San Francisco, CA: The Bush administration has decided not to challenge a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling striking down proposed US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) regulations that sought to criminalize the possession and manufacture of edible hemp seed or oil products that contain trace amounts of THC.
The allotted time for the US Justice Department to appeal the Ninth Circuit ruling expired this week.
The court had previously ruled in February that the DEA’s proposed ban was improper because it classified non-psychoactive hemp as a Schedule I controlled substance without following the required legislative procedures. The DEA “cannot regulate naturally-occurring THC not contained or derived from marijuana … because non-psychoactive hemp is not included in Schedule I,” the court determined. “The DEA has no authority to regulate drugs that are not scheduled, and it has not followed procedures required to schedule a substance.”
The administration’s decision not to appeal the ruling marks a long-awaited victory for the Hemp Industries Association (HIA), which represents over 200 hemp companies in North America. The HIA had urged the court to invalidate the DEA’s regulations, first proposed in October 2001, because the agency lacks the legal authority to regulate non-psychoactive hemp, and because minute amounts of THC in hemp products represent no threat to public safety.
“This is a huge victory for the hemp industry,” said David Bronner, Chair of the HIA’s Food and Oil Committee. This decision removes “the cloud the DEA put into the marketplace [and] will spur a dramatic surge in the supply and consumption of healthy omega-3 rich hemp seed in America.”
For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of the NORML Foundation, at (202) 483-5500, or visit:
http://www.votehemp.org