Hemp in the US?
The US government as of late is not known for even trying to be bipartisan, but one recent bill caught my eye that hopefully everyone can agree is a point of progress.
As reported by Vox (source 1), Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has introduced a bill with bipartisan support to lift federal barriers to growing hemp. This is quite exciting because, for starters, it's already legal to sell hemp products but not grow it. Wait a minute, what? In other words, we're spending a lot of money to buy and transport hemp from other countries when this plant grows just fine in the United States. According to NewsMax, we import about $300 million a year (source 2) worth of hemp products for things like hemp seed or oil for food, or hemp textiles. The potential of this industry in the US is probably a lot more once the barriers to using it are taken down.
So from a resource usage perspective alone, it makes almost no sense for this to be illegal.
The only reason why it would be illegal is because I guess people think it's too similar to marijuana, even though hemp itself is distinct and doesn't get people high. It's basically collateral damage from the war on drugs, which itself is more or less a failure anyway, given the number of money spent on it, and the fact that drugs are anything but gone from the United States.
I hope that the ban is successful in being lifted; I wonder what good faith arguments people would still have for keeping it banned (bad faith arguments are excuses for competitors like maybe lumber to keep competition squashed). On top of more American jobs being created, there's a lot of potential for researching, maybe creating more environmentally friendly products - perhaps hemp will be a better source for disposable paper products like paper towels, as opposed to cutting down a ton of trees!
(source 3)
Source 1: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/13/17233582/hemp-farming-act-marijuana-legalization-mcconnell
Source 2: https://www.newsmax.com/FastFeatures/legalizing-weed-hemp-products/2015/12/07/id/704894/
Source 3: image from https://pixabay.com/en/cannabis-hemp-intoxicant-drugs-2773112/
We should be using this renewable resource more frequently. It is really a shame that big cotton and lumber keep it suppressed. Maybe they will remove corn subsidies and give out hemp subsidies.
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