Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is pushing legislation through Parliament aimed at banning products made from hemp flower, according to a Reuters report.
Medical cannabis is legal in Italy, although the industry is heavily restricted, and personal cannabis possession and cultivation were decriminalized at the national level in 2016. But Meloni, who currently heads the country’s conservative leading party, argues the country’s so-called “cannabis light” reforms went too far and need to be adjusted to address the advent of hemp consumer products, which closely resemble THC-rich cannabis.
Hemp industry advocates and entrepreneurs, meanwhile, say the legislation is unnecessary because hemp contains mostly CBD, which is non-psychoactive. Additionally, the legislation will end thousands of jobs and jeopardize millions of euros worth of industry investments, the report said.
“It’s absurd that a state which put Italian businesses to work by starting a legitimate supply chain now wants to shut it all down. They are waging a war on a substance that is not a drug.” — Alessio Amicone, founder of Canapando in Rome, Italy
The hemp flower ban is attached to other conservative-leaning security decrees that include crackdowns on certain political demonstrations and new curbs on prison protests. The legislation was already approved by the lower parliamentary body and is now before the Senate.
Voters in Italy passed an initiative in 2021 to reduce the restrictions on home cannabis cultivation and ease penalties for other cannabis-related offenses, but the country’s Constitutional Court threw out the initiative.
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