(Huffington Post) A group of civilly-disobedient hemp farmers and business leaders were arrested Tuesday morning while digging up the lawn to plant industrial hemp seeds at the headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

David Bronner, the president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, a more than 60-year-old company that does tens of millions of dollars of business annually, was among those arrested.

Bronner buys the hemp used in his soaps from Canadian farmers. He was arrested outside the DEA museum, which shares space with the headquarters.

“Our kids are going to come to this museum and say, ‘My God. Your generation was crazy. What the hell is wrong with you people?’” he said as Arlington County Police handcuffed him and walked him to a waiting car.

Wayne Hauge and Will Allen, farmers from North Dakota and Vermont respectively, brought shovels and seeds to the protest, where they were joined by representatives of Vote Hemp, which advocates for federal legislation that would allow states to craft their own hemp policies.

Currently [eight nine] states — Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, [Oregon,] Vermont, and West Virginia — allow industrial hemp production or research, but federal law, which requires nearly-impossible-to-obtain-permits to grow hemp, trumps those state laws. A bill introduced by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) would allow states to craft their own policies.

Of all the insanities in the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs, the ban on industrial hemp is the looniest. We have the Drug Enforcement Administration enforcing a ban on something that is not a drug! They’ll tell you that by strict interpretation of the law, hemp does contain THC, so it has to be banned, even though the THC contained in hemp is so minute that you could literally burn a field of the stuff and not catch the slightest of buzzes.

They’ll tell you that if hemp were legal, growers of illicit high-THC pot would hide their crops in-between the rows of hemp. Any farmer can tell you that what you’d get is cross-pollination; the hemp would ruin the high of the pot and the pot would ruin the strength of the hemp.

Then they’ll tell you that if hemp were legal, law enforcement would be burdened trying to determine which fields were hemp and which were pot. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for the police in China, Australia, Canada, or most of Europe, however, as they seem to be able to tell the difference between a tall, reedy hemp plant and a short bushy pot plant without much difficulty. Maybe our American cops are just too stupid to handle basic botany.

The ban on hemp remains for two reasons. One is to protect the entrenched business interests that would stand to lose market share to legal hemp crops. Hemp can produce anything you can make from a tree or a barrel of oil, and do it cheaper, make it better, and cause less environmental damage along the way. Hemp paper resists oxidation far better than wood paper. Hemp pressboards are as strong as steel and save our forests. Hemp seed oil has the highest energy value of any seed oil crop – all current diesel engines can run on hempseed oil with no modifications required. Hemp seed is one of nature’s highest protein foods and a source of important anti-oxidants. Hemp cloth is impervious to mildew, repels water, and holds heat better, and requires no pesticides. Can you begin to imagine all the companies that would lose money if forced to compete fairly with hemp?

And the second reason is psychological. If hemp is legal, cannabis is just a plant. It’s a subtle thing, but under the current framework, the government can tell us cannabis is an evil drug. But if hemp is legal, then sometimes cannabis is an evil drug and sometimes it is just a plant. Once cannabis is sometimes just a plant, it is harder to scare people into thinking it can be evil.

We are approaching the 400th anniversary of the first colonial hemp plantations in North America. Hemp is our American heritage – this country exists because of hemp and our entire history is infused with its cultivation and use. The forces that combined to ban hemp in the 20th Century have stolen our very birthright and declared nature itself to be illegal.

I mean, even the DEA enjoys boasting about their so-called ‘accomplishments.’ They even have their own (taxpayer funded) museum.

Given this fact, it’s both curious and notable that the DEA has suddenly ceased publicizing data regarding how many millions of feral hemp plants (aka ‘ditchweed’) law enforcement eradicate each year.

In previous years, upwards of 98 percent of all the pot seized by law enforcement was categorized as ‘ditchweed’ — a term the DEA uses to define “wild, scattered marijuana plants [with] no evidence of planting, fertilizing, or tending.”

For instance, in 2005 the DEA reported that cops destroyed some 219 million feral hemp plants versus only four million cultivated marijuana plants. DEA data for the year 2004 tells a similar story. Of the estimated 265 million marijuana plants destroyed by law enforcement that year, more than 262 million (roughly 99 percent) were classified as ‘ditchweed.’ In 2006, roughly 84 million plants seized by law enforcement (and more than 94 percent of all the marijuana eradicated) were ‘ditchweed.’

So, how much ditchweed did police confiscate in 2007? That would be anyone’s guess.

Upon referencing Table 4.38 (Number of marijuana plants eradicated and seized, arrests made, weapons seized, and value of assets seized under the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program, by State, 2007) in the latest version of the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, visitors will discover that the column that previously reported on ‘ditchweed’ seizures (in prior years’ tables, it was seventh column from the left) is now conspicuously missing.

So why would the DEA abruptly want to cease taking credit for destroying hundreds of millions of pounds of marijuana each year? Perhaps it’s because unlike cultivated marijuana, feral hemp contains virtually no detectable levels of THC — the primary psychoactive component in cannabis — and does not contribute to the black market marijuana trade.

Or perhaps it’s because the public was finally beginning to smarten up to the fact that they’ve been paying their police millions of dollars each year to do nothing more than pull a few weeds.

Frustratingly, NORML recently discovered through a tip from a supporter and a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that an anti-drug group based in Florida called Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF) in their zeal against anything having to do with cannabis harass major corporations and retailers to stop marketing all products that are made of hemp, books that educate about the plant and even CDs from musical artists that dare mention the word ‘hemp’.

One of DFAF’s targets was retail giant Wal-Mart. In 2005, DFAF director Calvina Fay (a former law enforcement employee) wrote to the CEO of Wal-Mart, S. Robeson Walton, bringing to his attention that of the tens of thousands of products Wal-Mart sells, DFAF took great umbrage with the company for selling two hemp-related books and a CD by Canadian rock band ‘Chixdiggit’.

“Save Money. Live Better.” (Wal-Mart motto)
A search of Wal-Mart’s webpage today, and a trip to a Wal-Mart in Maryland confirms, that apparently DFAF’s harassment of Wal-Mart worked as the company no longer sells any book titles concerning hemp, no hemp-related clothing, jewelry or backpacks. However, despite DFAF’s protest, Wal-Mart still retails CDs by Chixdiggit, featuring the song ‘Hemp, hemp hooray!’

What can cannabis consumers and concerned citizens do to counter the anti-cannabis advocacy of groups like DFAF? Do the same thing! Write to the CEOs and/or owners of retail stores and tell them that you logically want hemp-based products to purchase for all obvious reasons—hemp is an environmentally safe, responsible and valuable agricultural product that takes little fertilizer and almost no pesticide to produce a cash crop that is as utilitarian, if not more so, than the soybean.

Let prospective business owners who may have a commercial interest in selling hemp products know that virtually every country in the world (even though ‘marijuana’ is not legal in these countries to ingest) allows non-psychoactive hemp to be cultivated and used for industrial purposes/apparel, and that the two primary reasons that hemp is not a staple agricultural commodity in America is 1) because of the country’s misguided and blanket cannabis prohibition (a.k.a. Reefer Madness) created by the federal government in 1937, and 2) so-called anti-drug groups disingenuously confusing industrial hemp with marijuana for the purposes of continuing the mindless practice of opposing any human interaction at all with the cannabis plant, be it for adult recreant use, a safe/non-toxic therapeutic or as a valuable industrial plant that humans have been cultivating and employing for the betterment of society for thousands of years.

On this 38th Earth Day, do something bold for the planet and personal freedom: Support and commend your local retailers and stores that carry hemp products while at the same time opposing anti-drug groups like DFAF from making the war on some drugs any worse for society or the environment than it already has become.

Earth Day Bonus in Washington, DC – After nearly 12 years without a true hemp store, eco-minded consumers in the nation’s capital can finally purchase hemp apparel and products with the grand opening this week of Capitol Hemp in the Adams Morgan neighborhood.

When Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, first strode onto the public stage in 1832 and stepped into American History, he was wearing a pair of hemp pants.

From many points of view, Abraham Lincoln was America’s greatest President. Besides guiding America though the Civil War, the most troubled passage since our nation’s founding, he possessed the keenest intellect of anyone to have ever lived in the White House. He also possessed the greatest understanding of the life lived by the common man of anyone who had been or will ever be elected President. Abraham Lincoln came from the dirt, the death, the toil, and struggle of the American frontier.

He was born of the pioneer hordes that keep forever moving westward. A champion wrestler, Abe was the tallest, the strongest, the toughest, the fastest runner, the longest crowbar and maul-throwing man to ever sit in the Oval Office. Almost entirely self-educated, Abe had the benefit of only a total of four months of formal schooling. The stories of Lincoln walking twenty miles to return a borrowed book are true. He had a great fire burning within to learn—and as a teenager, had read all the books within a 50-mile radius of where his family lived in frontier Indiana. Dennis Hanks said of his cousin, “Seems to me I never seen Abe after he was twelve ‘at he didn’t have a book in his hands or pocket…It didn’t seem natural, nohow, to see a feller read like that.” Through hard work, determination, unbending honesty, and a deep well of talent, Abraham Lincoln rose to become the most revered man in all of American history.

In Nineteenth Century America, social classes were set apart in many ways, their clothing was one of the most obvious. It was a time when the expression, “Clothing makes the man,” was still at full currency. Slaves, indentured servants, the pioneers living out on the frontier, the poorest of the poor, all wore a fabric called “tow-cloth”, and like a “tow-rope” it was woven out of hemp fibers. Tow-cloth was cheap and virtually indestructible. You could grow it and weave it yourself. Hemp had much longer, tougher, and courser fibers than flax. Flax was woven into the fabric called “linen”, and sometimes flax was blended with hemp to make tow-linen—though at times the term “tow-linen” was also used to give a fancy name to cheap goods (plain old tow-cloth) somewhat like how faux-suede or faux-fur is used today. Easy to grow in most climates, hemp resists pests, produces nutritious seeds, and has universally useful fibers. Josiah Henson (1798-1883) an escaped slave who won international fame and inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin stated in his autobiography that for fellow slaves: “Our dress was tow-cloth; for the children nothing but a shirt; for the older ones a pair of pantaloons or gown in addition.” Tow-cloth, tow-linen, hemp cloth, different names for pretty much the same thing—and not only for slaves, but millions of America’s poor whites wore it as well.

All the years Abe was growing up, the dirt poor Lincoln family wore tow-linen, home-grown hemp cloth they wove themselves. They were so poor that “Men and women went barefoot except in colder weather; women carried their shoes in their hands and put them on just before arrival at church meetings or at social parties.” his Dennis cousin Abe Lincoln; “In the early years he wore buckskin breeches and moccasins, a tow linen shirt and coonskin cap, ‘The way we all dressed in them days,’ said Dennis Hanks.” Hard cash money was very hard to come by on the frontier. Men’s wages were as low as $.25 per day, when there was work. Frontier people had to make do with what they could raise or catch. Dennis Hanks said it was a, “mighty interesting life fur a boy, but thar was a good many chances he wouldn’t live to grow up.” The pioneers made most of their own essentials for living, their log homes and hand-hewn furniture, their clothes that came from the animals they killed and skinned and the hemp and flax they grew, spun into thread, and wove into cloth. By the time Abe was eight, “The clerk was the only man he knew who was wearing store clothes, Sunday clothes, everyday of the week.”

It is an oft repeated, and even more often ignored, fact that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written on hemp paper. Paper in the early days of America was made primarily from rags. Since the poor and the very poor constituted by far the largest percentage of the early American population, most of the rags available to be made into paper came off the backs of the poor were rags of tow-cloth or tow-linen. The other famous hemp-growing Presidents, Washington and Jefferson, grew hemp for cordage and to clothe their own field slaves.

Of all the thousands of biographies of Abraham Lincoln that have been written, there is one that stands out to me, the biography written by Carl Sandberg, the poet. Sandberg grew up in the Illinois prairie, talked to and lived among men and women who knew Lincoln. His six-volume biography of Lincoln took Sandberg a whole lifetime to complete. He received a Pulitzer Prize for it in 1939. The first volume, The Prairie Years, through Sandberg’s mastery of the English language, captures the feel of the American frontier life as very few books ever have. It is from Sandberg’s Lincoln that I am quoting in this blog.

Lincoln was in attendance when, “The boys were having a jollification after an election. They had a large fire made out of shavings and hemp stalks; and some of the boys bet a fellow I shall call ‘Ike,’ that he couldn’t run his bobtail pony through the fire.” The pony had more sense than its rider and slammed on the breaks at the very last second, “and pitched poor Ike into the flames.” Lincoln saved him. You can be sure that the boys and Ike were drunk on corn squeezings, or somesuch, not high on hemp fumes, because the varieties of hemp grown for fiber contain less than .03% of the active ingredients for which its brother marijuana is world-famous. Today law enforcement in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois annually wastes significant time and resources each year gathering and destroying millions of wild hemp plants to puff-up their drug enforcement statistics. This “ditchweed,” this non-psychoactive feral hemp, mid-west law enforcement has been chasing for years, like a dog chasing its own tail, might very well have escaped into the wild from one of Tom Lincoln’s several farms in those states, between 1810 and 1830, when hemp was grown and worn the Lincoln family to protect American History’s most important person from the elements.

Elections were to become a big factor in the rest of Abraham Lincoln’s life, both those he lost as well as those he won. Abe volunteered at the outbreak of the Black Hawk War and was elected Captain by his men. Upon returning home from that campaign, Abe ran for public office for the very first time. When he first ran to try to become a state representative, he ran wearing a pair of hemp pants. “Lincoln started electioneering and kept it up till the ballots were counted. He traveled over Sangamon County with his long frame wrapped in flax and tow-linen pantaloons, a mixed jean coat, clawhammer style, short in the sleeves, and bobtail,” When the results were all in, Lincoln had lost his first election, coming in eighth among thirteen contenders. But, from the voters in his home district, Abe had received an astonishing 277 out of the 300 votes cast! Our man in hemp pants had a big future in politics.

Next, Lincoln hunkered down as a clerk in New Salem, Illinois and studied the law. “At one time, while storekeeping, he slept on the counter of the store because the Rutledge Tavern was overcrowded. He wore flax and tow-linen pantaloons, no vest, no coat, and one suspender, a calico shirt, tan brogans, blue yarns socks, and a straw hat bound round with on string or band.” These flax and tow-linen pantaloons could be the very same pair of pants mentioned earlier when Abe first ran unsuccessfully for election. Hemp cloth, as tough as it is, probably hadn’t worn out yet.

Abe won the election the next time he ran for state representative. But even after he’d become a member of the Illinois state legislature and a lawyer, Lincoln’s material station in life hadn’t changed very much. As described by a colleague, Abe, “He was poverty itself, but independent.” But Lincoln was now in position; he was ready now to make his mark in history, and to make it when slavery had become the dominant issue. As he said later, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not feel this way.” At the very end of his first term in the Illinois state legislature Abe and one other member introduced a resolution protesting resolutions supporting slavery stating, “They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” This humble man from the backwoods had taken his first public stand on slavery, the most important and divisive issue that has ever confronted America. It started a path for an honest man in hemp pants that he would walk unfailingly to its end, a path that would make him immortal.

Quotes from Carl Sandberg, © 1924 Lincoln The Prairie Years and Carl Sandberg, © 1954 Lincoln The Prairie Years and the War Years one volume edition, italics and bolding added

Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot in Ford’s Theater the evening of April 14, 1865. He died the next morning. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said, at Lincoln’s passing, “Now, his is one for the ages.” There was a white banner trimmed in black hung over Broadway in New York City, it read, “The great person, the great man, is a miracle of history.”

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In mid-March the Reason Foundation published a report entitled ‘Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition’. The report updates the precarious hemp industry in the United States and its continued struggles under absurdly strict federal laws that are meant to control the psychoactive strain of the plant, usually described as ‘marijuana’.

Hemp is legal for farmers to grow in virtually all countries where marijuana is still illegal (i.e, Canada, France, Great Britain, Switzerland, China, Romania, etc…), and to help highlight the non-sensible government policy Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota will soon build a home constructed of hemp in conjunction with the 2008 Hemp Hoe Down.

“There are numerous environmental advantages to hemp,” said Skaidra Smith-Heisters, a policy analyst at Reason Foundation and author of the report. “Hemp often requires less energy to manufacture into products. It is less toxic to process. And it is easier to recycle and more biodegradable than most competing crops and products. Unfortunately, we won’t realize the full economic and environmental benefits of hemp until the crop is legal in the United States.”