The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin has no legal right to grow industrial hemp on its reservation, the federal government says while seeking to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the tribe.
Attorneys representing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Justice have asked a judge to throw out the tribe’s suit challenging the basis for a federal raid last October on a crop that was found growing on the Menominee reservation.
Drug agents seized what they described as 30,000 marijuana plants from a remote field where a posted sign declared the operation an industrial hemp farm.
Menominee officials later sued the federal government and asserted that the tribe — in partnership with the College of Menominee Nation — was growing hemp only and that the tribe is exempt from Wisconsin state law prohibiting any such cannabis crop.
Without distinguishing between hemp and other forms of cannabis, federal attorneys responded to the lawsuit Wednesday by arguing that Indian tribes are subject to the same state and federal restrictions on hemp production as any other private concern.
“There is no question that the federal government can regulate hemp cultivation on tribal land,” the attorneys wrote.
Menominee Tribal Chairman Gary Besaw and other representatives of the tribe could not be reached for comment.
The tribe’s civil suit is pending in U.S. District Court in Green Bay.
The court battle is being waged against a backdrop of relaxed laws on marijuana in some states, accompanied by a growing number of native American tribal efforts to pursue related business ventures stemming from changing public attitudes toward cannabis usage.
Members of the Menominee tribe voted in an advisory referendum last August to approve legalizing marijuana for both medical and recreational use on the reservation north of Shawano.
Wisconsin state law, however, still prohibits marijuana as well as industrial hemp, which is another form of the cannabis plant commonly used in such products as clothing, paper and detergents.
The federal government has issued guidelines under which native American tribes should be permitted to cultivate industrial hemp crops, provided that such activity is consistent with state laws.
In their lawsuit filed in November, Menominee tribal officials asked a judge to declare that the tribe was within its rights to grow the crop that agents had seized one month previously.
No criminal charges have been filed in connection with the alleged marijuana plants, which the tribe insists were legal hemp plants.
The government’s response sets out numerous arguments for dismissing the tribe’s civil suit, including that hemp is illegal in Wisconsin, just like marijuana, and that the Menominee tribe is not exempt from the law.
“Wisconsin law clearly does not allow the growing or cultivating of industrial hemp,” the government’s attorneys state. “To the contrary, such cultivation is expressly prohibited.”
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