James Higdon is a freelance writer based in Louisville and author of The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate’s Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History. He can be reached at @jimhigdon. Full disclosure: His father, Jimmy Higdon, is a Republican state senator in the Kentucky state legislature.

Last May, a shipment of 250 pounds of hemp seeds left Italy destined for Kentucky as part of a pilot project made legal by the 2014 federal farm bill. Kentucky farmers had long hoped for a crop that could fill the void left by the decline of tobacco, and many thought that industrial hemp, which is used in a vast array of products, could be that crop.

The hemp seeds cleared customs in Chicago, but when the cargo landed at the UPS wing of Louisville International Airport, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized it, arguing that importing hemp seeds required an import permit, which could take six months to process. If farmers couldn’t get those seeds into the ground by June 1, the entire first year of the hemp pilot program would be dashed.


The DEA would have succeeded in blocking the seeds from reaching Kentucky farmers and university researchers but for the efforts of the state’s agricultural commissioner, who sued the agency and, most improbably, Mitch McConnell.

McConnell—then the Senate’s minority leader—worked furiously to free the seeds from the DEA’s clutches and continued the pro-hemp drumbeat throughout 2014, as he campaigned for reelection. This year, as Senate majority leader, he’s taken a further step by co-sponsoring the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2015 . While the farm bill carved out an exception to allow hemp cultivation in Kentucky, the 2015 bill would remove hemp entirely from the list of drugs strictly regulated by the Controlled Substances Act. It would, in essence, legalize hemp production in the United States.

“We are laying the groundwork for a new commodity market for Kentucky farmers,” McConnell told me. “And by exploring innovative ways to use industrial hemp to benefit a variety of Kentucky industries, the pilot programs could help boost our state’s economy and lead to future jobs. … I look forward to seeing industrial hemp prosper in the Commonwealth.”

Yes, Mitch McConnell said that. About hemp.

To grasp how McConnell—the quintessential establishment Republican—came to champion industrial hemp, you must first understand the economics and internal politics of Kentucky, as well as McConnell’s relationship to Kentucky’s junior senator, Rand Paul. It’s also helpful to know that close to $500 million worth of hemp products produced by Canada and other countries is already sold in the United States through such stores as Whole Foods. McConnell’s move also has potential ramifications beyond the marketplace, providing a credible threat to the Controlled Substances Act since it was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970.

“The fact that Majority Leader McConnell is a co-sponsor of a hemp bill shows how fast the politics are changing on this issue,” said Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit group that favors reform. (Bill Piper should not be confused with Billy Piper, former McConnell chief of staff and current K Street lobbyist).

***

The story of how Mitch McConnell evolved on the hemp issue began in 2010. Rand Paul, a Tea Party favorite, was running to replace the retiring Jim Bunning in the U.S. Senate and spent much of the primary season blasting McConnell, who not only represented the establishment but also supported a different Republican candidate. The McConnell-Paul relationship changed dramatically after Paul prevailed in the primary and McConnell vigorously stepped in to support him in the general election against the Democratic nominee, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway.

The bond only grew when Paul came to the Senate in 2011. Paul encouraged McConnell to consider the hemp issue because it was favored by conservatives and Tea Party types, according to two sources familiar with those discussions. McConnell listened.

The other Kentucky Republican who played a role in McConnell’s evolution was Jamie Comer, the state’s newly minted agriculture commissioner. In August 2012, Comer held a news conference before the 49th annual Kentucky Farm Bureau Country Ham Breakfast—a big shindig on the Kentucky politics circuit—to announce that legalization of hemp in the state would be his No. 1 priority in the next legislative session. Paul and U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, another Kentucky Republican, were there to support Comer; each later testified in support of Comer’s measure before the state Senate agriculture committee in February 2013, along with Rep. John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Louisville.

“I engaged with Jamie Comer,” Yarmuth told me. “He reached out to me. From the beginning it’s been a bipartisan thing.”

In Washington, D.C., McConnell was approached multiple times from hemp supporters back home. After the fourth such approach, the senior senator from Kentucky turned to his chief of staff, Josh Holmes, and said, “We’ve got to look into this.”

***

If, like the average U.S. senator, you are unfamiliar with the botany of the cannabis plant, here’s a quick primer:

For starters, hemp is sometimes referred to as marijuana’s “ cousin,” which is an unhelpful metaphor because hemp and marijuana are actually the same species, Cannabis sativa. They are simply different strains, and they are cultivated and harvested in different ways.

The cannabis plant is dioecious, which means its male and female flowers grow on different plants. This is unusual: Dioecious species—including gingkoes, willows and a few others—make up only 6 percent of all flowering plants.

Hemp is produced after the male plant fertilizes the females—something that happens almost immediately once the plants flower. Marijuana, on the other hand, is produced from the unfertilized flower of the female plant. A person interested in growing marijuana wants only female plants; a plant that shows signs of male flowers is plucked immediately, before it can mature and pollinate the females around it.

Pollen contamination is one of the chief concerns of marijuana growers, legal and illegal, because as soon as a female flower becomes pollinated, she stops making her THC-rich resin and begins focusing entirely on seed production. (Hemp is defined by Kentucky law as containing less than 0.3 percent THC; unfertilized marijuana flowers could have THC levels of 20 percent or more.)

For decades, the law enforcement lobby has peddled anti-hemp talking points that just didn’t add up. During the 2013 farm bill debate, the DEA asserted that, “It can be extremely difficult to distinguish cannabis grown for industrial purposes from cannabis grown for smoking. This is especially true if law enforcement is attempting to make this determination without entering the premises on which the plants are being grown.”

The problem is: While a person could hide some female cannabis plants in a hemp field, it would be impossible to prevent those females from being pollenated by the males surrounding them, rendering them worthless as cannabis grown for smoking.

***

In early 2013, Comer’s bill to allow hemp production in Kentucky had gained traction, and polls showed a growing majority of Kentuckians in support of hemp. As he was leaving a town hall meeting in western Kentucky, Comer’s cellphone rang. McConnell was on the line. “It was a call I was not expecting,” Comer recalls.

“Explain to me why this is important to agriculture,” McConnell said, according to Comer, who walked McConnell through the potential markets for hemp fiber and seed, rattling off a flurry of products made with hemp: cosmetics, oil, food products, automotive upholstery, plastics for door panels and dashboards, biofuel and building materials. And then McConnell asked, “Why should law enforcement not be concerned about this?” Comer gave McConnell his own version of the hemp-versus-marijuana primer and explained why it would be scientifically impossible for hemp to act as a “cover crop” for illegal marijuana.

“I’m going to come out in support of this bill tomorrow, if you’re OK with that,” McConnell told Comer, referring to the state bill.

Days later, Comer’s hemp bill won floor votes in both chambers of the Kentucky legislature, but problems remained. Kentucky Attorney General Conway said the law couldn’t be implemented because hemp was still illegal under federal law. To fix this problem, Comer came to Washington in May 2013 to lobby Congress. Among his appointments: a 20-minute meeting with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

“Why is hemp so important to you?” Boehner wanted to know.

Comer told him that he wanted Kentucky to be in a position to be a national and global leader in hemp production and processing. And then, according to Comer, Boehner shared a story that 10 years before, his daughter had come home from college relaying much the same information about industrial hemp.

“I’m fine with it,” Boehner told him. “If you can get McConnell to get it on the farm bill.”

Comer left that meeting with the impression that Boehner thought this was an impossible task. Far from it. McConnell inserted language into the farm bill that permitted hemp pilot programs in Kentucky and two other states, Colorado and Vermont, according to Vote Hemp, a hemp advocacy group. In the House bill, the hemp provision allowed pilot programs to be conducted only by universities, but McConnell’s version also authorized state departments of agriculture with existing frameworks for legal hemp production to participate. It just so happened that Kentucky, after passage of Comer’s bill, had such a program in place.

Until this point, hemp had only been on the fringes of Washington politics. Suddenly, it was legal to grow in Kentucky and two other states with the blessing of the federal government. Or so everyone thought.

***

McConnell began his reelection campaign in 2014 in the unusual spot of fending off a primary opponent, and hemp legalization and its promise for jobs and profits became a central talking point on the stump. “McConnell would always mention hemp at every stop he made,” Comer said.

His advocacy extended beyond the campaign. In early May, the DEA seized the hemp seeds at the Louisville airport; on May 20, McConnell defeated his primary opponent by 25 points; on May 21, McConnell summoned Michele Leonhart, the head of the DEA, to his Senate offices in Washington. The DEA, it appeared, was trying to find an interpretation of McConnell’s farm bill language that would render the hemp pilot projects unworkable. Leonhart told McConnell that her agency had not yet completed a policy review to determine the “intent” of the hemp provision.

In a news release issued at the conclusion of his meeting with Leonhart, McConnell took aim at this tactic: “I also stressed that as the author of the industrial hemp provision, the intent of this provision is to allow states departments of agriculture and universities to explore the commercial use of industrial hemp as a means for job creation and economic development. The language expressly exempts hemp from federal regulation for these defined purposes.”

McConnell’s message was clear: Don ’ t tell me what I intended. I ’ m the author; I ’ ll tell you.

At around the same time, Kentucky resolved the court case it had filed against the DEA for seizing the hemp seeds by agreeing to the fiction that the seeds were as dangerous as heroin and promising to file an import permit with the DEA. This move allowed the DEA to save face while establishing a method for seed importation that cleared the way for the 2015 hemp growing season to be the biggest in Kentucky since World War II.

But McConnell wasn’t done. As part of a 2014 appropriations bill, he sponsored an amendment to prohibit the DEA from spending federal funds to enforce anti-hemp laws in states where hemp is legal. Not everyone was on board, including Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California. Feinstein voted against McConnell’s amendment during the full committee markup by the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science in June 2014, saying, “I am concerned that this amendment would prevent DOJ, specifically DEA, from enforcing the current requirement to register and seek an import permit.” Despite the objection, McConnell’s amendment passed.

The 2015 Industrial Hemp Farming Act, introduced by Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and co-sponsored by McConnell, Paul and Oregon’s other Democratic senator, Jeff Merkley, would change the landscape even more dramatically.

When asked for comment about the hemp initiatives, the DEA referred questions to the Justice Department, which did not respond. The White House also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

So for now, at least, that leaves Mitch McConnell as the highest-ranking public official advocating for drug policy reform in Washington.

McConnell is “very concerned about the abuse of illegal drugs,” said Jesse Benton, McConnell’s former campaign manager. “But he was able to follow the hemp argument and have his eyes opened and his mind changed. It speaks to the power of the argument of the pro-hemp movement. The logic and the reasoning are so overwhelmingly convincing.”

Correction : An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that a hemp seed pilot program was part of the 2013 farm bill; the program was, in fact, in the 2014 farm bill .