Amendment killing nationally legal cannabis makes it into House farm bill

A ban on intoxicating hemp products has made it into the House version of the farm bill.

If the amendment makes it through a polarized House and divided Congress, it would end America’s brief experiment with nationally legal cannabis.

The language added to the House version of the farm bill by Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) in effect repeals a sweeping legal change passed by an all-Republican coalition in 2018’s farm bill.

That previous bill made it far easier for American farmers to grow nonintoxicating varieties of cannabis, defined in the statute as “hemp,” for industrial and medical use.

But vagueness in the law’s wording, combined with the fact that intoxicating and nonintoxicating varieties of cannabis (“hemp” and “marijuana,” respectively) are functionally the same plant, allowed the evolution over the past six years of something not seen in America since the Gilded Age: a thriving market in universally available and largely unregulated cannabis products, as The Hill reported.

“Because of the ambiguity created by the 2018 Farm Bill, a massive gray market worth an estimated $28 billion has exploded,” a coalition of 22 state attorneys general wrote Congress in March, demanding members shut it down.

The attorneys argued that the 2018 law forced “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.” [Read More @ The Hill]