Pubdate: Thu, 27 Jun 2013
Source: Boulder Weekly (CO)
Copyright: 2013 Boulder Weekly
Contact:  http://www.boulderweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/57
Author: Leland Rucker

GETTING OVER THE HUMP ABOUT HEMP

Come Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call

Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall

For he who is hurt will be he who has stalled

I thought about those lines and that almost-50-year-old Bob Dylan 
song while watching the debate over an amendment Rep. Jared Polis, 
D-Boulder, proposed to the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk 
Management Act of 2013 (FARRM) bill last week in the U.S. House of 
Representatives. If you're interested in the ways and means of 
federal policy-making, it's 10 minutes well worth watching. If it 
weren't showing the leaders who make major decisions in our country, 
it would be much funnier.

Polis' modest, bi-partisan amendment, which would allow universities 
under restrictive conditions to grow and study hemp for agricultural 
or academic research (one school he mentioned was Colorado State 
University in Fort Collins), was offered with a little show-and-tell 
- - he held up an American flag made of hemp while mentioning that 
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington both grew the crop. Spending 
on hemp-related products is more than $300 million a year, he said, 
and almost all of the 25,000 hemp-related products sold here use hemp 
imported from other countries.

But he quickly got to the point. "At the THC levels specified," Polis 
said, "it's physically impossible to use hemp as a drug." And he 
repeated himself while proposing rather sensibly that hemp is an 
agricultural commodity, not a drug.

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa objected, mentioning that he was aware of 
situations where industrial hemp operations could hide marijuana 
plants among the hemp to avoid detection by the Drug Enforcement 
Agency, which also endorsed this point of view at the hearings.

Here's what he's really talking about: The DEA mostly watches for 
illegal marijuana grows by air, and even our best drones and snooping 
equipment can't seem to be able to tell the difference between hemp 
and marijuana, so what can the government do to keep industrial hemp 
growers from hiding a little cheeba on the side?

For one, they could stop worrying about it. Beyond a couple of 
second-hand accounts from groups opposed to legalization, I could 
find no evidence to support this contention.

On the other hand, there are plenty of studies that say this is just 
false. For instance, King's own Agricultural Committee released "Hemp 
as an Agricultural Commodity" in March of this year, a tract that 
offers several reasons why nobody with any sense would want to plant 
marijuana and hemp together.

Among the findings: 1) Cannabis plants grown for fiber or oil are 
different from plants grown for medicinal/recreational products. 2) 
Each has its own methods of growing. 3) Neither are planted or 
harvested at the same time. 4) Most importantly, all cannabis plants 
are wind-or insect-pollinated, and thus subject to cross-pollination.

"This is particularly true for growers of medicinal or recreational 
marijuana, in an effort to avoid crosspollination with industrial 
hemp," the report says, "which would significantly lower the THC 
content and thus degrade the value of the marijuana crop."

Perhaps the funniest moment in the Polis-King debate comes after 
King's dissension, when Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., explains that 
researchers from the University of North Dakota have been able to put 
a fluorescent gene into hemp, which, if added to all American hemp 
crops, could solve the DEA's identification problem. And, he added, 
though he doesn't know anything about marijuana, he's heard that if 
you mix hemp and marijuana, it ruins the marijuana. I couldn't find 
any other mention of that gene splicing, but perhaps Peterson 
actually reads government reports, and let's hope he follows through 
on sharing that information with King and his staff, as well as that 
Ag Committee report, too.

As we point out again and again in this space, there is no shortage 
of stupidity when it comes to the federal battle against marijuana. 
But one of the most ridiculous was when hemp, which as Polis 
mentioned had been grown here without incident since the country was 
founded, fell victim to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Though the act 
didn't outlaw hemp, it regulated a stiff enough tax on it to dissuade 
anyone from growing it.

Except for a period several years later when the federal government, 
in need of fiber and seed oil, encouraged farmers (including in 
King's state of Iowa) to grow hemp to help the war effort, using a 
propaganda film called "Hemp for Victory." When the war ended, so did 
U.S. support for hemp, and in 1970, when Congress passed the 
Controlled Substances Act, it became illegal. Though it's a 
scientific fact that hemp and marijuana are different, the DEA 
officially continues to consider hemp a dangerous drug. Today the 
U.S. imports more hemp than any other country.

The tide is turning. More than 30 states have introduced hemp 
legislation. Colorado, Vermont and North Dakota have passed laws 
enabling farmers to grow hemp, and 10 other states allow hemp farming 
but have not started production yet because of continuing DEA resistance.

But here's the punch line: Polis joined a bi-partisan effort to vote 
against the FARRM Act, killing the hemp-study proposal.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom