Stop cannabis light, government amendment to security bill

Stop cannabis light. With an amendment to the security bill under consideration in the House committee, the government proposes to intervene in the law supporting the hemp industry for industrial use, with a Thc content of less than 0.2%. The amendment prohibits the cultivation and sale of inflorescences, even of cannabis with a low Thc content, for uses other than those expressly indicated in the law itself, and thus those industrial uses permitted. The trade or sale of inflorescences is punished with the rules of the Consolidated Law on Narcotic Drugs, putting light cannabis on an equal footing with non-light cannabis.

"There is an unmotivated repressive and punitive thrust from the government. It is dramatic, with this amendment the government wants to definitively cut off the legs of thousands of operators in the light cannabis sector, the one with a low Thc content. This amendment says that light cannabis must be equated in every respect with cannabis with a high THC content, despite the fact that it has no drugging effect, precisely because of its low percentage of active ingredient'. Thus, when questioned, +Europa secretary Riccardo Magi told ANSA. "It is a heavy and wrong intervention because it will also have an impact from the employment point of view on a sector that has developed in recent years and in which thousands of workers operate,' Magi added. 'It will have dramatic consequences. What would have been needed instead was a clarifying intervention, but in the opposite direction'. That is, they should have said 'that hemp inflorescences can also be produced and marketed all the more because they do not have a drugging effect'. "Moreover, in the most advanced democracies, most recently Germany, we are moving towards the legalisation of cultivation and possession even with a higher content of THC,' Magi stressed, 'while we have a government that sanctions and punishes even the legal one.

"As conceived, the amendment seems more driven by a prejudice towards cannabis and is at odds with the case law concerning industrial hemp. Needless to say, should it be approved, it will open the way for numerous disputes by those who have been operating for years in the sector regulated by the 246 of 2016 and who carry out an activity that is absolutely lawful'. Thus Giuseppe Libutti, a constitutional lawyer who follows companies in the light cannabis sector, when asked about the government's amendment to the Security bill.