A powerful Senate committee has approved a bill that contains provisions hemp industry stakeholders say would devastate the market by banning consumable hemp products with any “quantifiable” amount of THC. However, bipartisan members agreed to delay the implementation of the ban for one year.
On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA spending legislation that covers the next fiscal year—and also includes provisions that would significantly revise hemp laws following the crop’s legalization under the 2018 Farm Bill.
The bill “closes the hemp loophole that has resulted in the proliferation of unregulated intoxicating hemp products being sold across the country,” a committee summary says.
Ahead of the panel vote, several sources told Marijuana Moment that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who championed hemp legalization through that 2018 legislation while serving as majority leader, was behind the restrictive cannabis language, vying to redefine his legacy by recriminalizing intoxicating cannabinoid products such as delta-8 THC.
At Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) said he appreciates McConnell’s concerns but worries that the new prohibition would be overbroad and impact even non-intoxicating products, saying the language “addresses one very important issue, but causes another problem.”
“It’s been a privilege to work with Senator McConnell on hemp,” he said. “We first brought to this committee the idea that research should be done on hemp, and then later we put in an amendment that proceeded to allow seeds to be transferred across states, and now there is a hemp industry.”
“The important issue it addresses is not allowing hemp to be grown to produce hallucinogenic products, and that, unfortunately, due to the magic of laboratories, has occurred,” Merkley said. “But then there are other products that come from hemp such as CBD that has, in fact, been a significant factor as a healthcare supplement in many, many products across America that does not have a hallucinogenic effect.”
“I would like to continue to work with Senator McConnell to see if we can develop, in the course of this year, a definition that addresses hallucinogenic factors but does not eliminate the CBD product that is non hallucinogenic [and] that is valued by many Americans across the land,” he said.
“I know that there’s important work to be done on the hemp, but this one year [delay] will enable our farmers who are growing hemp currently to produce this year’s crop within the existing framework, and we’ll have a conversation over the coming year,” Merkley said.
McConnell appeared less interested in using the year to establish an alternative regulatory framework, saying that he’s simply agreeing to “give our hemp farmers ample time to prepare for their future.”
“The 2018 Farm Bill federally legalized hemp as an agricultural product,” the senator said. “This language had an unintended consequence that has allowed for intoxicating hemp-derived synthetic products to be made and sold across our country.”
“These intoxicating products have flooded the market in the absence—no regulatory structure, and [businesses] often use deceptive and predatory marketing towards children with packaging and logos similar to existing food products such as Oreos, candy, gummies and cereals,” McConnell said.
“The way I see it, the language I helped secure takes us back to the original intent of the 2018 Farm Bill, and closes this loophole,” the former Senate majority leader said, adding that the hemp provisions prior agriculture legislation “sought to create an agricultural hemp industry—not open the door to the sale of unregulated, intoxicating lab-made, hemp-derived substances with no safety framework.”
The hemp language in the new Senate spending bill is nearly identical to what the House Appropriations Committee passed late last month, with noted cannabis prohibitionist Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) leading the charge.
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