The fig leaf has come to symbolize what humans have used to cover up God’s mistakes, or, more precisely, our shameful -- and shame-full -- lack of understanding about how to use what God has given us.

Now the hemp leaf has been cast in that role by prohibitionists, who claim that hemp is really just a worthless plant being promoted as a smokescreen – literally – to cover-up a plot to legalize marijuana. (Naturally, they make the same claim about the medical marijuana movement as well.)

Prohibitionist paranoia aside, how can one tell the difference between a "marijuana" leaf and a "hemp" leaf? Who other than the prohibitionists care?

Well, MTV, for one. They air-brush out hemp leaves, but not guns in videos.

Now we are getting close to something resembling a real world problem. The hemp industry knows that so long as the media report hemp as a marijuana story, there are going to be political and/or image problems. This has come to be known by the infelicitous phrase of "separating the rope from the dope." This is code for "Now if those hippies would just stay home!"

Unfortunately, even if the "hippies" did stay home, the narks will not. In any case, the hemp industry is going to have to learn to live with its sometimes "embarrassing" friends, if for no other reason than it is often very hard to tell an environmentalist from a hippie. And the hemp industry needs the support of the environmental movement. Indeed, the Sierra Club was prominent in recent hearings in New Hampshire. It also needs the help of Libertarians, speaking of people who often look like hippies.

The hemp industry also needs to get the message out that the hemp issue is important to everyone, not just to the people directly involved in it. In other words, you don’t have to be a farmer or a processor -- much less a marijuana smoker -- to care about hemp cultivation in America.

In short, while it is intellectually very easy to make the distinction between "hemp" and "marijuana" – for everyone except American prohibitionists who are "perceptually challenged" – in the real world the tangle is not going to go away. I think that everyone knows this, but … Well, let’s not talk about.

Well, lets… Let’s look at some very odd facts

1. Hemp is kept illegal today as a part of the prohibitionist effort to suppress marijuana, especially medical marijuana, but there is substantial evidence that when prohibition began hemp, not marijuana, was the real target.
2. Consequently, there is an enormous irony in the present situation in which it is argued that hemp should be legal because it is not marijuana!
3. If there had been a "marijuana" lobby in 1937, should they have said, "Look, go ahead and ban hemp, so we can have all these wonderful synthetics (which would not have sounded at all ironic in 1937), but let us grow marijuana, so we can have a high that is a lot safer than alcohol?"

Obviously, there was not a marijuana lobby in 1937, except for the American Medical Association, which did not know quite enough about the medical value of cannabis to be able to raise all the pertinent arguments, but the question is hypothetical. Almost…

The point is that hemp movement needs always to understand who its friends and enemies really are. It friends may sometimes be embarrassing, but its enemies are armed and dangerous and more than a little difficult to see.

1. There are enormous vested economic interests in marijuana prohibition that go far beyond hemp.
2. There are even greater political vested interests in it, and they don't give a damn about hemp, which is why hemp is legal in prohibitionist France. This especially involves the mass media, which is now even more complicit, by way of gross negligence and malpractice by contemporary standards, than it was in the early days of "reefer madness."

Today,  we may be appalled by the racist origins of marijuana prohibition, but the fact is that racism was a basic part of the US legal system until the second half of this century, just as slavery was until the second have of the last. Because the original reefer madness was racist, it was consequently a basic part of the US system. Today, marijuana prohibition has no such "redeeming social value."

To switch racist analogies in midstream, the hemp ban is a part of marijuana prohibition which is a tar-baby to which the American establishment and its world-wide clients have gotten themselves hopelessly stuck. This would be alright, except that people are beginning to notice. (The Internet is a major factor.)

Long ago, the Dutch demonstrated the difference between marijuana and "drugs," but they are easy to lie about. Now, following many others around the world, the Canadian government has demonstrated its capacity to make relevant distinctions between hemp and marijuana. Many Americans actually know where Canada is, which much makes this harder to cover up.

Out in California, the sick and dying are getting uppity, and this complicates things even more. (In spite of our educational system, almost everyone knows where California is.)

For people in the hemp industries, all of this is both an opportunity and a problem. They want and need to be able to go about their business without talking about either Ross Rebagliati or Dennis Peron. They should be allowed to grow and process hemp without having to deal with other aspects of the cannabis controversies. For this there are hemp-specific organizations, conferences, tradeshows, web sites and companies. This is as it should be.

But people in the hemp industry also know that their very existence, not just as hemp entrepreneurs, but as free citizens of a civilized world, depends on facing and overcoming the forces that suppressed their plant for most of this century at immeasurable cost in human suffering and environmental degradation.

Truth and freedom are inseparable and indivisible. Ironically, one leaf does stand for just that.