Confused About the Hemp vs. Pot Debate? Here Are Answers

Last week, I joined Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Jamie Comer in support of legalizing industrial hemp on the public broadcasting program, Kentucky Tonight.  Click the picture at left to watch our debate with law enforcement officials.

Viewers of the program noticed that the two sides disagreed on some very critical underlying facts about the differences between hemp and marijuana and how the two plants are grown.

Janet Patton of the Lexington Herald-Leader spent a few weeks investigating this matter, and interviewing objective experts.  Here is an excerpt from her story published today:

The nightmare hemp scenario for Kentucky State Police apparently is a field legally licensed to grow hemp for grain with illegally planted marijuana mingled in.

Unlike hemp grown for fiber (when the plants are inches apart to promote tall stalk growth), the hemp grown for grain and marijuana plants would look substantially the same, said Jeremy Triplett, supervisor of the state police forensic lab.

Both could be shorter and bushy. The only way to really know, he said, would be to test for delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the chemical that gives marijuana smokers a high.

Such testing could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, at $755 per quantitative analysis, not to mention $1.8 million in start-up expenses, state police have estimated.

But would that really happen? Would an unscrupulous pot grower plant marijuana with hemp?

Take Canada, where marijuana also is illegal but hemp has been legally grown since 1998. “Health Canada’s Industrial Hemp Program has never found marijuana growing in hemp fields instead of hemp,” the agency said in a statement.

They’ve looked. A lot.

Canadian inspectors take samples annually from each field and have found THC levels slightly above 0.3 percent from stress during growing, but not above 0.5 percent, Health Canada said.

Keith Watson, Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Initiatives agronomist, has seen and tested most of the hemp grown in his province in the past 15 years. Does marijuana creep in?

“I’ve never run into it,” Watson said. About 95 percent of the crop is sampled annually, and he said that marijuana and grain hemp might look just alike and could be planted side by side and only an expert eye might distinguish the difference. But in his experience, it just doesn’t happen.

“Over the years, that’s taken me out to an awful lot of fields,” Watson said. “I’ve never found marijuana in the field or any trace of it.”

He said a “handful” of times he has seen paths cut into the fields, places where people have topped the plants. But it doesn’t happen much anymore.

“After a couple of years, nobody bothers it,” he said.

What about marijuana?

As for marijuana growers using hemp to pad their illegal pot, “the general impression is that’s a self-regulating industry,” Watson said. “They’ll get away with it once … but if the quality (of the marijuana) isn’t up to par, there will be a lot of broken kneecaps.”

Click here to read the full article.