DEA Hit With Hemp Industry Lawsuit

Hempire Building
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Stakeholders in the American hemp industry have filed a lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to challenge a recently-implemented rule that they say could have far-reaching consequences.

On Friday, September 18, the Hemp Industries Association (HIA) and South Carolina hemp manufacturer and retailer RE Botanicals filed a petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

HIA is a trade association representing approximately 1,050 hemp businesses, including 300 processors and others who are involved with or impacted by the manufacture, distribution, and sale of legal industrial hemp-derived products.

Representing the petitioners in the lawsuit are the Hoban Law Group, appellate attorneys from Yetter Coleman LLP, Kight Law Office PC, and hemp industry attorneys at Vicente Sederberg LLP.

The lawsuit requests that the court review the Implementation of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 that the DEA promulgated on August 21.

The lawsuit claims that the interim final rule is unlawful because it is a violation of the 2018 Farm Bill and exceeds the limits of the DEA’s authority.

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The hard thing about fighting the government is they have unlimited funds to keep this going for as long as the lobbying group has money

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See ya in a few years when anything comes of it.

Not only unlimited funds. Unlimited time.

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Hopefully they can successfully file an injunction to keep them from enforcing it until the case is settled.

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Now that would be the move. A hell of a time sensitive play tho. When you get the upper hand. They speed up time.

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Same group successfully beat the DEA back in the early 2000s when they scheduled natural occurring THC in Hemp as synthetic THC.

They seriously have a god complex…

So long as Congress doesn’t pass law to deschedule, they will always be there waiting to ruin lives .

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I still don’t understand why they went straight to an appeals court instead of a district court first. Appeals courts review lower court decisions, not the dea.

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I think this happens because they are appealing a government rule made by an agency claiming it violates federal law.

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They actually filed two suits, one in the Court of Appeals and one in Civil Court. The Appeals Court is a procedural challenge, i.e. challenging the DEA’s rulemaking authority altogether (not the legality/constitutionality of the rule itself). It’s a smart, dual-track legal strategy by the legal team. Those lawyers are working low-bono, BTW, and the HIA is a nonprofit trade association -not a lobbying group. They’re mounting this challenge on a shoestring budget, supported only by the dues of their members.

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