Hemp, Commerce, and Freedom
(First published in Planet Magazine, jan1996)
If you heard about a plant that could help supply the
basic necessities of life — food, shelter, and clothing-
-and could cheaply and easily serve as a non-polluting
alternative to many chemical and wood-based products
and replace fossil fuels altogether, what would you do
with it? For anyone of average intelligence, the
obvious course of action would be to make use of the
plant's many benefits in any way possible, as soon as
possible. Unfortunately, for those of subnormal
intelligence — which is to say, politicians — the obvious
course of action is the opposite of the obvious one.
Though it may sound too good to be true, industrial hemp may
be the most versatile raw material in the world. As a kid I
used to be amazed by the advertising on the sides of Arm &
Hammer boxes, which listed hundreds of uses for baking soda.
Industrial hemp is even more versatile, with over twenty-
five thousand known uses. Aside from its more well-known
uses, such as rope, paper, and clothing, there is hemp ink,
hemp soap, hemp shakes, hemp burgers, hemp cheese, even hemp
breakfast cereal.
It is almost unbelievable, then, that our nation's leaders
should forbid the growing of a such a useful plant, even
more so when you know that hemp had the enthusiastic backing
of our nation's original leaders. George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson, for example, couldn't say enough about the
benefits of hemp, growing it themselves and encouraging
others to do the same. (Hemp activists like to remind
people that the Declaration of Independence was originally
drafted on hemp paper.)
There was no official interference with hemp until the
beginning of the era of big government. After the repeal of
Prohibition, the Federal government's failed attempt to do
away with alcohol, the Feds immediately repeated their
mistake, outlawing marijuana in 1937. Unfortunately,
marijuana's downfall took industrial hemp along with it, in
spite of the fact that industrial hemp contains less than 1%
of THC, the psychoactive ingredient contained in marijuana —
you could smoke industrial hemp all day, but you might just
as well smoke the morning paper. Politicians not being
known for fine distinctions, however, this country has been
deprived of hemp's benefits ever since (except for a short
period during World War II when the government actually made
propaganda films as part of the "Hemp for Victory!" campaign
to persuade farmers to grow hemp).
Today, anyone can legally make, sell, and buy hemp products
in the U.S., but no one can legally grow it here. American
manufacturers are forced to import hemp from other
countries, an unnecessary outflow of U.S. dollars. "In the
past few years, the industry has been exploding faster than
importers can keep up with the demand," says Ted Kaercher,
owner of Headquarters, a retailer of many hemp products. "In
fact, U.S. Customs just raised the quota for importing hemp
because distributors were running out of their allotted
supply within three months of the calendar year."
Marjorie Holmes, of Everything Earthly, a Phoenix shop that
sells hemp goods, sees the biggest obstacles to hemp
legalization as "the Drug Enforcement Agency and lack of
education." Yet any fears the DEA might have about hemp
being a cover for marijuana are unfounded; even an untrained
eye can easily distinguish a hemp plant from a marijuana
plant. Industrial hemp's complete lack of psychoactive
powers is not of interest to the DEA, however. They seem
more concerned that any move toward legalizing an outlawed
substance would be seen as a blow to the agency's near-
dictatorial powers.
Even so, the states are beginning to fight back. According
to Kathy Trout, of Tucson's Crucial Creations, Kentucky,
Colorado, and California are trying to legalize the growing
of hemp, and tribes on eleven reservations have petitions
pending. The hemp issue is attracting the attention of
people from many different (though often opposed) camps,
including environmentalists, Libertarians, physicians, and
entrepreneurs.
Unfortunately, the effort faces a major stumbling block in
that people commonly think of the hemp legalization activism
as merely a front for disgruntled potheads. Activists often
do a lot to contribute to that image, an image that was
evident at November's showing of Hemp Revolution, a film
by Australian director Anthony Clarke at the Valley Art
Theater. Having run for public office as a Libertarian
myself, I've had my share of contact with marijuana law
reform groups, and I'd rate the film and its accompanying
"hemp fashion show" as a reasonably accurate microcosm of
the hemp legalization effort.
The fashion show featured local hemp activists modeling
clothing made from hemp fabric. There was definitely a
preaching-to-the-crowd atmosphere — there seemed to be about
as many "models" as spectators among the crowd of perhaps
five or six dozen. Anyone who wandered in off the street to
see what the hemp revolutionaries are doing would probably
have gotten the definite impression that a lot of reefer is
what they're doing, because there were pothead stereotypes
aplenty: tie-dyed Deadheads, dreadlocked rasta dudes, and
of course your off-the-rack Cheeches and Chongs. Not the
whole crowd, of course (I saw some clean-cut average Joes,
including some of the event organizers), but enough to
prevent anyone from thinking they'd wandered into a
temperance meeting.
The clothing itself — some made entirely from hemp, others
hemp/cotton blends — seems well-made and fairly stylish, but
many items are decorated with the inevitable pot leaf
designs. Whenever I see that sort of thing I can't help
recalling the dopes in my high school art classes, who used
to draw, paint, and silk screen pot leaves on just about
everything they owned. In ceramics class, they made ceramic
bongs; in plastic shop, they made plastic bongs; in wood
shop, they made stash boxes. It was my junior year before I
finally discovered that Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" was not
our school fight song. I'm always a little less than
impressed, then, when I see someone wearing a pot leaf.
Fortunately, someone had the good sense to emblazon some of
the clothes with the facsimile signature of dedicated hemp
grower Thomas Jefferson — now there's an angle worth playing.
Unfortunately, it's an angle that is underplayed and
overshadowed by stoner stereotypes. The fashion show's
message — for me, at least — was all but drowned out by the
background music, which consisted almost exclusively of
songs about smoking pot by such groups as Cypress Hill,
those Johnny Appleseeds of weed, whose albums are full of
marijuana anthems even less subtle than "Sweet Leaf."
After the fashion show, director Anthony Clarke stepped up
to the mike and played "Waltzing Matilda" and "The Star-
Spangled Banner" by squeezing his hands together (in junior
high we called it hand farting), supplying notes out of
hand's range with a vocal falsetto or bass, as appropriate
(though in such a setting it's hard to imagine what
inappropriate might be). Once again the image problem — I
mean, if hand farts aren't classic pothead entertainment, I
don't know what is. (Speaking of pothead entertainment, the
soundtrack to Clarke's film features veteran burnout Jackson
Browne. I remember hearing a bootleg album of his called
Pipeline, which captured for the ages the special magic of
a Jackson Browne so slammed he couldn't even remember the
words to his own songs.)
Another image problem the hemp effort faces is its perceived leftist
origin. But the hemp issue is not a leftist issue, it is an issue of liberty, and it is both unwise and
strategically unsound to suggest otherwise. Though most of
Clarke's interviewees kept to the subject of the benefits of
industrial hemp (even University of Arizona's Andrew Weil,
who sports a big Southcottian beard like Marx himself), the
Marxist line was represented by longtime goof Terence
McKenna, who characterized hemp as antithetical to
"capitalist, market-based society." If that were the case,
it's hard to see why the Libertarian Party supports its
legalization. The hemp issue is more of a liberty issue
than anything, and that, properly communicated, would give
it an across-the-board appeal.
In his narration Clarke acknowledges that some hemp
supporters may have what he calls "ulterior motives" (though
he was probably talking about recreational pot smokers
rather than Marxists), but most of the audience seemed
distinctly more interested in marijuana than hemp. Of the
many uses of hemp listed in the narration, the only one they
cheered was "inspiration" (illustrated by an old Asian man
puffing on a gigantic fatty). They responded with even more
applause to the scene of a huge effigy of a joint being
carried in procession like a holy image. These aren't the
kinds of images that are going to persuade ordinary people
to support the legalization of industrial hemp, let alone
marijuana. This is bad news for the hemp cause, since hemp
nearly always gets tarred with the same brush as marijuana.
The smart strategy would be to draw a sharp distinction
between the two. The shampoo commercial of the 70s — "With
beer...but don't drink it!" should be adopted and adapted as
the hemp product commercial of the 90s: "With hemp...but
don't smoke it!"
Like the woman selling rabbits in Roger and Me whose sign
"Food or Pet" turned away customers, hemp activists' lumping
together of hemp and marijuana is like a sign saying
"Clothes or Pot" — it alienates people whose attitudes toward
marijuana have been formed by government and media
propaganda. The chances for the legalization of hemp will
be much better if activists forget about marijuana, at least
for the time being, and emphasize the environmental and
utilitarian benefits of hemp, which are many.
Do people want to save trees? Tell them that hemp could
completely replace wood pulp in the making of paper,
cardboard, and particle board, leaving more of the world's
forests intact. In addition, hemp grows at an extremely
rapid rate ("like a weed," as Hemp Revolution put it,
drawing giggles from the crowd), reaching maturity in only
two months, and is therefore a much more renewable resource
than trees. Are people worried about the contamination of
ground water? Tell them that processing wood pulp into
paper requires toxic chemicals — chemicals which often find
their way into waterways and ground water supplies — while
the making of hemp paper requires none of these chemicals.
Nor do hemp plants require chemicals to fight insects or
even weeds — the plants grow close together and have flowers
at the top of the plant, which shut out light, which chokes
out weeds. Do people want to eliminate automobile
pollution? Tell them that hemp is a cheap and indefinitely
renewable replacement for fossil fuels: hemp fuel burns so
cleanly that automobile pollution could be a thing of the
past. Researchers interviewed in Hemp Revolution said
they ran an ordinary automobile on hemp fuel for 3,500
miles, took the engine apart and found almost no residue.
People not explicitly interested in environmentalism could
be drawn to the hemp cause for utilitarian reasons. The
growing of hemp would create jobs and free us from having to
import such a cheap and easy to grow crop. Tobacco growers
could switch to hemp, get off the Federal gravy train, and
devote their fields to a crop that benefits people instead
of killing them. Hemp is also a great rotation crop because
only the fiber (the stalk of the hemp plant) is harvested,
leaving the flower and root behind to enrich the soil.
Such — rather than pro-pot propaganda — are the kinds of facts
that could convince open-minded people to support the
legalization of hemp. Yet, having lampooned the marijuana
contingent, I don't want to leave the impression that I
favor anti-marijuana laws. The legalization of marijuana
would have its benefits as well. For one thing, our courts
and prisons would no longer be clogged with people whose
only crime is smoking or selling marijuana. One-fifth of
all criminal convictions in this country are marijuana-
related. Obviously the criminalization of marijuana has
been just as big a failure as the outlawing of alcohol
seventy years ago. Laws do not change human desires, and
the desire for alcohol and other mind-altering substances
has proven stronger than fear of punishment. Furthermore,
just as Prohibition virtually created the American gangster,
U.S. narcotics policy has made millionaires of thugs and
criminals of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens.
Instead of seeing the foolishness of their position, the
politicians instead waste more of other people's money on
the building of more prisons. And who's out terrorizing the
highways anyway, potheads or hopheads? It's alcohol that's
the killer on the streets, yet the politicians aren't trying
to reinstate Prohibition — so why do they refuse to
decriminalize marijuana?
Everyone under the age of 40 or so has heard plenty of
(mostly health-related) arguments against pot smoking. I've
known lots of potheads in my time, and while I don't know
much about how pot has affected their health, I do know that
most of them tended to become great layabouts and
procrastinators, whose inner life came to consist of having
a few bong hits while watching Kung Fu. Yet arguments
against recreational marijuana use in no way apply to the
medical use of marijuana, which can relieve the nausea of
AIDS patients and keep glaucoma in check. One of the
speakers at the Valley Art show was a man billed as
"Glaucoma Jim," who must ingest large amounts of marijuana
in order to keep his vision. If he should be arrested and
deprived of his marijuana, his doctors have told him, he
will almost immediately become ill and his eyes will fail.
"In three hours I'll be hurling," he says. "In 3 days I
could lose my eyesight."
That the government can without reason withhold medicine
from the sick illustrates the general deterioration of
freedom in the United States. There's no reason — no
constitutional reason, at least — why U.S. citizens should be
denied the right to choose clean hemp fuel instead of
polluting oil products (you don't suppose the giant oil companies
have a vested interest in throwing their massive lobbying weight
against the legalization of hemp, now, do you?) or chemical-free hemp
building materials and paper products instead of forest-destroying,
groundwater-polluting wood products.
The hemp issue's best — perhaps only — chance of success, however, is to
ground itself in the larger issue of freedom. On its own merits it probably
cannot succeed, because under the current system Congress is owned
by bureaucracies such as the ATF and special-interest groups such as the
petrochemical corporations, whose power and wealth would be threatened if
people were free to produce industrial hemp. The success of
the "hemp revolution," therefore, depends the success of a
larger revolution, one aimed at resurrecting and restoring
the freedom once enjoyed by American citizens. Those
politicians who do not educate themselves about freedom
today may tomorrow learn much more than they ever wanted to
know about that most ancient of all hemp products — rope.
© Deuce of Clubs
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