#5: It's a Hemp Thing

HEMP & CANNABIS – THE DEBATE,
MISCONCEPTIONS AND MISINFORMATION
By David Bonvillain
Owner and Chief Science Officer
Elite Botanicals
Regardless of whether you
research online, attend a
conference, or just talk to ‘those
in the know,’ there is a wealth of
misinformation regarding CBD and
Hemp. We want to clear up some
misinformation and provide some
basics in the hopes of allowing the
reader to properly differentiate
between the sources of products
that are available on the market.
Let’s address the “CBD from hemp
vs. cannabis” debate first.
Historically speaking—as in 4+
years ago—this would have been a
fairly straightforward discussion.
The differentiation was the source
of the CBD. On one hand you had
industrial hemp crops (oilseed and
fiber varieties) farmed in other
countries that contain almost
no cannabinoids at all and were
processed by the hundreds of
thousands of pounds to produce
isolated CBD. The counterpoint to
that was cannabinoid rich (type-
3 drug, see “Cannabis Botanical
Classifications” page 10) varieties
that are very high in CBD in addition
to having a full spectrum of other
naturally occurring cannabinoids,
terpenoids and flavonoids that
all play a synergistic effect with
9
each other. This is thought to be
significantly more therapeutic as
a whole than any one component
alone. Hence the sentiment – CBD
from hemp = bad, CBD from
cannabis = good.
I prefaced that paragraph with
‘historically speaking’ because such
a clean distinction no longer exists
outside of botanical and science
circles. The United States originally
had no real definition of ‘hemp’
outside of the exclusionary sentence
in the U.S drug code removing
seeds and stalks from the definition
‘Marijuana’ in the Controlled
Substances Act. That definition
changed with the introduction of a
clause in the 2014 Farm Bill (also
known as the 2014 Agricultural
Act) that defined Industrial Hemp
as “the plant Cannabis sativa L.
and any part of such plant, whether
growing or not, with a delta-9
tetrahydrocannabinol concentration
of not more than 0.3 percent on a
dry weight basis.”
Well…now we have a U.S. definition
for hemp that has nothing to
do with its industrial purpose,
botanical lineage of the plant, or the
scientific category it may be placed
in. This “new” definition of hemp is
purely based on the cannabis plant’s
cannabinoid percentage and, even
then, of one specific cannabinoid.