Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul Join Forces to Legalize Hemp

The push to legalize domestic hemp production is gaining steam.  

Matthew Hurtt | March 4, 2013

Supporters of industrial hemp gained a powerful ally in Washington several weeks ago when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joined fellow Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul and Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) as a co-sponsor of S.359, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013. The House companion, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), has 28 co-sponsors. The bills would amend the Controlled Substances Act to exclude industrial hemp, the domestic production of which has been illegal since 1970.

Though manufacturing hemp is currently just as illegal as growing smokable pot, 10 states already have frameworks in place for industrial hemp production. The problem is that the Drug Enforcement Administration classifies all forms of hemp as a controlled substance, despite the fact that industrial hemp generally contains less than 0.3 percent THC, or anywhere between 1/6 to 1/66 the amount you'll find in marijuana. If you tried smoking hemp, you'd exhaust yourself before you got high.

Federal regulations do not differentiate between marijuana and its non-psychoactive cousin, which is used in the production of many useful items, including clothing, rope, biofuel, construction materials, and pulp for paper products. According to David West of the North American Industrial Hemp Council, more hemp products are exported to the United States from places like China and Canada than any other nation on earth.

The most recent victory for industrial hemp at the state level came when SB50, a bill to create a framework for licensure in Kentucky, passed unanimously out of the Senate Agriculture Committee and by 31-6 on the Senate Floor. Sen. Paul (who donned a shirt made of hemp during his testimony), Rep. Massie, Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey all testified in favor of the bill in committee.

"The specter of people getting high on industrial hemp is pretty much exactly like saying you can get drunk on O'Doul’s," Woolsey testified. But there's another angle to the anti-hemp argument. Law enforcement groups claim hemp farmers could cultivate marijuana with substantial amounts of THC among an industrial hemp crop. Woolsey debunked this notion, saying marijuana growers would “hate the idea of having industrial hemp anywhere near” their crops because cross-pollination leads to less THC in marijuana, rather than more THC in hemp. As Reason’s Jacob Sullum has noted, “In Colorado… the managers of indoor marijuana grows (currently serving the medical market) are worried about drifting pollen from hemp farms, which could make their plants go to seed instead of producing lots of lovely buds and resin.”

American policymakers have had a love-hate relationship with hemp. Despite being widely produced in colonial America and grown by some of the Founding Fathers, the U.S. government can't seem to make up its mind about the plant. The U.S. allowed domestic hemp for nearly two centuries before passing the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which imposed onerous licensing requirements and taxes on hemp producers. When Japan invaded the Philippines in 1941, thereby cutting off the U.S. Navy from its sole provider for rope fiber, the U.S. launched the "Hemp for Victory" campaign, which sparked Kentucky's hemp farming revival. The Feds reversed their stance yet again with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.

Hemp is also a historically popular crop in Kentucky. In 2002, Purdue University released a study claiming that “[f]rom the end of the Civil War until 1912, virtually all hemp in the U.S. was produced in Kentucky.” Even today, industrial hemp farming would have tangible benefits for Kentucky, where tobacco has waned in recent years. Congressman Massie, who operates a family farm in Garrison, Kentucky, has taken the lead on legalizing industrial hemp in the House. In a recent press release, he said,

Industrial hemp is a sustainable crop and could be a great economic opportunity for Kentucky farmers. My wife and I are raising our children on the tobacco and cattle farm where my wife grew up. Tobacco is no longer a viable crop for many of us in Kentucky and we understand how hard it is for a family farm to turn a profit. Industrial hemp will give small farmers another opportunity to succeed.

Despite testimony from an all-star lineup in the Kentucky Senate Agriculture Committee, the measure faces a “tougher time” passing the House, according to Speaker Greg Stumbo; and it will face an even greater challenge making it past Governor Steve Beshear, who sympathizes with Kentucky's anti-hemp law enforcement community.

Nevertheless, half of Kentucky’s congressional delegation supports the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013 and state Agriculture Commissioner Jim Comer said it was a “top priority” for Kentucky’s agriculture lobby. McConnell, whose increasingly amiable relationship with Rand Paul seems to be making him lean in a slightly more libertarian direction, explained in a joint statement with the junior senator from Kentucky:

I am proud to introduce legislation with my friend Rand Paul that will allow Kentucky farmers to harness the economic potential that industrial hemp can provide. During these tough economic times, this legislation has the potential to create jobs and provide a boost to Kentucky's economy and to our farmers and their families.

Relaxing restrictions on industrial hemp production would allow American farmers to successfully compete. Under the current restrictions, American consumers are sending hundreds of thousands of dollars abroad annually and creating jobs in China, Canada, and elsewhere rather than buying products made from hemp that has been grown in the U.S.A.

Hemp, The Great Green Hope

by Rand Clifford
June 10, 2011

“It has something to do with something called marijuana. I believe it is a narcotic of some kind.”
So said congressman Rayburn to congressman Snell’s question: “What is this bill about?”

That was way back in the summer of 1937, when congress was being asked to essentially outlaw a drug they knew nothing about, marijuana. But realistically, marijuana had little to do with it. The real issue was non-drug industrial hemp.

Industrialists were like scarab beetles, rolling around this giant ball of profit protection, and they ran right over the domestic hemp industry. Hemp presented way too much competition, too much threat to entrenched and entrenching profits. Took a pretty big ball of dung, but the scarabs rolled it expertly, professionals. Except for several years of heavy production during WWII, under the feds’ “Hemp for Victory” campaign—which told the truth about hemp and helped us win the war...not a single acre of hemp has been legally grown in America since 1937. Seventy-four years and counting. That was one enormous ball of dung. The entire hemp-prohibition infamy could be called a dung deal, especially as related to the common good.

What could have possessed grown men, congressmen even, into making it a crime to grow one of the oldest, and the most valuable crop in history? Essentially the same thing that keeps the common good in government crosshairs today, the hideous mechanics of humanity’s ultimate modern plague: obsession with corporate profits—virtually the opposite of government Of, By and For the people.

Also in 1937, in its annual report to stockholders, the DuPont company gloated over “radical changes” regarding the federal government’s conversion of taxation authority into a tool for forcing acceptance of “sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization”. They went so far as proclaiming that, after massive farm foreclosures of the depression, farmers were inhibiting America’s industrial progress. They should move to industrial cities so farmland could be consolidated into huge agribusinesses controlled by corporations—along with all other means of industrial production. Farming should be primarily for food.

DuPont’s president, Lammont DuPont, even ordained: “Synthetic plastics find application in fabricating a wide variety of articles, many of which in the past were made from natural products. The chemist has aided in conserving natural resources by developing synthetic products to supplement or wholly replace natural products.”

Yes, a world of synthetics...mother lode patents, petroleum alchemy, pollution, extinction, poverty and disease, deforestation, global warming; fascism, globalization, perpetual wars for dwindling resources; corporate centralization of all means of production—even global food supply. Concentration of money, of power, of control—power to the corporations, slavery to the people. Conversion of largely rural, agricultural America into an urban, industrial nation. Landfills brimming with immortal waste leaching death into our living systems...until death do us part.

The reason scarabs were in such a frenzy over hemp in 1937 was clearly revealed by Popular Mechanics magazine—a full six months after! the American hemp industry was effectively dead and buried via trademark corporate chicanery. The February cover story for Popular Mechanics in 1938 was titled, “The New Billion-Dollar Crop”. Imagine how much money a billion dollars was in 1938. The article told the truth, praising the advent of new machinery that would drastically reduce hemp’s labor demands; and praising a crop so valuable that in the early days of America, for farmers with a certain threshold of acreage in production, it was illegal not to grow hemp.

Imagine the chagrin of people involved in our burgeoning hemp industry upon learning that hemp had been banned in America because of “The Killer Weed from Mexico”, by the illegal Marijuana Tax Act. By law, taxes are for raising revenue, not for molding behavior. But obviously—even more so today than ever before...upper echelons of power are above the law. Laws are for “small people”—unless they facilitate, as George Bush the elder said, speaking of certain clandestine federal operations, “The continuous consolidation of money and power into higher, tighter and righter hands.”

And remember DuPont’s “...radical changes regarding the federal government’s conversion of taxation authority into a tool for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization”? What about the Constitution...or as George Bush the younger calls it, that “...goddamned piece of paper”?

As for the news, the New York Times reported on August 3, 1937, that “President Roosevelt signed today a bill to curb traffic in the narcotic, marihuana, through heavy taxes on transactions”. A dung deal. Industrial hemp strains of cannabis have zero drug potential, and are NOT “marijuana”, but...never mind. Competition slammed. Profits protected. Hemp threat eliminated.

The negative impact to the common good of America from seventy-four years of hemp prohibition is difficult to fathom. America is largely about service jobs and finance, not manufacturing or production—despite consumer spending being 70% of our Gross Domestic Product. We offshore as much production as possible to take advantage of slave labor markets, lax environmental protections, tax incentives.... And we sink ever deeper into debt as former middle-class citizens, their jobs off-shored, become street people, and millionaires become billionaires, and billionaires shed their skins.
 
Spokane’s congressional representative is a republican named Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Somehow two of my email addresses got on her mailing list. I fatigued over all the trumpeting of GOP efforts to take from the poor to give to the rich, and repeatedly tried to get off Cathy’s list without success. So I replied to one of her emails by simply asking her to define her position regarding the common good of America. Bingo, I’m off Cathy’s list. Haven’t heard from her in months.

Hemp has taught us many things about how power works in America, and our education continues. Hemp’s usefulness is truly remarkable; food, fuel, fiber, paper, plastics—using modern technology, hemp offers an estimated 25,000 natural products. Hemp needs no petrochemical fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides, and is actually beneficial to the soil. Hemp is nature’s premier powerhouse for converting sunshine and water (and carbon dioxide while breathing out oxygen) into an astonishing range of superior, eco-friendly products. Perhaps one of the worst things about hemp is that, for the bulk of our perception-managed population, it sounds too good to be true. Well, for about the last 12,000 years hemp has proved true—yet for the last seventy-four years in America, growing hemp has been a crime. That’s the real crime.

The U.S. hemp industry is currently ringing up $400 million in annual retail sales—all of it on imported raw materials! The number of good, non-transferable (cannot be “off-shored”) jobs hemp prohibition costs us is shameful. We need solid jobs. We need to create value. Other economic benefits of hemp, along with the environmental benefits, are all but incalculable.

The idea of a “jobless recovery” is ludicrous, the term itself an oxymoron. Parasitic Wall Street casino killing off the middle class is also killing off America. Globalization is shoving us back toward feudalism. Dark-ages redux. Privatization is poisonous...and the way things are going, how long do you think it will be until some corporation privatizes the atmosphere, and we have to pay to breathe? Hemp is a powerful antidote to globalization and privatization. No other plant can actually empower entire regional economies...the antithesis of globalization. Farmers could regain the status they deserve, growing the world’s most useful crop and selling it to local markets that sell it to local processors that sell their products to locally-owned businesses that sell to local citizens that work in the hemp industry—all with the aid of public banking. All the wealth stays where it belongs—with the people that create it. This could all be happening across America right now, putting hundreds of thousands of people to work creating wealth. But...the same movers and shakers standing most in the way of America returning to hemp slither in the same den as other parasitic snakes that ripped off the whole world with complex toxic debt bombs rated as AAA investment-grade securities while at the same time profiting on bets that the toxins would foul the entire global economy—THEN when their toxic bombs burst, slithered to Congress dripping crocodile tears and begging for (and getting) $23.7 trillion! (1) of taxpayer blood via threats of global financial meltdown, and threats of martial law in America. The whole sordid nightmare represents the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history. Troubled Asset Relief Program...doesn’t paying federal taxes make you proud to be American?

So much for the “shining city upon the hill”. Too bad we commoners lack the spirit to fight for hemp and get back some shine....

Of course democrats and republicans are simply two sides of the same corporate-toady coin, despite apparent differences especially regarding the common good. In 2005, republican representative from Texas Ron Paul was chief sponsor of the “Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2005”. The bill would have allowed farmers to grow industrial hemp—non-drug varieties of cannabis, differentiating between cannabis strains and setting limits on the amount of psychoactive THC allowed. Now, for the environment, the economy, the common good—for everything that deserves a future, that sounded too good to be true.

The bill died in committee.

Ron Paul tried again in 2007, 2009, and on May 12, introduced the “Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011”. This time Ron Paul has twenty-two co-sponsors—and that’s where differences appear in the way democrats and republicans regard the common good; twenty of the co-sponsors are democrat, two of them republican. It’s the most co-sponsors Ron Paul has attracted so far. Sounds like hope? At this rate, perhaps in a few more decades such bills might even make it out of committee.

Chances even seem good for a democratic senator to introduce for the first time a companion bill in the Senate. But odds are overwhelming that the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011 will die in the usual place: The Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

You might wonder why in hell an agricultural bill is going first to a committee on crime, terrorism, and homeland security. Well...sorry folks, this is America, and the bill is actually an entrenched-profits issue, common good against the ruling elite. We should all know by now what function hope has in America, but collective amnesia is epidemic. So....

Never mind.

And the ultimate clincher that scarabs might never be able to obliterate with their mighty balls, stark revealment of marijuana interdiction being an attack on hemp...it’s getting closer. Hemp was prohibited by prohibiting marijuana...but it is conceivable—even almost certain that eventually, marijuana will be legalized, but not hemp. The purported reason for banning hemp will disappear, but not the ban on hemp. Such is how power works in America. And amnesia.

The environmental benefits, the economic benefits, the major surge of job creation, the luxury of superior natural products—forget them and the countless other benefits to the common good of America; the impact to entrenched profits would be too great for the elite to ever allow hemp to be grown in America again. As long as the status quo is maintained, hemp will never have a chance.

We obviously need drastic changes to the status quo, but us commoners have a profound problem called apathy. Relentless perception management of corporate mainstream media feeds the apathy, and amnesia. How are mainstream Americans ever supposed to learn the truth? How is the fact that we outnumber our primary oppressors nearly a million to one ever supposed to be seen clearly, and focused on as a platform for doing something...anything to correct problems such as hemp prohibition, and American imperialism being so vastly more important than us common Americans?

Hope is an elusive thing, unpredictable—just like us...we hope?

(1)  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aY0tX8UysIaM

Stoned on Righteousness

by Robert C. Koehler - Thursday, September 23, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

It’s not just about us. If Californians legalize marijuana on Nov. 2, maybe Mexico will end its horrific drug war.

The “war on drugs,” like the war on terror, is a simplistic and brutally stupid solution imposed on a complex, multifaceted human problem, born out of the notion that you can take evil out of context and eradicate it with the firepower of righteousness. Science and the arts have long ago moved on to new realms of awareness, but we’re still playing politics the way we did in the 19th century — or the 12th or 1st — with the primary difference being that we have the capacity to do far more harm these days.

And righteousness, indeed, all too often becomes a far greater cause of harm than the original problem; in tandem, problem and solution may combine to turn chronic trouble into unfathomable disaster, especially for innocent bystanders.

Mexico’s drug war, for instance, which began in late 2006, has so far resulted in the deaths of 28,000 people and consumed billions of dollars in military expenditures. Meanwhile, government human rights violations are rampant, crime in general is on the rise — and most Mexicans think the drug cartels are winning.

Writing earlier this month in the Washington Post, Héctor Aguilar Camín and Jorge G. Castañeda ask: “If California legalizes marijuana, will it be viable for our country to continue hunting down drug lords in Tijuana? Will Wild West-style shootouts to stop Mexican cannabis from crossing the border make any sense when, just over that border, the local 7-Eleven sells pot?”

If Californians pass Proposition 19 and make marijuana fully legal, Mexico may choose to legalize it as well, they suggest. The two countries are inextricably linked via drugs; what Mexico produces, the U.S. consumes. Thus: “If the initiative passes, it won’t just be momentous for California; it may, at long last, offer Mexico the promise of an exit from our costly war on drugs.”

All of which puts Prop 19 and the entire issue of legalizing pot in the United States in a context larger than the one we generally acknowledge. Our country’s anti-pot bureaucracy is wreaking harm and punishing the innocent beyond our borders as well as within them — all the while turning a plant with extraordinary medicinal and other highly useful properties into our arbitrary enemy, “devil weed,” to no serious end except to waste law-enforcement resources and keep our prisons full to bursting.

Indeed, in 2009, police busted 858,408 people for pot violations, according to the FBI’s recently released Uniform Crime Report. This is the second highest total ever, and just shy of the record set in 2007. What gives? Even as the country inches its way toward marijuana sanity — medical marijuana is now legal in 14 states and two more (Arizona and South Dakota) have the issue on the November ballot — a “stoned righteousness,” you might say, seems to be fighting back and punishing people when and where it can.

My friend Bernie Ellis, who was arrested eight years ago for growing medical marijuana on his farm near Nashville, Tenn., calls it “the farces of evil” — which have not stopped harassing him even though he has served 18 months in a halfway house run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Last month, the final hideous ritual of false justice was enacted, as the feds auctioned off the 25-acre piece of his farm they had confiscated in a plea-bargain arrangement that allowed him to keep the other 147 acres. Originally they were going to take the whole thing.

All of this, as Ellis wrote recently, was “for the crime of growing seven pounds of pot and giving it away to four terminally ill neighbors, a crime that I never denied I committed from the moment that two helicopters and ten four-wheelers descended on my farm.”

And in the three weeks before the auctioning of his land, he wrote, his farm was buzzed three times by pot-seeking government aircraft, “low enough to rattle my windows and blow down my late summer sweet corn.” What it sounds like is governmental stalking.

Lavishing so much righteous, punitive energy on marijuana users and growers is doubly ironic. The plant’s abuse potential is miniscule compared to its value. Harvey Wasserman, writing irreverently in the December issue of Hustler, points out that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers not only grew but in all likelihood smoked hemp; and that the plant’s national value was extolled in a 1942 video produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture called Hemp for Victory (five years after marijuana was declared illegal).

But even if marijuana was a clear social problem, on the order of cocaine, declaring war on it and proceeding ruthlessly, consequences be damned, to eradicate it, not only doesn’t work, but causes incalculable and pointless harm. Mexico’s nation-wrecking drug war is one example. The spraying of highly toxic herbicides across the landscape of Third World countries is another.

Prop 19, which no mainstream California politician has the nerve to support, could do more than legalize adult possession of an ounce of marijuana in the nation’s largest state. It could legitimize sanity and put a lid on the forces of simple-minded righteousness in politics and government.