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From: http://www.pantless.com/~pdxnorml/conde.html
Conde & Seber: Building Toward The Future With Hemp
Conde & Seber: Building Toward The Future With
Hemp, from _High Times_, July 1994. Bill
Conde, a longtime hemp activist who once ran
for governor of Oregon, and his partner David
Seber research the economic potential of hemp
fiber products. When you talk to production-
level people in the lumber industry, you
don't ask, "How did the wood turn out?" You
ask, "How was the fiber?" Inside the industry
everyone anywhere near a production capacity
relates to wood not as wood, but as fiber.
Hemp fiber is stronger and cheaper to produce
than tree fiber. The longest fiber in a
Douglas fir is three-quarters of an inch, but
a fifteen-foot hemp plant gets you fifteen-
foot fiber. Conde & Seber's product is called
medium-density fiberboard. It's the flagship
product of the composite industry, used in
applications that range from furniture to
backing in automotive panels. If you can
produce MDF, you can produce a whole
spectrum of other products.
Conde & Seber: Building Toward The Future With Hemp
By Zero Boy
_High Times_, July 1994, pp. 50-53
All over the Pacific Northwest one can see the effects of the massive
deforestation that's been taking place out there during the past 20 years.
Whole valleys and mountainsides have been clear-cut - stripped of all 
plant life - to meet our insatiable demand for fiber, paper and wood.  So 
when High Times learned that Bill Conde, a longtime hemp activist who 
once ran for governor of Oregon, was researching making an alternative to 
plywood utilizing hemp, we decided to look into it.
What immediately stands out when going to see Conde is the huge billboard 
for Conde's Redwood Lumber on the side of Interstate 5, just outside of
Harrisburg, Oregon. On one side of the company name is a giant green 
marijuana leaf and on the other side is an American flag  inside a peace 
sign.  In the heart of lumber country, the lumber industry is talking 
about planting hemp and converting to it as a primary source of fiber. 
Credit goes largely to Conde, David Seber and Barry Davis, partners in 
the research and development company called C & S, the company at the 
forefront in research on hemp use for fiber. HT met with Conde and Seber -
Davis was unavailable - to find out what progress they've made in 
developing a substitute for clear-cutting old-growth forest.
_High Times_:  Bill, why don't you tell me about where you grew up and how 
you ended up in the lumber business?
Bill Conde:  I was born in 1943 and raised in the San Francisco Bay 
Area.  Grew up there, graduated from high school, went into the military 
for four years, then went  to work at several different places.  I ended 
up involved in the mobile home industry, where I had to buy redwood. I 
moved to Oregon about twenty years ago and opened up a redwood lumber 
yard down in Cottage Grove.  One day while I was driving home from a 
delivery I picked up this hitchhiker - David Seber - and we've been 
buddies ever since.  He's the "S" in C&S.
HT: When and why did you start working to develop hemp fiber for 
commercial use?
BC: David and I have been working on hemp as a fiber for nearly four 
years now.  The why of it really has to do with twenty-five years of 
being an old-growth redwood merchant, working with the dead bodies of the 
oldest living things on the planet.  It starts weighing heavy on you if 
you have any conscience at all.
I just reached point where I asked myself, "What's my life for?"  I mean, 
it surely wasn't just to cut down old trees and make picnic tables and 
decks out of them.  And that's when I realized that as someone in the 
industry I was in a position to help make the change over, to change the 
fiber that's being utilized.  So David, Barry Davis and I formed C&S to 
try to do just that.  And in the four years we've been working on it 
we've made great progress.
HT: When I ask hemp activists, they say Bill Conde's the guy who's been
active the longest.  Any truth to that?
BC: In the state of Oregon that's probably true, but there are a lot of us
who have been doing it a long time. Personally, I was really encouraged 
years ago - back in the sixties - when I saw a guy walk into a courtroom 
in Southern California with a live plant in his hand and set it on the 
judge's desk.  It had a little sign that said "God grew it." That was my 
first inkling that something was really wrong with the way the whole 
system was. Actually, the first time I smoked a joint, I knew there was 
something wrong with the laws.
HT: Why don't you tell me a little about yourself, David?
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