Despite coming out publicly against the state’s upcoming adult-use cannabis legalization vote, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is moving toward vetoing a proposal to ban intoxicating hemp products in the state, CBS News reports.
The bill, passed in March, seeks to prohibit most hemp-derived THC products and would impose strict new regulations on the state’s hemp industry, effectively killing a billion-dollar industry that brings about 100,000 jobs to the state. The governor hopes that by throwing a lifeline to the intoxicating hemp products industry, hemp companies would in turn help finance the effort to block the upcoming cannabis legalization ballot initiative, which poses a similarly existential threat to the hemp industry, the report said.
An anonymous Florida official told CBS News, “It’s been flying under the radar, but he’s going to veto. The marijuana people are furious, and they are scrambling.”
Hemp advocates and industry representatives have also started pressuring the governor to veto the hemp restrictions, Health News Florida reports.
Federal lawmakers, meanwhile, are weighing what would effectively be an outright ban on hemp-derived delta-8 THC products and other intoxicating hemp products. That proposal comes as an amendment to the Farm Bill, introduced last week in the House, that would redefine legal hemp products as either non-intoxicating cannabinoid products or “industrial hemp” products like fiber or food. The amendment would depart from the country’s original hemp legalization language, which legalized essentially all products sourced from hemp, even intoxicants that were synthesized from the plant’s naturally occurring cannabinoids.
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