http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-hemp03jan18,1,1658290.story?coll=la-headlines-magazine

The Demonized Seed

As a Recreational Drug, Industrial Hemp Packs the Same Wallop as Zucchini.
So Why Does the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency Continue to Deny America This
Potent Resource? Call It Reefer Madness.
By Lee Green

Special to The Times

January 18, 2004

On an otherwise
unremarkable day nearly 30 years ago, in a San Fernando Valley head shop, an
ordinary man on LSD had an epiphany. The one thing that could save the world, it
came to him, was hemp.

Thunderbolts come cheap on LSD, but this one
looked good to Jack Herer even after his head cleared. The world needed relief
from its addiction to oil and petrochemicals. From deforestation and
malnutrition. From dirty fuels, sooty air, exhausted soils and pesticides. The
extraordinary hemp plant could solve all those problems. Herer was sure of it.
Thus began his journey as a heralding prophet.

For 12 years, Herer
expanded his knowledge of hemp, burrowing deep into U.S. government archives and
writing about his discoveries in alternative newspapers and magazines. He
self-published "The Emperor Wears No Clothes," an impassioned rant for the
utilitarian virtues of cannabis sativa, the ancient species that gives us both
hemp and marijuana, which are genetically distinct. Experts agree that in
contrast to marijuana, cannabis hemp—or industrial hemp as it is often
called—has no drug characteristics.

Herer's book, quirky but
substantive enough to be taken seriously, inspired thousands and became an
underground classic. The author has issued 16 printings over the years, revising
and updating his material 11 times. Today, Herer is widely credited with
launching the modern hemp movement, a persistent campaign by an eclectic
coalition of environmentalists, legislators, rights activists, farmers,
scientists, entrepreneurs and others to end the maligned plant's banishment and
tap its potential as a natural resource.

Despite the book's over-the-top
exuberance and occasional leaps of syllogistic fancy—or more likely because of
them—it has sold 665,000 copies in seven languages. Or is it 635,000 copies in
eight languages? The prophet isn't sure as he pads across the abused gray carpet
of his two-bedroom Van Nuys apartment, a flower-child domicile to which the
benefits of even the most rudimentary housekeeping remain foreign. Beard
unkempt, hair askew, Herer matches the décor. "How can they make the one thing
that can save the world illegal?" he asks, no less astonished by this paradox
now than he was three decades ago.

Herer's question is essentially the
same one hemp advocates in the U.S. have been asking with mounting consternation
for the past decade. They are asking it now with new urgency in response to the
Drug Enforcement Agency's latest foray against hemp, an attempt since 2001 to
ban all food products containing even a trace of hemp, even though the foods are
not psychoactive. The California-based Hemp Industries Assn. and seven companies
that make or sell hemp products won a reprieve for the industry in June, when
the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the DEA's efforts "procedurally
invalid." But the matter remains in litigation, and the hemp issue continues to
confound policymakers.

California's Legislature passed a bill on behalf
of hemp not long ago that, in its final, watered-down form, could hardly have
been less ambitious. Assembly Bill 388, approved in 2002 by wide margins in both
chambers, merely requested that the University of California assess the
economic opportunities associated with several alternative fiber crops. But
because one of the crops was cannabis hemp, then-Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the
measure, leaving California uncharacteristically behind the curve on a
progressive issue that many other states and nations have embraced in recent
years.

If all or even most of the oft-cited claims for hemp are true,
the substance may know no earthly equal among nontoxic renewable resources. If
only half the claims are true, hemp's potential as a commercial wellspring and a
salve to creeping eco-damage is still immense. At worst it is more useful and
diverse than most agricultural crops. Yet from the 1930s through the 1980s, many
countries, influenced by U.S. policies and persuasion, banished cannabis from
their farmlands. Not just marijuana, but all cannabis—the baby, the bath water,
all of it.

Confronted with declining demand for their tobacco, farmers
in Kentucky, where hemp was the state's largest cash crop until 1915, argue that
commercial hemp could help save their farms. California doesn't face that
particular dilemma but, in theory, hemp agriculture eventually could bestow
innumerable benefits on the state, from tax revenues to healthier farm soils and
reductions in forest logging for wood and paper. Environmentally benign hemp
crops could replace at least some of California's 1 million acres of
water-intensive and chemical-laden cotton.

Since taking root in the
early 1990s, the hemp movement has made great progress around the world.
Unfenced fields of the tall, cane-like plants flourish in Austria, Italy,
Portugal, Ireland—the entire European Union. Great Britain reintroduced the crop
in 1993. Germany legalized it in 1996. Australia followed suit two years later,
as did Canada. Among the world's major industrial democracies, only the United
States still forbids hemp farming. If an American farmer were to fill a field
with this drugless crop, the government would consider him a felon. For selling
his harvest he would be guilty of trafficking and would face a fine of as much
as $4 million and a prison sentence of 10 years to life. Provided, of course, it
is his first offense.

This for a crop as harmless as rutabaga.

Prejudiced by nearly 70 years of government and media propaganda against all
things cannabis, most Americans have no idea that hemp crops once flourished
from Virginia to California. Prized for thousands of years for its fiber, the
plant rode commerce from Asia to Europe in the first millennium and sailed to
the New World in the second. American colonists grew it in the early 1600s. Two
centuries later, hemp was the nation's third-largest agricultural commodity. The
U.S. census of 1850 counted 8,327 hemp plantations, and those were just the
largest ones. California farmers cultivated it at least into the 1930s.

If all this seems hazy to the American mind, it's because cannabis hemp slowly
vanished from our farms and our cultural memory. The abolition of slavery
following the Civil War put hemp at a competitive disadvantage because its
harvest and processing required intensive labor. The industry slowly declined to
the brink of extinction as cotton captured the fiber market, but by the
mid-1930s new machinery could efficiently extract hemp's fibers from its stalk,
and the plant was poised for economic recovery. The February 1938 issue of
Popular Mechanics hailed it as the "New Billion-Dollar Crop," while a concurrent
issue of Mechanical Engineering deemed hemp "The Most Profitable and Desirable
Crop That Can Be Grown."

The trail grows murkier here, but the crucial
element of this buried history lies beyond dispute: In 1935, the U.S.
government—in particular the Bureau of Narcotics (part of the Treasury
Department and a predecessor to the present-day U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency)
and its chief, Harry J. Anslinger—embarked on an inflammatory campaign to
convince the public of the evils of marijuana.

The Hearst newspapers
had acquired a taste for sensationalistic headlines and lurid stories about
Mexicans and "marijuana-crazed Negroes" assaulting, raping and murdering whites.
It was all nonsense, but Anslinger shamelessly parroted these myths and
concocted his own in congressional testimony and in speeches and articles,
branding marijuana the "worst evil of all." In a 1937 magazine piece titled
"Marijuana, the Assassin of Youth," he blamed suicides and "degenerate sex
attacks" on the drug.

"Marijuana is the unknown quantity among
narcotics," he wrote. "No one knows, when he smokes it, whether he will become a
philosopher, a joyous reveler, a mad insensate, or a murderer." Prior to such
calculated misstatements, few Americans had smoked marijuana. Most had never
even heard of it.

The government's motives for its attack on marijuana
remain unclear. Researchers have proffered theories ranging from collusion with
corporations threatened by hemp's commercial potential to moralistic fervor and
bureaucratic thirst for domain once Prohibition ended in 1933. Regardless of
motives, the ensuing stigmatization, red tape, state and federal controls,
punitive taxes and misconceptions about marijuana's nature and its relationship
to hemp doomed any chance that hemp would be resurrected as an agricultural
crop. Fewer and fewer farmers were willing to grow it, and manufacturers sought
other resources for rope, twine, nets, sailcloth, textiles, paint and other
fiber and oil products for which hemp is well suited. The government briefly
reversed course during World War II, launching an aggressive "Hemp for Victory"
campaign that implored U.S. farmers to grow the crop to alleviate wartime
materials shortages. But after the war, hemp again faded into oblivion.

In 1957, a Wisconsin farmer harvested the last legal commercial hemp crop in
America. The government's outright prohibition of the crop, a nonissue until
interest in hemp renewed in the early 1990s, was formalized in 1971 with
implementation of the Controlled Substances Act, the centerpiece of U.S. drug
policy.

Today's reawakened market faces an uphill battle in the U.S.,
not just because source materials can't be grown here but because decades of
enforced hibernation have left the industry light-years behind in technology,
infrastructure, research and development, marketing and public acceptance. Hemp
Industries Assn., a consortium of about 250 importers, manufacturers,
wholesalers and retailers, says that in the past decade the North American
market has gone from virtually nothing to an estimated $200 million. Not bad
under the circumstances, but still a pittance for a plant that could clothe and
house us, build and fuel our cars, enhance our diets and keep the front gate
from squeaking.

Hemp has attracted many passionate advocates over the
years simply because of its relation to the illegal drug. But a glance at hemp's
résumé makes it clear why a mere vegetable could inspire a devout constituency
that transcends the counterculture. Hemp's products, its proponents insist, are
interchangeable with those from timber or petroleum. The fiber volume supplied
by trees that take 30 years to grow can be harvested from hemp just three or
four months after the seeds go into the ground—and on half the land. Hemp
requires no herbicides, little or no pesticide, and it grows faster than almost
any other plant: from seed to 10 feet or taller in just a few months. Unlike
most crops, it actually enriches rather than depletes the soil. As a textile it
has proven stronger than cotton, warmer than linen, comfortable to wear and
durable. As a building material, its extraordinarily long fibers test stronger
than wood or concrete. As a nutrient it contains one of nature's most perfectly
balanced oils, high in protein, richer in vitamin E than soy and possessing all
eight essential fatty acids.

But because hemp contains traces of the
chemical intoxicant known as tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the U.S. government
lists cannabis as a Schedule I drug, a category reserved for the most dangerous
and medically useless drugs. Methamphetamine, PCP and cocaine don't warrant that
classification, but hemp does, right alongside heroin and LSD. The word hemp
doesn't actually appear on the list, but the drug-war establishment,
particularly the instrumental DEA, behaves as though it does by recognizing no
distinction between varieties of cannabis.

The DEA sometimes seems bent
on fomenting confusion. Two years ago, during his brief tenure as head of the
agency, Asa Hutchinson stated that "many Americans do not know that hemp and
marijuana are both parts of the same plant and that hemp cannot be produced
without producing marijuana." One reason many Americans do not know this is
because it's not true. That's like saying beagles and collies are both parts of
the same dog and that beagles cannot be produced without producing
collies.

Unmoved by logic, accepted nomenclature or the realities of
plant genetics, the DEA insists that all cannabis is marijuana. Does the agency
also consider industrial hemp grown legally outside the U.S. to be marijuana?
"Yes, we do," says Frank Sapienza, the agency's chief of drug and chemical
evaluation. Since more than 30 other countries manage to distinguish between
marijuana and industrial hemp and allow their farmers to grow hemp, one wonders
what they know that the U.S. doesn't. "I'm not going to comment on what other
countries do," Sapienza says.

The DEA argues that the revival of hemp
farming in the U.S. will somehow increase the availability, use and public
acceptance of marijuana. Hemp activists dismiss this argument out of hand, as
does one of their most formidable allies, former CIA Director James R. Woolsey.
Hailing from the political right, Woolsey vehemently opposes any loosening of
America's marijuana laws. But in his experience, he says, most people, once they
become informed about hemp, see no justification for America's prohibition
against the crop. "They understand that there's not been any increase in use of
marijuana in, say, Europe or Canada as a result of industrial hemp cultivation.
It's one of those issues in which there are no real substantive arguments on the
other side."

Sapienza points out, as DEA officials often do, that the
agency merely enforces the law. In truth, though, the DEA also interprets the
law, creates exemptions to it and makes judgments that determine how statutory
abstractions translate to on-the-ground realities. A case in point is the
agency's declaration in late 2001 that all edible hemp products—cereals, health
bars, sodas, salad oils and the like, products sold in the U.S. for years—are
illegal. Hundreds of retailers were given a few months to get such items off
their shelves. If a federal court hadn't intervened, a multimillion-dollar
industry would have been wiped out by a DEA decision to reinterpret existing
law. For now, edible hemp products remain legal and commercially available in
the U.S., pending a 9th Circuit court ruling expected sometime this
year.

Despite hemp's stigma, state legislatures in recent years have
been surprisingly bold in their willingness to address the issue. Though Davis
vetoed California's 2002 bill requesting research, in 1999 both the state
Assembly and the California Democratic Party approved unambiguous resolutions
supporting hemp commercialization. Twelve other states have passed similar
resolutions or bills. Since 1997, North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, West
Virginia and Maryland have legalized cultivation, and in 2000, the National
Conference of State Legislatures passed a resolution urging the federal
government to clear the barriers to domestic hemp production. But entrenched
federal opposition renders all these political machinations meaningless beyond
symbolic value.

The DEA, which is within the Justice Department,
justifies its unbending posture on hemp with assertions that legal hemp
agriculture would provide camouflage for illegal pot growers. From the air or at
a distance, the agency says, industrial hemp and marijuana are virtually
indistinguishable.

"The DEA is wrong," says Indiana University
professor emeritus Paul Mahlberg, a plant cell biologist who has studied
cannabis for more than 25 years and is conducting research on 150 different
strains, both hemp and marijuana. "Hemp plants are tall, 8 to 20 feet. Marijuana
plants in the field are shorter." And cultivated hemp grows a slender, nearly
leafless lower stem, whereas marijuana strains are bred to be "Christmas
tree-like in appearance," with abundant leaves, glands and flowers in which are
stored the intoxicating THC.

Marijuana's bushiness requires far more
space per plant, says John Roulac, a compost expert and owner of the Sebastopol,
Calif., health-food company Nutiva, which imports sterilized hemp seed from
Canada for nutrition bars. From the ground or the air, a hemp crop looks
significantly denser than a marijuana crop. "In a square yard, you might grow
one or two marijuana plants, whereas with hemp you might have 100 plants,"
Roulac says.

The argument about physical appearance should be a
nonissue, hemp advocates say, given that the last place a marijuana grower would
want to locate his drug crop is in or near a hemp field. The consensus among
cannabis experts, supported by the logic of plant genetics and field studies,
is that cross-pollination would sabotage the pot grower's efforts, causing his
next generation of marijuana to be only half as potent. This genetic convenience
delights hard-line anti-marijuana types such as Woolsey, the former CIA chief.
He was skeptical about pro-hemp arguments when he first heard them. "But then I
got into the science of it a bit, and it was quite clear to me that not only is
[hemp cultivation] a good idea, it's a major headache for marijuana [growers],"
he says with an impish laugh. If it were up to Woolsey, tall, lush fields of
industrial hemp would be greening America, filling the sky with airborne pollen
and frustrating marijuana growers everywhere.

The DEA flatly rejects the
idea that a hemp field would degrade any marijuana in the vicinity. A
spokeswoman for the agency recently maintained that "it cannot be said with any
level of certainty that a cannabis plant of relatively low THC content will
necessarily reduce the THC content of other plants grown in close
proximity."

Hemp may be absurdly intertwined with marijuana, but the DEA
could ease restrictions on hemp simply by removing marijuana from its list of
most dangerous drugs. That may sound radical to a public conditioned to believe
marijuana is as dangerous as heroin, but Mitch Earleywine, a drug addiction
expert and associate professor of clinical psychology at USC, doesn't think so.
In reviewing about 500 marijuana studies for his recent book "Understanding
Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence," Earleywine found little or no
scientific evidence for any of the most prominent allegations against the drug,
least of all that it causes violent or aggressive behavior, decreases motivation
or acts as a gateway to harder drugs. It is addictive, he says, but "it's
nowhere near the caliber of, say, heroin, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, any of
those drugs." Should it be a Schedule I controlled substance? "In all honesty,
the idea that it has to be scheduled at all might be up for question," he
says."Americans are just too freaked out about
[marijuana]."

One of the most persistent charges
against the hemp lobby is that it's really just a marijuana movement in
disguise.

"Let's not play dumb here," says America's reigning drug czar,
John P. Walters of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "It
is no coincidence that proponents of marijuana have invested a great deal of
time and money in an effort to expand hemp cultivation. They do this not, one
presumes, from any special interest in industrial fiber resources, but from an
earnest belief that more widespread domestic hemp cultivation will make the
cultivation and distribution of marijuana easier, and that a legal hemp industry
would frustrate law enforcement efforts against marijuana trafficking."

Unquestionably, the hemp and marijuana crowds overlap. Most pro-marijuana people
think American farmers should be able to grow hemp, and many in the hemp
movement condemn America's war on drugs and its marijuana laws. But the
government's claim that virtually everyone pressing for hemp cultivation has a
hidden agenda amounts to a sort of psychotropic McCarthyism. Eric Steenstra
represents a Hungarian hemp textile producer and runs an Internet-based advocacy
organization called Vote Hemp. "Industrial hemp is a peripheral issue to the
drug war, but it has gotten caught up in it," he says. "It's frustrating. You
can't discount this movement as being just a bunch of stoned hippies following
the Grateful Dead."

Quips former Kentucky Gov. Louie B. Nunn: "Should we
listen when Canada's Royal Mounted Police report no problems regulating hemp, or
are they also working to legalize marijuana?"

Yes, there is Woody
Harrelson, but the class photo also includes Nunn, Ralph Nader, Hugh Downs, Ted
Turner and Woolsey, who sits on the board of directors of the North American
Industrial Hemp Council, an advocacy organization founded in 1995.

"They've tried to tie us to the marijuana movement all along, and they can't get
it done," says Erwin "Bud" Sholts, chair of the hemp council. Sholts is a
69-year-old farmer whose career as an alternative crop researcher for the state
of Wisconsin convinced him America should consider hemp a valuable resource, not
an outlaw crop. "If the rest of the world wants to make marijuana legal, that's
fine, but we're interested in the agriculture crop."

When Jack Herer
began his quest to emancipate hemp, he just assumed that everyone would find the
essential facts about the plant's qualities so compelling that the battle would
be won in six months—two years, tops. That was 29 years ago.

One of the
many people intrigued by Herer's book was Dave West, a Midwest plant breeder
with a doctorate in breeding and genetics. His curiosity about hemp had already
been piqued by something he witnessed in the mid-1980s as he toiled one
sweltering day in a Wisconsin cornfield. A helicopter suddenly appeared low in
the sky, then hovered over an adjacent field while several men rappelled to the
ground. It was a drug-enforcement operation going after wild marijuana. "Which,
as a plant breeder and as somebody who grew up in Wisconsin, I knew was
preposterous," West recalls. "I knew this was feral hemp and nobody wanted it,
and that's why it was growing as a weed out there and nobody was picking
it."

Since 1979, at a cost of millions of dollars annually ($13.5
million in 2002), the DEA has orchestrated an ambitious campaign of "marijuana
eradication." The scene West observed in the cornfield was, and still is, a
common one: a marijuana eradication team eradicating not marijuana but harmless
feral hemp, often called "ditchweed." Escaped remnants from commercial hemp
harvests of long ago still grow along railroad tracks and fence lines and in
fields and culverts throughout America's heartland. Justice Department
statistics show that year after year, as much as 98% of the "wild marijuana" the
DEA pulls up is actually ditchweed.

"Here was an agency
of the government that was selling this line"—calling ditchweed
"marijuana"—"that was obviously a perversion of reality," West says. "This is a
genetic resource issue. Instead of collecting, preserving and working with it,
we're sending the DEA to rappel down from helicopters to pull it out and destroy
it wherever they can find it."

From July 1999 until recently, West
presided over a state-sanctioned, corporate-funded quarter-acre test plot of
cannabis on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. He possessed the only DEA license to
research cannabis for industrial use. To meet DEA requirements, he fortified
his site with better security than you'd find at a typical Russian nuclear
stockpile. Ten-foot-high fencing topped with barbed wire, an alarm siren,
infrared beam perimeter. You'd think he was manufacturing enriched
plutonium.

For nearly four years West worked to develop a strain of
cannabis ideal for cultivation as industrial hemp in the United States. Funding
proved difficult given that investors and grants don't tend to find their way
to research for a crop that has been illegal in this country for 33 years. But
when he shut down the project last fall, West says, his decision wasn't prompted
so much by money woes as by the federal government's "strong and entrenched
opposition to hemp." In a written statement he handed to DEA agents Sept. 30,
the day he walked off the property for good, he left no doubt about his
feelings. "I quit in protest," his statement said.

A few months earlier,
he had begun girding himself for the unpleasant task of eliminating the very
thing his labors had created. "When I pull the plug," he lamented with wry
sarcasm, "the DEA will require that the seed be destroyed. It is, after all a
narcotic with no known redeeming use here on this flat earth."

The DEA
agents did indeed require West to destroy the seed. The government shows no
signs that it will allow industrial hemp to be grown in the United States
anytime soon.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A Cannabis
Primer

Because they're often used interchangeably,the
terms cannabis, hemp and marijuana can be confusing. While cannabis encompasses
all varieties of the species, hemp, often called industrial hemp, has come to
mean a few dozen nonintoxicating varieties of cannabis bred and cultivated for
commercial ends: clothing, paper, food, biofuels, biodegradable plastic,
building materials, automobile parts, insulators, paints, lubricants—the list of
possibilities goes on.

Marijuana, on the other hand, refers strictly to
the cannabis drug plant, of which there exist endless varieties differentiated
by the amount of intoxicating substances they contain, notably
tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Today virtually all strains of cannabis are the
product of human alteration, manipulated by scientists, breeders and drug
dealers to increase or decrease THC content and other characteristics to suit
their purposes.

Mitch Earleywine, a drug addiction expert at USC, says
marijuana typically contains a THC concentration of 2% to 5%, and some strains
have measured as much as 22% or higher. By contrast, industrial hemp has been
reduced by breeders to 0.3%, a trifle that authorities agree produces no
psychoactive effect.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The Myth
of Hemp Licensing

If you want to apply for a license to grow commercial
hemp, you must solicit the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA consistently
claims that no prohibition on hemp farming exists in this country, as if to
suggest that all one need do is file the proper paperwork and make a reasonable
case.

"We don't have any preconceived notions that we are or are not
going to approve or deny any application," says Frank Sapienza, the DEA's chief
of drug and chemical evaluation, implying that every case is a judgment call
that could go either way.

Nonetheless, the agency has rejected every
application it has ever received. How many? There's no telling—literally. The
agency will say only that "the DEA does not have records of the number of
applications received for such activities"—an extraordinary claim from an
organization that documents every marijuana plant that it and cooperating law
enforcement agencies uproot from U.S. soil. (In 2001, the total was 3,304,760
plants, though nearly all of them were feral hemp, or "ditchweed," not
marijuana.)

Any denial that there is a U.S. hemp prohibition contradicts
a salient fact: The DEA has never approved an application for commercial hemp
cultivation.

Lee Green last wrote for the magazine about secular
ethicist Michael Josephson.

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