Harrelson was at the school for a lecture on economics, agricultural products, the environment and hemp -the controversial cousin to marijuana. The children paid rapt attention and peppered Harrelson with questions. "Which crop is easier to raise -hemp or tobacco?" The answer was hemp, probably. No pesticides needed. Kills weeds itself. No topping or stripping. In truth, the children probably were hemp believers before Harrelson even got there.
Cockrel is a fire ball proponent of the Kentucky Agriculture Department's Agriculture and Environment in the Classroom program, and she had already been over hemp's historical importance in the state and its environmental friendliness. But just so that they wouldn't be mistaken for advocating marijuana the 20 or so children all wore black "D.A.R.E. to Resist Drugs and Violence" T-shirts. Harrelson wore a shirt, pants and a hat made of hemp.
Besides Harrelson, the students also listened to Jake Graves, a Lexington farmer and banker who said his family has been raising hemp in the Bluegrass area for five generations. "It won't make you drunk. It won't make you crazy. And you might make some money on it," Graves told them.
They listened to Ian Low, from England; Adrian Clarke, from Australia; and Sergei Vorontsov, from Ukraine. And when it was all over, they all ran to Harrelson for autographs.
Harrelson, an avid environmentalist, is a financial backer and highly visible promoter of industrial hemp. It is essentially illegal in the United States because strains of hemp are cultivated for marijuana--though the experts say industrial strains have no functional amount of the psychoactive ingredient, THC, for which marijuana was outlawed.
Harrelson and other hemp experts will attend the Fiber Hemp Conference today in Lexington. It is being sponsored by the Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative Association. From 9 a.m. to 4:30p.m., the visiting experts--many of whom are following up on work they did at the Bio-Resources Hemp Symposium in Frankfurt, Germany, last year--will talk with researchers, equipment manufacturers and legislators. "Any policy-makers who hold public trust, heads of farm organizations--they're all invited," said Joe Hickey, executive director of the cooperative association. The evening portion of the conference from 6 to 9p.m., is for farmers who might want to grow hemp if it becomes legal.
Hemp was a leading farm crop in Kentucky from the late 1700s until early in the l900s. It was outlawed in 1937 but enjoyed a strong resurgence during the years of World War II, because it was needed for rope, fabric and oil used for the war effort. The cooperative association was formed during those war years and reactivated two years ago after then Gov. Brereton Jones appointed a task force to look into the viability of hemp as a Kentucky crop.
The task force was not encouraging, but the association has pressed on, and earlier this year secured the endorsement of the American Farm Bureau Federation in its call for research into the question. Hickey indicated that conference participants will get essentially the same message as Cockrel's class did: that hemp is easy to grow, that American companies are eager to buy it, and that Kentucky farmers could make money growing it. A University of Kentucky study funded by the association has shown that 77 percent of Kentuckians all ready believe that. The main argument against legalization, according to the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, is the danger that industrial hemp will be diverted into illicit drug traffic. The message at the school, delivered by the Englishman Low in an accent that delighted the children, was that that notion is "rubbish."