Hemp and CBD could be illegal in NC by next week, if the legislature doesn’t act
Hemp and CBD products will become illegal in North Carolina starting July 1 unless state lawmakers act before then to keep it legal.
But on Wednesday a key legislative committee did the opposite, removing pro-hemp language that had been on the verge of passing as part of the annual Farm Act.
Hemp is a cousin of marijuana. Smoking or ingesting it can’t get people high, but it has similar chemicals that supporters claim give users similar medical benefits like pain relief. However, a large part of the opposition to hemp stems from the fact that it looks and smells like marijuana, making it harder to enforce anti-marijuana laws.
When the state brushed aside that opposition and legalized hemp and hemp-based products several years ago, it did so through a temporary pilot program. That authorization expires next week, at the end of the month.
It’s unclear what might happen if it does expire, although the level of enforcement might be up to individual police departments, to decide for themselves if they want to go around tearing hemp out of the ground at local farms or shutting down local stores that sell CBD products.
Hemp a large industry in NC
Chris Suttle, a hemp and medical marijuana activist, came to the legislature Wednesday to express his outrage at the change that he said will put both business owners and patients at risk of legal trouble for something that the state previously told them was OK.
“You can’t take someone, that you provided a way to exist and make a living, and then sweep that out from underneath that person’s feet without a safety net,” he said. “They are turning their backs on people who made them $26 million in tax revenue alone.”
The state estimates that at least recently, there were over 1,500 hemp farms in North Carolina. They likely employ thousands of workers in rural areas.
Suttle said some smaller hemp farms employ around a dozen people, while the bigger ones can have 150 employees between the actual farm work and jobs in distribution, marketing and more.
What happens now?
To address the concerns of the North Carolinians who work in the hemp industry or use hemp products like CBD, Republican senators had written language into this year’s Farm Act, SB 762, that would permanently remove hemp from the state’s list of illegal drugs — starting June 30 when the pilot program ends.
That would mean that as long as it remains legal federally, it would be legal in North Carolina, too.
That change, if it does end up passing, would apply only to hemp and not to marijuana. There is a separate medical marijuana bill at the legislature this year; it passed the Senate nearly unanimously but has stalled in the House due to conservative opposition.
Permanent hemp legalization wasn’t the only focus of this year’s Farm Act, but it was one of the more high-profile pieces. The bill passed the Senate unanimously last month, but then it went nowhere in the House — until Wednesday, when the Agriculture Committee voted to remove the hemp language and pass the bill without it.
Republican Rep. Jimmy Dixon, a Duplin County farmer who chairs the committee, told reporters that around a third of House Republicans had told him they would vote against the Farm Act in order to oppose hemp. While he personally has voted in favor of hemp, Dixon said, he didn’t want to put his fellow GOP members in the position of voting against the Farm Act — something that might not look good in the rural districts that many of them represent.
Republican Sen. Brent Jackson, a Sampson County farmer who wrote the Farm Act, came to the meeting Wednesday to criticize the decision to take hemp out of the bill.
There was bipartisan agreement on that front. Democratic Rep. John Ager of Asheville said it was a “horrific” decision, and several members of the committee voted against the bill Wednesday to oppose the removal of the hemp language. But it still passed, setting up a potential vote on the House floor in the next few days — which would be before the June 30 cutoff.
While that’s not very much time, Ager said it’s at least enough time for the House to restore the language before the final vote.
“We need to think about putting hemp back in, maybe not today, but maybe when it hits the floor,” he said.
Dixon implied that’s unlikely to happen, but he was adamant that it wasn’t just his decision that might doom hemp — and that he actually doesn’t think it is doomed.
That’s because there’s a separate pro-hemp bill that the House already passed, SB 455. He said that bill “completely fixes it, word-for-word what it would have been in the Farm Act.”
And now that the hemp language is out of the Farm Act, he said, he expects the Senate to pass that other bill. If that happens, hemp could be legalized without some anti-hemp Republicans in the House needing to choose between voting for hemp or against the Farm Bill.
“I believe the Senate will do the right thing,” Dixon said.
This story was originally published June 22, 2022 at 5:11 PM with the headline "Hemp and CBD could be illegal in NC by next week, if the legislature doesn’t act."
