In the US it may have changed , but Alberta is in Canada where it is still a Schedule II drug .
Updated: 09/06/2014
In 2013, Canadian farmers grew about 27,000 hectares(66,700 acres) of cannabis hemp for seed. These fields of female "hemp" plants look just like "marijuana" with big, sticky, resinous buds. In fact, "hemp" plants can produce just as much resin as "marijuana" plants.
It's true that hemp resin is low in psychoactive THC, but it's still rich in CBD and other medicinal cannabinoids. Like THC, CBD is a cannabinoid with many medicinal benefits, but unlike THC it doesn't really get you high.
The benefits of CBD have only become known fairly recently, and now many marijuana breeders are working to produce high CBD strains, by crossing "hemp" strains with "marijuana" strains. Their goal is to produce marijuana-type plants that make CBD instead of THC.
When marijuana is grown indoors, male plants are culled, and only the resin-bearing female plants are allowed to grow. This maximizes resin production as the unfertilized female plants do not use any energy to make seeds.
When the female cannabis plants are grown outdoors for seed production, they are fertilized by male pollen. Yet even when full of seeds, the plants still keep producing resin, albeit less then when they are left unfertilized.
What all this means is that Canada's hemp fields are also producing a lot of CBD-rich resin, even though the farmers are only harvesting the seeds.
Sadly, our hemp farmers are forbidden by law from saving or using any of the resins their plants produce. During harvest, the seeds are removed from the resinous flower heads, which are then mulched back into the soil or otherwise disposed of.
So that 27,000 hectares of cannabis grown last year, how much resin did it produce? It's tricky to estimate, but we can make a pretty good guess.
A million kilos of resin
According to the United Nations, Afghan cannabis farmers get a yield of about 145 kilos of resin per hectare of cannabis. However, they're not growing seeded plants, and so their resin yields are higher than what we'd get for our seeded hemp in Canada.
Morocco is a better comparison, because there the farmers don't bother to separate the male and female plants, and so they use seeded buds to make hash. According to the UN, Moroccan farmers get a yield of about 40 kilos of resin per hectare.
If we assume that the seeded Canadian cannabis would yield the same as Moroccan, then 27,000 hectares times 40 kilos comes to just over a million kilos of resin.
A billion grams of cannabis resin -- that's what our farmers are throwing away each year!
Let's compare that million kilos of hemp resin with Canada's indoor marijuana harvest.
Canada's total annual marijuana consumption has been estimated at 770,000 kg, but let's assume that's too low, and round up to a million kilos of cannabis being smoked across the country each year. With a 20 per cent resin content, that comes to 200,000 kilos of resin, less than a fifth of what is being thrown away by our hemp farmers!
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
