While the legalization of industrial hemp five years ago heralded potentially vast new markets, the reality has brought chaos, exploitation and threats to public health, state attorneys general warn in a letter to the Committee on Agriculture in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Top law enforcement officials from 20 states and the District of Columbia signed on to the bi-partisan letter, dated Wednesday, March 20, which urges Congress to use the upcoming Farm Bill to address the spread of intoxicating hemp products across the nation.
“The promise of the 2018 Farm Bill to create this agricultural commodity market . . . has failed,” according to the two-page letter. “Instead, hemp-derived intoxicants have proliferated across our states, posing a significant threat to public health and safety, and benefiting unregulated, untaxed, and unaccountable market actors,” the letter says.
Congress legalized hemp under the 2018 Farm Bill, and the crop was touted for its potential across a number of sectors: seed for food; fiber for textiles, insulation and high-tech applications; hemp “hurd” for construction; and extracts, mainly CBD health supplements made from the plant’s flowers.
But the federal law created a loophole by not accounting for synthetically produced psychoactive products that can be manufactured from CBD base material.
After the market for over-the-counter CBD extract health aids boomed then busted beginning in 2019, companies left holding backlog CBD stocks started selling them to the producers of high-producing compounds such as delta-8 THC, often referred to as “diet weed” or “marijuana light.”
An entirely new sector made up of intoxicating hemp products rapidly developed among CBD producers, and distributors and sellers of products containing the synthetic compounds. The products, packaged to mimic popular brand-name snacks to make them attractive to youth, quickly spread, unregulated, through gas stations and convenience stores, bodegas, hemp and CBD shops and other retail outlets.
“Because of the ambiguity created by the 2018 Farm Bill, a massive gray market worth an estimated $28 billion has exploded, forcing cannabis-equivalent products into our economies regardless of states’ intentions to legalize cannabis use, and dangerously undermining regulations and consumer protections in states where adult-use legal cannabis programs are already in place,” the letter observes.
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