Chaos is the ‘word’ that is not fizzling out of the minds of companies (and drivers) that are transporting legal hemp from one state to another via highways.
Although the federal law has declared hemp legal through its 2018 US Farm Bill, tensed situations are arising in conservative states like Idaho, where hemp is still illegal under the state laws. Drivers transporting legal hemp from various states to Idaho, for instance, are being arrested and their shipments being confiscated because of the mismatch between the federal and state laws.
The extent of the situation can be better understood with the help of the following example- on January 24, the Idaho state police took no time in seizing a shipment containing around 6,700 pounds of hemp, coming in from Colorado from an Oregon company. However, the shipper, named Big Sky Scientific, sued the police to get the hemp back for its client, though in vain, as a US District Court Judge ruled in the favor of the police department. Notably, any amount of THC is illegal in Idaho.
The situation, however, is not just limited to Idaho and similar cases have been reported in Oklahoma and Tennessee as well.
Putting all the blame on the police officers isn’t justified either, as legal hemp can look and smell a lot like potent cannabis; and in the absence of any on-the-spot technology to differentiate between the two, such cases are bound to happen.
Unlike the state police, the US Postal service has been on quite a losing side when it comes to confiscating hemp deliveries. Here, shipping companies have emerged winners as most of the rulings have gone into their favor.
But a burning question that arises at this point is why some states in the US are still reluctant to legalize hemp even after the implementation of the Federal Bill? Mason Walker, a marijuana farmer in the state of Oregon, is very vocal about the desynchronized laws and believes that the “Situation is frustrating” at each level.
Mankind has made use of hemp in the form of fiber, food, and fuel for many years now, of course, because of its “anti-high” nature. However, since hemp is often regarded as the cousin of cannabis because of the feeling of well-being it ‘promotes’ among the masses, it had been federally illegal since the early 1930s, and the state governments wasted no time in following suit.
However, when the time has come to go into the ‘reverse mode’ and legalize hemp once again, states like Oregon, Idaho, Tennessee, etc. have gone on to the back foot.
