Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell gets our kudos this week for taking a long-overdue and wise step to reform the silliness of the federal government’s approach to hemp.
Four years after supporting a provision in the 2014 Farm Bill that allows state to authorize the growing of industrial hemp in supervised pilot programs, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell now says he wants to bring hemp production back into the national mainstream by removing it from the list of controlled substances.
This is of course a no-brainer and the fact that hemp -- with a negligible amount of THC in it -- is treated the way it is by the federal government is perhaps the best example possible of how misguided our federal policies can be when it comes to being smart about combatting drugs with increasingly scarce resources.
McConnell, the top Republican in the U.S. Senate Monday told Monday a group of hemp advocates in Kentucky that he will introduce legislation to legalize the crop as an agricultural commodity. Once top cash crop in Kentucky, exceeding even tobacco, hemp has been banned by federal law for decades, because the law does not distinguish industrial hemp from marijuana.
Former Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner James Comer was an outspoken advocate of lifting the ban on industrial hemp during his four years in office. Narrowly losing on Matt Bevin in the 2015 Republican gubernatorial primary, Comer was elected to Congress from Kentucky First District in 2016, where he has continued to be a strong advocate for hemp.
During Comer’s final year as agriculture commissioner, Kentucky used the new federal farm bill to approve a pilot program for the first legal raising of hemp in the state in decades. The pilot program has grown so rapidly that Kentucky agriculture officials recently approved about 12,000 acres to be grown in the state this year, and 57 Kentucky processors are turning the raw product into a multitude of products.
Hemp and marijuana are the same species, but hemp has a negligible amount of THC, the psychoactive compound that gives marijuana users a high. Law enforcement agencies have opposed the lifting of the ban on hemp because they say it is difficult to distinguish from marijuana, particularly from a distance. More than 30 other states have joined Kentucky in authorizing hemp research by approving pilot projects.
As we have said in this space previously, we still are not convinced hemp, if legalized, can again become a major cash crop in Kentucky but a growing number of Kentucky farmers are so convinced of hemp’s potential that they have signed up for the pilot program.
We believe the only true way for hemp to realize its potential as a cash crop is to let the free market determine its value and not some outdated federal ban that unfairly confuses hemp with pot.
No comments:
Post a Comment