Hemp
is currently a Schedule I federally controlled substance, in the same
legal category as LSD, heroin, and Ecstasy. Like all forms of cannabis,
it was criminalized in 1970, partially because Congress was worried that
law enforcement couldn’t tell the difference between hemp and
marijuana.
“There was tremendous biological understanding of the
difference, but Congress was not making policy based on this—they were
basing it on fear,” said John Hudak, a senior fellow at Brookings and
the author of Marijuana: A Short History.Now,
four years after universities and state agriculture departments were
allowed to begin growing limited quantities of hemp for research
purposes, Congress is expected in September to make hemp legal for
Americans to grow for the first time in nearly 50 years. Legalization as
part of the 2018 omnibus farm bill would be a major victory for
American hemp producers, who believe hemp cultivation could become a
billion dollar-plus industry, given hemp’s growing use in
pharmaceuticals, food and textiles. But legalization is just the first
step in cultivating the American hemp industry, with many challenges
ahead for farmers to assure the viability of what is essentially a
brand-new crop: establishing a supply chain, creating technologies for
large-scale cultivation, and building markets both at home and abroad.
These are daunting tasks for a crop whose prospects had been ruined for
half a century by its association with marijuana.
Hemp and marijuana are both types of Cannabis sativa, but they’re bred differently, and have different biological attributes.
Most importantly, hemp does not have psychoactive properties because it
has far lower levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) than marijuana. The
two plants look different, too—hemp stalks are long, thin, and fibrous,
while marijuana grows closer to the ground.
Still, for
decades after hemp was criminalized, Congress wouldn’t touch it with a
ten-foot pole. “Everybody said, ‘That’ll never happen! Everybody thinks
that it’s pot, and nobody’s going to support it,’” said Senator Ron
Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, who started the legalization push back in
2012.
Hemp’s multitude of uses include food, lotion, and (perhaps most profitably) a recently-approved epilepsy drug called Epidiolex
made of cannabidiol (CBD), a cannabinoid that can be extracted from
cannabis in both its marijuana and hemp forms. It’s legal to sell
products made from hemp in the United States, but the market is
currently filled almost entirely by imports from other countries.
Around the same time Wyden introduced his first bill to legalize hemp, Kentucky state officials started to consider the crop as an alternative for farmers
struggling to make profits on tobacco, which has historically been the
state’s top agricultural commodity but whose importance has declined
in recent years. In 2012, James Comer, then Kentucky’s agricultural
commissioner and now a first-term Congressional representative, made
legalizing hemp under state law his top priority. Legalization passed
the Kentucky legislature with bipartisan support, but was stalled by the
state’s attorney general because of hemp’s federal status.
So Kentucky’s hemp advocates turned their attention to Congress.
Legalizing hemp, they argued, could give Kentucky farmers a chance to
corner the market on hemp help make up for some of the tobacco losses.
In
2013, after hearing from officials and advocates for several months,
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, jumped on board
with the proposition. That year, a bipartisan coalition of the two
Republican senators from Kentucky—McConnell and Rand Paul—and the two
Democratic senators from Oregon—Wyden and Jeff Merkley—introduced the
first version of the Industrial Hemp Farming Act, which would have
removed hemp from the controlled substances list and made it legal to
grow as an agricultural commodity.
They
weren’t successful, in large part because hemp’s continued association
with pot made it too much of a political liability. But with the
Senate’s top Republican publicly arguing that hemp wasn’t marijuana and
shouldn’t be treated as such, members of both parties began to sign onto
the Senate version of the bill.
At McConnell’s urging,
the 2014 farm bill created the pilot research program that authorized
universities and state departments of agriculture to grow and research
hemp. Because hemp was still a controlled substance, there were many
restrictions on its cultivation—farmers who wanted to participate in the
program had to get a waiver from the Drug Enforcement Administration,
and the number of acres farmers could legally plant was strictly
limited. But, according to a Congressional report,
at least 19 states participated in the pilot program, and at least 40
have since passed legislation relating to the cultivation of industrial
hemp. “I’m one of hemp’s biggest advocates, and I never expected it to
go this fast,” said Jonathan Miller, another former Kentucky state
official who is general counsel, spokesperson, and registered lobbyist
for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable.
So
far, according to its proponents, this limited research endeavor has
been a success. “Last year alone, the hemp pilot program yielded more
than $16 million for Kentucky farmers,” McConnell wrote in an April op-ed.
Geoff Whaling, the chairman of the National Hemp Association, said that
American farmers can’t keep up with the growing United States demand
for hemp, which is currently filled by imports from other countries like
Canada and China.
The most recent version of the
legislation to legalize growing hemp was introduced in April, with
McConnell as the primary sponsor. Though that version never made it to
the House, McConnell eventually worked it into the Senate’s version of
the farm bill. There’s no organized opposition, with the exception of a
brief objection to the bill’s definition of hemp from Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who nonetheless classifies himself as “pro-hemp.”
Despite all the hype surrounding hemp’s economic potential, nobody is really sure what to expect once it’s legalized. A recent Congressional report
noted that even in Kentucky, studies concluded that “short run
employment opportunities evolving from a new Kentucky hemp industry
appear limited.” It also cited a USDA study that concluded with
“uncertainty” about the long-term demand for hemp and the “potential for
oversupply” in the United States market.
Then
there’s the fact that hemp hasn’t been grown in the living memory of
many, if not most, farmers in the United States. There’s simply not many
people with experience growing the crop—a situation exacerbated by the
bill itself. The farm bill’s language precludes people with drug felony
convictions from cultivating hemp, which means that many people with
experience growing cannabis in the form of marijuana would be federally prohibited from growing its sister plant.
Despite the relative success of the campaign to distinguish hemp from
pot, it hasn’t been able to shake this relic of hemp’s history; Politico
reported that the provision was added in early July to appease Grassley.
Though at least one advocacy group has condemned the ban on people with drug felony convictions, backers have largely brushed aside criticism.
Yet because drug felony convictions disproportionately impact
communities of color, the provision could serve to keep black, Latino,
and Native American farmers out of the hemp market—much as similar laws
at the state level have served to exclude them from the medical marijuana industry.
“This
amendment will force many African Americans, Native Americans,
Hispanic/Latinos and others who have a state or federal drug felony
convictions to shut down existing hemp operations and they will be
unable to grow, process or own a hemp business in the future,”
GrowHempColorado said in a statement. Federal agriculture policy has historically favored white farmers, both explicitly and implicitly, and bans like this could further this exclusion while providing another profitable crop for large-scale, mostly white farmers.
Sharp
also worries that farmers are all going to get into the type of hemp
that seems most profitable on the surface—hemp grown for pharmaceutical
drugs that use CBD—without considering all the red tape that comes along
with that pursuit. “Hemp is three distinct disciplines. You have hemp
made for food, made for fiber, and made for pharma,” he said. “Each one
of those disciplines has a distinct, different way of growing and
processing.” Farmers unfamiliar with the crop, he’s worried, might start
growing without thinking about what market they want to sell their hemp
to.
Though he’s much more optimistic about hemp’s
future, Whaling of the National Hemp Association largely agrees about
the challenges. “We need to be wise and be methodical about the steps
that we take, because if we start to grow this product because people
think that ‘it’s new, it’s easy, it’s a panacea crop, it’s going to
solve a lot of problems for farmers,’ and we don’t have the facilities
in place to process it, then everyone will give up and it’ll fall flat
on its face,” he said. “We need to go from zero to millions of acres of
fiber, and the question is how we start to build that supply chain
because the largest processing equipment for hemp today only processes
14,000 acres.”
Wyden
argues that the pilot program has allowed states who took full
advantage of it ample time to prepare for the crop’s full legalization.
“That was the point of those extra years [of research],” he said.
“Certainly in states like Oregon and Kentucky, the fact that I
introduced the bill in 2012, that we started making preparations for
this day with the research and the pilot projects. We now have 400-plus
farmers ready to go, so a fair amount of foresight has gone into this.”
In
all likelihood, it’ll be clear soon enough if producers are prepared
for the onslaught of hemp. Both McConnell and Comer are on the farm
bill’s Congressional conference committee, putting two of hemp’s biggest
advocates in prime position to advocate for its inclusion in the joint
bill that is scheduled to be brought before both chambers by the end of
September.
No comments:
Post a Comment