Analysis by researchers at Reason Foundation and Harvard University finds that states permitting adult-use of recreational marijuana tend to have fewer vaping-related lung injuries, suggesting that legalizing marijuana could be a partial solution to reducing vaping illnesses.

The Center for Disease Control started a panic over legal vaping products, only to later say vaping-related illnesses were primarily caused by black market THC products containing vitamin E acetate, which is found only in illicit products. 

Despite the increased legalization of cannabis in the US, the FBI’s latest crime data release shows arrests for drugs increased in 2018. 

Some doctors and researchers think that the risk of psychosis from marijuana is low and research into other areas of cannabis science and policy should be prioritized. 

Legislation, Regulation, and Markets

One Kentucky state representative is proposing legalizing marijuana and using the subsequent tax revenue to pay down unfunded pension liabilities. 

Michigan’s recreational cannabis market opened recently and is experiencing high demand. The legislature is also considering forcing marijuana businesses to reach labor peace agreements. 

Illinois, which also recently opened its recreational market, is already experiencing shortages.

Illinois also made changes to its cannabis law related to the expungement of past marijuana crimes, banking, DUI policy, and more. 

Some of Massachusetts’ recommendations for determining marijuana-impaired driving have little or no connection to driving while impaired by THC. Roadside sobriety assessments conducted by drug recognition experts remain the best option.  

Nevada’s flawed marijuana licensing process has led to corruption and lawsuits.  

Evidence

A time-series analysis from Washington state and Colorado finds “no significant” increase in crime after marijuana legalization.

In a simulated driving experience, researchers found that smoking cannabis led to an acute decrease in driving speed but otherwise had no significant acute or residual impacts on driving performance.

After controlling for pre-use cognitive ability, researchers from the University of Colorado found that regular cannabis use has no significant impact on cognitive ability. 

Johns Hopkins researchers find cannabis products are typically advertised in six major categories: psychoactive effects, physical effects, social effects, sensory profile, therapeutic and curative claims, and negatives/warnings. However, the researchers also conclude, “Online cannabis retailers are making potentially unsubstantiated product claims.”

A new study claims extreme binge drinking at your 21st birthday party can cause permanent brain matter damage. 

An estimate of e-cigarette use in 2019 suggests that roughly 27 percent of high schoolers and 10 percent of middle school students vape e-cigarettes. Among those who vape, only 18 percent reported regularly engaging in the behavior.

The post Drug Policy Newsletter: Drug Arrests Increase, Driving Under the Influence of Marijuana, and More appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The case is a blow to the state’s marijuana legalization movement overall and shows how the licensing process can become subject to corruption when not set up correctly.

Nevada is one of 11 states to have legalized recreational marijuana and among five states that have placed statewide limits on the number of marijuana licenses that will be granted, although Nevada does so only at the retail level.  When the Legislature finally authorized a commercial system for medical marijuana in 2013—13 years after voters had approved a constitutional amendment approving its use—it allowed for a statewide maximum of 60 medical marijuana dispensaries.  No limitations were placed on the number of cultivation centers or processors.

Later, when advocates filed the initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes that passed in 2016, they allowed that number to roughly double to 130 dispensaries.

The original licensing process for medical marijuana was fraught with problems.  Clark County, the state’s most populous county and also home to Las Vegas’s lucrative tourist market, decided to award licenses using its own criteria before the state had chosen which applicants would be approved.  This resulted in some applicants being approved at the state level but denied licenses in Clark County, and vice versa. A series of lawsuits followed.  Complicating matters further, several Clark County commissioners were exposed as receiving large campaign donations from applicants immediately before voting on which dispensaries would receive county medical marijuana licenses.

The initiative to legalize recreational marijuana then granted existing medical marijuana licensees the exclusive ability to apply for recreational licenses for the first 18 months after the state began to accept applications.  The Nevada Department of Taxation, which regulates the industry, allowed these businesses to apply to co-locate a recreational license with their existing medical marijuana businesses shortly before the recreational program went live in July 2017.  It would subsequently make all additional, statutorily authorized licenses available in a second application period that spanned a few weeks in September 2018. This would effectively ensure that businesses that didn’t already possess medical marijuana licenses in Nevada would never be able to apply for a recreational dispensary license, regardless of what clouds might hang over that original process.

At a February 2018 hearing where state lawmakers approved the department’s proposed regulations to govern the application process, I testified that the draft regulations ran afoul of statutory protections meant to ensure the process would be fair and objective.  The voter-approved initiative required the process to be “impartial and numerically scored.” However, the regulations contained scoring criteria that demonstrated bias toward some applicants. For example, total tax revenues already collected from each applicant was a criterion, although only existing dispensaries paid retail excise taxes and dispensaries sell inventory at marked-up rates, which effectively guaranteed only existing dispensary licensees would score well. They also failed to clarify the scoring system being used and instead declared the Department of Taxation could, arbitrarily, assign different weights to each scoring criteria every time it opened an application period.

Lawmakers considered these concerns briefly but were advised by legislative counsel they had no choice but to pass the regulations as written because the existing emergency regulations would expire later that week.

Once the Department of Taxation announced it would accept applications in September 2018, it notified applicants they would be eligible to receive only one dispensary license in each jurisdiction where they applied.  This was a last-ditch effort to ensure fairness in execution, if not in written law.

This is where things really went haywire. Despite its written guidance, the Department of Taxation awarded several entities multiple dispensary licenses within the same jurisdiction.  Only 17 of 127 companies that applied received any of the 61 licenses made available and more than half of those licenses went to just four companies.  The winners were heavily associated with a group of insiders at the Nevada Cannabis Coalition and court records show that the group’s attorney, Amanda Connor, enjoyed privileged access to department staff despite written warnings from the state against such activity.

Nevada Department of Taxation Deputy Executive Director Jorge Pupo was wined and dined by applicants and acknowledged that he changed the application in ways favorable to these applicants.  For instance, he allowed applicants to be considered separate companies simply by altering their names slightly or setting up shell entities.  The department also circulated different versions of the application to different applicants—some required a specific street address and others did not, which is important because securing an address adds up-front costs to an applicant that may be lost if they don’t get a license.

After applicants who were denied licenses filed suit against the department, additional discrepancies came to light. According to court records, the department hired temporary workers to score the applications without providing significant training or oversight to those workers.  Points awarded for gender and racial diversity among ownership groups invited gamesmanship from applicants, who hired or promoted frontmen to boost their scores. Ultimately, though, what led Judge Gonzalez to issue an injunction against the state’s licensing decisions was the Department of Taxation’s decision to not require background checks on owners with less than a five percent stake in licensed businesses.  That ran afoul of a statutory requirement that all owners the state’s marijuana industry submit to background checks.

Nevada’s mishandling of marijuana licensing is sadly the predictable result of a flawed regulatory structure and is likely to be repeated elsewhere.  First, states contemplating marijuana legalization should take caution not to place arbitrary limits on the number of licenses. This only invites the types of political gamesmanship and corruption seen in Nevada. Nevada should move quickly to open up its licensing process and allow the market to balance supply naturally against demand.

The Reason Foundation’s conceptual framework for marijuana regulation cautions against these limits.  It also recommends specific agency structures and basic licensing criteria that would help states avoid the types of problems seen in Nevada.  We’ve found a warm reception for many of those recommendations in places like Michigan, but forecast looming difficulties in places like Illinois.

Nevada’s experience now offers a cautionary tale that other states should seek to avoid.

This column originally appeared in The Nevada Independent.

The post Nevada’s Flawed Marijuana Licensing Process Leads to Corruption and Lawsuits appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In wake of the bill’s passage, though, a growing demand has also materialized for hemp extracts such as cannabidiol, or “CBD” for short.  CBD is the primary ingredient in an FDA-approved drug that reduces the frequency and severity of epileptic seizures in children and may hold other health benefits.

Now, a handful of states are beginning to craft the types of commercial hemp programs foreseen in the 2018 Farm Bill.  Although most states had already created pilot programs to study hemp cultivation under the authority of the previous Farm Bill passed in 2014, the programs allowed under the 2018 iteration are expressly intended to allow full-scale commercialization.  The first states to establish one of these commercialization programs will likely be able to shape much of the emerging hemp industry because these early movers will form templates that guide future actions by other states.

In May, Florida passed legislation authorizing the creation of a state hemp program and its state agriculture department has already circulated draft rules to implement the program.  Likewise, North Carolina lawmakers are currently debating legislation to create a state hemp program and the bill has already passed the state senate.

These two early-moving states have key differences in their proposed approaches to hemp regulation.  Both states would expressly legalize cannabinoids extracted from compliant hemp at the state level, matching current federal law.  One wrinkle federally is that the Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved these extracts to be included in food or cosmetic products that enter into interstate commerce.  North Carolina’s proposed law would permit CBD-infused products to be sold within the state’s borders but only after those products are approved by the FDA.  

Florida would allow these products to be sold without FDA approval, provided they are manufactured to standards set by the relevant state agencies.  For example, foods would have to be produced in a facility that meets state food safety standards, lotions would be governed by the state’s Drug and Cosmetic Act, and CBD-infused alcoholic beverages would be regulated by Florida’s Division of Alcoholic Beverages.  

This approach is similar to pending legislation in California, which would allow CBD products to be sold within the state’s borders even prior to FDA approval.  Measures like this are significant because earlier this year then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned that it could take another three years, or longer, for the FDA to approve rules governing CBD-infused products.

In other ways, though, Florida’s draft rules fall short of those in North Carolina.  The current legislative draft in North Carolina includes an express immunity for licensees from prosecution under the state’s controlled substances act even if their hemp crop winds up with more than the federal limit of 0.3 percent THC by dry-weight volume.  There are many reasons this could happen inadvertently, such as genetic mutations or simply having to wait too long before harvest. THC develops in higher concentrations the longer a cannabis plant is left in the field. North Carolina also requires only growers and manufacturers to acquire licenses and not retail stores that simply sell the final products.  Florida would require retailers to be licensed as well.

Florida would also require growers to await clearance from the state agriculture department before they can harvest a hemp crop.  But this wait time could allow more THC to develop in the plants, which could force the growers to then destroy the entire crop if it exceeds legal levels.  Language in the draft rules would create incentives for farmers to minimize their lot sizes in ways that could be inefficient. They’d be doing so simply to minimize the risk of having their plants destroyed if state regulators cause too many delays prior to harvest that lead to unacceptable THC levels in that batch.  Florida could fix these issues by allowing farmers to harvest their plants and then quarantine them pending the results of lab tests conducted by state regulators.

As more states explore hemp programs, they will look to these early states as examples.  So it’s important that the first states get it right.

The post A Comparison of the Proposed Hemp Programs in North Carolina and Florida appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Over the past century, state and federal agencies have developed a myriad of policy approaches for regulating the cultivation, production, and sale of cannabis and cannabis-based products. Although many Americans living today have grown up in a policy environment of strict federal prohibition and have been socialized to accept that approach as the cultural norm, cannabis has been a significant agricultural product within the United States for much of its history.

Historically, Americans have farmed cannabis for several purposes. Most early interest in cannabis was for its stalks and fibers which were the primary material from which early American textiles were produced, as well as cordage and paper. Secondly, cannabis seeds and seed oil were also a historical feedstock for both humans and animals. Third, the flowers and leaves of the cannabis plant produce unique chemical compounds called the “cannabinoids” that can exert medical and psychoactive effects on humans. While scientists have identified more than 100 cannabinoids, the most famous is delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which produces a temporary psychoactive effect when consumed. Not all strains of cannabis produce significant amounts of THC, but among those that do, the dried leaves, flowers, resins and fertile seeds of those plants are legally defined today as marijuana. The remaining portions of the plant, and, in the case of low-THC strains of cannabis, the whole plant, are commonly classified as industrial hemp.

Cannabis farming played a central role in the founding of the American republic. In fact, it was a primary motive for British colonization of the original American colonies. Sailcloth and cordage made from cannabis fibers were essential for maintaining the British fleet, and the island nation had limited land on which to grow the necessary supplies of both food and cannabis. King James ordered every property owner at Jamestown to grow a minimum of 100 cannabis plants for export to England. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, these quotas were expanded and the American colonies were restricted from trading cannabis with other nations so that any cannabis not consumed domestically would be shipped back to England. England’s demand for cannabis fiber was so great that the Crown began to offer free transportation to America, free land and free seeds to induce additional migration to the colonies for cannabis cultivation. The Crown ultimately offered to purchase one pound of colonial cannabis fiber for as much as two pounds of tobacco—a new cash crop that unexpectedly flourished in the colonies.

Given the centrality of cannabis in the settling of the American colonies, it is little surprise that many of the American founders, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were cannabis farmers or processors. Further, their writings indicate that Washington, Jefferson and other major figures in American history not only harvested cannabis for its fibers but also enjoyed smoking or cooking with the flowering parts of the plant. The original drafts of the American Declaration of Independence were likely written on paper made from cannabis fibers, and Betsy Ross stitched the first American flag out of cannabis-based fabric. Although the demand for cannabis fiber declined following the Civil War, the first Federal Reserve notes were still printed on paper made from cannabis fibers, and the original ten-dollar bill displayed a drawing of American farmers harvesting cannabis.

By the early 20th century, however, many countries in the West grew increasingly alarmed at the potentiality for cannabis to be consumed for its inebriating effects.5 Following World War II, these concerns culminated in the passage of a series of federal legislation that made it either difficult or illegal to produce cannabis in any form, including for purely industrial purposes.

Prior to and throughout the century-long debate on the federal treatment of the cannabis plant, however, individual states have developed a wide range of policy alternatives to regulate its production, sales, and use. Although many states very recently have taken widely publicized actions to regulate cannabis within their own borders, states have been developing unique policy regimes to accomplish that same task dating back to the late 19th century.

This paper makes three facts particularly clear. First, cannabis played a central role in the forming of the American republic. Second, states have historically taken the lead in regulating the market for cannabis products that contain the psychoactive cannabinoid THC within their own borders. Third, federal action to outlaw marijuana was unfounded on the science, was used as justification for growth of the federal bureaucracy, and has created tense friction with state governments regarding the federal allocation of powers under the U.S. Constitution.

There is no evidence that states intend to relinquish to federal agencies the power to regulate marijuana within their borders. To the contrary, a growing number of states are passing laws to legalize marijuana for either medical or recreational purposes as a direct affront to federal assertions of power under the Filburn interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause. Although early versions of these laws were almost exclusively passed by voter initiative, state lawmakers have increasingly considered legalization statutes through the legislative process. In 2018, Vermont became the first state to legalize marijuana for recreational use by a legislative act, indicating antipathy from even state policymakers toward the federal assertion of power in this area.

Predicting the future is difficult, and no one knows how this conflict will ultimately be resolved. Congress may elect to end the federal prohibition of marijuana at any point, such as through a reclassification under the Controlled Substances Act or another means. It has recently taken similar action with regard to low-THC strains of cannabis, or hemp, which is now protected from prosecution under the Controlled Substances Act when grown under a license issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture pursuant to provisions of the 2018 Agriculture Act. Alternatively, Congress might restore the traditional interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause by reserving to the states the undisputed power to regulate marijuana within their borders.

On the other end of the spectrum, Congress may elect to crack down more forcefully on state marijuana programs and the businesses they license. One thing is for certain though: The status quo, given all the staunchly competing interests, is untenable.

Full Brief — Cannabis and States’ Power: A Historical Review Of State Efforts And Authority To Regulate Cannabis

The post A Historical Review of State Efforts and Authority To Regulate Cannabis appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Idaho State Police seized 6,701 pounds of legal hemp and are being sued by the owners as a consequence.  

In 2017, over 151,000 pounds of processed marijuana were destroyed by federal agents.

A Canadian medical marijuana patient with multiple sclerosis was arrested for violating Canada’s THC per se driving level, but was later found to be unimpaired by a drug recognition officer and was released with the charges dropped.

Denver’s voters will have a chance to decriminalize psilocybin, the main chemical compound in psychedelic mushrooms, this May.

A California cannabis testing lab had multiple equipment failures leading to faulty results, but the incident also shows that legal marijuana products are under more scrutiny for health purposes than the black market ever would be.  

Massachusetts is going to be relying more heavily on drug recognition experts to enforce marijuana driving and impairment laws.

Regulating marijuana effectively may mitigate many of the risks it presents.

Legislation, Regulation, and Markets

Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis called on President Trump and the federal government to allow marijuana businesses to bank normally and legally, saying that cash businesses encourage crime.

Some California lawmakers are acknowledging that high tax levels and too much red tape are stunting the legal marijuana market’s growth.  

A new report concluded that a state-run bank for marijuana in California would not be a cost-effective or reliable long-term solution, emphasizing the need for continued reform at the federal level.   

A Florida circuit judge struck down Florida’s hard cap on dispensaries, the second ruling against the law in the last year.   

Florida’s governor has asked the legislature to end the ban on smoking.

Evidence

Occupational licensing requirements, which restrict who is eligible for work in the cannabis industry, harm workers, consumers, and the economy.

In order to regulate marijuana and driving, law enforcement should focus on impairment as verified by drug recognition experts, not per se THC levels.

The post Reason Foundation’s Drug Policy Newsletter, February 2019 appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The post Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition in the United States appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Hemp is also a cost-effective, environmentally-friendly substitute for polyester, cotton, fiberglass and concrete, according to a new Reason Foundation study that examines hemp’s potential uses and the ways other countries are benefitting from it. Industrial hemp production is banned in the U.S. as an archaic consequence of the war on drugs.

“There are numerous environmental advantages to hemp,” said Skaidra Smith-Heisters, a policy analyst at Reason Foundation and author of the report. “Hemp often requires less energy to manufacture into products. It is less toxic to process. And it is easier to recycle and more biodegradable than most competing crops and products. Unfortunately, we won’t realize the full economic and environmental benefits of hemp until the crop is legal in the United States.”

The Reason Foundation study reveals that polyester fiber manufacturing requires six times the energy needed to grow hemp. And cotton is one of the most “water- and pesticide-intensive crops in the world.” Hemp’s naturally higher resistance to weeds and pests means it requires dramatically fewer pesticides than cotton.

Not only has the government banned hemp production in the U.S., it is also directly subsidizing other crops that the study shows to be “environmentally inferior.” Corn farmers received $51 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2005; wheat farmers were given $21 billion; cotton farmers fleeced taxpayers for $15 billion; and tobacco farmers were handed $530 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

The Reason study says the Drug Enforcement Administration’s inability to distinguish between industrial hemp and marijuana is irrational and ignores scientific fact. The report states, “Marijuana cultivated for drug value contains between 3 and 10 percent of the active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. Industrial hemp typically contains 0.3 percent or less of this active ingredient-as a result, it has no value as a drug.”

Full Report Online

The full study, Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition, is available online at: www.reason.org/ps367.pdf. A summary of the report is here: www.reason.org/ps367polsum.pdf.

About Reason Foundation

Reason Foundation is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to advancing free minds and free markets. Reason Foundation produces respected public policy research on a variety of issues and publishes the critically acclaimed monthly magazine, Reason. For more information, please visit www.reason.org.

Contact

Skaidra Smith-Heisters, Policy Analyst, Reason Foundation, (707) 569-9279
Chris Mitchell, Director of Communications, Reason Foundation, (310) 367-6109

The post Study: U.S. Hemp Ban Hurts Environment, Economy appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The environmental performance of industrial hemp products is of particular interest because, to a large degree, environmental inefficiencies impose costs on society as a whole, not just on the producers and consumers of a specific good. Many commodities which came to replace traditional uses of industrial hemp in the United States in the last century and a half have created significant environmental externalities.

Assessments of industrial hemp as compared to hydrocarbon or other traditional industrial feedstocks show that, generally, hemp requires substantially lower energy demands for manufacturing, is often suited to less-toxic means of processing, provides competitive product performance (especially in terms of durability, light weight, and strength), greater recyclability and/or biodegradability, and a number of value-added applications for byproducts and waste materials at either end of the product life cycle. Unlike petrochemical feedstocks, industrial hemp production offsets carbon dioxide emissions, helping to close the carbon cycle.

The positive aspects of industrial hemp as a crop are considered in the context of countervailing attributes. Performance areas where industrial hemp may have higher average environmental costs than comparable raw materials result from the use of water and fertilizer during the growth stage, greater frequency of soil disturbance (erosion) during cultivation compared to forests and some field crops, and relatively high water use during the manufacturing stage of hemp products.

Overall, social pressure and government mandates for lower dioxin production, lower greenhouse gas emissions, greater bio-based product procurement, and a number of other environmental regulations, seem to directly contradict the wisdom of prohibiting an evidently useful and unique crop like hemp.

The post Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Last year, the California Industrial Hemp Farming Act, which would permit and regulate the cultivation of hemp in the state for the first time in more than a half-century, sponsored by Assembly members Chuck DeVore (R- Irvine) and Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), was vetoed by Schwarzenegger. The two assemblymen have re-introduced the act this year with the notable help of fiscally conservative Senator Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks).

The sizeable economic opportunity for domestic industrial hemp products explains the tenacity of lawmakers and industrial hemp advocates seeking a second chance for the law. The long, strong fibers of the hemp plant require less energy to manufacture than many petroleum-based plastics used in comparable industrial applications today. Carmakers like Ford and BMW report that replacing heavy fiberglass and epoxy automotive components with durable, lighter-weight hemp-based fiberboard cost-and pollute-less. Savings are realized both in the production stage and through better gas mileage for the life of the vehicle. Altogether, millions of cars are already on the road today with hemp components, and the industry says they’d likely use more hemp if it was available domestically.

The California Energy Commission even lists hemp as a possible biomass energy crop; a source of fuel that will be needed to meet the ambitious emissions reductions goals set by the governor.

Hemp can also produce textiles similar to cotton, an important agricultural commodity in California, worth $630 million in 2005. On a per-acre basis, however, hemp would likely produce more fiber, using half the irrigation water and half the nitrogen fertilizer, in half the time that it takes to grow even genetically-engineered herbicide tolerant (“Roundup Ready”) cotton varieties in California.

Substituting hemp for cotton would also result in substantially fewer herbicides, pesticides and other agricultural chemicals being used in the San Joaquin, Sacramento and Imperial valleys.

According to the Hemp Industries Association, more than 75 percent of the sales of legal hemp products are already made by California-based businesses, many in the popular hemp foods and cosmetics industries. But California companies must import the raw materials for their products from Canada or other places where hemp growing is allowed, at an added expense of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

For politicians the hang-up seems to be that some believe the relationship between industrial hemp and marijuana is too close for comfort. In the message explaining his veto last September, Gov. Schwarzenegger stated that he would not support a law perceived to conflict with federal statutes, and that, “California law enforcement has expressed concerns that implementation of this measure could place a drain on their resources and cause significant problems with drug enforcement activities.”

With worries about terrorism, school shootings, and escalating gang violence, you’d think California law enforcement would have better things to do than complain about growing hemp, based on the unfounded and archaic linkage between this promising industrial crop and marijuana as it is grown and consumed today. Law enforcement authorities should understand that a field of industrial hemp is the last place anyone would try to grow marijuana. They have an ally in California hemp farmers, who will be required to take extra precautions to keep illegal marijuana growers from trespassing and damaging hemp fields. And from the marijuana grower’s perspective, cross-pollination with a hemp crop in close proximity would ruin their product-not unlike crossing two purebred dogs of different breeds. The two plants are the same species, but industrial hemp contains insignificant amounts of the active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (or THC), that is valued in marijuana.

Further, hemp grown for fiber is planted in dense stands of tall, thin plants, similar to bamboo in appearance-easily distinguished from the bushy, flower-laden drug varieties. As an added precaution, the California Industrial Hemp Farming Act would require that farmers test their crops before harvest and only use seed from stock containing three-tenths of one percent THC or less.

The fear that marijuana could be “hidden” in industrial hemp crops is unfounded. When harvest season comes around this year, hopefully Schwarzenegger won’t have trouble identifying the California Industrial Hemp Farming Act for what it really is: a serious opportunity to make economic and environmental gains for all of California.

The post Industrial Hemp Can Boost Economy, Cut Pollution appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The California Industrial Hemp Farming Act, a bipartisan effort co-authored by Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and Chuck Devore (R-Irvine), would have lifted the ban on industrial hemp, creating a licensing procedure for researchers and farmers that would allow one of the world’s most useful agricultural crops back in California.

The return of industrial hemp farming and research cannot come soon enough, especially in light of the Schwarzenegger’s ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the state.

Though decades of hemp prohibition have certainly set back industrial hemp technologies, industry is familiar with the benefits. Biofuels like ethanol were the “fuel of the future” back in the 1920s when Henry Ford engineered a light-weight passenger car utilizing plant-based plastics instead of costly steel for the body of the vehicle. Hemp was a key ingredient in both the plastics and the fuel for Ford’s “futuristic” car, and it was more than just a public relations stunt. Ethanol derived from plant cellulose in crops like hemp or wheat (even as a secondary product, after the seed or grain is harvested) has advantages over traditional sources like corn; advocates claim this cellulosic ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below those of gasoline as compared to only a 20 to 30 percent reduction from corn-based ethanol.

Today, millions of cars on the road in this country have components, such as interior panels, made of hemp composites which are lighter and cheaper than their fiberglass or petroleum-based alternatives. Other hemp composites are being used in tree-free building materials, such as pressed boards and concrete, utilizing hemp’s light weight and strength.

Hemp industry representatives estimate the current U.S. hemp market at more than $270 million in annual retail sales. But all of the hemp fiber, oil, and sterile seed that goes into U.S. products must be imported from Canada, China, Romania—or virtually any other industrialized nation besides our own.

California has some of the most fertile agricultural land in the world, and irrigating that land is not only the state’s single largest water commitment, it also accounts for 5 percent of our energy use. Replacing some of our water-intensive California crops like cotton, rice and alfalfa with industrial hemp would make more competitive use of our water and energy resources, lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

You won’t read about hemp in the U.S. Department of Energy’s reports on agricultural feedstocks for the biofuels industry, nor will you hear of any promising new cultivars or cropping techniques developed in the University of California’s top agricultural science programs, because the federal Drug Enforcement Administration currently maintains the same controls over hemp as it does over the physically and chemically dissimilar drug, marijuana.

Industrial hemp doesn’t have the delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to appeal to smokers any more than the California poppy contains opium. In North Dakota, where similar hemp legislation is in the works, the state’s agricultural commissioner recently explained, ”It [industrial hemp] would take a joint the size of a telephone pole to have an impact.”

Nevertheless, Schwarzenegger said he vetoed the hemp bill because it would violate federal law. But California Industrial Hemp Farming Act would not have changed the DEA’s jurisdiction over drugs and the bill would have actually required farmers to have their crops tested to prove the hemp they were growing was non-hallucinogenic.

We won’t fully understand the unique potential of industrial hemp in California for use in textiles, as a feedstock for biofuels and plastics or in use with other applications without putting it on the market. As the state faces climbing energy costs and increasingly strict environmental regulation, low-input carbon-sequestering crops like hemp-which requires less water, herbicide, and fertilizer than many of the crops grown in the state-will be a valuable option.

The Governor’s team insists that their new greenhouse gas emission law will produce economic opportunity and environmental benefits in California, despite the significant cost to business—so why not give the green light to industrial hemp, which would have done that but cost nothing?

Skaidra Smith-Heisters is an environmental policy analyst at the Reason Foundation. An archive of her work is here and Reason’s California research and commentary is here.

The post Schwarzenegger Vetoes Industrial Hemp appeared first on Reason Foundation.