Can Chris Fontes save the Hemp Loophole that Created a $1 Billion Beverage Industry?

It was the week before Christmas, 2018, and Chris Fontes was supposed to be relaxing on a cruise with his wife. On the day his ship embarked, however, the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture released the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, commonly known as the farm bill, the omnibus legislation that determines the nation’s agricultural agenda, setting everything from organic certification policy to food stamp eligibility requirements. This time around, anticipation centered on a plank concerning the legal production of industrial hemp, a versatile fiber that had been banned in the U.S. since 1946. 

Fontes, a longtime cannabis activist and software programmer, at the time was a part-owner and CEO of a company called Hemp Exchange, one of many start-ups whose future would be determined by the language in the bill. While his wife sunned on deck, he ate meals in their cabin and made a close study of the 500-page legislation.

When Fontes reached Section 10113, he read the language closely; then he read it again. The bill defined legal hemp products as containing “a delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol concentration of not more than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis.” The definition was copied from the 2014 farm bill, which allowed agricultural and academic research on hemp, and likely borrowed it from an obscure 1976 paper proposing an arbitrary but possibly useful number to develop a taxonomy of cannabis plants. 

Fontes froze as the ramifications of this one small clause sank in. It did more than greenlight industrial hemp production. It codified the first federally approved quantity of hemp’s psychoactive element, THC, in nearly a century.

“It was a forehead-slapping realization,” recalls Fontes. Any amount of THC had been illegal since the 1930s, and was fully criminalized by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. “Suddenly, here was this legal threshold in the middle of a major federal law.”

This threshold has provided the basis for a national market in “full-spectrum” cannabidiol (CBD) wellness products, the power of which may be increased by trace amounts of THC. More controversially, it has given rise to a bifurcated market in products containing intoxicating amounts of hemp-derived THC. On one side are high-potency hemp-THC gummies and vapes that target cannabis consumers; on the other are lower-dose THC-infused hemp beverages that have stormed into the adult-beverage industry on the back of mainstream adoption and are estimated to become a $20 billion to $30 billion market over the next decade. This is roughly the size of today’s craft beer industry, and two to three times the size of the bourbon industry.

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles hold up their ‘hemp pens’ during the signing ceremony for the 2018 farm bill. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Eight years later, McConnell has made closing this “loophole” a signature piece of legislation before his planned retirement after four decades in the Senate. “Industrial hemp and CBD will remain legal for industrial applications — such as seed, stock, fiber, grain oil — or used in drug trials,” he told Salon in 2025. “This language merely clarifies the original intent of the 2018 farm bill, rooting out the bad actors and protecting the growing hemp industry.” (McConnell’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The Senator has been hospitalized since June 14.)

A fierce lobbying battle is now taking place on Capitol Hill, with a deadline in view. Barring intervention, on November 12, 2026, a new federal legal THC limit of no more than 0.4 milligrams per container will go into effect. If successful, McConnell’s efforts — backed by an unlikely alliance between Big Alcohol and Big Cannabis — will upend a vast national network of entrepreneurs that turned a footnote into an opportunity.  

Few of Fontes’ peers immediately understood the implications of the point-three THC threshold introduced by the Farm Bill, because grasping them required two things: mathematics, and thinking outside the distinct regulatory and business lanes occupied by hemp and cannabis.

“People had trouble wrapping their heads around the idea of 0.3% THC as a ratio by dry weight, and not as an absolute number, which isn’t enough to get anyone high,” says Fontes. It was an easy statistic to glance over, Fontes explains. Most readers of the bill were used to the federal ban on THC, hemp entrepreneurs were focused on CBD wellness products, and cannabis entrepreneurs assumed “anything that could get you high was a state-level matter.” 

But that was no longer true. The farm bill granted federal permission for the production, sale, and transport of THC-infused hemp products in every state, including those that maintained strict cannabis prohibitions.

After confirming with lawyers that he had read the law correctly, Fontes launched Trojan Horse Cannabis, which he believes was the country’s first hemp-derived Delta-9 THC brand. He sold his first product — a flavored gummy containing 10 milligrams of THC — directly to retailers, one at a time, starting in late 2020. For a few months, he dominated the retail market in states where cannabis was illegal. Plenty of companies were selling high-potency gummies in legal-cannabis states, but only Trojan Horse was selling all over the country, including in liquor stores that had never before offered THC products.

“Eventually, someone took our products back to their lab, did some quick looking at the math, and went, ‘Yep, we know how this works,’” says Fontes. “Then the floodgates broke loose.

As Trojan Horse expanded its product line throughout 2021, Fontes began to wonder: What if the .3% ratio were applied to liquid milliliters? During the 2010s, emulsion technology had advanced to a point where it could finally stabilize cannabinoids in liquid, allowing microscopic droplets of THC to be dissolved evenly in water and quickly absorbed by the bloodstream. The ability to produce THC drinks with a reliable, precise dosage — analogous to the alcohol content in a bottle of wine — was a game-changer that seemed to arrive just on time.

“A lot more people are comfortable buying cans of intoxicating drinks in bars and grocery stores than are smoking flower or eating edibles,” says Fontes. “I was confident there was a massive untapped retail market for THC drinks.”

He was right. In March 2022, Fontes launched the High Spirits beverage brand, working with celebrated Canadian cannabis culinary chef, Jordan Wagman, to formulate two low-dose seltzers: grapefruit-and-lemon-flavored Oracle and the cherry-lime Underworld. High Spirits officially debuted the 3 mg drinks at the Delta 9 and CBD Expo held in Dallas under the tagline: “No hangover. No guesswork. Just a better way to unwind, connect, and enjoy life.” (Fontes eventually changed the name of the company to High Spirits later that same year.)

Until then, THC drinks had languished as a failed experiment in California dispensaries, where they rarely accounted for more than a sliver of sales. Although they were newly legal, distributors and retailers were slow to accept orders. “When we first launched, alcohol distributors refused to touch us, and we had to walk them through the law,” says Fontes. 

But by late spring, he began having conversations with major players, including regional Anheuser-Busch distributors.

Liberated from the dispensary, hemp beverages took off across the country. Since the launch of High Spirits in early 2022, hundreds of startup brands have emerged, creating a billion-dollar market anchored by dozens of states that permit their sale in bars, grocery stores, liquor stores, and gas-station convenience marts. In Pennsylvania grocery stores and Florida dive bars, a generation that was already turning away from alcohol embraced brightly-colored cans that offered a mild buzz with less sugar, fewer calories, and no headache or cotton mouth the next morning. In February, Chicago’s United Center, where the NBA’s Bulls play, became the first arena to offer THC drinks at concession stands during concerts.

But the number of states permitting the broad retail sale of hemp-beverages has been shrinking under state-level regulations. More concerning for the industry, the ratio set by the 2018 farm bill has been legislatively programmed to expire. 

On August 1, 2025, McConnell, who has served on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry since 1985, announced on the Senate floor his determination to “close the bad-actor loophole” opened by the 2018 farm bill. Unless preempted, a new federal legal THC limit for hemp products of not more than 0.4 milligrams per container will become law on November 12, 2026. Unlike the current limit, this is insufficient to produce even low-dose intoxicating beverages or full-spectrum CBD products.

Cannabis beer and other cannabis-infused drinks at the ‘Mary Jane’ hemp trade fair in Berlin, 2024. Photo by Monika Skolimowska/picture alliance via Getty Images

In Washington, hemp advocates are pushing to preempt the scheduled change with comprehensive regulations that appease critics, especially McConnell, and secure the long-term future of hemp products. “We’re used to chaos in this industry … but a federal existential threat really focuses your attention,” says Christopher Lackner, founder and president of the Hemp Beverage Alliance. “The feeling is that the plane is going to land. It’s going to be bumpy. But we’re going to land it.”

Imagine walking into a gas station in Wisconsin. On the counter are brightly colored boxes that appear to contain packages of candy. Upon closer examination, they promise something much stronger than a sugar high. These legal edibles contain high amounts of semi-synthetic THC derived from hemp plants. (One of these, THCP, a cannabinoid discovered in 2019, is said to feel three to ten times stronger than the delta-9 used in beverages and CBD products.)  

These high-dose candies are the red-headed stepchildren of the 2018 farm bill, widely known by the derogatory shorthand “gas station weed.” The wider hemp industry deeply resents them for giving hemp a bad name and does not consider them legitimate products that deserve mention in the same breath as CBD oils and low-dose beverages. But nobody hates their existence — or takes it more personally — than McConnell, whose office was instrumental in passing the law that allowed them to flourish.

The .3% hemp-THC ratio must be ended, McConnell argued last November, to keep dangerous products, like THC candy, “out of the hands of children.” To illustrate the point, he cited data showing a rise in cannabis-related calls to poison control centers in Kentucky for children under age 12. 

McConnell is not alone in his opposition: it is shared by the more reputable sectors of the hemp industry — farmers, producers of CBD and low-dose THC drinks — who are dismayed to find their fates tied to candy knockoff THC products in the slow march toward November’s legislative cliff.

“No one in the hemp-beverage industry supports these products,” says Jack Sherrie, CEO and founder of Delta Beverages, a Charlotte, North Carolina, hemp-beverage company with 40 employees and a retail presence in 27 states. “McConnell wanted to address the ‘bad actor’ problem, but you don’t have to destroy entire industries to stop the sale of these dangerous products.”

Jack Sherrie, CEO and founder of Delta Beverages, a Charlotte, North Carolina, hemp-beverage company with 40 employees and a retail presence in 27 states. Photo courtesy of Delta Beverages

The anger extends to farmers who face uncertainty about the next hemp harvest, which could be their last if no regulatory action is taken. “No farmer I know supports these products that look like boxes of Nerds, and it’s frustrating that we’ve been lumped in with them — it’s a black eye,” says Jay Grundy, a fifth-generation tobacco farmer in central Kentucky who transitioned to growing hemp for CBD products and low-dose THC beverages in 2018. “Legalizing hemp in 2018 was a good thing, and it helped a lot of people, from small farmers to cancer patients. We just need to clean up the industry with informed regulations.”

The debate over hemp regulations is bigger than banning “gas station weed,” however. The new 0.4 mg limit also reflects the lobbying efforts of an alcohol industry that has not looked kindly upon the rapid rise of a new “hangover-free” competitor. In D.C. and in statehouses across the country, alcohol producer groups have worked to upend what they see as an unfair advantage for the legal hemp industry, suggesting it could be regulated as part of a 3-tier system like alcohol, of producers, wholesalers, and retailers. While pushing for the new restrictive federal limit, they have lobbied successfully to get hemp-beverage products removed from retail shelves in a growing number of states, from California to Idaho. 

In these efforts, Big Alcohol had an ally in Big Cannabis, whose protectionist-minded operators in legal-cannabis states — organized through national lobbies such as the US Cannabis Roundtable — did not welcome retail competition from lightly regulated “red-state hemp” products, any more than liquor producers welcomed high-end “sessionable” THC drinks.

“It’s obvious that alcohol and marijuana pushed bans because they didn’t want to give up market share to hemp products,” says Dexter Rice, an organic hemp farmer in Colorado and founder of NuuMe Organics, which makes full-spectrum CBD products. “The question is why they promote poorly conceived legislation that impacts non-psychoactive CBD used for pain relief, epilepsy, insomnia, anxiety, the list goes on.  What are people gonna do if you take away their medicine?”

There is little evidence that either Big Alcohol or Big Cannabis was much concerned with this question, say hemp advocates who have closely observed the lobbying fights in their states and in Washington, D.C. “The targets were ‘gas station weed,’ and the hemp-beverage industry, and all that mattered was stopping them,” says Jim Higdon, a co-founder of Cornbread Hemp, a Kentucky-based CBD and hemp-beverage company that launched in 2018 and now employs 100 people.

“They didn’t care if the collateral damage included a CBD market where parents buy cannabidiol for their epileptic children.”

Jim Higdon, a co-founder of Cornbread Hemp, a Kentucky-based CBD and hemp-beverage company that launched in 2018 and now employs 100 people. Photo courtesy of Cornbread Hemp

To hedge against the looming hemp deadline, Higdon says the company — currently on track to hit $75 million in revenue for 2026—has diversified its offerings to include functional mushroom gummies and non-alcoholic spritzes with nootropic ingredients.

“While we are lobbying to save access to hemp products, we are also diversifying our lines to serve consumers in the event the hemp ban goes into effect.” 

Alcohol consumption has declined over the past couple of years. The trendline now runs through a very different market. Hemp beverages appeared on the scene, proliferating in liquor and convenience stores across the country. THC drinks with names like Cycling Frog THC Iced Tea Lemonade and Cheech & Chong’s High & Dry appeared alongside cases of Miller Lite and handles of Jack Daniel’s.

Compared to those venerable but struggling brands, the upstart THC makers appeared like rockets in boost phase, the new “it girl” that retailers struggled to keep in stock. In states where the drinks were most popular, such as Minnesota, they commanded significant shelf and cooler space in some stores.

The major alcohol producer groups responded quickly and with force. Since 2018, sales of THC beverages and edibles have been restricted in more than 20 states, either banning them outright, capping their potency at a few milligrams, or pushing them to the outermost margins of retail. In some of the most well-known marijuana states (Colorado, Washington), for example, they have mostly been forced back into their original domain: the cannabis dispensary. In September 2024, California governor (and vineyard owner) Gavin Newsom banned retail sales of hemp beverages by emergency regulation, following a campaign led by the assemblywoman representing Napa County.

“Bourbon wanted to shut a door on its new competitors, and McConnell was willing to clear the deck for his friends and donors.”

Jim Higdon

The makers of hemp products always knew they would face challenges in states that retained the power to regulate hemp products. According to Fontes, this expectation was baked into their business strategy from the start, and has allowed them to weather a frequently hostile and constantly changing regulatory map. “We’ve had to be very intentional and scrappy about where we invest dollars and how to survive catastrophe,” he said. “We’ve separated our product and our distribution across multiple regions, so if we lose a state, it didn’t put us out of business. We felt pretty proud about our pivotability right up until McConnell announced the new definition in November. You can’t pivot around that.”

At the federal level, the campaign to overturn the farm bill “loophole” was led by the beer, wine, and spirits associations, which sent a joint letter to Congressional leaders in November supporting McConnell’s ban. “The ambiguous language contained in the 2018 Farm Bill has been manipulated and exploited by certain actors,” the letter stated, “fueling the rapid growth of a largely unregulated market.”

Kentucky’s bourbon industry has been a major supporter of McConnell’s four-decade Senate career, funding such McConnell legacy projects as a new state GOP headquarters in the senator’s name. “Bourbon wanted to shut a door on its new competitors, and McConnell was willing to clear the deck for his friends and donors,” says Higdon, of Cornbread Hemp. 

The chief of government relations for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States in Washington, Denzel McGuire, tells Inc. that it supports “Congressional action to close the Farm Bill loophole and treat intoxicating hemp the same as marijuana, recognizing that both contain THC and are intoxicating.” Any future markets for intoxicating hemp products, he says, “must be supported by a well-defined regulatory framework and tax structure … Until essential safeguards necessary to create a fair, responsible and safe marketplace are in place, THC hemp should be treated the same as recreational marijuana.” 

Opposition to hemp drinks within the adult beverage industry is not monolithic — and rifts are deepening. While many alcohol producers oppose their sale, distributors and sellers have embraced them. Industry insiders say that Anheuser-Busch, for example, has worked through the Beer Institute to support a ban on hemp beverages, even as around half of its wholesalers happily sell them.

Among the most powerful players to break with alcohol producers and join the coalition to save hemp drinks before the November ban is Total Wine & More, the nation’s largest adult beverage retailer. “Our work reflects consumer demand, and our number one goal is to make sure our shelves match the reality of what people are shopping for on a daily basis,” says Eric Brewer, the company’s senior vice president for external affairs and government relations. “We’re in a period right now where the term ‘adult beverage’ is being redefined, and two of our highest growth areas are THC-infused hemp beverages and non-alcoholic.”

High Spirits founder Chris Fontes at Sleeping Giant Brewing, where High Spirits is brewed and packaged. Photo by Amanda Lopez

The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) serves as another field general on the distributor side, whose members distribute 80 percent of all wine and spirits sold at wholesale in the country. When McConnell announced his intention to undo the 2018 hemp law, the WSWA teamed with the wider hemp industry to lobby on Capitol Hill for bringing hemp beverages in line with the existing regulatory framework for alcohol production, distribution, and sale. “This summer, we’re calling for regulation — not prohibition,” wrote WSWA CEO Francis Creighton. “We need a policy environment that reflects today’s marketplace and prepares for tomorrow’s.”

That marketplace has become less alcoholic in recent years. In a 2025 Gallup poll, only 54 percent of Americans said they drank alcohol, the lowest number since tracking began in 1939. This decline is not limited to the United States. The World Health Organization reported last year that per capita global alcohol consumption had dropped by 12 percent between 2010 and 2022 and, if that rate continues, will be on track for a 20 percent reduction by 2030. 

These numbers support what the alcohol producers may be hesitant to admit: Their problem isn’t new competition, but the product they’re selling. Alcohol’s decline started before the rise of hemp beverages. In February, the Brewers Association published a report that found the retail availability of THC drinks had no impact on beer sales. 

“Rather than displacing alcoholic drinks, wholesalers report that hemp beverages are filling existing gaps on shelves, in trucks, and in the bottom line, which is the result of shifts in consumer purchase behavior,” says Diana Eberlein, chair of the Coalition for Adult Beverage Alternatives.

The broad hemp industry — farmers, emulsifiers, CBD and beverage producers and distributors — is now engaged in a life-or-death push to pass comprehensive regulations that prevent the new limits from becoming law in November. A major plank of these efforts involves bringing hemp beverages into the “three-tier” tent that has regulated alcohol since the end of Prohibition in 1933.

“We’re asking to be regulated like other drinks — taxed, label restrictions, age-gating, all of it,” says Lackner of the Hemp Beverage Alliance. “There is an existing structure that these products can be easily folded into. You don’t have to build a new mousetrap.”

Among the unlikely officers on the lobbying frontlines is Chris Fontes. When he started High Spirits in 2022, he says that he was a diehard libertarian. But the experience of the last few years has convinced him that strong oversight is needed to ensure public safety and trust. “No real industry survives without regulations and rules of the road,” he says. “We can’t be selling shit to kids. We need to be full-panel testing, following good manufacturing practices — all the things to make a consumer-safe product.”

As of early May, the hemp industry had yet to coalesce around a specific bill, or even agree on federal limits for hemp-derived THC. While CBD wellness companies would be fine with a three mg cap per serving — the amount of some types of THC set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in its pilot program for reimbursing some participants for certain products that contain CBD; THC beverage producers would prefer a cap in the neighborhood of five or 10 mg per serving. Crucially, both numbers would effectively eliminate the problem of “gas station weed.”

“There’s work going on behind the scenes to align stakeholders behind a reasonable limit, which is not sufficient for making high-dose candies, smokable hemp flower or vapes,” says Higdon, of Cornbread Hemp. “We’re hopeful Congress can see our decision to leave them out as demonstrating a level of maturity.”

“We’ll probably end up with a five-milligram limit, but we’d fare better at ten,” says Fontes. “I know there’s marijuana versus hemp political interests here that complicate that number. 

There are currently multiple bills circulating in Washington that propose to save the hemp industry while satisfying its critics, notably the Cannabinoid Safety and Regulation Act (CSRA), sponsored by Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, the Democratic senators from Oregon, and Kentucky Representative Andy Barr’s Lawful Hemp Protection Act.] Other bills would allow states to opt out of a federal ban or delay the November ban for two years, giving more time to implement full regulations. But those close to the effort say there is little appetite for half-measures that leave the hemp industry in limbo.

“It’s disheartening that Congress is threatening an industry that saves family farms and makes things that help people.”

Jay Grundy, hemp farmer

“The mood right now is that people don’t want to settle for an extension that doesn’t clean up the marketplace and address public safety concerns,” says Eberlein, of the Coalition for Adult Beverage Alternatives. “We really want to be included in the three-tier system, and I think it’s hard for anyone to get behind legislation that looks like it’s just kicking the can down the road.”

Years of education and advocacy appear to be paying off down the stretch. “Not long ago, we had to explain to lawmakers what a hemp beverage is,” says Sherrie of Delta Beverages in Charlotte. “Now there’s so much activity happening on the Hill, they are sick of hearing about it. We’re cautiously optimistic about getting something over the line before November.”

Jay Grundy, the Kentucky hemp farmer, admits that he is “scared to death,” but is similarly positive. “We’ve made significant investments and could lose it all, but we’re hopeful, too,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s simple: Get rid of the smokable hemp flower, get rid of the dirty synthetics, and put a low THC cap on the products.” 

Meanwhile, the alcohol producer groups are also speaking a language of regulations and public safety, with one key difference: They appear perfectly happy to send CBD and hemp-beverage companies flying off the cliff and crashing first. This would dramatically deflate these companies’ valuations, and thus highlights a question that has always haunted Big Alcohol’s opposition to the hemp-beverage industry: Do they really want to derail the hemp-THC retail train, or merely bring it to a temporary halt, so that they can change the tracks, climb aboard, and take an assessor’s measure of its engine and finest cars?

The first alcohol producers to enter the U.S. retail market for hemp beverages came from the world of craft beer, which itself once played the role of a rebellious upstart, crashing the gates of Big Alcohol. Notable names included New Belgium Brewing’s “The Hemperor HPA” and Four Saints Brewing Company’s “Founding Fathers Hemp Ale.” But if the legacy brands have stayed out of the wild west U.S. retail market for intoxicating hemp beverages, they have shown interest in other ways, notably by producing THC drinks for sale in Canadian and U.S. cannabis dispensaries.

High Spirits founder Chris Fontes remains hopeful, but has no illusions about what will happen if he and his allies lose the political fight over hemp beverages. ‘I probably get back into tech or consulting,’ he says. Photo by Amanda Lopez

In California dispensaries, you can purchase cans of Hi-Fi Sessions made by the Heineken subsidiary Lagunitas Brewing Company and Pabst Blue Ribbon-branded cannabis-infused seltzers. Once regulations are in place, it is easy to imagine them breaking with the Beer Institute’s official line that THC beverages are “fundamentally different” than beer and do not belong in the same retail settings.

This future is already on view in Canada, where several years ago Constellation Brands—maker of Corona—invested heavily in Canopy Growth, which sells several THC drink brands in dispensaries and government-run liquor stores. (Constellation exited the partnership in 2024.) Ditto the Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams, whose line of THC-infused teas can be found in Canadian cannabis dispensaries. In 2018, Molson Coors Canada formed a partnership with HEXO Corp to develop and sell a cannabis-beverage line under the name Truss Beverage Co. (Molson Coors sold its stake in 2023). A crack has even emerged in the hardline world of Big Bourbon. In 2019, Sazerac, maker of Fireball and Southern Comfort, began selling a licensed Fireball-branded THC gummy in Nevada.

Longtime observers of the hemp and alcohol industries say convergence is inevitable, if not imminent, once the national market is de-risked through comprehensive regulations.

“I suspect they all have R&D going on for hemp beverage products, and want to reset the starting line with a temporary ban, followed by regulations,” says Lackner. “They have watched the hockey stick growth of our category. They will come in just like they did with non-alcoholic and hard seltzer.”

While Fontes remains hopeful that disaster can be averted, he is under no illusions about the impact of the ban going into effect. “There is no contingency plan,” he says. “We’d be stuck with pallets of product that we need to destroy. We go out of business and take a massive financial bath. I probably get back into tech or consulting.”

As the political fight moved into a critical stage, hemp advocates are pressing lawmakers to consider the jobs at stake. The U.S. Hemp Roundtable estimates that the industry employs more than 300,000 people and generates $1.5 billion in tax revenue. (In 2025, the Texas hemp industry generated nearly $268 million in state taxes.) Others believe the actual employment numbers are much higher. “There’s a lot of ancillary industries beyond hemp that have built out infrastructures and departments,” says Eberlein. “When you include wholesalers, retailers, marketing, and more, who might have a very different landscape without hemp beverages on the shelves, I think the real number is in the millions.”

At the base of this economy is the family hemp farmer, about 150 of whom are located in Kentucky, Senator McConnell’s backyard and the bastion of red-state hemp. “We have debt from last year’s operations and biomass we can’t market because processors are nervous and aren’t taking it on,” says Grundy, the tobacco-turned-hemp farmer.

“It’s disheartening that Congress is threatening an industry that saves family farms and makes things that help people. I can go to the store and buy a pack of cigarettes, but the government is going to remove low-dose hemp drinks and full-spectrum CBD oil? It just blows my mind.”