“That raised a lot of eyebrows, including in McConnell’s office,” Eric Steenstra, a hemp lobbyist, told me. “They saw the winds were shifting.”
Along with Representative Jared Polis, now the governor of Colorado, Mr. McConnell included a hemp pilot program in the 2014 farm bill — for “research.” In the legislation, hemp was defined as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent THC — an arbitrary threshold, not a scientific distinction: Nothing in the Farm Bill, in case law, or in the Controlled Substances Act seemed to say anything about CBD. So entrepreneurs interpreted this research-oriented pilot program as the de facto legalization of cannabidiol.
The Drug Enforcement Administration disagreed, but couldn’t stop the tidal wave of CBD production. In 2018, over 60 percent of the hemp crop in Kentucky was grown for CBD. Then, long after the country was already flooded with CBD products both dubious and legitimate, Mr. McConnell inserted language into the 2018 Farm Bill explicitly making hemp federally legal.«