Loper Comes for the DEA. Will it Matter, Though?

By Griffen Thorne, Attorney@ Harris Sliwoski,

Earlier this week, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a case entitled Anderson v. Diamondback Investment Group, LLC, handed the DEA a big loss when it comes to hemp – at least for now. In Anderson, the court held that DEA’s interpretation that a host of hemp-derived products were illegal was essentially wrong. Today I want to talk about why Anderson is – and isn’t really – important.

Anderson, as I wrote more than a month ago, was based in relevant part on Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a 2024 US Supreme Court decision. Here’s what I said then:

Loper ended what’s often referred to as “Chevron deference.” To vastly oversimplify, Chevron deference required federal courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes, even if courts did not agree with those interpretations. With Chevron dead, courts will not be required to defer to agencies and courts can decide, on their own, whether an agency’s interpretation was within its statutory authority.

Ever since Loper was decided, there have been a million different theories on how it could affect the cannabis and hemp industries. [For the record, I agree with folks like Shane Pennington who argue that Loper will not affect rescheduling.]

When it comes to hemp though, Loper may in theory have more of an impact, as my colleague, Vince Sliwoski, argued prior to Loper‘s publication. That’s because the DEA routinely issues what amount to opinion letters as to whether this or that cannabinoid is or is not a schedule I narcotic. Under Loper, if there were any statutory ambiguity, the DEA’s interpretation would no longer be given deference. That’s not to say that the DEA might not prevail, but it means the deck would be less stacked in DEA’s favor.

And that is essentially what happened in Anderson. Without getting into the factual weeds of the case, an employee had been terminated after drug tests allegedly showed marijuana use. She sued, in part claiming that she used legal hemp-derived products. The court ultimately held that she had failed to provide they were legal because she did not introduce sufficient evidence that the hemp products had less than 0.3% delta-9 THC.

However, for purposes of this post, the important part of the Anderson decision was its discussion of the 2018 Farm Bill and DEA’s interpretations of the legality of various cannabinoids under that law. One specific cannabinoid that the court analyzed was THC-O, which does not occur naturally but is created from hemp derivatives.

For years, there has been a heated debate as to whether hemp-derived products like delta-8 THC are considered “hemp” under the 2018 Farm Bill. The debate centers around whether these products are “synthetic” because they are derived from other cannabinoids. This is important because DEA considers synthetic cannabinoids to be controlled substances.

A few years ago, in AK Futures LLC v. Boyd Street Distro, LLC, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals addressed the issue (albeit in a much different context), and held that delta-8 THC products derived from hemp with less than 0.3% THC were legal under the 2018 Farm Bill.

Importantly, Anderson found AK Futures persuasive, holding:

“we think the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation of the 2018 Farm Act is the better of the two. And we’re free to make that determination ourselves, despite a contrary interpretation from the DEA, because we agree with the Ninth Circuit that [the 2018 Farm Bill’s definition of hemp] is unambiguous . . ., and because even if it were ambiguous, we needn’t defer to the agency’s interpretation [as a result of the Loper decision].”

Crucially, Anderson held that “rather than originating from organic matter—like the hemp-derived cannabinoids at issue—, synthetic cannabinoids are just that: compounds manufactured entirely out of synthetic materials.”

To summarize all of this, according to the Fourth Circuit, if a product is derived from hemp and does not contain more than 0.3% THC, it is legal. This includes things pulled directly from the plant, or things like delta-8 THC which may take other processes to produce. But, any cannabinoid derived purely from synthetic materials would not be considered “hemp” under the 2018 Farm Bill.

All of that said, Anderson probably won’t matter much. As I noted in in July:

[A]ll of [the discussion about Loper] is almost certainly academic – at least if Congress passes the Farm Bill with proposed amendments that would ban intoxicating hemp products. If that happens, the DEA won’t need to opine on the legality of many (if not most or all) intoxicating hemp products. The law would have already changed to prohibit them expressly.

But what happens if the upcoming Farm Bill doesn’t contain bans on intoxicating hemp products? Things will almost certainly not end there. The FDA, which has been hostile to many hemp products since the day the 2018 Farm Bill was passed, could simply claim products are adulterated or misbranded and seek to pull them from the market. It does this with kratom, which is an unscheduled plant, and there’s no reason why it could not do it here (subject again to FDA having to prove its case in a post-Loper court challenge).

And, as I noted, federal law isn’t the only thing that matters:

Things are also not looking great for intoxicating hemp products at the state and local levels. The State of Virginia, for example, just levied nearly $11 million in fines against more than 300 retailers allegedly selling state-prohibited intoxicating hemp products. Out west, the Colorado attorney general sued a business in June for allegedly selling super-high THC products marketed as federally legal hemp.

We also assume that there is a lot of local enforcement actions that go under the radar – things like state or local public health officials pulling products from shelves or warning stores. That can be harder to track if for no other reason than it doesn’t often make the news. We also assume that a lot of the reports concerning enforcement against alleged illegal marijuana stores or operators, including in places like New York, may miss the legal nuances between intoxicating hemp products and illegal cannabis products.

In sum, the intoxicating cannabinoid industry just won the battle with DEA, but it’s probably not going to win the war.

Reprinted with the permission of Harris Sliwoski