39 Bipartisan State And Territory Attorneys General Push Congress To Ban Intoxicating Hemp Products
Ban intoxicating hemp products. That’s the battle cry echoing down the marble halls this week, as 39 state and territory attorneys general—red ties, blue ties, same tired fluorescent lighting—urge Congress to clarify the federal definition of hemp and outlaw the booming gray market of hemp-derived highs. They’re not mincing words: they want lawmakers to use the appropriations process or the next Farm Bill to make it crystal clear that selling intoxicating cannabinoid products is a criminal act. It’s a bipartisan bloc led by Arkansas’s Tim Griffin, Connecticut’s William Tong, Indiana’s Todd Rokita, and Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, unusual bedfellows aligned by a shared conclusion that cannabis policy drift has let an under-regulated industry sprint ahead. The primary fault line runs straight through the 2018 Farm Bill’s hemp definition—0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight—a tidy number that opened a Pandora’s box of chemistry, commerce, and confusion in the broader hemp and cannabis market.
Here’s the rub. Hemp’s natural cannabinoids, especially CBD, can be transformed—legal hemp to lab bench to gummy jar—into intoxicating compounds like delta-8 THC, delta-10 THC, and HHC. Those “legal” gummies can fly under the federal radar even as they punch above their weight in psychoactivity. The attorneys general call these “Frankenstein” products: not your grandmother’s hemp seed lotion, but something cooked up to skirt marijuana’s Schedule I status while landing on gas station counters and in the mailboxes of kids. They argue the market is outpacing guardrails, with slick packaging and candy-store marketing aimed down the barrel of adolescence. The coalition’s message, laid out in the National Association of Attorneys General’s letter, is blunt: fix the federal hemp definition, stop the synthesis-to-high pipeline, and don’t leave states alone to mop up a mess that moves across state lines. See the NAAG statement for yourself—its tone is prosecutorial, its timeline urgent (NAAG press release; full letter PDF).
States have tried to throttle the chaos with bans and age gates, but interstate commerce doesn’t stop at a welcome sign. Shipments keep slipping through, rules fragment, and enforcement starts to look like whack-a-mole at a county fair. The AGs insist Congress never meant to greenlight a synthetic THC industry, and they want lawmakers to say it out loud, in statute, with teeth. The rhetoric is surgical and severe: close the loophole, protect public safety, and preserve industrial hemp’s legitimate future—textiles, grain, building materials—without the psychoactive hitchhikers. The politics, though, are messy. A Senate package flirted with a sweeping prohibition on any “quantifiable” THC in consumable hemp products. That move spooked farmers and entrepreneurs who saw their margins and investments dangling over the shredder. Kentucky’s two most famous Republicans split like a wishbone: one championing a crackdown, the other threatening to stall the bill unless the hammer came off. That’s not just a policy kerfuffle; that’s a food fight in a crowded kitchen.
The industry’s counteroffer is pragmatic: regulate intoxicating hemp-derived THC like the powerful consumables they are. Age-gate sales. Test products. Label dosages. Police marketing. If Congress bans all intoxicating hemp products outright, they argue, it will torch legitimate operations alongside the bad actors and shove demand right back into illicit channels. A quieter faction on Capitol Hill is listening. Proposals are circulating to study state regulatory models before slamming the door, and there’s the HEMP Act—again—aiming to rationalize testing protocols and even raise the THC limit in raw hemp, a nod to agronomy and reality. Meanwhile, the courts continue to circle the larger beast: whether federal cannabis prohibition still passes constitutional muster, a question shadowing every agency memo and appropriations rider. For a snapshot of that legal undertow, see Cannabis industry case challenging prohibition hits Supreme Court (Newsletter: October 27, 2025), and how Second Amendment fights intersect with cannabis policy in Florida Case On Medical Marijuana Patients’ Gun Rights Is On Hold As Supreme Court Weighs Underlying Issue. When your rulebook is this contradictory, litigation becomes the house special.
Outside the Beltway, the drumbeat is older and louder. Decades of drug war exceptionalism still haunt the policy floorboards, from botched raids to broken communities and soldiers asked to do things they never should have been tasked with in the first place—context worth remembering alongside a fresh call to criminalize a new crop of compounds. If you want the unvarnished critique, revisit Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Drug War Killings Put Military In Untenable Position, Former GOP Attorney General Of Idaho Says (Op-Ed). And if you think today’s hemp fight is just about gummies and loopholes, consider the global counterpoint: when a head of state tells a U.S. president to legalize to sap the illicit market’s lifeblood, as captured in Colombia’s President Tells Trump To Legalize Marijuana To Combat Illicit Drug Trade, you start to realize the stakes aren’t a boutique concern—they’re geopolitical. In the end, Congress has two levers in front of it: rewrite the hemp definition to slam the door on intoxicating hemp products, or build a real regulatory framework that treats these cannabinoids like the potent, popular consumables they’ve become. Either way, the clock is running, the market is moving, and consumers deserve clarity. Until lawmakers pick a lane, the best move is to choose transparency and compliance—start with lab-tested, clearly labeled products from trusted sources by visiting our shop at https://thcaorder.com/shop/.
