Stacy McCaskill began growing hemp in 2019, shortly after Congress included the long-prohibited plant in the farm bill.
Now her business Hempstock Pharms in northern Illinois sells more than 150 hemp products.
“We do everything that’s hemp-derived and that’s legal compliant, from smokeables, topicals, tinctures, edibles, drinkables,” McCaskill said. “We’re in every single category of cannabinoid consumption.”
But a new federal ban on hemp products set to go into effect on Dec. 11 would force her to stop selling most of her inventory.
“This is devastating what’s happening,” McCaskill said. “We’re really busy right now trying to figure out our end of game. Like, how do we wind this all down? How do we make a pivot into the products that are not cannabinoids or can be compliant products?”
Right now, she said the products that would fit the new regulations make up less than 10% of her business.
THE 2018 Farm Bill established the framework for a legal hemp market. It defined hemp as cannabis plants below a certain threshold of THC, which is the psychoactive part of cannabis, and removed it from the Controlled Substances Act.
This opened what many call a loophole in federal law that established a new industry of cannabinoid products. Companies are able to extract enough THC or synthetically create it from the legal hemp plants to make products with similar effects to highly-regulated marijuana. There are also CBD products, which are non-intoxicating and commonly used in therapies.
Then, last November, Congress passed a measure that limits what’s considered legal hemp. The new rules ban products that contain more than 0.4 milligrams of THC and products that contain cannabinoids that are manufactured in a lab or aren’t naturally produced by the cannabis plant.
The ban is meant to curb unregulated sales of intoxicating hemp products, according to a Senate Appropriations Committee memo.
But business owners and advocates in the hemp industry say the ban would affect nearly everything that’s currently on the market.
“Even the vast majority of non-intoxicating CBD products have more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container,” said Jonathan Miller, the general counsel for the advocacy group U.S. Hemp Roundtable.
Miller said the federal ban would be a “death blow” to the U.S. hemp industry.
“We’re talking about a $23 billion industry with about half a million jobs in agriculture and retail sectors,” Miller said. “And 95% of that would be wiped out.”
THE BAN WAS supposed to start in November, but Congress recently delayed the start date by one month. Miller said the extra time means lawmakers could add a different hemp framework into a government spending bill due in December.
He said his organization and others across the country have been meeting with legislators and White House officials to discuss regulations that address concerns in the industry while protecting other products.
