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The government's motives for its attack on marijuana remain unclear. Researchers have proffered theories ranging from collusion with corporations threatened by hemp's commercial potential to moralistic fervor and bureaucratic thirst for domain once Prohibition ended in 1933. Regardless of motives, the ensuing stigmatization, red tape, state and federal controls, punitive taxes and misconceptions about marijuana's nature and its relationship to hemp doomed any chance that hemp would
be resurrected as an agricultural crop. Fewer and fewer farmers were willing to grow it, and manufacturers sought other resources for rope, twine, nets, sailcloth, textiles, paint and other fiber and oil products for which hemp is well suited. The government briefly reversed course during World War II, launching an aggressive "Hemp for Victory" campaign that implored U.S. farmers to grow the crop to alleviate wartime materials shortages. But after the war, hemp again faded into oblivion.

In 1957, a Wisconsin farmer harvested the last legal commercial hemp crop in America. The government's outright prohibition of the crop, a nonissue until interest in hemp renewed in the early 1990s, was formalized in 1971 with implementation of the Controlled Substances Act, the centerpiece of U.S. drug policy.

Today's reawakened market faces an uphill battle in the U.S., not
just because source materials can't be grown here but because decades of enforced hibernation have left the industry light-years behind in technology, infrastructure, research and development, marketing and public acceptance. Hemp Industries Assn., a consortium of about 250 importers, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, says that in the past decade the North American market has gone from virtually nothing to an estimated $200 million. Not bad under the circumstances, but still a pittance for a
plant that could clothe and house us, build and fuel our cars, enhance our diets and keep the front gate from squeaking.

Hemp has attracted many passionate advocates over the years simply because of its relation to the illegal drug. But a glance at hemp's résumé makes it clear why a mere vegetable could inspire a devout constituency that transcends the counterculture. Hemp's products, its proponents insist, are interchangeable with those from timber or petroleum. The fiber volume supplied by trees that take 30 years to grow can be harvested from hemp just three or four months after the seeds go into the ground—and on half the land. Hemp requires no herbicides, little or no pesticide, and it grows faster than almost any other plant: from seed to 10 feet or taller in just a few months. Unlike most crops, it actually enriches rather than depletes the soil. As a textile it has proven stronger than cotton, warmer than linen, comfortable to wear and durable. As a building material, its extraordinarily long fibers test stronger than wood or concrete. As a nutrient it contains one of nature's most perfectly balanced oils, high in protein, richer in vitamin E than soy and possessing all eight
essential fatty acids.

But because hemp contains traces of the chemical intoxicant known as tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the U.S. government lists cannabis as a Schedule I drug, a category reserved for the most dangerous and medically useless drugs. Methamphetamine, PCP and cocaine don't warrant that classification, but hemp does, right alongside heroin and LSD. The word hemp doesn't actually appear on the list, but the drug-war establishment, particularly the instrumental DEA, behaves as though it does by recognizing no distinction between varieties of cannabis.

The DEA sometimes seems bent on fomenting confusion. Two years ago, during his brief tenure as head of the agency, Asa Hutchinson stated that "many Americans do not know that hemp and marijuana are both parts of the same plant and that hemp cannot be produced without producing marijuana." One reason many Americans do not know this is because it's not true. That's
like saying beagles and collies are both parts of the same dog and that beagles cannot be produced without producing collies.

Unmoved by logic, accepted nomenclature or the realities of plant
genetics, the DEA insists that all cannabis is marijuana. Does the agency also consider industrial hemp grown legally outside the U.S. to be marijuana? "Yes, we do," says Frank Sapienza, the agency's chief of drug and chemical evaluation. Since more than 30 other countries manage to distinguish between marijuana and industrial hemp and allow their farmers to grow hemp, one wonders what they know that the U.S. doesn't. "I'm not going to
comment on what other countries do," Sapienza says.

The DEA argues that the revival of hemp farming in the U.S. will
somehow increase the availability, use and public acceptance of marijuana. Hemp activists dismiss this argument out of hand, as does one of their most formidable allies, former CIA Director James R. Woolsey. Hailing from the political right, Woolsey vehemently opposes any loosening of America's marijuana laws. But in his experience, he says, most people, once they become informed about hemp, see no justification for America's prohibition
against the crop. "They understand that there's not been any
increase in use of marijuana in, say, Europe or Canada as a result of industrial hemp cultivation. It's one of those issues in which there are no real substantive arguments on the other side."

Sapienza points out, as DEA officials often do, that the agency
merely enforces the law. In truth, though, the DEA also interprets the law, creates exemptions to it and makes judgments that determine how statutory abstractions translate to on-the-ground realities. A case in point is the agency's declaration in late 2001 that all edible hemp products--cereals,
health bars, sodas, salad oils and the like, products sold in the
U.S. for years--are illegal. Hundreds of retailers were given a few months to get such items off their shelves. If a federal court hadn't intervened, a multimillion-dollar industry would have been wiped out by a DEA decision to reinterpret existing law. For now, edible hemp products remain legal and commercially available in the U.S., pending a 9th Circuit court ruling expected sometime this year.

Despite hemp's stigma, state legislatures in recent years have been surprisingly bold in their willingness to address the issue. Though Davis vetoed California's 2002 bill requesting research, in 1999 both the state Assembly and the California Democratic Party approved unambiguous resolutions supporting hemp commercialization. Twelve other states have passed similar resolutions or bills. Since 1997, North Dakota, Minnesota,
Montana, West Virginia and Maryland have legalized cultivation, and in 2000, the National Conference of State Legislatures passed a resolution urging the federal government to clear the barriers to domestic hemp production. But entrenched federal opposition renders all these political machinations meaningless beyond symbolic value.

The DEA, which is within the Justice Department, justifies its
unbending posture on hemp with assertions that legal hemp agriculture would provide camouflage for illegal pot growers. From the air or at a distance, the agency says, industrial hemp and marijuana are virtually indistinguishable.

"The DEA is wrong," says Indiana University professor emeritus Paul Mahlberg, a plant cell biologist who has studied cannabis for more than 25 years and is conducting research on 150 different strains, both hemp and marijuana. "Hemp plants are tall, 8 to 20 feet. Marijuana plants in the field are shorter." And cultivated hemp grows a slender, nearly leafless lower stem, whereas marijuana strains are bred to be "Christmas tree-like in appearance," with abundant leaves, glands and flowers in which are stored the intoxicating THC.

Marijuana's bushiness requires far more space per plant, says John Roulac, a compost expert and owner of the Sebastopol, Calif., health-food company Nutiva, which imports sterilized hemp seed from Canada for nutrition bars. From the ground or the air, a hemp crop looks significantly denser than a marijuana crop. "In a square yard, you might grow one or two marijuana plants, whereas with hemp you might have 100 plants," Roulac says.

The argument about physical appearance should be a nonissue, hemp advocates say, given that the last place a marijuana grower would want to locate his drug crop is in or near a hemp field. The consensus among cannabis experts, supported by the logic of plant genetics and field studies, is that cross-pollination would sabotage the pot grower's efforts, causing his next generation of marijuana to be only half as potent. This genetic convenience delights hard-line anti-marijuana types such as Woolsey, the former CIA chief. He was skeptical about pro-hemp arguments when he first heard them. "But then I got into the science of it a bit, and it was quite clear to me that not only is [hemp cultivation] a good idea, it's a major headache for marijuana [growers]," he says with an impish laugh. If it were up to Woolsey, tall, lush fields of industrial hemp would be greening America, filling the sky with airborne pollen and frustrating marijuana growers everywhere.

The DEA flatly rejects the idea that a hemp field would degrade any marijuana in the vicinity. A spokeswoman for the agency recently maintained that "it cannot be said with any level of certainty that a cannabis plant of relatively low THC content will necessarily reduce the THC content of other plants grown in close proximity."