By Ahmad Dagher
WASHINGTON, D.C.––The House’s farm bill 2024 now includes a nationwide ban on products containing intoxicating cannabis.
Passed every 5 years, this version of the farm bill would significantly depart from the last bill enacted into law in December 2018.
The 2018 bill had made it much easier for farmers to cultivate hemp, or the nonintoxicating type of cannabis, for medical use.
However, focusing on the pure language of the 2018 bill does not offer a complete picture of its practical implications. While still seemingly disallowing the cultivation of intoxicating cannabis plants, the bill’s vagueness in its wording, as well as the fact that both hemp and marijuana (the intoxicating and nonintoxicating versions of cannabis) are essentially the same plants, meant that in the past six years, something unprecedented has occurred in America: the creation of a thriving market of unregulated, available cannabis products.
This market, a “multi-billion-dollar industry subject to few rules and regulations,” is one that 22 state attorneys general demand should be shut down.
The vocabulary added to the bill by Representative Mary Miller changes the definition of legal hemp to “naturally, occurring, naturally derived and non-intoxicating cannabinoids.”
In effect, that would make cannabinoids like delta-8 THC, delta-9 THC, and THCa (all naturally occurring, but also generally chemically derived and intoxicating), and the edibles and drinks that use them, illegal.
Miller stated in a press release that she was proud her amendment would be able to “close the loophole that has allowed drug-infused THC products like Delta-8 to be sold to teenagers in packaging that looks like candy.”
The hemp sector fired back on Friday: the Hemp Roundtable asked Congressmen to “vote against the Farm Bill unless the Mary Miller Amendment is removed,” referring to the amendment as “hemp industry-killing.”
But this crackdown on hemp might prove to bring together many: specifically, marijuana farmers in states like Nevada, who have very strictly regulated markets, have been calling for more regulation on intoxicating hemp, since it’s a product that is nearly identical to their own, except without any form of regulation.
The amendment, however, will have to pass through both the House and the Senate if these groups wish to see their wants fulfilled.
