From: Institute for Hemp <instforhemp@delphi.com>
Newsgroups: alt.hemp
Subject: LA Times Article about "Budding Industry In Canada"
Date: Tue, 31 May 94 19:30:00 -0500
Message-ID: <5G4MGdQ.instforhemp@delphi.com>

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OUR GOAL:  The reestablishment of Cannabis Hemp as a Farm Crop for the Worlds
Farmers and as an environmental safe alternative resource.
 
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John Birrenbach
 
           A *BUDDING* INDUSTRY MAY TAKE ROOT IN CANADA: *HEMP*
 AGRICULTURE: OFFICIALS CONSIDER LEGALIZING MARIJUANA CROP FOR PROCESSING
                   INTO PAPER, ROPE, BUILDING MATERIALS.
 
Los Angeles Times (LT) - MONDAY May 16, 1994
By: CRAIG TURNER; TIMES STAFF WRITER
Edition: Home Edition   Page: 1  Pt. A  Col. 5
 
    TILLSONBURG, Canada - Joe Strobel dreams marijuana dreams.
 
    Wait, it's not what you think.
 
    In Strobel's dream, the tobacco fields sloping up from the north shore
of Lake Erie--his fields and those of his neighbors--are patched with dense
stands of Cannabis sativa ruffling in the wind. And it's all legal.
Press <return> to continue.
 
    The Canadian government is poised to make Strobel's dream come true,
perhaps as early as this summer.
    For Strobel's marijuana--or hemp, as he prefers to call it--would be so
low in THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the active ingredient in pot, that no
one could get high smoking it. Instead, Strobel and the 11 other Ontario
farmers in his consortium plan to sell their hemp fiber for processing into
paper, rope, building materials and maybe even shirts and caps.
 
    These would-be hemp growers, and others like them from the Great Lakes
to the Canadian Rockies, are beneficiaries of a surging international
movement on behalf of low-THC hemp, powered by an unlikely coalition of
environmentalists, entrepreneurs, farmers and, yes, advocates of legalized
pot.
 
    Canadian officials are listening. The ruling Liberal Party is
sponsoring legislation that would license hemp growing throughout Canada.
 
    "Farmers in Canada are very interested in it. It's an excellent
commercial and industrial type of crop. It's high in fiber, it's an
excellent alternative to (growing) tobacco. . . . It has a great deal of
potential," Health Minister Diane Marleau said in an interview.
 
    She said the bill, which would closely regulate hemp growers, could get
final approval in the House of Commons this year and then would go to the
Canadian Senate.
 
    Canada would follow a number of European and Asian countries, most
recently Britain, in legalizing cultivation of low-THC hemp.
 
    Advocates of the plant, often sporting "Hemp Can Save the Planet"
buttons, get rapturous about its attributes.
 
    Not only is it the environmentally correct alternative to lumber and
wood pulp, they say, but you can cook with hemp oil, fabricate it into
particle board, combine it with old plastic milk containers and mold it
into two-by-fours, burn it as fuel, feed the seeds to your pet and even
make it into, ahem, cigarette paper.
 
    "This will grow anywhere, all the way from Canada down to most of the
U.S., if not all of the U.S. This is the finest thing we could be growing
to replace forest," enthused George Tyson, general manager of Xymax 2001, a
Montrose, Kan., company that has contracted with Strobel's farmers to
convert hemp fiber into building material. "It's the environmental answer,
and it's the agriculture answer."
 
    Those on the business end of the budding hemp industry are more
circumspect. While acknowledging the attractions of low-THC hemp, they say
the economics of growing and processing it on a large scale in North
America today remain unproven.
 
    The leading hemp processor in Britain still sells it mainly to stables
as horse bedding.
 
    But there is no shortage of interest among Canada's recession-pummeled
farmers. Fiona Briody, director of an Alberta crop development association
that has a hemp license request pending, has been astonished by the number
of growers in Western Canada seemingly ready to try it.
 
    Among the backers of legalizing hemp here are the Sierra Club of
Eastern Canada, other environmental organizations, a handful of
enthusiastic grass-roots organizations and a few adventuresome business
people.
 
    But Strobel, a lively, 65-year-old retired physical education teacher,
has become the hemp movement's top salesman. He brings to the crusade the
kind of bouncy enthusiasm that once led him to develop a fitness program
called the Health Hustle, which has been adopted by schools throughout
Canada and in parts of the United States.
    "Let's face it, we farmers have an economic problem, and this might be
an out, so people are pretty receptive," he said, sitting in the dining
room of the spacious Tillsonburg, Ontario, home that serves as Hemp
Headquarters, Canada. "We know it can be grown here because it's been grown
here before, (and) . . . the potential is about unlimited. Somewhere it
will pay off."
 
    Strobel retired from teaching seven years ago and began devoting all
his time to the family tobacco farm, about 85 miles southwest of Toronto.
 
    Tobacco remains profitable, he said, but needs to be grown in rotation
with other crops. Strobel and his wife, Judith, tried a variety of
alternatives, but "nothing really paid off. It pays the taxes and nothing
else, so we were looking for something."
 
    Last year, that something turned out to be hemp.
 
    Since then, Strobel's quest has taken him around Canada and into the
United States.
 
    He has rummaged through abandoned warehouses in Kentucky where hemp was
grown legally in the 1940s as a wartime measure, compiled back issues of
High Times magazine, collected hemp paper with marijuana leaf watermarks
and picked through records and photos of early 20th-Century Canadian hemp
cultivation.
 
    Now he speaks with confidence about potential crop yields, prices per
acre and transit costs.
 
    Because the bill before Parliament will not pass in time for planting
season this year, Strobel's consortium, using existing law, has asked for
an experimental license to grow 18 acres of hemp in scattered locations
near Tillsonburg.
 
    They hope to harvest 80 tons and have reached agreement with processors
in Canada and the United States for production of a variety of products.
Other, similar proposals are pending from elsewhere in Canada, including
Alberta.
 
    They await final approval by the Bureau of Dangerous Drugs of Health
Canada, which grants a handful of licenses annually, mainly for academic
and law enforcement research.
 
    While Strobel acknowledged the debt he owes to the pro-pot crowd, who
turned him on to the potential of hemp in the first place, he stressed that
the kind of cannabis that he wants to grow should not be confused with what
he calls "the happy stuff."
 
    Although it is of the same species, cannabis grown for hemp has been
specially developed in Europe through selective breeding.
 
    The main difference is the low-THC factor of commercial stocks. The
pending law in Canada would call for testing seeds and plants to ensure a
THC content no higher than 0.3%. THC concentrations in marijuana generally
range from about 3% to more than 5%, according to the U.S. National
Institute on Drug Abuse.
 
    Nonetheless, Stuart Carpenter, director of Hemcore Ltd. in Essex,
England, Britain's major processor, said hemp farmers there have occasional
problems with night raiders snipping cuttings from low-THC plants and
presumably peddling them as marijuana seedlings.
 
    Those who want to legalize the drug say they back the hemp movement out
of environmental concerns and the assumption that acceptance of legalized,
low-THC hemp eventually will erode the ban on the high-THC variety.
    The law that would authorize growth of low-THC hemp would also toughen
penalties for marijuana use.
 
    Participation of the pro-pot crowd has caused some political obstacles
and awkward moments.
 
    Ken Masse, 44, who farms 1,800 acres of peas, wheat, barley and oats in
central Alberta, and is applying for a license to grow an experimental hemp
plot, said, "What we really need is a name change, because as soon as you
say hemp, people think of marijuana and half the population gets up in
arms."
 
    Hemp originated in Asia and is known to have grown in China as early as
2800 BC. For most of history it mainly has been used as a source for rope,
twine and canvas; a 1943 U.S. government film, now gleefully exhibited by
marijuana advocates, notes that the rope, sails and rigging of "our beloved
Old Ironsides" were made from hemp.
 
    The crop was legally grown in the United States and Canada until the
1930s, when it was banned in both countries as an illicit drug.
 
    Hemp was briefly grown under license in the United States during World
War II when the Japanese overran most hemp-growing countries, interrupting
the U.S. supply.
 
    Canadian environmentalists were first attracted to hemp as an
alternative to lumbering, a considerable lure in a country that still
permits clear cutting of old-growth forest. But the Establishment patina of
agriculture and business have lent invaluable credibility to a movement
that still carries a lingering whiff of counterculture.
 
    Larry Duprey, president of a 23-year-old Montreal-based fashion
accessory distribution firm, is importing hemp fabric and making caps,
shirts and other clothing.
 
    Carpenter, the British hemp processor, began contracting with English
growers mainly for horse bedding, but his company is moving into hemp paper
and textiles.
 
    He noted that "it's an extremely difficult crop to process. We've had
to develop our own specialty machinery."
 
    Briody, the Alberta farm official, said that after studying the crop in
the Netherlands, Romania and Russia, "the yields definitely aren't what
some people say."
 
    But Briody said farmers in the association are undeterred.
 
    As Gar Knutson, a Liberal member of Parliament from Ontario who
supports legalization and licensing of low-THC hemp, put it: "Agriculture
has been so bad anyway, what do we have to lose by trying out hemp for a
while?"
 
CAPTION:
Photo: Beyond Pipe Dreams: Canada's ruling Liberal Party is sponsoring
legislation to license the growing of a marijuana so low in
tetrahydrocannabinol no one would get high smoking it. Joe Strobel, above,
and 11 other Ontario farmers in his consortium plan to sell their hemp
fiber for processing into paper, rope and building materials.
Photo: Canadian Joe Strobel hefts a hank of hemp fiber. He hopes to get
permission to grow cannabis.
JEFF CHEVRIER / For The Times
 
DESCRIPTORS:  MARIJUANA; CANADA--AGRICULTURE; CROPS
 
                     Copyright (c) 1994, Times Mirror Company