| Dear Letters Editor: After 62 years of legal differentiation between psychoactive marijuana and non-psychoactive industrial hemp, the US Drug Enforcement Administration has suddenly begun seizing shipments of legal hemp seed products. According to the NORML Foundation, the first seizure was a 53,000 pound loaf of sterilized hemp seed on its way to a major birdseed broker. The company whose shipment was seized, Kenex, Ltd., is Canada's largest producer of hemp food and fiber products. According to Don Wirtshafter, proprietor of the Ohio Hempery, Kenex is not the only company that has been affected. "They have held up some clothing in recent weeks. They took a shipment of hemp pillows, hemp covered pillows from Thailand. Instead of unzipping the ends of the pillows to see what's inside, they cut them all open with a knife. It's that sort of stuff. I'm aware of shipments from about five companies now that have been held up." Wirtshafter concluded, "The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act specifically excluded the sterilized seed and the seed oil and the seed cake from the definition of marijuana, which then became incorporated in the Controlled Substances Act of 1961. What's going on here is we've done a responsible job here for 10 years separating industrial hemp from marijuana, and the DEA has refused to admit that they're two different things, that you can't get high from industrial hemp, that there's no drug issue here. Everybody agrees that the shipments were sterilized seeds, incapable of germination. So they're clearly not marijuana by definition, yet the DEA insists on treating them as marijuana, and is extending their jurisdiction over these industrial products, that Congress was very careful to exclude from their jurisdiction." Sincerely, Bill Holmes, Vice Chair Antelope Valley Libertarian Party P.O. Box 3202 Quartz Hill, California 93586 wtholmes@compuserve.com, 661-943-7473 voice/fax http://synergy-enterprises.com/wth.html |
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