Pubdate: Mon, 15 Jan 2001
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO)
Copyright: 2001 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Contact:  900 North Tucker Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri 63101
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Author: Pat Gauen,  http://www.mapinc.org/hemp.htm (Hemp)

SIUC CASH CROP COULD KEEP ECONOMY FROM GOING TO POT

My eyes fixed on Rodin's "The Thinker." Not the real bronze sculpture of 
the hunched-over figure deep in thought, but the small knockoff decoration 
on a shelf in a friend's dormitory room at SIU at Carbondale.

The friend had challenged me to locate her "stash" of marijuana in an 
environment less neat than a Dumpster the night before pickup. "You'll 
never find it," she said in almost a dare.

Ten seconds later, the baggie of what police like to call a leafy green 
vegetable substance was in my hand, removed from the hollow under Mr. 
Thinker's seat.

"First place the cops would look," I said, proud of my powers of 
observation. I was much less proud of my acquiescence to the powers of peer 
pressure. It turned into the one and only time I ever tried marijuana.

Unlike the young Bill Clinton, who was doing the same dumb thing at about 
the same time, I did inhale. It reinforced my amazement that anybody would 
smoke anything. I choked and wheezed and coughed as if I'd sucked soot 
right off the end of a smoldering shred of rope, which is about what was 
happening.

It was all the fun of an asthma attack, which I think it almost caused.

My mind buried that moment of stupidity for almost 31 years. But how could 
I not remember it last week, when I was reading news linking marijuana and 
SIUC. No, they didn't finally catch my friend, who graduated and went on to 
what I think - I hope, anyway - is a drug-free life.

SIUC and the University of Illinois may end up, of all things, growing 
marijuana as an experimental cash crop. Not exactly marijuana, but a cousin 
called hemp. It contains a lesser quantity of the same intoxicating stuff 
(THC) that still makes some silly people willing to suck on a burning rope.

Rope happens to be one of the products made from hemp, among many. Illinois 
legislators want to lead the way in developing more.

Edwardsville's own state Sen. Evelyn Bowles, at 79, hardly a flower child 
of the drug generation, was a leading proponent of the bill that passed 
last week. She and a majority of other lawmakers have decided that going to 
pot might provide some crop diversity to help keep the Illinois farm 
economy from going to pot.

As I write this, Gov. George Ryan is believed to be leaning toward a veto. 
But there's a chance that a grandfatherly anti-crime Republican broadminded 
enough to put brakes on the death penalty might just look past the smoke 
and consider this bill.

The anti-drug crusaders are in full wail, and as a parent I might join them 
if I could be convinced that fields of low-potency weeds would matter much 
in a world where high-potency abounds. One point of the college 
experiments, in fact, would be to try to breed the last of the offending 
THC right out of the commercial strain.

Most of the proposed cost of up to $1 million would be for security, like 
fences, at participating universities.

I suppose the temptation for a little midnight harvest would be real 
enough. But nobody is requiring fences to block the midnight harvests 
already going on at farms and supply companies across Illinois almost every 
night. Cookers of the far more insidious drug methamphetamine seek out 
anhydrous ammonia from fertilizer tanks to complete their nasty brew.

The component is cheap, so dollar losses to the tank owners are too small 
for them to justify much expenditure on anti-theft measures. Given the 
dangerously erratic behavior and health risk among meth users, it may be 
surprising that we hear no anti-drug cry for farmers to seek some other way 
to replace nitrogen in their fields.

Maybe hemp and ammonia left together would provide one-stop shopping for 
the after-dark scavengers of drug ingredients. Or maybe rules for hemp 
farmers would force them to take security steps that could protect their 
fertilizer tanks, too.

Surely, reasonable solutions to manage some of our drug woes can be found 
by those who just concentrate with open minds. Maybe that's what "The 
Thinker" was thinking about with his insides full of marijuana those many 
years ago.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager