Hemp on the ropes

Back in the 1970s, a friend of mine was headed to Missouri on a motorbike. Due to the low horsepower and speed of his vehicle, he stuck to the back roads. As he cruised through rural Indiana he looked over and gosh-a-mighty there was a field of marijuana as far as the eye could see. Feeling like he'd hit the jackpot on a one-armed bandit he grabbed as much as he could carry and headed on down the road.

When he finally got around to smoking it, imagine his surprise when it didn't get him high. It was probably a wild hemp field left over from World War II, when it was widely grown as part of the war effort. Back then, the U.S. government produced and distributed Hemp for Victory, a film encouraging farmers to grow hemp because industrial fiber was in short supply.

Hemp is the non-psychoactive cousin of marijuana. It has about a 0.3 percent level of THC, the part of marijuana that gets you high, while marijuana's level is more like 5 percent to 10 percent. There are some 25,000 products made from hemp or with hemp ingredients or parts, from textiles to soap to cooking oil to cars. Yet almost all of them come from outside of the United States, because the hemp plant is lumped in with marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug along with the likes of heroin and cocaine. Even during World War II, farmers who grew it needed a special permit.

"The United States has sweeping anti-marijuana laws that don't recognize that hemp is not the same as marijuana," says LaMar Lemmons Jr., a former state representative who introduced three bills supporting hemp in Lansing last year.

"The Chinese make a massive amount of hemp products, everything from foodstuffs to bricks. There's a biodegradable plastic that's made from hemp, there's a brick that's stronger than concrete. It's all part of the new green economy."

Lemmons' bills — one called for Congress to reschedule industrial hemp and remove barriers to farming it, another for a feasibility study on growing hemp in the state, a third to allow hemp farming here without DEA permits — went to the Committee on Agriculture and died when the new legislative body came in on Jan. 1. Lemmons, who retired due to term limits, says the main problem around hemp is "ignorance."

"For lack of a better word, people are unfamiliar with the difference between psychoactive and non-psychoactive," Lemmons says. "They see no upside and they're hesitant to do anything courageous or think outside of the box."

Maybe a little education would help. That's certainly the goal of the Michigan Industrial Hemp Education and Marketing Project that is, according to its website, "working to expand hemp as a natural resource for industrial and private enterprise." MIHEMP is holding an Industrial Hemp Education Bazaar Feb. 19, at the Atlanta Senior Center in Atlanta, in northern Michigan. The event will feature hemp products for sale, speakers on hemp farming, workshops connecting retailers with producers of hemp products, video presentations and hemp history. There will be an auction too — though I'm not sure what folks will be bidding on.

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