Newsbrief:
DEA
Must
Pay
Hemp
Industry
Plaintiff's
Legal
Bills,
Court
Rules
2/4/05
https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/373/bronner.shtml
The Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) must reimburse Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps more than $20,000 in legal
bills the company accrued as it financed the Hemp
Industry Association's (HIA) effort to overturn DEA attempts to ban
the sale of foods containing hemp products. Citing the Equal Access
to Justice Act, the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered
the DEA to pay $21,265.
"The EAJA allows an award
of attorneys fees in this situation only where the court finds the Government's
position was not 'substantially justified,'" said Joe Sandler, HIA's counsel
in the case. "By making this award, the Court has basically decided
that DEA's attempt to outlaw hemp foods never had any real legal merit."
Lack of merit did not stop
the DEA from reflexively attempting to bar hemp foods. In a
three-year legal struggle that ended last September, the agency willfully
misconstrued the language of the Controlled Substances Act, which clearly
leaves non-psychoactive hemp outside the purview of DEA regulation, leaving
the country's nascent hemp foods industry stalled at a time it should have
been taking off. The DEA also argued that hemp foods must be banned
because they could cause false positive readings on drug tests, a
position the industry has effectively debunked.
"We are very pleased to recoup
a portion of the costs associated in fighting off the DEA's illegal attempt
to ban nutritious hemp seed," said Dr. Bronner's president David Bronner.
"We plan to use the money to fund industrial hemp studies in Canada as
well as legislative efforts to allow farmers to grow industrial hemp in
the United States. Hemp seed for foods on account of its omega-3
content is the immediate market driver building economies of scale; we're
also supporting hemp fiber research and applications as a substitute for
timber in paper and fiberglass in composites."
"The recently revived global
hemp market is a thriving commercial success," noted the Hemp Industry
Association in a press release greeting the ruling. "Unfortunately,
due to drug war paranoia, the DEA confuses non-psychoactive industrial
hemp varieties of cannabis with psychoactive varieties, and thus the US
is the only major industrialized nation to prohibit the growing of industrial
hemp."
-- END --
Issue #373
-- 2/4/05
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