 The US Farm Bill is revamped every five years, and it’s up for congressional review this year.
The Farm Bill is a massive, $428 billion multifaceted bill which covers rural development, nutrition, what American farmers grow, and how they grow it. The last time the Farm Bill was revised, in 2018, it legalized hemp, which led to the rise of hemp derrived cannabanoids being sold, such as Delta-8 THC. That, in turn, resulted in a huge, on-going controversy over regulations on hemp derrived cannabanoids. Michael Bronstein, president of the American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp, one of the DC lobbies, said that when the 2018 Farm Bill was written, “There was no thought that {at the time that intoxicating} hemp-derived cannabinoids would be permissible in any way in the marketplace, and now an entire kind of gray-market product category has emerged.” That gray market has left states scrambling to decide how they’ll handle it. To date, 14 states have banned delta-8 products outright, but many more are still stuck without clear direction on how to handle it. Federal agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration have made it clear they are not responsible for regulating the CBD market, and that Congress should be the one to handle the next step, since they were the one’s who made it’s legalization possible. Congress has heard this message over and over from the Federal goverment, the state governments, and the hemp producers. Jim Higdon, who is a co-founder of a CBD company called Kentucky-based Cornbread Hemp said, “principally, we’re looking for clarity” on what exactly is or is not legal to extract and sell from hemp, along with specifics about what the legal levels of extracted compounds will be. In addition to pressure on hemp derrived cannabanoid legality and levels, Congress has also been receiving a lot of pressure to consider cannabis reform while considering this year’s Farm Bill structuring. The ever-optomisic sponsor of the SAFE Banking Bill, Oregon Democratic Representative Earl Blumenauer, told MJBizDaily that he believes this year’s Farm Bill discussions could “absolutely [pose] a path forward” for federal cannabis reform. The eventual outcome of this years Farm Bill is still far away. Technically the bill expires at the end of the federal fiscal year, in September. However, the review process is always a very lengthy one, this year especially. It’s not unusual for negotiations to stretch past September, and out into the next calendar year. Initial discussions are underway now, but indications of how they’re going probably won’t start to materialize until this summer. Comments are closed.
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