DEA's Insane Policy on Banning Industrial Hemp in USA

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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.

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.

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.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times