I don't use it either and have to agree with those statements.

When I was proctoring GED exams, I saw increasing numbers of teens coming in to take the exams. Not because they wanted to quit school, not because they were expelled. But because teachers are now telling students to go get their GED's instead because they are adversely affecting the school's standing with the NO Child Left Behind statute.

These were not slow or dumb individuals either. These are bright kids that just don't fit in and because of their marginalization at school, tend not to care and under perform.

The sad thing is, the GED exams have been made harder and only 60% of high school seniors can even pass them. These kids are passing the GED on their first try.

Which means, if the schools did a better job at accepting students that were different, that didn't fit in the standard "norms" society wants everyone to be, then these students would be doing better and helping the schools perform better under the No Child Left Behind policy.

Sorry, got away from the main topic. But at least two people mentioned this and it is one of my major pet peeves.

I quit smoking dope years ago.

The number one reason? I don't smoke cigarettes either for the same reason. Smoke makes my mouth taste funny. That's neither here nor there.

Please, let's keep rapists, murderers, pedophiles and a whole bunch of those white collar financial system robbers in those jail cells not pot smokers.

I very much doubt Obama will do anything so bold on the federal level concerning pot. I could see him telling the DEA to refocus it's efforts on other sorts of drug enforcement actions and shifting focus. Perhaps more subtle policy changes could result like allowing easing the federal restrictions and speeding up the licensing approval processing for farmers seeking to grow industrial hemp. (A product you wouldn't want to waste your time smoking haha)

"The dumbing down of America?" A proper response to that would get me another ban I suppose as it might make some posters feel bad...

/cry me a river

Seek information...many republicans support a change in DEA regulations regarding the cultivation of hemp. It could represent a real godsend for farmers.

FARMERS LOBBY TO LEGALIZE THE GROWING OF HEMP

BISMARCK, N.D. -- Dennis Carlson sold his first wheat, grown on a field borrowed from his parents, in 1975, when he was 14 years old. He earned $4.51 a bushel and resolved to follow his father, grandfather and great-grandfather into farming.

Nearly 24 years later, spring wheat is selling for $2.91 a bushel, and Carlson worries whether he can afford to plant next month. "We're going to get a low price," he said. "And if we get a bumper crop, it's going to get lower."

Battered by sinking commodity prices and rising costs, Carlson and other wheat farmers are looking across the Canadian border at a crop they say could help save them -- if only it were legal. That crop is hemp, a non-intoxicating look-alike cousin of marijuana grown around the world for its fiber, seed and oil. But long identified with marijuana both by law enforcement and the counterculture, it is banned in the United States as part of the war on drugs.

As farmers from Hawaii to North Dakota to Vermont lobby state legislatures to study hemp's potential and make it legal, they are opposed by federal officials unwilling to relax drug laws even symbolically, whether by endorsing marijuana's medical use, or approving a once-common crop, hemp.

Until recently, the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy asserted that making hemp legal would send the wrong message, "especially to our youth at a time when adolescent drug use is rising." But in late March its director, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, indicated in an interview that his opposition was softening.

"If people believe that hemp fiber can be sold in the marketplace for a profit, and aren't actually trying to normalize the growing of marijuana around America, to the extent you want to grow hemp fiber we'd be glad to work with you," McCaffrey said. But as a profitable crop, he said, "I think it's going nowhere."

But in North Dakota, where the Republican-controlled Legislature appears likely to enact laws promoting hemp, Carlson said: "We're all desperate. We're trying to find something that will change our outlook, and hemp is one of many crops."

It does not help that hemp remains identified with the counterculture, its products -- from oils to clothing -- often sold in shops that sell rolling papers, pipes and other drug paraphernalia, its cause cheered on by marijuana advocates.

"They are our worst enemies," said Gale Glenn, a tobacco grower in Winchester, Ky. "If marijuana didn't exist, hemp would be growing here on hundreds of thousands of acres."

Legislation to revive hemp passed in Hawaii this month and has been introduced in legislatures in North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Virginia, Vermont and Hawaii.

The federal Controlled Substances Act says the government does not intend to prevent states from legislating in this area. But even with state approval, hemp growers would need permits from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which so far has resisted.

"There's widespread bipartisan support for this becoming a crop in North Dakota," state Sen. Joel Heitkamp said. "The problem is at the federal level."

State Rep. David Monson, a farmer and school superintendent who sponsored the North Dakota legislation, said, "I think 99 percent of the people in my district, when you show them the bottom line, they're ready to go."

After Canada made hemp legal a year ago, about 5,000 acres were planted with hemp, said Geof Kime, president of Hempline, a hemp growing and processing company in Delaware, Ontario.

Monson recalled watching his neighbor across the border in Manitoba grow 23 acres of hemp that netted about $250 an acre. "When he came out with all those profits, we were really upset," Monson said.

The harvested hemp can be imported into the United States for processing, "but we can't grow it ourselves," said Jeffrey Gain, who promotes the revival of hemp as a director of the North American Industrial Hemp Council.

Hemp flourished as a cash crop through most of American history. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp on their plantations. The Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp-fiber paper. Hemp supplied early Americans with rope, sails, clothing and other necessities.

But in 1937, Congress enacted a ban on marijuana that came to encompass hemp. During World War II, after imports of Manila hemp from the Philippines were cut off, the government distributed seeds for farmers to grow in a "Hemp For Victory" drive, but once the war ended, hemp was banned again. By then, synthetic fibers like nylon were taking its place.

Environmentalists describe hemp as a renewable, biodegradable resource that can be used in paper, fabrics, building material and even automobile moldings. Farmers say it is a crop that needs few pesticides, shades out weeds, resists erosion -- and can make money. "This is not a panacea," Mrs. Glenn said, "but it's one of the answers."

Dr. Paul Mahlberg, a cell biologist at Indiana University, has a license from the DEA to grow experimental marijuana and hemp. He described them as varieties of cannabis sativa, a species whose cell structure he has studied for 30 years.

"If you had hemp and marijuana here and set it on the table, could you tell the difference?" he said. "The answer is no, not in young ones."

But, he said, "When you're growing it in the field and it's planted, you can." Each, he said, could easily be identified from the air.

Hemp is densely planted and grown as tall as 15 feet to develop the stalks and kill off leaves. By contrast, marijuana plants are short, bushy and spaced three to four feet apart to encourage the leaves and flowers that deliver the psychoactive ingredient delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, popularly called THC. Hemp is also harvested before it flowers, and marijuana afterward.

Both varieties have THC: Industrial hemp has less than 1 percent THC by weight, rendering it ineffectual as a drug, while marijuana contains 5 percent THC or more by weight. Canada and some European countries require cultivated hemp to have a THC content of 0.3 percent or less.

"What we're working for now is to produce a zero-percent THC," Mahlberg said.

In rural areas, neglected hemp has degenerated into a feral remnant called ditch weed, with low THC content. "There's a standing joke in our corner of the state that no self-respecting marijuana smoker would touch the stuff," said state Sen. Russell Thane of North Dakota.

Thane said National Guardsmen and law-enforcement officials spend weekends uprooting ditch weed. "It's probably a poor utilization of time," he said. "You don't have anybody coming from around the United States to get it."

In Vermont, the state auditor's office determined that 78 percent of the marijuana reported eradicated in the state, and 99 percent destroyed nationwide with federal funds, in 1996 was ditch weed.

"The eradication is somewhat misdirected because they're destroying remnants of the old hemp," Mahlberg said. "Some of the hemp they're destroying is close to zero THC."

Law-enforcement officials argue that marijuana could be hidden in hemp fields. But hemp would actually be a weapon against marijuana, Mahlberg said, because cross-pollinating with hemp would dilute marijuana's potency.

In theory, marijuana pollen could also affect hemp. But hemp planted in quantity -- Canada requires at least 10 acres -- would overwhelm marijuana. Andy Graves, a farmer who heads the Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative, a group trying to make hemp legal again, said marijuana growers would find hemp farmers "their worst nightmare, because our pollens will cross."

On March 3, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by Graves' group challenging the government's ban on hemp, because Kentucky state law forbids it too. But with their tobacco quotas slashed 28.8 percent this year, some farmers are giving hemp another look.

"A third of our income is down the drain because of the quota," Dorothy Robertson, a farmer in Bethel, Ky., said. "Farmers have their backs against the wall."

Tobacco earns more money, but diversifying into hemp makes sense to farmers because it could be processed locally, creating more work. Tribby Vice, a tobacco and dairy farmer in Fleming County, Ky., said hemp would provide healthy bedding for his 80 cows and would make a good rotational crop. "The equipment we have for tobacco we can take and use for hemp," he said. "We don't have to go out and buy new equipment."

The farmers said they could live with the kind of controls that other countries impose. Canada requires that every hemp farmer have a license and police background check, use seed certified to produce 0.3 percent THC, report the precise location of his crop and open it for random inspection, Kime said.

In North Dakota, Carlson said, "If there's been any group of people who've been against drugs, it's the farmers. And if hemp becomes legal, we'll make sure that marijuana won't get in there."

I knew that at least bring back hemp production was a good idea, but that article really hit all the salient points and reasons for it without getting bogged down in jargon and arguments. Thanks for posting it!