Pubdate: Mon, 30 Mar 2015
Source: New Mexican, The (Santa Fe, NM)
Column: Ringside Seat
Copyright: 2015 The Santa Fe New Mexican
Contact: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/SendLetter/
Website: http://www.santafenewmexican.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/695
Author: Milan Simonich

INDUSTRIAL HEMP MEASURE'S FUTURE RESTS WITH GOVERNOR

Part-time farmer Jerry Fuentes has spent the last 15 years 
championing industrial hemp as the perfect crop for drought-ridden 
New Mexico and corporate America.

Hemp is used to make auto dashboards, briefcases, carpeting, 
insulation and an array of other products. Even so, Fuentes' attempt 
to legalize industrial hemp seemed like a fool's errand or a cause 
for rebels, not button-down businessmen.

Industrial hemp is a cousin of the marijuana plant. So no matter how 
straight-laced industrial hemp production is, and no matter how many 
captains of industry import products made of hemp in other countries, 
it could not shake outlaw status in the United States.

Fuentes, 61, of Truchas, remembers it being impossible to convince 
those in power that hemp is a crop capable of strengthening the 
economy. One year, a headline in an Albuquerque newspaper announced: 
"Hemp bill goes up in smoke," another punch line after yet another 
political defeat.

So far, 2015 has been different. Still to be seen, though, is whether 
it provides a breakthrough, or if it was just a tease.

New Mexico legislators this month overwhelming approved state Sen. 
Cisco McSorley's bill to import industrial hemp seeds and allow 
research of the plant at New Mexico State University.

Congress has authorized states to study hemp's uses as an industrial 
product. McSorley says the federal government soon will take the next 
logical step by legalizing the growing of hemp for commercial and 
industrial purposes. He wants to make sure that New Mexico farmers 
are positioned to take advantage of this sea change in public policy.

His bill is on the desk of Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, who 
recently had harsh words for McSorley, D-Albuquerque. He happened to 
be filibustering in the last 10 minutes of this year's legislative 
session while Martinez's favored bill for capital construction 
projects died in the Senate. McSorley's role in killing the 
governor's capital construction proposal was minimal. All 24 
Democrats in the Senate were unanimous in saying they would not 
accept her plan, dooming it from the start.

Still, Fuentes and other advocates of the hemp bill wonder if 
Martinez just might veto it, given her displeasure with McSorley in 
particular and Democratic senators in general.

Martinez won't say. Her press aide did not respond to a question 
about whether she would sign McSorley's industrial hemp bill.

Fuentes said a powerful Republican from Kentucky was McSorley's 
greatest ally in this year's hemp debate in New Mexico. U.S. Senate 
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is sponsoring the Industrial Hemp 
Farming Act of 2015.

McConnell's proposal is the one that McSorley and other New Mexico 
lawmakers are tracking because it would allow American farmers to grow hemp.

"Mitch McConnell is the shining light in this whole thing," Fuentes said.

Like McSorley, McConnell knows farmers who could use a good cash crop 
that doesn't require enormous amounts of water. Industrial hemp fits 
the description.

Plus, American companies last year imported $640 million in products 
made with hemp from Canada, India, Turkey and China. Homegrown 
industrial hemp would create jobs in American manufacturing plants.

Joe Rael is president of a company in Santa Fe called BioDesign Labs. 
He is helping run a 40-acre industrial hemp farm in Antonito, Colo.

Farmers in Colorado have a head start on hemp production because 
voters in their state have legalized marijuana. McSorley's bill 
proposes nothing so radical. It's all about business, not 
recreational drug use.

Rael says industrial hemp is a green product, and he's not just 
talking about the money it would make for farmers.

"Plastics are filling up the ocean. Hemp biodegrades," he said.

Today, New Mexico is in the midst of a bitter political 
confrontation, even as officeholders say that they want bipartisan 
efforts to put people to work and expand the economy. The first small 
step would be the governor signing the bill for industrial hemp.

What a sight that would be: old foes Martinez and McSorley sitting 
next to one another, the hatchet buried for a minute, as they find 
common ground through industrial hemp.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom