ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 7, 1996 TAG: 9612090048
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Associated Press RICHMOND
SOME FARMERS HOPE that hemp could become comparable to peanuts in potential income as a cash crop.
Lobbyists for the state's farmers will ask legislators to consider legalizing the growth of industrial hemp, a type of marijuana that lacks the kick of the street drug.
``It would be a highly renewable source of building materials and paper,'' said Ed Crowgey, a delegate to the Virginia Farm Bureau convention who proposed the idea.
Hemp production was one issue considered at the state convention of the 123,000-member bureau. Delegates on Wednesday voted to have lobbyists present the issue to the General Assembly next year.
Crowgey, a Wythe County dairy farmer, said hemp could become comparable to peanuts in potential income as a cash crop. It requires a relatively short growing season and could be harvested with existing farm equipment. It also could be processed, with few changes to equipment, in most any paper mill.
Hemp was outlawed in the United States in 1937 because of its association with marijuana. The plant is legally grown in parts of Europe and China.
Crowgey said hemp was grown legally in Kentucky during World War II, when the government used it to make rope. The Kentucky Industrial Hemp Growers Association is working to get hemp legalized there again, he said.
``It grows well in Kentucky; it would grow well in Virginia,'' Crowgey said. ``There was no opposition from the floor once I explained it.''
Sen. Richard Holland, a member of the Senate's Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee, said he needed more information about hemp farming.
``If there is a distinct difference between that and marijuana, if it was not harmful to individuals and if it would help Virginia agriculture ... I'd have to find out a lot more about it,'' Holland said.
Industrial hemp and marijuana are varieties of the same plant, said David Martyn, vice president of The Hempstead Co., a Costa Mesa, Calif., company that makes clothes and other products from imported hemp.
Industrial hemp is not intoxicating because it contains less than 5 percent of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the hallucinatory chemical that gives off the ``high'' from marijuana smoking, Martyn said Thursday.
Martyn said more than 36,000 products can be made from hemp.
``We make everything from soap and shampoo and lip balm, to paper, backpacks, hats, wallets, clothing and jeans,'' he said.
Actor Woody Harrelson is a partner in The Hempstead Co. He was charged in June with a misdemeanor count of marijuana possession for planting four hemp seeds on a small plot of land in Kentucky.
Harrelson said he planted the seeds so he could be arrested and challenge a Kentucky law that makes no distinction between hemp and marijuana. He faces 12 months in jail if convicted.
Several states have considered legalizing hemp to help struggling farmers.
Vermont this year passed a bill allowing production as a test, while a similar bill died in the Colorado legislature after Drug Enforcement Administration agents complained.
On Tuesday, Iowa Farm Bureau delegates meeting in Des Moines tentatively approved a resolution supporting research into hemp as a farm crop.
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