22 states want Congress to re-Criminalize some Hemp and Cannabis….

America the Beautiful has second thoughts?

The states are NOT happy with the  Hemp and Cannibis availabity to American’s….

And they ain’t making money what they thought they would….

A coalition of 22 state attorneys general is calling on Congress to address “the glaring vagueness” that has led to legal cannabis products being sold over the counter across the country — including sometimes from vending machines or online.

A letter dated March 20 addresses the consequences of Republican lawmakers’ choice to legalize hemp production in the 2018 omnibus Farm Bill — a decision that perhaps inadvertently led to a multibillion-dollar market in intoxicating cannabis products that are arguably federally legal.

Now, the attorneys general want Congress to shutter the market it helped create. In the new Farm Bill, they want the legislature to enshrine in statute the idea that intoxicating cannabis is not federally legal — contrary to what the law currently states.

In other words, they want Congress to say that, by definition, hemp can’t get you high.

The rise of the legal (and intoxicating) hemp market runs counter to the development over the past decade of the highly-regulated recreational and medicinal cannabis industries that voters have approved across the country — a wild west of exotic cannabinoids sold without any of the strict controls of the formal legal market.

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“Because of the ambiguity created by the 2018 Farm Bill, a massive gray market worth an estimated $28 billion has exploded, forcing cannabis-equivalent products into our economies regardless of states’ intentions to legalize cannabis use,” the attorneys general wrote….

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In 2018, when an all-Republican Congress legalized the production of “hemp” in the Farm Bill — which President Trump signed — it effectively split the plant into two categories.

First were those plants that didn’t have significant amounts of THC — which they assessed as 0.3 percent by weight or more — and those that did.

The former (hemp) became legal, while the latter (marijuana) remained in a strange legal gray area: Federally illegal under the same drug classification schedule as heroin and available only through tightly controlled and heavily taxed markets in a growing number of states….

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While affirming that Congress should want to create a legal market for “non-intoxicating hemp,” the attorneys general wrote that “the promise of the 2018 Farm Bill to create this agricultural commodity market, however, has failed.”

“Instead, hemp-derived intoxicants have proliferated across our states, posing a significant threat to public health and safety, and benefiting unregulated, untaxed, and unaccountable market actors.”

The lost taxes in particular are significant: In 2022, the states with legal marijuana took in an estimated $3.77 billion in taxes on recreational and medicinal sales….

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