Is
it Time for Hemp?
Agriculture
Secretary Tom Vilsack has suggested that the United States assist the Ukraine
by purchasing hemp seeds, but wouldn’t letting American farmers grow their own
be a better idea?
Go
to any supermarket and read the labels carefully: a surprising number of foods
contain hemp seeds or hemp oil – even hemp milk for that bowl of cereal. In the drug store look for cosmetics,
shampoos, and soaps containing hemp-seed oil.
Entire shops sell only hemp clothing.
A few years ago, a car fueled only by hemp-seed oil circumnavigated the
United States. But none of that hemp was
grown by American farmers. It was all
imported from Canada, Europe (including the Ukraine), and China.
Why
don’t American farmers grow this versatile crop? It’s because Congress has made it illegal,
treating it like a dangerous drug, and growing it could land the farmer in
federal prison for a long stretch of years.
In 1937 Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act, which included all parts
of the plant Cannabis Sativa in its
definition of marihuana; but in response to the complaints of fine-art paint
manufacturers who used hemp seed oil instead of linseed and bird seed
manufacturers complaining that caged canaries would not sing without hemp seed
in their diet(the fore-runners of today’s rock musicians?), congress allowed
their importation of sterilized hempseeds.
That exemption, which also included allowance of the importation of
processed hemp products, was continued in the current law, the Controlled
Substances Act of 1970. The result is
that American canaries can eat hemp bird seed, American food processors can
include hemp in their products, American clothiers can sell hemp garments, and
American cars can run on hemp fuel. Only
the American farmer is barred from participating in that market.
Are
hemp and marijuana the same thing? As
the federal government recognized, both hemp and marijuana are variants of the
same species, Cannabis sativa,
(marijuana also includes C. indicia,
but that plant is rarely used for food or fiber) just like Saint Bernards and
Chihuahuas are both members of the same species, Canis lupus familiaris . The difference between hemp and marijuana is
primarily the content of THC, the primary psychoactive chemical in
marijuana. Hemp contains less than 0.5%
THC, while marijuana has anywhere from 6 to over 20 per cent. The old saying is that one would have to
smoke a joint as big as a telephone pole in less than fifteen minutes to get
high from hemp. I have found no record
in over three thousand years of history of anyone getting high from consuming
hemp.
The
government’s insistence on conflating hemp and marijuana is based on the claim
that law enforcement officers will not be able to distinguish a hemp field from
a marijuana patch and their efforts would be hampered. The problem with that argument is that the
two plants require totally different cultivation methods, making their growths
highly distinctive from as far away as they can be seen. Hemp is planted as close together as possible,
forcing them to grow high with little or no branching, to produce the longest
fibers possible. Marijuana plants are
widely spaced and pruned relatively low to encourage branching for maximum
flower production. The collateral fear
expressed is that a marijuana patch would be hidden by placing it in the center
of a field, surrounded by the taller, more thickly planted hemp stalks. However, marijuana grown that way would be
useless. The plants would be pollinated
by the hemp, producing seeds and lowering the THC content to a uselessly low
level. Over two hundred years ago, the
great biologist Carl Linnaeus recognized that hemp and marijuana (then called
“Indian Hemp”) were the same species and observed that the cultivation methods
prevented hemp from being psychoactive.
The police can quickly learn to tell the two varieties apart, just as
they have no problem preventing millions of gallons of ethanol from being
diverted to bootleggers.
Hemp
has a long and central, if largely unsung role in American history. British law required most farmers in the
American colonies to grow hemp to supply the royal navy; George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson were hemp farmers. The
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were circulated on hemp paper,
and all U. S. currency was printed on hemp from the Civil War into the
1930s. The U.S.S. Constitution, “Old Ironsides”, was rigged with miles of hemp
rope and acres of hemp sails, as were all the China clippers, New England
whalers, and almost all other sailing ships.
Even during World War II, the federal government exempted hemp growers
from the drug laws to ensure the navy would have the ropes it needed for that
war.
Secretary
Vilsack should not only buy sterilized hemp seed from the Ukraine, he should
fight to change the law so that he could buy fertile seeds as well. The law should be changed so that American
farmers can regain their place as leaders in the production of this versatile
crop.
