When attorney Hilary Bricken first started working in the cannabis space, she never would have expected there to be a conflict between the cannabis and hemp industries.
“Because the messaging, at least around the Farm Bill, has been ‘rope, not dope,’ right?” Bricken said Monday during a session at CSP’s Tobacco+ Forum. “Use it as a textile. Help us build stuff. But nobody ever thought bout actually consuming hemp … It is a loophole.”
Bricken, who currently serves as general counsel for climate change organization Tradewater in Milwaukee, spent more than a decade working on cannabis-related legal issues.
She urged retailers at the event to approach the segment with caution as so much remains up in the air on the regulatory front.
“States have caught onto the fact that hemp is running rampant without much government oversight,” she said.
And those states are behaving in three different ways: They’re regulating hemp, much like they do alcohol. (She called out Minnesota is a prime example of this behavior.) A second group of states is banning the products outright.
“And then the third category is probably the worst category,” Bricken said. “Which is head in the sand. It’s out there, but they’re not going to regulate it. They’re not going to ban it.”
Texas, where the governor recently signed an executive order calling for hemp-THC regulations, is an interesting example, she noted.
“You will see Texas as kind of an outlier,” Bricken said. “A strong, strong ban at first has moved over into regulation.”
Bricken said she expects to see a contraction in a hemp-THC industry that has seen much investment and innovation in recent years.
“Many, many, many are going to fail,” she said. “It is a bubble. It is bound to burst … The dumb money has left the room, and now they have to get by on actual merits and the ability to run ops at scale. Overall, making, distributing or selling these hemp-derived intoxicating products is super legally precarious. It’s not what I would recommend that a client do unless they were very prepared to take the risk and had a financial war chest to support it.”
CSP will host a Cannabis Forum in March 2026. If you are interested in attending or learning about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Mike Marino, senior director of Retail Relations for Informa Connect, at Michael.Marino@informa.com.
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