During the 2018 legislative session a large group of legislators from both the Democratic and Republican caucuses signed on as co-sponsors, with Republican Senator Sonny Borelli, the bill’s primary sponsor, in an attempt to create a legal hemp industry in Arizona.  This bill passed through the House and Senate with little opposition and went to the Governor's desk for a second time in two years. Thankfully, Governor Ducey did the right thing in 2018, unlike in the previous year, and signed the bill into effect.

For the proponents of this bill the argument for having a hemp industry in Arizona was always simple.  In a state with scarce water resources for farming and a large cotton industry, the benefits of growing hemp are dramatic. Unlike cotton, hemp uses far less water when it is being grown for industrial purposes and just like cotton, hemp can be used for basically all of the industrial applications for which cotton is currently farmed. Water savings are not the only  reason that hemp is a good investment for Arizona’s farming community. Hemp is a very heat-tolerant plant and it actually reconditions the soil compared to the deplenishing effects of growing cotton. This means that even for farmers of other crops like cotton, hemp can be grown in rotation with the other main crops as a way to make the soil more suitable for additional crops to be grown on that same land in the future.

As the proponents of Hemp add, hemp is a variety of the Cannabis plant that can be used to make anything from paper and rope to cosmetics, food and clothing. Hemp is also different from other Cannabis plants because it contains low amounts of the primary psychoactive chemical in Cannabis plants that are used for the production of marijuana. Even with these differences between hemp plants and plants grown for marijuana production, hemp could not legally be grown industrially in Arizona or most places in the United States because it is still classified as a Schedule 1 drug just like marijuana. This federal classification has caused big issues for the growth of this highly beneficial industry in Arizona and other places in the United States and likely is the major reason that a small group of legislators were always in opposition to an industrial hemp industry in Arizona.

One such opponent was Republican Senator David Farnsworth. When questioned about his no vote in the Senate on SB1337 in 2017, Senator Farnsworth stated that he does see hemp’s commercial benefits but that hemp might create challenges for law enforcement to distinguish a small hemp plant from a small marijuana plant and that “[e]nforcement of our marijuana laws would be more difficult if we have a lot of hemp growing”. Finally, Senator Farnsworth has made statements that he is worried that hemp could be used as a backdoor way to legalize marijuana in Arizona, even though no marijuana plants would be able to be grown on hemp fields under the way the bill is written.

Proponents of a hemp industry would likely point out that Senator Farnsworth’s arguments missed the point because the language of SB1337 would set up the process to produce, distribute and sell hemp without changing any of Arizona’s medical marijuana laws and that hemp plants are clearly distinguishable by the naked eye from flowering marijuana plants.  Also, the Hemp bill when passed, created a very stringent program with oversight by the Arizona Department of Agriculture, requiring all people employed in the hemp program to pass criminal background checks and all growers and producers to have to keep detailed records about where all hemp is grown. Under this program, hemp needs to be inspected and tested by the agriculture department. When tested, if any plant is found to have more than 0.3 percent of THC, the crop will be destroyed and the farmer would be banned from growing hemp.

IN 2018, Governor Ducey did sign the industrial hemp bill into effect and now the pilot program is moving the industry toward full effect in the upcoming years.  Continue to what our updates on this burgeoning industry as it goes into effect and grows from its infancy.

Source: Cronkite News