THESE JEANS AREN'T MADE FOR SMOKING


This is an article taken from The Bulletin, May 10, 1994. Written by Damien Murphy


They may be made of cannabis, but packing a pipe with these pants will only give you a headache. Better to wear them according to the makers' advice.

Ian Flay and Karen Muscat may be Australia's biggest cannabis importers. They have five tonnes of the stuff lying around in bolts at their Clifton Hill factory in inner Melbourne.

The pair became cannabis dealers two years ago when they were unemployed in Adelaide. He was a jeweller, she a clothes designer. Flay hit on the idea of making jeans and T-shirts from hemp, and together they started the Slaam clothing company and shifted to Melbourne.

They went after the street wear market - those baggy, daggy clothes worn be skateboarders, surfers and snowboarders, and just about everyone else under thirty. It's a cult that somehow has filtered into mainstream fashion. Oversized shorts and T-shirts worn as casual clothes by business people are a street wear crossover in the same way that fluoro garments walked off the beach and into the boardroom a few seasons back.

It is difficult to be different in Australia's rag trade but Slaam's cannabis gambit seems to have scored. According to Flay, word-of-mouth and some judicious advertising in the youth media and on FM stations has seen Slaam struggle to keep up with orders.

"Street life is hard on clothes," he says. "For centuries before they turned their backs on it, humans knew hemp was the toughest natural fibre." We've not only got the toughest material, but the street credibility that goes with [cannabis] being a prohibited substance."

However, hemp still has the power to confuse. Flay and Muscat can import the fibre from China by the tonne, but Slaam has encountered difficulties trying to register a serrated-edged cannabis sativa leaf as a trademark because the Industrial Property Organisation deems it an illegal substance.

Similarly, Tasmania's Hemp for Paper consortium has had problems importing cannabis seeds to plant a secret, but government-sanctioned, crop outside Hobart a year ago, due to zealously imposed seed quarantine regulations. "It was finally sorted out," says consortium spokeswoman Patsy Harmsen, "but it could have been avoided. People, politcians and public servants seemed afraid it would give Tasmania a bad name."

The potential for drug abuse ensures that Tasmania's poppy industry - whereby flowers are grown to produce heroin for pharmaceutical purposes - is even more carefully regulated than that other example of Australian agrarian socialism, the sugar industry.

Stringent regulations govern the growing of cannabis in Australia; plants used here for paper production or imported for clothing materials are high in fibre but low in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the mind-altering active ingredient that gives hemp a bad name.

"The material is made from the fibrous stalks, not the leaves or the flowers," Flay says. "If you smoked a pair of jeans you'd just feel sick, not high."

Hemp only went out of fashion prior to World War II. For thousands of years before Hitler it was a staple, with myriad applications in the making of ship sails, rope, cloth, and medicine. The marijuana legalisation lobby claims fell into disrepute after the invention of nylon in the 1930s. It says that in order to push nylon as a wonderful new product, powerful American interests conducted a disinformation campaign against hemp, to the extent of producing that kitsch film classic Reefer Madness.

Australia, apparently, did not need to be told. It banned hemp in the 1920s, following England's lead after London discovered that colonial exiles tended not to work after smoking hemp.

The latest push to use cannabis in paper production came out of Tasmanian conservationist fears about forest destruction. But Flay, while espousing its environmental value as a low-impact crop, says Australia is stupidly missing out on billions of dollars by not jumping on the band-wagon. He says it is grown for paper in France, Holland and Britain, and used for fibre in China, Hungary and what used to be the Soviet Union.

"Italy is producing seeds where the fibre content is higher and better strains are being sold around the world," he says. "Those people are no fools. They know how superior hemp is as a fibre. It's absorbent, won't stretch, is UV-resistant, better for the environment, produces three times more fibre than cotton per hectare and four times more pulp than woodchipping.

"The industry could be worth $10 billion a year here in four years if the government would just take notice."

Meanwhile if hemp does take off, Flay and Muscat have the licence to market textile derivatives in Japan, South Africa, New Zealand, the UK, France and Germany.