Washington has removed Venezuela from the group of countries deemed to have “failed demonstrably” in their anti-drug obligations while maintaining it on the broader list of major drug-transit and producing countries, citing growing cooperation with Delcy Rodríguez’s interim government. At the same time, U.S. oil companies and policymakers are rapidly deepening their involvement in Venezuela’s enormous crude reserves, raising questions about how energy, counternarcotics policy and Washington’s broader geopolitical strategy now intersect.

Since 2005, when former President Hugo Chávez was still governing Venezuela, Washington has presented the Latin American country as a central concern in its regional anti-drug policy. That has just changed.

On September 16, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that Venezuela was no longer among the countries Washington considers to have “failed demonstrably” to meet their international drug-control obligations, as reported by Diario Red. Venezuela, however, is still considered a major drug-transit or illicit drug-producing country—a different category that does not, by itself, imply that its government is failing to meet its anti-drug commitments.

How did Venezuela go, in a matter of months, from occupying a central place in the U.S. narrative on drug trafficking to being led by a government whose anti-drug cooperation Washington is highlighting?

This shift comes as another relationship central to both countries is also changing: oil.

From Adversarial Relations to Renewed Cooperation: What Happened to the Anti-Drug Narrative

To understand what changed, we first need to separate two classifications that are often confused. Every year, the president of the United States identifies countries considered major drug-transit or illicit drug-producing countries; this is known as the Major’s List. Venezuela remains on it: it’s one of the 23 countries included in the determination for fiscal year 2027.

But appearing on that list does not, by itself, mean that Washington believes the government of that country is failing to combat drug trafficking. The State Department has explained that the designation may be based on geographic, commercial, and economic factors that facilitate drug production or transit even when authorities implement control measures. The “failed demonstrably” category is different: it applies when the president determines that a country has failed to make substantial efforts to meet its international anti-drug obligations during the previous 12 months.

Here’s the relevant change. In September 2025, the White House included Venezuela, along with Afghanistan, Bolivia, Burma, and Colombia, among the five countries that had “failed demonstrably” to make those efforts. One year later, the list was reduced to four: Venezuela disappeared from that second classification, although it remained on the Major’s List.

Trump explicitly attributed that decision to the new relationship with Delcy Rodríguez’s interim government. In the determination sent to Congress, he argued that political changes in South America had opened new possibilities for cooperation and said Washington was already seeing results from its joint work with Caracas against cartels. “Given the positive steps” under Rodríguez, he said, Venezuela should no longer be considered a country that had demonstrably failed to meet its anti-drug commitments.

In September 2025, the Trump administration launched a military campaign in the Caribbean against vessels it claimed were linked to drug trafficking. The first known attack, on September 2, killed 11 people aboard a vessel from Venezuela; Trump said they belonged to Tren de Aragua and were carrying drugs, but at the time the U.S. government did not publicly release evidence about the identities of those on board or the cargo. Various experts, politicians, and news outlets questioned the legality of summarily killing people suspected of drug trafficking instead of arresting them.

Still, the campaign continued. On September 15, another U.S. attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug-trafficking vessel killed three people; once again, Trump did not publicly present evidence showing that the vessel was carrying drugs. By October, several similar attacks had already taken place.

And then came the decisive change: in January 2026, the United States captured Nicolás Maduro and Delcy Rodríguez took charge of the interim government. From that point on, Washington began working directly with that administration. Reuters describes the current situation explicitly: Trump attributed Venezuela’s removal from the “failed demonstrably” category to the results of cooperation with the Rodríguez government. The government Washington was dealing with had changed, and the bilateral relationship shifted dramatically with it.

So What Happened to the ‘Cartel of the Suns’?

Washington’s shift in tone raises another important question: what happened to the so-called “Cartel of the Suns,” a structure that the U.S. government itself presented for years as a drug-trafficking organization run from the highest levels of the Venezuelan state?

It is worth separating several things that are often conflated. One is the existence of drug-trafficking and corruption allegations against specific Venezuelan officials. Another is the allegation that state protection or corruption networks were linked to drug trafficking. And another, far more specific, is the claim that all of those activities constituted a centralized, hierarchical criminal organization called the “Cartel of the Suns.”

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice advanced precisely that last version. In the indictment filed against Nicolás Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials, prosecutors alleged that Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, Hugo Carvajal, and Clíver Alcalá had acted as “leaders and managers” of the Cartel of the Suns and had used state institutions to facilitate shipments of cocaine to the United States. It is important to emphasize that these were criminal allegations, not convictions.

The Trump administration took that characterization even further in 2025. In July, the Treasury Department sanctioned the Cartel of the Suns as a global terrorist organization and said it was a criminal group “headed by Nicolás Maduro” and other senior officials. In November, the State Department also moved forward with its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

But just a few months after Maduro’s capture, the Justice Department filed a revised indictment that no longer describes the Cartel of the Suns in the same way it did in 2020. The new document accuses Maduro of participating in and protecting a “culture of corruption” in which Venezuelan elites enriched themselves through drug trafficking and the protection of traffickers, and defines the Cartel of the Suns as the name given to a “patronage system” directed from the top.

The change does not eliminate the drug-trafficking allegations against Maduro or the corruption allegations against Venezuelan officials. What it changes is something more specific: the characterization of the Cartel of the Suns as a formal, distinct, centralized criminal organization. The New York Times, comparing the two indictments, noted that the earlier document mentioned the Cartel of the Suns 32 times and presented Maduro as its leader, while the 2026 version sharply reduced those references and instead described the term as a system of corruption and patronage.

The Anti-Drug Allegations Also Had Economic Consequences

U.S. sanctions policy toward Venezuela was never based exclusively on drug-trafficking allegations. For years, Washington built a broader framework that brought together allegations of corruption, human rights violations, institutional deterioration, political repression, and links between senior officials and drug-trafficking networks.

Those different justifications ultimately translated into increasingly broad financial restrictions against officials, state-owned companies, and eventually entire sectors of the Venezuelan economy.

The anti-drug component was part of that framework. In 2017, for example, the Treasury designated then-Vice President Tareck El Aissami as an international drug trafficker under the Kingpin Act. The following year, it also sanctioned Pedro Luis Martín Olivares, a former senior Venezuelan intelligence official, and a network of individuals and companies that Washington said were involved in drug trafficking and money laundering.

A major escalation came in January 2019, when the Treasury directly sanctioned PDVSA (Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.), the country’s main source of foreign currency. But the U.S. statement itself makes clear that the measure did not serve solely as punishment for alleged acts of corruption. The Treasury presented the sanction as a way to ‘ramp up pressure’ on Maduro and support a political transition. It also said that the path to lifting sanctions on PDVSA involved transferring control of the company to the then-interim president recognized by Washington, Juan Guaidó, or to a subsequent, democratically elected government.

The political purpose of the sanctions regime was not implicit, either. The Treasury said these measures were intended to “change behavior” and could be lifted for those who took concrete actions to restore democratic order, rejected human rights abuses, or fought corruption. In another statement that same year, it reiterated that rationale, describing the sanctions as intended to bring about a “positive change of behavior.”

The pressure also extended to third parties that helped Venezuela maintain its oil revenues. In June 2020, the Treasury sanctioned a network of intermediaries that it said had helped PDVSA evade U.S. restrictions and resell more than 30 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil.

Just three months earlier, Maduro and other Venezuelan officials had been charged with narcoterrorism, corruption, and cocaine trafficking. Prosecutors alleged that Maduro and his associates had used Venezuelan political and military institutions to protect those activities. These were U.S. criminal allegations, not judicial convictions.

Thus, oil, sanctions, corruption, drug trafficking, and political pressure all operated together within the U.S. strategy toward Venezuela. Official documents themselves intertwined them over time: a figure sanctioned for drug trafficking could also appear as a central player in schemes designed to maintain PDVSA exports; a narcoterrorism indictment against Maduro coexisted with restrictions aimed at cutting off his government’s oil revenues; and sanctions relief was explicitly linked to political changes Washington sought to promote.

Washington used access to oil, the financial system, and the U.S. market as tools of pressure against the Venezuelan government, while criminal and anti-drug allegations formed part of the stated rationale for those restrictions. Today, that isolation appears to be starting to ease.

How the U.S. Position on Oil and Drug Trafficking in Venezuela Changed

This economic isolation began to be dismantled rapidly after January 2026. Since then, the U.S. Treasury has issued a series of licenses that progressively reopened activities that had been restricted for years: the purchase and sale of Venezuelan oil, the sale of U.S. diluents, the provision of equipment and services for oil operations, new investments, and certain transactions directly involving PDVSA.

In March, OFAC (the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control) expressly authorized certain companies to make new investments, expand existing operations, and explore, produce, and develop oil and gas projects in Venezuela.

The easing continued throughout the year. On August 27, OFAC again modified several of those licenses, including those related to Venezuelan oil, the sale of diluents, the supply of goods and services, oil-company operations, and transactions with PDVSA. The Treasury itself explained that some of those changes were in response to “investment-related reforms” implemented by the Venezuelan government since January and said the U.S. sought to support American companies looking to “reinvest in Venezuela.”

The reopening is already having material effects. In January, Venezuelan oil exports jumped to around 800,000 barrels per day, up from about 498,000 in December, while companies such as Trafigura and Vitol began operating under new U.S. authorizations. Chevron was exporting around 220,000 barrels per day to the United States, making the U.S. market the leading destination for Venezuelan crude oil once again.

U.S. buyers also returned. In February, Reuters reported that Valero planned to import as much as 6.5 million barrels of Venezuelan crude during March for its Gulf Coast refineries, the company’s largest volume since the 2019 oil sanctions. Chevron, meanwhile, expected to increase its Venezuelan exports to around 300,000 barrels per day.

The shift reached a new level on September 16, the exact same day it became known that Venezuela would no longer be listed among countries that had “failed demonstrably” to meet their anti-drug obligations. That day, U.S.-based Continental Resources signed a memorandum of understanding with PDVSA to develop Ayacucho 2, a block in the Orinoco Belt with estimated resources of 30 billion barrels. The company expects to turn the preliminary agreement into a production-sharing contract and said extraction could begin in about 18 months.

The U.S.’s Longstanding Interest in Venezuelan Oil—and Why It Matters Now

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves: around 303 billion barrels—approximately 17% of global reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Most of those reserves consist of extra-heavy crude oil from the Orinoco Belt. That gives the country extraordinary economic and geopolitical potential, although having enormous reserves does not guarantee prosperity on its own: turning them into revenue requires investment, infrastructure, technical capacity, markets, and the conditions needed to produce and export.

For much of Nicolás Maduro’s government, Venezuela was willing to sell that oil to the U.S. In fact, before the 2019 sanctions, the United States was the largest buyer of Venezuelan crude. In 2018, it imported around 505,000 barrels per day; Gulf Coast refineries had historically processed even larger volumes of heavy Venezuelan crude and are particularly well equipped to handle that type of oil.

The rupture, therefore, did not happen because Venezuelan oil had stopped being useful to the United States or because Caracas refused to sell it. Instead, it reflected a U.S. policy decision to restrict that relationship.

When the Treasury directly sanctioned PDVSA on January 28, 2019, it described the company as one of the country’s main sources of revenue and foreign currency. The title of the statement itself said the measure sought to “ramp up pressure” on Maduro, and the U.S. government explained that it was using its economic power to support a political transition it recognized as democratic (in contrast to Maduro’s government).

The United States did not control Venezuela’s oil reserves or determine how Caracas used resources within its territory. PDVSA and the reserves remained Venezuelan. What Washington could do—and did—was leverage the weight of its market, its currency, and its financial system to make that oil significantly more difficult to sell: blocking assets under U.S. jurisdiction, preventing certain transactions with PDVSA, and sanctioning companies, intermediaries, and vessels involved in transactions Washington had decided to restrict.

That pressure was not even limited to bilateral trade. The United States also acted against third parties transporting Venezuelan oil to other countries. Cuba is one of the clearest examples: in April 2019, the Treasury sanctioned shipping companies and identified dozens of vessels as blocked property, including ships used to transport Venezuelan crude oil to the island. Washington described the oil industry at the time as a “lifeline” for Maduro’s government and also targeted Cuban support for Caracas.

In other words: for years, Washington used its financial and commercial power not only to restrict U.S. purchases of Venezuelan oil, but also to raise the costs and risks for other actors participating in that trade. Meanwhile, much of the oil Venezuela managed to sell shifted toward markets such as China. The EIA notes that, following the 2019 sanctions, a significant proportion of Venezuelan exports went to China, including some under debt-repayment arrangements.

After the U.S. operation that ended with Maduro’s capture in January 2026, oil appeared almost immediately at the center of Washington’s plans for the new phase.

On January 3—the same day Nicolás Maduro was captured and imprisoned in the U.S.—Trump said U.S. oil companies would invest billions of dollars to restore Venezuela’s deteriorated infrastructure and increase its production. Reuters noted at the time that the country’s heavy crude oil is particularly useful for U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.

The following day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was even more explicit about the geopolitical component. “No more using the oil industry to enrich all of our adversaries around the world,” he said, after stating that Washington would not allow the Western Hemisphere to become a base of operations for U.S. “adversaries, competitors, and rivals.” He also specifically mentioned Iran and Hezbollah among the actors whose influence Washington intended to eliminate from Venezuela.

A few days later, the U.S. and the new Venezuelan government agreed to redirect up to $2 billion in sanctioned Venezuelan oil to the U.S. market, in an operation that also sought to divert some of the shipments that had previously gone to China.

Thus, U.S. oil interests did not emerge months later as a consequence of the current price crisis: they were on the table from the first days after Maduro’s removal. What happened afterward was that the international situation considerably increased the strategic value of that access.

Since late February, the war involving the United States and Israel against Iran and the subsequent disruptions in the Middle East have hit some of the world’s main energy supply routes and sources. By September, Brent and WTI had surpassed $100 per barrel, while the inventories that had initially cushioned the impact of the conflict were shrinking. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth warned that those buffers were being depleted and that upward pressure on prices could persist.

The situation is particularly sensitive for the United States when it comes to refined fuels. In September, diesel surpassed $6 per gallon, reaching record levels amid global refining and supply constraints.

Venezuela occupies a particular place in this equation. Its heavy crude oil is not simply “more oil”: it is a type of feedstock that U.S. Gulf Coast refineries are familiar with and are equipped to process.

For years, the United States used its economic power to limit the Venezuelan government’s oil revenues, restricted PDVSA’s operations, and even sanctioned third parties for transporting the country’s crude. Washington’s sanctions were explicitly designed to constrain the revenues available to Maduro’s government from Venezuela’s oil sector; U.S. officials described those measures at the time as instruments of pressure intended to change the government’s behavior.

Now, following Maduro’s removal, the Trump administration is promoting U.S. investment to increase production of that same oil, redirecting Venezuelan barrels from China to the United States, and presenting control over those flows as part of its national security interests. And it is doing so just as an international energy crisis makes the heavy crude oil Venezuela can provide especially valuable.

This does not prove that oil alone explains the U.S. operation in January or that the recent decision to remove Venezuela from the category of countries that “failed demonstrably” to meet their anti-drug commitments was made in exchange for access to its reserves. But the timing makes it reasonable to examine both processes as part of the same broader transformation in Washington’s policy toward Caracas.

Venezuela’s oil reserves have not changed, and the underlying drug-trafficking concerns have not disappeared. What has changed is who governs Venezuela, that government’s relationship with Washington, and the role Venezuelan resources now play within U.S. energy and geopolitical strategy.

How Does Trump’s Pardon of Silk Road’s Founder Fit With His Administration’s Anti-Drug Policy?

The two cases show markedly different uses of executive power in drug-related contexts.

While his government presented drug trafficking as a national security issue and cited it to justify fatal attacks on vessels in the Caribbean, economic sanctions, and ultimately a military operation inside Venezuela in which Maduro was captured, Trump used his pardon power to free Ross Ulbricht, the founder and operator of one of the largest dark web drug markets of its time.

On January 21, 2025, just one day after returning to the White House, Trump granted a full and unconditional pardon to Ross Ulbricht, founder and operator of Silk Road. Ulbricht had spent more than a decade in prison and was serving two life sentences plus 40 years after a federal jury convicted him on seven counts, including narcotics distribution, narcotics distribution over the internet, conspiracy to distribute drugs, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, and money laundering.

Silk Road was hardly a marginal platform either. According to the Department of Justice, between 2011 and 2013 it was used by thousands of vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs to more than 100,000 buyers, in addition to other illicit goods and services. Transactions conducted through the site exceeded $200 million, while Ulbricht earned more than $13 million in commissions.

Trump publicly justified the pardon in terms very different from those he later used regarding Venezuela. In announcing it, he called the people who had worked to secure Ulbricht’s conviction “scum” and linked his case to what he considers the “political weaponization” of the U.S. justice system. Reuters also noted that the pardon fulfilled a campaign promise made to libertarian groups that considered the life sentence excessive.

Ulbricht spoke at the Republican Midterm Convention in September 2026 and returned to that same argument during his speech. According to The Economic Times, he said Trump had empathized with him because “both had been victims” of state institutions allegedly used politically against them.

In Ulbricht’s case, Trump overturned a final conviction for crimes connected to a marketplace that facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal drug sales, arguing that the defendant had been the victim of a politicized justice system. In Venezuela’s case, his administration used drug-trafficking allegations that were still being litigated as part of the justification for a military operation inside a foreign state.

What Objective Facts Does Washington Cite to Justify Venezuela No Longer Being on the List?

So far, Washington’s public explanation for the change has focused primarily on growing cooperation with Delcy Rodríguez’s interim government. Trump attributed the decision to that cooperation and highlighted as a concrete result the operation that ended with the death of Niño Guerrero, leader of Tren de Aragua. The determination does not, however, detail a quantified reduction in drug trafficking, increased seizures, or other indicators that would make it possible to measure how much the situation has actually changed since 2025. In fact, Trump himself said he expects to see “continued and measurable” progress in the future.

If the publicly available evidence specifically related to drug enforcement is relatively limited, it is worth looking at what other dimensions of the bilateral relationship changed over exactly the same period.

That makes the simultaneous transformation in the U.S.-Venezuela oil relationship particularly relevant to the question.

Cover photo created with AI.

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Congress voted last year to strip most hemp THC products of their federal legal status, starting November 12. On Saturday morning, the Senate pushed that date to December 11. Here is what the ban actually does, what the vote changed and why this extension is probably the last one.

At 3:35 on Saturday morning, after a week of political fights and a threatened holdup of the entire government funding bill, the US Senate voted to give the hemp industry 29 more days.

Three days earlier, a White House official had already told Senate Republicans there would not be another 29.

If you have not been following this fight closely, here is the short version of what is at stake, and then what actually happened.

First: What Is the Hemp Ban?

In 2018, the Farm Bill legalized hemp, defined as cannabis containing no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight. Nobody in Congress seemed to anticipate what would happen next. Chemists worked out how to convert legal hemp-derived CBD into intoxicating cannabinoids the statute had not mentioned: delta-8, delta-10, HHC, THC-O. Growers realized THCA flower is not intoxicating until you heat it, which meant it technically fell inside the definition. Beverage makers built a THC seltzer category from scratch.

Within a few years, that gap became a multibillion-dollar industry selling weed-adjacent products in gas stations, smoke shops, liquor stores and grocery aisles, including in states where marijuana itself is still illegal.

Late last year, Congress moved to close it. Tucked into the spending bill that ended the record-long government shutdown was Section 781 of P.L. 119-37, a rewrite of the federal definition of hemp. Trump signed it into law, though his administration would later push Congress to postpone the very restrictions he had approved. The provision was championed by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the same senator who wrote hemp into the 2018 Farm Bill in the first place.

The new rule does two things. It measures total THC, which counts THCA rather than ignoring it. And it caps finished consumable products at 0.4 milligrams per container of total THC plus other cannabinoids with similar effects.

The 0.4-milligram cap, not the word “ban,” is the mechanism. A typical hemp gummy carries 10 milligrams. A THC seltzer carries between 2 and 10. Almost nothing on the market clears 0.4.

The US Hemp Roundtable has estimated roughly 95% of existing hemp cannabinoid products fall outside the new definition. The effective date was November 12, one year after enactment. We broke down the fine print here.

Then Came the Fight Over Delaying It

The hemp industry spent nine months lobbying to get the law changed before it landed. It did not get a rewrite. What it got instead was an attempt at more time.

Senate leaders released a stopgap funding bill on August 2 to keep the federal government open through December 11. Inside it, at the White House’s request, was a provision pushing most of the hemp restrictions to that same date. Cannabinoids that the plant cannot naturally produce would still lose federal hemp status on November 12. Everything else would get 29 extra days.

Sen. Ted Budd, a North Carolina Republican, filed an amendment to strip it out and hold the original date. He called intoxicating hemp a “public health crisis” and held up posters on the Senate floor showing THC packaging that resembled Oreos and Skittles as evidence that the hemp industry’s goal is to make children “addicted to these disguised substances.” His amendment collected 13 cosponsors and threatened to derail the entire funding bill and the Senate’s August recess. We covered that standoff here.

What Happened Saturday

Budd’s amendment died at 3:35 a.m.

The Senate voted 61-32 to table it. The motion came from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who wrote the delay provision in the first place. Twenty-four minutes later, the chamber passed the underlying continuing resolution 90-6, according to the Senate’s official record.

That means the Senate bill would push most of the November 12 restrictions to December 11, if the House agrees and Trump signs it. Neither has happened. Until both do, November 12 remains the operative federal date.

Read past the vote count, though, and the week produced four things that matter more than the calendar.

1. Nobody Voted the Way You’d Guess

Start with the roll call, because it scrambles every assumption about who sits where on cannabis policy.

Eleven Democrats voted with Budd to keep his amendment alive: Kirsten Gillibrand, Dick Durbin, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Martin Heinrich, Mazie Hirono, Jeff Merkley, Alex Padilla, Jacky Rosen, Adam Schiff and Lisa Blunt Rochester. Republicans including Rand Paul, Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy voted to protect the delay.

Merkley and Padilla lined up with Ted Budd. Rand Paul lined up with Amy Klobuchar. Hemp has managed to scramble both parties at once.

Paul, the delay’s loudest Republican defender, accused his colleagues of wildly exaggerating the risk. He told reporters for the Associated Press and PBS NewsHour after the lunch that the senators pushing to keep the ban on schedule were behaving “like they watched ‘Reefer Madness’ in 1937.”

On the other side, Sen. Tom Cotton called the products “gas-station marijuana candy” during a closed-door Republican lunch that Sen. Josh Hawley later described to MS NOW as a “big blow-up.”

2. The White House Signaled This Is the Last Delay

The most important thing of the week happened three days before the vote, in a room the industry was not in.

James Braid, the White House director of legislative affairs, attended that Republican lunch. Cotton, Sen. Pete Ricketts and Budd pressed him on why the administration had reversed course on a law the president himself signed. According to Axios, NBC News and Punchbowl News, all citing people present, Braid committed that there would be no further delays beyond the one in the funding bill.

The pressure went beyond the lunch. Trump personally called Budd on Tuesday night, after the senator filed his amendment. According to a Senate aide cited in reports of the call, the president discussed setting up federal regulations for hemp but did not directly ask Budd to withdraw it.

December 11 is not a waypoint. On the current signals, it is the cliff.

That matters because the delay exists almost entirely because the administration wanted it. The Hill reported the provision went in at the White House’s request, and Trump has publicly pushed Congress to fix hemp rather than kill it, writing on Truth Social that lawmakers must “get this done RIGHT and FAST, especially for those who saw that CBD helps them.” Take that support away in December and the coalition for another temporary extension gets substantially weaker.

Congress has had nine months to write a permanent fix. It has produced the Barr-Craig Lawful Hemp Protection Act, which would replace the ban with federal potency limits, age restrictions and labeling rules; a competing draft circulating from Rep. James Comer; and a stack of delay proposals. None has advanced far enough to replace the November law.

Why the Reversal Is Being Questioned

There is another reason the White House’s sudden investment in the issue has drawn scrutiny.

In June, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s younger daughter Caroline married Bret Worley, the chief executive of MC Nutraceuticals, a hemp company that describes itself as the largest global supplier of cannabinoids. MS NOW reported that Worley’s company urged industry allies to press lawmakers for the delay, and The New York Times reported that once the provision was added to the funding bill, MC Nutraceuticals told prospective customers the industry now had “a seat at the table.”

The White House denies that the family connection influenced its position. Spokesman Kush Desai said Wiles “has never lobbied in favor of this or any other position on hemp with Capitol Hill,” and that the administration is guided by the interests of veterans and patients. Neither Wiles nor Worley responded to requests for comment from MS NOW, and MC Nutraceuticals did not respond to the Times.

None of that establishes that the delay was written to benefit anyone’s business. It does explain why senators in both parties spent the week asking harder questions about an abrupt reversal.

3. The Cannabis Industry Is Split

Hemp groups treated Saturday’s vote as permission to keep building.

“This morning’s vote was a huge turning point in the pursuit of safe, responsible federal regulation,” said Christopher Lackner, founder and president of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, which represents 375 members across the US and Canada. “The next chapter begins today.”

Thomas Winstanley, president of Edibles.com, part of Edible Brands, the parent company of Edible Arrangements, was more measured.

“Congress did not solve the hemp issue today. It preserved the opportunity to solve it correctly. A delay is not a destination.”

Thomas Winstanley, president, Edibles.com

Winstanley said in a statement that the ban would have “increased consumer risk by driving demand toward the illicit market” while undermining farmers, manufacturers and retailers. That is a central argument from the hemp industry, and the Senate just gave it four extra weeks to land.

But parts of the state-licensed cannabis sector treated the same vote as another month of unequal rules. So did a bipartisan coalition of 35 state and territory attorneys general, who sent Congress a letter on August 4 arguing the ban had “protected consumers, provided much-needed regulatory clarity, and preserved legitimate industrial, agricultural, and nonintoxicating hemp markets.”

The logic is not complicated. A licensed operator pays for a state license, mandatory batch testing, compliance staff, seed-to-sale tracking and state cannabis taxes, then watches a hemp company sell a comparable high through ordinary retail with none of that overhead. From inside a dispensary, November 12 does not look like prohibition. It looks like the end of an arbitrage.

From inside a hemp beverage company, the same date looks like the government erasing a legal business built on a law Congress itself wrote in 2018.

Both pressures are real, and the split helps explain why a clean fix has been so hard. Hemp operators are lobbying to preserve a national market. Prohibition groups and parts of the licensed cannabis world are lobbying for the opposite outcome. That makes for an unusual coalition, even if its members arrived there for entirely different reasons.

4. The Medicare Guy Showed Up

The strangest detail of the week got almost no coverage.

On Friday, Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, urged senators to reject Budd’s amendment. His concern was a program his own agency launched in April.

The Substance Access Beneficiary Engagement Incentive lets providers in certain CMS Innovation Center models consult with Medicare beneficiaries about eligible hemp products for symptom control, and furnish those products at the provider’s own expense, up to $500 per beneficiary per year. Medicare does not pay for them. Five accountable care organizations submitted implementation plans for the first performance period.

So Medicare’s own agency is already in the hemp business, and its administrator spent political capital on a Senate floor fight to keep the new hemp law from gutting it.

Here is the part that makes it coherent rather than merely odd. The CMS program already imposes limits of its own. Eligible products must contain no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC. Oral products cannot exceed 3 milligrams per serving of tetrahydrocannabinols, including delta-8, delta-10 and THCA. Cannabinoids the plant cannot naturally produce are excluded outright.

But the incoming federal standard would cap finished hemp products at 0.4 milligrams per container of total THC, including THCA, plus other cannabinoids with similar effects. That is far below the ceiling CMS currently allows, and it would sharply narrow the universe of products the agency can use in its own demonstration. CMS says it will adjust its eligibility definition if federal hemp law changes.

Budd’s response was the sharpest line anyone landed all week. “Why do unregulated intoxicating edibles need to be available at gas stations for CMS to continue studying hemp-derived pain relief?”

It is a fair question, and it points at what the whole fight keeps failing to separate. The full-spectrum tincture a Medicare patient might get through a CMS demonstration and the 100-milligram gummy sold beside the register at a gas station are governed by the same paragraph of federal law. Most of the proposals on the table are attempts to draw a line the current statute does not draw cleanly. None has gotten a vote.

What Still Has to Happen

The delay is not law. It is one chamber’s position, and the House passed its own funding bill with no hemp language in it at all.

• When the House returns. It has to decide whether to accept the Senate bill, amend it or negotiate something else.
• September 30. Current government funding expires. By then both chambers need to enact identical legislation or the government shuts down.
• November 12. Cannabinoids the plant cannot naturally produce lose federal hemp status regardless. That carve-out survived the Senate untouched.
• December 11. The 0.4-milligram cap and the rest of the new definition arrive, on the same day the Senate’s own funding bill expires.

The states are on their own clocks either way. Illinois restrictions take effect November 12 under state statute, which no federal stopgap touches. North Carolina is weighing legislation that would write the federal standard into state law. For a company whose immediate problem is Illinois, the federal extension does not move the November 12 state deadline.

Budd has already said he will be back.

“We agreed to ban these drugs nearly 9 months ago, but clearly our fight to stop this scourge is just beginning.”

Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C.

Nine months produced no framework. The Senate has now offered the industry four weeks more than it had on Friday, but the House still has to agree, the administration has reportedly told senators it is done spending capital on extensions, and the opposition runs from Tom Cotton to Jeff Merkley.

Winstanley had it right. A delay is not a destination. It is also, on the current signals, the last one anybody is handing out.

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Labour MP and long-time medical cannabis advocate, Tonia Antoniazzi, has called on the government to fund a new observational trial to support children with drug-resistant epilepsy, who are still unable to access medical cannabis on the NHS.

Antoniazzi is spearheading a new campaign launched in memory of Hannah Deacon, the mother of Alfie Dingley, who campaigned for the legalisation of medical cannabis in 2018. Hannah died of cancer last year, aged just 45. 

Her high-profile campaign led to Alfie, who has a rare and severe form of treatment-resistant epilepsy, becoming the first person to obtain a full licence for the prescription of medical cannabis through the NHS in June 2018.

Later that year, on 1 November, the government announced the rescheduling of cannabis-based medicines, making them legal to prescribe by doctors on the specialist register. 

Almost eight years on, an estimated 80,000 patients are now able to access medical cannabis through private clinics in the UK, but only four children (including Alfie) receive prescriptions through the NHS, whilst other families face costs of around £15,000 per year.

Hannah Deacon died last year after a short battle with cancer.

An “unacceptable burden”

During Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, 4th March, Antoniazzi, MP for Gower, asked Keir Starmer to commit a “modest” £2 million for an observational trial to relieve these families of this “unacceptable burden”. 

“Many families are still paying around £1,300 a month for a treatment that is already legal to prescribe,” said Antoniazzi, who has previously accompanied families travelling to the Netherlands to access medical cannabis.

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The proposed study would run alongside two previously announced NHS-funded randomised control trials (RCTs) on medical cannabis and epilepsy, which are being conducted by researchers at UCL. It would allow children who are currently prescribed the treatment privately to continue accessing it at no cost, while real-world data is collected.

The research team is said to have confirmed that an accompanying observational trial would be a viable option. However, the Prime Minister failed to commit to the additional funding, instead pointing to the £8 million already invested in RCTs. 

“Hannah Deacon’s campaign for her son, Alfie, was remarkable, and I know how much she’s missed,” Starmer told the House.

“We are investing £8 million in clinical trials on cannabis based medicines for conditions like drug-resistant epilepsy, and I want to see patients accessing safe, effective medicines and new treatments as quickly as possible.” 

The RCTs were first promised in 2019 following a review commissioned by former Health Secretary Matt Hancock. Although finally announced in 2024, they have since been delayed again.

Campaigners warn that these will take several years to complete and are not suitable for those children already prescribed medical cannabis, for whom the treatment has already significantly reduced seizures, where all other options have failed. 

“While I understand the government’s reticence to move towards any kind of drug reform… this is a titrated drug, and is widely accepted in other countries around the world,” Antoniazzi tells Cannabis Health.

“Why we are making it difficult for these families to access a prescription that makes their children’s lives so much easier baffles me.”

“We made her a promise we wouldn’t give up”

Even after Alfie secured his NHS prescription, Hannah continued campaigning to ensure other families could access the same treatment. Now, Antoniazzi and other parents say they will continue that fight in Hannah’s name.

“What drives me is Hannah, and how she fought for all families and how she fought for their children,” she adds.

“She was a really special woman, and her family wants her legacy to remain.”

In a post on her Instagram, Emma Appleby, who campaigned alongside Hannah on behalf of her daughter Teagan, said: “Although Hannah’s son had an NHS prescription, she continued to fight and stand alongside other families like mine who still had to battle… We all made a promise that we wouldn’t give up.”

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Medcan Family Foundation commented: “Hannah was a tireless advocate and a driving force behind progress for families fighting for access. She refused to accept a system that left children waiting without answers… Her legacy continues in this new campaign.”

You can support the Hannah Deacon Campaign for Access to Medical Cannabis by emailing your MP and signing Hannah’s petition here.

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