December 25, 2018
Legalizing Hemp Will Likely Shake Up The Market
The 2018 farm bill legalized industrial hemp, after decades of restrictions. Hemp looks like marijuana, it smells like marijuana, but it’s not marijuana. Hemp growers are now anticipating a boom.
ESTHER HONIG, BYLINE: The 2018 Farm Bill legalized industrial hemp after decades of restrictions. Hemp looks like marijuana and smells like marijuana. But it’s not marijuana. Esther Honig of Harvest Public Media reports that hemp growers are now anticipating a boom.
HONIG: Farmers can already grow hemp in more than half the country. States like Colorado where Kristen Kunau grows it with her husband. Come December, most of what’s left of her crop sits in her fridge. She pulls out a mason jar of thick dark syrup. Does that smell more hemp-like or?
KRISTEN KUNAU: Kind of. Kind of sweet.
HONIG: Yeah. But still a little – it smells like…
KUNAU: Cannabis.
HONIG: …Marijuana.
KUNAU: Yeah.
HONIG: I’m always…
KUNAU: It is cannabis.
HONIG: This is CBD or cannabidiol. An oil made from hemp flowers. Unlike marijuana, there’s hardly any THC. So it won’t get you high. It’s increasingly popular for its purported health benefits.
KUNAU: I gave it to my kids. I put it on my face, burns, cuts. We’ve had so many different people tell us how much it’s helped them.
HONIG: CBD is driving the hemp market, which was once a common crop in the U.S. until lumped together with marijuana and banned in 1937. Then in 2014, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for hemp to be grown again as part of state-run research programs. This year, he pushed to remove hemp as a controlled substance.
KUNAU: With the Farm Bill passing and everything, we’re going to be doing more full time.
HONIG: Like many of today’s hemp farmers, the Kunaus have a small operation, just one acre. They also work day jobs. But with the law change, they can finally access bank accounts and low interest federal loans even to be eligible for crop insurance. It all comes at a time when the market for hemp CBD is booming.
JAMIE SCHAU: It’s extremely versatile. It can be used for a whole host of different applications.
HONIG: That’s Jamie Schau with Brightfield Group, a market research company. She says CBD is used in everything from lotions to sports drinks, even dog treats.
SCHAU: It has treatments for everything from epilepsy to MS to arthritis to anxiety, depression, insomnia. The list goes on and on and on.
ESTHER BLESSING: We don’t know that. We don’t have the clinical trial evidence to support that.
HONIG: Esther Blessing teaches psychiatry at NYU and is studying the effects of CBD on people with PTSD and alcohol abuse. The FDA recently approved CBD in a drug that treats a form of epilepsy but that’s it. She says all the hype around CBD is getting ahead of the research.
BLESSING: But on the other hand, as a scientist, I really feel like it is one of the most promising medications that has come along in the last 50 years.
HONIG: Meanwhile, hemp growers like the Kunaus are bracing for change. The price for a pound of hemp flowers reached $75. But with legalization, that’s likely to drop.
KUNAU: I do know everybody’s going to be wanting to grow hemp and CBD. And this one acre is going to seem like nothing compared to people doing 10s and 30 or 50.
HONIG: As more hemp is planted in the country, she hopes falling prices don’t squeeze out small farmers. For NPR News, I’m Esther Honig.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
That story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a reporting collaboration focusing on agriculture and rural issues.
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How Working On Christmas Became A Privilege For 2 Young Doctors
Katherine Streeter for NPR
In what has become a holiday tradition for Shots, we’re encoring a piece by Dr. John Henning Schumann that first ran in 2013. He reminisced then about a difficult assignment during his medical residency that helped him understand what it meant to be a good doctor.
December is supposed to be the time of year filled with family gatherings and holiday good cheer. For medical residents, quite the opposite is true.
There are no school breaks during residency. Being a medical resident is a real job, and a stressful one at that. Residents work long shifts, even with caps that max out at 16 hours for the newbies and up to 28 hours for those beyond the first year.
For many of our trainees — especially those fresh out of medical school — this will be the first holiday season without time off.
It’s well-known among residency program directors like me that interns, trainees in their first year, enter the doldrums as daylight wanes and they have to come to and leave the hospital in cold darkness.
At holiday time, interns are approaching the midpoint of their year. That’s long enough to feel committed to their chosen path but not nearly far enough along to see the finish line’s banners. Doubts amplify.
Combine the low emotional ebb with the knowledge that more of our patients die at this time of year, and interns feel understandably vulnerable. Many wonder at this point if they’ve made the right professional choice. In extreme cases, they wonder if they’ll survive.
I remember lamenting my first December having to work straight through. A wise mentor helped me reframe my self-pity. “It’s a privilege to work on Christmas,” he told me. “Our patients count on us. You may not want to be in the hospital, but think of what they’re going through.” He smiled, as if he were welcoming me to a special club, one that I wasn’t wholeheartedly ready to join. “Your mere presence helps reduce each patient’s sense of loss.”
I was rotating in intensive care, where the outlook for patients can be quite grim on any day, regardless of the season.
A 30-something patient I’ll call Will was brought in after paramedics found him unconscious on the street.
He was in a coma. We didn’t know the cause but set to work trying to give him every opportunity to arise from the slumber of his critical illness.
I was on the rotation with two other interns. We took turns spending nights in the hospital — each of us taking every third night on call. The first night, my buddy Paul spent the night at Will’s bedside trying to figure out a way to replenish his body with fluid, given the massive output that was draining into his urine bag.
Will had suffered a brain injury. One effect was diabetes insipidus, a condition that meant his kidneys couldn’t hold on to his body’s water. The result can be rapid dehydration and death.
Paul’s work saved him. Paul squeezed a few bags of IV fluid into Will to rehydrate him and administered a drug called desmopressin that restored his water balance.
I was certain I wouldn’t have known what to do.
It soon became clear that Will wouldn’t recover from his brain injury. His brain had simply been without oxygen too long before Will got medical attention.
When it was my turn on call, the instructions were simple: Keep Will alive until his relatives could come and say goodbye in person. Will’s grieving mother had expressed the wish, and we felt honor-bound to make it happen. We saw ourselves in Will, and his mother could easily have been our own.
Two days later, when everybody had said their goodbyes, we somberly withdrew the ventilator keeping Will alive. He died soon thereafter.
Years later, reflecting on my first holidays in the hospital, I realized that my mentor’s wisdom had been crucial. That December, Paul and I had started the long process of becoming professionals.
John Henning Schumann is a writer and doctor in Tulsa, Okla. He serves as president of the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa. He also hosts Public Radio Tulsa’s Medical Matters and is on Twitter: @GlassHospital
