Hemp businesses immediately decried the proposed federal ban and said it was championed by anti-cannabis U.S. Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, a Republican who has for years introduced various bills to block or roll back marijuana and hemp reforms. Harris’ office used the same summary language in a press release.
“It’s another bill to destroy the hemp industry,” said Art Massolo, the founder of Cycling Frog, a Colorado-based hemp THC beverage company, after speaking at a cannabis business conference in New York City yesterday. “The fact of the matter is that THC hasn’t killed one human being on the planet, ever. So what are worried about? What are people so afraid of?”
Jim Higdon, co-founder of Kentucky-based Cornbread Hemp, said most Americans want a regulated national THC market, not a return to the days of cannabis prohibition.
“This amendment proposed by known anti-cannabis zealot, Rep. Andy Harris, would be a huge step backwards for the American farming economy and the American consumer. The American people have spoken repeatedly: they want legal, regulated cannabis products, not the sort of 1980’s-style prohibition proposed by Rep. Andy Harris,” Higdon said in a text message.
Some members of the marijuana industry said the proposed intoxicating hemp ban would likely benefit the marijuana sector, at least in the short term, by eliminating major competition for state-licensed cannabis shops.
“Overnight, it’s great news,” said Vince Ning, owner of cannabis distributor Nabis, which operates in California, New York and Nevada. “I think it’d be good news for us. It gives us more work to do.”
But others decried such a proposal as short-sighted and potentially harmful in the long run for anyone in either the marijuana or hemp trades.
“What I fear is, this reaction isn’t coming from prohibitionists or those who hate the industry. I see this happening in a lot of states, that members of our industry who are trying to eliminate competition are educating those who still believe in prohibition, to crack down on what we call ‘hemp,’ ” said Demitri Downing, co-founder of the Marijuana Industry Trade Association of Arizona.
“It would be a net positive for those people who are participating in the THC licensed market, because it limits the competition and it limits the supply chain to them,” Downing said. “At a higher level, it’s a negative, because it sends the message out to the community that there’s something dangerous about this plant. That message in general isn’t one our industry shouldn’t be supporting.”
Whitney said a hemp ban would provide a “plus to the marijuana industry,” but warned that the policy would probably be a “net neutral” because large multistate operators have put so much money into intoxicating hemp already.
When Whitney was researching the issue in 2023, he said, “there was hundreds of millions of dollars being derived by MSOs in the hemp space that would also go away. So they’ll lose the revenue from hemp that they’re going into these markets on. I mean, just think of Curaleaf in Florida, they just basically closed down a bunch of their medical dispensaries in favor of hemp.”
A federal hemp ban, if signed into law, “sets a dangerous precedent against the marijuana industry, because they’re advocating for all of these different policies to really box in hemp. And those very same policies could be applied to the marijuana industry, which would be devastating to them,” Whitney warned.
