Senate leaders released a stopgap that would push most of the federal hemp deadline to December 11. Cannabinoids the plant cannot make still die on schedule, both chambers have to agree and the states writing their own rules are not waiting.

The federal ban on hemp-derived THC products was supposed to arrive November 12. Most of the industry could now be one congressional agreement away from getting 29 more days.

Senate leaders released a stopgap funding bill on Sunday that would keep federal agencies running through December 11 and, tucked inside, delay the planned prohibition on most hemp products until that same date.

“Until December 11, 2026, the amendments made by section 781 of division B of Public Law 119–37 shall only apply with respect to products described in paragraphs (1)(C)(ii)(I) and (1)(C)(iv)(I) of section 297A of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946.”

Section 2019, Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027

The hemp language appears in Section 2019 of the bill’s separate extensions division. Rather than repeating the definition, it cross-references two clauses in the hemp law Congress enacted last year. Those clauses cover intermediate and final products containing cannabinoids “that are not capable of being naturally produced by a Cannabis sativa L. plant.” Until December 11, those would be the only new exclusions taking effect. The restrictions on cannabinoids that occur naturally but are synthesized outside the plant, along with the 0.4-milligram cap, would be delayed for 29 days.

That’s the proposal. Four extra weeks, for most products, with one category left behind.

What Would Actually Move

The 0.4-milligram ceiling is low enough to push most hemp beverages, intoxicating edibles and full-spectrum tinctures currently sold in the United States outside the law. That cap, not the word “ban,” is the mechanism that kills the market.

Why December 11, of all dates? The extension was written to expire the same day as the funding bill that carries it, which hands Congress another decision point the next time government money runs out. Hemp’s legal status would be pegged to the same clock as federal government funding. Nobody who has watched Congress lately should find that comforting.

The House is not a formality. It passed a different funding bill last month, one that runs to December 4 and carries no hemp extension at all. The Senate still has to pass its own version, the two chambers would then need to approve identical language and only then does anything reach the president’s desk.

“As Mark Twain might have said, ‘The reports of hemp’s death have been greatly exaggerated.’”

Jonathan Miller, general counsel, US Hemp Roundtable

Four weeks is also not the unit of time this industry runs on. Co-packers book production lines out months. Distributors need to know what they can legally warehouse before they take delivery. A processor ordering inputs in August is ordering against a federal rule that may not exist by the time the pallets show up. An extension pegged to the next funding fight buys the lobbyists another round. It does not buy anyone a purchase order.

Washington Wants a Fix

Supporters say the delay is meant to buy time for an actual fix, and for once the pressure runs from the top down. President Donald Trump has publicly pushed Congress to redefine hemp and protect full-spectrum CBD products, writing on Truth Social: “We must get this done RIGHT and FAST, especially for those who saw that CBD helps them.” His budget office sent House Speaker Mike Johnson a letter asking lawmakers to “ensure the fair treatment of hemp products.”

The leading vehicle is the Lawful Hemp Protection Act, introduced in July by Reps. Andy Barr, R-Ky., and Angie Craig, D-Minn. It would repeal the ban language outright and replace it with a federal framework: it directs regulators to set potency limits, with fallback caps of 5 milligrams of THC per serving for ingestible products and 50 for inhalables if the agency fails to act within a year, plus a 21-and-over sales floor, testing and labeling rules, domestic sourcing requirements and restrictions on synthetic and artificially modified cannabinoids. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., is circulating a competing delay-and-regulate bill, and a Senate companion to Barr-Craig is expected from Sens. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as Marijuana Moment reported.

“While not a lot of time, this one-month extension gives lawmakers the opportunity to address this critical issue after Election Day,” said Jim Higdon, co-founder and chief communications officer of Kentucky’s Cornbread Hemp, in a statement. The Barr-Craig bill, he added, “sets a national potency standard and closes loopholes that allowed foreign-made synthetic THC to proliferate in an unregulated market.”

The States Aren’t Waiting

Here’s the part the celebration skips. Illinois enacted its own hemp restrictions effective November 12, limiting products sold outside the licensed cannabis system to less than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. Anything above that threshold gets treated as cannabis and can move only through licensed dispensaries. That date sits in state statute, and no federal stopgap moves it. North Carolina lawmakers are considering legislation that would write the incoming federal standard into state law. A company whose real exposure sits in Springfield or Raleigh gets little from four extra federal weeks.

The hemp industry spent the summer asking Congress for time. If Congress says yes, it gets a countdown stapled to another countdown.

<p>The post The Hemp Ban Could Slip a Month. Read the Fine Print Before You Celebrate. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Every nongovernment participant selected for the DEA’s rescheduling hearing opposed reform. By the time the record closed, one marquee witness had undercut a central part of his side’s case, another had reportedly acknowledged that cannabis meets the Schedule III criteria, and the opposition’s strongest agency scientist had exposed the legal question likely to shape what comes next. Briefs and transcript corrections are due August 17, while a parallel court fight is already underway.

This is the third installment in High Times’ coverage of the DEA’s rescheduling hearing. Read Part I, “The DEA Blocked the Cameras at This Cannabis Hearing. Here’s What They Didn’t Want You to See,” and Part II, “Prohibitionists Just Argued Themselves Into a Corner: To Stop Weed Reform, They Told a Court How Much Money They’d Lose”

The states of Nebraska, Idaho and Indiana called Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal to make a straightforward argument: that legal cannabis fuels crime, and that federal rescheduling would make it worse. Honsal runs law enforcement in the heart of California’s Emerald Triangle, the most storied weed-growing region in the country. If anyone could tell a federal tribunal that legalization bred lawlessness, it was supposed to be him.

Then the Justice Department got him on cross-examination, and he complicated his own side’s theory. Regulated cannabis can help law enforcement, Honsal told the tribunal, and most of the California product diverted to other states comes from unlicensed operators, not the legal market. That is according to attorneys from Vicente LLP who were in the room. It did not erase every concern in the states’ filing. But it undercut a central implication of their crime argument, that the regulated market itself was the engine of the crime they described.

The states’ own pre-hearing statement had blamed the growth of the illicit market directly on changes in cannabis law, complete with a warning about organized criminal groups buying up California property to mass-produce weed for interstate sale. Under oath, their witness complicated that account. And it wasn’t a slip. Honsal has said versions of this for years. Back in 2019, he told the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors that the number of illegal grows in the county was falling, “and that is what we call a win,” and that large-scale trafficking operations were on the wane. His point then, as on the stand, was not that legalization had erased every harm. It was that the illicit market had shrunk after legalization, even as the operators who remained outside the law changed tactics.

The Problem the Opposition Carried Through the Hearing

Honsal was the clearest example of a problem that ran through the whole proceeding. When the opposition’s witnesses engaged the government’s actual legal criteria, some handed the government useful admissions. And when its strongest scientist went after the rule, she made the fight about which legal standard applies.

The most consequential reported admission came from Smart Approaches to Marijuana’s marquee expert, Harvard’s Dr. Bertha Madras, among the most credentialed cannabis skeptics in the country. The Marijuana Herald reported, citing a source familiar with the exchange, that Madras answered “yes” when asked under cross-examination whether cannabis meets Schedule III’s statutory criteria. The account was corroborated by The Dales Report’s correspondent inside the hearing. Until that transcript is public, the precise scope of the admission remains uncertain.

The Opposition’s Strongest Witness Made the Fight About the Test

Not every opposition witness helped the government. The opposition’s strongest moment came from a witness who works for the agency defending the rule.

SAM subpoenaed Dr. Luli Akinfiresoye, a pharmacologist in the DEA’s own Drug and Chemical Evaluation Section and an author of the agency’s 2024 scientific review. She testified that under the DEA’s traditional five-part test, cannabis lacks a currently accepted medical use, is not consistently reproducible, and is diverted through state medical systems. The government declined to cross-examine her, leaving that testimony untested on cross even as its own affirmative case rested on a different medical-use framework.

That silence has been read as confidence. Business of Cannabis interpreted it as the government signaling that Akinfiresoye’s five-part standard had been superseded and that her testimony was aimed at the court record rather than at this judge. That is a plausible reading, but it is an interpretation, not something the government proved by declining to ask her a question. Her testimony gave SAM the factual foundation for its strongest legal argument: not merely that cannabis fails the DEA’s traditional five-part test, but that the government could not replace that framework with the two-part inquiry it used to reach its conclusion. That is the same dispute the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel addressed in 2024, when it found exclusive reliance on the five-part test impermissibly narrow and concluded that HHS’s two-part inquiry was sufficient to establish a currently accepted medical use.

That is the real shape of what the opposition built. Its most effective play was not to prove that cannabis fails the standard the government applied. It was to contest which standard governs in the first place.

One Hearing, Two Audiences

That helps explain the rest of the opposition’s case. Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius set the scope narrowly on day one: whether cannabis beyond FDA-approved products and state-licensed medical cannabis, both moved to Schedule III in April, meets the criteria for accepted medical use, comparative abuse potential and dependence. Much of the opposition’s testimony concentrated elsewhere, on youth exposure, potency, mental-health risk and diversion. Those issues can bear on abuse potential and on the controls placed around cannabis. They did less to rebut the government’s threshold claim that cannabis has at least one currently accepted medical use and a risk profile consistent with Schedule III.

The gap between that testimony and the question in front of Julius suggests that the judge was only one audience. The other was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where three challenges to the April rescheduling order have already been consolidated and a motion to stay the order is pending. This does not prove the opposition expected to lose before Julius; parties preserve issues for judicial review regardless of how confident they are. But it fits what observers in the room described. MJBizDaily reported that much of the opposition testimony appeared aimed at building a record for later litigation, and quoted NORML’s Paul Armentano saying opponents were likely establishing a record for appeal rather than primarily trying to influence the ALJ.

The government, for its part, chose not to fight every point. As journalist Natalie Fertig reported from inside the hearing for Cultivated News, the DEA cross-examined sparingly, sometimes only a handful of questions. Its theory was comparatively narrow: establish at least one accepted medical use, a lower abuse potential than Schedule I and II substances, and a dependence profile consistent with Schedule III. On safety, the government’s point was specific: that cannabis does not produce the fatal respiratory-depression pattern associated with opioids. That strategy makes sense if the government believed the governing framework had already done most of the work. But it also left Akinfiresoye’s contrary testimony largely untested on cross.

What Happens Next, and When

The day after the record closed, Julius issued an order for transcript corrections and post-hearing briefs that set the next real marker. Designated parties have until August 17 to file optional post-hearing briefs, up to 50 pages, one per party, with no adverse inference for declining to file. The same date is the deadline to propose corrections to the hearing transcript, and those corrections are limited to genuine transcription errors, misspellings and misattributed lines. They cannot be used to revise testimony or to walk back something a witness said. Whatever the witnesses said on the stand is locked in. Only transcription errors get fixed.

After the briefs, Julius drafts a recommended decision, which is not binding. Once it lands, parties get 20 days to file exceptions, and then the full record is certified to DEA Administrator Terrance C. “Terry” Cole, who makes the agency’s final determination. No timetable has been set for either Julius’s recommendation or Cole’s final call. Meanwhile, the parallel D.C. Circuit litigation continues.

The record in front of Julius is less favorable to the opposition than its hold on every nongovernment participant slot might suggest. Honsal undercut a central implication of the states’ crime argument. Madras reportedly acknowledged that cannabis satisfies the Schedule III criteria, though the transcript will determine the scope of that admission. Akinfiresoye gave the opposition its strongest answer, and in doing so clarified the decisive fork in the case: if Julius accepts the government’s two-part framework for currently accepted medical use, the path to Schedule III is relatively straightforward. If he concludes that the DEA’s traditional five-part test still governs, it is not.

That leaves the opposition’s strongest argument in this hearing resting on a legal claim: that the government used the wrong test for accepted medical use. The D.C. Circuit is already considering a separate challenge to April’s partial rescheduling order, and any final rule extending Schedule III to cannabis more broadly would likely trigger another round of judicial review, potentially before the same court.

<p>The post Prohibitionists Packed the DEA Hearing to Keep Marijuana in Schedule I. Their Own Witnesses Made the Case for Schedule III. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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Rolling Stone just told the story of how Afroman turned a botched police raid into a viral hit and a First Amendment win. Here is the piece that did not fit in that story: why the song that made him famous a quarter century ago lands harder now than it did then.

Rolling Stone just published a terrific long read on Joseph Foreman, better known as Afroman, and his unlikely second act. In 2022, at least nine officers from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office raided his Ohio home on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. No arrest, no charges. Foreman turned the security-camera footage into a string of mocking music videos, the officers sued him for nearly $4 million, and in March a jury cleared him on every count. The novelty rapper came out the other side a free-speech folk hero.

We covered this from the start, both the 2022 raid that set it off and the verdict that turned it into a movement. When Rolling Stone’s Jason Newman reached out for the feature, the conversation ran long, and some of it landed on the cutting-room floor. The part that got cut is worth expanding, because it is about the song, not the trial.

The Joke Was Always the Narrator

By 2001, cannabis was already deep in the bloodstream of popular music. Cheech and Chong. Cypress Hill. Snoop and Dr. Dre. Rick James, Peter Tosh and Bob Dylan before them. What made Afroman different was not the weed. It was the point of view. Most cannabis music of the era treated weed as cool, rebellious or aspirational. Afroman played a guy who blamed weed for everything wrong in his life. The joke was the narrator.

That is also why the song traveled so far outside cannabis culture. Different audiences heard different songs. Stoners heard a comedy anthem. Everyone else heard something close to anti-weed propaganda, a catalog of missed classes, missed court dates, wrecked relationships and slow self-destruction. Both sides thought the song agreed with them. That tension is what carried “Because I Got High” to Number One in nearly a dozen countries and a Grammy nomination.

The Song Aged in Reverse

Here is the strange thing about the song. It got better as the culture changed around it. Twenty-five years ago, a lot of people genuinely believed weed automatically turned adults lazy, irresponsible or dysfunctional. Today, millions of adults have their own experience with cannabis, and the public conversation is more nuanced. So the song no longer plays like a warning. It plays like a guy comically blaming weed for the ordinary business of being human.

That is part of why the revival connected. The prohibitionist arguments the song parodied in 2001 are back in 2026, almost word for word. Weed makes you stupid. Weed makes you violent. Weed makes you immature. We have spent the last several months at High Times answering those claims one by one, from the people who built careers predicting weed would destroy America to the New York Times ignoring the real-world evidence, from the Wall Street Journal tying teen use to legalization even as the DEA reports teen use falling, to the pretense that teens just discovered the plant and the weaponized hype around cannabis vomiting syndrome. The data does not support any of it. So the joke lands harder now, not softer. The audience is more cannabis-literate, and the prohibition pitch sounds more like a sketch than a study.

Same Voice, New Target

What Afroman did with “Lemon Pound Cake” and the rest of the raid songs was take the same comedic voice and point it somewhere new. In 2001 he made himself the joke. In 2026 he made the raid the joke. Same humor, different target.

There is a neat symmetry in that, and it is the whole story in one line. The 2001 Afroman wrote a song about being too high to make it to court. The 2026 Afroman made it to court and won.

<p>The post The Weed Moral Panic Afroman Mocked in 2001 Is Back. His Song Aged Into a Weapon. first appeared on High Times.</p>

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The DEA invited only opponents to its rescheduling hearing, turned reform supporters away and refused to livestream it. Then the government’s own witnesses stood up and made the case that cannabis has real medical value and is safer than substances sold at every gas station. Here is what has been happening inside a room the public is not allowed to see.

The most consequential federal cannabis hearing in more than fifty years began on June 29 in a courtroom in Arlington, Virginia, with roughly 25 public seats and no cameras. The DEA denied a request from Marijuana Moment, a congressman and other news outlets to livestream the proceedings. So what the country gets is secondhand, filtered through the handful of reporters and attorneys allowed in the room, and through the daily social media broadcasts of the people who want the reform dead.

Strip away the noise and the picture inside is clear. The government is arguing, with its own scientists, that cannabis belongs out of Schedule I. The case against it has so far amounted to attacking the test rather than the plant.

A Hearing Built for One Side

The setup matters because it shapes everything that follows. The DEA is the proponent of the rule, a strange posture for an agency that spent half a century defending prohibition. Under the process Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche set in motion, only “interested persons” could participate, and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole decided reform supporters did not qualify because they were not “adversely affected or aggrieved” by the reform. The result is an official participant list, published on the DEA’s own website, made up entirely of opponents: the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the states of Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana and Louisiana, DUID Victim Voices, Kenneth Finn MD, and Phillip A. Drum PharmD.

Reform advocates gathered outside DEA headquarters before the first gavel to say they had been shut out. The Marijuana Policy Project put the irony plainly, noting the DEA would be arguing for the first time in its history that cannabis meets the requirements for removal from Schedule I. The agency built the hearing, chose the guests and then had to make the case its own guests came to tear down.

What the Government’s Witnesses Actually Said

The heart of the hearing is a single legal question. To leave Schedule I, cannabis needs just one currently accepted medical use. The government says it has at least three: pain, anorexia tied to a medical condition and chemotherapy-related nausea.

Cannabis Business Times, whose reporter was in the room for the FDA witness’s testimony, reported that FDA scientist Dominic Chiapperino walked the court through the agency’s ten-month evaluation. His team compared cannabis against heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone, cocaine, benzodiazepines, alcohol and tobacco. Asked directly whether marijuana has fewer overdose deaths than those comparators, he answered, “Yes, that’s what we observed.” He said cannabis withdrawal looks like tobacco withdrawal, and that the data supports Schedule III. Of 39 clinical trials his team reviewed, the strongest evidence was for neuropathic pain.

The government’s second witness, New Hampshire physician Corey Burchman, testified on day two about treating pain patients. According to sources in the room who spoke with Marijuana Moment and Cultivated, Burchman said that once medical cannabis became available he and his colleagues would “avidly use that ability to limit opioids,” and that some patients transitioned off prescription painkillers entirely. His line on relative safety was the sharpest of the hearing. “Withdrawal from opioids is like a dumpster fire,” he said. “Withdrawal from marijuana is more like a dying glowing ember of a campfire.”

None of this makes cannabis harmless. Heavy use is linked to cannabis use disorder, a real risk the science does not dispute. The government did not pretend otherwise. Its own lawyer, James Schwartz, told the court the hearing was “not about legalization” and that the government was “not putting forth any evidence to suggest marijuana is not dangerous,” only that a drug must be weighed by its risks against its medical benefit. That is a scientific argument. What came back at it mostly was not.

The Opponents Are Fighting the Test, Not the Plant

Unable to dispute that cannabis is used medically across more than 40 states, opponents spent day two attacking the yardstick. For years, the FDA used a five-part test to judge accepted medical use, one that demanded known, reproducible chemistry and large controlled trials. In 2023, the government switched to a two-part test that asks whether licensed providers widely use the substance under state law, and whether credible science supports at least one condition. Opponents call the switch proof that politics corrupted the process.

The problem is that the switch was neither secret nor cannabis-specific. In 2024, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled the old five-part test “impermissibly narrow,” and the DEA has since used the two-part standard for other substances. Schwartz told the court the legality of the test was already settled and off the table for the hearing. When NDASA attorney David Evans pressed Chiapperino on why the agency abandoned the old test anyway, DEA lawyers objected and he withdrew the question.

There is a reason the old test failed cannabis, and it is not safety. As Vanderbilt law professor Robert Mikos has written, the five-part test amounted to a kind of tyranny: it demanded large-scale clinical trials to justify removing a drug from Schedule I, while Schedule I status blocked exactly those trials from happening. It is a test botanical cannabis, with many active compounds rather than a single molecule, could never pass. One attorney in the room described the opponents’ whole line of attack to Cultivated News as “ships passing in the night,” an argument about a test that is not material to the case actually before the judge.

Where the Prohibitionist Case Falls Apart

Outside the courtroom, the loudest voice has been Kevin Sabet of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, who has posted a video nearly every day. The videos are confident and aggrieved, and they keep colliding with the record.

He described a hearing packed with “the suits, all the industry folks.” There were industry executives and lawyers in the public gallery, but not one is a designated participant with the power to question witnesses or enter evidence. That role belongs entirely to the opponents. He said the government was arguing “the opposite of what the science says,” yet SAM’s own outlet, The Drug Report, reported that the FDA witness testified cannabis has accepted medical use for three conditions, the exact opposite of Sabet’s claim that there is none. He called Chiapperino’s acknowledgment that cannabis would fail the old five-part test “truly extraordinary,” without mentioning the Justice Department had already ruled that test unlawfully narrow.

Then there is the money. Sabet’s strongest-sounding argument is that the government moved “solely because” of donations, and the donations are real. Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers, whom Forbes called “the Trump whisperer,” was in the Oval Office when Trump signed the rescheduling order, and cannabis companies gave millions to a PAC that funded his. But “solely” has to erase a ten-month scientific review, an eight-factor analysis and years of majority public support to hold up, and MJBizDaily noted it is doubtful the political argument carries any weight in a hearing about medicine. It is also an odd charge from a group funded by donors it will not name, whose action arm reported $8.6 million in contributions in 2024. On day three, Sabet suggested the government’s pain doctor was “maybe even paid,” then added “who knows,” while calling his own side “the real scientists.”

The pattern is consistent, and it is not new. In a 2025 letter to Trump, SAM claimed drug cartels were running marijuana farms “many licensed at the state level,” and cited a Wall Street Journal article that said the opposite, that the sites were unlicensed. SAM could not produce evidence that any cartel had been licensed. For years, the group has pushed the claim that cannabis lowers IQ, leaning on a single decade-old study challenged in the very journal that published it and that the original author’s own follow-up work could not confirm. NORML’s Paul Armentano, who has tracked SAM for years, calls the continued use of that talking point “unethical” and “dishonest.” On day three, Sabet claimed the FDA witness had blown up the idea of cannabis as a PTSD treatment, a straw man given that no serious advocate claims cannabis cures PTSD and that PTSD is not among the three conditions the government’s case rests on.

Why the Noise, If They’re Winning the Room

So here is the question worth sitting with. If the prohibitionists secured a hearing where every invited participant is on their side, where supporters were excluded and the public cannot even watch, why the frantic daily messaging? Why tell people the room is full of an industry that has no vote, that the science says something it does not, that a settled legal question is a fresh scandal?

Because the room was never the hard part. Public opinion is. Most Americans support reform, the medical evidence keeps accumulating, and a government agency that fought legalization for fifty years just stood up and said, through its own FDA witness, that cannabis carries less overdose risk than the substances sold at any gas station. You can stack a hearing. You cannot stack a country. The hearing was the easy win. Moving the public is the fight SAM is actually losing, and it shows in how loudly they argue about a room they already control.

The hearing runs through July 15. The opponents present their own witnesses next, among them Harvard’s Bertha Madras and Yale’s Deepak Cyril D’Souza, and their attorneys will cross-examine Burchman. Sources told Cultivated to expect their knives sharpened. They will get their turn on the record. The record so far belongs to the other side.

This article is a reported analysis. It is based on public records, federal filings, and on-the-record reporting from Cannabis Business Times, Marijuana Moment, Cultivated and MJBizDaily, as well as statements made publicly by the people named. The views and interpretations are the author’s own. Claims about what was said inside the hearing are attributed to participants and to outlets that spoke with people in the room, as the proceedings were not livestreamed and official transcripts are not yet available.

<p>The post The DEA Blocked the Cameras at This Cannabis Hearing. Here’s What They Didn’t Want You to See. first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post The DEA Blocked the Cameras at This Cannabis Hearing. Here’s What They Didn’t Want You to See. appeared first on Paradise Found.

With Britain weeks away from a new Prime Minister, former UK parliamentary adviser James Matthewson argues that the incoming leader, widely expected to be Labour’s Andy Burnham, has a rare chance to be bold: end the war on weed and pour the proceeds into teen mental health.

The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, but when it comes to the options available to Britain’s next Prime Minister, there could be a real pot of gold hiding in plain sight.

For American readers, a bit of context. Britain is on the verge of a change at the top, with Labour’s Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, widely tipped as the frontrunner to be the next Prime Minister. He has built a reputation as a plain-talking figure who likes to position himself to the left of his party’s establishment. And far too few voices in mainstream British politics have made the argument I’m about to make, so I think it’s high time a Labour government finally hashed it out.

For a long time, the idea of drug policy reform has belonged to the fringes of our politics, with parties like the Greens or the Liberal Democrats leading the calls and shaping the conversation. But times have changed, and one of the biggest issues facing any prospective leader of our country right now is that many apathetic voters have simply lost faith in the ability of their politicians to change things. Changes do not always need to be drastic or highly visible. Some areas of policy require governments to wield their power like a scalpel, shaping the edges of laws and reforms with fine precision. But when facing a country that has seen few progressive shakeups at the heart of government, signalling your desire to shape the world we live in, and to catch up with the shifting tides of time, is crucial.

Born in 1994, I came up when drug education was a big deal in schools, and anyone around my age will tell you the same thing. Whether it was the theatre-in-education actors who came into school or the uninterested teacher handed extra responsibilities, what we were taught about cannabis was largely laughed out of the classroom before we even started high school. The reality stood in such blatant contrast to even the most progressive version of the message, the notion that weed was a gateway drug that would have you taking Class A’s by the time you were 17.

The real issue that many my age found out in due course was that the people in charge of that messaging did not truly understand what they were talking about. I may have spent years of my wayward youth as a stoner, but in truth the bong-hitting, Dorito-munching teenager in my past is not the person I am advocating for when it comes to reforming Britain’s drug policy.

Cannabis has changed. The older generations who smoked recreationally, or even very recreationally, had been consuming an entirely different substance from the one we were beginning to. Skunk and high-potency strains were just becoming popular as I was in my era of smoking every day, and in my experience the difference was stark. After several experiences with it, I became more selective, and eventually I quit altogether. I haven’t smoked in years, but I smell on the street what we all do, something closer to cat urine than the earthy, tempting plant I had enjoyed in my youth.

I watched what I believe that stuff did to friends of mine, and by the time the messaging and information began to slowly change, it felt too late. This nasty, almost synthetic-seeming weed was everywhere in the UK. That was very different from the situation in North America, where, as the decriminalization and then legalisation movement spread across the hyper-capitalist United States and into Canada, the quality of the cannabis increased and the revenue generated skyrocketed. Comments from American friends visiting the UK always remind me of this difference. They don’t even recognise the smell the rest of us have to tolerate at bus stops, out of car windows and on our high streets.

A good friend of mine, the social media creator and trade union organiser Craig Stewart, known as @thatguycraig on Instagram, was in Chicago earlier this month for the international trade union conference known as Labor Notes. While there he texted me, “this is incredible, they’ve even got weed unions,” along with a photo of a union rep from California wearing a t-shirt from his local branch of the cannabis growers’ union. Imagine what such an industry, grown from scratch here in the UK, could look like, especially if developed under a progressive government. Trade unions could be central to the vision of such a new sector, and the economic benefit alone has already turned the heads of even Conservative Members of Parliament and British business leaders.

The 2025 report from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, titled “High Returns,” found that legalising and regulating cannabis for non-medical adult use could generate over 15,000 new jobs and up to £1.5 billion in annual net benefits to the Treasury through tax revenue and savings across the criminal justice system. Specifically: projected tax revenues of £1.1 billion, the creation of 15,525 new jobs, and criminal justice savings of £284 million. The context of the illegal market is just as compelling. The estimated value of the UK’s recreational cannabis trade is around £2 billion annually, all of which currently flows to unregulated producers, suppliers and organised crime groups. The social impact is felt in every corner of our country, because where there is demand, there is supply.

The economic case is, of course, tempting to avowed capitalists, which should make it no surprise that Americans have led the way on legalisation in the West. But for left-wingers in Britain, there is even more to be done to make cannabis legalisation a policy that can kill two problem birds with one stone.

In 2025, a record 850,000 children accessed NHS mental health support. Yet around 385,000 children are still waiting. Children with mental health difficulties are three times more likely to miss significant amounts of school. At the end of July 2025, over half a million referrals to children’s mental health services were still waiting to start treatment, with half of those young people having waited over a year. In March 2026, only 1 in 9 under-18s with a suspected diagnosis had had a first appointment within the recommended 13 weeks, according to research from the University of Manchester.

Getting ahead of young people’s mental health challenges requires ambitious policy-making, the same sort that would create a brand new stream of tax revenue from a legalised and regulated cannabis industry. Ring-fencing that income for young people’s mental health services could let a Burnham government do something truly radical: commit to providing UK teenagers with a guaranteed amount of counselling and therapy contact hours before they leave high school. It’s that kind of combined policy power that I believe could let Burnham signal clearly what his vision for the country’s future is, while tackling multiple issues in one action.

Obviously this is without any of the in-depth fiscal analysis that must come before any further policy development, but the ideas alone should be recognised for their merits. Burnham needs to show he is serious about change. The inevitable attacks from right-wingers in the media and the political sphere will call him “Pot Head Andy,” but if he were to approach this with confidence and secure the buy-in of the labour and trade union movement, his government could finally take pride in progressive change-making.

Pre-empting concerns about anti-social behaviour, and tackling the existing irritant of public weed-smoking, the government could simultaneously introduce a fine on smoking any cannabis products in public spaces. That fine could feed the same ring-fenced budget, either symbolically or literally.

Bringing the UK up to date with the rest of the world, and using the power of public office to refocus efforts on future generations’ mental health, is a net positive that I believe would benefit both the country and a brand new Burnham-led government. Polling suggests the public is closer to this than Westminster assumes; YouGov’s 2026 survey lays out where British opinion actually sits.

Andy Burnham has a once-in-a-generation chance to do something truly high-minded. I just hope he has the confidence to roll with it.

James Matthewson is a UK broadcaster, writer and former political adviser in the UK Parliament.

This is a guest opinion piece from an external, unpaid contributor. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the reporting or editorial positions of High Times.

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A drug company spent nearly eight years fighting the DEA to make cannabis medicine the hard way. Now that everyone else is getting an easier path, it’s in court trying to undo the whole thing, a move that could send cannabis back to Schedule I for the entire industry.

MMJ International Holdings spent nearly eight years and millions of dollars fighting the DEA for the right to grow cannabis. It sued the agency. Its CEO called the delays “obstruction in uniform.” Now that the federal government has created a new, easier path for state-licensed cannabis businesses, MMJ is in court challenging the rescheduling.

For nearly a decade, it was the kind of company cannabis reformers could point to as a victim of the DEA. It did everything the federal government said to do. It filed drug applications with the FDA, won an Orphan Drug Designation, stood up a DEA-licensed lab, and asked the agency for permission to grow cannabis for clinical trials. Then it waited. And waited. Its application has been pending since December 2018.

The company was furious about it, loudly and for years. Its CEO, Duane Boise, did not mince words about the agency’s conduct. Now that same company is in federal court trying to reverse the rescheduling of marijuana, the first major federal marijuana reform in half a century. If it wins, cannabis could revert to Schedule I, the punishing 280E tax bill could return, and every state operator that just applied for federal relief could be left holding a voided application.

The company that spent the better part of a decade trying to get through the front door is now asking a court to decide whether everyone else should have to use it, too.

The Hard Road

To be fair to MMJ, and the story does not work unless you are, its grievance is real. The company, through its subsidiaries MMJ BioPharma Cultivation and MMJ BioPharma Labs, has chased FDA approval for cannabinoid medicines aimed at Huntington’s disease and multiple sclerosis since 2015. It holds FDA Investigational New Drug (IND) applications and FDA Orphan Drug Designation, and its lab carries a DEA Schedule I analytical registration. This is the expensive, slow, by-the-book pharmaceutical route the federal government has long told cannabis companies was the only legitimate one.

And the DEA stonewalled it. MMJ BioPharma Cultivation applied in December 2018 to become a federally authorized bulk manufacturer of cannabis for those trials. The DEA opened its pre-registration investigation in 2021 and inspected the facility that October. Then nothing. As Cannabis Business Times reported, MMJ sued the agency in 2024 over the delays, accusing it of obstructing legitimate research and running what the company called a “kangaroo court.” MMJ even challenged the constitutionality of the DEA’s in-house judges, and the Justice Department later conceded that the removal protections shielding those judges violate the separation of powers, though that concession did not resolve MMJ’s own stalled application.

On that record, MMJ had a point. A company that did everything right sat in limbo for years while the agency that demanded the rigor refused to act on it.

The Turn

Then the ground shifted. In April 2026, the Trump administration rescheduled state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III and opened an expedited DEA registration path for state operators. While MMJ kept pursuing FDA-approved cannabinoid medicines, state-licensed cannabis businesses were suddenly getting federal relief through a faster route, no INDs required.

So, MMJ joined the other side. It is now one of the petitioners in the consolidated challenge to the rescheduling order before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As Business of Cannabis reported, MMJ filed alongside an addiction recovery clinic, a victims’ group and two doctors, naming President Trump, the Justice Department, the DEA, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole as defendants. The petitioners are not asking for a tweak. They want the court to stay the order and vacate it entirely.

Read what that means in plain terms. A stay freezes the reform. Vacatur erases it. Cannabis would revert to Schedule I, the 280E tax penalty that costs operators an effective rate far above ordinary businesses would come roaring back, and the DEA applications state companies are racing to file would rest on a legal foundation the court had just voided. A win for MMJ could become a major setback for the state-licensed industry.

The Argument, And the Witnesses

MMJ frames this as principle, not spite. Asked directly whether a company that fought to enter the federal system is now trying to block reform for everyone else, Boise rejected the premise. “That question assumes rescheduling is about helping an industry. It isn’t,” he told High Times. “We don’t oppose legitimate medicine, we oppose lowering the scientific standard for what gets called medicine.” The broader industry, he argued, “has spent years bastardizing the word ‘medicine’” by marketing state products as medical without the reproducible formulations, stability testing and clinical trials the FDA pathway demands. “MMJ chose the harder path because patients deserve medicines backed by science, not marketing.”

That distinction sits at the heart of the dispute, and so does the word itself. MMJ uses “medicine” in its pharmaceutical sense, in reference to products that have completed the FDA approval process. Much of the state-licensed cannabis industry, by contrast, has never argued that dispensary flower is equivalent to an FDA-approved pharmaceutical. It argues the two serve different purposes under different regulatory systems. So, the fight is less about whether pharmaceutical standards matter than whether state medical cannabis should have to become a pharmaceutical product before federal law can acknowledge it at all.

The company’s core claim is a regulatory double standard: it argues the government cannot extend Schedule III benefits to state operators who skipped the FDA pathway while companies that spent years and millions following it remain stuck in limbo. Its filings raise constitutional, statutory and treaty objections, including the argument that the rescheduling order creates a “hybrid schedule” Congress never authorized. On the consequences, a stay that would freeze the relief the whole industry is counting on, Boise was unmoved. If the court finds the order unlawful, he said, “any consequences for tax treatment, registrations, or existing business models would be the legal result of correcting an invalid agency action, not the objective of MMJ’s lawsuit. Our case is about restoring the rule of law, not restoring Schedule I for its own sake.”

To carry the message, MMJ has put forward people with federal pedigrees. In a June 17 announcement, it pointed to Jorge Jimenez, a retired DEA supervisory diversion investigator who once served as a section chief at DEA headquarters overseeing registrations, and Dr. Elio Mariani, a pharmaceutical scientist with decades in drug development. Their pitch is that opposition to rescheduling is not all ideology, that some of it comes from people who built the federal drug approval system. Also cited in the broader opposition is Dr. Bertha Madras, the Harvard Medical School professor and longtime cannabis skeptic who served on President Trump’s 2017 opioid commission, a figure with her own decades-long record on drug policy, not a witness MMJ brought forward.

The Ladder Problem

Here is the tension the company cannot fully escape. For years, MMJ argued that the DEA was the villain, that it ignored science, defied the rule of law and kept medicine from sick patients. Now it is asking a federal court whether anyone else should be allowed to enter through a different door. MMJ says it is a matter of scientific standards and equal treatment. Critics see a company trying to keep everyone else out of a system it spent years trying to enter.

You can read MMJ’s move two ways, and the company would insist on the first. One, it is a consistent demand that the government hold everyone to the same scientific standard, even if that means slowing the whole thing down. Two, it is a company that did the hard work, got beaten by the bureaucracy, and now wants to make sure nobody else gets the prize it was denied. The filings are about standards. The effect, if they succeed, is to pull the ladder up behind it.

Boise rejects the second reading outright. “This isn’t about denying anyone relief. It’s about ensuring that everyone who wants to market products as medicine plays by the same scientific rules,” he said. “Equal treatment doesn’t mean lowering the standard, it means applying the same standard to everyone.”

He also pushed back on the idea that simply granting MMJ its long-stalled DEA license would make the lawsuit go away. The application, filed in 2018, is still pending, and resolving it “would certainly address one part of the harm MMJ has experienced,” he said, but “even if MMJ received its DEA registration tomorrow, the legal questions before the Court would remain.”

That distinction matters. By MMJ’s own account, simply receiving its long-delayed registration would not end the dispute. The company is not only asking to enter the federal system itself. It is asking the court to throw out the easier path the rest of the industry just started using.

The stakes are not abstract, and they are close. The petitioners asked the D.C. Circuit to freeze the rescheduling order while the case plays out. That fight runs parallel to a separate DEA hearing on rescheduling that begins June 29, and there is no fixed deadline for either to resolve. If the court grants a stay, the relief the industry has been counting on, the tax break, the registration path, the first real federal thaw in half a century, stalls while the lawyers argue. There is an irony in that. The company that spent years condemning the DEA for making it wait is now asking a court to make everyone else wait, too.

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In the midst of blossoming cannabis and CBD reform throughout the West, hemp-derived cannabinoid products are increasingly taking center stage as legislators continue to raise red flags surrounding the lack of regulation and intoxicating potential of these products.

Just in the past several months, a number of states have moved to introduce new policies to limit or ban the sale of psychoactive hemp-derived cannabinoid products, like delta-8 THC. Similarly, many are calling out some of the issues surrounding the regulatory gaps surrounding hemp-derived products in the market.

Among them is CBD Oracle, a consumer research company aiming to improve safety and transparency surrounding cannabis products. 

Most recently, it turned its attention to CBD gummies and other hemp products available for purchase on Amazon.com. While the company notes that Amazon will “tell you confidently” that they do not allow CBD gummies on the platform, CBD Oracle’s new independent analysis on such products begs to differ.

A Look at Amazon’s Approach to Hemp and CBD Products

While Amazon doesn’t technically allow CBD products, CBD Oracle suggests that sellers on the site largely get around this obstacle by avoiding the term “CBD” and instead using “hemp” on packaging and in product descriptions. 

Neurogan CEO Jan Brandup said that Amazon’s “hemp products” are not related to actual hemp and rather use the term as a sales tactic.

“It’s alarming how easily consumers are deceived into trusting these products, just because they are sold on a reputable platform like Amazon,” Brandup said. “The best case is they may drain your wallet.”

Sunday Scaries CEO Mike Sill agreed, adding that many of the products on Amazon automatically lack credibility and ultimately quality due to the nature of the platform’s regulations.

“When you search for ‘CBD gummies’ on the platform, no reputable brands populate in your search results,” Sill said. “The reason for this is that credible brands like Sunday Scaries, Charlotte’s Web and cbdMD are not allowed to sell on Amazon without being banned.”

Rather, Sill said these companies engage in “brand burning,” meaning that once they are banned from Amazon, they essentially rebrand with a new name and packaging only to reupload the same products to the site and continue sales.

“Their business model doesn’t include a focus on building a reputable brand and providing the highest quality and safest products to consumers; they are just looking for a quick sale and will do whatever is necessary to stay ‘live’ on Amazon,” Sill said.

So what exactly do Amazon “hemp” products contain?

Investigating the Contents of Amazon’s ‘Hemp’ Products

In an effort to analyze the specific contents of CBD products on Amazon, the company purchased 56 of the most popular hemp products on the site and tested them through InfiniteCAL Labs. Most of the products (80%) were gummies, with eight tinctures, two topical creams and one pack of mints. A majority (89%) also made specific numerical claims regarding dosage.

Around 30% (17 of 56) of the products tested contained CBD, averaging 547 mg per package. However, there was a large variance in CBD quantity between products, with a minimum of 28 mg of CBD and a maximum of 1,582 mg. While CBD Oracle notes that this at least shows Amazon isn’t being totally dishonest about some of these products containing hemp and hemp compounds, it still violates Amazon’s policies and may not be legally compliant.

THC is also banned from Amazon sales, though six (11%) of the tested products contained the cannabinoid with the three containing the most comprised primarily of delta-8 THC. While all of the products were under the THC threshold set by the 2018 Farm Bill, the three delta-8 products “had very high quantities of THC” with 641, 2,507 and 3,028 mg per pack. The product with the highest amount of THC had 76 mg per gummy.

The majority of tested products (35 of 56 products, or 62.5%) contained no cannabinoids at all with more than a third (24 of 56 products, or 43%) containing no hemp.

InfiniteCAL Lab Manager Dr. Erik Paulson explains that hemp is typically infused into consumable products through hemp seeds, which contain no cannabinoids, or through extractable material pulled out of leaves, stems or buds — generally to create cannabinoid-infused products.

“Simply put, if you buy ‘hemp’ from Amazon it is likely that you will actually be buying an expensive jar of gummy bears. Gelatin and sugar, priced at a premium,” CBD Oracle notes in the report.

The report also confirmed that a whopping 96% of tested products did not advertise an accurate dosage.

“If we assume the dosage listing refers to cannabinoids (and not just the total mass of hempseed oil), just two products were confirmed by lab testing to have a dosage within 10% of that listed on their labels,” the report states. “They contained an average of just 25% of the advertised dosage. In most cases, this was less than advertised, but one product primarily containing delta-8 THC had twice the promised dosage.”

In addition, 52% of the products appeared to make an unapproved medical claim, and almost 95% of products did not provide Certificates of Analysis (COA), typically considered an essential for reputable companies selling hemp products.

A Growing Issue and Potential Solutions

While the report focused on Amazon products, CBD Oracle notes the prevalence of this trend, as other companies like eBay, Walmart and Alibaba carry similar products — sometimes the exact same options.

Authors note the potential ramifications of selling these products, beyond safety and health concerns, in that it could undermine the broader hemp and cannabis industries and the reform progress so many are actively pushing for.

“Amazon has demonstrated that they don’t understand the difference between hemp seed oil and hemp extract that contains cannabinoids,” said Forge Hemp’s Kelly Lombard. “As long as sellers are vague about a product’s contents, Amazon doesn’t seem to care. This is problematic because U.S. consumers need more information about hemp and CBD, not less. Amazon’s convenience and return policy may entice more consumers to try hemp products, but if their experience is negative, that hurts the industry.”

CBD Oracle also lists some potential solutions to remedy these issues, though they largely fall on Amazon to either adhere to more strict verification and COA guidelines, if not completely remove any products making false claims. They note that customers tend to have limited impact and that individual efforts to combat or report these products may ultimately result in frustration and wasted time. 

Authors also cite that the current model, a blanket ban on CBD encouraging companies to be dishonest and actively work around it, may not be the answer.

“Even establishing a bare minimum requirement for hemp sellers — showing an up-to-date lab report — would be enough to send the snake oil sellers running for the hills,” the report concludes. “Will you be able to pretend that CBD isn’t available on your platform? No. But customers who are buying CBD on your platform — who already exist, like it or not — would be much, much more likely to get safe products that offer what they say on the label.”

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The majority of Americans now live in a state that has legalized adult-use or medical cannabis, a new Pew Research Center analysis indicates. In addition, nearly 80% of U.S. residents also have at least one cannabis dispensary in their county.

“According to our analysis, 74% of Americans live in a state where marijuana is legal for either recreational or medical use,” Caleb Keller, a communications assistant with Pew Research Center told High Times.

“Our analysis finds that around three-quarters of all dispensaries in the country are in states that have legalized the recreational use of marijuana,” the Pew Research Center reports. “Another 23% are in medical marijuana-only states. In fact, two of the top five states with the largest number of dispensaries—Oklahoma and Florida—allow the drug for medical use only.”

In addition, nearly 80% of Americans live in a county with at least one cannabis dispensary. Even for people that live in states and areas that don’t allow cannabis, dispensaries near state borders are also thriving, often next to states with less permissive cannabis laws.

The catalyst for change was the approval of California’s Prop. 215 in 1996, ushering in the era of state cannabis laws. (California is now home to a quarter of dispensaries in the U.S.) That number has since grown to 38 medical cannabis markets and more with limited forms of medical cannabis.

Pew Research released the following key findings:

• 54% of Americans live in a state where the recreational use of marijuana is legal—just a dozen years after Colorado and Washington became the first states to allow cannabis for recreational purposes.
• 74% of Americans live in a state where cannabis is legal for either recreational or medical use. California was the first state to legalize medical cannabis in 1996.
• 79% of Americans live in a county with at least one cannabis dispensary.
• There are nearly 15,000 cannabis dispensaries in the United States. Dispensaries (businesses that sell cannabis products) are common on the West Coast and Northeast, but also in interior states like Michigan, Oklahoma and Colorado.
• California has far more dispensaries than any state: 3,659 at the time of this analysis, more than double the amount in the second-highest ranking state. A quarter of all cannabis dispensaries in the U.S. are in California, and nearly all Californians (99.5%) have a dispensary in their county. Los Angeles County alone has more dispensaries (1,481) than any state other than California itself.
• Oklahoma has the most cannabis dispensaries per capita of any state: 36 dispensaries for every 100,000 residents.

How the Data Was Gathered

Pew based updated cannabis laws on data from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and all information is current as of February 2024. According to NORML, there are now 24 states plus the District of Columbia that have legalized adult-use cannabis as of February 2024, and another 14 states allow medical cannabis.

A remaining 12 states have legalized limited access to cannabis products that contain little to no THC, i.e. things like CBD oil. Finally, 27 states across all levels of legalization have decriminalized adult-use cannabis.

For population estimates at the state, county and census tract levels, Pew Research relied on the U.S. Census Bureau—specifically, Table B01003 of the American Community Survey’s 5-year estimates for 2019. 

County-level estimates include counties and county equivalents (such as Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska). For median household incomes at the state and census tract levels, we used Table S1901 of the same publication.

For information about cannabis dispensaries, including geolocation details, Pew researchers used data provided by SafeGraph, which curates information about millions of places of interest around the globe

Another interesting finding is that state borders do little to stop people from getting access to cannabis: one in every five dispensaries in the U.S. is located within 20 miles of a state border. And 29% of these border dispensaries adjoin a neighboring state with less permissive cannabis laws.

Household incomes in areas with high concentrations of dispensaries varied depending on the state, dispelling the myth that they thrive in low-income areas. 

“In four states that have legalized marijuana for both recreational and medical purposes—Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland and Virginia—median annual household incomes are at least $20,000 lower in areas with high concentrations of dispensaries than areas in the state with low concentrations of dispensaries,” Pew Research Center reports. “In New Hampshire and New York, by contrast, median household incomes are around $20,000 or more higher in areas with many dispensaries than in areas with few dispensaries.”

The findings show how state cannabis laws have spread since the first statewide law establishing a medical cannabis market in 1996.

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Some CBD products may not be all they seem, according to newly published analysis. 

Researchers from the United Kingdom assessed a variety of CBD-based liquid products –– tinctures, oils, e-liquids and beverages –– that are sold online in Britain. 

“Cannabidiol (CBD)-containing products are sold widely in consumer stores, but concerns have been raised regarding their quality, with notable discrepancies between advertised and actual CBD content. Information is limited regarding how different types of CBD products may differ in their deviation from advertised CBD concentrations,” the researchers wrote in an introduction to the analysis, which was published this month in the Journal of Cannabis Research.

The researchers purchased 13 aqueous tinctures, 29 oils, 10 e-liquids and 11 drinks on the internet.

“CBD concentrations were quantified in aqueous tinctures, oils and e-liquids via high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and in drinks via gas chromatography-mass spectrometry,” they explained.

Ultimately, the researchers found that many of the products were misleadingly labeled. 

“Measured concentrations fell -25.7 ± 17.3, -6.1 ± 7.8, -6.9 ± 4.6 and – 0.03 ± 0.06 mg/mL below advertised concentrations for aqueous tinctures, oils, e-liquids and drinks, respectively,” they wrote in their explanation of the study’s results. 

“Oils deviated relatively less (-19.0 ± 14.5%) from advertised concentrations than e-liquids (-29.2 ± 10.2%), aqueous tinctures (-51.4 ± 41.4%) and drinks (-65.6 ± 36.5%; p < .01), whilst e-liquids deviated less than aqueous tinctures and drinks (p < .05), and deviation was not different between aqueous tinctures and drinks (p = .19). Only 5/63 (8%) products had measured concentrations within 10% of advertised concentrations,” the researchers added.

The researchers noted that, similar to previous studies on the subject, “few products had measured CBD concentrations within 10% of advertised concentrations, with most falling below advertised concentrations.”

“All individual product types deviated from advertised concentrations, with oils deviating least. These findings may be indicative of poor manufacturing standards, or that CBD undergoes degradation in consumer products,” they wrote in their conclusion. “This reinforces concerns over quality of CBD-containing consumer products and may highlight the need for improved regulation of such products.”

CBD products have proliferated considerably around the world in recent years, including in the United States. But although they are legal, those products are often woefully unregulated, leaving consumers in the dark as to what is –– and isn’t –– in the stuff that they are buying.

Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill reintroduced legislation that would place CBD products under the regulatory eye of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Despite being legally grown in the United States for nearly five years, hemp and hemp-derived CBD are still in a regulatory gray zone that puts consumers at risk and holds producers back,” said Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, one of the co-sponsors of the bill. “The FDA says it needs Congress to act. We’ve got the bill to ensure equal and safe access to hemp-derived CBD.”

In a press release, the group of senators and representatives explained that currently “the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act prohibits any new dietary ingredient, food, or beverage from entering the market if it has been studied or approved as a drug.”

“The FDA has the authority to exempt items from this prohibition, but has yet to exempt hemp-derived CBD, despite Congressional action to legalize its production and sale. By exempting hemp- derived CBD from the prohibition, the Hemp Access and Consumer Safety Act will allow FDA to regulate hemp-derived CBD like all other new dietary ingredients, foods, and beverages,” the press release said.

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According to a Quest Diagnostics Drug Testing Index Analysis that was published on May 18, post-accident workplace drug testing hit an all-time high in 2022. Last year, 7.3% workforce drug urine samples contained cannabis, in comparison to 6.7% of workers in 2021. Quest Diagnostics states that it has recorded a steady rise in post-accident cannabis positivity since 2012, with a 204.2% increase in workers testing positive for cannabis over the past 10 years. Between 2002-2009, post-accident positive test results had decreased.

Katie Mueller, National Safety Council senior program manager, said in a press release that the rise in legalization corresponds to an increase in workplace accidents. “Intoxicating cannabis products, including marijuana, can have a major impact on safety at work and have been proven to slow reaction time, impact memory and impair skills essential to driving. State legalization of the drug creates new challenges for employers,” said Mueller. “The Quest data provide compelling evidence that increased use of cannabis products by employees can contribute to greater risk for injuries in the workplace. It is imperative employers take the proper steps to create and maintain a policy that addresses cannabis use, build a safety-focused culture and educate the workforce to keep all workers safe on and off the job.”

The report states that cannabis was the main reason that workers’s drug tests have been positive, but other substances such as amphetamines have also contributed to the increase, with cannabis increasing by 10.3% and amphetamines increasing by 15.4%. In 2022, the most common industries that saw a rise in positive workplace drug tests were Accommodation and Food Services (7%), Retail Trade (7.7%), and Finance and Insurance (3.6%).

Keith Ward, Quest Diagnostics General Manager and Vice President for Employer Solutions, 

“Our 2022 Quest Diagnostics analysis shows that the overall U.S. workforce positivity rate continued to be at a historically elevated level in 2022, even as much of the nation’s workforce returned to the office post-pandemic,” said Ward. “This historic rise seems to correspond with sharp increases in positivity for marijuana in both pre-employment and post-accident drug tests, suggesting that changing societal attitudes about marijuana may be impacting workplace behaviors and putting colleagues at risk. The increase in amphetamines positivity is also notable, given the addictive potential and health risks associated with this class of drugs.”

While safety is of the utmost importance in any workplace, the Quest Diagnostic data does not address how cannabis can remain in a person’s system for weeks after consumption, long after the effects have faded. With the rise in cannabis legalization, many industries are becoming more understanding of how cannabis is being commonly used as a relaxation aide, as well as treatment for common conditions like anxiety, depression, and more.

In February 2021, the Biden Administrations announced a new policy that would allow applicants to be hired even if they had previously consumed cannabis. “The White House’s policy will maintain the absolute highest standards for service in government that the President expects from his administration, while acknowledging the reality that state and local marijuana laws have changed significantly across the country in recent years,” the policy stated.

In September 2022, New Jersey regulators issued employment guidance for cannabis rules in the workplace, which “is meant to support employers’ right to create and maintain safe work environments, and to affirm employees’ right to due process.”

Additionally, a Canada-based study from 2020 found no association with cannabis use and increased workplace injuries. It analyzed 136,536 workers, 2,577 of whom experienced a work-related injury within the last 12 months, and only 4% stated that they were cannabis users during that time frame.

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