Hemp Bound (13 page)

Chapter Eleven

Teach Your Regulators Well

F
or hemp to once again take off in the United States, history tells us that two more elements have to fall into place. First, the industry pioneers must work with regulators to craft domestic standards. I learned this from the saga of American biodiesel pioneers Kelly and Bob King. They were in biofuels so early, their Pacific Biodiesel website is biodiesel.com.

According to
Business World Magazine
, Pacific Biodiesel shared its pre-launch study results with regulators and even competitors because the world frankly didn't know how to make an industry of waste restaurant oil. Today their oil fuels a good deal of Hawaii, and they consult the world over. You can fill up at gas pumps on two Aloha State islands, and municipalities use the fuel for backup generators.

Similarly, the initial Canadian hemp players, several of whom are still in the industry, worked with regulators on everything from field-testing hemp varieties to THC analysis, right from the beginning. As we've discussed, this actually started several years before Canada's official 1998 reboot.

As Hermann put it, “Even if President Obama and Congress legalize hemp tomorrow, there's still a lot of work ahead for the U.S. market and anyone who wants to be a player.”

The initial U.S. state hemp legislation generally nods toward the Canadian model: Colorado, in addition to unlimited commercial cultivation for registered farmers who grow hemp with that inert 0.3 percent THC limit, is making a vocal statement of top-level support by allowing those ten-acre developmental test plots wherein THC levels won't be tested until a cultivar is ready for the commercial market. Similarly, Hawaii's step one looks to be a hundred-acre state-sponsored research project. Pacific Biodiesel's Kelly and Bob King are big supporters of that project, because, in the end, the french fries that today drive their business are finite.

“Hawaii is close to legislation allowing for a test hemp plot that we hope will remediate a few centuries of sugarcane monoculture soil and provide energy feedstock,” Kelly King told me.

Now, patiently developing a regulatory framework and official cultivars would seem to be essential. But there is another fairly loud opinion out there, and I'd be remiss not to mention it. It goes like this: The original American hemp farmers planted what they had on hand in their wagons after crossing wild rivers and unnamed mountain passes. And they managed, before interstates, let alone NAFTA, to build a world-leading industry.

In other words, some hemp activists make the case for starting now with that ditch weed (or, if you prefer, the “heirloom cultivars”) easily found out by the railroad tracks in the heartland. This
Let Darwin choose what we plant
philosophy is running up against the
We live in a lab-coat-and-hairnet era because of uniformity and product safety demands
line of thinking.

Hermann's view on this comes with too much in-the-field experience to ignore, and it's basically this: Once she's expanded beyond selling carrots at the farmer's market, any farmer has to be savvy about her choice of variety.

“Every Walmart already carries hemp oil, Nature's Path hemp cereal, and hemp twine,” she said. “A mature industry has to be ready for the professionalism that level of reach demands.”

She's talking about standards, testing processes, and certification paperwork. Humanity's oldest plant is about to grow up. “We have food and health inspectors certifying our industry in Canada,” she reminded me. Burritos in front of the Phish show this is not. Still, this first to-do item is standard business stuff. It can be easily checked off.

The second crucial hemp industry to-do item sounds a little woo-woo at first, but it comes down to the very bottom-line concept of “preserving the brand.” I firmly believe that if industrial cannabis is to emerge in a big way Stateside, its initial large purveyors must stick to the root values that, over the difficult decades of prohibition, have guided the industry: an industry that without question has also been an activist movement.

What are these core values? You only need to look at how the hemp industry standard-bearer, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, operates as a business.

Hemp Pioneers

David Bronner, CEO of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap

Who knew? You can be president of a fast-growing, multimillion-dollar, family-owned company while sporting a ponytail, mentioning Bob Marley's birthday on your company's official website, and stating openly that you like “all forms of the cannabis plant.”

The successful can generally live how they like. Yet in an era that's demoted “prominent businessman” to a social rank just below “used car salesman” and just above “congressman,” thirty-eight-year-old Bronner wears the mantle of a solidly old-school hero. That is, to the type of patriot who believes prosperity is best engendered by running a sustainable business that shares the wealth with its employees. Though he deservedly gained attention by risking his own freedom to ensure that his company's sustainability ethic remains undiluted (this when he locked himself in a cage in front of the White House in 2012 with only a potted hemp plant for company), Bronner's greatest accomplishment to date might have come while working within the law in 2004.

That was when he coordinated and helped fund a coalition of hempsters who pulled off a Lake Placid–level miracle: Helmed by Hemp Industries Association lead attorney Joe Sandler, they defeated the DEA in federal court (that was what happened on Bob Marley's birthday, by the way). This after a protracted legal effort to prevent the federal banning of hemp food products from import into the United States. It's one of the great unheralded victories of the drug war.

“We were already using hemp,” Bronner told me. “When the Bush administration began seizing hemp shipments at the Canadian border, we sued to be able to keep using it.”

The 2013 U.S. House passage (and very likely 2014 full congressional passage) of the first federal hemp cultivation law in half a century is a direct result of that underdog victory nine years earlier: One of the most compelling arguments hemp supporters like Representative Jared Polis (D-Colorado), Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) were able to make to colleagues is the absurdity of importing a crop that the U.S. farmer could be profitably growing if not for Big Government regulation.

In Wyden's words, “The outlandish restriction on free enterprise hurts rural job development and increases our trade deficit.” If Bronner and the rest of the parties to the DEA lawsuit hadn't drawn a line in the sand in 2004, we might not be on the cusp of a new, billion-dollar domestic agricultural and manufacturing industry today. To be able to import and use but not grow a crop is, as farmer Bowman put it at his Fourth of July hemp planting, exactly the kind of absurd trade restriction that fomented the original American Revolution.

So how did Harvard alum Bronner come to hemp activism? “In Amsterdam some years back I had some frankly intense revelatory experiences while using psychoactive cannabis. Those experiences convinced me, after years of dismissing it, that my grandfather [company founder Emanuel Bronner] was right when he spoke of a spiritual unity and a quest for world peace.”

First off, this Ivory Soap of the American organic food co-op is a third-generation family company—older than that, really, since the Heilbronner family was making soap in the old country before emigrating to the United States and dropping the
Heil
. But today's CEO David Bronner is the grandson of the famously gifted if verbose modern founder (as many of us first discovered in a friend's bathroom late at a party, the company's bottles are covered with spiritual, prophetic, poetic, and philosophical citations). The important part is that even with fifty-three million dollars in sales in 2012, the Escondido, California–based company is still run by a spiritually minded and progressive family, and this is reflected in its policies.

David Bronner, like all the company's executives, makes only five times more than the company's lowest-paid employee. He also makes sure the company buys some of its olive oil from an orchard worked jointly by Israelis and Palestinians, and uses only organic, fairly traded ingredients.
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Furthermore, the thirty-eight-year-old Bronner, when I emailed him a few follow-up questions to a recent phone call, was in Washington State fighting GMOs. He's also led a legal charge against greenwashing body care companies that dangerously call their products “natural.” Not only that, Bronner is an American agricultural patriot. Eager to reduce the twenty tons of Canadian hemp seed oil the company imports annually, Bronner told me in February 2013 that the company is “financing a project to collect and develop cultivars for American latitudes and soil.” Six months later, as we'll see in a little while, I visited that project.

If all that weren't enough, the reason Bronner added hemp to the family recipe in 1999 was pure performance: “It makes a better emollient,” he told me. “Less skin-drying.” At the same time the hemp went in, caramel coloring, in Bronner's view the sole unnecessary ingredient in the soap, went out. This was, in the end, an artisan soap maker improving the generations-old family product. As a before-and-after patron who washes my kids in the stuff, I can attest that the hemp version is demonstrably superior. You no longer need to dilute it before using it on children's skin. The point is, Bronner didn't add hemp as a political gesture. He added it as a customer service move.