“The charade of hemp intoxicants must end. Sneaking in the back door with synthetic drugs nobody asked for is not the path to legalization.”
By Chris Lindsey, American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp
Last week, the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) asked its supporters to urge Congress to keep intoxicating hemp products on the market. I read the group’s action alert with more than professional interest. I spent nearly a decade on MPP’s staff, helping pass medical and adult-use cannabis and decriminalization laws throughout the country. I am proud of that work.
That is why MPP’s latest campaign troubles me. It asks Congress to protect synthetic THC products and THCa flower that bypasses the state regulatory programs MPP built, and it leaves behind the people those programs were meant to serve. In Illinois, that work took six years and three laws: medical access in 2013, decriminalization in 2016 and a legalization law in 2019 that went back and cleared the records of people already convicted.
By its own count, MPP led the way on 15 medical cannabis laws and played a leading role in 14 of the 24 adult-use states. Those states adopted its model of licensing, testing, tracking and taxation—and businesses agreed to build within it. Those programs have since generated tens of billions of dollars in state tax revenue, served millions of patients and led to the normalization of cannabis.
MPP’s alert says the era of a dual system for hemp and cannabis needs to end. I agree, and THC should be treated as THC. The real question is why MPP would undermine its advocacy on regulation by supporting the unregulated intoxicating hemp charade now known as “gas station weed” over the regulated systems MPP built.
MPP calls the coming federal changes prohibition. On December 11, intoxicating hemp such as THCa flower will be treated as what it is: marijuana. Synthetic THC derivatives will be treated as what they are: designer drugs. THC regulation will play by the same rules state-licensed cannabis and hemp businesses have followed for more than a decade. Fairness is all those businesses have ever asked for, and it’s what sensible regulation requires.
MPP says the changes to federal hemp laws are detrimental to people in prohibition states. Yet by MPP’s own count, more than 300 million Americans already live in states with medical cannabis programs, and most prohibition states never chose hemp intoxicants. They arrived through a federal loophole, without a state vote.
Nor are these products what they claim to be. MPP names THCa flower and delta-8 among the products it wants protected. THCa flower is marijuana by another name, designed to confuse people into thinking it’s different. Delta-8, HHC, THCP and whatever comes next are lab-made versions of THC, produced because actual hemp contains so little natural delta-9.
We need real legalization. States that want legal cannabis can have it through the front door, the one MPP spent 30 years building.
What troubles me most is what the alert leaves out.
It mentions the failed war on cannabis once and it says nothing about the people that war left behind. At one time, that was the focus at MPP. When I helped write the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act in Illinois, its equity provisions were the point. The law cleared hundreds of thousands of records through automatic expungement and pardons, created social equity licensing and sent a quarter of cannabis tax revenue to communities harmed by uneven enforcement. MPP itself called those efforts the law’s most historic aspect.
Hemp legislation has offered nothing close. Of the hundreds of hemp bills filed since 2019, our review found that only one hemp-only bill tried to address equity, and it largely borrowed from Illinois’s cannabis law.
The need for reform around cannabis laws has not gone away. Police issued more than 200,000 cannabis charges last year by MPP’s own count, many of which involved arrest. Some argue hemp products reduced criminal charges in prohibition states, yet FBI data shows those 26 states still reported 186,581 cannabis charges in 2025. Texas, one of the states MPP staff pointed to, led the nation with more than 29,000 charges.
Where hemp actually did lower arrests, MPP’s own staff said it was partly because crime labs were overwhelmed. An arrest that is avoided because a lab is backlogged changes nothing about the broken system and clears no one’s record.
The licensed cannabis and hemp businesses my current organization—the American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp (ATACH)—represents carry those commitments at a real cost. They operate inside demanding state systems MPP helped design.
When Illinois launched adult-use sales, the first licensees paid into a fund to bring new social equity businesses into the market, and many incubated those businesses themselves. In New Jersey, licensed cultivators pay a Social Equity Excise Fee. Most states that have legalized for adults paired it with some form of social equity, from clearing records to equity licensing to reinvesting tax revenue in harmed communities.
That is the price of admission to a legal market and these businesses choose to pay it. Intoxicating hemp competes for the same customers while contributing nothing, using a business model that depends on avoiding regulation. Consumers are left with untested, lab-made products.
Last October, MPP Executive Director Adam Smith asked the licensed cannabis industry to invest in independent advocacy, arguing that a legal, well-regulated industry is the best antidote to dangerous, unregulated markets. He was right.
The charade of hemp intoxicants must end. Sneaking in the back door with synthetic drugs nobody asked for is not the path to legalization. Federal policy must be built on the foundation that already works: the state systems that regulate cannabis, with their testing, age limits, accountable businesses and commitment to repair.
MPP taught a generation of advocates, me among them, that ending prohibition means building something better in its place. That is still the right mission. MPP should return to it.
Chris Lindsey is vice president of policy and state advocacy at the American Trade Association for Cannabis and Hemp. While at the Marijuana Policy Project, he helped pass Illinois’s 2013 medical cannabis law, drafted and helped pass the state’s decriminalization law and helped write the 2019 Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act, in addition to work on similar laws in over a dozen other states.
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