The City of St. Louis is considering a ban on the sale of cannabis products sold outside of dispensaries. That would mean trouble for many shops and bars that sell hemp-derived cannabis products.
Many cannabis products have been largely unregulated since 2018, when Congress passed the latest version of the Farm Bill.
That’s because the bill legalizes hemp — defined as cannabis with less than 0.3% delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. That allowed farmers to grow industrial hemp for use in grain and fiber, but also opened the door for products with other intoxicating chemicals to come to market.
The Missouri state government, through executive and legislative action, has tried to close the “hemp loophole” in various ways for years, citing safety concerns. These efforts have been mostly unsuccessful.
Now, St. Louis is trying to fill in the gap.
Alderman Shane Cohn introduced Board Bill Number 46 last week, which was then assigned to the city's Health and Human Development Committee. It would limit the sale of all hemp-derived drugs to marijuana dispensaries.
Cohn did not respond to KBIA’s request for comment.
Businesses in the hemp industry have said they want regulations, and have introduced their own bills in the state legislature that would require safety testing and age limits. But many say restricting sales to the limited number of marijuana dispensaries would kill their business.
“We are absolutely in favor of regulation,” said Craig Katz, a board member of the Missouri Hemp Trade Association. “We're just in favor of reasonable regulation.”
Brian Riegel is the owner of South Point Hemp. He sells hemp-derived edibles and beverages and said 20% of his sales are from the St. Louis area.
“The uncertainty is always there,” he said. “It's hard to navigate forward and expand and invest when you're constantly being threatened, and people constantly want to keep changing the rules on it.”
If passed, St. Louis wouldn’t be alone in regulating hemp— the City of Farmington passed an ordinance last October that completely banned the sale of hemp drugs.
Katz said he’s worried the ordinance could set a precedent that leads to the end of Missouri’s hemp-derived drug industry.
“Generally speaking, the government is a copycat kind of a process,” he said. “If one city or county passes a law like that, other cities or counties are generally inspired to try to do the same thing.”
