THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 23, 1996 TAG: 9608230401
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JENNIFER DZIURA, TEENOLOGY COLUMNIST
LENGTH: 106 lines
DURING MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with hemp, I started having flashbacks.
No, not that kind. Flashbacks of an old ``Saturday Night Live'' skit, one in which a miraculous new product was marketed as ``a floor cleaner and a dessert topping!''
I had happened upon a Virginia Beach store called Tomorrow's World, and an extremely buoyant store owner was trying to tell me all about hemp, the plant perhaps best known for being the source of marijuana.
``Did you know Columbus brought hemp over to the New World?''
``Yes.''
``Well, did you know George Washington grew hemp?''
``Yes.''
``How about that the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper? Did you know that?''
``No, but thank you,'' I said.
As owner Richard Hahn continued his spiel and as I wandered about the store, I discovered a seeming contradiction that sent my synapses into frenzied firing. Among the hemp products available were both jeans and lip balm. Made of the same stuff. Might as well have been floor cleaner and dessert topping.
Hemp, or Cannabis sativa I., is a plant from which almost anything can be made, from fabrics and cosmetics to building blocks, flour and chain saw lubricant. But despite the fact that it has more uses than the wheel, growing it is almost universally illegal in the United States.
This is the case because one form of hemp is a popular recreational drug. Be it known to all, however, that the long-leaved plant grown for fiber is a completely different strain then the paraphernalia-associated one; even before it is turned into rope or paper, smoking a thousand industrial hemp plant cigarettes would get a person no more high than breathing smoke from burned toast.
``A lot of people come into the store, and they say about the products, `Oh, that's pot,' '' says Hahn. ``Hemp is not pot - marijuana is merely a variety of hemp.'' In essence, a guy with a whole outfit made of hemp, plus hemp twine, lip balm and granola is going to be left with a clear head and a useless bong.
And as Hahn so readily points out to casual shoppers, hemp has been grown and used throughout history. ``Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere,'' wrote George Washington in 1794.
According to ``Industrial Hemp,'' a booklet published by Hemptech, the Chinese were making hemp ropes and fish nets as early as 4500 B.C., and the American colonists used it to produce Bibles and lamp oil. In the United States, dozens of towns - such as Hempstead, N.Y. and Hemphill, Texas - were named after the crop.
All of this was fine and good until hemp hating became a national pastime in the 1920s and '30s. A rather fuzzy-headed public, apparently afraid that the world was about to be overtaken by stoners, prompted the passage of the Marahuana Tax Act of 1937. This was the end of American hemp farming; hemp products are now imported from countries such as Hungary and China.
The world did not end when we stopped growing hemp. But if you're enough of an environmentalist that you enjoy breathing air, then perhaps you will see some merit in farming hemp once more.
Hemp grown in North America requires no pesticides. This means no chemicals polluting our groundwater and causing farmers to drop dead from cancer. This also means no pesticide production.
The plant also makes excellent paper. Consider the difference between wood pulp and hemp papers in regard to this newspaper.
The unrecycled portion of this newspaper came from a tree that took 50 to 500 years to grow. It will take the same amount of time for another tree to grow in its place. The paper is then bleached, which produces nasty factory sludge.
Hemp paper, however, comes from plants that take about 100 days to grow. Also, an acre of hemp can be turned into four times as much paper as an acre of trees. This paper can be recycled more times than tree paper and is naturally white, resulting in less sludge.
Other sludgeless hemp products - of which there are more than 25,000 - include cardboard, insulation, caulking, stucco and mortar, salad oil, margarine, oil paints, fuel, soap, shampoo and cosmetics.
But is hemp destined to be kept down by an establishment that insists on responding ``Just say no'' to a harmless textile?
``There is a small segment of the population that sees the benefit of buying hemp. Twine is our best-selling product,'' says Hahn. ``Our hemp jeans and wallets sell well, and the hats do OK.''
And it may not be long before hemp is grown domestically. Today, individual states can license hemp farmers.
In 1791, Thomas Jefferson called hemp ``of first necessity . . . to the wealth and protection of the country.'' When we come around to this realization - perhaps before we kill off the rest of our trees - hemp will be omnipresent.
After eating a protein-rich hemp butter sandwich on hemp-flour bread, you may remove your hemp clothes, take a hemp-soap shower, and fall asleep on soft hemp sheets kept warm by a hemp-fueled heater and hemp insulation in a house of which the very bricks are held together by hemp.
At Tomorrow's World, hemp is touted as ``a crop more versatile than soybeans, cotton and the Douglas fir.'' In fact, industrial hemp is so useful that you can do pretty much anything with it - the only thing you can't do with it, actually, is light up. MEMO: Jennifer Dziura is a 1996 graduate of Cox High School who will
attend Dartmouth this fall. If you'd like to comment on her column, call
INFOLINE at 640-5555 and enter category 6778 or write to her at 4565
Virginia Beach Blvd., Virginia Beach, Va. 23462. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
MORT FRYMAN
The Virginian-Pilot
Jennifer Dziura by CNB