The sale of marijuana related products for recreational use began this month in Missouri. But also, a revival of a related pre-Civil War agriculture staple for Platte County, hemp, is underway.
Bill Graham
Various varieties of the cannabis plant produces either a drug experience or a non-drug industrial fiber. Production of both types may change the texture of the greenery you see growing when driving through the county in summer.
I think about the Fourth of July regarding the THC-heavy products used to get high. When I light the fuse on inexpensive bottle rockets, I know most are going to go upward, at least at first, but then they can zig and zag in a variety of directions.
Now and then, one goes sideways toward the house. That may be the way legal recreational pot goes. Just like alcohol, some people will handle it, some won’t.
So here we go again, because prior to the Civil War, Missouri was a leading hemp producing state. Platte County was listed in federal records as among the top five hemp producing counties in Missouri in 1860. Excellent soil, slave labor, and the ability to transport product down the Missouri River to markets made it so.
Hemp paid for many of the antebellum brick houses we still find scattered across the county. Then the war ended slavery. Farm families were unable to come up with enough workers for the back-breaking hand labor to plant, cut, bind in shocks, lay the shocks out in the fields over winter for retting, and then roll the hemp into large bales for shipping.
W.M. Paxton, the lawyer and historian who witnessed and wrote about the county’s early decades, wrote: “From the first settlement of the county, hemp was the staple product. We became wealthy by its culture.”
In the last century, commercial substitutes arose for products hemp once supported, plus various complicated legal and government issues arose. Then in the 1970s, the war on drugs outlawed anything connected with the marijuana plant. But now, hemp production is ramping up, including here in northwest Missouri, thanks to recent federal and state changes in law.
I recall a few decades back a Platte County farm family lobbying for legalization of industrial hemp. It’s happened. For example, on the internet I found a 2020 webpage for a company founded by Buchanan and Platte County business folks that is gearing up for hemp production.
Missouri voters approved medical marijuana in 2018, and then in November they approved the sale of recreational cannabis for people 21 and older. People can grow limited quantities for personal use.
So now we need clarification. What’s the difference between the weed people have been smoking or eating for a high and the hemp plants raised to produce fiber and oil?
Remember, too, there are varieties of cannabis sativa and cannabis indica, and various hybrid combinations. Generally, the THC compound that produces a “high” is higher in plants for drug use and very low in industrial hemp plants.
It’s been a surprisingly quiet start up for commercialization of both types. Although, if you were around in the 1960s and 1970s it is strange and surreal to see billboards along Interstate 29 promoting cannabis products, be they providing CBD or THC.
When I arrived in Platte County in 1981, patches of “ditch weed” plants were commonly seen along roadsides and in fallow fields. Wild hemp descended from the mid-1800s farming grew in fence lines and field corners. Pot smokers avoided it. But when the war on drugs provided significant federal financial reimbursement to law enforcement for destroying cultivated pot, local agencies began attacking the wild weed and publicizing it loudly as a tamp down on crime.
Law enforcement correctly noted that drug dealers in cities were profiting by watering down the real deal with ditch weed. But sometimes it felt like overkill. Law enforcement and private landowners were successful in eradication. I can’t recall the last time I saw a marijuana plant growing wild in the county. Though University of Missouri Extension notes it as still present.
The next decade will be interesting. I favor, with hesitations, legalization of cannabis. I’ve had a problem with beer, wine, and whiskey ads being all over television, and a staple of the Super Bowl ads and celebrations, and yet people could go to prison for marijuana. But I worry about use by young people. Just like with alcohol, I worry about people driving under the influence.
Yet I also believe in personal freedoms for adults if they are harming no one else. I don’t smoke cigarettes and despise second-hand smoke. But I feel people should be free to smoke if they choose.
Freedom enables choices in life that produce consequences. We head into uncharted territory with the hope, though uncertain, that this new era reduces some problems such as gang crime, and that the consequences are no more severe for our community overall than the end of alcohol Prohibition in 1933. We’ll see.
Bill Graham is a long-time commentator on Platte County and its history. He lives in the Platte City area and can be reached at editor@plattecountycitizen.com.