President Donald Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill on Thursday, finally legalizing commercial cultivation of hemp \u2014 defined as cannabis with under 0.3 percent THC.<\/p>\n
Because the law explicitly removes<\/a> any cannabinoids from hemp other than THC from the Controlled Substances Act, it implicitly makes hemp-derived CBD a legal substance. This medically promising and extremely fashionable non-psychoactive cannabinoid appears to now have an unambiguous legal path to widespread production and mainstream commercialization.<\/p>\n For the first time since the passage of the\u00a0Marihuana Tax Act in 1937<\/a>, hemp can now be\u00a0freely grown<\/a>\u00a0under federal law. And for the first time since passage of the\u00a0Controlled Substances Act in 1970<\/a>, its production is regulated not by the Drug Enforcement Administration but the Department of Agriculture. The bill had broad bipartisan support and was actually\u00a0championed<\/a>\u00a0by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.<\/p>\n McConnell, a pillar of the country\u2019s conservative Republican establishment, comes from a state where farmers have long been at the forefront of pushing for legal hemp. He originally drafted the legislation as the Hemp Farming Act, but\u00a0merged\u00a0it into the Farm Bill, officially the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, to speed passage.<\/p>\n \u201cLast year alone, Kentucky hemp recorded more than $16 million in product sales through the state pilot program I previously secured, demonstrating that hemp holds great potential for the future of Kentucky agriculture,\u201d McConnell said in a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0pushing passage of the bill. \u201cMy Hemp Farming Act as included in the Farm Bill will not only legalize domestic hemp, but it will also allow state departments of agriculture to be responsible for its oversight.\u201d<\/p>\n The pilot program was established by the\u00a02014 Farm Bill<\/a>, which also made the\u00a00.3 percent THC maximum<\/a>\u00a0federal law.\u00a0But it did not allow full commercial production, and it kept both hemp and all cannabinoids, including CBD, as a Schedule I controlled substances. The burgeoning CBD industry has to a large extent been based on a legal fiction: that CBD derived from industrial hemp, as defined by federal law, was legal \u2014 despite court rulings and the DEA\u2019s explicit rule that CBD remained a controlled substance.<\/p>\n The\u00a0text of the Farm Bill<\/a>\u00a0does not actually mention CBD. But in amending the\u00a0Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946<\/a>\u00a0to allow hemp farming, it defines hemp thusly: \u201cThe term \u2018hemp\u2019 means the plant Cannabis sativa L.<\/em> and any part of that plant, including the seeds thereof and all derivatives, extracts, cannabinoids, isomers, acids, salts, and salts of isomers, whether growing or not, with a delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol concentration of not more than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis.\u201d The reference to \u201cany\u2026 cannabinoids\u201d implicitly covers CBD.<\/p>\n CBD\u2019s legality is now a question of production, whether it is derived from federally-defined hemp or from marijuana. CBD from hemp is, therefore, now legal and under the oversight of the FDA.<\/p>\n The industry has certainly been anticipating this. Joshua Camp, CEO of local firm\u00a0LabCanna<\/a>\u00a0which runs a line of CBD products, called Tennessee a \u201csleeping giant\u201d of the hemp industry when he spoke to the\u00a0Tennessean<\/a>\u00a0about state\u2019s first Hemp Expo, held in Nashville in September. In contrast to hemp expos a decade ago which featured clothes, fiber and hemp-seed foods, the most prominent products on display were various CBD preparations.<\/p>\n Passage of the Farm Bill was preceded by efforts to legalize hemp-derived CBD through the courts, exploiting apparent contradictions in federal law. On April 30, the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals in San Francisco turned down a bid by the\u00a0Hemp Industries Association<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0overturn<\/a>\u00a0a DEA\u00a0rule\u00a0that explicitly added CBD to the list of controlled substances.<\/p>\n The HIA argued that the DEA rule\u00a0contravened provisions of the 2014 Farm Bill allowing research in substances derived from industrial hemp. As the legal blog\u00a0Cultivalaw<\/a>\u00a0noted, the Ninth Circuit rejected the appeal on narrow procedural grounds. Although a technical defeat for the CBD industry,\u00a0HIA v. DEA<\/i>\u00a0loaned momentum to the push for consistent federal law on the matter.<\/p>\n And where the regulatory apparatus is concerned, the law is still not thoroughly consistent. Immediately after Trump signed the Farm Bill, the Food and Drug Administration issued a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0saying it will take steps to identify \u201cpathways for the lawful marketing\u201d of hemp-derived cannabis products, but that for now it remains \u201cunlawful\u2026 to introduce food containing added CBD or THC into interstate commerce.\u201d As\u00a0Marijuana Moment<\/a>\u00a0blog notes, the FDA said it will \u201cgather additional input relevant to the lawful pathways by which products containing cannabis or cannabis-derived compounds can be marketed.\u201d<\/p>\n It was the FDA\u2019s June approval of the CBD-based pharmaceutical\u00a0Epidiolex<\/a>\u00a0that forced the DEA to reconsider the cannabinoid\u2019s status as a Schedule I substance. The DEA\u2019s September ruling\u00a0drew the line very finely<\/a> \u2014 rescheduling Epidiolex but not CBD itself.\u00a0\u00a0With the letter of the law now changed by Congress, it is the FDA\u2019s turn to bring its own regulations into conformity. If this doesn\u2019t happen soon, further litigation may be forthcoming.<\/p>\n Then there is the question of state law. While the Farm Bill removes federal roadblocks to hemp-derived CBD\u2019s commercialization, it is up to each state to set its own policy.<\/p>\n An optimistic report from the\u00a0Brightfield Group<\/a>, issued just before the Farm Bill passed, anticipates a $22 billion hemp-derived CBD market by 2022 as a fruit of the new legislation. But it warned that \u201ceven if the Farm Bill were to pass, states would not be required to create hemp programs or regulatory systems, leaving producers, retailers and consumers in those states in the same conditions they\u2019re in today.\u201d<\/p>\n The report on\u00a0MarketWatch<\/a>\u00a0following passage of the bill included a similar caveat: \u201cThe overall effect is not assured because\u2026 states will continue to be able to enact laws related to CBD and industrial hemp, allowing for a potential patchwork of legislation across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n One obvious dilemma is posed by California, where state health authorities in July\u00a0actually banned<\/a>\u00a0preparations of CBD derived from industrial hemp rather than from psychoactive cannabis (marijuana). The California Department of Public Health found that CBD derived from industrial hemp did not fall under the purview of the state\u2019s cannabis regulations.<\/p>\n This will hopefully be reversed now that Congress has officially made CBD kosher. But it may take a while for the states to catch up with federal law\u2014and even for federal regulations to catch up with the new law. Until then, elements of the erstwhile legal grey zone may persist.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, what do you hope to see in the realm of CBD now that hemp has been federally legalized?<\/p>\n The post What Will the Farm Bill Mean for Hemp-Derived CBD?<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill on Thursday, finally legalizing commercial cultivation of hemp \u2014 defined as cannabis with under 0.3 percent THC. Because the law explicitly removes any cannabinoids from hemp other than THC from the Controlled Substances Act, it implicitly makes hemp-derived CBD a legal substance.Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6726,50,136,6849,6850,1074,170,3156,296,2622,5014,6851,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31591,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31590\/revisions\/31591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Implicit Hemp CBD Legalization in the 2o18 Farm Bill<\/h4>\n
Remaining Federal Wrinkles<\/h4>\n
\u201cPotential Patchwork\u201d<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: What Will the Farm Bill Mean for Hemp-Derived CBD?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"