Federal grant guidelines deny US CBD business free PPE

A US CBD retailer has been denied free PPE because federal funds cannot be used to support the cannabis industry

The City of Denver has received 4,500 free PPE kits containing hand sanitiser, face masks, face shields, disinfectants and a thermometer which almost all small businesses qualify to receive.

Meadowlark 64 has seen business drop by around 20% since the pandemic took hold.

Owner Damon Miller hoped that the program would help make customers feel safe to return to the store.

He said:

“Getting a little help from the City to help my customers come in here, yeah, that would absolutely help.

“A business such as myself that does not dispense THC, but we do happen to dispense CBD. We were denied our PPE package just because of those parameters, apparently”

Susan Liehe, the marketing director for Denver’s Office of Economic Development and Opportunity, explained that federal dollars could not be used to support ‘certain industries’, even though cannabis is legal in the state and hemp is federally legal.

Liehe said:

“For folks who are in the cannabis industry, the fact that they are caught sideways between local and federal governments is not exactly news, right?

“This is by no means the first time they’ve heard this and regrettably probably not the last”

Until the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, the Cannabis Sativa plant had been controlled as ‘Marijuana’ under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

The FDA now states that ‘cannabis plants and derivatives that contain no more than 0.3 percent THC on a dry weight basis [hemp plants] are no longer controlled substances under federal law.’

But despite hemp being legalised, CBD products derived from hemp are regulated by the FDA.

The regulator has only approved one CBD product, Epidiolex.

The medicine treats seizures associated with two rare types of epilepsy – Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome.