america's war on hemp seems to be flagging under a counterattack of
>reason. Legislation to effect or encourage hemp's declassification as an
>illegal drug has been introduced or attempted in Colorado, Hawaii, Iowa,
>Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North
>Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. Last March, under growing
>political pressure, McCaffrey made the first conciliatory noise to The New
>York Times about maybe "working" with hemp advocates. But on August 9 the
>DEA seized a Kenex trailer bringing in 40,000 pounds of hemp birdseed from
>Canada, alleging it was a "Schedule 1 narcotic." Seventeen other loads of
>hemp products, including granola bars and horse bedding, were recalled.
>After Kenex was threatened with a $500,000 fine, president Jean Laprise
>commented: "It seems the DEA could be spending drug-war money in better
>ways than chasing after birdseed and horse bedding." Now McCaffrey is
>saying hemp can't be grown economically.
>
>It struck me as odd that the responsibilities of the drug czar have been
>extended to protecting American agriculture from its own bad business
>decisions, so I contacted a farmer, one David Monson, who works 1,050 acres
>in Osnabrock, North Dakota, and who says he and his neighbors aren't even
>breaking even on corn, wheat, and soybeans. "All the fungicides,
>herbicides, and insecticides we have to use are pushing the cost out of
>sight," he told me. "The bottom line is that we need to find some
>alternative crops that we can make money on." Monson has been forced to
>work at other jobs-such as insurance underwriter and state representative,
>in which capacity he introduced the nation's first bill to decriminalize
>the cultivation of hemp, signed by the governor last April.
>
>Monson, a Republican, also serves as superintendent of schools for the
>nearby community of Edinburg. Drug abuse isn't much of a problem in
>northern North Dakota, but Monson works to discourage what little there may
>be by arranging seminars for students and training for teachers. And
>despite the drug czar's and the DEA's pronouncements, the people of North
>Dakota somehow remain unconvinced that he's trying to legalize pot.
>
>While hemp could make things lots easier for this tired old planet and the
>farmers who till its soil, no one in North Dakota will be growing it
>anytime soon, because anyone in that state or elsewhere who plants the
>seeds will get busted by the DEA. Monson doesn't think that's fair,
>especially when hemp farmers 20 miles away in Manitoba are legally making
>$250 an acre. But until the Feds recognize hemp for what it is (a versatile
>crop) instead of what it isn't (an illegal drug), McCaffrey will have it
>right when he warns that it's not economical to grow.
>
>Ted Williams has never smoked hemp.
>
>Factoid: A crop of hemp, one study shows, could bring a return of $319 per
>acre, compared with $135 for white corn.
>
>
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