US Senator Rand Paul proposed an amendment that would raise the permitted THC level in hemp from 0.3% to 1%, following a global trend toward higher thresholds.
The industry has long complained that 0.3% is too low. Because CBD rises in proportion to THC, a higher limit is also expected to be positive for the CBD industry.
Understanding farmers
“There is still work to do to prevent farmers from dealing with unnecessary bureaucracy,” Paul said, adding that the proposed change had support from the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The global trend is 1%
The current 0.3% barrier distinguishing high-THC cannabis from industrial hemp was established in 1987 based on well-known research conducted in the 1970s by Canadian plant scientists Ernest Small and Arthur Cronquist for the International Association for Plant Taxonomy. Based on flower dry weight, it was designated as a boundary between Cannabis sativa, industrial hemp, and Cannabis indica, marijuana. Today, even Small acknowledges that the threshold he and Cronquist set was arbitrary.
Australia's Queensland was the first to change the 0.3% limit to 1%. Uruguay followed in 2016. South Africa, Malawi, Thailand, Ecuador, Mexico and Argentina set national limits at 1% in the preceding two years. Non-EU Switzerland also has a 1% limit. The European Union's threshold was recently increased from 0.2% to 0.3%.
The 0.3% limit adopted in the United States when the 2014 Farm Bill allowed growers to restart the industry was reaffirmed in the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized hemp federally.
