N.D. farmers appeal to grow hemp – USATODAY.com
Two North Dakota farmers will ask a federal appeals court in St. Paul on Wednesday to allow them to grow hemp on their farms, even though the federal government says it’s illegal.Farmer Dave Monson, a Republican representative in the North Dakota Legislature, says the variety of the cannabis sativa plant grown as hemp is an ideal crop to rotate annually with wheat and barley.
Canadian farmers 20 miles north of his Osnabrock farm do a brisk business selling their hemp to Detroit carmakers who use it inside door panels and for insulation in seats, he says.
Monson says the hemp has no value as a drug because it has a low concentration of THC, the ingredient in marijuana that causes a high.
Hemp fibers, oil and seed can be imported from Canada, Europe and Asia and used to manufacture products in the USA, but growing hemp in the USA is illegal, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says.
“The level of THC in the plant doesn’t matter. If there’s any THC in the plant, it’s illegal,” DEA spokesman Garrison Courtney says. “To get those pieces of stalk that are legal, you have to grow a marijuana plant.”
David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps in Escondido, Calif., says he spends more than $100,000 a year to import hemp oil from Canada for his soaps, lip balms and lotions.
“I think the market has explosive potential,” Bronner says. “As soon as hemp goes into the ground here, it’ll be a massive boost. If you look at Canada, where they don’t have this draconian, absurd drug policy, there’s mass penetration of hemp into the market.”
The farmers sued the DEA in June 2007. They are backed by the North Dakota Legislature, Gov. John Hoeven, a Republican, and the state agriculture department. In 1999, the Legislature passed a law allowing farmers to grow hemp, and a licensing process was finalized in December 2006, Monson says.
The ban on hemp farming remains only due to ignorance and fear about marijuana. In the comments section of the story, one reader hypothesized that if farmers grew hemp, cops wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from illegal marijuana. Every other industrialized country that legalized hemp still prohibits marijuana, and they don’t seem to have much trouble telling the two apart – hemp is tall and reedy, marijuana is fat and bushy.
Another reader hypothesized that, like “Africanized killer bees”, the hemp would start off low-THC, but then cross-pollinate with the marijuana and make it psychoactive. First, nobody growing for psychoactive marijuana wants hemp anywhere near it – the hemp would downgrade the “high” of the successive generations. Second, nobody growing for industrial hemp wants marijuana anywhere near it – the marijuana would downgrade the strength and usefulness of the successive generations.
The real issue here is that the US government is protecting the bottom line of timber producers, cotton farmers, oil companies, paper mills, ethanol corn farmers, pharmaceutical companies, and soy farmers by preventing a competitive product from coming to market. Hemp can produce anything we currently make from a tree or a barrel of oil. But if Americans suddenly learned that hemp was OK and useful, they might question some of the government’s other lies about marijuana.
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