DEA announces plans to legally grow 3.2 tons of psychoactive hemp in 2020 for scientific use
If the existing by-laws actively used by representatives of law enforcement agencies to create corruption mechanisms are applied to the legal crops of technical hemp, what should be done first before trying to lobby for the adoption of new legislation regulating the possibility of using the plant for medical and scientific purposes?
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has announced plans to permit the cultivation of 3,200,000 grams of legal psychoactive hemp for research purposes next year. It should be noted that the quota of 3.2 tons for 2020 is 30 percent more than the 2019 quota.
The DEA initially announced quotas for legal production, including psychoactive hemp in 2020, in a notice published in the Federal Register in September. Employees of the Office took into account information received during the public discussion of the above quotas, during which hundreds of messages were received from health workers, state and federal officials, and the general public.
Most of the comments related to the DEA proposed reduction in the quota for opioid production, with many expressing concern that this reduction could negatively impact patients and potentially cause drug shortages. Despite these arguments, the DEA has actually further reduced the quota for certain opioids, such as oxycodone (by 7%) and oxymorphone.
The quota for psychoactive hemp has not changed. DEA staff said quotas reflect "the anticipated medical, scientific, research, and industrial needs of the United States , legitimate export supplies, and the creation and maintenance of reserve reserves." From this statement and the increase in the volume of raw materials needed for research, we can conclude that the need for legally grown psychoactive hemp, which in 2020 will be used for scientific purposes, has increased significantly.
DEA documents indicate that the number of people registered with the Office for research with legally grown psychoactive hemp, plant extracts and their derivatives "increased by more than 40 percent - from 384 in January 2017 to 542 in January 2019." However, despite the fact that the quota for the legal production of psychoactive hemp, as well as the number of registered researchers, is growing steadily, in the United States there is only one federal authorized center for the legal cultivation of psychoactive hemp - a farm at the University of Mississippi. And despite the fact that more than three years ago, the DEA leadership officially announced that it would approve an additional number of legal manufacturers, at the moment this promise has not been fulfilled.
The inaction of the Office became the basis for a trial in the summer of 2019, when scientists accused the DEA of using delay tactics. In particular, the fact that the Office did not proceed to consider more than two dozen applications to formally register as structures that are allowed the legal cultivation of psychoactive hemp.
In August, the DEA announced that the number of applications required the Office to develop alternative rules for processing them, and so the federal court dismissed the lawsuit, deciding that the government was taking the necessary steps to resolve the issue.
Another problem identified by researchers and lawmakers is that the current source of legal hemp raw materials provided for research does not reflect the full range of products already on the US market . Most raw materials contain an insufficient amount of drug-free cannabinoids, which raises the question of the reliability of cannabis-based studies provided for conducting experiments on behalf of the US government .
Commentary of the Ukrainian Technical Hemp Association
In this material, several key factors that should be interesting to national hemp breeders can be noted:
- in the United States there is the only state organization that officially provides raw materials for research on the therapeutic properties of hemp, and its products do not satisfy the market;
- US government structures impede the expansion of the number of organizations that could legally grow psychoactive hemp for its further use for scientific purposes;
- quotas for psychoactive hemp are issued by the USA DEA in relation to psychoactive hemp and have nothing to do with industrial crops.
And now the questions that arise from the above points:
- why Ukraine is currently the only country in the world whose business entities should receive quotas for the cultivation of technical hemp, which poses absolutely no social danger and is not even protected since 2012;
- Much has been said about the need to adopt a new law governing the cultivation of hemp for medical purposes. Why no one talks about the absolute absence of by-laws governing this type of activity, and in particular about the need for the existence of any structure that cannabis will legally grow with an increased content of tetrahydrocannabinol;
- why so far no one has analyzed the existing by-laws governing hemp breeding in our country. No one even thinks that at least certain provisions of PKMU 589 - June 3, 2009 directly indicate the need for daily destruction of hemp leaves and inflorescences.
Now, the rhetorical question is if the existing by-laws actively used by representatives of law enforcement agencies to create corruption mechanisms apply to legal crops of technical hemp, which should be done first before trying to lobby for the adoption of new legislation regulating the possibility of using plants in medical and scientific purposes?