Legal cannabis oil: fact or fantasy?

Table of Contents

What do you think when you hear people talking about legal cannabis oil. Are they crazy? Self-deluded? Cannabis is illegal in most U.S. states unless you have a medical marijuana card, right? Wrong. Why? Well, it’s complicated, but we’ll try to explain.

THC equals marijuana, CBD equals hemp

Why is marijuana still (mostly) illegal? Because it is a drug. Why is it a drug? Because it makes people high. What imparts these properties to marijuana? THC! What are you tested for when you have a marijuana drug test? THC! So far so good. We’re on the same page. So what about CBD from hemp? It’s not a drug. It can’t make you high. It isn’t addictive.

So why all the fuss every time a new state “legalizes” the medical use of what is essentially CBD oil? The fact of the matter is that the DEA has added CBD to the list of schedule one substances. But the Hemp Industries Council has already won a legal battle against the DEA in which the courts determined that the DEA did not have the right to arbitrarily add CBD to the list. The DEA has, according to the court, “no right” to regulate hemp products. Guess what? CBD is a hemp product!

A legal tangle that few people understand the extent of

Despite the court’s findings, which should theoretically imply that hemp products can be freely moved across state lines and sold, there is still the occasional legal tussle with the organization, which seems hell-bent on ignoring the court ruling as if it had never happened. But we have the legal precedent. Hemp products cannot be regulated by the DEA. Full stop. It’s quite simple really, but politicians can make anything complicated.

This said, there are few US states that allow the cultivation of non-psychoactive hemp, and when they do, there are barriers to crossing state lines with locally produced hemp products. What’s the solution? It’s remarkably easy, and also very frustrating for local hemp producers. The US has been importing hemp right through marijuana prohibition. Do you want to import hemp products? Perhaps you’d like a nice hemp shirt, some hemp soap or legal cannabis oil? Feel free to go ahead. There is nothing to stop you!

There is further fog surrounding the part of the plant from which oil is extracted, variation in the definition of how much THC content is allowed for a legal product and so on, but in essence, nobody is going to kick down your door and arrest you for having some hemp oil in the house.

Legal cannabis oil? Sure!

An additional legal argument came to the fore after the FDA sent out letters saying that cannabidiol, or CBD was a new pharmaceutical undergoing medical trials and could therefore not be used. Again, the Hemp Industries Council’s legal team stepped into the breach, providing historical evidence for the use of CBD as a medicinal herbal product spanning hundred if not thousands of years. New? Hardly! Once again, the battle was won, underlining the fact of legal cannabis oil’s availability.