Politics
Virginia Just Set An August Deadline That Will Wipe Out Hemp Businesses—Eleven Months Before The Legal Marijuana Market Opens (Op-Ed)
“We support the emergence of a recreational adult-use market, but not at the cost of small mom-and-pop businesses that started in hemp.”
By Barbara Biddle, Cannabis Small Business Association
For more than eight years, I have built my business one customer at a time, pouring in my savings, my time and countless sacrifices to create something that supports my family, employs Virginians and strengthens our local economy. This week, I learned that much of it is likely to become illegal on August 15.
Virginia’s new marijuana compromise, announced this week, sets recreational sales to begin in July 2027 and eliminates what state leaders call the “25-to-1 hemp loophole.” At first glance, the change looks technical—a new definition of hemp. In reality, it renders roughly 80 percent of the products currently legal in Virginia illegal overnight.
For hundreds of small businesses and the thousands of people they employ, that is not a minor amendment. It is an extinction event with a date attached.
Here is the part that should give every Virginian pause. Hemp products with more than two milligrams of THC become illegal on August 15, 2026. But the legal retail marijuana market does not open until July 2027. That leaves an eleven-month gap in which there is no legal, regulated place to buy these products at all. Businesses like mine are being shut down nearly a year before the market meant to replace us even exists.
For anyone following this for the first time, the 25-to-1 ratio is not a loophole; it is the foundation of Virginia’s legal hemp market.
Under current law, retail hemp is capped at two milligrams of total THC per package unless it meets a 25-to-1 ratio of CBD to THC. That ratio is what allows the full-spectrum CBD oils, tinctures and softgels that Virginians rely on for sleep, pain and recovery to exist on the shelf at all. Eliminate it, and a flat two-milligram cap takes its place, with no room for these products.
It has been suggested that these products were sold outside a robust regulatory framework. That is not accurate.
Since 2023, Virginia hemp has operated under one of the strictest frameworks in the country: mandatory testing, packaging and labeling standards, age restrictions limiting sales to those 21 and older and registration and licensing requirements. We were told there was a path to compliance. We followed it—signing leases, hiring employees and building long-term plans around those rules.
Now, after years of operating under them, the rules change again in a way that makes compliance impossible for much of the industry.
The economic consequences are staggering. Last year alone, my business contributed more than $30,000 in Virginia sales tax, not counting payroll, income and other state and local taxes. If my experience is even remotely representative of Virginia’s roughly 1,400 licensed hemp retailers, the commonwealth stands to lose more than $42 million a year in sales tax revenue alone.
As the state prepares for a future marijuana market, shutting off an existing stream of revenue before the new one operates makes little sense. Why drain the hemp revenue river before the marijuana revenue river has begun to flow?
The change is being framed as a matter of consumer safety. But consider what actually happens on August 15 under the new deal reached by Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) and lawmakers.
The Virginians who rely on these products—many of them seniors, veterans and parents seeking alternatives to conventional pharmaceuticals—do not simply stop seeking them. With no legal source for eleven months, many will turn to unregulated, out-of-state online sellers. The predictable result is a stronger illicit market and a weaker legal one, which is the opposite of consumer protection.
The most troubling consequence is what this does to non-intoxicating wellness products. The 2018 federal Farm Bill was inspired in part by stories like that of Charlotte Figi, the young epilepsy patient whose response to hemp-derived CBD helped reveal the therapeutic potential of non-intoxicating cannabis.
Full-spectrum CBD oils, softgels and tinctures have become essential to countless Virginians. They are not being used to get high. They are used to sleep, to manage discomfort, to support recovery—and many of the people buying them have no interest in visiting a secured marijuana dispensary, nor are future dispensaries likely to stock low-margin wellness products when their focus is THC.
By regulating products on total package content rather than realistic serving sizes, the new definition effectively bans products that are legal and widely used across the country. Most hemp products contain multiple servings; a standard CBD tincture may contain 15 or more. Applying a strict per-package limit to products designed for daily wellness use is not a regulation. It is prohibition dressed up as policy.
Virginia still has time to get the transition right. Our policymakers need to take the time to revisit this definition in a way that makes sense for existing businesses that have invested in regulations the government promised would be put in place to create sustainability. We support the emergence of a recreational adult-use market, but not at the cost of small mom-and-pop businesses that started in hemp.
Good policy should solve problems, not create new ones. Right now, a single date on the calendar threatens hundreds of small businesses, millions in tax revenue and the wellness products countless Virginians depend on. I hope our leaders choose to fix it.
Barbara Biddle is the owner of District Hemp Botanicals and serves as president of the Cannabis Small Business Association.
