COSTA MESA : OCC Club Focuses on Many Uses of Hemp

An Orange Coast College club that wants to legalize marijuana has become popular with students, attracting more than 150 members, according to its founder.

Lee Wilson, a 21-year-old business major, founded the college-sanctioned Hemp Club in January. He and other club members now sell T-shirts and hats made from hemp fibers and have meetings to educate people about the beneficial uses of hemp.

The hemp plant is best known as the source of the drug marijuana, but club members argue it can be processed into methanol fuel and oil as well as used in the manufacture of paint, varnish and other oil-based products. Hemp plant fibers would produce enough paper to eliminate the use of timber, Wilson said.

Club members are circulating petitions in favor of a ballot initiative to let people grow marijuana and use the drug, Wilson said. The group is focused around building support for the hemp initiative, not personal use of the drug, he said.

“All the time I’ve had this hemp club, there has never been a discussion about smoking marijuana,” Wilson said. “Our goal is not to get high. This is about saving Earth while we can.”

Wilson denounced the “sensationalism” that he said surrounds the movement to legalize hemp. But he agreed that he would enjoy the freedom to use marijuana. “If the hemp initiative were passed, yeah, I believe I’d smoke some marijuana,” he said.

Wilson said OCC’s Earth Day celebration on April 19 will feature speakers who will proclaim the virtues of the banned plant. Jack Herer, who wrote “The Emperor Wears No Clothes,” a book that argues the benefits of hemp, will be there, Wilson said.

In addition, a woman with glaucoma, who is one of the few people in the country legally allowed to use marijuana, will talk about the drug’s use in treatment of her eye disease.

The Hemp Club meets on Tuesdays at noon at the Technology Building, Room 118, on the OCC campus.