A Brief History of Hemp in America, Part II

The 1970 Controlled Substances Act 

Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 with a platform attacking marijuana, hippies, blacks, and urban disorder. Under his leadership Congress approved the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified all forms of cannabis, including hemp, as Schedule I controlled substances. That designation was reserved for drugs that, according to the DEA, have "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse."

 The designation lumped marijuana and hemp in with lethal drugs such as heroin, along with psychedelics such as LSD and peyote, and weirdly pronounced cannabis as more of a threat than cocaine and methamphetamine, which were and are Schedule II substances, a less restrictive designation for drugs with "a high potential for abuse" but with some medical applications.

 The passage of that law and Nixon's reorganization of the federal drug-fighting apparatus, including the creation of the DEA, arguably mark the beginning of the modern war on drugs, which has seen tens of millions of people arrested on drug charges in the decades since, including millions arrested for cannabis. The modern drug war has also seen an erosion of Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure and a ramping up of police tactics and militarization.  Hemp was an early casualty. 

Hemp Reemerges 

But while hemp was suppressed during the second half of the 20th Century, various actors were beginning to lay the groundwork for its reemergence in recent years. As early as 1916, the US Department of Agriculture determined that hemp was four times more efficient at producing paper than wood pulp. In 1938, apparently not realizing that it had been banned the previous year, the editors of the science- and technology-centered magazine Popular Mechanics published an article claiming that hemp "can be used to produce more than 25,000 products, ranging from dynamite to cellophane." Three years later, Henry Ford was experimenting with plastic car panels composed in part of hemp fibers.

 And even amid the excesses of the drug war, an undercurrent of hemp-favorable sentiment endured and eventually flourished. In 1985, cannabis activist Jack Herer published The Emperor Wears No Clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy, which argued that hemp could save the world and had been repressed by industrial and media interests. 

As a back-cover blurb explains: "If all fossil fuels and their derivatives, as well as trees for paper and construction were banned in order to save the planet, reverse the Greenhouse Effect and stop deforestation, then there is only one known annually renewable natural resource that is capable of providing the overall majority of the world's paper and textiles; meet all of the world's transportation, industrial and home energy needs, while simultaneously reducing pollution, rebuilding the soil, and cleaning the atmosphere all at the same time... and that substance is -- the same one that did it all before -- Cannabis Hemp... Marijuana!" 

The book is now in its 14th edition and has sold more than 800,000 copies worldwide.  

Beginning in the late 1980s, activists inspired by Herer's work established the Cannabis Action Network to spread the gospel of hemp, along with proselytizing for medical marijuana and cannabis liberation in general. The group toured college campuses around the country for years ginning up support for reefer's country cousin. Other groups, such as the Hemp Industry Association (HIA), a trade group for industrial hemp producers, and Vote Hemp, a DC-based lobbying group, added their voices. The two entities were founded in 1994 and 2001, respectively.  

Momentum gathered as the 20th Century ended, with the legalization of hemp seed and hemp oil imports in 1998, and the state-level legalization of industrial hemp cultivation in Hawaii, Minnesota, and North Dakota the following year. In 2003, the HIA, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, the Organic Consumer Association and a handful of hemp businesses took the DEA to court over its ban on hemp food and body care products imports and won a year later in the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in HIA v. DEA. The US now faced the bizarre circumstance of being able to import hemp products but not to grow hemp domestically.  

The 2014 Farm Bill—Hemp Research and State Licensing Permitted 

A decade later, Congress approved allowing states and research institutions to create pilot programs in hemp harming in the  2014 farm bill. The bill also allowed states to create their own hemp programs to study the growth, cultivation, and marketing of hemp, but required state departments of agriculture to license participants in such programs.  

Importantly, the farm bill created a clear legal distinction between hemp and marijuana, defining hemp as cannabis plants with less than 0.3 percent THC, the primary psychoactive cannabinoid in cannabis. But it did not remove hemp from the Controlled Substances Act, leaving hemp cultivation illegal except for those programs especially permitted by the bill.  

The wake of the 2014 farm bill saw increased interest in hemp cultivation across the US, with many states developing their own regulation and expanding their programs. According to Vote Hemp, by 2018, 41 states had defined industrial hemp as distinct and removed barriers to its production. Likewise, the number of acres of hemp under cultivation—78,176—had more than tripled over 2017. And state licenses to grow hemp were issued to 3,544 farmers and researchers. Forty universities conducted research on hemp in 2018, doubling the number doing so the previous year.