This story was updated on August 16 to reflect new developments.
A controversial Californian bill that threatened to ban ‘90-95% of hemp products for retail sale’ is thought to have been shelved for the legislative session.
Yesterday (August 15), the state’s hemp industry urged legislators to vote ‘no’ on Assembly Bill 2223, amid expectations it was set to be brought up for a Senate vote before the end of the week.
Earlier in the week, the Senate Appropriations Committee reviewed the bill’s financial impact and put it on a list for potential votes. However, during the Thursday hearing, the committee chair didn’t call for a vote, effectively stopping the bill from progressing this year, Marijuana Moment reported.
Assembly Bill 2223 in California aims to regulate the incorporation of industrial hemp into cannabis products. The bill allows licensed cannabis businesses to manufacture, process, and sell products containing hemp, provided they comply with state laws.
It also imposes stricter guidelines on hemp products, including THC limits, and bans synthetic cannabinoids unless authorized. Additionally, the bill mandates registration for out-of-state hemp manufacturers and introduces penalties for violations.
The bill follows the creation of Assembly Bill 45 three years prior, which the US Hemp Roundtable, a major contributor to the bill’s construction, says created a balanced framework for legalizing hemp CBD products.
Following the establishment of this framework, a nearly $4 billion industry in California was created.
However, they accuse the California Department of Public Health of failing to enforce this framework effectively, allowing bad actors to infiltrate the market.
AB 2223, they contend, takes a step backward by imposing stringent requirements that could decimate the hemp industry. They argue that the bill has been pushed through with minimal transparency and in collaboration with large cannabis companies, seeking to monopolize the market and eliminate competition from small businesses and minority-owned companies.
In a public statement, the organization said: “The bill included outrageous requirements that would result in the ban of 90-95% of hemp products for retail sale – including most non-intoxicating CBD products that were the explicit focus of passage of AB 45.
“Hemp advocates were met with continual promises – both privately and during public hearings – that our concerns would be addressed, that the language in AB 2223 was just a starting point of the discussion. The hemp industry provided legislators and the administration with scientific and economic studies to bolster our arguments.
“Yet just within the past few weeks, the California Department of Cannabis Control dropped a bomb on the discussions. In 41 pages of new ‘technical’ amendments, the agency proposed that all hemp products with any THC in them – again, meaning nearly every hemp product – come under their purview and therefore be banned from retail sale.”
Furthermore, the group has accused the agency of trying to rush through the bill at the end of the legislative session, with ‘barely two weeks left’ and a ‘massive rewrite’ of the reconfiguration of hemp and CBD laws yet to be made public.
