The farm bill, passed by the House on Wednesday after clearing the Senate, has plenty of corporate welfare and market-distorting subsidies, but it also includes a long overdue end to the prohibition of industrial hemp -- which should never have been illegal in the first place.

Hemp lacks the psychoactive properties of its better-known cousin marijuana. For much of early American history, was a key fiber used in everything from clothing to rope to paper, making it one of the most widely grown and most popular crops in the colonies.

That all changed at the federal level with the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 which brought an end to legal marijuana in the U.S. Marijuana and hemp alike were demonized as Congress adopted a new narcotics regime, leaving no room for pragmatic analysis that would have revealed the error of conflating hemp with its psychoactive counterpart.

Indeed, had lawmakers bothered to look at the most comprehensive study at the time, things might have been different. The Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission had been commissioned by the British House of Commons in 1893, and it showed that the salacious stories in the poplar press had little bearing on reality. Hemp was just an innocent bystander, not the reefer they were afraid of.

Since then, hemp has remained illegal and has not been widely cultivated. The exception, of course, was the brief period during World War II when need for hemp for the U.S. Navy saw government encouragement of cultivation. But when the wartime market dried up, so did support for hemp, which was again regulated like marijuana.

That illegality was formalized the passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. Cannabis, including hemp, was put on the list of Schedule I drugs, alongside heroin.

Decades later, lawmakers finally seem to have figured out the difference between the two products derived from cannabis, recognizing that outlawing useful fiber that doesn’t get you high is the worst kind of overregulation.

The political will for such a change is due, in large part, to a push from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has talked about the issue for months owing to its potential to boost the economy in Kentucky. That effort seems to have finally paid off, and Congress has paved the way for U.S. farmers to get back in the profitable business of hemp.