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4/1/99 BISMARCK, N.D. -- Dennis Carlson sold his first wheat, grown on a field borrowed from his parents, in 1975, when he was 14 years old. 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, 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. But in North Dakota, where the Republican-controlled Legislature appears likely to enact laws promoting hemp, Carlson said: "We're all desperate. We're trying to find something that will change our outlook, and hemp is one of many crops."
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 NorthDakota," state Sen. Joel Heitkamp said. "The problem is at the federal level."
State Rep. David Monson, a farmer and school superintendent who sponsored 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.
Recalling 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.
The harvested hemp can be imported into the United States for processing, "but we can't grow it ourselves," said Jeffrey Gain, who promotes the revival of hemp as a director of the North American Industrial Hemp Council.
Hemp flourished as a cash crop through most of American history. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp on their plantations. The Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp-fiber paper. Hemp supplied early Americans with rope, sails, clothing and other necessities.
But in 1937, Congress enacted a ban on marijuana that came to encompass hemp. During World War II, after imports of Manila hemp from the Philippines were cut off, the government distributed seeds for farmers to grow in a "Hemp For Victory" drive, but once the war ended, hemp was banned again. By then, synthetic fibers like nylon were taking its place.Environmentalists describe hemp as a renewable, biodegradable resource that can be used in paper, fabrics, building material and even automobile moldings. Farmers say it is a crop that needs few pesticides, shades out weeds, resists erosion -- and can make money. "This is not a panacea," Mrs. Glenn said, "but it's one of the answers."
Dr. Paul Mahlberg, a cell biologist at Indiana University, has a license from the DEA to grow experimental marijuana and hemp. He described them as varieties of cannabis sativa, a species whose cell structure he has studied for 30 years.
Hemp is densely planted and grown as tall as 15 feet to develop the stalks and kill off leaves. By contrast, marijuana plants are short, bushy and spaced three to four feet apart to encourage the leaves and flowers that deliver the psychoactive ingredient, popularly called THC. Hemp is also harvested before it flowers, and marijuana afterward.
Both varieties have THC: Industrial hemp has less than 1 percent THC by weight, rendering it ineffectual as a drug, while marijuana contains 5 percent THC or more by weight. Canada and some European countries require cultivated hemp to have a THC content of 0.3 percent or less.In rural areas, neglected hemp has degenerated into a feral remnant called ditch weed, with low THC content. " National Guardsmen and law-enforcement officials spend weekends uprooting ditch weed. "
In Vermont, the state auditor's office determined that 78 percent of the marijuana reported eradicated in the state, and 99 percent destroyed nationwide with federal funds, in 1996 was ditch weed.
"The eradication is somewhat misdirected because they're destroying remnants of the old hemp," Mahlberg said. "Some of the hemp they're destroying is close to zero THC."
Law-enforcement officials argue that marijuana could be hidden in hemp fields. But hemp would actually be a weapon against marijuana, Mahlberg said, because cross-pollinating with hemp would dilute marijuana's potency.In theory, marijuana pollen could also affect hemp. But hemp planted in quantity -- Canada requires at least 10 acres -- would overwhelm marijuana. Andy Graves, a farmer who heads the Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative, a group trying to make hemp legal again, said marijuana growers would find hemp farmers "their worst nightmare, because our pollens will cross."
The farmers said they could live with the kind of controls that other countries impose. Canada requires that every hemp farmer have a license and police background check, use seed certified to produce 0.3 percent THC, report the precise location of his crop and open it for random inspection, Kime said.
