A couple of stories from earlier this week on the Nothing But Hemp blog demand follow ups, namely our coverage of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s hemp guidance rules and the proliferation of CBD searches online.
Thursday, rules from the USDA governing that agency’s stance toward hemp cultivation became public officially.
The guidelines announced include reasonable accommodations for scientific testing methods with varying levels of certainty to show that CBD and hemp products contain less than 0.3% THC content. [3]
If hemp crops test as high as 0.5% THC, these will still be destroyed without the punishments associated with negligent violations, USDA Undersecretary Greg Ibach told Yahoo! News. [2]
According to the National Law Review, this acceptable limit is called the “acceptable hemp THC level.” [4]
“USDA recognizes that hemp producers may take the necessary steps and precautions to produce hemp ... yet still produce plants that exceed the acceptable hemp THC level,” the USDA said in its draft guidance, according to Yahoo! News. [2]
The USDA requires the Drug Enforcement Agency to conduct tests on hemp crops, finding the THC content based on the dry weight content of the hemp crop. [1]
THC is the active ingredient in marijuana, and even CBD isolates have trace amounts of THC if the observation method includes enough precision. For instance, products that test at 0.000% THC can test at 0.00005% THC or more with more precise measures.
These guidelines come along with a frothing wave of interest for CBD and hemp products. Cannabidiol, or CBD, a relative of THC that doesn’t get its users high.
CBD is used by thousands of trusting customers for their problems with anxiety, chronic pain and epilepsy.
According to data research from Forbes, CBD has outperformed Kanye, Pornhub, Taylor Swift, The Joker and even Jesus in Google search results in recent months as it reached new heights of interest among people seeking answers about the newly-popular product. [2]
Forbes said it used cannabisMD’s “Knowledge Navigator” back-end tool to study 1,200 different websites over two years to determine traffic and search trends related to CBD. [2]
Sources
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2019/11/01/cbd-popularity/#305bce1b54e7
[3] https://news.yahoo.com/usda-posts-hemp-rules-calls-140319218.html
[4] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/usda-proposes-establishment-hemp-regulatory-framework
