Hemp Bound (11 page)

“That was the year Canada's market opened up,” he said. “So I wound up touring the north giving advice to our competitors.” Fortunately, he said, the American market's launch is now “inevitable”—though he warned against measuring everything in terms of a coming billion-dollar industry. “It should be cultivated in everyone's backyard. We don't have to turn hemp over to big business.”

Wirtshafter's other hemp-related exploits include driving in a hemp car that “did laps around the U.S.” in the 1990s, including a California leg with longtime hemp activist Woody Harrelson. “The Hempery was making money,” he said. “And we supported projects like that,” as well as an abortive 1994 plan to plant a test crop at a USDA-recognized research facility in Imperial County, California (state authorities chopped the half acre down).

Looking at the coming hemp era, the pioneer (he is one) said, “Twenty years from now we'll be building our houses from hemp.” Wirtshafter paused for a moment, before adding, “Again. Did you know that the [1883] Chicago World Exposition's buildings were finished with a hemp plaster called ‘staff'?”

One Pennsylvania weaving plant is terrific. But does the United States really have sufficient infrastructure to support hemp? As with oil processor Shaun Crew's intent to parachute into the North Dakota seed oil market the moment it's legal to grow hemp Stateside, I think it's worth noting where the already successful hemp building companies are putting their money.

Our British friend Ian Pritchett, Lime Technology's VP, struck me as a savvy, unsentimental businessperson. His company wouldn't devote resources to a market if its “sums,” as he put it so Britishly, didn't make the accountants smile. He went so far as to tell me, “Every new market is a battle.” And Lime Technology is evidently so jazzed about the United States coming online that it's already started the Chicago-based subsidiary called American Lime Technology we earlier discussed.

This is a company from which you can today order hempcrete for your next building project. It'll be imported hemp, for now, of course, but what're you gonna do, beyond calling your congressperson and senators to bend their ears about the Digital Age Homesteading Act?
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Chapter Nine

Patriots Ponder Planting

B
ack in the waiting American fields—the millions of ready-for-hemp acres in North Dakota, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, Oregon, California, and Colorado, to name a few states with either significant historic harvests or modern hemp-friendly laws—the inability to capitalize domestically on these market forces is intolerably stifling.

With the tide turning their way, some farmers aren't waiting. Coloradans explicitly legalized industrial cannabis farming in the same 2012 election that permitted adult social use of psychoactive cannabis. As many as two dozen farmers in the Rocky Mountain State planted hemp in the spring of 2013. One of them, fifth-generation Colorado rancher Michael Bowman, told me he's quite willing to be a test case, on the agricultural side and the legal side.

“We can eat it, wear it, and slather it on our bodies, but we can't grow it?” posited Bowman, whose
Aw shucks, I don't know better than anyone else, I'm just tryin' to do what's right
humility belies both his political savvy and his ranching know-how. “That's inexcusable. It's shameful. Do our federal drug squads really want to raid a longtime family rancher for growing the fiber the Declaration of Independence was drafted on?”

Hemp Pioneers

Michael Bowman, National Hemp and Sustainability Lobbyist

“Check your email—I just shot you a photo of me with [U.S. agriculture secretary] Tom Vilsack,” Colorado's Bowman told me when, in April 2013, I had asked, “C'mon, really? Hemp is going to be federally re-legalized in this session of Congress? It never gets more than a snicker in committee.”

“At least in the House,” he said.

He was right (and I still have that and other Beltway action photos he sent during what turned out to be the partly victorious whirlwind hemp effort in 2013). The tide had turned. Common sense had prevailed. Or maybe the money the Canadians were making had finally talked.

It's safe to say that Bowman (along with years of effort by other hemp activists) was a key figure in the lobbying effort that saw Colorado representative Jared Polis's groundbreaking hemp research bill sneak into the FARRM Bill, thus (if Congress finishes the job in 2014) ending one of the most counterproductive agricultural bans in human history.

A towering fifty-four-year-old farm boy intellectual who emerges from weeks of communication darkness to call me at weird hours from weird time zones after tracking down cabinet officials and key congressional “maybes” on hemp, Bowman laughs like a good ol' boy, never has a negative word for anyone, and gets things done by operating according to a sort of Zen-inspired seven-year patience plan.

“It started with a community center I worked on [he's from a small, conservative farming town of 2,354 called Wray] back in 1983,” Bowman told me over doughnuts in Denver. “I saw that a project that takes six months to accomplish the goal isn't even enough of a challenge for me. Renewable energy was years in the wilderness. Hemp was years.”

Bowman's graying around the fringes and not wearing a peace sign t-shirt, “always a plus on the Hill,” he said. After he was instrumental in his home state's passage of the first substantive renewable energy requirements in the nation in 2004 (for which, as a resident of downwind New Mexico, I am very grateful), Bowman realized what a difference an individual can make in state politics.

So he thought he'd see if that was true on the federal level. He paid his own way to DC in 2013 and crashed with friends while pounding the legislative and executive branch hallways every day for two months to speak the truth about hemp. And what did President Obama say when he bent the POTUS's ear about hemp as a biofuel source during a 2012 Oval Office visit that he'd earned as a White House Champion of Change for his renewable energy work? “He listened respectfully,” Bowman said.

“This is not a new crop,” he told me, draining his coffee mug. “We're just late to the game in recognizing its value in the digital age.” Indeed, at least thirty countries cultivate industrial cannabis today.

One of Bowman's key political skills is that he can speak eastern Colorado rancher-ese. No one accuses him of being a hippie. Raiding his family farm would end the federal war on hemp in about a week, just from right-wing outrage.

Could happen. He was explicitly threatened by a DEA agent on NPR on January 28, 2013.
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Even longtime hemp activist Adam Eidinger, a man who's been handcuffed for planting hemp seeds at the Pentagon, said that farmers like Bowman, if they plant before the drug peace officially breaks out, are “literally betting the farm.”

As with all bets, there's a payoff for the winner. Like the North Carolina hemp builders, what Bowman is trying to get a slice of is the drug peace dividend: the billions that transfer back to the economy when the drug war budget is redirected. Besides saving taxpayers tons of money during a federal debt crisis, the coming era allows hemp to take off as a profitable commodity. Bowman's no fool.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron sees $46.7 billion just in annual tax benefits when the drug war ends. He's talking about the legalization of all forms of the cannabis plant, but we already know the industrial side will be a significant part of the new cannabis economy. As Bowman frequently reminded me, the rest of the industrialized world has a considerable head start over the United States. Luckily, American academia is starting to educate a new generation of hemp farmers and entrepreneurs.

Hemp Pioneers

Lynda Parker, Hemp Advocate, Grandmother

I met the gray-haired, dignified Parker (and these qualities are important, as we'll see) at the August 1, 2013, official hemp flag hoisting above the Colorado statehouse in Denver. The matriarch of hemp in the Rocky Mountain State was beaming here in the city in which she lives and had worked for decades as a yellow page directory sales rep. “Farmers are planting, I consider this achieving the goal,” she told me.

What I discovered from the love Parker was being shown by the comparatively latter-day hemp activists that day at the statehouse was that Colorado's farmers and entrepreneurs are leading the United States into the billion-dollar world cannabis industry in large part because of the preparatory work done by this single human being.

It all happened because when Parker retired from the phone book sales job in 2005, she took a year off to decide what she wanted to do with her life. She only knew that “environmental values” comprised her criteria.

“I remember where I was when it came to me clear as day,” Parker told me as state police unfolded and raised the flag made from the same material that Betsy Ross used for the first American flag. “It was hemp in neon letters. Hemp was the biggest difference I could make for the planet as an individual.”

The now sixty-three-year-old grandmother had no previous lobbying experience of any kind. And yet if this industry takes off as predicted (remember, Canada can't plant new hemp acreage fast enough to keep up with demand), there will be buildings named after her one day. That's because unlike Kentucky and Ohio, Colorado doesn't have a traditional hemp industry. “This is about rescuing wheat and corn farmers who are losing their soil due to monoculture and climate change,” she told me. “About a modern cash crop in an expanding area for our agriculture industry.”

Parker's backstory—and Colorado's hemp head start over the rest of the United States—reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. If a series of crucial happy accidents hadn't happened, hemp cultivation probably wouldn't be taking off in the state full-bore in 2014. To name one, ten years before her post-retirement hemp catharsis, in 1996, Parker had taken a political science course at the University of Colorado at Denver. As part of a “follow a bill's life cycle” project, she happened to be assigned to cover the nation's first modern hemp legalization bill (sponsored by Colorado state senator Lloyd Casey, it passed the state house but failed in the senate when the DEA complained about it).

“Had I not taken that course, I would not be talking to you today, and this hemp flag might not be flying above the capital,” she said. In other words, hemp would probably not be legal in Colorado.