There’s a common and tired trope that, if Americans give bureaucrats the power to ban products, households will be healthier, and the streets will be safer. A coalition of companies is disappointingly marching to the beat of that tempting tune, calling for new restrictions on hemp.
A trade association called the Consumer Brands Association (CBA) recently sent a letter to House and Senate leadership calling for the end of the 2018 Farm Bill’s “hemp loophole” removing hemp as a controlled substance. According to CBA, allowing these products on the market has “caused significant investigative and testing challenges, as well as unseen health and safety impacts.” Meanwhile, nearly 40 state and territory attorneys general have called on Congress to heap new restrictions onto hemp.
The harms alleged by CBA and these attorneys general are simply not supported by the evidence. Millions of consumers have benefited from a wider variety of products on the market, and bringing back prohibition would introduce a wide array of unintended consequences. Lawmakers need to reject these misguided calls for control and embrace choice and innovation.
Even as the hemp market has grown significantly in the seven years following legalization, there’s been little evidence of disproportionate harms to consumers. Systematic safety reviews and clinical data on purified CBD derived from hemp consistently find that it is well tolerated, albeit with adverse effects like somnolence, diarrhea, and reversible liver enzyme elevations. There are very low rates of life-threatening events when properly formulated and monitored. Meanwhile, a Food and Drug Administration analysis of adverse events involving cannabinoid hemp products from 2019-2023 located about 600 cases, an infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to about 8 million adverse events total over the same time period (2 million per year). There are, of course, real reports of consumers getting sick and reporting anxiety after using these products. But the justification for a new regulatory crusade against these products just isn’t there.
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Thanks to historical experience, regulators should know better than to embrace prohibition. Ratified in 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution banned the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, and exportation of “intoxicating liquors.” As historian and author of Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City Michael Lerner noted, “What followed [from Prohibition] was a litany of unintended consequences. ... The trade in unregulated alcohol had serious consequences for public health. As the trade in illegal alcohol became more lucrative, the quality of alcohol on the black market declined. On average, 1000 Americans died every year during the Prohibition from the effects of drinking tainted liquor.”
A key fatal conceit was the idea that officials and bureaucrats could smoothly smother demand for a wildly popular product. When Berlin (Germany) Mayor Gustav Boess visited New York City near the end of Prohibition, he asked the city’s mayor when Prohibition was set to take effect. To quote Lerner, “That Boess had to ask tells you plenty about how well it was working.”
While Prohibition is commonly regarded by policymakers as a failed experiment, it’s certainly not America’s only case of command and control. Decades of heavy-handed policies against cannabis products have resulted in mass incarceration and the rise of dangerous drug cartels pedaling illicit products. And, thanks to a vague and open-ended call by Congress to protect the “public health” with regard to tobacco harm reduction products, the FDA has denied more than 99 percent of applications, effectively criminalizing the market. The result has been illicit and potentially unsafe products—largely from China—dominating the market.
Prohibition and out-of-control regulation predictably lead to a bad result. The CBA and attorneys general should back off their call for returning to a failed status quo. And lawmakers must learn from history and choose consumer choice over baseless product bans.
Ross Marchand is a senior fellow for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
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