A coalition of 22 state attorneys general is calling on Congress to address “the glaring vagueness” that has led to legal cannabis products being sold over the counter across the country — including sometimes from vending machines or online.
A letter dated March 20 addresses the consequences of Republican lawmakers' choice to legalize hemp production in the 2018 omnibus Farm Bill — a decision that perhaps inadvertently led to a multibillion-dollar market in intoxicating cannabis products that are arguably federally legal.
Now, the attorneys general want Congress to shutter the market it helped create. In the new Farm Bill, they want the legislature to enshrine in statute the idea that intoxicating cannabis is not federally legal — contrary to what the law currently states.
In other words, they want Congress to say that, by definition, hemp can’t get you high.
The rise of the legal (and intoxicating) hemp market runs counter to the development over the past decade of the highly-regulated recreational and medicinal cannabis industries that voters have approved across the country — a wild west of exotic cannabinoids sold without any of the strict controls of the formal legal market.
“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,” the attorneys general wrote.
The bipartisan coalition brings together representatives of a diverse group of states — not just red and blue, but those where recreational marijuana is legal (California, Hawaii), those where it is only legal for medical use (Pennsylvania) and those where it is fully illegal (Georgia).
It also includes some states where ballot initiatives for legal cannabis were voted down (North Dakota, South Dakota and Arkansas).
The impacts of the intoxicating hemp product boom — which, for example, allows highly-concentrated isolates of the active ingredient in cannabis to be sold by mail — are “dangerously undermining regulations and consumer protections in states where adult-use legal cannabis programs are already in place,” they added.
That massive industry, and the current controversy, rest on a bit of legal hairsplitting that in many ways contradicts a biological reality. The law relies on the idea that there is a clear distinction between marijuana, which is........