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Category: Hemp

  • Police, Thieves Keep Confusing Hemp For Marijuana

    Police, Thieves Keep Confusing Hemp For Marijuana

    There are over 50,000 ways to use hemp but chances are incredibly slim that it will get you high.

    To the untrained eye hemp closely resembles marijuana. From its outward, fuzzy appearance to its smell, it could be easy to make this mistake but smoking hemp will more than likely not get you high, seeing as the plant contains less than .03% or less of THC.

    According to Medium, there are over 50,000 ways to use including food, textiles, paper and even buidling materials. Some believe that hemp may also have been one of the first crops. 

    “Weed” Thieves

    While there may be thousands of uses for hemp, the one thing it won’t do is give you a psychotropic experience if you smoke it. Something that a few “weed” thieves in Philly found out after stealing some from a local grower, The Inquirer reports.

    “I thought I was in pot heaven,” said one young man who was caught stealing hemp from a crop owned by Ashleigh Baldwin on Halloween. This wasn’t the first time that somene has “lifted” hemp from Baldwin’s dairy farm.

    “There’s a lot of these dumb 18-year-olds out there doing this,” Baldwin said. The farmer uses the hemp oil from her 50-acre crop to make CBD-infused soda call CBDelight. 

    In 2018, the Trump adminsitration legalized the growing of hemp with the passage of The Farm Bill late last December. According to Fortune, marijuana supporters viewed the bill’s passage as a “an important first step in legalizing marijuana at a federal level.”

    But even though it’s federally legal, many don’t know the difference between the plants including the police.

    Police Continue To Seize Legal Hemp Plants

    Since hemp has been legalized there have been a growing number of seizures of the plant by police who are mistaking it for marijuana and the field tests they use don’t seem to know the difference. New York police received flack for seizing a 106lb hemp crop (which they thought was weed) and celebrating it on Facebook.

    In Idaho, a 6,700 pound shipment of hemp was confiscated by police in January.

     

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Would-Be Pot Thieves Accidentally Steal Pile Of Hemp

    Would-Be Pot Thieves Accidentally Steal Pile Of Hemp

    One of the accused was reported to have been boasting to fellow patrons at a local tavern about the number of plants he had stolen.

    Six Wisconsin men are facing felony charges for stealing or damaging what they believed to be a bumper crop of marijuana plants but were revealed to be industrial-grade hemp.

    Two of the six alleged thieves were caught by employees of a state-licensed hemp-growing operation in Kenosha County and were detained until law enforcement arrived. The other four defendants were either apprehended nearby or arrested after an investigation by the county sheriff’s office.

    Hemp has become a newly prevalent crop in Wisconsin after the passage of a 2017 law that allowed the production and processing of the plant for industrial use as well as the production of CBD oil.

    The Kenosha News detailed a criminal complaint regarding the thefts, which stated that on September 15, the property owner and two employees discovered two of the aforementioned individuals in their field at 3 a.m. The two individuals, who were carrying a suitcase and duffel bag, were held at gunpoint until law enforcement arrived.

    Thieves Hit The Same Crop Twice In One Month

    A third individual, who had reportedly dropped off the other two, was arrested nearby, while the remaining three alleged thieves were arrested after an investigation by the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department for having reportedly stolen plants earlier in the same month, which prompted the property owner to take watch over his crop.

    The latter three defendants had been seen loading a large pile of plants into an SUV parked near the field. According to the complaint, one of the accused thieves was reported to have been boasting to fellow patrons at a local tavern about the number of plants he had stolen.

    The criminal complaint claimed that three of the defendants had taken as many as 30 plants during the first raid on the farm, but in the second incident, only five plants were reported as damaged. 

    According to the property owner, each plant produces one to three pounds of hemp that sells for $300 to $400 per pound.

    “Hemp” and “marijuana” are terms given to varieties of cannabis plants that differ according to the amount of THC, the psychoactive compound that produces a euphoric effect or “high”—by dry weight.

    Plants classified as hemp contain 0.3% or less of THC, while those labeled marijuana contain more than 0.3% THC. Hemp also contains another chemical compound, cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive compound that is reported to have medicinal properties. 

    Previously Illegal Hemp Now Legal to Grow In All 50 States

    The Farm Bill of 2014 marked a turning point in the cultivation of hemp, which had been made illegal by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The Farm Bill officially defined hemp by its THC content, which allowed for increased growth for research and industrial usage.

    The 2018 Farm Bill made hemp legal to grow in all 50 states, which Wisconsin had adopted through the passage of its own act the previous year.

    According to the Kenosha News, Wisconsin currently has more than 1,400 licensed hemp growers and nearly 700 processors, with 39 in Kenosha County alone. Those farms take up 239 acres across the county, and are easy to spot—which made the thefts all the more baffling to Sgt. Christopher Hannah of the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department.

    “If it’s an illegal marijuana operation, it’s not going to be growing along the roadside for everyone to see,” he said. “The person is going to have illegal activity is not going to do it in plain view.”

    View the original article at thefix.com