Pubdate: Sun, 18 Oct 2015
Source: Bulletin, The (Bend, OR)
Copyright: 2015 Western Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.bendbulletin.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/62
Author: Taylor W. Anderson
HEMP FOR MEDICINE: OREGON FALTERS
ALFALFA - Michael Hughes could grow pot in his Bend backyard if he wanted to.
As long as they were out of view, he could grow the plants, cut and
dry the flowers, smoke them and get high. But he can't grow hemp
there. He bought a license to grow hemp, but a variety of factors has
made it more difficult to grow hemp than marijuana and other crops in Oregon.
Hemp, a cannabis plant with virtually no psychoactive ingredients
that traditionally was grown for its strong fibers and edible seeds
and oils, has been legal in Oregon for six years.
The Legislature authorized it in 2009 despite it being considered
illegal federally. The law tasked the Oregon Department of
Agriculture with writing rules and licensing growers.
After taking five years to finish the rules, the agency geared up
this year for what turned out to be a painful growing season in which
just nine licensed hemp farmers got a crop in the ground. Those who
did navigated months of uncertainty and pushback in a state that last
November voted to legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older.
Hesitation by the Department of Agriculture to embrace new uses of
hemp has combined with the now-outdated state law and federal
framework to cripple Oregon's hemp market despite interest in
creating a nation-leading industry, according to interviews with
farmers, businesses, lawmakers and the agencies overseeing hemp here
and in other states.
State regulators recoiled after Oregon's farmers emerged with plans
to grow the plants for an extract - cannabidiol, or CBD - that many
believe can treat and cure cancer and other ailments, but which
remains unregulated by the FDA because hemp remains tied to its
psychoactive cousin, marijuana.
While an array of Oregon residents have told the state they want to
grow and process hemp, bureaucrats and state lawmakers are at a
crossroads heading into the next growing season: they could let hemp
farmers and businesses shape the industry, or they could put in place
restrictions similar to those followed by recreational and medical
marijuana growers.
After a season in which few acres have been grown in Oregon while
thousands were grown in other states, including for CBD, Hughes
remains skeptical that Oregon will get it right.
"What they're going to do is screw around long enough that they're
going to disadvantage their farmers," says Hughes, an attorney who
raised and studied hemp in the Midwest before he moved to Central
Oregon and grew hemp in the state's first legal hemp harvest in decades.
CBD surprise
The Oregon Department of Agriculture has made clear that when it gave
out 13 hemp licenses this year (two of which were later returned) it
thought farmers would grow for rope and seeds.
But that's not how money is made in the American hemp industry.
Hughes stood in his field on a late-August day, watching birds land
near his hemp plants, peck at the ground in search of seeds and fly
away with empty stomachs. There are no seeds to be found on this farm.
"I kind of feel bad for the birds," Hughes says.
Hughes, like all other hemp farmers in Oregon, wasn't primarily
interested in growing male plants that produce seeds.
Instead, farmers planted their crops in spacious rows, at times in
greenhouses, in a horticultural style similar to marijuana growing
that encourages female plants to grow dense flowers.
Unlike the flowers on marijuana plants, which have anywhere from 0.4
percent to around 30 percent THC, the psychoactive, high-inducing
compound in cannabis, hemp by law may contain no more than 0.3 percent THC.
Farmers this year grew cannabis strains low in THC and high in
cannabidiol, a naturally occurring compound in cannabis that can be
highly profitable and can already be purchased in Oregon marijuana
dispensaries as an edible supplement.
The substance, which is extracted from cannabis plants and refined,
is sought after at times as a last resort for people suffering from
cancer, seizures and other ailments. It has grown in popularity in
recent years because of the spreading belief - including by at least
one Oregon hemp grower - that it may cure cancer in some patients.
The 2009 hemp law allowed the plant to be grown on at least 2.5 acres
of land, and it didn't limit what was produced. Yet for months,
agency officials told growers they believed the law didn't intend to
let farmers grow for CBD, which isn't regulated by the FDA or other
federal agencies because hemp is still illegal federally.
The agency says that during the five-year rule-making process, it was
never alerted to the desire to grow hemp for CBD.
"I don't think anybody knew about CBD production" during the
rulemaking process, said Lindsay Eng, the Department of Agriculture
employee overseeing hemp regulation. "It wasn't anything that the
Legislature probably had thought about."
Sen. Floyd Prozanski, who co-authored the 2009 bill, told The
Bulletin he didn't have CBD production in mind when the bill was
making its way through the Legislature.
Records show the Department of Agriculture should have known about
the desire for hemp-based CBD months before it finished writing its
hemp rules. Numerous people told the agency they wanted to produce
CBD-based veterinary medicine, edible supplements and other products.
One man told the agency he wanted to produce honey sticks high in CBD
from hemp in a December 2014 email forwarded to ODA Assistant
Director Lauren Henderson.
In October 2014, Ron Pence, a main agency employee working on the
hemp rules, asked Duane Sinning, a counterpart in the Colorado
Department of Agriculture, whether Colorado limited what varieties
hemp growers there could produce. It doesn't.
In his response, Sinning noted his agency has adaptable THC testing
rules that account for the variety of products Colorado growers
produce from hemp, including biofuels and CBD.
Numerous prospective hemp growers have since said they didn't pursue
a license in 2015 because of the onerous regulatory framework.
After months telling growers and prospective growers the law intended
for things like seed and fiber production, the agency was told in
September its interpretation of the law was wrong.
"The legislature did not limit what products may be produced from
industrial hemp; growing industrial hemp for the production of CBDs
is not contrary to the text of the statute," wrote Renee Moulun,
assistant attorney in charge at the Oregon Department of Justice
natural resources section, in a Sept. 23 memo to Coba.
Moulun's opinion that CBD production - along with any other product
from hemp - is legal is monumental for current and future hemp
growers looking to make money from the crop.
If Cliff Thomason can get enough plants in the ground next year, he
estimates he can generate about $4.2 million on about 4,200 hemp
plants. That's based on what he calls a conservative estimate, with
each plant producing a pound of flower during the growing season,
generating around $1,000 each in CBD content.
Growing methods
The Department of Agriculture also incorrectly believed the law
required growers to plant thick fields of hemp, growing dense plots
for traditional textiles like fiber.
The agency went as far as writing a violation in August for Hughes,
alleging his farm, with some rows of hemp spaced several feet apart,
didn't meet field density requirements that Moulun in her memo later
said don't exist.
Eng said the violation - along with two more dated Aug. 21 intended
for two other growers - was never sent, and Hughes said he never received one.
The Moulun memo did uphold a Department of Agriculture interpretation
of the 2009 law: prohibiting tactics growers used to prolong the
growing season. And that could impact the ability of farmers east of
the Cascades to grow hemp.
Hughes, like others, started his plants in a greenhouse. The process
allowed some of his cannabis plants to grow massive, their stalks as
thick as his wrist. He transplanted others into the high-mountain
soil on his 2.5-acre farm in Alfalfa, about 20 miles east of Bend.
"I want to be an innovator," Hughes says. "If I wanted to follow
farming I'd have stayed back in Nebraska planting Roundup Ready
soybeans in the ground and spraying them" with pesticides.
Agriculture officials throughout the 2015 growing season told growers
they didn't believe the 2009 law allowed for greenhouse production,
though they never took the step to revoke licenses, as allowed by the
law for growers who are out of compliance.
Because lawmakers in 2009 didn't expressly write the word greenhouses
or anything related to indoor growing into the statute, the DOJ's
Moulun used what a court might if a hemp grower challenged the
prohibition of greenhouse growing: a dictionary.
Moulun opined that because lawmakers required a contiguous 2.5-acre
field, and because the Webster's dictionary definition for "field"
doesn't include greenhouses, the 2009 statute doesn't allow
greenhouse production.
Similarly, because the law doesn't mention growing techniques used in
the marijuana industry like cloning plants so all crops are
genetically identical, anything but direct seeding into the ground is
a prohibited hemp farming practice.
The Department of Agriculture has since told The Bulletin it will use
the information from Moulun to move forward next year, and that it
doesn't plan to revoke licenses for growers who prolonged the 2015
growing season by starting indoors.
The interpretation means farmers east of the Cascades face an
unfriendly hemp growing climate that wiped out Hughes' outdoor crops
during a late-August cold front.
"What are we talking about here? It's not like our greenhouse is
hidden up in the mountains. None of it makes sense," Hughes said. "I
see more of an effort to look for things to complain about as opposed
to look for things to be positive about."
Legislative uncertainty
While agency regulators experienced growing pains early on, hemp took
a back seat to marijuana during the legislative session.
While lawmakers were primarily focused on adding protections and
regulations to Oregon's marijuana laws before it became legal for
adults 21 years and up to consume in July, a potential conflict
between hemp and marijuana emerged.
Outdoor marijuana growers, primarily from Southern Oregon's
cannabis-friendly growing climate, were concerned about the prospect
of vast fields of hemp that could include male plants capable of
pollinating marijuana being grown for high THC, with potentially
ruinous effects.
Likewise, if marijuana plants pollinate hemp plants, hemp THC content
could rise above the legal 0.3 percent THC threshold.
While Oregon's early hemp growers were primarily interested in
producing females with flowers for CBD, the fears from the state's
large outdoor growing industry attracted lawmakers' attention.
Rep. Peter Buckley, an Ashland Democrat who co-chairs the
budget-writing Ways and Means committee and sits on the committee
that focuses on pot issues, proposed a bill that would have frozen
the hemp program through March 2017 to quell cross-pollination fears.
House Bill 2668 also would have required 5-mile buffer zones between
outdoor marijuana and hemp grows.
Buckley's bill took various forms before failing on the Senate floor
on the closing day of session in July. Senate Majority Leader Ginny
Burdick told The Bulletin she voted against the bill because "it was
seen as an effort to really give favoritism to marijuana over hemp."
Despite the failed legislation, the Department of Agriculture moved
in August to put a moratorium on new hemp licenses, likely until
lawmakers have another chance to address hemp in the short session
that begins in February.
Internal agency emails show more growers were interested in obtaining
hemp licenses but withdrew their applications amid pushback from the
agency over CBD production and because of uncertainty over whether
their licenses would be revoked. At least one other had applied
before the moratorium was announced and didn't receive a license.
The agency said the moratorium would have little impact on the hemp
industry as its decision was announced late in the growing season and
newly licensed farmers likely wouldn't get plants in the ground until
next spring. Farmers say they need to be planning for the next
growing season, and the open questions impact planning.
Critical Congress
Oregon has faltered despite strong support in Congress from its
Democratic delegates, who this summer weighed in on the hemp program's issues.
Oregon's congressional delegates were at the forefront when Congress
included language in the 2014 Farm Bill language that paved the way
for a legal hemp framework in states with laws friendly to cannabis.
The delegates are now critical that Oregon has missed the mark, and
in August the state's five congressional Democrats wrote a letter to
the Department of Agriculture and Oregon State University warning
that unless the state changes course, "Oregon farmers could lose out
on the chance to make Oregon a leader in the hemp industry."
Sen. Ron Wyden later said he has no interest in limiting what hemp
growers produce.
"If you're pro-farmer, pro-business, pro-environment, pro-common
sense, you give farmers more freedom," Wyden said. "This is not pot.
This does not contain active ingredients. We don't get high from
hemp. So I think we're going to pick up more support."
Oregon delegates have proposed a new bill that has support in
Congress and would effectively remove hemp from the Controlled
Substances Act, where it is associated with marijuana as a drug on
the same level as heroin and ecstasy unless states receive a permit
from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which Oregon hasn't yet
tried to obtain.
In a draft response in late August - which agency officials and
Wyden's office say was never sent - Oregon Department of Agriculture
Director Katy Coba maintained that Oregon hemp farmers weren't
following the law's intent.
"It has become apparent that a majority of the 11 licensed growers
are not growing hemp for the purposes originally intended with the
establishment of Oregon's industrial hemp regulatory program," Coba
wrote in the draft letter before the Moulun memo was released. "By
that we mean the growing of hemp in Oregon for industrial purposes
such as fiber and seed. Instead, these growers are growing hemp to
extract valuable cannabinoids for medicinal purposes."
The agency says its commercial hemp industry will be bigger next year.
"We want hemp to survive and thrive as much as anything," Eng said.
"We just want to make sure we're doing it right and that it's able to
be flexible."
Lawmakers are now considering focusing on hemp during the 35-day
legislative session that starts in February.
Sen. Prozanski said any product intended for human consumption should
undergo the same testing as medical marijuana grows "for health and
safety reasons."
"I would assume that if a person is growing industrial hemp as
defined and the purpose is medical grows, I think they're going to
have to be very, very similar rules as to the quantity as to the
grows that are under the (Oregon Medical Marijuana Program)," Prozanski said.
Under laws passed during the 2015 session, new medical marijuana
growers are limited to 48 plants. Their products must undergo tests
for pesticides, mold and mildew before reaching the dispensary.
Hughes, meanwhile, says if the state continues to resist the crop,
he'll consider moving to another state that has been more encouraging
for hemp farmers, like Colorado.
"I'm not going to sit around here and piss away a bunch of money in
Oregon if the ODA is going to continue to be stupid about it," he
said. "I've been in contact with many different departments of
agriculture who are just flabbergasted why Oregon of all places would
continue to resist this."
[sidebar]
Hemp vs. marijuana
Hemp and marijuana are the same species, Cannabis sativa. But
marijuana is cultivated to dramatically increase THC, a psychoactive
chemical that exists only in trace amounts in hemp. ("Marijuana"
refers to the flowering tops and leaves of cannabis varieties with
high THC levels.)
The history of hemp
Hemp has historically been used for rope but has hundreds of other
uses: clothing and mulch from the fiber; foods such as hemp milk and
cooking oil from the seeds; and creams, soap and lotions. Even George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp, and Betsy Ross' American
flag was made of it (supposedly, at least). But centuries later, the
plant was swept up in anti-drug efforts, and growing it without a
federal permit was banned by the 1970 Controlled Substances Act.
The industry of hemp
The United States is one of the fastest-growing hemp markets. In
2011, the U.S. imported $11.5 million worth of legal hemp products,
way up from $1.4 million in 2000. Most of that growth was seen in
hemp seed and hemp oil, which finds its way into granola bars and
other products. The plant's path to legitimacy in the U.S. could
clear the way for American farmers to compete in an industry
dominated by China and Canada. But U.S. law still says it's illegal.
Source: Bulletin research and archives
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom