The Hemp Industry Didn’t Get Killed By Regulators, It Killed Itself (Op-Ed)

“No outside force killed the hemp industry. The hemp industry killed itself—and dragged the legitimate full-spectrum wellness market down with it on the way out.”

By Max Jackson, Cannabis Wise Guys

Open any cannabis news site this week and the contradiction stares back at you from the same screen: Missouri’s Senate passes a bill to ban intoxicating hemp products. Texas enforces its smokable hemp ban. And right between them, hemp operators in Virginia are publicly pleading with the governor to save the industry.

The obituary and the plea for resuscitation, side by side.

Hemp operators across the country are petitioning governors, flooding legislative inboxes and declaring war on the regulations closing in from every direction—state by state, with a federal law to recriminalize hemp THC product set to take effect on November 12.

They are not wrong that the industry is ending. But they are wrong about who ended it.

No outside force killed the hemp industry. The hemp industry killed itself—and dragged the legitimate full-spectrum wellness market down with it on the way out.

As of this writing, some hemp retailers in Virginia are selling jars of THC gummies containing 500 milligrams of THC per container, marketed as “VA Legal.” The labels proudly advertise the 25:1 CBD-to-THC ratio that made them technically compliant under the old framework. Pack 12,500 mg of CBD into the jar alongside the THC, and the arithmetic checks out. The CBD was not there for therapeutic value. It was there to satisfy a ratio.

Five hundred milligrams of THC in a single retail container. For context, the most common adult-use edible limit in the country is 100mg per package. Michigan, the most permissive adult-use state, caps solid edibles at 200mg. Virginia’s own adult-use bill that’s now on the governor’s desk, HB 642, sets its limit at 100mg. The 500 mg jars on sale in Virginia hold two and a half times what the most lenient regulated market in America would allow—and nobody needed a license to sell it.

The state is set to replace that framework with a 2 mg THC cap per package. Hemp operators call it a death sentence. What they will not say publicly is that the 500 mg jar is precisely why every state capitol in the country is moving in this direction.

The 2 mg cap does not just eliminate the gummy. It hurts the low THC sleep tincture, the CBD pet product, the full-spectrum wellness line that was never the problem. Collateral damage—created entirely by an industry that optimized for the loophole.

The proposed fix circulating among Virginia hemp advocates—and directed at Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D)—asks for a 500 mg total THC cap as the reasonable middle ground.

The industry’s proposed compromise is identical to what was already sitting on the shelf. The “middle ground” is the product that already exists.

That is not a negotiating position. That is a request to keep selling exactly what they were selling—and it tells you everything about what the old rules actually produced.

New Jersey tried to thread the needle. Starting on April 13, 2026, intoxicating hemp beverages will move out of less-regulated retail and into licensed Class 5 cannabis dispensaries. Limits: 5 mg per serving, 10 mg per container.

Sounds like progress. It is not.

The original bill language in S3235 required hemp products to be stored or displayed in a location not accessible to customers without employee assistance. Behind the counter. Like cannabis. That provision was deleted by amendment before the final version passed.

What replaced it: hemp THC on the open shelf, where customers can pick it up without asking anyone for help.

On March 31, Matha Figaro—co-founder of CannPowerment, a Class 2 cannabis manufacturer operating in New Jersey since December 2023—testified before the Cannabis Regulatory Commission about what this means in practice. The New Jersey Economic Development Authority invested in her company through a state-supported program. With that funding, she invested in equipment, research and formulation to bring canned THC beverages to market—the first in the state’s regulated system.

“Two products with similar intoxicating effects are being sold in the same stores,” Figaro told the commission. “One category operates with broader commercial flexibility. The other carries the full regulatory burden of the CRC framework.”

She was not speaking abstractly. Her company carries testing, packaging, seed-to-sale tracking, taxes, social equity contributions, municipal fees and licensing costs that hemp operators do not. The product she built to open an entirely new category in the state’s regulated market now competes on the same dispensary shelf against a product that sits in the impulse-purchase position while hers stays behind the counter.

As Figaro put it: “The state is asking the fully regulated cannabis market to compete with one hand tied behind its back.”

What is happening in Virginia and New Jersey are not two separate policy failures. It is the same structural collapse repeating across the country: regulated operators absorb the full compliance cost while unregulated competitors absorb the retail advantage, and the legislative fix gets amended out before it can work.

North Carolina’s governor-appointed Advisory Council on Cannabis just documented the same failures in its Interim report: “North Carolinians—including our youth—can legally purchase intoxicating hemp-derived products devoid of any potency limits, standardized laboratory testing, or clear labeling requirements.”

This is not an argument for protectionism. It is an argument for a single regulatory standard—the same testing, the same age-gating, the same shelf rules—applied to every intoxicating cannabinoid product regardless of what the label calls it.

States did not start banning hemp products because they hate farmers or CBD or the idea of accessible cannabis.

They started banning them because billboards on highways advertised THC at liquor stores in illegal cannabis states, smoke shops sold mystery-formulation vapes, online retailers shipped intoxicating products across state lines where 62.5 percent of CBD websites and 30 percent of Delta-8 websites required no age verification at all—and not a single product out of twenty in a peer-reviewed study required verification at delivery—and the industry that most loudly objected to being called illegal was functionally operating like it was.

When you move pounds across state lines outside a regulated framework, the word you are looking for is not “hemp operator.”

The full-spectrum wellness market—tinctures, topicals, non-intoxicating formulations that genuinely serve people—is now collateral damage. A war the 500 mg jar started and could not finish.

Virginia is set to open applications for adult-use marijuana businesses in September. New Jersey’s dispensary shelf resets April 13. The federal clock runs out November 12—and the new federal standard caps finished hemp products at 0.4 mg of total THC per container.

Every operator entering these markets over the next six months inherits a regulatory environment shaped partly by an industry that spent its political capital protecting a loophole instead of building a market. The licensing frameworks, the canopy limits, the equity provisions—those conversations happened while the loudest voices in the room were focused on something else entirely.

Max Jackson is the founder of Cannabis Wise Guys and specializes in translating between cannabis operations, investment and public policy. He provides operational and policy consulting to cannabis markets in Virginia, New Jersey and beyond.