Daily Mail editorial: State should support, not hinder, hemp industry

Source: wvgazettemail.com

CHRIS DORST | Gazette-Mail photo

West Virginia Hemp Farmers Cooperative Executive Director Morgan Leach points to the seeds growing on a hybrid hemp plant at the plot he maintains with his father in Vienna.

During World War II, hemp was a vital resource with production reaching 150 million pounds in 1943.

Now, hemp growers in West Virginia are facing myriad challenges in their attempts to grow the crop.

The Legislature passed a rules bill earlier this year that nearly killed hemp production, and the Department of Agriculture requires farmers to jump through a series of hoops, including FBI background checks, fingerprinting, an exhaustive application that shows geographical coordinates of where the hemp will be grown and agreeing to quarterly inspections, the Gazette-Mail’s Elaina Sauber reported.

But proponents of hemp have set out to prove the crop is valuable and worth the state’s support. A handful of growers across the state are working to pioneer hemp’s return by growing and maintaining research plots used to collect data for study. They say the data will be vital to swaying the Legislature to support, not hinder, the growth of the state’s hemp industry.

But hemp has a successful history in the United States. Some believe the state is trying to reinvent the wheel by requiring further study of the crop and its production methods.While hemp and marijuana come from the same species of plant, Cannabis sativa, hemp is a separate variety with its own chemical makeup, and it has different cultivation practices than marijuana, Sauber reported earlier this year. Though the chemical makeups are different, some lawmakers have expressed concern about the Drug Enforcement Agency’s classification of the plant as a controlled substance despite the fact that THC levels found in hemp are lower than in marijuana.

“It was a subsidized crop in the U.S., so you know USDA has some records somewhere about growing [it],” hemp farmer Dave Hawkins told Sauber. “The historical significance is, maybe we could learn something from the past.”

Mike Manypenny, a former state delegate and Democratic nominee for U.S. House of Representatives in the first district, has long supported the hemp industry. The crops growing on his quarter-acre lot are part of four projects. One studies hemp’s potential as a high-quality activated carbon, which is used to filter water impurities and flue gas in coal-burning power plants. Manypenny is also in talks with the Polymer Alliance Zone to find a use for hemp as a bioplastic.

Hemp is not a drug as many opponents assume. It’s a way for West Virginians to start businesses, make a profit, grow the economy and find new, innovative ways to use it. Hemp could be the state’s next big cash crop.

The state government needs to back off with the burdensome rules and regulations and let the industry grow.