Wyoming has outlawed a popular marijuana substitute, forcing stores that sold it to remove it from shelves this month and prompting a hemp industry group to sue the state. The lawsuit aims to re-legalize their wares.
The 2018 Farm Bill legalized the sale of many hemp products nationwide, including Delta-8, a psychoactive substance found in cannabis plants that is similar to but less potent than the main compound that gets marijuana users high.
In Wyoming, hemp shops started selling Delta-8. But they were forced to stop this month by a new state law outlawing the product.
K.C. Yohe is the co-owner of the Green Room in Casper, a shop that exclusively sells hemp products and derivatives. She said the ban is devastating for her business.
"We call ourselves a hemp-only dispensary," Yohe said. "We do not sell nicotine, we do not sell kratom. So with this law, it takes away 94 percent of our sales because we have nothing else in the shop."
The Green Room, alongside several other shops, a farmer and a processor, came together shortly after the passage of the new law. Dubbing their coalition the Hemp Community of Wyoming, the industry group is challenging the new ban in court, calling it unlawful and requesting injunctive relief.
The state argues banning Delta-8 is within its power, that the drug was already technically illegal and that the new law simply closes a "loophole."
Yohe said the lawsuit isn't just about their bottom line. It's also about the customers who have become regulars at the Green Room over the last half decade.
"With Delta-8, with it being a little less potent, they found something that doesn't give them that paranoia or anxiety or the overbearing high that they can't deal with with products from the cannabis-legal states," Yohe said.
Delta-8 has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, meaning it cannot be marketed for therapeutic or medicinal uses. As with many drugs that are illegal or have recently been illegal, research about health effects is limited because access to the substance, even for researchers, is tightly controlled.
Yohe said the industry group she's a part of is not opposed to regulation and would have welcomed state rules surrounding the product, its sale and its safety requirements when the federal farm bill opened up the possibility of sales in 2018.
"[Wyoming] did not put in any regulations, which ended up inadvertently opening an unregulated commercial market where we have other shops who are not as responsible as some of the other ones and tend to give us all a bad name," Yohe said. "When the legislators had the option to regulate this in the beginning, they chose not to. It kind of opened a door there that should never have been opened."
