One of Governor Kristi Noem's objections to the industrial hemp industry may fall to the wayside. South Dakota Public Broadcasting Radio reported in Virginia Trying Field Test To Differentiate Hemp And Marijuana:
Governor Kristi Noem says she’s concerned legalizing industrial hemp production will put law enforcement at a disadvantage.
She says police officers are unable to distinguish between hemp and marijuana on the road.
However, the Commonwealth of Virginia says it’s in the process of validating a field test to distinguish between the two. . . .
. . . Virginia’s Department of Forensic Science says its found a field test kit that has the potential to differentiate between industrial hemp from marijuana.
Commonwealth officials could not be reached for comment. Matthew Schwiech, deputy director at the marijuana policy project and worked on…
He says it’s important all states have processes to determine THC levels of hemp.
“We’re seeing the hemp industry and CBD industry grow fairly dramatically across the country,” Schweich says. “That means hemp is being transported across the country through states without hemp laws. I think it behooves policy makers in every state to ensure that their authorities and their labs have the ability to differentiate.”
According to an article by the Virginia Mercury, the Department of Forensic Science is distributing 15,000 new field tests for a total cost of $52,500.
That’s about $3.50 per test.
Well then. We thought of an observation in the Rapid City Journal's Two Cents for Sept. 3:
Our farmers need to thank Kristi Noem for saving them from the evils of the Hemp industry that is "expected to top $1.8 billion by 2022." Is there anyone who doesn't realize she just skipped the next big thing for agriculture?
That's about it.
Winona's hemp hope killed by reefer madness scare
The technological fix Virginia's developed brings to mind a pair of articles published in the Winona Daily News' Throwback Thursday feature.
We'll begin with the article from the Winona Republican-Herald first published on Friday, Dec. 31, 1937, and reprinted Thursday as Throwback Thursday: When Winona companies processed hemp:
Two hemp processing companies brought to Winona in 1937 a new industry here for which the promoters see a good future development bringing an increase in jobs for Winona employees and a new and profitable cash crop for Winona area farmers.
Chempco Inc., operating in the big former Union Fibre Company plant in the West End, has 40 employees on its payroll and is removing the fiber here from raw hemp, much of it grown locally.
It is baling the fiber and selling it in carload lots for fine paper manufacture, while a great surplus of by-product woody material is accumulating in every available storage place, including outdoor bins, for later use.
Farmers in the vicinity of Altura, Minneiska, St. Charles, Dover and Lewiston raised hemp on about 950 acres for this factory in 1937, and about 50 acres of hemp was grown in nearby Wisconsin. The scale of operations at the Chempco plant is shown by car lot movements of 350 carloads this year to and from the factory.
Operating on a smaller scale, with a crew of 12, is Cannabis Inc., in the former Winona Yarn Mills factory at Wall and Second streets, and this company has gone into spinning hemp fibre and making out of it such finished articles as rugs, mops and cloth used in upholstering furniture.
“We have begun the spinning of hemp yarn, something never done before on any large scale,” declared E. G. Witt of Winona, who is assistant secretary and in charge of the plant under F.E. Holton of Mankato.
Hemp shipped here
While the Chempco company gets its hemp raw in bales here and threshes or decoricates it, the Cannabis company has the fiber extracted at plants of an associated company at Mankato, Blue Earth, Lake Lillian in southwestern Minnesota and shipped here.
At the Cannabis plant, the hemp fiber is further machined and processed chemically to fit for manufacturing into yarn and cord, which later is made into rugs, various forms of cloth and the majority of spun material into mops. . . .
Hemp is a good weed killer and fits well into a farmer’s crop program, he states. It requires no cultivation in the growing season and is a fairly dependable crop. The average net profit to the farmer raising hemp per acre in Minnesota in 1937 was about $20 a ton.
Some of the hemp grown in the immediate vicinity of Winona in 1937 was good and some not so good, he said. Special harvesting machinery is not needed, and it is planted in the spring from seed, either in a drill or broadcast. . . .
An editor's note at the end of the article lets readers know:
While Winona industrialists had high hopes for hemp, Washington politicians and bureaucrats had other ideas. In the face of near-hysterical accusations by anti-drug czar Harry Anslinger and others, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 that, among other things, required government agents to be on hand to observe every aspect of hemp manufacture and placed extreme regulatory requirements on the disposal of foliage and other hemp waste. The law was the death warrant to the use of hemp as an industrial raw material and effectively regulated Cannabis Inc., Chempco Inc. and other enterprises out of business.
That story was told in a January 2016 Thursday Throwback by WDN editor Jerome Christianson, Cannabis Inc. and the marijuana men of Winona:
With prohibition over and the saloons open again, there were men in Minnesota who saw marijuana as the business to get into.
In 1937, Cannabis Inc. was an optimistic start-up business at 902 E. Second St., current address of the Winona Daily News, and Chempco Inc. was operating at the address now occupied by Technigraph on West Third Street. Both enterprises were linked to the fortunes of Frank Holton, who probably sold more marijuana in Minnesota than any man yet to live.
Now Holton wasn’t the Pablo Escobar of ditch weed, and Winona was hardly the Medellin of Minnesota. Like the advertising slogan for a popular cigarette brand of the era, Holton could claim not a cough in a carload for the marijuana he marketed and for a simple, straightforward reason: Only a dope would try to smoke it. The cannabis Holton dealt in was the near-beer of marijuana industrial hemp. With a THC content of less than 0.5 percent, the closest to a buzz anyone would catch off Holton’s weed amounted to a headache and a sore throat with a lingering bad taste on the tongue. . . .
As it struggled with new technology and the need to create and expand markets, Harry Anslinger was exactly what the infant hemp industry did not need.
Commissioner of the federal Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger launched an all-out attack on marijuana. Reefer Madness was alleged to be sweeping the nation, drawing hapless youth into depraved lives of crime, indolence and sexual debauchery. In the face of the near-hysterical accusations, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
The new federal law required government agents to be on hand to observe every aspect of hemp manufacture and placed extreme regulatory requirements on the disposal of foliage and other hemp waste. While the legislation has clearly been less than successful in eliminating the use of marijuana as an intoxicant, it was the death warrant to the use of hemp as an industrial raw material.
The law effectively regulated Cannabis Inc., Chempco Inc. and other enterprises out of business. Farmers put their land back to corn, oats and hay, while Anslinger went on to make his mark as the first field marshal in the war on drugs. . . .
We're pleased to read the news out of Virginia, so this foolishness can end.
Maybe even in South Dakota.
Photo: The Chempco building in Winona. Via the Winona Daily News.
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