In the News

he second floor of the Pines Eatery hosted a trade show on Friday with producers and visionaries displaying building blocks, shoes, wallboard, insulation, ink, takeout food containers and pretzels that shared an ingredient: hemp, a plant akin to marijuana but without psychoactive properties.

Going back to colonial times, hemp was a part of Pennsylvania’s economy. Workers wove hemp fibers into rope and fabric and ground hemp seeds into oil.

That changed after the criminalization of marijuana in the 1930s.

Now an effort is underway to recreate the state’s hemp industry.

And it’s starting in Hazleton.

“It’s got to be a whole new ecosystem that we’re putting together,” said Thomas Trite, who inserted Hazleton into hemp’s resurgence by creating a nonprofit corporation, Vytal Plant Science Research, to 140 people at the trade show.

Vytal obtained a grant of $1 million from the National Science Foundation to map out a plan for industrial hemp in Pennsylvania. The trade fair and reception to announce the start of that effort drew, among others, the director of the National Science Foundation, the president of Penn State University and the Pennsylvania secretary of agriculture.

“What we need around here are jobs, more jobs and better-paying jobs,” U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, whose rank on a science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee helped get the grant. “That’s what we’re up to today.”

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