By Gwen Mickelson
In The Water
Santa Cruz Sentinel
November 12, 2006)

Aaron Carvajal hefted the deep-green, bat-tailed board into the air and eyeballed it.

"I'd say it's about nine feet," he said, peering upward past the bill of his hemp cap.

Carvajal, one of Santa Cruz's newest hemp evangelists, was decked head to toe in clothing made of hemp on Friday, as he is every other day at his hemp products shop and museum, U.S. Hemp Co. And, you guessed it, the surfboard in his hands was also constructed with fibers from the controversial plant, which many praise as the world's premier renewable resource but whose use in the United States is severely restricted by governmental drug enforcement bodies because it contains the psychoactive ingredient found in hashish and marijuana.

That ingredient, THC, is only found in minute levels in hemp, according to Wikipedia. Though industrial hemp is legal for import and sale in the United States, American farmers are not permitted to grow it.

The World-Spectator
November 6, 2006

John Ackland heard all the jokes when he decided to try his hand at growing hemp on his farmland.

"The first time I grew it around here, I had lots of guys coming into the shop and laughing, 'So, you're growing marijuana, are you?'" he chuckled.

"Now it's becoming a more common crop around here, and the jokes are long gone," he said. "People are starting to understand that it's actually a cash crop. Now, my phone bounces off the wall with people asking how they go about getting contracts to grow hemp. So they realize there is potential out there."

Commercial hemp production became legal in Canada in 1998, although growers must still be licensed by Health Canada. In 2005, roughly 24,000 acres were seeded to the crop across the country -- over one-third of it in Saskatchewan, equally split between conventional and organic production.

IRIN News
October 30, 2006

A fundamental shift in Swaziland's attitude towards the cannabis plant, or hemp, the country's most lucrative cash crop, could be on the horizon. The government is set to allow small-scale production of hemp to see if it has the potential to become an economically viable crop.

"In hemp we have an alternative to cotton, which has let us down badly over the last few years. It has been because of marijuana that we have found it difficult to talk about hemp, but that is changing, and we are beginning to shape public opinion to its benefits," said Lufto Dlamini, the Swazi Minister for Enterprise and Employment.

"The government is considering a proposal to grow hemp, and a decision will be reached by the end of this month. But I expect it will be given the go-ahead to grow for research purposes, and if that proves successful then we will see," he told IRIN.