CONCORD, N.H. — PRESS RELEASE — The House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee approved a bill Jan. 28 (13-7) that would legalize possession and limited cultivation of cannabis for adults 21 and older in New Hampshire. A full House vote on H.B. 1648 is expected to take place on Thursday, Feb. 6.
H.B. 1648 would allow adults 21 and over to possess up to three-quarters of an ounce of cannabis, five grams of hashish, and up to 300 mg of cannabis-infused products (currently a violation punishable by a civil fine). It would also permit cultivation of up to six plants (including up to three mature ones) at home in a secure location that is not visible from other properties. A summary of H.B. 1648 is available here.
The House of Representatives passed a similar bill in 2019, H.B. 481, that would have legalized cannabis in the state. That bill, which unlike H.B. 1648 would have created a regulated and taxed market, ultimately died in the Senate after being referred for “interim study” by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Matt Simon, New England political director at the Marijuana Policy Project, said, “Like most Granite Staters, this committee understands that it’s time for New Hampshire to stop prohibiting cannabis. Adults in the 'Live Free or Die' state should not be punished for their choice to use a substance that is objectively less harmful than alcohol. Now that New Hampshire is literally surrounded by jurisdictions where cannabis is legal for adults, our current policies can no longer be justified in any way. It’s time for the House, Senate and Gov. Chris Sununu to work together and move cannabis policies into the 21st century.”
Andris T | Adobe Stock
Hemp Business Sues Carson City, Nev., After City Denies Its Permit
Tahoe Hemp LLC is accusing the city of breaching a contract with the property’s former owner.
Tahoe Hemp LLC has filed a lawsuit against Carson City, Nev., after the city attempted to block the company from growing hemp on property owned by the city, according to a Washington Times report.
Tahoe Hemp filed the lawsuit in state court Jan. 15 and is accusing Carson City of breaching a contract with the property’s former owner, according to the news outlet.
The company wants to grow hemp on a portion of the former Buzzy’s Ranch property, which used to be a public outdoor recreation area.
The Carson City Board of Supervisors has argued that when the city purchased some of the property in 2010, it used, in part, money it had received from a state land grant, which prohibits any use of the land aside from preserving the open space or its cultural or wildlife resources, Washington Times reported.
Tahoe Hemp has argued that the previous owner of the property, Jarrad Trust, maintained agricultural rights on the land when the city purchased it, according to the news outlet. Trust entered into a leasing agreement with Tahoe Hemp, and the company then applied with the Nevada Department of Agriculture to grow hemp on 100 acres of the property.
When the state agriculture department requested approval from Carson City to move forward in the licensing process, the city sent Tahoe Hemp a cease and desist order, Washington Times reported.
The company is now seeking up to $15 million in damages and lawyer fees, according to the news outlet.
Adeliepenguin | Dreamstime
Hawaii Lawmakers Propose New Cannabis-Related Bills for 2020
The deadline to introduce new legislation passed last week, and 21 new cannabis-related measures have been proposed in the House and Senate.
Dozens of cannabis-related bills have been introduced in Hawaii’s legislature this year, after the deadline to introduce new legislation passed last week.
Twenty-one new measures have been proposed, with ten introduced in the House and 11 in the Senate, according to a West Hawaii Today report. Eighteen bills in the House, and another 18 in the Senate, have been carried over from the 2019 legislative session after stalling or being deferred, the news outlet reported.
Two of the House bills aim to extend the state’s current industrial hemp pilot program to create a permanent program in the state, a proposal that passed the legislature last year before being vetoed by Gov. Davie Ige, West Hawaii Today reported. Hawaii’s current hemp program will expire in 2021.
Another hemp-related measure in the House would require labeling for hemp products and would clarify that cannabis dispensaries in the state can sell these products, according to West Hawaii Today.
Other legislation in the House would make minor adjustments to the state’s medical cannabis dispensary system, the news outlet reported, such as allowing dispensaries to sell cannabis cuttings, seeds and edible products. Another bill would allow naturopathic physicians to certify patients for Hawaii’s medical cannabis program.
Adult-use legalization is also back on the table this year; one bill in the House would add a cannabis legalization question to the state’s 2020 ballot, West Hawaii Today reported.
In the Senate, lawmakers have introduced companion bills to the House’s industrial hemp legislation, as well as the measures that would legalize edibles and authorize naturopathic physicians to certify patients for the medical cannabis program, according to the news outlet.
Other legislation in the Senate aims to broaden Hawaii’s medical program by updating the definition of “usable cannabis” to include dried leaves and flowers, and by asking the Drug Enforcement Administration to grant a federal Schedule 1 exemption for the use of medical cannabis in Hawaii, West Hawaii Today reported.
Some of the other Senate bills would allow dispensaries to deliver to patients, as well as allow patients to be reimbursed by insurance companies for medical cannabis.
Two bills in the Senate would legalize adult-use cannabis, allowing it for personal use and repealing all criminal penalties associated with it, according to West Hawaii Today.
Last year, an adult-use legalization bill cleared a Senate committee, but ultimately stalled when time ran out at the end of the legislative session.
Hawaii did successfully decriminalize cannabis and ease some of its restrictions on medical cannabis dispensaries during last year’s session, and the state also unveiled a process to allow out-of-state visitors to access medical cannabis at Hawaii’s dispensaries during their stay.
Bits and Splits | Adobe Stock
Cherokee Nation Forms Work Group to Study Benefits of Cannabis
The tribe, one of the largest in the nation, wants to create a ‘well-informed policy’ regarding the use and cultivation of cannabis and hemp.
The Cherokee Nation, one of the largest tribes in the U.S., has formed a work group to study various facets and potential benefits of hemp and cannabis.
Under Cherokee law, it is currently illegal to use or possess cannabis on all tribally owned properties. The tribe, based in Tahlequah, Okla., recently revised its workplace drug use policy to protect employees and applicants who possess a valid medical marijuana patient license. Oklahoma legalized medical cannabis in 2018.
“As chief, I want well-informed policy, and the team we have assembled will be a great asset in that regard. I believe there are opportunities for Cherokee Nation, our businesses and our citizens to benefit from this emerging industry. But we need to move forward carefully and responsibly and in absolute strict adherence to the law in order to ensure success and sustainability,” said Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. in a press release.
The new group, called the “Executive Work Group on Hemp, Cannabis and Related Opportunities,” will explore opportunities for cannabis in commerce, health care and agriculture. The group plans to study legal and ethical implications of hemp and cannabis use and growth, as well as the role they may play in the tribe’s health services system.
The group will also study the opportunities for Cherokee citizens to raise, process and sell hemp and cannabis.
Ultimately, the group will make recommendations on updating internal Cherokee Nation policies and statutes regarding the growth and use of the crops.The work group will report its recommendations to the principal chief and council of the Cherokee Nation no later than May 31.
The Cherokee Nation has more than 380,000 tribal citizens, making it one of, if not the largest, in the country.
If the tribe legalizes any form of cannabis, it will join a growing number of tribes embracing the crop for its economic and health benefits. Tribes create and follow their own jurisdictions, so several across the country have already begun cultivating cannabis for medical and recreational use.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) website, 23 different tribes so far plan on taking part in their own hemp programs. Three have already been approved, including in South Dakota, where hemp cultivation is currently illegal.
Members of the Cherokee work group include:
Chad Harsha, Cherokee Nation secretary of natural resources (chairman)
Tina Glory-Jordan, secretary of state
Todd Enlow, chief of staff
Paden Qualls, assistant attorney general
Andy McMillan, Cherokee Nation businesses
Kim Teehee, executive director of government relations
Dr. Roger Montgomery, Cherokee Nation health services
“The work group established by Chief Hoskin is a substantial step for the Cherokee Nation [to] evaluate the changing regulatory environment surrounding hemp and cannabis in areas of commerce, agriculture and health care,” Harsha said. “I look forward to working with this team to bring clarity on these issues and to present policy recommendations that will advance the Cherokee Nation in these emerging areas.”
Arlin Fratzke's 20 acres of industrial hemp in western Montana.
Andrew Burgess
Bitterroot Hemp Cooperative in Montana Finds Strength in Numbers
Learning from early experiments in hemp in 2019, the farmers of the Bitterroot Valley have big plans for 2020.
When Arlin Fratzke set out in the spring of 2019 to plant 20 acres of industrial hemp on his western Montana ranch, he didn’t know what was going to happen. Like so many things he’d been through before, this was an experiment.
“I really didn’t have any expectations,” he tells Hemp Grower. “I just wanted to try my hand at it.”
His curiosity was bolstered not only by the early years of Montana’s industrial hemp pilot program (approved in 2016), but by his neighbors’ interest in banding together and forming the Bitterroot Hemp Cooperative. When Fratzke found out his grandfather had grown hemp in Minnesota, well, that just sealed the deal.
In Stevensville, Mont., just south of Missoula, Fratzke has lived and worked on 100 irrigated acres of fine ranch land for the past 20 years. He’s developed a herd of registered cattle (40 pregnant cows and 13 replacement heifers, as of mid-January 2020), part of a closed genetic line that’s quite valuable on the market. Now, though, retired and 62 years old, Fratzke is scouting buyers for his herd, scouting a way out of the ranching life and into the curiosities of industrial hemp.
Andrew Burgess
Arlin Fratzke and his neighbors walk through his 20-acre hemp crop in Stevensville, Mont.
So, last spring, Fratzke took 20 tilled acres otherwise set aside for his cows’ forage crops (oats, barley, turnips, radishes) and planted 500 lbs. of CX-2 hemp seeds sourced from Canada.
Western Montana is fortunate to have hard soil and a high water table, though this works as a double-edged sword for prospective hemp growers. “The good news is it retains moisture. The bad news is it retains moisture,” Fratzke says. “There’s a real fine line sometimes between how much water is enough water and how much water is too much.”
But western Montana is also victim to skyrocketing real estate prices—the result of eyebrow-raising demand from the well-heeled. It’s hard to find much more than a 10-acre plot in the Bitterroot Valley, a scenic strip of beauty that rests between the Bitterroot Range and Sapphire Mountains.
Fratzke counts himself lucky. But last year’s planting season had other plans. With relentless rains throughout the spring, he didn’t get his seeds into the ground until June 1, when, suddenly, weeks of dry weather settled into the valley. And right as he began to increase the water on his experimental crop to draw out the reticent seedlings, the rains came back—and stayed. Later in the summer, he watched his plants whither in standing water.
“Early on, you really need an even amount of moisture to crack the seed open and get started,” he says. “Too much water kills it. Not enough water, and you can’t even get the seed to sprout.”
By mid-September, Fratzke took a straight-cut combine to his crops and harvested. Between the immature plants and the ones that had succumbed to inundation, “Our yield was poor at best,” he says. “But it was a great education.”
And that’s the prime mover for the 70 members of the Bitterroot Hemp Cooperative in western Montana: Learn from your experiences with this crop. Learn and improve on last season’s yields.
At the same time, Fratzke joined the Montana Hemp Advisory Committee, representing small western Montana farms. Led by the state’s agricultural director, Ben Thomas, the committee will develop plans for the Montana hemp “marketing, research and education.” Fratzke sees is as an opportunity to elevate the work of his neighbors, who themselves are pooling resources to stand out in a rapid and competitive business landscape.
Andrew Burgess
Hemp plants growing on Arlin Fratzke's ranch.
“Here in western Montana, we don't have the large acreage that they do in eastern Montana,” Fratzke says. “It's become the chic place to live. Real estate prices are extremely high. So, there are a lot of people that can grow one to 10 acres here and there. Well, that only way you're going to make that work is if we all get together on the same page and set that up. You can market it as a locally based product too.”
Together with Bitterroot residents Andrew Burgess, Steven Smith, Jeanette Haas, Brigid Jarrett and Daniel Wolf, Fratzke saw the board of the Bitterroot Hemp Cooperative come into being. At the first meeting of curious and prospective hemp farmers in January 2019, everyone agreed that this was something worth exploring.
Burgess recalls: “I started asking so many questions that before the first meeting was over with, everybody pointed to me and said, ‘He needs to run this.’ And I went, ‘You're nuts. I know nothing about hemp. I'm just asking the questions you all should be asking.’”
He was swiftly elected president.
“I convinced most of the other growers in the co-op to use this year as an experiment, so that we could learn what we needed to do, which was my main focus to drive the co-op in the first year,” Burgess says. “I’d realized that nobody knew what they were doing, so the trick was for us to learn from each other and do as much as we can in this first year to understand what we were getting involved with.”
A lot of the early conversations revolved around simple distinctions between THC-rich cannabis and industrial hemp. What is this crop, exactly?(Montana has a licensed medical cannabis market, but no adult-use market—yet.) And a lot of those conversations revolved around the pricing benchmarks associated with both of those crops. How much will this biomass fetch on the market? How do you even sell it?
“Our yield was poor at best, but it was a great education.”
- Arlin Fratzke
Some farmers chose to pursue a half-acre or a single acre of hemp plants for CBD extraction purposes. Fratzke was concerned with the labor needed to pull that off. Burgess ultimately went that route, extracting CBD with equipment built by fellow cooperative member Daniel Wolf. “For me, in one year, I've managed to learn how to go from a seed to end product,” Burgess says the day after he bottled by hand his first 90 units of CBD oil.
This year, Burgess is doubling his acreage and hoping to bring in area high school students and FFAs to learn more about the crop and develop mock business projects. “They're looking to see how they can further involve that in Montana because it is a big product,” he says. “The more we involve the younger kids the better. And to me hands on is the best way to do it.”
For Fratzke’s part, he intended to process his hemp seed for oil and perhaps bale the fiber leftover from his harvest—and find a market later. But his yield was such that he simply left the biomass in the field and took the seeds to a processor in eastern Montana.
Andrew Burgess
Arlin Fratzke harvests his hemp crop in mid-September 2019.
“I would really like to see us establish some sort of a facility that processes the entire plant,” he says. “And I think that's the only way we're going to get people interested in growing hemp, is if there’s a market for [farmers to] go out there, cut it, bale it, drop it off and process it. I think that's where they're kind of the future is because the whole plant is useful.” He points to Ag Processing Solutions in Great Falls, Mont., as a whole-plant processor equipped to join the state’s increasing number of licensed hemp farmers (197 in 2019) with product manufacturers and the open wholesale market.
Looking ahead, Fratzke hopes to plant upwards of his full 100 acres this year. He’d already installed a pivot on 40 acres of his ranch, and, in off-season, installed another pivot to cover yet another 40 acres. His biggest lesson from 2019? This crop wants even, careful irrigation.
“Once that taproot started down, it really went to town,” he says, thinking back to last year. “But the key was to get the plant started.” Now, he’s equipped with a more detailed plan to get from springtime to autumn harvest and beyond in 2020.
“I understood when I finally planted it year that I may not have any market for it,” Fratzke says. “But if you don't know how it grows—and that you can even grow it— that's why it was pretty much an experiment. And I had no expectations. I just wanted to see if I could make it grow.”
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