Effort to Repeal Ag Crop Statutes Creates Stir
After working for more than seven years to promote hemp as an agricultural crop farmers could produce and successfully carrying legislation to ensure by law hemp would not fall under the supervision of the Marijuana Control Board and instead the Division of Agriculture, you can imagine my reaction to seeing the title of a bill in the House, HB 117 which included these words: “renaming the Marijuana Control Board the Cannabis Control Board; relating to the Cannabis Control Board; repealing the industrial hemp program”.
Did that bill title ever get my attention! Let’s just say had you been in the room, you might have seen steam coming out of my ears.
The lead-up story
Allow me to back up to 2016. That was when a farmer from Palmer whom I deeply respected wanted to try growing hemp to feed to his livestock as he was seeing it be used as fodder in other parts of the world. Former Senator Johnny Ellis had a bill that would allow this farmer to do that. Ellis, a Democrat, was in the Senate Minority at the time and I was in the House Majority, a Republican. That made no difference to me when it came to sensible policy.
I began making my rounds in the Capitol building to the powers that be, those in the Senate who had the ability to get Ellis’s bill moving and to the floor. I made the pitch that it was time to separate hemp from marijuana and give Alaska a chance at a new industry, one that in other northern locations on the globe was turning out profits in the billions of dollars. I pointed out the myriad of product potential as well as the fact that it would be an easy-to-grow and fast-to-grow livestock feed solution.
A few listened and were curious – and I could tell they might be open to the idea – but I could also tell it would take more time than we had that spring to convince enough legislators to move the bill through the legislative process. As Senator Ellis was retiring in early 2017, I let him know I’d pick up where he left off and keep working on the effort, and that I did.
With my Chief of Staff at the time, Buddy Whitt, we worked 2017-2018 on successful statute changes (SB 6) to ensure hemp could be a crop under the Division of Agriculture and not under the jurisdiction of the Marijuana Control Board. We updated the statutes again in 2021 via SB 27 to keep up with the federal changes in law.
Fast forward to January 2023
Unbeknownst to me, in 2022 the Marijuana Control Board learned that some edible hemp products that were intoxicating had made their way into retail stores in Alaska where a minor could purchase them. Hemp produced by farmers in Alaska, according to Alaska law, cannot have psychoactive properties, in other words the THC level cannot exceed .3% based on the dry weight of the plant (this definition is based on Congress’s definition in the 2018 Farm Bill).
Those processing edible hemp products outside of Alaska found a loophole in that definition and began selling items across state lines that had psychoactive properties but met the dry-weight definition. All 50 states are grappling with the same problem.
Meanwhile the Governor’s Advisory Task Force on Recreational Marijuana, which was convening to look at changing the tax structure for marijuana, looked into the edible hemp situation. In their report dated January 13, 2023 – which I did not know about at the time and just had the chance to comb through a few days ago – states the following recommendation (bold italics are mine):
Create one regulatory authority over Cannabis sp. The Task Force recommends that Cannabis sp. (whether industrial hemp or adult-use marijuana or any other species of the genus) be regulated by one state board and one state agency. This includes regulatory jurisdiction over the production, growing, manufacturing, retailing, importation, exportation, and intrastate distribution of Cannabis sp. To achieve this aim, the Task Force recommends AS 17.38 be amended to provide AMCO and the Marijuana Control Board jurisdiction over all Cannabis sp. The Task Force also recommends changing the Alcohol & Marijuana Control Office (AMCO) to the Alcohol & Cannabis Control Office (ACCO) and the Marijuana Control Board (MCB) to the Cannabis Control Board (CCB).
In late January, Joan Wilson, the executive director of AMCO, informally stopped by my office to let me know about the problematic hemp edibles showing up on store shelves and that either putting hemp under AMCO or fixing the definition and banning the intoxicating hemp products would address the issue. We discussed the point that all 50 states were grappling with the same problem because the “less than .3% THC” threshold had been federally defined in the 2018 Farm Bill. I remarked to Ms. Wilson that we would not want to put hemp under AMCO as farmers would choose not to grow it and that I would work on fixing the definition and banning the problematic edibles. Ms. Wilson gave me no indication that she was working on a bill with the other approach.
I proceeded to meet with Rep. Stanley Wright who had a bill on the topic of marijuana and also learned that another bill regarding marijuana taxation would soon be rolled out. My office’s plan was to fix this hemp hiccup via a redefinition and ban of the intoxicating products in one of these two bills if they looked like they were moving or file our own if one or both became stagnant. I discussed with my staff that we would be working to adjust the hemp definition so it addressed the issue of the edibles and to ban products that didn’t meet the new definition.
Jump to March 2023
Meanwhile, apparently one or more Task Force members or the executive director of AMCO through the Rules Committee requested a bill be drafted based on the Task Force report. During the drafting process, the drafters provided a memo to the Speaker’s office with various explanations about the bill draft they prepared. Below is the pertinent piece related to hemp from the Legislative Legal Memo dated March 10, 2023 (bold italics are mine):
“The task force also recommended that “industrial hemp” and marijuana be defined as a single plant “cannabis.” Therefore the industrial hemp statutes, which comply with federal requirements, have been repealed in this bill. This means that the industrial hemp industry in Alaska is no longer in compliance with federal requirements. Treating industrial hemp cannabis also now criminalizes certain amounts of cannabis that were previously considered legal industrial hemp.”
Three days later, on March 13, 2023, the Task Force publicly posted the following letter draft which appears they marked up but did not send because the same day, fortunately, they changed their tune in a memo.
The worrisome March 13 letter draft (bold italics are mine):
“Taskforce Recommendation Three. Create one regulatory authority over cannabis sp.
The Marijuana Control Board unanimously supports the principle that cannabis, whether industrial hemp or marijuana, should be regulated by one agency, such as the recommended Alcohol & Cannabis Control Office.”
The better March 13 memo issued the same day indicates AMCO and the Marijuana Control Board were beginning to see the errors of their ways (bold italics are mine). The Division of Agriculture had fortunately intercepted the overreach by AMCO.
“Issue Three – Industrial Hemp – the change requested to incorporate hemp and marijuana into one single definition needs further analysis by the task force…. Given the Marijuana Control Board’s (MCB) discussion with the Division of Agriculture at the March 9th MCB meeting, it appears there will be forthcoming emergency regulations to address the current public health crisis of intoxicating hemp products being available to minors. Therefore, assuming these emergency regulations are promulgated and codified, this issue could wait for next session and undergo further analysis by the task force.”
The change of heart by the task force and AMCO was too late however to be incorporated into the first version of the bill, HB 117, which was read across the House floor on March 17.
Last 10 days stage-right: Shelley enters
That same day, on Friday March 17, I’m reviewing the upcoming schedule for the following week which had been posted the previous evening. That is when sparks began to fly. On the schedule I see there is a hearing in House Labor and Commerce for a bill, HB 117, with a title that when I read it, steam may have emerged from my ears as mentioned earlier (bold italics mine):
“…renaming the Marijuana Control Board the Cannabis Control Board; relating to the Cannabis Control Board; repealing the industrial hemp program;…”
In the rush of the day on a Friday, I did not have time to investigate who requested the bill and was still yet unaware of the report recommendations, the letters, and the memos mentioned in this article. I did, however, have time to point out the bill to my former chief of staff who now works in Rep. Kevin McCabe’s office. I did not want to see seven years’ worth of work to promote hemp as an ag crop go down the drain.
That brings us up to this past Monday when I began to drill down on what had happened and to make sure those working on HB 117 knew that repealing the industrial hemp program would be a huge mistake. The good news is they agreed. The office of the Chair of House Labor and Commerce, Rep. Jesse Sumner, is now working on a new version of the bill that will remove the repeal language. Whew. On the Senate side, because the bill is a “Rules Committee by request” piece of legislation, I also made sure the Senate Rules Chair, Senator Wielechowski, knew that putting hemp under AMCO was the wrong approach and that we could fix the problematic hemp edibles by banning them and redefining the allowable THC content in hemp edibles. He was in full agreement. A second whew.
I also learned that a concerned citizen and hemp advocate – whom I unfortunately did not get to meet – flew to Juneau last week and apparently was working the halls on the same issue, worried like I was that HB 117 in its original form would be the death knell to the hemp ag industry. Thank you to this individual; please know the message is resonating that repealing the hemp statutes is a bad idea.
What could have been a sad and disastrous end to an ag opportunity turned out to be a mere hiccup. I hope AMCO and the Task Force take note and, in the future, communicate with the Division of Agriculture earlier if they ever have questions or concerns regarding hemp. I also hope the executive director, Ms. Wilson, will be more forthright with me in the future.
