Navajos want industrial hemp for cash crop

Story Published: Sep 6, 2000

Story Updated: Sep 10, 2008

Editor;s note: Interviews for this story on the potential of an industrial hemp operation on the Navajo Nation were conducted prior to Aug. 24 when agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized thousands of hemp plants on two plots on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Grand jury indictments are expected. The plants were being raised for a building project, meeting requirements of a 1998 Oglala Sioux Tribal ordinance. However, Earl Tulley says that action will have no effect on plans on the Navajo Nation. “The sky is not falling here.”

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – Navajo entrepreneurs are urging new Navajo Nation laws to permit cultivation of industrial hemp, citing research showing profits from small-scale farms.

Encouraging the cultivation of hemp as a cash crop, and for Navajo food and clothing, Earl Tulley says, “Hemp is better than the edible egg.

“We’re here. We are people of the Earth, and we want to grow our own economy.”

Tulley said efforts to introduce hemp follow the language of the Navajo Treaty of 1868, which urges self-sufficiency in the cultivation of land and production of clothing.

Pointing out that hemp crops add nitrogen to the soil, Tulley sees multiple possibilities, from producing oil and profitable fibers to establishing a Navajo seed bank.

“It’s going to be better than the casino. It is going to put us back to working. It is going to get us out from in front of the TV and out working the land.”

The Navajo Nation Council recently passed the first of two resolutions necessary for the legal cultivation of hemp. The first resolution changed an existing law that allowed for the legal possession of one ounce of marijuana on the Navajo Nation.

“We had to make sure there is zero tolerance,” Tulley said.

Changing the law was necessary for the protection of small businessmen who want to avoid confusion about the purpose of growing industrial hemp. “We wanted to put people at ease. This was done for those who think that everyone is going to be out in the cornfields smoking.”

Tulley said the agricultural crop lacks the properties of marijuana used to obtain an altered state of consciousness.

“The way I explain it to my mother is, ‘It’s like blue corn and yellow corn.’ People would have to smoke a cigarette the size of a telephone pole (to get high).”

Tulley, working with Ervin Keeswood, tribal councilman from Hogback, N.M., said the second legislation, now being drafted, will further allow for legal hemp crops.

Christopher Boucher, president of Hempstead Corp., in Laguna Beach, Calif., is a consultant to the Navajos’ proposing hemp cultivation.

Boucher said American Indian tribes could cash in on the $100 million hemp foods industry. The greatest profits are in production and sale of hemp oil for hemp nut butter, shampoo and cosmetics.

“It is ideal for the Navajo Nation. They can develop their own seed and have a plant that grows in their climate.”

Hemp stalk is in demand in the production of a popular horse bedding. The shredded stalk produces anti-bacterial bedding.

“The horses love it,” Boucher says.

Lakotas on Pine Ridge are already cultivating industrial hemp, he said, in hopes the fibers can be used to produce building materials.

“It is a home-based economic endeavor. Most of the developed nations are growing hemp, except for the United States.”

Boucher said the domestic commercial market is ripe because U.S.-based industries now have to purchase hemp products from China, Canada and elsewhere, paying costly tariffs.

Hemp fibers are now in demand by the automotive industry.

After the EPA discovered that the “new car smell” in automobiles was actually a scent from glue pollutants that exceeds allowable standards, Ford Motor Co. switched to hemp for door panel fibers for Mercedes-Benz.

Hemp has exceptional properties, Boucher said.

“The fibers are termite and mold resistant. As a food source, hemp seed is the most perfect essential fatty acid.”

While seeds were once a mainstay of survival, humanity moved away from seeds as food during the past 100 years. The result has been more degenerative diseases such as arthritis and diseases of the heart and kidneys, he said.

“It is essential to life as we know it,” he said of the essential fatty acids.

Further, the seeds have the highest concentration of digestible protein. Although soy is often cited in this category, soy protein is not as digestible as hemp.

In the fields, most pests dislike it. “It is easy to grow and harvest.”

England’s popular Body Shop is a good example of a company that contracts directly with Canadian farmers for hemp products for their lotions and bath products.

Jeff Gain, chairman of the board of the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Alternative Agricultural Research and Commercialization Corp., is among the hemp advocates.

Pointing out that hemp can be used in everything from rope to car bodies and food and clothing, Gain says, “We must have diversity, crops like hemp that grow without pesticides.”

Boucher said his company is ecology based and views hemp as an alternative for a society polluting its oceans with oil spills.

“Hemp looks like a solution to oil-based economies. We need to go back to agricultural-based economies.”

Tulley, an environmentalist and cofounder of Din? Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment which halted clear-cutting of Navajo forests, says cultivation of hemp could eventually lead to a decrease for the demand of lumber for paper products.

“It can keep us from cutting down our forests.”

He said globally, mankind needs to return to agricultural-based societies.

“The people who control the food, control the world.”

ARTS GROUPS NEED FEDERAL HELP NOW

Michael Kaiser, Washington Post – While government bailouts are being offered or considered for financial institutions, the auto industry, homeowners, and so many other needy and worthy sectors, one group is quickly and rather quietly falling apart: our nation’s arts organizations. In the past few months, dozens of opera companies, theater companies, dance organizations, museums and symphonies have either closed or suffered major cash crises. . .

Subsidies — in the form of government grants or private contributions — have long been required to help arts organizations balance their budgets. Well-managed arts organizations have typically been able to find the money required to operate if they create interesting programs, market them aggressively and build strong donor bases.

But these times are different. Many organizations that spent years building large endowments to provide more stable sources of support have seen them decimated. A number of our most loyal donors have watched their own investment portfolios be depleted and cannot provide their traditional funding. Our audience members cannot buy as many tickets as they have in the past. And our board members are less able to involve friends and associates in our fundraising galas and other activities.

This perfect storm has already weakened the fabric of our nation’s arts ecology. Over the past several months, the Baltimore Opera Company, Santa Clarita Symphony, Opera Pacific, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and others have closed or come close to closing. There probably will be a torrent of additional closures, cancellations and crises in the coming months. . .

We need an emergency grant for arts organizations in America, and we need legislation that allows unusual access to endowments. Washington must encourage foundations to increase their spending rates during this crisis, and we need immediate tax breaks for corporate giving.

The writer is president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

THE MELLOWIST ECONOMIC STIMULUS

Norm Stamper, Salem News – In early December, Barack Obama invited Americans to participate in an unprecedented, bottom-up approach to government. Visitors to the President-elect’s official website, Change.gov, were able to submit questions and vote on which questions should take priority for the new administration.

More than a dozen of the top 50 questions called for amending America’s drug policies, with inquiries ranging from availability of doctor-recommended medical marijuana to the economic impact of continuing to arrest and incarcerate millions of people for drug offenses.

The number one vote getter was:

“Q: Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?”

Americans got their answer, sort of. A one-sentence response from the President-elect’s transition team:

“A: President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.”

Speaking as a 34-year cop with six years as police chief of one of America’s largest cities, I know how much money has been squandered in prosecuting the drug war. Obviously, I’m disappointed and confused by this response.

His silence on the issue can’t be due to fear of political backlash. He and his team must have seen the recent Zogby poll that shows three of four Americans believe the “war on drugs” is a failure. And the Time/CNN poll showing only 19 percent of Americans think we should continue arresting and jailing marijuana users. . .

A legal and regulated drug trade would imprison fewer people and generate substantial new revenues. A recently released Harvard study reports we could boost our economy by at least $76.8 billion a year by ending drug prohibition, and that’s a conservative estimate.

Legalizing and regulating drugs would help Mr. Obama achieve a greater state of security for Americans. It would effectively “take a bite out of” rampant domestic organized crime, which goes well beyond mere domestic street gangsters. And, given that our drug war enriches the coffers of organizations such as the Taliban and al Qaeda, it would dramatically reduce international crime and terrorism. . .

GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE

Reto U. Schneider is the author of The Mad Science Book. This is one of the experiments described

Reto U. Schneider, The Mad Science Book – The Good Friday service in Easter 1962 was a memorable experience for ten seminarians at the Andover Newton Theological School. Although they could remember hardly anything of the sermon delivered by Pastor Howard Thurman, they could recall a sea of colors, voices from the Beyond, and the feeling that they were melting into the surrounding world. In a word, the students were high.

At the beginning of the 1960s, some daring scientists turned their attention to studying mind-altering substances. This was the period when it was all part and parcel of a lecture on mysticism to ingest magic mushrooms to gain practical insight into the subject, and when a doctoral thesis could entail giving students drugs and observing their behaviour. This is exactly what Walter Pahnke did: this young theologian and doctor from Harvard University was keen to discover whether psychedelic drugs could induce the kind of mystical sensations that only very few people otherwise experience, for example when in a state of religious trance. Users of LSD, psilocybin or mescaline had long claimed that this was the case.

Pahnke turned to Timothy Leary, who a short time before had begun conducting drug experiments at Harvard, and who later became a leading figure in the 1960s counterculture. He proposed an experiment to Leary: test subjects would attend a church service, but half of them would be given mind-expanding drugs in advance. Afterwards, all participants would be required to fill in a questionnaire and be interviewed.  Comparing the findings with descriptions of mystical experiences from the realm of religion would demonstrate whether there was a qualitative difference between them.

[Leary] explained to Pahnke that a psychedelic trip was an intensely personal experience and that a person would have to have experienced several himself before he could even contemplate devising such an experiment. However, Pahnke was adamant that he would have to wait until his thesis had been accepted before he indulged. He didn’t want anyone accusing him of partiality: the experiment would only have a chance of succeeding if he hadn’t taken any drugs himself beforehand. . .

On the morning of Good Friday, two hours before the service, 20 students met in the crypt of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. They were encouraged “not try to fight the effects of the drug even if the experience became very unusual or frightening.”. . .

The service lasted two and a half hours. When it had ended, the students were interviewed for the first time. At 5 o’clock, Leary invited everyone to come and eat with him, but ‘the trippers were still too high to do much except shake their heads, saying “Wow!”‘, as he later recalled. . .

In the days following the experiment, and again six months later, the subjects were quizzed about what they had gone through. . . The results were unequivocal: eight of the 10 students who had eaten the magic mushroom experienced at least seven of the impressions and feelings customarily associated with a mystical experience. By contrast, no-one from the control group reached this kind of score. In every category, they lagged far behind the experimental group. . .

Twenty-five years after the experiment, the psychologist Rick Doblin attempted to find the surviving participants. In four years’ of detective work, he succeeded in tracking down 19 of the 20 students. Sixteen of them agreed to be interviewed and filled in the same questionnaire as in the original experiment. The results were astonishingly consistent: those in the experimental group and the control group gave much the same answers as they had done a quarter of a century before. The test subjects from the experimental group described the Good Friday service of 1962 as one of the high points in their spiritual lives. They all claimed that the experiment had had a positive influence on them. Some attributed their later socially aware outlook to it, while others said it had helped them come to a positive accommodation with their fear of death.

Nevertheless, most of the former participants also recalled that the experiment also had its negative aspects. There were moments when they thought they were going mad or dying. Pahnke only treated this aspect in passing in his thesis. In particular he hushed up the fact that one subject had to be injected with an antidote when the situation got out of hand: seized with an urge to put Pastor Thurman’s call to spread the word of Christ into action straight away, one student left the chapel and went out onto the street, from where he had to be fetched back. . .

Just one member of the control group claimed that the experiment had benefited him greatly. Not that it was the church service as such that had such a positive effect on him, but rather the decision he made during it to try psychedelic drugs himself at the next available opportunity.

Recent Research on Medical Marijuana

Emerging Clinical Applications For Cannabis & Cannabinoids
A Review of the Recent Scientific Literature, 2000 — 2008

Despite continued political debates regarding the legality of medicinal marijuana, clinical investigations of the therapeutic use of cannabinoids are now more prevalent than at any time in history. A search of the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed website quantifies this fact. A keyword search using the terms “cannabinoids, 1996” reveals just 258 scientific journal articles published on the subject for that year. Perform this same search for the year 2007, and one will find over 3,400 published scientific studies.

While much of the renewed interest in cannabinoid therapeutics is a result of the discovery of the endocannabinoid regulatory system, some of this increased attention is also due to the growing body of testimonials from medicinal cannabis patients and their physicians. Nevertheless, despite this influx of anecdotal reports, much of the modern investigation of medicinal cannabis remains limited to preclinical (animal) studies of individual cannabinoids (e.g. THC or cannabidiol) and/or synthetic cannabinoid agonists (e.g., dronabinol or WIN 55,212-2) rather than clinical trial investigations involving whole plant material. Predictably, because of the US government’s strong public policy stance against any use of cannabis, the bulk of this modern cannabinoid research is taking place outside the United States.

As clinical research into the therapeutic value of cannabinoids has proliferated exponentially, so too has investigators’ understanding of cannabis’ remarkable capability to combat disease. Whereas researchers in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s primarily assessed cannabis’ ability to temporarily alleviate various disease symptoms — such as the nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy — scientists today are exploring the potential role of cannabinoids to alter disease progression. Of particular interest, scientists are investigating cannabinoids’ capacity to moderate autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease, as well as their role in the treatment of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease.)

Investigators are also studying the anti-cancer activities of cannabis, as a growing body of preclinical and clinical data concludes that cannabinoids can reduce the spread of specific cancer cells via apoptosis (programmed cell death) and by the inhibition of angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels). Arguably, these latter trends represent far broader and more significant applications for cannabinoid therapeutics than researchers could have imagined some thirty or even twenty years ago.

HOW TO USE THIS REPORT

As states continue to approve legislation enabling the physician-supervised use of medicinal marijuana, more patients with varying disease types are exploring the use of therapeutic cannabis. Many of these patients and their physicians are now discussing this issue for the first time, and are seeking guidance on whether the therapeutic use of cannabis may or may not be appropriate. This report seeks to provide this guidance by summarizing the most recently published scientific research (2000-2008) on the therapeutic use of cannabis and cannabinoids for 17 separate clinical indications:

* Alzheimer’s disease
* Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
* Diabetes mellitus
* Dystonia
* Fibromyalgia
* Gastrointestinal disorders
* Gliomas
* Hepatitis C
* Human Immunodeficiency Virus
* Hypertension
* Incontinence
* Multiple sclerosis
* Osteoporosis
* Pruritis
* Rheumatoid arthritis
* Sleep apnea
* Tourette’s syndrome

In some of these cases, modern science is now affirming longtime anecdotal reports of medicinal cannabis users (e.g., the use of cannabis to alleviate GI disorders). In other cases, this research is highlighting entirely new potential clinical utilities for cannabinoids (e.g., the use of cannabinoids to modify the progression of diabetes.)

The diseases profiled in this report were chosen because patients frequently inquire about the therapeutic use of cannabis to treat these disorders. In addition, many of the indications included in this report may be moderated by cannabis therapy. In several cases, preclinical data indicates that cannabinoids may halt the progression of these diseases in a more efficacious manner than available pharmaceuticals. In virtually all cases, this report is the most thorough and comprehensive review of the recent scientific literature regarding the therapeutic use of cannabis and cannabinoids.

For patients and their physicians, let this report serve as a primer for those who are considering using or recommending medicinal cannabis. For others, let this report serve as an introduction to the broad range of emerging clinical applications for cannabis and its various compounds.

Paul Armentano
Deputy Director
NORML | NORML Foundation
Washington, DC
January 24, 2008

* The author would like to acknowledge Drs. Dale Gieringer, Gregory Carter, Steven Karch, and Mitch Earleywine, as well as NORML interns John Lucy, Christopher Rasmussen, and Rita Bowles, for providing research assistance for this report. The NORML Foundation would also like to acknowledge Dale Gieringer, Paul Kuhn, and Richard Wolfe for their financial contributions toward the publication of this report.

** Important and timely publications such as this are only made possible when concerned citizens become involved with NORML. For more information on joining NORML or making a donation, please visit: http://www.norml.org/join. Tax deductible donations in support of NORML’s public education campaigns should be made payable to the NORML Foundation.

Members Of Congress Demand An End To Federal Pot Possession Arrests

Members of Congress convened a Capitol Hill press conference in July to demand lawmakers enact legislation to eliminate the government’s authority to arrest and prosecute adults who possess marijuana.  Lawmakers called on colleagues to endorse HR 5843, which sought to remove federal penalties for the possession and non-profit transfer of marijuana by adults.  The legislation was the first proposal introduced in Congress in 30 years to eliminate criminal marijuana penalties.  Read the full story at: http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7670.