In December, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) made a grand show. Waving a pen made from hemp over the 2018 Farm Bill like a magic wand, McConnell ushered in what he promised would be a brave new era for farmers in his home state: They could grow hemp again, legally, and bring their crop to market without fear of arrest and seizure by federal drug agents.<\/p>\n
It took only a few weeks after President Donald Trump\u00a0signed the Farm Bill<\/a>\u00a0into law for McConnell\u2019s promise to be put to the test. And early results, like the load of nearly 18,000 pounds of what its erstwhile owners insist is pure Kentucky hemp, seized by Oklahoma law enforcement who insist it is, in fact, the biggest-ever marijuana bust and have charged the four men transporting the load with drug-trafficking charges, are not encouraging.<\/p>\n Panacea Life Sciences<\/a>\u00a0is a Colorado-based company that needed more industrial hemp than Colorado could provide. On Jan. 9, a truck and a van were pulled over by local police in Pawhuska, Oklahoma,\u00a0as local media reported.<\/a><\/p>\n Paperwork found the shipment of 17,258 pounds of \u201cplant material\u201d indicated that the plant material was hemp, or cannabis sativa with 0.3 percent or less of THC. After a \u201cfield test,\u201d police disagreed, and seized the shipment and arrested the four men \u2014 two drivers in the truck and two employees of a security firm following the truck in a van. Prosecutors this week filed drug-trafficking charges against the four men \u2014 despite still not being entirely sure that it was marijuana in the truck.<\/p>\n As of Friday, all four remained in jail pending lab results.\u00a0Oklahoma authorities apparently shipped some<\/a>\u00a0of the suspected marijuana to a Drug Enforcement Administration lab in Washington, D.C., rather than do the very simple testing locally. This was an odd move, considering states have had drug-enforcement labs for decades, and even odder considering that Oklahoma has medical marijuana now, and the lab equipment necessary to test for potency is commercially available.<\/p>\n But since the DEA is hamstrung thanks to Donald Trump\u2019s shutdown, no results are available and the men remain in jail on the basis that even though \u201cwe don\u2019t have a level\u201d of THC \u201cyet,\u201d the Osage County District Attorney\u2019s Office is still convinced that what they have is marijuana and not hemp,\u00a0according to KFOR.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWhile we are fully aware of the new federal regulations pertaining to the interstate transportation of hemp, it is our belief that what was being transported was more than hemp as alleged by both the defendant\u2019s attorneys as well as others associated with the companies purportedly associated with the truck involved,\u201d the DA told KFOR on Wednesday. \u201cThe state will proceed with what we believe are appropriate charges and expect that the full story will come to light as the case moves forward through the courts.\u201d<\/p>\n Attorneys for the men working the shipment say they have evidence that proves the exact opposite.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a suite of paperwork that [proves the shipment] is hemp, but they jump to the conclusion that it\u2019s marijuana and that it\u2019s the biggest marijuana bust of all time,\u201d Colorado-based attorney Mark Robison\u00a0told Tulsa World<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to Robison, the nearly 9 tons of hemp is worth about $850,000, and was intended to be processed into various CBD products. And according to attorney Matt Lyons, who is representing the two men who worked as security, they have both GPS tracking, video surveillance, and lab results from the Kentucky-based supplier that proves the load is hemp.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to remember that even before McConnell\u2019s magic show \u2014 which promised to create a domestic source for the CBD poured into coffees and extracted into cosmetics, pills, and other \u201cwellness\u201d products sold by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s GOOP to video-rental stores in the heartland \u2014 industrial hemp and its related products were all legal commodities in the United States.<\/p>\n There are many examples: Dr. Bronner\u2019s soap, hemp seeds, hemp clothes, hemp wicks, and whatever it is that CBD entrepreneurs are using as source material.<\/p>\n Whatever it is, as long as it had\u00a00.3 percent or less of THC<\/a>, the key distinction that, in the federal government\u2019s eyes, makes cannabis sativa legal (hemp) or illegal (marijuana).<\/p>\n But what good is any of that if the very commercial activity McConnell is openly encouraging is intercepted by police and the participants slapped with charges worthy of cartel kingpins? Not very good. If he was serious about anything, McConnell should dig around for that pen and start writing messages to both the DEA and Oklahoma authorities, who are demonstrating that it takes more than a change in the law to change law enforcement.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b>\u00a0do you foresee future problems when it comes to law enforcement defining what is hemp and what is marijuana?<\/p>\n The post The Problem with the Farm Bill<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
In December, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) made a grand show. Waving a pen made from hemp over the 2018 Farm Bill like a magic wand, McConnell ushered in what he promised would be a brave new era for farmers in his home state: They could grow hemp again,Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6726,50,321,699,90,139,7210,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32244,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32243\/revisions\/32244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: The Problem with the Farm Bill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"