Congress voted last year to strip most hemp THC products of their federal legal status, starting November 12. On Saturday morning, the Senate pushed that date to December 11. Here is what the ban actually does, what the vote changed and why this extension is probably the last one.
At 3:35 on Saturday morning, after a week of political fights and a threatened holdup of the entire government funding bill, the US Senate voted to give the hemp industry 29 more days.
Three days earlier, a White House official had already told Senate Republicans there would not be another 29.
If you have not been following this fight closely, here is the short version of what is at stake, and then what actually happened.
First: What Is the Hemp Ban?
In 2018, the Farm Bill legalized hemp, defined as cannabis containing no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight. Nobody in Congress seemed to anticipate what would happen next. Chemists worked out how to convert legal hemp-derived CBD into intoxicating cannabinoids the statute had not mentioned: delta-8, delta-10, HHC, THC-O. Growers realized THCA flower is not intoxicating until you heat it, which meant it technically fell inside the definition. Beverage makers built a THC seltzer category from scratch.
Within a few years, that gap became a multibillion-dollar industry selling weed-adjacent products in gas stations, smoke shops, liquor stores and grocery aisles, including in states where marijuana itself is still illegal.
Late last year, Congress moved to close it. Tucked into the spending bill that ended the record-long government shutdown was Section 781 of P.L. 119-37, a rewrite of the federal definition of hemp. Trump signed it into law, though his administration would later push Congress to postpone the very restrictions he had approved. The provision was championed by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the same senator who wrote …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
