National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, we are working on the very important Defense bill, but I just wanted to take a few minutes to discuss another topic.

For some time, with the support of the Senate majority leader, Mr. McConnell, Senator Merkley and Senator Paul and I have all been trying to change Federal law so farmers across the country can secure the green light to grow hemp in America.

About a year ago, I came to the floor of the Senate with a basket of hemp products to highlight that this is a particularly important time in the debate--a time in history when we have kind of reflected on what this issue has been about. I have talked about how hemp products are made in this country, sold in this country, and consumed in our country, but they are not 100-percent American products. They can't be fully red, white, and blue products because the law says the hemp used to make them cannot be grown on a large-scale basis here at home.

Another year has gone by since the majority leader, Senator Merkley, Senator Paul, and I teamed up, and unfortunately industrial hemp continues to be on the controlled substances list. Because of that unjustified status, hard-working farmers in Oregon and across our country have been deprived of the opportunity and benefits of a crop that has enormous economic potential--all because there has been this misinterpretation that in some way this is affiliated with marijuana.

Industrial hemp and marijuana come from the same plant species. Someone could say they have a similar look, but they are, in fact, very different in key ways. First and foremost, industrial hemp does not have the psychoactive properties of marijuana. You would have about as much luck getting high by smoking cotton from a T-shirt as you would by smoking hemp. In my view, the hemp ban looks like a case of illegality for the sake of illegality.

Four Members of the United States Senate, including the Senate majority leader, want to bring an end to this anti-hemp stigma that has, in effect, been codified in the law. We have talked about a whole host of hemp products--foods, soap, lotion supplements, hemp milk, and you can even use a hemp product to seal the lumber in a deck.

If you just look at the variety of products--the kinds of products I have shown here before--you can certainly see the ingenuity of American producers. You see a growing demand of American consumers for hemp products. My view is our hard-working farmers ought to have the opportunity to meet that demand.

Unfortunately, 100 percent of the hemp used in the kinds of products I brought to the floor have to be imported from other countries. So this ban on hemp is not anti-drug policy, it is anti-farmer policy. I have held this belief. I remember going to a Costco at home, when my wife Nancy was pregnant with our third child, and I saw there were hemp products available there at the local Costco, and I announced what was going to be a guiding principle of mine on this; that is, if you can buy it at a local supermarket, the American farmer ought to be able to grow it. Quaint idea, but I think if you walk through a Costco or any other store, you say to yourself: Must be pretty exasperating for American farmers to not have an opportunity to be part of generating that set of jobs associated with the ag sector because the jobs are coming from people overseas.

There has been a bit of progress. The 2014 farm bill puts the first cracks in the Federal ban. It okayed growth research projects led by universities and agriculture departments in States such as Oregon and Kentucky that take a smarter approach to hemp. These projects have proven successful. Farmers are ready to grow hemp, but the first cracks in the Federal ban do not go far enough, and these projects are still just tied up, tied up, and tied up in various spools of redtape.

In my view, what is needed is a legislative solution. So what we now have, in addition to the four of us--the Senators from Kentucky, the Senators from Oregon--is a bipartisan group of 12 Senators on the Industrial Hemp Farming Act. Once and for all, what we would say is, as a matter of law, let's remove hemp from the schedule I controlled substances list and give a green light to farmers from one end of the country to another who believe they would like to have a chance putting people to work growing hemp.

I urge my colleagues to reflect on the history of this time, to learn more about the safe and versatile crop and the great potential it holds to giving a boost to American agriculture and our domestic economy.

This is a bipartisan bill. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell; my colleague from Oregon, Senator Merkley; Senator McConnell's colleague from Kentucky, Rand Paul--the four of us, both Senators from Oregon, both Senators from Kentucky--say this is common sense. Twelve Members of the Senate are on board. It is time to turn this into law and give our hard-working farmers--and I note the Presiding Officer knows a bit about farming--I want to give our farmers another opportunity to generate profit and revenue for their important enterprises in America, and I hope my colleagues will support the legislation.

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