Legal Today, Illegal Tomorrow? Wisconsin’s Hemp Shops Face A Federal Crackdown

Wisconsin Hemp Flower owner Luke Heidt has been growing hemp on an old dairy farm outside Eau Claire since the state legalized the crop in 2017.

Now, like many hemp farmers across Wisconsin, Heidt is planting less as he prepares to go out of business this November. That’s when a federal law changing the legal definition of hemp goes into effect.

“I have sustained myself entirely through hemp, as a hemp farmer, and the government put me out of business,” Heidt said.

He says he’s “terrified” and “sad” for the future of Wisconsin’s bustling hemp industry, calling it a “100 percent disaster for hemp farmers” across the nation.

Recreational and medicinal marijuana are both illegal in Wisconsin. But, stores selling THC and CBD products, and the farms distributing them, have been working under a federal loophole. It allows the sale of these products as long as they are hemp-derived and contain no more than 0.3 percent of delta-9 THC.

The new federal legislation ends this by banning all hemp products with a total THC concentration over 0.3 percent.

In a letter sent to Congress on Feb. 27, Gov. Tony Evers said the change will cut $700 million in production and 3,500 jobs from the state’s economy.

Wisconsin currently has 274 licensed hemp growers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Last November, that number was 470.

The decline could be due to people waiting to see how the law plays out and if the loophole will close or not, said Shelby Ellison, an agricultural professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It might be clearer in another month how many people reapply for licenses through the USDA.

Heidt calls himself an “old-school CBD farmer,” meaning his business focuses on hemp without tetrahydrocannabinolic, or THC, the intoxicating chemical in marijuana, and its variants, THC-A and delta-9 THC. But he worries that because his products are so close to the new legal limit, his customers will not want to take the risk by buying.

“Almost everything I produce will be so close to the line of being illegal that I’ll be too close to the line to do it,” Heidt said. “What if I get 0.31? Am I going to get a felony and get locked up?”

It’s a question going through some minds of those in Wisconsin’s hemp industry.

Chris Busky owns Wonders of Nature, a cannabis cafe and dispensary in Eau Claire. He works with small hemp farmers around the area. He says many are sitting “in a state of limbo.”

“A lot of these farmers are sitting on crops that they grew last year (and) it’s going to be difficult for them to sell,” Busky said. “Because by the time you get that material processed into a finished good we’re going to have the November deadline up.”

By then, he said the dispensary, which funds the cafe, will be forced to close. He’ll also have to layoff all eight of his employees.

Working behind the counter, Busky said he’s seen his customers improve their quality of life by taking his products.

“From your 80-year-old grandma that hasn’t slept in 20 years (and) is now using a five milligram sleep gummy and is sleeping like a baby … to somebody that just came in with stage four pancreatic cancer and is scared and not sure how to handle their anxiety and stress, and it’s keeping them up at night,” Busky said.

He said he fears that THC consumers benefiting from the products might turn to buying illegally when November comes.

Listen to the WPR report

‘The government put me out of business’: Wisconsin hemp growers, sellers brace for new federal hemp law was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.