In May 2022, a 4-year-old named Tanner Clements got into a jar of gummies at a home outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. His mother had bought them over the counter at a shop, believing they were CBD. Tanner overdosed, and Virginia’s chief medical examiner ruled the cause of death delta-8 THC toxicity.
Last year, after tireless leadership from officials like Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Congress banned the kinds of drugs that killed him. Now, it is considering a rollback in the upcoming continuing resolution. Lives are at stake. Congress should keep the law exactly as it wrote it.
Hemp intoxicants were legalized overnight in 2018 across all fifty states — not because Congress decided dangerous drugs belonged next to the Skittles, but because of a drafting error. The 2018 Farm Bill defined hemp by its delta-9 THC content alone (7 U.S.C. § 1639o). Shady chemists noticed. Within five years, an industry had grown up around cannabinoids cooked with acids and solvents and sold in wrappers that mimic familiar candy brands.
Last November, Congress fixed it. Section 781 of Public Law 119-37 redefined hemp to keep non-intoxicating CBD legal while prohibiting the products that killed Tanner Clements. When Sen. Rand Paul forced a vote, the Senate backed the ban 76-24 — a bipartisan supermajority in a chamber that agrees on almost nothing. President Donald Trump signed it. There was one catch: Congress built in a full year before the new definition takes effect, on November 12, 2026.
That year is nearly up. The industry spent most of it lobbying rather than adapting, and it has one play left: extend its deadline through the continuing resolution.
The House has passed a clean CR funding the government through December 4. The Senate will write its own version, and the quiet negotiation over “anomalies” — technical adjustments tucked into stopgap bills without a hearing or a roll call — is where a hemp delay would land. Delay bills are already drafted, waiting for a vehicle. Senate Democrats hold the votes any funding deal requires, and their leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), has spent a decade as the chamber’s most determined advocate for loosening federal pot laws.
Let’s call it what it is. Pushing the date is not a technical fix; it is a repeal by other means, handing the industry potentially three more years selling hemp gummies to kids and addicting America, a problem 76 senators have already voted to end.
The case for delay is always the same — don’t ban, regulate — and it always arrives wrapped in the American farmer. It does not survive even the most brief perusal of the facts.
Nobody is coming for rope or hempcrete or birdseed. The fight is over floral hemp, the flower grown for cannabinoid extraction that becomes the gummies and the vapes. USDA reported in April that America’s entire 2025 floral harvest came to 16,880 acres — every acre in every state. Against 328 million acres of American cropland in production, that is roughly one acre in every 19,000. This is not a major commodity. It is a rounding error with a lobbying budget.
Kentucky, the emotional center of this fight, accounted for 4,400 of those acres — more than a quarter of the national total. New York, represented by Schumer, harvested 80. Minnesota, home to House Agriculture ranking member Angie Craig, lead Democratic sponsor of the industry’s own Lawful Hemp Protection Act, reported 93 the last year USDA published a state figure.
States tried regulating and couldn’t. That is why 39 state and territory attorneys general, Republicans and Democrats alike, asked Congress to close the hemp intoxicant loophole.
The good news: before November 12, all Congress has to do is what it’s best at: nothing.
THE DEA SHOULD NEVER HAVE BECOME THE AGENCY THAT NORMALIZED MARIJUANA
The law is written, passed, and signed. The only real risk is that it gets quietly unwound in a spending bill weeks before an election.
So don’t move the date. Enforce it and direct the Justice Department to prepare for what will still be on shelves on November 13. Let the standard Congress already voted for take effect.
Kevin Sabet is President and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.