Hemp
Taste-Test
Demonstrations
Target
DEA
Offices
Across
the
Country,
Protests
Held
in
76
Cities
12/7/01
The hemp foods industry and hemp and drug reform activists staged coordinated hemp food taste tests at Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) offices nationwide on Tuesday to protest the agency's recently revised administrative rules effectively banning the sale and consumption of any ingestible hemp products. Under the new rules, hemp bars, hemp pretzels, hemp ice cream and similar products will become illegal controlled substances effective February 6. Hundreds of mild-mannered activists from Washington, DC, to West Palm Beach, Oakland to Orlando, Seattle to Syracuse, as well as at least 70 other cities, politely offered free hemp food samples to DEA employees on their lunch breaks and curious passersby, garnering considerable media coverage for the cause in the process. While in most cities, demonstrators confronted only the usual reflexive petty harassment the agency doles out to unwanted visitors -- unlawful demands that no photos of agency buildings be taken, refusal to grant access to public spaces -- in Syracuse, NY, local police arrested and charged three demonstrators for violating state marijuana possession laws, according to Syracuse University SSDP member and arrestee Patrik Head. They were in possession of hemp bars, according to one of those arrested. (In St. Louis, at least one police officer had a different impression of the pretzels. Visit http://rescomp.wustl.edu/~wussdp/pics/DSCF0020.JPG to see Washington University Students for Sensible Drug Policy members offering a sample to one of the city's finest.) At DEA national headquarters in Arlington, VA, just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington, hemp industry representatives including David Bronner of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps and VoteHemp.com president Eric Steenstra joined activists from the Marijuana Policy Project, Common Sense for Drug Policy, SSDP, DRCNet and Green and Libertarian Party members to encourage DEA agents to take a taste. Met with barricades and uniformed Federal Protective Services officers on their arrival, demonstrators were initially forced completely off the property and even the bordering sidewalk, onto the street. Fortunately, an Arlington city police officer with traffic safety concerns prevailed upon the feds to allow demonstrators onto the sidewalk. Most DEA employees averted their eyes and scurried past the proffered health treats, but not all. "Almost nobody from the DEA would speak to me," said Alexis Baden-Meyer of the Mintwood Media Collective, which was hired by VoteHemp to coordinate the quickly-organized effort. "Some claimed to know nothing about the hemp foods ban, others claimed to know everything about it and wouldn't comment. One older employee refused, but told me 'I'm going to wait until I'm 80 years old to try it, and then I'll probably regret not having done it years earlier,'" Baden-Mayer related. "With this rule, you won't be able to find it in a health food store," she replied. According to reports gradually coming in from across the country, the reaction at DEA offices (and a few federal buildings and other facilities) was similar: petty harassment and DEA employees too scared, too incurious, or too sure of themselves to take the taste test. In some cities, such as Houston and Las Vegas, the media failed to show, but taste tests in numerous other cities made the local newspapers and TV news. "These were very successful demonstrations," said Baden-Meyer. "The point was to make the DEA know that we were there, and we did that. They took it very seriously. They know now that people care about hemp food issues, and now they have to worry about what other issues are going to cause them public relations problems," she said. "That we got this off the ground in a little over a week also shows that national actions like this can be used for other small issue-focused actions in the future. This also helps build a grassroots constituency that can be mobilized for regional or national convergences," she noted. "We're extremely pleased," said VoteHemp's Steenstra. "With the media coverage we've generated, we've reached hundreds of thousands of people with our message that hemp foods are safe and nutritious, and the DEA rules are simply ridiculous," he told DRCNet. Mintwood Media head Adam Eidinger told DRCNet local TV news coverage had reached nearly a million people, according to reports gathered so far. "It will be more by the time we get it all tallied," he said. "We got coverage in lots of smaller media markets, and some big ones too," Eidinger added. "We had three local stations cover us in Philadelphia, two in Los Angeles, one in the Bay Area. Tallahassee stations went wild, airing repeated stories about the local event," he said. (Washington DC's local ABC affiliate aired footage that included this author among others.) While hemp industry representatives pronounced themselves satisfied with the demonstrations, they are not relying solely on public opinion to win their struggle to be able to sell hemp-based food products. "We have already filed a motion for a stay of the new DEA rules," Steenstra told DRCNet. "We hope for a ruling before Christmas, and if we do get a stay that will be a very positive indication of the direction this case is going," he said. "We are also working with several Canadian companies who are preparing to file claims that the new rules violate the NAFTA agreements. The Canadian government has already sent a letter to the DEA notifying the agency that it failed to follow NAFTA rules in notifying Canadian officials about this and its effects on their hemp industry," Steenstra added. "We are taking the legal battle to all fronts." Still, said Steenstra, if the ruling remains in effect after February 6, the industry will be faced with an unknown future. "We don't know what kind of enforcement the DEA will undertake," he said. "The ideal outcome is that they drop those rules, but second best would be if they sat down with us and negotiated rulemaking with reasonable standards that we can accept." Visit http://www.votehemp.com for extensive information on the DEA/hemp controversy.
|
