Rules Committee, April 9, 2025

Marijuana and Intoxicating Hemp

After hearing so many residents express concern about the health and safety of marijuana and hemp products, the Rules committee met to discuss the situation and what we can do about it.

City staff invited an officer who has worked with the Warren County Drug Task Force and the city’s lobbyist to come to our committee meeting and talk with us.

The legal environment is constantly changing related to marijuana and intoxicating hemp. We essentially have 3 categories for these products.

Legal - Regulated

Settled

Marijuana - both medical and adult use

Legal - Unregulated (Loophole)

Delta-8 and other chemicals derived from hemp in the Farm Bill, or no law exists.

Intoxicating hemp. Can be sold in many forms - drinks, etc.

Illegal Legalized

Enforcing

Breaking marijuana regulations: marijuana sold outside dispensaries, sold to minors

Additional challenges to regulating this industry:

• Evolving chemical compositions. 

• Crime labs have to adjust tests to identify marijuana vs hemp and identify chemical composition. Some crime labs don’t even test this anymore. They have narrowed the scope of what they’ll accept for testing. Makes gathering evidence as law enforcement expensive, time-consuming, and difficult.

• Current enforcement requires the substance to test as marijuana, not hemp, and above a certain concentration to be useful in a case. 

Law enforcement is aware of community concerns, especially around sale of these products to minors. 

Beverages - seltzers claim to have 5 mg of THC or CBD but these aren’t regulated and could have more or less of that.

The Farm Bill legalized the growing of hemp as a product, which can be used in all sorts of things - fabrics and textiles. 

Must have less than 0.3% THC to be legal. 

Delta-8 THC has to be small amounts.

New law signed today (4/21/25) - state patrol can use mouth swabs to detect intoxication, supposed to allow for more real-time detection, still requires additional testing for law enforce ment.

Goal: resolution recommended to the council to advocate for the state to close the loopholes around intoxicating hemp. 

At a city level, we cannot change the legality of intoxicating hemp. We also can’t limit the availability.

Definitional problems with attempting to use zoning to limit the sales: how to define the exact type of business because it’s available across multiple business types. Land use/zoning doesn’t regulate the product itself - which is what we actually want to limit.