As promised, the Tennessee Growers Coalition (TGC), the state’s advocate for the cannabis industry, sued the state over new rules it says are “void” and threaten the industry.
State lawmakers passed new laws last year to regulate the burgeoning cannabis industry in Tennessee. Among many other things, the new law made the Tennessee Department of Agriculture (TDA) responsible for regulating the cannabis industry in the state. Late last year, the department issued a draft of new rules for cannabis producers and products.
The department updated those rules in July after a public comment period. However, TGC said state officials did not include ideas from the nearly 19,000 public comments in the new rules.
Instead of blending those ideas into a set of final rules, the TGC said agriculture officials issued emergency rules. The timing and procedure of issuing these new rules form the basis of the cannabis industry’s lawsuit filed Friday. The process, TGC said, “imposed an immediate and irreparable threat of harm” to the businesses of its members.
“TGC members’ businesses and livelihoods are at stake by being forced to adapt their business practices to regulations, change the type of products they sell, and how they manage compliance while paying a license fee under regulations that are void as a matter of law,” reads a statement from the group. “The (TDA) has nothing to lose while TGC Members risk losing everything.”
The new rules still include new THC standards for THCA and CBD flowers. New limits could see those products removed completely. The new rules would also allow police to arrest manufacturers, retailers, and consumers for selling or possessing these smokable products, according to Cultivate Tennessee, another hemp advocacy group.
The new state rules redefine THC to include a product’s total THC. This includes a lot of THCA — the cannabinoid that produces a “high” — smokeable products.
“They’re trying to redefine it by combining two different cannabinoids,” TGC executive director Kelley Mathis Hess told us last month, “two different things, when it should just be Delta 9, and Delta 9 only. They’re trying to put a limit on [THCA] but the limit would, basically, ban a lot of it.”
Hess said these products are probably the most popular products on the market right now. Many small businesses have built their business around sales of these products, she said. Removing them could prove fatal to them.
TGC promised to fight the rules in court last month. A court date for the lawsuit has been set for next Thursday, September 19th.
