When the federal Farm Bill passed last December, it\u2019s doubtful that its crafters \u2014 like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell \u2014 anticipated what we are now witnessing. In convenience stores, smoke shops and truck stops across the country, what is to all outward appearance marijuana bud is freely and openly for sale. To the eyes as well as the nose, this stuff is marijuana: fragrant flower-tops, sticky with resin. There\u2019s only one real difference: it doesn\u2019t get you high.<\/p>\n
While it may be rich in the non-intoxicating cannabinoid CBD, it contains less than 0.3% THC \u2014 not nearly enough to feel high. This makes it \u201chemp\u201d under the law \u2014 and, its purveyors insist, therefore perfectly legal.<\/p>\n
And so far, the courts agree with them.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 13, a federal district court in Indiana handed the hemp industry a first victory on this question. Judge Sarah Evans Barker issued a preliminary injunction against a portion of the state\u2019s hemp law that criminalized what lawmakers called \u201csmokable hemp\u201d \u2014 regardless of the THC content.<\/p>\n
Indianapolis-based CY Wholesale brought the suit, arguing that the state law was in direct conflict with the U.S. Farm Bill (officially the\u00a0Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018<\/a>), which removed hemp from the federal schedule of controlled substances and prohibits states from enacting statutes more stringent than the federal code.<\/p>\n In issuing her injunction, Judge Barker found that the plaintiffs are likely to win their case on the merits. As local\u00a0Indypolitics<\/a>\u00a0reports, it is unclear if the state plans to appeal the decision.<\/p>\n This does not bode well for the moves by other states to similarly ban this quasi-marijuana. In late August, the North Carolina Farm Act passed the state house in Raleigh after long debate. The bill, now before the state senate, would revise the definition of hemp to exclude \u201csmokable hemp.\u201d<\/p>\n As the\u00a0Raleigh News & Observer<\/a>\u00a0reports, lawmakers disagreed on whether banning the stuff would make \u201csmokable hemp\u201d a controlled substance like actual marijuana. But hemp growers objected to associating it with marijuana at all. They said the law would hurt farmers, making it harder to compete with farms in other states and undercutting their chance of getting crop insurance.<\/p>\n The house heard testimony against the bill by Fen Rascoe, a hemp farmer and member of the\u00a0North Carolina Industrial Hemp Commission<\/a>. He\u00a0said: \u201cTake the marijuana out of it; it\u2019s not marijuana.\u201d<\/p>\n Even if this stuff isn\u2019t marijuana, however, its closeness to it is what is driving these legally dubious bids to ban it.<\/p>\n Hundreds of cannabis possession charges have been\u00a0dismissed in Texas\u00a0<\/a>over the past months because police don\u2019t have labs that can differentiate between actual marijuana and \u201csmokable hemp.\u201d Gov. Greg Abbott, his attorney general and allied politicians have made abundantly clear their unhappiness with the situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other states are scrambling to update their test kits to distinguish between CBD and THC in confiscated samples. But until the new technology is in place,\u00a0cops and prosecutors are stymied<\/a>. The prosecutor for Florida\u2019s Miami-Dade County is the latest of several around the country to\u00a0halt minor cannabis cases<\/a>\u00a0due to this dilemma.<\/p>\n CBD is not entirely in the legal clear, despite passage of the Farm Bill, because the Food and Drug Administration has still\u00a0failed to promulgate regulations<\/a>\u00a0governing use of the cannabinoid. But the FDA rules only concern CBD\u2019s use as an additive or ingredient in food or drugs \u2014 they do not apply to a simple hemp flower.<\/p>\n A new report jointly produced by the cannabis industry number-crunchers\u00a0BDS Analytics<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0ArcView Market Research<\/a>\u00a0explores the rapid mainstreaming of CBD products. Entitled \u201cCBD: Cannabinoids Escape the Dispensary<\/a>,\u201d the report sheds some light on the \u201csmokable hemp\u201d dilemma \u2014 without actually using that phrase. But the report\u2019s imprecise terminology also, unintentionally, provides a case study in the confusion on the question.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCBD can be derived from either cannabis or hemp, as both are simply varieties of\u00a0Cannabis sativa,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the report states. \u201cSales of products that use CBD derived from cannabis are limited to the licensed medical and adult-use dispensary channel in the 33 U.S. states, Washington, DC, and four territories that have thus far superseded federal law to legalize cannabis at least for medical use within their own borders. Cannabis-derived CBD isolate, a compound processed to remove all substances besides CBD, technically should be legal for products sold beyond the dispensary channel but this has yet to be tested in the courts.\u201d<\/p>\n Hemp-derived CBD products (or actual \u201chemp,\u201d including the flower) \u201ccan legally be sold anywhere,\u201d and last year\u00a0generated $1.9 billion in sales \u2014 a figure expected to rise to $4.1 billion in 2019.<\/p>\n This again raises the\u00a0semantic dilemma<\/a>\u00a0posed by the industry\u2019s reluctance to use the word \u201cmarijuana\u201d\u00a0because of the racist stigma traditionally associated with it<\/a>. However, it is an absurdity to say that cannabis and hemp are both varieties of cannabis, when really they are both the same plant \u2014 the cannabis plant \u2014 but with different levels of THC.<\/p>\n However much industry dogma now eschews the word \u201cmarijuana,\u201d it can be effective to use it to differentiate between the two legally defined categories of cannabis: that with high THC (which has been lovingly referred to as marijuana for decades)\u00a0and that with low THC below 0.3% (legally codified as hemp).<\/p>\n In the new legal environment, this distinction is breaking down somewhat. Increasingly, hemp is being grown for CBD extraction rather than the traditional industrial uses. When you\u2019re talking about a fragrant bud, obviously intended for smoking \u2014 is it really hemp? Or just marijuana that doesn\u2019t get you high? In this case, we\u2019d be talking about categorizing the cannabis plant not based upon how much THC it has, but based on what the plant is grown for. Might we suggest a rewrite such that \u201chemp\u201d concerns varietals of the cannabis plant grown for fiber, seed and hull, while \u201cmarijuana\u201d concerns varietals grown for flower, regardless of the cannabinoid profile?<\/p>\n In any case, while there are certainly good reasons to oppose the prohibition of \u201csmokable hemp,\u201d there is also an argument for not caving to the stigma by rushing to disassociate it with \u201cmarijuana.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, states cannot \u201csupersede\u201d federal law \u2014 only ignore it. Federal law remains in effect within their borders. Since California legalized medical marijuana in 1996 and Colorado and Washington led the way to general adult-use legalization in 2012, states have been basically ignoring \u2014 in effect,\u00a0defying<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the federal Controlled Substances Act. It would certainly be an irony if states now succeed in prohibiting \u201csmokable hemp,\u201d similarly defying the Agriculture Improvement Act.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0have you ever smoked hemp?<\/p>\n The post Is \u2018Smokable Hemp\u2019 Legal?<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
When the federal Farm Bill passed last December, it\u2019s doubtful that its crafters \u2014 like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell \u2014 anticipated what we are now witnessing. In convenience stores, smoke shops and truck stops across the country, what is to all outward appearance marijuana bud is freely and openlyContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,136,1074,296,610,90,298,12616,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38660"}],"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\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38660"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38661,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38660\/revisions\/38661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Is It Marijuana or Isn\u2019t It?<\/h4>\n
Cannabis Sativa, Or Why We Can\u2019t Just Call It \u2018Marijuana\u2019 and \u2018Hemp\u2019<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Is \u2018Smokable Hemp\u2019 Legal?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"