“W
hat can’t hemp do?” my partner asked @TravelNewMexico when I texted him someone’s claim that, because hemp is referenced in the Bible, some users of hemp products find it a “truly spiritual experience.” I laughed, but I had to think for a minute. Hemp can be used to make textiles and rope. It can be used to produce building materials, animal bedding, paper, and fuel. It can be used in the fabrication of bioplastics. It’s said to sequester more carbon than other crops, and has been used in phytoremediation, perhaps most famously in Chernobyl. Its seeds can be eaten or pressed into oil. And its various chemical constituents—most notably, at least for now, cannabidiol (CBD)—can be extracted and used in a myriad of topical and edible products that users believe to have a dizzying array of beneficial effects. “It can’t kill people,” I finally replied, with relative certainty.
plant Cannabis sativa L. and any part of that plant, including the seeds thereof and all derivatives, extracts, cannabinoids, isomers, acids, salts, and salts of isomers, whether growing or not, with a delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol concentration of not more than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis.” Translation: hemp is cannabis with less than 0.3 percent of the psychoactive compound tetrahydrocannabinol, more commonly known as THC. The New Mexico Department of Agriculture issued the first license to grow hemp in December 2018. As of October 2019, when I speak with Brad Lewis, administrator of the hemp program for the NMDA, four hundred licenses have been issued, approving 7,500 acres of outdoor and one hundred acres of indoor growing. “It’s kind of a bucket list thing for me,” says Caldwell. So, instead of retiring, she secured two of those licenses, teamed up with experienced growers, and transitioned her greenhouse space to hemp.
If I were speaking of almost any other crop, this would be an insignificant statement. But hemp has been conflated with marijuana since the passage of the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act of 1937, and marijuana, since 1970, has been listed as a Schedule 1 drug in the Controlled Substances Act, meaning that in addition to being characterized as having a high potential for abuse and no known medical value, it is characterized as unsafe to use even under medical supervision. Theories abound as to the motivations behind both pieces of legislation, but there is no dispute about the outcome: virtually no hemp was produced in the United States from the end of World War II to 2014.
A one-night freeze is forecast the afternoon I visit Caldwell at Atrisco Valley Farm, and a few workers are busy harvesting the last of the tomatoes and peppers from the raised beds out front. I peek into a greenhouse and see a small forest of what look like mature, robust marijuana plants—mothers, I’ll learn, from which hundreds of clones have been cut for sale. Inside the house, young people stand trimming flowers (the plump, hairy buds produced by female cannabis plants). In the next room, dozens of fuzzy green flower-laden stalks hang upside down, drying. The intensely pungent, skunky odor of hemp—identical in profile to marijuana—permeates the house.
FIRST, THE WORD
It should not be surprising that plants of the same species would be very, very similar. Yet there has been so much effort to distinguish between marijuana and hemp that I had come to perceive them as fundamentally different. So it comes as something of a shock to realize that the naked eye (and nose) can’t tell them apart.
To enable the cultivation of hemp, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first had to define it. “I was ready to retire,” says Kathi Caldwell, well-known among Albuquerque farmers for her years running Rio Valley Greenhouses, where she started thousands of the vegetables that made their way into the local produce circuit. “I used to tell my husband I was going to grow hemp; he’d say that’s never gonna happen in our lifetimes.” But then it did. The 2014 Farm Bill opened the door by allowing licensed growers to research hemp. Four years later, the next farm bill legalized commercial production. According to the 2018 Farm Bill, hemp is “the
“T
“The FDA’s definition is not botanical,” confirms Dr. Rich Richins of Rio Grande Analytics, one of two in-state facilities approved by the NMDA to test the THC content of hemp and hemp products. “It’s the same plant.” That doesn’t mean Richins doesn’t take the testing process seriously. Nor does it mean the plant should be feared. What it does mean is that if you want to grow ten acres of hemp, you might want to hire security. (It turns out that former governor Susana Martinez’s concern about
The New Mexico Department of Agriculture issued the first license to grow hemp in December 2018. As of October 2019, when I speak with Brad Lewis, administrator of the hemp program for the NMDA, four hundred licenses have been issued, approving 7,500 acres of outdoor and one hundred acres of indoor growing. WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
67