Washington, DC-based advocacy group Vote Hemp is urging the hemp community to take advantage of a narrow window on Capitol Hill to sign and submit a petition telling Congress to change the legal definition of hemp to allow 1% THC. Arbitrarily set by Canadian cannabis researcher Dr. Ernest Small in the 1970s, the currently allowed 0.3% limit has proved to be problematic for growers, producers and manufacturers alike, and Vote Hemp and its supporters feel that action has to be taken now.
Even Dr. Small agrees, more than four decades later, that “a 0.3% level is very conservative,” he told Cannabis Now in December 2018. He stressed that the allowed 0.3% THC designation for hemp has had negative implications for biodiversity. “0.3% is proving a little problematical for those who wish to produce some cultivars,” he told Cannabis Now. “It’s an especially stringent criterion [for] those who want to produce CBD. Most of the varieties selected for that have in excess of 0.3%, which is kind of inconvenient.”
