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Unrelated to the brouhaha on the West Coast, tobacco farmers in Kentucky were seeking a new cash crop. In 2011, James Comer won the race for Kentucky state agriculture commissioner by promising to legalize industrial hemp.
“That raised a lot of eyebrows, including in McConnell’s office,” Eric Steenstra, a hemp lobbyist, told me. “They saw the winds were shifting.”
Along with Representative Jared Polis, now the governor of Colorado, Mr. McConnell included a hemp pilot program in the 2014 farm bill — for “research.” In the legislation, hemp was defined as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent THC — an arbitrary threshold, not a scientific distinction: Nothing in the Farm Bill, in case law, or in the Controlled Substances Act seemed to say anything about CBD. So entrepreneurs interpreted this research-oriented pilot program as the de facto legalization of cannabidiol.
The Drug Enforcement Administration disagreed, but couldn’t stop the tidal wave of CBD production. In 2018, over 60 percent of the hemp crop in Kentucky was grown for CBD. Then, long after the country was already flooded with CBD products both dubious and legitimate, Mr. McConnell inserted language into the 2018 Farm Bill explicitly making hemp federally legal.«
It's actually pretty amazing how quickly this happened. Prior to the new legislation, "cannabis" was illegal, that is, the plant, regardless of THC content. Schedule 1 narcotic according to the DEA.
Then this farm bill passes, without a lot of fanfare (about cannabis) and poof, it's legal across all 50 states (as long as it's less than 0.3% THC).
What's interesting to me is how the DEA is losing influence. They not only tried to stop this legislation, but also kratom (they were making it schedule 1 as well). Due to public outcry, the DEA backed down and we're in this weird limbo where kratom remains legal federally, even though the DEA doesn't want it to be.
I'm guessing over the next 20-30 years, we'll see a lot of changes with regards to the war on drugs. It started with marijuana, but it won't stop there.
This is definitely one of the spaces where the internet has made the status quo unacceptable to the majority of at least the US public. It’s very hard to fight one of humanity’s basic urges with disinformation in a open society with the internet.
And yet adult contact is down overall, sex workers cannot communicate online anymore, and covid is seen as a 'nothingburger' by half the people I meet reguardless of political leanings. Never underestimate a good disinfo wave. Hell, even Biden is singing the old 'we don't know if it is safe, better keep it illegal' refrain.
“That raised a lot of eyebrows, including in McConnell’s office,” Eric Steenstra, a hemp lobbyist, told me. “They saw the winds were shifting.”
Along with Representative Jared Polis, now the governor of Colorado, Mr. McConnell included a hemp pilot program in the 2014 farm bill — for “research.” In the legislation, hemp was defined as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent THC — an arbitrary threshold, not a scientific distinction: Nothing in the Farm Bill, in case law, or in the Controlled Substances Act seemed to say anything about CBD. So entrepreneurs interpreted this research-oriented pilot program as the de facto legalization of cannabidiol.
The Drug Enforcement Administration disagreed, but couldn’t stop the tidal wave of CBD production. In 2018, over 60 percent of the hemp crop in Kentucky was grown for CBD. Then, long after the country was already flooded with CBD products both dubious and legitimate, Mr. McConnell inserted language into the 2018 Farm Bill explicitly making hemp federally legal.«