The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently started a new pilot to reimburse patients for hemp-derived products – like CBD – but a hemp ban that Congress passed in November could derail the program.
The new program will make certain Medicare and Medicaid recipients eligible for reimbursement for up to $500 worth of hemp products each year and is intended in part to evaluate whether these products could reduce their other health related costs.
But the program’s definition of hemp comes from the 2018 Farm Bill, which created the loophole that has allowed so many cannabis products to be sold outside state-authorized dispensaries. Under the Farm Bill, hemp is any cannabis product derived from plants containing less than .3% delta nine THC. If the hemp ban that passed with last year’s spending bill goes into effect as planned on 12 November (it goes into effect one year after passage), all products containing more than .4mg of THC of any kind will become federally illegal.
This would criminalize “the vast, vast majority of hemp products, including most non-intoxicating CBD products”, says Jonathan Miller of US Hemp Roundtable.
Inesa Ponomariovaite, owner of Nesa’s Hemp, which specializes in CBDA hemp extract, met with members of Congress this week to advocate for laws that would keep her products legal.
“Congress is trying to pass laws on something that they’re not even fully understanding, and that’s really going to affect us,” Ponomariovaite said, who noted that during her meetings, she had to explain the endocannabinoid system to senators who had not heard of it before.
The endocannabinoid system is a system of receptors throughout the brain and other organs that interacts with cannabinoids, which appear in the cannabis plant but also form naturally in the human body. It helps regulate pain, memory, cognitive processing and energy, which is part of why cannabis products affect us the way they do.
Ponomariovaite says products that contain a wide array of cannabinoids have stronger therapeutic effects than isolated CBD, for example, which might be the only type of CBD available should the ban go through.
Lawmakers have been trying to pass legislation to delay the hemp ban or replace it with regulation since it first passed, Miller said. In December, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden re-introduced the Cannabinoid Safety and Regulation Act, which would replace the ban with regulation to ensure hemp products are safe and free of contaminants. Indiana Representative Jim Baird introduced a bill in January that would delay the hemp ban for two years.
Miller blames political tension as to why neither of these laws have yet made it through Congress: “Congress isn’t passing anything these days, it’s so polarized and so partisan that it’s hard for them to pass even the most obvious bills, and so we’re kind of caught up in that.”
While the White House hasn’t proposed any specific counters to the hemp ban, Trump has posted on Truth Social calling for Congress “to update the Law to ensure that Americans can continue to access the full-spectrum CBD products they have come to rely on.”
The Trump administration has taken steps to reschedule cannabis to acknowledge its medical potential, but has also faced political resistance to many of its pro-cannabis policies, including the Medicare-linked hemp pilot program. A group of advocates, including Drug Free America Foundation and Cannabis Industry Victims Educating litigators sued the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and the CMS administrator, Mehmet Oz, over the program, accusing them of establishing a plan to promote substances that may soon be considered federally illegal without going through proper administrative procedure. The court denied the lawsuit’s attempt to block the program.
Ponomariovaite says that lawmakers are worrying about the wrong thing when they focus their energy on trying to dissect the cannabis plant, making parts of it legal and parts of it illegal. Their focus should instead be on contamination.
“Hemp itself is like a natural soil cleaner. It actually grabs all the micro toxins, the mildew, bacteria, metals, and absorbs them within the hemp plant. So if you extract that plant for medicinal properties, that plant is going to be loaded with toxins,” she said.
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