Author’s Note

Hot Off the Hemp Presses— Just Trying to Keep Pace with America’s Light-Speed Return to Its Usual Attitude About a Plant

Hemp cultivation is about to become legal (and shortly thereafter, big) again in the United States. It started to happen while I was about halfway done with this book. I’m just not used to winning big, important societal battles outright. It’s an astonishing no-brainer. And it directly affects my life.

To give just one example, my plan the day hemp becomes legal is to begin cultivating ten acres of the plant so that my Sweetheart no longer has to import from China the material she already uses to make the shirts I wear in media interviews to discuss the fairly massive economic value of hemp. In a cynical age, we can use one less irony.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that in humanity’s eight-thousand-year relationship with the hemp plant, this past year has been the most impactful one since the first Paleolithic hunter with blistered feet noticed that hemp’s fibers made a stronger sandal than the leading brand. We saw Kentucky’s passage of hemp (also called industrial cannabis) legislation and the Colorado legislature’s near-unanimous approval of commercial hemp cultivation in time for the 2014 planting season1 (making ten states that have in some form allowed cultivation, including North Dakota and Vermont).

Most important, the U.S. Congress, as I send this book to my publisher, is also poised to re-legalize domestic hemp cultivation without the necessity of federal approval for the first time since 1937.2 The federal drug war is the last impediment to U.S. farmers and entrepreneurs benefiting from what we’ll see is already a half-billion-dollar hemp industry in Canada.

In the House version of the massive 2013 FARRM Bill (one of those “must pass” infrastructure bills that come along every five years), the psychoactively inert hemp plant was removed from the purview of the federal Controlled Substances Act (where it currently is classified as more dangerous than meth and cocaine). The wording of a bipartisan amendment allows industrial cannabis cultivation as part of university research in states that permit hemp farming.

To many who have battled for years to get the plant we’re going to be discussing back into the economy, this seems like a baby step. But Canada followed a similar course prior to ramping up its hemp crop in 1998, conducting government-sponsored research into the best cultivars (seed varieties) for its farmers to use from Ontario to Alberta, starting in 1994. In Europe as well, new cultivar certification is a three-year process.

“We don’t have the seed stock in the U.S. anymore,” plant breeder, former Big Corn scientist (he invented the plant molecular marker), and renowned hemp researcher David West told me. “I checked with the National Seed Storage Laboratory. They found me a few bags of the old Kentucky seed sitting in a hallway. They were long rotten. It’s hard to express what a terrible loss that is—this was a blending of Asian and European cultivars that comprised the best hemp germplasm in the world.”

In other words, it’ll take some time and study to re-learn what hemp varieties will work in the American heartland’s soil. West and many others believe that feral hemp—the “ditch weed” that’s survived prohibition in places like Nebraska—might be a source for rebuilding the stock for a seed that’s been cultivated in the New World since the earliest colonial moments (1545 in Chile, 1606 in present-day Nova Scotia3). Let Darwin pick the cultivar, is the argument. “I tell farmers to make clandestine collection of feral seeds in advance of legalization,” West told me with a laugh.

Hemp Pioneers

Dr. David West, Geneticist, Actual Twenty-First-Century American Hemp Researcher

From his home alone in Prescott, Wisconsin, along the St. Croix River, the sixty-five-year-old West said that what is, on the surface, his unusual journey from legendary Big Ag researcher to legendary hemp researcher actually follows what for him was an obvious course. After pioneering the use of molecular markers in plant breeding (now part of the standard commercial plant identification tool kit), he “watched the seed industry get taken over by the chemical industry” in the 1990s. At the same time, he told me, “One day I saw a helicopter land in a neighboring field [in Wisconsin] to eradicate feral hemp. Now, as a plant breeder, I’m quite aware of what hemp is. I thought, What the hell is going on here?”

In a 1994 paper titled Fiber War, West declared modern hemp’s agricultural value, a radical view for someone with unimpeachable creds in what was fast becoming the GMO monoculture world (which industry he had by this time left, saying, “I don’t want to grow terminator corn for Monsanto”).

His notoriety from that piece and subsequent writing on hemp (as well as the co-founding of the North American Industrial Hemp Council) led, in 1999, to him being contacted by Hawaiian representative Cynthia Thielen (R-Oahu), who is still in office and to this day battling for hemp production in the Aloha State. She’s trying to find a replacement for the declining sugarcane industry, help remediate soil, and find an animal feed that can be grown on the islands.

“Cynthia basically said, ‘Do you want to come to Oahu to grow hemp?’” West explained. It was an Is this a trick question? moment. Or as West, who thought that maybe he was on Candid Camera, puts it, “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

The half-acre project, which got its federal permits to acquire hemp seed at what West described as “the last second,” ran from 1999 through 2003, and began with a state Hemp Day declared by the governor for the morning of the first planting on December 19, 1999.

“There were cameras, the Kahuna ceremonial blessing, the whole deal, then everyone went home, and it was me on a fenced-in, alarmed patch of dirt, dealing with every problem farmers have always had to deal with.”

One of his first discoveries, he told me with an It’s funnier now snicker, was that “birds love hemp. Took a while to rig a netting system that kept them out. They ate the whole first planting.”

The project was funded by a hair care company interested in a publicity stunt for what West called a “dash” of hemp oil in its product. West was fine with that. “When I saw like-minded people at energy fairs speak about hemp without any real knowledge—and how could they have knowledge?—I realized that what we really needed was some studies. But I also knew, since I worked for seed companies for years, how much that kind of research costs.”

West groaned like a hungry man when I told him I was just back from a visit to the sixty acres of hemp that Colorado farmer Ryan Loflin was able to cultivate in 2013. “My study was on a very small, academic scale, but we wound up showing that hemp could be viable in Hawaii’s latitude, which is important because growing hemp is all about the photoperiod. It was a Chinese cultivar that worked best. Grew more than ten feet tall. And it was on former Dole plantation land.”

When the project wrapped, West said, George W. Bush was in the White House, 9/11 had happened, and almost no one was paying attention, not even the reps at Alterna, the hair care company. But he rigorously recorded his data and methods, because “I knew people would care about hemp again.”

West calls himself retired today, but he’s still researching ditch weed in Nebraska and trying to fund a hemp genome project. I watched a YouTube video where he visited a feral Midwest hemp field, dissecting several plants’ morphology. His explanation for all the activity is that it’s involuntary. “When you open one door with hemp genetics and even with American hemp history, a dozen other doors open,” he said.

He then launched into perhaps a twelve-minute (and riveting) tale of one of the original “hempreneurs,” David Myerle, who went bankrupt in the 1820s after planting and contracting for hemp in Kentucky, Missouri, and elsewhere.4 One problem? The U.S. Navy kept rejecting his multi-ton hemp deliveries, either for quality reasons or because of corrupt ties to another supplier. A bigger problem? Too many of his workers were dying of pneumonia trying to implement his special water-based hemp-processing regime. We’ll be looking at less deadly and potentially faster methods in these pages.

What’s astonishing, for someone who’s been following “drug” policy pretty much full-time for three years now, is that it’s really happening: America’s worst policy since segregation—cannabis prohibition—is ending. It lasted seventy-seven years. That’s how powerful the rhetoric of the drug war has proven since alcohol prohibition’s chief crusader, Harry Anslinger, took the helm at the new Bureau of Narcotics in 1930. Using the same arguments that the American people no longer bought regarding beer, cannabis prohibition began seven years later. Banning (in actuality, restricting to zero by not issuing federal permits) hemp cultivation is like banning wheat. It’s a surreal policy. Absolutely, 100 percent baseless.

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.

While I’ve got you thinking big picture, and before we launch into the plant’s most lucrative digital age killer apps, I thought it might be helpful to include a quick, explicit definition of hemp. That’s because it’s finally sunk in, after several years spent researching an industry that’s indeed growing 20 percent a year (and that’s just the hemp seed oil market), that such growth means a lot of new people are coming to the topic all the time. These folks will want to know what exactly this plant is we’re discussing.

Even some of 2014’s U.S. farmers will be fresh to the species, given that Canada’s cultivators can’t keep up with demand, meaning a much-needed cash crop is ready to roll Stateside. Now. The North American industry is growing like feral hemp in a Nebraska ditch.

Hemp8 includes all varieties of the Cannabis genus that contain negligible amounts of THC (a component of the cannabis plant that can be intoxicating when heated). It is synonymous, as we’ve said, with industrial cannabis and in fact has been used in industry for so long that linguists can trace when and where key language changes occurred based on a culture’s word for the plant.

Cannabis is a dioecious plant (there are males and females), and branches are covered with hand-like leaf fans. Originating in Central Asia, hemp has a four- to six-month growing cycle and has been successfully cultivated on every continent except Antarctica. Mature plants range from two to twelve feet tall, depending on variety.

There are two main reasons the plant is important to humanity: It feeds us and it protects us. The seed oil, as we’ll see in a Canadian study I visited in the lab, is an incredibly nutritious protein- and mineral-rich source of essential fatty acids. And the fiber is freakishly strong. When you slice a hemp stalk in half, you’ll see, nestled in a snug hollow tube, a long, string-like band running the length inside. This is hemp’s famous bast fiber. Cultivated correctly, it’s stronger than steel. So when I say hemp protects us, I mean it has done so from the time of our earliest and still most durable clothing and shelter right up to our next-generation body armor.9

Okay. So now as I rattle off all the hempsters’ favorite historical uses for hemp (which, really, is a way of showing how patriotic and conservative their view is, how history is on hemp’s side), you’ll know the reasons why.

Thomas Jefferson famously wrote his Declaration of Independence draft on hemp paper, and Betsy Ross’s first flag was made from the plant. Early Virginia colonists were ordered to cultivate industrial cannabis and could even pay their taxes with harvest shares. More recently, a 1938 Popular Mechanics article that’s become legendary among hemp boosters presciently called hemp “the billion dollar crop,” and extolled its bafflingly strong fibers’ twenty-five thousand industrial uses, half a dozen of which we’ll be looking at in this book.

Really all of this is most elegantly expressed in that Shinto coronation ceremony. The message is, “Bring the hemp with you.” It’s what anthropologists call a camp follower—it was toted nearly everywhere as humans traipsed around the globe.10

Which is actually good for the U.S. industry, according to hemp agronomist Anndrea Hermann. Rather than relying on feral Nebraskan ditch weed, “Farmers in Kentucky and Colorado can look for varieties that have worked in climates similar to theirs.” An Uzbek cultivar, for example, might be perfect for Illinois, where as a state senator Barack Obama voted twice for hemp cultivation.

West told me that a century before Hemp for Victory, the U.S. Navy was so desperate for hemp rope that the federal government began contests, in the 1840s, for the production of high-quality fiber strains that could compete with the then-standard-bearing Italian and Russian varieties that taxpayers were being forced to expensively procure.

“Missionaries sent back Chinese hemp, farmers blended it with the more coarse European strains we already had, and the result was the finest hemp in the world,” he said. “It’s generally called Kentucky hemp, but there were many named varieties with specific properties that were well known and widely marketed for more than half a century. Government-run breeding programs continued until the 1930s.” USDA-researched strains had names like Kymington, Keijo, and Yarrow.

And so was birthed an industry that employed thousands, earned millions, and spanned a dozen states by the turn of the twentieth century. Kentucky’s first millionaire, Lexington’s John Wesley Hunt, made his pile in the 1840s weaving his hemp crop into rope, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.11

For a solar-powered goat herder like me, it’s worth noting that, according to the Canadian government, hemp can be cultivated with almost no pesticides (though as we’ll see, there’s a bit more to that story than that).

I think that covers everything a newcomer should know before diving into this book. Oh, except for a special note to those very new to the topic—especially those who were raised, as I was, on “Just Say No” era rhetoric: You can’t possibly confuse industrial cannabis with psychoactive cannabis, for a number of reasons.

For one, hemp grows in vast, dense fields of thin, stick-like plants (as opposed to the flower-heavy, manicured prima donna social/medicinal cannabis plants). Even more crucially, hemp’s pollen will immediately ruin a psychoactive cannabis crop, by diluting the psychoactivity that, as President Obama so eloquently pointed out in describing his own affection for the plant, is “the point.”

In fact, this is why when California passed a terrific bit of industrial cannabis legislation in 2011 with bipartisan and local law enforcement support (inexplicably vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown12), it called for cultivation only in counties (incidentally, very politically conservative counties) that are far from the Emerald Triangle region in the northern redwoods that’s known worldwide for its top-shelf psychoactive cannabis.

Also, eating, drinking, wearing, or sleeping in a house made of hemp will never cause intoxication, nor THC to show up in a urine test. Young children can safely eat and drink hemp oil and other hemp food products. All are as healthy and inert as flaxseed and cod liver oils.

In the real world, would you care to know how many cases of hidden or accidentally psychoactive cannabis plants have turned up in the course of Canada’s decade-and-a-half-old and burgeoning hemp industry, according to Hermann, who does the testing and inspecting in the province of Manitoba? Zero. “There’s no confusion,” she told me. “We’ve been at this for fifteen years now. Everyone recognizes hemp’s great value to farmers and the country.”

—Doug Fine Funky Butte Ranch, New Mexico August 22, 2013