While hemp food products do contain traces of THC, someone would have to eat a truck load of hemp granola bars to get high – much like it would take about five cases of non-alcoholic beer to get sloshed. While the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals appropriately granted a stay on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ruling banning all edible hemp products, the DEA never should have passed the ban in the first place.
Although products like breads, salad dressings, waffles and pasta made with hemp seed will not provide a high, activists do claim the foods can provide all the fatty and amino acids bodies need. Furthermore, consumers who eat these products usually seek them out, and hemp food packaging usually boasts of its contents to attract a specific group of consumers. Consumers can easily avoid the traces of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is much more present in hemp’s related plant, marijuana.
The only problem with hemp products seems to be that government officials and the general population know hemp and marijuana are related but forget how different the plants are. For example, the DEA claims hemp farmers could also hide marijuana plants within their legal crops, but the plants cannot effectively be grown together because of pollination issues. Also, the plants serve very different purposes and therefore create very different industries with separate business models.
The fact that the DEA ruled on the ban shows how confused the government has become about cannabis. Rather than ruling on perfectly legal plants that make useful products like clothing, rope and food, the DEA should stick to enforcing laws dealing with drugs like marijuana if it truly wants to fight drug use. Decisions about hemp foods should be left to the Food and Drug Administration, which would be a far more appropriate agency to determine if hemp should be used in edible products.
Moreover, reducing hemp products will not have any significant effect on marijuana use or sales. Deciding to eat a hemp granola bar does not mean that the same consumer will decide to smoke pot, and deciding to grow hemp does not mean a farmer will also grow marijuana. The DEA can achieve more of its goals by sticking to joint efforts to reduce supply through investigations and heavy penalties along with reducing demand via drug education programs.
The DEA’s ban on edible hemp products seems unprovoked and to have come out of nowhere. A relatively small group of consumers enjoy the benefits of hemp foods while only ingesting tiny amounts of mind-altering chemicals; no OxyContin-like crimes are being committed for hemp granola. This seems like an odd issue for the DEA to pounce on, and it should go back to seeing whether it can have any success with its traditional activities, instead of focusing on a few bad seeds.