Article on hemp in Virginia

Last year the Virginia legislature started to vote on the law to allow Virginians their constitutional right to grow hemp - as did so many of its famous sons, some of them former US presidents. Today this article appears in the Daily Progress of Charlottesville, VA, titled "Will Hemp be a cash crop again for Virginia?"

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Hemp is not marijuana.


It looks like marijuana.
 

                            

It’s related to marijuana.


But it’s not marijuana.


It’s a plant fiber so useful that it can be used in making things from auto parts to yarn. Not quite A to Z, but close enough.
A hemp car? Really? Apparently so. “Hemp fibers have higher strength to weight ratios than steel and can also be considerably cheaper to manufacture,” reports Alan Crosky of the School of Material Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He and other researchers are working on using hemp fiber to replace plastic in some car parts. The result could be a car that has more fuel efficiency because it weighs so much less, but is still just as strong.
So why aren’t American farmers rushing out to plant hemp and cash in on this miracle plant?
Umm, because it’s kind of illegal.
In Colonial times, Virginia required farmers to plant hemp because it was deemed so useful. Rope, clothes, sails for ships — all could be made from hemp. Thomas Jefferson penned the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper. In World War II, the federal government promoted “Hemp for Victory!” Growing hemp for use in making industrial fiber was considered patriotic.
Then came another war — the War on Drugs. Hemp got lumped in with marijuana (same cannabis species, but different genetics and vastly different psychotropic potential) and was effectively banned.
The feds do allow hemp farming, as long as your state has a law allowing it and regulating it. Lately, there’s been a campaign to do just that.
However, the push to legalize hemp isn’t coming from drug-addled hippies. It’s coming from people who see hemp as a potential cash crop to replace tobacco — or no crops at all. At the national level, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is pro-hemp, and he’d never be mistaken for a pot smoker.
In Virginia, one of the main hemp advocates is Jim Politis, a former Republican member of the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors. He sees it as a pro-economic development measure for struggling rural areas. Another Republican, Del. Joseph Yost of Pearisburg, has already filed a bill for next year’s General Assembly to create the Virginia Industrial Hemp Farming Act.
The main objections to hemp come from law enforcement, which argues that it’s easy to confuse the two plants. The counter-argument is that alcohol looks pretty much the same but authorities do a good job of distinguishing between a craft brewery and a moonshine still.
So let’s say again: Hemp is not marijuana.
But if Yost’s bill passes, it could be a cash crop again.
Adapted from the Roanoke Times.

List of US states that are supporting hemp

A quick overview of states' activity re hemp legislation is useful at this time. Most states have cultivated hemp at some time, so there is a record for many to go forward with this initiative; however, there are many states to go.
And then of course there is federal approval needed, which Mina Hegaard is working on with her
petition at www.minawear.com/about-us/ 
Please sign, and if your state is not already looking into hemp, please get in touch with us here and we would love to help out!

So far,  31 states have introduced pro-hemp legislation and 19 have passed pro-hemp legislation.

Eight states (Colorado, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont,Washington, and West Virginia) have defined industrial hemp as distinct and removed barriers to its production.

Three states (Hawaii, Kentucky, and Maryland) have passed bills creating commissions or authorizing research.

Nine states have passed hemp resolutions: California, Colorado, Illinois, Montana,New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Vermont and Virginia.

Eight states have passed hemp study bills: Arkansas, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Vermont. Many other states have done studies without legislative directive.

Hemp movement news from Washington State: House Bill 1888

It is always welcome news when I can post an a new state taking on the hemp issue. So far Kentucky, Colorado, California, Oregon, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota and North Carolina have all got some news items on this blog. Washington joins the frey, and I am hoping to start a New York initiative here, hopefully reps Jerrold Nadler who co-sponsored Ron Paul's bill and Carolyn Maloney

(NY's 8th and 12th districts) will support this. All 50 states could benefit, so let's see 40 more posts of this genre - and of course let's get lots more signatures on the petition to the White House at www.minawear.com/about-us/

 

 

 

 

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — A legislative committee has approved a bill that would allow Washington farmers to grow industrial hemp.

Washington officials are in the process of establishing a system to legalize the production and sale of marijuana for recreational use, following passage of Initiative 502 last fall. But that initiative didn't cover the production of hemp or hemp products.

House Bill 1888 would permit development of an industrial hemp industry in Washington. A House committee approved the bill Thursday, sending it to the full House for a vote.

Nine other states have passed laws allowing hemp production, but none grows hemp as a crop. The federal government still bans the plant.

Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Legislative-committee-approves-hemp-bill-4298715.php#ixzz2LaSgdjOo

Wythe County Virginia in support of hemp

This week I posted about hemp politics in Virginia for the first time, now there is more from that state, an article titled Wythe comes down on side of hemp by Millie RothrockTriCities.com:

The Wythe County Board of Supervisors Tuesday unanimously voted to adopt a resolution urging Congress to pass the Industrial Help Farming Act and grant states the authority to license and regulate the production of hemp.Montgomery County asked Wythe County officials to vote on the resolution. Jim Politis, chairman of the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors, is a strong advocate for hemp farming in the United States.

Hemp is member of the cannabis family, like marijuana, but contains miniscule amounts of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.

According to the resolution, the long, tough, fibrous plant is used in more than 25,000 products, including, paper, clothing, plastics and body care products. American farmers grew hemp until lawmakers outlawed it as part of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
After that, it was banned in the Controlled Substance Act of 1970.
Farms around the world have farmed hemp for thousands of years.
Politis has circulated his resolution in support of hemp farming to numerous governments and agencies throughout Virginia, including Blacksburg; the counties of Floyd, Giles and Buckingham; and the Virginia Association of Counties. So far, only Christiansburg has not approved the resolution, and Politis plans to present a second resolution to officials there.
Politis hopes if the Industrial Hemp Farm Act comes up for a vote in Washington, D.C., again, lawmakers will approve it.
Bills supporting the act, one in the Senate and one in the House of Representatives, died in the last session of Congress, which ended in late 2012. Supporters plan to reintroduce the bill.
To reach Millie Rothrock, call 228-6611, or email mrothrock@wythenews.com.

Hemp activism takes root in Virginia

Hemp activism takes root in yet another state, again, from the south - Virginia, which historically may have been the first state to cultivate hemp, and whose famous sons, among them many presidents, were hemp farmers. Today they would be arrested in that state, or any other, for doing what they noted was good for the economy and the military.

The present president needs to be made aware of what his predecessors used to make America strong and prosperous, and we urge you to sign the petition to the Executive Branch at www.minawear.com/about-us/ Whatever your state, this will be needed for final approval from the federal government.

Aaron Richardson in the Daily Progress (19 Jan) gives us a look into what his fellow Virginians are doing about hemp:

 

 

Hemp, a robust, fast-growing plant with uses ranging from food to fiber to biofuel, could be the cash crop economically ravaged areas like Southside Virginia need to jump start their economies, its proponents say.

Albemarle County could soon join a long list of Virginia localities, including Charlottesvile, that have signed resolutions to separate industrial hemp from marijuana. The supervisors will consider a resolution at their February meeting.

 

Earlier this month, Montgomery County Supervisor James D. Politis was invited before the Albemarle Board of Supervisors to make the case to legalize industrial hemp.

Politis' presentation painted a sunny picture of the weed, made infamous by the 1937 film "Reefer Madness."

Politis said it has almost 25,000 different uses, and could be planted extensively across the commonwealth, particularly in areas that were once known for sprawling tobacco farms.

But there's a problem. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration doesn't differentiate hemp, which is used to make shirts, biodiesel and building material, from marijuana, its potent, illegal cousin.

Both plants are a form of cannabis sativa, which became a Schedule I controlled substance with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

Two bills -- one in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate -- that would have excluded hemp from the definition of marijuana failed in 2012.

According to the DEA, there is no difference between industrial hemp and marijuana. To the administration, because both plants contain tetrahydrocannabinol -- the substance that makes smokers high -- they fall under the same category.

" Hemp and marijuana are actually separate parts of the species of plant known as cannabis ," reads a post on the DEA website.

According to hemp's allies, that isn't the whole story.

"Under the Marijuana Tax of 1938 and the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, all cannabis was put in the same category," Politis said. "But there are as many kinds of cannabis as there are canines and felines; some of them will bark at you, some of them will bite you."

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, industrial hemp is less than 1 percent tetrahydrocannabinol. The cannabis people smoke -- better known as pot, weed or grass -- contains between 3 percent and 15 percent of thc.

"I think the objections to hemp in the past have been that the police have a hard time telling them apart in the field," said Supervisor Dennis S. Rooker. "But I think we are denying farmers a significant opportunity that is going to be an expanding opportunity in the world, and I think that the basis for that denial is very weak."

Supervisor Kenneth C. Boyd was less enthusiastic than Rooker.

"I'm actually open to anything that is going to promote economic vitality, but as is always the case, I'm sure there is another side to the story," he said. "I'm a little bit anxious to hear from law enforcement because the argument that I have heard in the past is that [hemp] is similar to marijuana and can be used as a substitute for marijuana."

The United States currently imports tons of the plant in the form of fiber, seed oils and car parts. In 2012, the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center valued the industry at $419 million.

Those imports come primarily from Canada and China, Politis said.

Hemp production is legal in Canada, China, much of Europe, Russia and Australia, according to the DEA.

HEMP IN MASSACHUSETTS

One might say that hemp was first grown in Massachusettts by European settlers, citing early laws ca. 1630 which mandated hemp. A Virginia law of 1619 did the same; some assert that this was America's first 'marijuana' law. However, it may well be that the indigenous people grew it long before the Mayflower ever touched the shores of New England.

Early explorer Thomas Heriot noted: "The truth is, that of hempe and flaxe there is no great store in any one place together, by reason it is not planted but as the soule doth yield of itself." Lord Delaware related quite similarly: "The country is wonderful fertile and very rich, Hempe better than English growing wilde in abundance."

Many other records of hemp exist to support pre-Columbian cultivation of this plant. It would be fair to say that some of the settlers were instrumental in the cultivation of hemp, and that many of them were in Massachsetts, where America's first textile mill was built by Ezekial Rogers in 1638.

The state went so far as to subsidise hemp farming, giving farmers one farthing per pound of hemp produced starting in 1701. Later that century many of the Founding Fathers wrote about hemp, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. In the nineteenth century Bourne Spourner, an abolitionist, started the Plymouth Cordage Co. in Plymouth, Massachusetts. At that time, most of America's hemp was grown in the south, mainly in Kentucky, and was produced by slave labour. For this reason, Spourner used Russian hemp; he may have also used Russian hemp as it was water-retted as opposed to dew-retted, which was the typical practice in the US at that time. This fact led to lively debates in Congress over whether it was better to buy from Russia or use 'made in the USA'; it was the US Navy who settled the debate, taking the Russian hemp rather than the domestic. Because of this import, St. Catherine's Day came to be celebrated in Massachusetts on the 25th of November each year, with the rather innacurate idea that Catherine was a Russian saint, possibly mixing her up with the Empress by that name.

By the middle of the eighteenth century Massachusetts had become very industrialised, and there is scant record any hemp raised on its soil. The tabular statements from 1840-1870 record but two tons produced, both in 1870. On the other hand, ports in that state, including Boston and Salem, took in more than those of any other state. An 1804 record shows Massachusetts as the destination for over half of US hemp imports from Russia.

The Plymouth Cordage Co. grew to become the largest of its kind in the world. However, as hemp became fased out after the Civil War, other fibres came into play. When WWII broke out, the company was seen as strategic to national security, and hemp was once again used there, this time, though, not made in Russia, but in the good ol' USA, most of which came from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinios.

This wartime crop was encouraged by a US government film titled Hemp for Victory, which came about after some rather un-American laws that were enacted to the detriment of the hemp industry in 1937. After the war there was much demand for hemp to be reintegrated, but this was not to be the case. For decades industrial hemp was neither grown nor processed in Massachusetts.

As interest in hemp was resumed in America with such books as Jack Herer's The Emperor Wears no Clothes, hemp items were once more to be seen, although the plant itself is still illegal to grow in the US (or rather, illegal according to the federal govenment, though some states have legalised forms of it). Herer's book debuted in 1985, and in the '90s there was a grassroots movement to restart the industry.

At present Boston has the state's leading hemp business, The Hempest, at 207 Newbury Street, Boston, not far from the Copley. This was the flagship 'Hempest', there are now three more Hempests, two of which are in New England, with a fourth in Santa Barbara, California. In these shops one can buy a number of clothing brands including Nibus and Minawear, as well as other hemp items, many of them made in the USA. This company is one of the oldest and largest in the US hemp world, and it may well become to the hemp scene what the Plymouth Crodage Co. became to the ropemaking industry. One thinks the early settlers and the Founding Fathers would be proud.