Hemp Bound (2 page)

As recently as 2012, hemp-friendly legislation would get floated by the leading congressional iconoclast every couple of years, and promptly get laughed out of committee. For three-quarters of a century, for my father's entire lifetime, the truth didn't matter, until last June. Hemp burst back from within our genetic memory. I'm glad my pop's getting to see the dawn of the era in which America returns to a healthy agricultural paradigm. We all have a significant vested interest in its success.

Anthropological and archaeological research, including the recent discovery of cannabis in a twenty-seven-hundred-year-old Chinese tomb, shows that we humans probably have been making use of this plant at least as long as we have any other. It's the last seventy-seven years that have been atypical. In the Shinto coronation ceremony, for example, Japan's incoming emperor wears a hemp robe, and not to prove a political point, but because of the plant's broad value. It symbolizes abundance, comfort, and health.

Places like China, Romania, and France never stopped cultivating hemp. And as I and others have pointed out, even U.S. industrial cannabis prohibition got off to a poor start soon after the federal drug war got rolling with the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.

What happened was, in 1942, the U.S. Navy tried to place an order for the (far and away) best rope, on which it and America's war effort were dependent—they needed as much as twenty tons of rigging per vessel. For some reason there was none in the supply room. Seems Japan had captured the new Filipino source—notice that the drug war had already shifted American business offshore.

So the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) quickly shot and released a passionately pro-hemp documentary, a classic of short-form propaganda vérité. The film begs farmers to plant as much hemp as possible, yesterday. It's called
Hemp for Victory
. Check it out on YouTube.

An analysis of the reasons behind today's unfolding sea change in U.S. public opinion about drug policy is a book in itself, but suffice to say that this is a people-driven hemp economic boom we're about to experience (actually we're already experiencing it, but Canada's making most of the dough). And it's about time.

Not only do we Americans buy that half billion dollars of Canadian hemp products every year, but the number is growing 20 percent annually. We're just not allowed to grow it here. “This kind of trade imbalance is why the American colonies fought for independence from Britain,” Colorado rancher and putative hemp farmer Michael Bowman told me just as he was about to violate federal law and throw a few seeds on the ground on July 4, 2013. The date not being accidentally chosen.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), whose two-and-a-half-billion-dollar budget you and I pay, enforces the Controlled Substances Act. Cannabis is the largest target of the drug war, by far. The agency's deciders are putting its budget ahead of the clear interests of the nation, fighting tooth and nail to defend the outrageous hemp ban.

I should note here that, after three years of reporting from the drug war's front lines, I believe the good men and women of the DEA and other law enforcement agencies are doing their best. I applaud efforts to stem the flow of dangerous drugs like cocaine and black-market prescription pills. What's coming through here in the hemp discussion is my citizen frustration with a government agency that, for the good of the country, needs to make an immediate 180-degree shift on hemp. As we'll see, the agency can become part of the industry's regulatory process. That's how Canada does it.

Instead, as usual, the DEA's lobbyists brought all the now conventional lies to the 2013 congressional hemp legalization discussion—
People can't tell the difference between hemp and psychoactive cannabis
;
People might smoke their drapes
—only this time it didn't work. When Representative Jared Polis (D-Colorado), along with his bipartisan friends Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon), brought forth their FARRM Bill amendment on July 11, 2013, it passed by a vote of 216–208, with 69 Republicans voting yea.

On the Senate side, there was also some delicious Beltway cloakroom strong-arming surrounding the garnering of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)'s support for hemp, best reported by Ryan Grim in the
Huffington Post
. Allegedly, McConnell's pro-hemp Bluegrass State colleague, Rand Paul, promised not to back a McConnell Tea Party primary opponent if the senior senator threw his support behind industrial cannabis.

Long story short, according to Eric Steenstra, president of the Vote Hemp advocacy group, after thirteen years of hemp lobbying, he's suddenly noticed that “hemp hasn't been controversial” in recent legislative discussion.

So even though Senate and House FARRM Bill negotiations timed out during the 2013 federal government shutdown, I think hemp legalization will have happened, if not by the time you're reading these words, then by mid-2014.
5
Sure is proving to be a page-turner, though, complete with six-month-long cliffhanger.

From the perspective of a patriotic American who's just researched hemp's potential from Canada to Hawaii, Germany to Colorado, things are moving from fantasy to reality so quickly that it's kind of making me believe in a societal version of
The Secret
—ask for what you think's best for your nation's economy, the planet at large, and your children's future, and you will get it.

My excitement is perhaps best described this way: Ten months ago, I was shocked that Congress was even discussing hemp seriously. Suddenly I'm confident that future editions of this book will be printed on U.S.-grown hemp paper.
6
In fact, in these pages we'll be meeting two of the farmers who will be making it happen. It's been a dream since my I wrote my first book that not a tree would have to perish in order for me to publish—particularly since the idea of a sustainability author printing on shredded forests for some reason felt a little ticklish to me. Smarty-pants audience members were always asking me about that at live events, especially at those dang college talks. Now it looks like the paper itself will soon be soil fixing.

Humans, after a seventy-seven-year break, are returning to one of the most useful plants ever bestowed on them. And it happened while I was in the middle of writing about said plant, so I had to stick this note in here to hammer home the point that by the time this book hits shelves and e-readers, we might have hemp drapes in the White House Situation Room.
7

I mean for practical reasons. Hemp fabric is less flammable and longer lasting at a lower cost than the leading brand. So when you see farmers, energy companies, and policy makers from places like North Dakota and Kentucky expressing outrage in these pages about their inability to capitalize on the production side of the exploding worldwide hemp phenomenon, you can bet they're rubbing their palms together now, just a few months later.

That's because the U.S. market's well ahead of the politics. It is expensive to have to import hemp. The plant is popular enough to do it, but it'll be a pleasure not to have to, folks in the business tell me. Which is to say, people are already making real wampum from hemp.

As John Roulac, founder and CEO of Richmond, California–based Nutiva, the seventy-million-dollar company that makes omega-balanced and mineral-rich hemp seed oil, puts it, “Our company has doubled in size each of the past two years, has been growing 41 percent per year since 2006.
Inc.
magazine named us one of its fasting-growing companies in 2010. That's only going to continue. Look for hemp to grow fencerow-to-fencerow in the heartland. It's going to displace the corn and soy duopoly in the American Midwest.”

Hemp Pioneers

John Roulac, Founder and CEO, Nutiva

Given that I've been pouring a tablespoon of Nutiva's organic hemp oil (Canadian-grown, for now) into my family's breakfast shake every day for half a decade (to the tune of about eight hundred dollars per year and willingly counting), I thought it worthwhile to ask the company's fifty-four-year-old founder about his personal and entrepreneurial journey. Turns out his arc is similar to that of a solar electrician friend of mine in New Mexico, who's so busy that he describes himself as a “failed hippie.”

“I was a forest activist in the California redwoods in the 1980s and early '90s,” Roulac told me. “And the opponents would say, ‘If you're not gonna cut down trees, where will our houses come from?' That led me to hemp fiber, one of the strongest in the world. Then I discovered that the seed is one of the most nutritious available.”

That discovery still moves Roulac profoundly, judging by the fact that for about the next eight minutes I couldn't type fast enough to keep up with the guy's love song to hemp oil. It's making him rich—the
we're hiring
button on the privately held company's home page is large—but clearly Roulac was feeling it.

Highlights from his serenade include this, when I asked how hemp oil compares with other omega-rich oils like flax: “Flax is fine, hemp oil is divine. Hemp has what flax, chia, and fish oil don't: both GLA [gamma linolenic acid] and CLA [conjugated linoleic acid]—omega-6 fatty acids that are superfoods. GLA is an anti-inflammatory, and CLA is a building block of cell membranes, to just scratch the surface on those two. So hemp has a better fatty acid profile than flax. The shelled hemp seed—the hemp heart—is a gift from the universe. One little seed gives you magnesium—a master mineral involved in three hundred chemical processes in the body—zinc and iron. Vegans in particular can be short on those. Hemp is just nutritionally superior to flax and will surpass flax sales in the coming decade.”

And it went on like this for a while. Let me tell you, as someone who finds living preferable to the alternatives, I was all ears.

The business side kind of blends with the societal side with Roulac, and on both counts you can't accuse the fellow of failing to think big. “Our goal is to change the way the world eats, and to improve the food systems across the food chain. And we're already doing this.”

How so? “Today we're working with states like Kentucky to get hemp grown domestically. I testified there,” he told me. “But our biggest issue is that we only sell certified organic seed and oil, and there isn't the infrastructure yet with hemp. Believe it or not, even though GMOs are banned in Canadian hemp, which is a nice gesture, today most Canadian farmers are GMO farmers who use hemp as a bridge crop for three months and there's plenty of pesticides applied the rest of the year at least. It's part of the GMO cycle. We working to build that organic market.”

For that reason, toward the end of our conversation, Roulac added a challenge to consumers: “If you want to see a green future, buy organic hemp. The more organic hemp you eat, the more organic hemp will be planted, and the healthier the planet will be.”

Now, I'm a journalist of some experience, and I recognize a line out of an industry trade group playbook when I hear it. But I'll cut Roulac some slack and include his talking point, for two reasons. First off, he's talking about a plant that it is at the time of this writing a federal felony to cultivate. And second, as a sustainability writer for two decades who's just back from visiting a lot of hemp farms and reading a lot of hemp research, and as a fellow who's had to work with drought-affected soil on my own ranch, I can tell you he's right.