Hemp Magazine

4 | h ealth.livlabsnow.com The study found that there were hemp varieties – cannabis grown for industrial purposes – in both the indica and sativa categories. This suggests that hemp is not just a very low THC variety of cannabis sativa. In fact, another study of 124 cannabis plants found that hemp varieties had significant genetic differen - tiation from marijuana strains but that they generally had more in common with marijuana strains labeled indica. Hemp, it seems, defies a clear taxonomical definition. Today, in the United States and across much of the world, there is a legal, if somewhat arbitrary, definition of what consti - tutes hemp versus marijuana. This definition is based solely on the content of one of hundreds of cannabinoids found in can- nabis plants, namely THC, the psychoactive compound that can make you “high.” Laws legalizing hemp in the United States have determined that anything containing less than .3% of THC is clas - sified as industrial hemp and does not fall under the marijuana prohibition. Anything above that concentration of THC is consid- ered marijuana. The 0.3% number comes from an article that tried to create a “practical and natural taxonomy” for cannabis. In 1973, Canadian researcher Ernest Small and his partner, Arthur Cronquist, needed a benchmark to separate hemp from cannabis for their taxonomy study . They chose THC content as the marker and arbitrarily decid- ed .3% would be the cutoff between the two. Years later, Small stated in an interview that he and Cronquist never intended .3% to be a method of legal standardization. He indicated it was only meant to separate the subtypes for research purposes. But their intention didn’t matter. In the 1970s, when marijuana was officially outlawed in the United States, the .3% threshold was written into law. Many think the threshold is flawed for several reasons. A con - centration of .3% THC is well below the 1% threshold, which is the amount required to get someone “high.” Additionally, simple environmental factors are enough to change the THC content of a cannabis plant. An extra warm spring could easily push the THC level of any given crop from .27% to .31%, effectively destroying the farmer’s whole crop for no reason except that it crept over the arbitrary, artificially low threshold for THC content. There is currently a movement in a few states and some countries in Europe to change the laws so that the legal defini - tion of industrial hemp is anything below 1% THC instead of the arbitrarily set .3%. Switzerland already has a 1% THC threshold as law. For perspective, most marijuana strains these days contain between 10% and 20% THC content. What makes the .3% threshold even more arbitrary is the fact that industrial hemp often is used to create clothing, building materials, cosmetics and for other uses, where there is no con- cern whatsoever about the THC content since the products are not inhaled or ingested. In the case of CBD and other supple- ments, any small trace amount of THC allowed by law in most countries is nowhere near the threshold to have an intoxicating potential.