A pro-Big Pharma, anti-natural medicine policy is moving forward in the halls of Congress. We must act now to stop it and preserve access to critical CBD and other natural medicines. Action Alert!
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THE TOPLINE
- A new amendment threatens to eliminate many CBD and hemp oil products by banning any hemp-derived products with “quantifiable amounts” of THC. This broad language could outlaw numerous beneficial hemp products.
- While the amendment has progressed, it still requires approval from the full House and reconciliation with the Senate. Some congressional members, such as Rep. Dan Newhouse and Rep. Matt Cartwright, are fighting to protect consumer access to safe hemp products.
- The FDA and pharmaceutical companies create monopolies on natural medicines, making them expensive and less accessible. This undermines the potential of plants like hemp, which have significant healing properties.
It’s a shame. You’d think it would be a good thing if the latest science showed that a plant had incredible healing and health-optimizing properties—that it touched a part of our biology that had only been recently discovered affecting everything from our mood to our immune system. Enter the FDA and Big Pharma. Instead of having a system that harnesses this healing power and makes it accessible to everyone, we have a crony system where megacorporations, with the help of their allies in government, take ownership of natural medicines, create monopolies, and sell them to us at enormous profit.
Your natural medicine cabinet is in danger of getting smaller. A terrible amendment has moved one step further, having been added to the text of the FY 2025 Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA, and Related Agencies subcommittee appropriations bill after a markup late last week. If left unchanged, this amendment will eliminate many healthy CBD and hemp oil products from the market because of its overly broad language. It must be stopped.
The amendment essentially bans any hemp-derived cannabinoid products containing “quantifiable amounts” of THC, with those “quantifiable amounts” to be defined by regulators later. Here’s the problem: with analytical methods becoming ever more sensitive, the lowest quantifiable amounts of THC will be far below those that can engender any physiological, let alone psychotropic, effects. Put simply, this would ban all ingestible hemp products, whether they are sold as foods or supplements, with any level of THC in them. In a single stroke of the law, many CBD oil and full-spectrum hemp oil products would suddenly become illegal.
While it’s disappointing that the subcommittee approved this amendment, not all is lost. For starters, there’s still a long way to go before this becomes law. The full House must negotiate and approve this language, and then the House’s version of the bill must be reconciled with the Senate version of the bill. The chances of all of that happening before the election in November is quite small—so there’s still time to defeat this with your help.
Secondly, some Congressional members did stand up for consumer access to hemp products. Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) was able to add report language to the bill calling for regulation of hemp products to protect consumer safety rather than a blanket ban on THC-containing hemp products as contained in the amendment. During the hearing, Rep. Newhouse and Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) defended access to safe and health-promoting hemp products during the committee markup.
As we explained previously, the stated purpose of the amendment is to close a loophole created by the previous Farm Bill that has allowed unregulated, intoxicating hemp products on the market like delta-8 and delta-10. The problem is that some of the best and healthiest products are full-spectrum hemp oils that contain all of the plant’s cannabinoids, terpenes, and fatty acids that occur naturally in the plant—including small, non-psychoactive amounts of THC. Banning, in one fell swoop, all hemp products with “quantifiable amounts” of THC is the very definition of throwing the baby out with the bath water and will take vital products out of our medicine cabinets.
It would be a real tragedy to lose these products. We’ve only recently discovered the human ECS (endocannabinoid system), an entire network of receptors throughout the human body that plays a role in modulating our mood and how we feel, how we experience and respond to pain, how our immune system responds to threats, and much more. CBD and other cannabinoids interact with the ECS in a number of different ways, so it’s no wonder that research is finding CBD to have potential in such a wide variety of health conditions, exerting neuroprotective, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and analgesic effects. This could be a game-changer for some people.
There is time, but we cannot sit back and wait. We must oppose this Big Pharma-inspired amendment and kill it before the bill moves any further.
Action Alert! Write to Congress and oppose the anti-CBD amendment to the Farm Bill. Please send your message immediately.
