cannabisnews.com: Hemp Bills Pass In Hawaii and North Dakota! 





Hemp Bills Pass In Hawaii and North Dakota! 
Posted by FoM on April 17, 1999 at 07:09:24 PT
Source: High Times Magazine
Gov. Cayetano of HI: Turning into a pillar of hemp? Hemp was legalized in the Hawaii state legislature this week with the solemn invocation of the Almighty's everlasting wrath: "For those of you who are going up to vote for it," state senator Cal Kawamoto (D-Waipahu) admonished his fellow lawmakers, "may God have mercy on your souls."
Thirteen of these solons gravely took the risk of eternal damnation nevertheless, comprising a one-vote majority in favor of the Hawaii Strategic Industrial Hemp Act of 1999. And by the time Gov. Benjamin Cayetano signs it into law next month, as he's indicated he will, some of the Almighty's annoyance may be mitigated by the fact that North Dakota jumped the gun on Hawaii by getting their own hemp bill completely enacted weeks previously.If the Hawaii lawmakers were playing gingerly with eternal fire in legalizing hemp by a whisker, the North Dakota solons were dancing in the flames: 86-7 in the House, 44-3 in the Senate in favor of HB1428, authorizing the planting, growing, harvest, possession, sale and buying of hemp. It passed on April 12, and was signed into law forthwith.God will be hopefully placated somewhat by the fine print in the new North Dakota hemp law, which defines "industrial hemp" as any strain of Cannabis sativa L. which yields less than .03 percent THC in the flowering tops. At those concentrations--a full order of magnitude lower than the Canadian definition of "hemp"--it's likely that even the wild, feral, unsmokable "ditchweed" hemp of North Dakota will remain officially illegal, so that the state police can go on collecting federal money from the DEA for eradicating vast, useless swaths of it every autumn.This concession did not keep the ND state police from lobbying heroically against the new hemp law in the Bismark legislature. Even though none of them seems to have thought to invoke the displeasure of the Deity, like Kawamoto in Hawaii, they nevertheless put a fine stretch of superstition on the record. Taking their script from the federal DEA, the professional law-enforcement lobbyists mainly predicted that sly, sneaky hippies will surely be creeping into industrial hemp fields to raise up their super-potent marijuana plants there, with the poor overworked police too stupid to tell the difference.This DEA-invented red herring is losing its distractive pigmentation over the seasons, though. To grow marijuana, as any hippie knows by now, it's absolutely necessary to rip out all the male plants in the plot during the week they appear, about two months into the grow season, or they'll pollinate the females and render them worthless. If you are bringing up your pot in a hemp field, this won't work because you'd have to rip out all the male hemp plants too, millions of them, a physically impossible proposition. So all your females would get pollinated around the end of the second month, and by the time they were pluckable for smoke--two months later on, mind you--they'd be so lousy with seeds and no-THC buds, no one would ever buy them. Or if some sucker did buy them, that sucker would be going after the dealer's kneecaps with a baseball bat after the first burn. (It would be better to sue in court, of course, but then, that's the basic problem with the pot laws, isn't it?)As for the Hawaii law, this will not be enriching any narcotics masterminds, either. All that it provides for is a half-acre plot at the University of Hawaii at Hilo to be planted with different strains of industrial-quality hempseeds, so that a new hybrid strain can be developed for subtropical tillage, yielding plenty of fibre and oilseed, but remaining religiously scant of dat ole demon tetrahydrocannabinol. This was scarcely enough for Sen. Kawamoto, of course, who even went over God's Head and invoked the DEA itself: "The law-enforcement agencies, the prosecutor's office, DEA, all of them have concerns that this would be an avenue in which we allow drugs to come into our community," wailed this Jeremiah of Pearl City. "To allow another avenue in which to bring this in under the headlines of economic development, I don't think we can sacrifice our young people."Celestial music to the ears of the hemp farmers in Canada, this was, where they're right now planting their second crop of industrial hemp already. Coming up next in this space, early next week, we'll be running an article on a Canadian hemp company which has developed so many patents on industrial-hemp applications that no outfit in the United States is going to be able to do anything with commercial hemp from now on, without going into business with these people. And we have the United States DEA, and legislators like Cal Kawamoto, to thank for this. Thank the nice men, won't you? 
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Comment #1 posted by Julie Shirley on April 21, 1999 at 13:30:20 PT:
Industrial Hemp.
 I would like to know what our government is afraid of? The reason I ask that question is because of the recent rumors I have heard about our government making(?) a fungus that will attack Cannabis plants. WHY! From what I have about these plants-Cannabis-there is plenty of reasons to want to keep this plants around. OR is it that to many companies that line the pockets of our polticians are afraid of the potential in this crop. MEDICALLY AND INDUSTRIALLY. Thanks for listening, :) no profanity. 
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