By Christopher S. Wren, New York Times
(Marijuananews note: It has long been my belief that the efforts of the DEA to suppress hemp are actually very damaging to marijuana prohibition, because they undermine the credibility of the narcs, and they guarantee that the issue gets publicity. This article and the editorial that follow it illustrate this point very well.

Again, we can see how the Internet makes it possible for us to know and understand things that would not be possible otherwise.)

Falling prices make option more attractive

BISMARCK, N.D.—Dennis Carlson sold his first wheat, grown on a field borrowed from his parents, in 1975, when he was 14. He earned $4.51 a bushel and resolved to follow his father, grandfather and great-grandfather into farming.

Nearly 24 years later, spring wheat is selling for $2.91 a bushel, and Carlson worries whether he can afford to plant next month. "We’re going to get a low price," he said. "And if we get a bumper crop, it’s going to get lower."

Battered by sinking commodity prices and rising costs, Carlson and other wheat farmers are looking across the Canadian border at a crop they say could help save them—if only it were legal. That crop is hemp, a non-intoxicating look-alike cousin of marijuana grown around the world for its fiber, seed and oil. But long identified with marijuana both by law enforcement and the counterculture, it is banned in the United States as part of the war on drugs.

As farmers from Hawaii to North Dakota to Vermont lobby state legislatures to study hemp’s potential and make it legal, they are opposed by federal officials unwilling to relax drug laws even symbolically, whether by endorsing marijuana’s medical use, or approving a once-common crop, hemp.

It does not help that hemp remains identified with the counterculture, its products—from oils to clothing—often sold in shops that sell rolling papers, pipes and other drug paraphernalia, its cause cheered on by marijuana advocates.

"They are our worst enemies," said Gale Glenn, a tobacco grower in Winchester, Ky. "If marijuana didn’t exist, hemp would be growing here on hundreds of thousands of acres."
See
Wisconsin Legislator Wants To Legalize Hemp; Fears Support Of Marijuana Reform Advocates;
Attorney General Is Opposed; Narks Claim Local Weed Is 25% THC!

(Marijuananews note: Or if hemp did not exist, marijuana might be growing there on hundreds of thousands of acres. In any case, if it weren’t for marijuana no one might have heard of hemp. Jack Herer found out about because he owned a head shop. He started the hemp movement and the farmers resisted until recently.
See
American Farm Bureau Drops Opposition To Hemp;
State Marijuana Eradication Program Poses Environmental, Human Hazards --  NORML PR

Isn’t it interesting that a tobacco farmer thinks that the people who tell the truth are his enemies and people who lie are his friends? Like narcs and tobacco company executives?)
See
Tobacco Deal Forces Kentucky Farmers To Take Hemp Issue More Seriously

Legislation to revive hemp passed in Hawaii this month and has been introduced in legislatures in North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Virginia, Vermont and Hawaii.
See
"States Back Hemp Farming," The AP and US News Report -- 2 Articles

The federal Controlled Substances Act says the government does not intend to prevent states from legislating in this area. But even with state approval, hemp growers would need permits from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which so far has resisted.

"There’s widespread bipartisan support for this becoming a crop in North Dakota," state Sen. Joel Heitkamp said. "The problem is at the federal level."

State Rep. David Monson, a farmer, school superintendent and sponsor of the North Dakota legislation, said, "I think 99 percent of the people in my district, when you show them the bottom line, they’re ready to go."

After Canada made hemp legal a year ago, about 5,000 acres were planted with hemp, said Geof Kime, president of Hempline, a hemp growing and processing company in Delaware, Ontario.
See
Meanwhile Back In Canada, The Hemp Industry Is Being Reborn

Monson recalled watching his neighbor across the border in Manitoba grow 23 acres of hemp that netted about $250 an acre. "When he came out with all those profits, we were really upset," Monson said.

Copyright: 1999 The Charlotte Observer

BAN ON HEMP CROP MAKES YOU WONDER

April 3, 1999
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
editpage@seattle-pi.com
http://www.seattle-pi.com/

For sheer absurdity, we assumed we’d never hear the like of a fellow in Washington, D.C., losing his city job for using the word "niggardly" and prompting an uproar among those who didn’t know the word means stingy.

But now we have the federal Drug Enforcement Administration refusing to permit farmers in North Dakota to grow hemp. Because hemp looks like its cousin, marijuana, it’s a symbol in the nation’s drug culture. The nation’s war on drugs doesn’t abide even symbolic approval of the counterculture.

See
Police Opposition Stalls Hemp Bill In Minnesota After Killing Medical Marijuana

Hemp is good for fiber, seed and oil—good enough that such farmers as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it for profit on their plantations. But the hemp variety of cannabis sativa has almost no THC (aka, tetrahydrocannabinol, the ingredient that makes marijuana intoxicating). So it works as rope but not as dope.

The DEA does not want to issue permits to grow hemp to North Dakota farmers who can’t make a living growing wheat right now. (The farmers look at the hemp crops thriving across the border in Canada and know the hemp harvested there is imported legally into the United States. They correctly think something is wrong with this picture.)

Since the restriction on growing hemp comes from the same source, this confusion of apples and oranges can’t help change their minds.

(Marijuananews note: I couldn’t have said it better.)