The US loosens cannabis and tightens hemp

In August the US Drug Enforcement Administration filed its closing argument in the proceeding meant to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III. The agency that spent more than fifty years defending the strictest classification now wrote that the plant no longer belongs there. The same autumn brings a date that sends hemp in exactly the opposite direction: a seed containing next to no THC becomes a controlled substance if the plant it came from tested above 0.3 percent.

The closing argument

The hearing ran from 29 June to 15 July this year, eleven days before DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek C. Julius. On 17 August the DEA and seven opposing parties filed their post-hearing briefs, limited to fifty double-spaced pages.

"Marijuana can no longer remain in Schedule I", the DEA wrote in its brief, pointing to more than 30,000 US practitioners now treating over six million patients across 43 jurisdictions. The basis is a ten-month scientific and medical evaluation commissioned by the US health department, which led to a Schedule III recommendation in August 2023. That evaluation concluded that cannabis has currently accepted medical use for at least three conditions: anorexia related to a medical condition, nausea and vomiting, and pain.

Most of the brief went to dismantling the opposing parties' witnesses. The DEA argued that several of them lacked the qualifications to be recognised as experts, and that those who did hold the credentials were asked to testify well beyond their field. The judge will now issue a recommendation, after which the DEA Administrator decides.

This concerns the US drug classification of cannabis. It says nothing about industrial hemp, nothing about CBD products in the EU, and nothing about what such products do or do not do.

The provision heading the other way

On 12 November 2025 Congress ended a 43-day government shutdown. The deal contained a 141-page agriculture appropriations bill, and inside it a provision numbered 781 that rewrites the federal definition of hemp.

Three things change. The threshold moves from delta-9 THC to total THC, that is delta-9 plus 0.877 times the THCA content. Finished products may contain no more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. And the hemp definition now excludes "any viable seeds from a Cannabis sativa L. plant that exceeds a total tetrahydrocannabinols concentration of 0.3 percent in the plant on a dry weight basis".

Those three words, "in the plant", are what matters. The seed itself holds nothing close to the limit. Its legal status is nonetheless decided by the mother plant, and a seed that falls outside the hemp definition falls under marihuana, which remains Schedule I.

The American Seed Innovation & Growth Alliance, formed specifically to stop the provision, writes in its white paper that for the first time in US hemp law a seed's legal status is determined not by what it is but by where it came from. The organisation notes that the standard comes with no testing protocol, no designated responsible party and no transition pathway for material already in lawful commerce. As recently as January 2022 the DEA confirmed that seeds below the threshold are hemp, and the American seed trade was built on that assurance. The market is valued at 49.7 million dollars.

Kenneth Morrow, who has followed the question for years, describes in Cannabis Business Times how most American seed companies he has spoken to do not intend to challenge the law, pivoting instead to clones and tissue cultures, forms the provision does not mention. Others plan to sell seeds as collector items, or give them away with a T-shirt. He does not believe in any of those routes.

A four-week reprieve

On 10 August the Senate passed a stopgap funding measure 90 to 6, after an amendment to strip the delay failed 61 to 32. The House followed on 1 September, 370 to 48, and the president signed the day after.

The reprieve moves most of Section 781 from 12 November to 11 December this year. The exception is products containing cannabinoids the plant cannot produce naturally, which are prohibited on the original date. Four weeks, in other words, and those four weeks are meant for lobbying, not for a solution.

What it means for European breeders

ASIGA states plainly what it expects to follow: American breeders face a compliance burden no major trading partner imposes, and the global market for cannabis genetics is handed to China, Canada and the EU.

It is worth looking at how the Swedish arrangement actually works, because it rests on the same underlying idea by opposite means. The EU decides which hemp varieties are approved, and every approved variety carries a THC content of at most 0.30 percent. Anyone growing in Sweden must grow an approved variety and apply for basic income support for the area, with a minimum contiguous plot of 0.1 hectares. Any hemp grown without such an application counts as narcotics production.

So in Sweden too, legality is decided by the genetics rather than by what happens to sit in the individual seed. The difference lies in how it is tested. Here the test comes first: the variety is approved, the list is published, and the grower knows the rules in advance. In the American construction the test comes afterwards, against a mother plant that in many cases no longer exists, with no agency having said how it should be measured.

The route in the other direction is closed as well. Importing hemp seed from outside the EU requires a licence from the Swedish Board of Agriculture, and seed intended for sowing additionally requires a supplier certificate that the THC content does not exceed 0.3 percent. American genetics that lose federal hemp status will not reach a Swedish field whatever Section 781 finally settles into.

Keeping the categories apart

Two American proceedings are running in parallel and they are not about the same thing. The Schedule III case concerns cannabis as medicine in the US. Section 781 concerns hemp and hemp products, and that is the one touching this industry. Neither changes the EU definition of hemp, the common catalogue of varieties or the Swedish rules.

What may change is where the breeding work happens. If November and December pass without the provision being rewritten, a market moves, and part of it moves this way.