There’s more to cannabis than bong rips and vaporizers. Everyone’s favorite greenery might just be the key to earth’s redemption.
by Siobhan O’Connor

Eric Steenstra likes to start off his day with a healthy dose of cannabis. A wake and bake, if you will. Hemp toaster waffles most days, or a handful of hemp granola to mix it up. He’ll sprinkle its seeds on his lunch salad—“for protein,” he says. “And omega 3s.” If he’s still hungry, he’ll wolf down a hemp energy bar in the late afternoon. His kids do as well, and his wife. For the Steenstras, hemp is a family affair.

Steenstra isn’t a stoner, nor a hippie. He isn’t even a vegetarian (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he adds, with a laugh). He’s more of a business-attire kind of guy, the president of a national nonprofit agency that happens to be part of a movement that could have a massive impact on the country’s winds, water, and trees. If Vote Hemp has its way, our lifetime will see the legalization of the true wonder weed: a plant with the potential to replace countless harmful industries, among them paper, cotton, soy, construction fibers— even gasoline. And though it isn’t Steenstra’s focus, hemp’s psychotropic flower, marijuana, has just as much potential as a sustainable, nontoxic crop. What other natural drug can calm a chemo patient’s nausea, quell the night terrors of an Iraq vet, and still make your girlfriend (and you) forget she has PMS?

It sounds utopian—a lush, pesticide-free paradise where modern-day Cheeches and Chongs drive hempseed-oil-powered cars. But America’s day has not yet come. Cannabis is on the DEA’s controlled-substance list, illegal to grow without a permit (which is, of course, nearly impossible to get), even though hemp has so little THC in it that smoking it would make you sick before it made you high. Medical marijuana is technically legal in 12 states, but with states and feds disagreeing, those laws can be iffy at best. Meanwhile, the DEA spends a third of its $50 billion annual budget enforcing anti-marijuana laws. In 2006, the DEA broke its own dubious record, arresting over 800,000 people, a disproportionate number of them black. All this for a plant that, acre for acre, produces four times as much paper as trees.

On its own, cannabis has virtually no footprint at all. It can grow to full size in as few as 110 days, without pesticides, over and over again on the same soil. Every part of the plant can be used, and it costs very little to grow, which makes arguing against its eco-friendliness all but futile. As legalization support grows, then, naysayers are getting craftier, focusing their arguments on its illegal harvesters. Indeed, bootleg growers operating in the backwoods of national parks tend to trample the land, disrupt delicate ecosystems, set up shoddy irrigation systems, and leave in a hurry without cleaning up after themselves. But, says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, prohibition itself is to blame for creating such conditions—and environmental damage is likely to continue as long as cannabis remains illegal.

The United States is the last industrialized country to maintain a ban on industrial hemp. Not surprisingly, as with their attitudes toward sex, death, and taxes, Europeans are a step ahead on cannabis. Already, every new 5 Series BMW has door panels made of composites that are 50 percent hemp, replacing the heavier, non-biodegradable fiberglass. Hemp clothing, too, is increasingly trendy (though it should be said that hemp is notoriously butt-chafing, and to get it cotton-soft often requires chemical processing that cancels out the karma accrued by choosing the fiber in the first place).

The biggest market for hemp stateside is food. The seeds are loaded with protein, beneficial omega-3 and -6 fats, vitamins, and minerals. And as Steestra and his family know, it’s convenient—breakfast doesn’t get much easier than toaster waffles. But since it can’t be grown domestically, companies that want to use it are forced to import it. Nearly 95 percent of Canada’s licensed hemp crops are exported to the U.S. for food and body-care companies. With each acre of hemp worth about $500 per yield, it’s potentially a very big business.

“Legalization isn’t about people wanting to get wacked out,” says hemp advocate Arthur Livermore. “People are going to do that no matter what.” But in the meantime, one of our most plentiful and versatile ecological solutions is going up in smoke.