A multi-section bill containing an array of changes to Connecticut’s cannabis regulations that was passed by the Senate this week included language intended to close loopholes in existing law that allow intoxicating hemp-derived products to be sold at unlicensed stores. But critics of the bill, HB6699, which was passed by a vote of 32-4 late Monday and will now go to Governor Lamont’s desk for signing, argue it will have a deleterious impact on existing hemp farmers in the state.

Simply put, the bill limits hemp-based products sold outside of licensed cannabis dispensaries to 1 mg of THC per serving and 5 mgs of THC per package. Wednesday, however, both chambers of the Connecticut General Assembly rushed through another bill that purportedly contains fixes to the language in HB6699 that prevents hemp farmers’ from selling the products they currently produce. HB6700, which was passed by the Senate shortly before the legislative session ended for the year, permits the sale of so-called high-THC hemp-derived products in licensed dispensaries, but only “from a location within the dispensary facility that is separate from the area within such dispensary facility where marijuana is sold, and labeled as hemp products that are not subject to marijuana testing standards.” The bill also extends from July 1 to October 1 the deadline for hemp farmers and producers to make the changes outlined in HB6699, which include alterations to packaging.

That last date change was the least that Becky Goetsch, co-owner of Running Brook Farms in Killingworth, Connecticut, was looking for from the state. In the immediate aftermath of the passage of HB6699, the producer of hemp-derived teas was deeply disappointed but resolute in her determination to stay the course as far as fighting for a future for hemp farmers in the state.

“We have had a lot of dialogue [with legislators] regarding [HB6700] and trying to get hemp farmers cultivation licenses for the recreational market, and I knew that was a big lift,” said Goetsch Tuesday, before the votes approving the bill. “And of course, it is a big lift, but we were just trying to mirror what New York State did. We’re existing cannabis farms, and we’ve invested a lot into this industry, so we felt like we deserved some access to the recreational market.”

The dialogue on HB6700 was in sharp contrast to the interaction they had with regulators about HB6699. “In this last year, never did they seek our guidance or input from the broader CBD industry on the language for 6699,” said Goetsch. “So, as soon as the General Law [Committee] put forth its bills, we were elated that they brought [HB6700] to a vote. That was their promise to us, and that was their only promise to us. They told us it was going to be an uphill battle, but they fulfilled their commitment to us in that regard.”

That uphill battle was still in play Monday when the Senate passed HB6699, which in addition to reworking hemp-derived products with problematic formulas regulating THC, also contains more than 50 sections updating cannabis law on subjects such as testing labs, social equity partnerships and the social equity lottery, background checks, amending certain drug convictions as disqualifies to become a caregiver, the transportation of products, and the creation of a cannabis advocate office within the Office of healthcare advocate, as well as a task force to study whether or not to authorize outdoor events, among many other provisions.

During the Senate floor debate, when faced with an amendment by Senator Kissel that proposed changes to HB6699 that would have allowed the sale of full-spectrum hemp products that exceed the .3 percent THC threshold by allowing 20-1 non-intoxicating formulations, HB6699-sponsor Senator Maloney told the gathered legislators to vote the amendment down because HB6700 contained equivalent fixes. At this point in time, two days before the session’s last day, HB6700 had not seen any action since March, and was considered a long-shop to make it through to final passage, which it did last night, when it was passed by a 36-0 vote at 11:52pm.

As much as that may be a relief to farmers like Goetsch, who is also president of the Connecticut Hemp Industry Association (CHIA), HB6700 does not completely address the damage caused by HB6699. “It doesn’t for two reasons,” she explained. “One, myself and most other hemp farmers I’ve spoken to in no way shape or form want to be aligned with the MSOs that are operating the dispensaries. That’s really important. It takes away our liberty to sell our farm-raised products. These are Connecticut-grown products. I’m certified organic, and it subjects us to having to only wholesale our products, which none of us can afford to do, and it also takes our craft boutique products and forces a state tax on them. It’s going to be treated as a marijuana product and all that entails.

“And it completely diminishes the appeal to our customers,” she added. “The thing I’m most passionate about is that I’ve built a loyal community-oriented customer base. My customers want to talk to me, give me feedback on my products and really get to know their farmer, and they trust me. That relationship between the farmer and the customer is what the industry in Connecticut has been built upon, and it’s the only way that those of us who are still cultivating hemp have been able to stay successful.”

The goal of hemp farmers like her, noted Goetsch, is to differentiate themselves by “creating craft products that are wholesome, non-intoxicating, and really effective.”

The problem with bills like HB6699 was that they essentially throw out the baby with the bathwater. “Just to be clear, we all fully support addressing the issue of high-THC hemp products,” she added. “That’s definitely something we can support. What we can’t support is the way they wrote the language basically decimating the CBD industry. You probably know about this better than I do, but I feel like it’s following a nationwide trend where heavy MSO lobbying is pushing every cannabis product into the dispensary, even our CBD products. It’s happened in numerous states across the country, and Connecticut, from what I understand, has some of the worst language. They phrased it so that a full-spectrum tincture that people are consuming that is completely non-intoxicating winds up becoming an illegal product?”

The loophole they and others are trying to address, and which many people have exploited, was the result of the poorly crafted 2018 Farm Bill championed by Senator Mitch McConnell, which defines hemp as a cannabis plant that has no more than .3 percent THC on a a dry weight basis. Cannabis is anything above that threshold.

“So, hemp-manufactured products must also contain .3 percent THC or less,” explained Goetsch. “But if you make your gummy heavy enough or your beverage in a big enough can, you can actually make that .3 percent THC intoxicating.”  That allowed politicians to rail against the dangers of unregulated products that are potentially lethal. “There’s a clip that’s been circulating of Connecticut Rep. D’Agostino holding up these gummy bears that are 25 milligrams, and it got a little bit of play on the internet and social media sites,” said Goetsch. “The prohibitionists and the child’s safety people are basically saying that a kid can go in and get an intoxicating THC product at a gas station or at a smoke shop or somewhere like that. I believe that they did not intend to necessarily harm our industry as much as they have. I think what they did was to take some really bad language – and I’d love to know where it was proposed, who proposed it, and who got it in front of them – and adopt it under a child safety banner.”

Under the new language, she added, “If you’re used to buying a 1500 milligram tincture from me to go to sleep, and I say, ‘I’m not allowed to make it that strong, so you now have to take twice as much, which means you’re ingesting twice as much oil and it might make your stomach sick, and you can only buy five servings at a time instead of a one-month supply bottle, doesn’t that impact your experience?” It was a rhetorical question with only an affirmative answer as the correct one.

Cannabis Business Executive has not spoken with Goetsch since the passage of HB6700 late Wednesday evening, but as relieved as it may make her in that it will give farmers a few more months to face the music, as she put it the day before, the entire trend in Connecticut paints a problematic picture for her.

“Maybe I’m upset today,” she said Tuesday, “but I think what’s really going on is there’s sort of a nationwide influence by these large marijuana companies, the MSOs, to try to capture the entire cannabis market into the dispensary. And there are incentives for the states to like this, too. It’s appealing to them, because then they can get the marijuana tax revenue from it and meet their objectives with their marijuana program, and it’s at the expense of the consumer and the farmer.”

Running Brook Farms is a full-service operation with many profit centers, she said, and hemp is just a small slice of the pie, but it’s an important one. “In my little microcosm of the farm, I grow two acres of medicinal herbs for tea blends, and my hemp gets used in my tea blends,” she explained. “I grow everything from basil and rosemary to akinesia and valerian, and California poppy. I grow probably just shy of 3000 varieties of herbs, and cannabis is only one of them. So, I will continue to fight for some revisions to this bill and I will continue to fight for full-spectrum hemp products because I believe in them as medicinals, and I believe in them as medicine.

“I don’t consume THC products, so I had no real dog in the fight for the marijuana industry,” she added. “But my colleagues did, so I’ll continue to work on behalf of Connecticut hemp farms. I built some good relationships up in Hartford this year, and hopefully next year we’ll be able to talk some sense into them. I think it’s going to be a challenging year for the CBD industry, so hopefully next year we can make some changes that will reverse some of the damage that’ll be done.”

There are currently 77 licensed hemp farmers in the state. “I believe that’s an accurate number, and I believe the number [of farms] that harvested last year is about 38,” said Goetsch. “So, people have their licenses but didn’t grow, and those numbers are subject to change, because we just had another round of USDA compliance that we had to go through as farmers. We’ll see how many people have bothered to or have the interest and the motivation to complete that paperwork, but I think that number will shrink again.”

It’s a depressing possibility, but one that is not unique to Connecticut and groups like CHIA working to support viable businesses. “[CHIA] was founded in 2018 after the passage of the Farm Bill as an organization to try to support the hemp community, the hemp farmers as well as the CBD industry as a whole – manufacturers, product makers, and consumers – and we do it through outreach and education,” said Goetsch of the non-profit. “We host events throughout the course of the year to try to bring the community together, and we try to represent the interests of the community up in Hartford as best we can.”

With her focus squarely on Connecticut, Goetsch is aware that the issues she and her fellow hemp farmers face are not unique to the state. “I haven’t looked outside of the state as much as maybe some other people have to know exactly what the landscape is like everywhere, but just since HB6699 has come to my attention, it’s become clear to me that this is a nationwide fight.,” she said. “I think that there’s a lot of momentum and while I don’t know who all the stakeholders are, I can’t help but feel like the large MSOs have a lot of momentum behind them to try to capture the entire industry, and I do think that this is a nationwide fight. For me, it’s a local fight for my friends and my community, but I think that it is a greater issue for the whole CBD community, absolutely.”

She stressed the basic request she has made from the beginning, reiterating, “What we really need is a seat at the table so that we can help draft bills. They need to put together a legitimate working group. We were supposed to have a task force last year and it never met. The powers that be said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. We’re going to put a bill together. We don’t need to meet as a task force.’ But we need to get the key stakeholders in a room so that we can draft language that ensures mutual success for everybody.”

Do people not see or appreciate the true potential of hemp-derived products? “That’s a hot topic right there,” replied Goetsch. “I think the MSOs realize the entire potential of the plant, and that’s exactly why this has happened. I don’t think they’re lobbying just to get CBD products in there. I think they’re lobbying for this to capture the full potential of the plant.”

What about the legislators? “They probably don’t have the bandwidth to be as invested as I am in that kind of information,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying. We need to be able to be at a table where we can explain to them what we do, how we do it, and why we need to preserve the right to make these products. We operate with integrity, and we operate with passion. We’re putting our farms on the line for this, and it’s our families. I’m a third-generation farmer. My daughter has been growing hemp with me since she was 14 years old, and she’s witnessed how it has changed lives and what it can do. We have this one woman who is incapacitated with PTSD, and since she started drinking my tea blend she no longer suffers, and now she can leave her apartment.”

In addition to cannabis-related legislation, Connecticut’s two-year, $51.1 billion budget also contains give-and-take provisions that could impact the state’s cannabis industry as significantly as any individual bill. On the take front, effective July 1, “The state’s cannabis angel investor tax credit program will be repealed through the state’s new biennial budget, ending a short-lived initiative that resulted in $3.1 million in investments to qualified marijuana companies.” reported Hartford Business Journal. Ending the program is expected to save the state “$27.5 million over the next two fiscal years combined,” the Journal added.

In the give column, “Starting with the current tax year, the new budget allows medical and adult-use cannabis licensees to deduct, for state tax purposes, ordinary and necessary business expenses that would typically be eligible for a federal tax deduction but aren’t because of marijuana’s status as a controlled substance,” reported the Journal. “The cannabis industry has lobbied for more than a year for the tax deductions, as entrepreneurs balance starting a business with the high cost of building in a new, and expensive industry.”