“If they make a change in the drinks, then this is something we will have to look at in January…putting a framework around specifically the drinks.”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

When Joshua Grigaitis founded the Mighty Kind Company in St. Louis in 2019, his team started by producing flavored sparkling water infused with CBD, a non-intoxicating compound found in cannabis.

The company has since become a major player in the market for intoxicating hemp-THC beverages. But with a federal ban looming, Grigaitis said he is prepared to return to the company’s roots.

The ban is now set to take effect December 11, after President Donald Trump signed a bill last week delaying its implementation by one month.

“Big picture is we’re gonna sell a variety of products, and we’re gonna stay diversified,” Grigaitis said. “We were originally a CBD company. We’ve never had the thought: we’re not going to have anything to do if we can’t sell THC drinks. We’ll just do something else.”

Hemp companies across Missouri and the nation are rethinking their business plans in anticipation of the ban. While Grigaitis is confident Mighty Kind can adapt through new products, companies built around low-dose, full-spectrum cannabis products—those created specifically for people seeking relief from chronic pain or health ailments—could face a far more difficult path forward.

Dr. Ethan Russo, a neurologist in Washington and founder of the medical cannabis research and drug development company Credo Science, said the medical side of the industry is in “chaos.”

“There are just many, many companies going out of business, some of whom have produced very good products that have been helpful to people with medical conditions that haven’t had relief otherwise,” Russo said. “It’s a very bad time for the industry.”

Russo said these products focus on the therapeutic compounds found in cannabis, such as CBD and CGB, and the small amount of THC, such as 3 mg or less, in them activates those non-intoxicating compounds and makes them more effective.

While Congress may end up allowing and regulating these products, particularly considering Trump’s support for them, there is no wiggle room in the legislation Missouri lawmakers passed this spring.

When Missouri’s law goes into effect on November 12, intoxicating hemp products will be “put under the purview of the department’s existing regulations for cannabis products,” said Lisa Cox, spokeswoman for the Missouri Department Health and Senior Services, which oversees the state’s cannabis program.

On November 12, everything that comes from cannabis and is intoxicating—or has more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container—will be considered marijuana and can only be sold in licensed dispensaries. The cannabis also has to be grown and manufactured in licensed Missouri facilities.

For now, beverages will stay on store shelves until December 11, and there will be no other regulation of these items except that people now must be 21 to buy them until then.

Missourians won’t be able to purchase hemp-derived THC products online after November 12, even though it’d be federally still legal. There are currently a few low-dose full-spectrum products available in dispensaries.

Dr. Patricia Hurford, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist in Chesterfield, said she anticipates she’ll hear more concern from her patients when their full-spectrum products are no longer available in November. Like Russo, Hurford commends Missouri’s legislation for protecting children and regulating the quality of cannabis products, but she worries about access to medicinal products.

“Patients require protection,” Hurford said, “and sometimes protecting those patients means we have to take dangerous products off the shelf. Sometimes it just means we’re offering and preserving access to safer and lower-dose alternatives.”

Hemp vs marijuana

This wave of complicated, confusing policymaking around cannabis is pushing a necessary conversation about having two different laws for hemp and marijuana, Russo said.

That conversation should be, “legalize it and regulate it. That’s the only way that this can work,” he said.

Hemp and marijuana are essentially terms the government uses to distinguish between the part of the cannabis plant that has high amounts of THC.

Hemp has previously been defined as any part of the plant containing 0.3 percent or less delta-9 THC by dry weight.

Last November, a provision in the federal spending bill amended the definition of hemp, changing the limit to a total THC concentration of less than .3 percent on a dry weight basis, rather than only delta-9 THC. It also prohibits products from containing more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container.

Missouri’s law was aimed at getting unregulated intoxicating cannabis products, particularly those that are attractive to children, off the shelves.

Republican state Rep. Dave Hinman of O’Fallon, who sponsored the ban, believes the state will send out communication directly to retailers to make sure they understand the nuisance of the law.

Hinman anticipates Missouri’s upcoming legislative session to be filled with much more work to be done on this issue, and he said he’s been asked by state leaders to continue taking the lead on cannabis-related legislation.

If Congress allows full-spectrum products, Missouri will have to approve that use through a bill. And if there is further delay of the federal ban, then lawmakers will have to pass regulations on beverages.

“If they make a change in the drinks, then this is something we will have to look at in January…putting a framework around specifically the drinks,” Hinman said. “If we need to make changes and adjustments, I will absolutely be involved in this.”

Panic for patients

Hurford said the marijuana industry was born out of creating medicinal, therapeutic products. However, now dispensaries are often more focused on recreational products, she said, and offer an environment that might be intimidating for patients to enter and find what they need.

“Let’s get back to promoting the medicinal aspects in those products,” she said.

Healer is an example of a company that has helped her patients, and she believes its co-founder, Dr. Dustin Sulak, is a “well-respected, knowledgeable clinician.” But its products will be banned in November, and company owners say they won’t pursue trying to work within the marijuana regulations.

Healer’s co-founder and CEO, Brad Feuer, said marijuana cultivation facilities nationwide focus on growing cannabis with high THC and low CBD content, which doesn’t work with their formula. And secondly, it wouldn’t be cost effective for the company or patients.

Katherine Golden is a nurse who seven years ago founded an independent cannabinoid health hotline called Leaf411. She said while more medicinal products with only one or two milligrams of THC were available in dispensaries when her hotline first started, many of them have been pulled off the shelves.

“That to me is the heartbreak of what’s happening with our legislation because you’re taking access away from a product that is not being abused,” Golden said. “The hemp market—those who are the responsible players—are providing this product that the retailers aren’t carrying because it doesn’t sell enough for them.”

Part of the reason is because these customers need it delivered to their homes, particularly those caring for people with dementia or those struggling with ailments, she said. Her hotline has already gotten a taste of the panic patients may feel in November after California’s ban was put in place in July.

“I can only guess when we see another state like Missouri ban on Nov. 12, we’re going to hear from Missourians calling us saying, ‘What do I do? I just found this out,’” she said. “Because a lot of patients are so involved in what they’re doing in their lives, they’re not following what’s happening.”

Andrew Mullins, executive director of the Missouri Cannabis Trade Association that represents the state’s marijuana businesses, said for patients to be protected, their medical products must be “tested, taxed, age-gated and responsibly packaged, which simply isn’t happening with intoxicating hemp.”

“Many dispensaries already carry low-dose THC products,” Mullins said, “and we expect there will be more emphasis on medicinal uses of their products and development of additional products to meet patient demand, as online and unregulated channels diminish.”

Adrian Holguin, a California-based cannabis consultant under his business CannaShark, said Missouri’s regulatory framework ties the hands and potential profits of businesses working in intoxicating hemp and low-dose, full-spectrum. Like Healer, most of these businesses will choose to not to find a place in Missouri’s market.

“They have to take their operations and either leave the state and find the last remaining states,” he said, “or they have to be ready to pivot in a direction that’s going to make sense and that follows the legislation that’s coming.”

Business owners could try to work with a licensed Missouri marijuana manufacturer or cultivator to make their products under the new law. However, even for marijuana companies, Missouri is “a tough state to crack,” he said, partly due to the consolidation of facility licenses. Other states are going to be more accommodating.

“When you decide on business,” he said, “where to play is one of the main questions you ask yourself.”

Grigaitis believes this moment is going to produce challenges, but it’s also going to push innovation. Mighty Kind is looking to launch a new seltzer with Lion’s Mane mushroom concentration, he said, which promotes relaxation, focus and brain support.

“I see it as all very positive,” Grigaitis said, “you know, evolution of moving from alcohol to something less harmful for everybody and plant magic of all kinds.”

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.

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A handful of congressional Republicans threatened this week to upend their leadership’s agenda in protest of legislation to delay the scheduled federal recriminalization of hemp THC products from taking effect.

Hemp derivatives with less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis were federally legalized under the 2018 Farm Bill that President Donald Trump signed during his first term in office. But late last year, the president signed new legislation containing provisions that redefined hemp to make it so only products with 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container would remain legal after November 12.

The House of Representatives on Tuesday, however, approved a Senate-passed funding bill that contains provisions to delay the effective date of most parts of the ban, with an exception for synthetics, until December 11.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) and several other members knew that they didn’t have enough votes to block that bipartisan funding bill, known as a continuing resolution, so they set out instead to block a rule for consideration of a separate package of largely partisan GOP-led legislation touching on issues such as condemning socialism, defending Israel from boycotts and the mining of mineral.

Harris, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, voted against the rule on Tuesday, as did Reps. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Chip Roy (R-TX), each of whom cited the hemp product ban as among the issues they want to take a stand against their own party’s leadership over.

But their opposition, along with that of Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), was not enough to defeat the rule clearing the way for House leadership’s agenda for the week to advance.

Two Democrats—Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and Jared Golden (D-ME)—voted with Republicans to approve the rule, 210-208.

Harris complained in a social media post that THC products are “being sold in convenience stores across the country,” saying that some “can contain even more THC than marijuana.”

Sessions, for his part, said he wanted House leaders to “change” the bill by removing the hemp ban delay provision.

“Let’s just make it a clean CR. I’ll vote for that,” he said.

Roy, for his part, said in a letter to leadership that he had “serious concerns” about issues in the bill that “Congress should address rather than simply extend,” including its “treatment of harmful intoxicating hemp products.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), for her part, criticized her colleagues for threatening to delay their party’s agenda over hemp.

“There are a few House Republicans so upset the Continuing Resolution includes a delay in the implementation of the Mitch McConnell-backed language to ban most consumable hemp-derived products from the marketplace, they are threatening to vote against this week’s rule, which has nothing to do with the CR,” she said in a Facebook post. “Make that make sense.”

Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR), who did not join other prohibitionists in voting against House leadership to protest the hemp move, said in a social media post that he opposes delaying the ban.

“Congress legalized hemp in the 2018 Farm Bill for agricultural uses like fiber, not as a backdoor for intoxicating products. Modern extraction techniques turn low THC hemp into gummies, snacks and drinks; items that can particularly cause risk to children,” he said. “Unregulated, intoxicating products should not remain on the market. The currently scheduled restrictions close this gap. A delay prolongs the harm. I sincerely hope that the ban goes into effect without further delay.”

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK), said he was “sympathetic” to concerns from Harris and others about use of the funding bill to address the hemp issue.

“This should not have been on here, CR should not be controversial, so I’m sympathetic with that,” he said, though he also criticized the handful of GOP holdouts for using the rule as “leverage” for their concerns.

“A lot of this is we’ve got a group that wants to leverage the procedural votes to extract things that the majority of us probably don’t want to do. I find that disappointing,” he said, according to The Hill. “I mean, if you’re going to be a member of the Republican conference, you ought to be able to vote for the rule. It’s just that simple, and you shouldn’t use it to leverage things against your own team. You want to vote against the bill? That’s perfectly fine, and that’s true in any bill. Your final vote on the bill is up to you, but blackmailing your colleagues is not the way to build an effective team.”

The funding bill’s provision to delay the ban, which is supported by the White House and is now headed to Trump to be signed into law, contains a carve-out to allow the immediate recriminalization on November 12 of synthetic cannabinoids “that are not capable of being naturally produced by a Cannabis sativa L. plant.”

A number of lawmakers from both chambers and both parties have filed or are circulating a growing number of bills to prevent the scheduled federal recriminalization of hemp THC drinks and other products later this year. Until now, none of those proposals have gained traction with congressional leaders.

For example, Reps. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX) and Greg Landsman (D-OH) filed a bill to keep hemp THC drinks legal while taxing and regulating them like alcohol.

Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is circulating legislation that would delay a planned federal ban on hemp THC products and institute some regulations—including packaging requirements, testing rules and age limits.

Separately, Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY), filed a lengthier proposal to prevent the federal recriminalization of hemp THC products and put in place a number of regulations for manufacturing, labeling, sales and taxation of hemp-derived products, including an age limit of 21.

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Plaintiffs argue in the lawsuit that the result is “a single product is simultaneously legal ‘hemp’ and illegal ‘marijuana.’”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

A federal judge is being asked to decide whether Missouri’s new law banning intoxicating hemp products is clear enough to enforce in November or so contradictory that a constitutional challenge to it should move forward.

At the center of the dispute is the question of whether Missouri calls a product legal “hemp” in one part of state law and illegal “marijuana” in another.

The plaintiffs, led by the Missouri Hemp Trade Association, said in a filing this week that the state has created overlapping definitions, leaving businesses unsure what they can legally sell when the law goes into effect on November 12. They argue the case over House Bill 2641 deserves to be heard in court.

“Most judges would read [House Bill 2641] and go, ‘What is going on here?’” said Chuck Hatfield, attorney for the plaintiffs. “‘This seems like something we need to at least dig into and figure out.’ And that’s what our clients want is a day in court.”

The state says there’s no contradiction because the law specifically outlines which category controls: if it meets the definition of a hemp-derived cannabinoid product, it’s treated as marijuana. The state asked Judge M. Douglas Harpool of the U.S. District Court Western District of Missouri to dismiss the lawsuit earlier this month.

The state argues the case is part of a growing nationwide effort by the hemp industry to overturn similar state laws.

“The industry’s playbook is well established,” the motion to dismiss states, citing other federal cases where the challenges against other state legislation regulating intoxicating hemp have failed.

Plaintiffs hit back in their response this week, saying that Missouri’s law is different from the other states cited. These products will be considered marijuana in Missouri under the new law, they argue, and that’s where the legislation gets “unconstitutionally vague.”

The federal law distinguishing marijuana and hemp has brought intense debate both in the legislature and courts nationwide since Congress legalized hemp in 2018.

For Missouri, the lawsuit is the latest episode in a long saga to regulate intoxicating hemp products that, in previous years, has ended with lawmakers throwing their hands up in frustration.

When Congress legalized hemp in 2018, it opened a door for intoxicating products like hemp-derived THC beverages that are now found in grocery stores and bars throughout the state.

Congress closed that loophole in November by passing a federal ban that’s set to go into effect November 12. Missouri lawmakers said they intended to mirror that language by a law passed this spring.

However, plaintiffs argue in the lawsuit that the result is “a single product is simultaneously legal ‘hemp’ and illegal ‘marijuana.’”

The state argues in its motion to dismiss that it prevented this scenario because it “enacted provisions to guard against confusion.”

“In other words, to the extent that a hemp-derived cannabinoid meets the statute’s definition of ‘hemp’ and is not included in any of the statute’s exclusions from ‘hemp,’ then the product is not a ‘hemp-derived cannabinoid product’ for purposes of HB 2641’s central mandate,” according to the state’s motion. “It is that simple.”

The bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Dave Hinman of O’Fallon, will prohibit hemp products from containing more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container, which is among the limits included in a provision in the federal spending bill Congress approved last year.

Even if Congress reverses course and decides to allow the sale of these products, Hinman’s bill would only permit them to be sold in Missouri’s licensed marijuana dispensaries. And if Congress chooses to delay the ban, Missouri would still ban all products, except for intoxicating beverages.

However, plaintiffs argue beverages are not specifically stated as being exempt.

The law lists types of products that would go into effect if there was a delay, which includes “any solid candy, gummy, chewable product, tablet, capsule, oil, baked good, or other solid edible.” It also includes products “that can be smokable or vapeable in the form of raw plant material, flower, or bud material and that contain any amount of tetrahydrocannabinolic acid.”

Beverages are thought to be allowed because they aren’t on the list of things that would go into effect. However, critics have said other products might be unintentionally exempt because they are not listed here, not just beverages, and the law just creates another loophole. Plaintiffs point to the carve-out clause as further reason the law is “difficult to parse.”

This list has become a bigger focus because Congress is currently considering delaying the federal ban.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate approved a measure to fund federal agencies until December 11, and it includes delaying the federal ban on intoxicating hemp THC products until that date.

It now goes back to the U.S. House for final approval before heading to the president’s desk.

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.

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The California Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) recently posted a voluntary recall notice for a Baddies Worldwide Flower cannabis product by Backpackboyz after officials determined the product violates cannabis industry packaging and labeling regulations by being too attractive to children.

The packaging contains 3.5 grams of cannabis flower and a small figurine offered as part of a brand partnership with Natalie Nunn, a California reality television star who first appeared on the Oxygen show “Bad Girls Club” and now executive produces the show “Baddies” on the Zeus Network.

“DCC determined that the packaging and labeling used for the affected product contains imagery and design elements that are attractive to children and therefore does not comply with California cannabis packaging and labeling requirements.” — Excerpt from the voluntary recall notice

While the DCC notice does not express concerns about the cannabis flower itself, the agency recommends that consumers who still have the product either dispose of or return it to the retail location where it was purchased.

The product was sold on or after May 15, 2026, at retailers in Alameda, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Clara, and Sonoma.

Ganjapreneur: Offering daily insights since 2014, the leading digital business journal for cannabis industry professionals. Subscribe to the newsletter to join our community of over 40,000 ganjapreneurs.

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4,516 people logged what they drank for three weeks. On the days they had a THC beverage, their odds of also drinking alcohol fell by roughly half. The finding held for 23 of the 36 products tested, and moved the same direction in every one.

The largest real-world study of hemp THC beverages has published its numbers, and the clearest thing in it has nothing to do with sleep, pain or productivity.

It’s beer.

MoreBetter, a Philadelphia research firm that has run observational studies on consumer products since 2016, tracked 4,516 people across 36 products from 23 brands, at doses between 1 and 10 milligrams of THC. Each participant logged seven days before touching any product, fourteen days on it, then answered an exit survey. Every person served as their own control, measured against their own pre-use baseline. The fieldwork ran in two waves across 2025, so the results are new rather than the research. The company published the full dataset free on its Real-World Data Exchange platform and prepared a findings summary exclusively for High Times, breaking out the numbers behind each measure.

On a participant’s ordinary day, before any of this started, the modeled probability that they would drink alcohol was 22.9%. On days they drank one of these beverages, it was 10.9%.

Two Measurements, One Direction

What gives that number weight is that it doesn’t come from asking anybody about it. It comes from what people logged, day by day, about what they actually drank, run through a model that compares each person to themselves.

The exit survey asked the question directly, and the answers point the same way. Two-thirds said they were consuming less alcohol. Fifty-six percent called the drinks a regular replacement for it. Those are people describing themselves, which is a weaker kind of evidence, but they line up with the behavioral measure instead of contradicting it.

The tightest number in that group is the health one. An 86.6% average with a floor of 80% across every single product means the belief holds no matter which drink somebody picked up. Worth being precise about what that measures: it’s what people think, not what is true. Nothing in this study tested whether these products are safer than alcohol.

The eleven-point gap between the health answer and the social one is the more interesting detail. People are more confident about what these drinks do to their body than about how showing up with one plays in a room.

Fifty Days Later

The obvious question about a two-week study is whether anything survives it. MoreBetter went back and asked.

Fifty days after the study period ended, the company surveyed participants from 18 of the 36 products about how their relationship with alcohol had changed. It got 1,420 responses. Setting aside the 249 who weren’t drinking alcohol before any of this began leaves 1,171 people who were. Those results are not on the public dashboard; MoreBetter provided them to High Times on the record.

Two things to hold onto there. A third of respondents reported no change at all, which is the honest headline alongside the 63%. And this is people recalling their own drinking seven weeks later, on a narrower base than the main dataset, which makes it softer evidence than the daily logs. It points the same direction anyway, and the gap between 63% and 2.4% is not a close call.

MoreBetter also says a portion of the original group has continued into a second and now a third cohort, the third of which is currently open, spanning 12 to 18 months between the first and the present one. The point is to see whether consumption patterns and substitution behavior hold up over that kind of stretch. Those results don’t exist yet.

What It Actually Feels Like

The experience these numbers describe is mild and short, which is the whole design premise of the category and now has some evidence under it.

Duration is the most consistent thing in the entire dataset. Thirty-six products, 23 brands, doses spanning a factor of ten, and every one of them landed between two and 2.9 hours. The standard deviation is 0.2 hours. Whatever else varies in this category, how long it lasts does not.

Feeling high is the opposite. It swings from 18.8% of use days to 81.5%, which is what a 1 to 10 milligram spread would predict, and it means the 53.3% average describes almost nobody’s actual product. Half the people buying in this category are not particularly trying to get high, and the products know it.

The onset figure needs an asterisk. Participants picked from bands rather than clocking themselves, so 26.9 minutes is a center of mass, not a stopwatch reading.

And the hangover number, which the industry will want to run with, is a share of use days rather than a share of people. There was no alcohol comparison group in this study, so it cannot be read as better or worse than a hangover from drinking. MoreBetter says so itself, in writing, which is not something most industry-funded research bothers to do.

The Productivity Number, Handled Carefully

Participants reported roughly 36 more minutes of productive time on product days than on their own non-product days, a jump from 5.64 hours to 6.24. That reached significance for 20 of the 36 products, and every significant result was positive.

The companion measure is messier and deserves the scrutiny. The probability of reporting a productive day rose 12.5 points on average, but that only held for 13 of 36 products, and one product moved 15 points in the other direction. The accurate version is that for about a third of the products tested, people were more likely to report a good day, and for one of them the reverse was true.

Both are estimates people made about their own hours, not measured output.

How to Read Any of This

This is observational, not a clinical trial. There is no placebo arm and no separate comparison group; the comparison is each participant against their own pre-use baseline, which is a real method with real limits. People chose to enroll and chose their product through what MoreBetter calls a semi-blinded process. Almost everything here is self-reported, including the alcohol logs behind the headline finding. This describes what a large group of people reported while drinking these products. It does not establish that the products caused any of it.

One caveat matters more than the rest, and it comes from MoreBetter rather than from us. When a finding is significant for 23 of 36 products, the headline average covers only those 23. Products that showed no significant change are left out of the average, not counted as zero. Quote the twelve-point drop without the coverage number and you have overstated it. That warning is printed in the company’s own summary, in bold.

Who Paid For It

MoreBetter says it funded the Infused Beverage Study primarily itself, with partial funding from the beverage brands whose products were tested, and that those brands had no influence over protocol design, data analysis or published findings.

Twenty-three brands participated: BRĒZ, Cantrip, Nowadays, Uncle Arnie’s, Willie’s Remedy+, Woodstock, Medterra, Rebel Rabbit, Snoop Dogg’s Iconic Tonics, Herbal Oasis, Cornbread Hemp, Stiiizy, 1906, Sober(ish), Wims!, Hippie Water, Squared, Hightail, Kava Haven, 23rd State, Drippy, Good Feels and Rexis Biotech.

None of that makes the data bad, and the company reports 17 peer-reviewed publications across 12 university research partnerships behind it. It does mean some of the companies that helped pay for the study sell the products the study is being used to defend, and anyone citing these numbers in a policy fight should say so. Nothing is broken out by brand, so no figure here belongs to any individual participant.

The Products in This Study Are About to Stop Being Legal

Section 781 of Public Law 119-37 caps finished hemp products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container, applied to the whole package rather than a serving. It takes effect November 12.

The products in this study run from 1 to 10 milligrams per serving. The weakest one carries more than twice the legal ceiling for an entire container.

None of the 36 would survive it.

That date is still moving. The Senate has passed a stopgap that would push most of the new restrictions to December 11, and the House hasn’t taken it up. Until it does, November 12 is the law. We’ve been tracking the whole fight here.

Some brands have already made their bet. Cann pulled the THC out of part of its lineup, while B-Real and Rachel Wolfson launched into the same market with full-dose product. One side is reformulating for the rule on the books. The other is betting Congress changes it first. NielsenIQ data cited by MoreBetter puts the category at $239 million in tracked retail sales over the 52 weeks ending June 27, up 135% year over year, which is what the 0.4 milligram number is aimed at and why the fight has pulled in everyone from trade groups to Rosario Dawson.

Every figure in this article, and the several dozen measures that didn’t make it in, are free at rwdexchange.com/community. Verify a phone number or email, enter the code, then open Community Insights and the Infused Beverage Performance Data dashboard. No cost, no trial period, no card. Everything is filterable by seltzer, soda, sparkling beverage, functional tonic, and spirits, shots and mixers, and MoreBetter asks that anyone using the figures credit the source.

The data arrived after the vote.

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“For more than seven years, Texans have built a multibillion-dollar hemp industry under laws that define these products as legal hemp.”

By Stephen Simpson, The Texas Tribune

Three members of the hemp industry are suing the state of Texas for violating commerce protections after it was announced last week that nearly all hemp-derived THC products are illegal.

On Friday, two hemp retailers and a distributor filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas against the Texas Department of State Health Services; Attorney General Ken Paxton (R); and the Galveston County criminal district attorney and sheriff, alleging that classifying hemp-derived substances as illegal violates the 2018 Farm Bill, which removed it from the federal Controlled Substances Act.

The complaint states that the reinstated definitions provide no delineation between lawful hemp and unlawful marijuana; that it’s preempted by the 2018 Farm Bill’s protections for the interstate hemp market; and that these classifications impose an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce.

In addition to the complaint, the plaintiffs are also moving for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prevent the ban on these THC products.

“For more than seven years, Texans have built a multibillion-dollar hemp industry under laws that define these products as legal hemp. Without any change to those laws, the State now says they’re Schedule I drugs, like heroin,” said Andrea Steel, lead counsel for the hemp industry in this case, in a news release.

State officials banned at the end of last month several hemp-derived THC cannabis products, including those containing delta-8 and delta-10 THC variants, punishing people in possession of them with jail time and fines. However, delta-9 THC, the most commonly sold THC product in Texas, will remain legal.

Now that THC variants are classified as a schedule I drug, possession of illegal THC products will be treated as a state jail felony, which carries a punishment of 180 days to two years in prison and fines of up to $10,000, say cannabis experts.

“Our Constitution does not allow the government to jail a person under a framework no one can make sense of—our clients are asking the federal court to protect Texans from their own confused government,” Steel said.

Cannabis experts say if the ban is not removed, more than half of the THC products in stores might be removed from shelves.

“It’s a pretty big blow, and it’s recriminalizing a lot of cannabis products that have been completely legal and allowable in the state for many years, so we’re taking steps backwards toward prohibition,” Sarah Todd, media representative at Texas Cannabis Policy Center, previously told the Tribune.

The recent change stems from a Texas Supreme Court decision in May that allowed the Texas Department of State Health Services to reclassify all hemp-derived THC, except for low-dose delta-9 THC, as a Schedule 1 drug, prohibiting its possession and sale in the state. The ruling ended a 2021 injunction that paused DSHS from enforcing the new classification, which effectively allowed stores to stock different kinds of THC for the past five years.

The ban applies to all synthetically created THC forms, including delta-8, delta-10, THCP and THCA flower. The one exception will be delta-9 products with less than 0.3% THC by dry weight.

Delta-9, which naturally occurs in cannabis and is not typically synthetically derived, will remain the only THC option for Texas consumers because the federal 2018 Farm Bill legally defines hemp as cannabis containing no more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC, and it does not list other cannabinoids.

This is the latest blow to the state’s hemp industry, whose year started with promises from lawmakers that hemp is here to stay but has been consumed with uncertainty over the last several months as flurries of court actions have ripped products off the shelves and then put them back on.

A statewide ban on the sale of smokeable hemp, such as flower buds and rolled joints, was supposed to go into effect on March 31, but a court ruling has paused it, so delta-9 smokeable hemp will also still be available to consumers.

Texas banned the sale of vape pens containing THC in the last legislative session.

Various lawmakers have promised to continue their crusade against hemp this upcoming legislative session, making arguments against THC that harkened back to the days of the “Just Say No” campaigns of the ’80s regarding the risks of THC usage and its effects. Members of the committee used the frying-pan-and-brain analogy as an example of how these products cause mental health problems among young people.

Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, has already confirmed he will once again file a bill to ban consumable hemp products at the next legislative session.

There are about 14,000 retail stores statewide that are licensed to sell consumable hemp, according to the Department of State Health Services.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

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