As Other States Legalize Pot, KY Still Stuck on Legalizing Hemp

It will be just too perfectly ironic when Kentucky finally legalizes hemp - the one non-intoxicating crop that can replace the coal economy - just as the rest of the nation legalizes the real cash crop: marijuana.

Janet Patton at the Herald:

The new priority for Kentucky farmers has a lot of history: Agriculture Commissioner James Comer announced Wednesday that his top agenda item for the next legislative session is hemp.

Comer, a Republican, told the Interim Joint Agriculture Committee that he will push for a strongly worded resolution by the General Assembly urging Washington to revise drug policy to allow U.S. industrial hemp cultivation.

"We just want the freedom to be able to grow a crop that we know will grow well in Kentucky," Comer said. Congress should "get out of the way and let the private sector create jobs in rural communities manufacturing this product."

He said if Congress acts this year, the first hemp seeds could be planted in Kentucky in spring 2014.

"If the United States Congress and the federal government gives us the permission to do this," Comer said. "We just want to pass the legislation, set an example to Congress. We are serious about this. ... Get out of our way. Let us do this in Kentucky. It will help farmers, and it will create jobs."

Earlier Wednesday, Comer reactivated the Kentucky Industrial Hemp Commission, which had been dormant for a decade. He was named chairman of the new commission, which includes Sen. John Schickel, R-Union, and Rep. Tom McKee, D-Cynthiana, University of Kentucky Agriculture College Dean Scott Smith, hemp activists, farmers and entrepreneurs.

For more than a century, hemp was Kentucky's top agricultural product and a major profit center for the state.  Hemp is native to Kentucky, and to this day grows wild in fence rows and suburban backyards.

For decades, forward-thinking Kentucky politicians of both parties have been trying to get hemp authorized for commercial growing. Hemp is a renewable, easily-grown substitute for dozens of wood-based products like paper and petroleum-based products like rope, carpet, clothing and furnishings. It promises profits and jobs that could easily eclipse that of the doomed coal industry at its height.

Yet while Kentucky still struggles to get federal approval to grow non-intoxicating hemp, Colorado and Washington just legalized marijuana (which also grows like a weed in Kentucky) and are now poised to get a huge jump on Kentucky in the future pot industry.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/11/14/2407570/state-hemp-commission-revived.html#storylink=cpy

Kentucky: always 20 years behind.