“This is not consumer protection. It is the elimination of an entire legal industry, along with a government-mandated monopoly.”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

A coalition of hemp businesses filed a federal lawsuit Thursday a Statewide ban on intoxicating hemp products from entering into force in November.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District, says the ban passed by state lawmakers this spring contains “constitutionally vague” definitions of hemp and marijuana.

Craig Katz, St. Louis-based MNG 2005, Inc. A government relations and compliance manager for one of the plaintiffs said the problem starts with lawmakers’ lack of understanding of the cannabis industry.

“A lot of this stuff is in the weeds,” Katz said. “It’s very hard to understand. And when people are trying to legalize it, if they don’t understand it, you come up with something like HB2641, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

The coalition includes MNG, which is the parent company of 55 CBD Kratom shops nationwide, the Missouri Hemp Trade Association and a Wisconsin-based hemp business, Lifted Liquids Inc.

The bill in question was one of the first to be signed by Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe (R) this year remove all intoxicating hemp products from the shelves as of Nov. 12, including THC seltzers currently sold in bars and grocery stores.

The legislation largely aligns state law with the subsequent federal ban passed by Congress last year.

According to Missouri’s bill, if Congress reverses course and decides to allow the sale of these products, the state would only allow them in licensed marijuana dispensaries. And if Congress delays the ban for a couple of years, the Missouri law would ban all products except alcoholic beverages.

It also provides enforcement to Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R).

Kehoe, Hanaway and Sarah Wilson, director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, which oversees the state’s marijuana program, are the defendants.

A spokeswoman for Hanaway said the office was not served the case. Kehoe’s office and DHSS declined to comment because of pending litigation.

Similar bills have been discussed since 2023, but have not been adopted. Without regulation, intoxicating hemp products containing 1,000 mg of THC are currently sold in smoke shops outside of Missouri’s licensed marijuana dispensaries.

The bill’s sponsor, Dave Hinman, R-O’Fallon, said the legislation would largely give state law enforcement and prosecutors the authority to enforce the federal hemp ban starting Nov. 12.

“I think this is a last ditch effort for the hemp industry,” Hinman said. “HB2641 passed the Missouri House, Senate and was signed by the governor. It was vetted throughout the process. I don’t think this Hail Mary will get the results the Hemp Trade Association wants, and Missouri will mirror the federal government.”

The lawsuit argues that the bill defines the same products as “hemp” and “marijuana” in different provisionswhich leaves businesses, law enforcement and prosecutors confused about what is legal.

“Because unlicensed marijuana activity is a crime in Missouri, this confusion carries criminal consequences,” reads the coalition’s press release announcing the lawsuit.

While the bill “promises” not to interfere with interstate commerce in hemp, the coalition notes that it also limits who can transport hemp products across the state, the press release says.

And it has effective date provisions that are “so complicated that companies can’t determine which products are covered or when,” he said.

The coalition believes the “confusing” definitions will also remove non-intoxicating CBD products from Missouri’s shelves.

“This is not consumer protection,” said association president Jay Patel. “It’s about wiping out an entire legal industry along with a government-mandated monopoly.”

This story was first published by the Missouri Independent.

Cannabis extracts and isolates carry pesticides and heavy metals more often than raw flower, which means that the purification step that the industry sees as a path to a cleaner product is concentrating the contamination it’s supposed to remove. These are the findings of Fundacion CANNA, a non-profit initiative that studies the cannabis plant and its active ingredients.

© Canna Foundation

Iñaki García, agricultural engineer and biotechnologist at the CANNA Foundation, has analyzed samples in research from 2018 to 2023. “An important finding is that the CBD purification processes do not always clean the product from contaminants. The data show that the presence of pesticides is more evident in the extracts and isolates than in the raw materials. The presence of lead in all the matrices analyzed, from flowers to purified oils and crystals, is significant, also the presence of mercury is highlighted, certain solvents used in the purification may be contaminated or may have selectivity for this metal”, says Inaki. A buyer reads “isolate” as “cleaner,” and the analysis reads the other way because everything the plant carries travels with the compound and is reduced to a smaller volume, so the concentration goes up instead of down.

The same sample body continues its increasing strength at the top of the market. “A significant change in the concentration of THC has been observed in THC-dominant flowers, reaching the highest peak in 2023 (17.95%). Technical improvement has also been noticed in Broad Spectrum oils and extracts, and over time they have significantly increased their CBD concentration. This is probably because the other THCs that are more efficient extraction processes are kept more efficiently. It reduces the efficiency in both directions. Learned to extract THC and retain CBD it is the same process that transfers the pesticides to the final product, so improvements in cannabinoid selectivity do not necessarily translate into improvements in contaminant control.

© Canna Foundation

Purification concentrates what it needs to remove
Fundación CANNA analyzes microbial, metal and chemical contamination in all types of products it receives. “Regarding microbiological contaminants, plant materials consistently have high microbial loads. Among the most dangerous are fungi of the genus Aspergillus, which can cause aspergillosis in immunocompromised people, and their aflatoxins are carcinogenic. Lead is widespread in most types of samples. It should be noted that cannabis is potent. 60% of plant materials and extracts are cross-contamination in the cultivation or surrounding areas. One of the most striking findings is the sale in Europe It was the detection of vitamin E acetate in e-liquids, a substance associated with serious lung injuries.

The bioaccumulation point explains why lead appears downstream. A plant grown in contaminated soil leaches the metal directly from the soil and into the tissues, so all oils and crystals made from that plant inherit it. The finding of vitamin E acetate indicates something added to the formulation rather than being absorbed from the field, which means the European vape supply chain may be carrying a substance linked to serious lung injury.

The stage at which this contamination enters is usually the one that growers pay the least attention to. “Growers often underestimate the importance of the final stages of cultivation and processing. For example, the use of contaminated tools or improperly composted manure at the end of the cycle facilitates the emergence of pathogens such as E. coli. The duration of systemic pesticides that remain on the plant after application is also often underestimated,” said Inaki.

The systemic pesticide problem is the more difficult of the two to design because a compound that moves inside the plant cannot be washed off the surface during harvest, and a grower who applied it early in the cycle is still in flower months later.

The industry has already arranged tools for a pathogen. “The problems caused by HLVd in crops are already well known, as the viroid is now widespread. In this case, the industry has reacted with testing services now available to growers to determine whether a plant is infected, along with in vitro cultivation protocols to repair infected plants,” says Inaki. This is the case where hidden hop viroids came to a detection and fix, an exception to the contaminant that Inaki works with the model.

© Canna Foundation

Tags and content match
The CANNA Foundation also tests finished consumer products against the numbers printed on them. “Based on our research, only one-third of CBD oil products met the label specifications. E-liquids also showed a lack of rigor in terms of label specifications. A major problem with cosmetic creams is that less than half of manufacturers specify the alleged CBD content, and only a minority of them met their negative deviations.” he says A negative deviation of 99.9% describes a product sold as having almost no CBD, which puts it in a position to charge for an active ingredient that does not provide a share of the cosmetic market.

The same decline occurs in the entire movement of processed goods. “Moving from calabash flower to oils, cosmetics or evaporative liquids should, theoretically, guarantee greater quality control. However, research shows that in this transition quality decreases and the consumer is left without protection. When moving from flower to processed product, the industry often gains commercial appeal and ease of use, but loses significantly in transparency and chemical product, in regulatory safety, which consumers often do not pay for. Inaki stated. The processed format is the one that gives a consumer the most finished and controlled, and the analysis finds the least correspondence between the claim and the content.

Operators bring their questions to the lab. “Customers often ask how to interpret the terpene profile. They also have great doubts when a contaminant appears in the product, trying to understand if its presence is harmful or within the recommended limits,” says Inaki. The second question reveals where the gap grows the hardest, because an operator with a positive result has no authority anywhere to verify that the level clears a threshold, because in a large part of the market the threshold does not formally exist.

© Canna Foundation

Lack of regulation leaves consumers without protection
The market still classifies cannabis as Indica and Sativa. “Terpene data is fundamental and much more accurate for classifying varieties than commercial labels. Principal component analysis (PCA) of the terpene profile allows the grouping of plants according to their true aromatic profiles. For example, it has been found that what the market labels as Indica usually has myrcene, and then perfume, a little more, research and alpha-pine mainly myrcene, and a little more correlates with the profile. Rather than pure THC potency, it is the subjective experience for the consumer that determines pleasantness,” said Inaki. The commercial consequence is that the number of producers competing, the THC percentage, is not the number that predicts whether a consumer will enjoy the product, leaving the industry to optimize for a figure that is not supported by aroma data as a driver of experience.

The CANNA Foundation’s testing addresses a basis that the European market does not currently have. “The lack of specific legislation for the recreational market and commercial CBD leaves consumers without protection. Most flowers have a level of contamination that would be unsuitable for human consumption. There is an urgent need to ban dangerous pathogens, such as Aspergillus fungi or E. coli bacteria, which are caused by poor cultivation hygiene. Lead appears in almost all samples, and companies believe that isolation processing removes mercury, analyzes show that even more that it is concentrated in the manufacture of isolates Reality must reflect the terpene profiles, which define the aroma Research shows that aroma is a good indicator of quality and effect, but the industry maintains trade names that do not match the actual chemical composition.

Every item on that list follows the same starting point, which is that a market without a mandatory test floor allows each of these failures to reach a shelf, and isolation step operators stoop to solve the metals problem, a step that Inaki’s mercury data worsens.

Instruments already find more than research can explain. “The main challenge is to clean the flower without degrading its composition. It is urgent to develop microbiological cleaning methods that replace irradiation and do not destroy terpenes or aromas, since these compounds define the quality and effect of the product. Moreover, although laboratories already identify small cannabinoids such as THCV, CBGV, CBC or CBDV, clinical studies suspect that they do not benefit from true clinical studies. it is not in isolated compounds, in the interaction and synergy between them all rather”, concludes Inaki.

For more information:
CANNA Foundation
(email protected)
fundacion-canna.es

A drug-testing industry association and a pharmaceutical company are asking a federal court to block the Trump administration from moving forward with federal cannabis reregulation while hearing lawsuits challenging the reform, “arguing that marijuana abuse has lifelong dangerous consequences, especially for teenagers and pregnant women.”

The new filing says that by “reducing taxes on cannabis companies,” the federal reorganization will “stimulate the industry and increase marijuana abuse.”

The brief, filed Thursday, is the Justice Department’s response to the drug-testing group’s and pharmaceutical company’s motion to halt the rescheduling.

The government, in a brief issued earlier this month, noted that the entities challenging the rescheduling of cannabis “out-of-pocket interest all marijuana stored on schedule I” and they are not suitable opponents of reform because they are not the “intended beneficiaries” of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

Opponents filed this week, however, say the DOJ’s arguments are “meritless diversions.”

“Movers should not be ‘intended beneficiaries of the CSA,'” he says. “It doesn’t matter that the movements have ‘pocket interests’ at stake, while the CSA has broader goals aimed at the general welfare.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia District is considering three separate cases that have since been consolidated from Schedule I to Schedule III of the CSA.

A lawsuit is led by a prohibitionist organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) and National Drug and Alcohol Screening (NDASA)and they say they are “offended” by the reform. Another comes from a coalition anti-marijuana activists, substance abuse professionals, doctors and a cannabis-focused biopharmaceutical corporation. He filed a third claim Attorneys General of Indiana, Nebraska and Louisiana— although the latter appeared later withdrew from the suit.

Two of the organizations involved in the case—NDASA and MMJ International Holdings and its subsidiaries—filed a separate motion. asking the court to suspend the rescheduling of marijuana while considering the broader challenge.

In the latest filing, their lawyers say they would “suffer irreparable harm” from federal cannabis reform.

New costs related to medical review officer (MRO) practices to be imposed on NDASA members in the drug testing industry “will force some out of business,” he says.

“Because the authority makes marijuana legal for state ‘medical’ use, MROs will have to conduct time-consuming checks to determine whether positive THC tests are attributed to legitimate uses. This causes irretrievable losses—irreparable harm—in two ways. First, NDASA’s MRO members will absorb some of the new costs themselves because they cannot bear the losses. billing decision(s).’ Second, those who don’t absorb themselves will be passed on by higher prices, which will cause some customers to stop trying marijuana. It is not “speculative” that some customers will forgo more expensive tests; it is inevitable that “common sense economic reality(y)” – often relied upon by courts – is that demand falls as prices rise.’

The brief also states that the revision “forces many NDASA members who require employee drug testing to either (1) forego marijuana testing and live with the increased risk of employee accidents and reduced productivity, or (2) pay significantly more for marijuana testing and testing due to affirmative action liability under the Disabilities Act (ADA) or state law.”

Responding to the government’s argument that NDASA is not the right entity to deal with reprogramming because it is not a beneficiary of the CSA, the report says the group’s members “turn CSA prohibitions into concrete practices that protect the public.”

“Drug testing creates an essential deterrent to the CSA’s “primary purpose of combating drug abuse.” Thus, NDASA members’ interests in marketing drug testing devices and services—and their clients’ interests in safe, drug-free workplaces—are “unquestionably consistent with the purposes of the statute.”

Additionally, “NDASA members who test their employees have a vested interest in ensuring the safety of their employees and the public who may be affected by their work,” he says. “That interest is consistent with the goals of the CSA. Marijuana reorganization harms that interest by requiring costly revisions to drug testing policies; by making marijuana testing itself more expensive; and by placing NDASA members who act on positive marijuana test results at greater risk of ADA and state law liability.”

MMJ, for its part, will also harm its “competitive position in the market for federally illegal cannabis-based pharmaceuticals,” the filing claims.

“Prior to the Reconsideration Order, MMJ enjoyed a significant advantage due to federal compliance and significant progress toward an FDA-approved cannabis product. The order destroys that competitive advantage—reflecting eight years of hard work and a $10 million investment—by making competitors’ products that have defied capital federal law federal.”

“These damages cannot be ruled out on the theory that MMJ” has allowed no cannabis drug to come to market so far, the government said in its brief, the company’s lawyers wrote. “MMJ has jumped eight years to seek DEA registration and FDA approval, while its competitors have taken “few steps”—indeed, no steps—to seek federal drug approval.

“MMJ has spent nearly eight years and $10 million developing cannabis therapeutics to comply with federal law,” the filing states. “The Reconsideration Order suddenly creates illegal competition among the state’s illegal cannabis drug producers, who have so far made no effort to comply with federal drug laws.”

NDASA and MMJ also argue that the general lawsuit challenging the reorganization will ultimately succeed on the merits, saying the proposed rule is “unlawful” because the government did not undergo formal rulemaking procedures in “flagrant violation” of federal statute.

“The public interest clearly supports the stay,” he concludes.

The latest filing of the legal dispute comes as a The testimony concluded a hearing on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) marijuana reorganization proposal and the judge overseeing the proceedings outlined the next steps for filings that will lead to his own recommendation on whether the reform should be approved.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in April He issued an order that immediately reclassified the state’s licensed medical cannabisas well as marijuana products approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under Schedule I through Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). According to a separate order signed by the acting attorney general, the hearing is looking into Class III marijuana.

Meanwhile, Two medical marijuana companies filed a motion to intervene in the reconsideration case siding with the government and opposing the prohibition lawsuits. NDASA and SAM lawyers, however, filed a brief arguing that cannabis businesses should not be included in the lawsuit.

The challenge to SAM and NDASA’s reconsideration request was signed by attorneys at Torridon Law PLCC, where former US Attorney General William Barr, who led the DOJ during Trump’s first term, is a partner.

SAM announced in January that it was Hiring Barr’s firm to fight cannabis rescheduling After Trump signed an executive order directing officials to quickly complete the process.

Meanwhile, the Appropriations Committee of the Chamber Federal officials voted to block further steps to reschedule cannabis. Bipartisan lawmakers told Marihuana Moment, however, that they don’t expect legislative efforts to block rescheduling to be successful.

Separately, SAM, MMJ and other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration’s program. Certain hemp-derived products are covered by Medicare. That the case was dismissed by a federal judge in May, though that decision is being appealed.

Read the full set of opponents to marijuana reprogramming short in the case below: