High on hemp: can a small-town lawyer and a Vegas ex-con make this crop respectable again?

• Author: Leggett, Page
• Position: NC TREND: Agriculture

If you were to grab a bit of industrial hemp, roll it into a joint and smoke it, hoping for a marijuana high, you'd be sorely disappointed. The distinctive star-shaped leaves look like pot and smell like pot, but weed's cousin is legal and transforming another tobacco state, Kentucky. North Carolina is next, according to two distinctively different hemp evangelists: Bob Crumley, an Asheboro lawyer, real-estate developer and president of Founder's Hemp, and Las Vegas-based Hemp Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin. Crumley expects hemp to be a $1 billion industry here in the next decade, bigger than tobacco, which was worth about $800 million in 2015. Perlowin, who spent nine years in prison for drug smuggling in the 1980s and has been called the King of Pot, plans to employ 100 people at his hemp-processing plant in Spring Hope, near Rocky Mount.

A big part of their mission is educating people on the difference between illegal marijuana and hemp, a crop so respectable it was grown by the first five U.S. presidents. Yep, Mount Vernon and Monticello were hemp farms. The durable natural fiber is used in thousands of products, including clothing, paper, textiles and food for people and pets, but growing it was banned in the U.S. in 1937 with the passing of the Marihuana Tax Act. That changed when President Obama signed hemp into law as part of a major farm bill in 2014. Now, 31 states, including North Carolina, have passed legislation allowing farmers to cultivate hemp, which should replace some of the $300 million in hemp products imported to the U.S. every year, mostly from China and Canada. In 2016, U.S. farmers in 15 states planted nearly 10,000 acres of hemp, most of it in Colorado and Kentucky, where plantings doubled last year. Kentucky grew 2,350 acres in 2016. North Carolina grew none, though that's expected to change this year now that the N.C. Industrial Hemp Commission has approved rules for a pilot program. It is expected to begin issuing licenses this month.

The commission's chairman tempers the enthusiasm of hemp advocates. "Anyone forecasting industry size or impact would be very premature, due to so many market unknowns," says Tom Melton, who is also deputy director of the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service.

Marijuana, hemp and cannabis are common names for plants of the genus Cannabis, but they are not synonymous. Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC--marijuana's psychoactive ingredient--is present in hemp only in trace amounts. "A mule is not a...