Virginia Hemp Farmers And Businesses Worry About Changes Included In Newly Passed Marijuana Market Legislation

Legislators want to “change the law that they created, to clearly favor Wall Street corporations over Virginia farmers and small businesses.”

By Charlotte Rene Woods, Virginia Mercury

A legal cannabis market is set to take effect in Virginia next summer under the final state budget, but Mannassas-based Barbara Biddle has already given notice to her landlord to shut down one of her two hemp stores.

As a purveyor of hemp-infused products, her District Hemp Botanicals shops sell creams, bath salts, infused drinks and gummies that contain CBD or THC—two chemical compounds found in both cannabis and hemp plants.

Forthcoming federal hemp definition changes after Congress previously opened the door to broader hemp markets are set to take effect in November this year while Virginia’s potential legal cannabis market is set to take effect next July.

While CBD, short for cannabidiol, does not produce a high, THC, short for tetrahydrocannabinol, does.

Both components have been touted for their health benefits like soothing pain and relieving stress or anxiety. THC-infused drinks have also emerged as an alcohol alternative for people abstaining from the substance who don’t want to be totally sober. The concept has been a driving force in Virginia’s yearslong effort to establish a legal recreational cannabis market after first permitting a prescription-based medical one in 2018.

While the nation’s patchwork cannabis laws have slowly sprouted, an enterprising hemp industry has taken root following Congress’s 2018 Farm Bill that enabled hemp products with up to 0.3 percent THC. Late last year, however, Congress reversed course and by November many products will become illegal.

As of late June, some federal lawmakers are pursuing measures to support the hemp industry.

“There’s so much in flux,” Biddle said.

With a new baby on the way, she noted the scale down from two stores to one is not totally spurred by legal limbo in Virginia, but it certainly didn’t help, she said.

As Biddle’s Leesburg location will soon shut down, Caroline County farmer Graham Redfern has been stressing about his crops amid his planting season.

By fall, many of his products will be illegal, he said.

“Cannabis, which hemp is, will produce cannabinoids,” Redfern said this spring while looking out at his fields on a rainy day that The Mercury visited. “It’s about impossible to create any industry in the industrial hemp world without taking the plant to maturity, which will then create cannabinoids, which will then now be marijuana.”

Redfern and Biddle point to how they have already complied with strict restrictions on their industry within the state.

The tighter guardrails were put in place after a spike in calls to poison control centers from children eating edibles they thought were candy or people becoming more high than intended. New potency thresholds and clearer labeling requirements have since been applied after 2023’s Senate Bill 903 made hemp laws in the state more stringent than federal ones.

That meant child safety improvements to packaging, third-party lab testing and reformulations of products. It also entailed a chemical composition where products had to have 25 times the amount of CBD per every one part of THC.

As one of the patrons of Virginia’s latest attempt to legalize cannabis, Sen. Lashrecse Aird, D-Henrico said in a statement that “closing the 25-to-1 loophole does not prevent farmers from continuing to grow industrial hemp or produce hemp products that comply with Virginia’s 2 milligram THC limit.”

Instead, she said, it addresses “a loophole that has allowed intoxicating products to be marketed and sold as cannabis outside of a robust regulatory framework that protects consumers.”

Biddle feels that classifying hemp businesses as “unregulated” is unfair to those within it that have complied with state and federal laws for years.

“Now [legislators] change the law that they created, to clearly favor Wall Street corporations over Virginia farmers and small businesses,” Redfern said.

As the medical marijuana industry has been established in the state for years, with donations made to legislators, he worries small business locals like he and Biddle’s are getting left out in favor of corporations.

Redfern said that he and others have been in touch with lawmakers and the governor about their concerns. He said that they’d felt reassured until recently.

“We are left with zero pathway and will not survive until July 2027 without a grace period,” Redfern said.

State lawmakers and the governor have been at odds for months over the state budget over a debate about taxes for data centers ahead of a looming July 1 deadline to have it implemented or face a government shutdown. After the legislature passed agreements to the governor last week, the body convened Monday to approve her amendments.

This story was first published by Virginia Mercury.

Photo courtesy of Brendan Cleak.