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Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Cannabis issue lands at doors of Parliament

Ian Townsend, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Radio Transcript

AUSTRALIA — MARK COLVIN: Two and a half tonnes of cannabis landed at the doors of Federal Parliament today, a gift from Queensland.

It’s the legal stuff, of course, though it did raise a few eyebrows.

A frustrated Queensland company has sent each federal politician a 10-kilogram pack of industrial hemp mulch.

It’s part of a long-running battle to get the Government to relax the restrictions on growing hemp for food and fibre.

Ian Townsend reports.

IAN TOWNSEND: The mailrooms at Parliament House get the occasional odd item in the post. These individually addressed packs of cannabis posed a few problems, mainly because of their size, not their contents.

PHILIP WARNER: This is first commercial product that has been produced of industrial hemp in Australia. And we thought we’d give them a sample, and get the discussion up there for debate.

I mean, simply what we are trying to achieve is that the Government should recognise that there is a considerable difference between marijuana, and industrial hemp, and stop putting industrial hemp in the same bracket as marijuana at all the time.

IAN TOWNSEND: Philip Warner is the Managing Director of Ecofibre Industries, a Brisbane-based company that’s process industrial hemp from trial farms in Queensland, Victoria, and Tasmania.

It’s up to state governments whether they’ll allow industrial hemp to be grown, but Mr Warner’s seeking Federal Government’s moral and financial support to turn it into something more valuable than garden mulch.

He says without federal backing, an international market for fibre, food and plastics is going begging.

PHILIP WARNER: Every time we go to a government agency about sort of some assistance. Whether it’s to do some research into technology or to import a piece of unique equipment, or even to develop that equipment ourselves, we get a knock back.

And it’s more of an attitudinal thing. I’ve been to Warren Truss’ department, I’ve been to McFarlane’s department, I’ve been to a number of departments trying to get somewhere with this, but we always get knocked back at the top end.

And we in Australia, our varieties, outperform all those anywhere else in the world. We have double the yield, and further more, we are even just doing a joint-venture presently with a French company where we’ve invented a technology which will revolutionize the industry by reducing the price by about 30 per cent and decreasing all the handling and processing costs.

And we can’t get anybody to look at this from a government prospective. They’re, sort of, more worried about whether it is a problem for police or not. Well, it’s not.

IAN TOWNSEND: If a politician wanted to say brew up some of this hemp and try to distil into something that might be able to get high on, they wouldn’t be able to do that?

PHILIP WARNER: Well, they would have to smoke something probably about two times the size of a telegraph pole, and I think they’d probably die of asphyxiation before they got anywhere near any potential… like marijuana is of a level which can create psychoactive changes in the mind, whereas industrial hemp is clearly well beyond that.

IAN TOWNSEND: Do you think a bag of hemp to the Prime Minister is going to soften his attitude towards the product?

PHILIP WARNER: I don’t think… we didn’t expect that would happen. I just hope that he has the opportunity to think twice about this, and get someone to get in touch with the organisations that are involved or with ourselves, so that he can actually hear the real story rather then some sort of scare mongering drug story.

The bottom line is we would dearly love some government assistance there. Not necessarily just in money, but also in attitudinal response, rather then this sort of stonewall, ‘oh we are dealing with drugs’. You’re not.

MARK COLVIN: Philip Warner, Managing Director of Ecofiber Industries Limited with Ian Townsend.

Related article:

Hemp growers send cannabis to educate politicians
Tuesday, March 23, 2004