In the ongoing skirmish between the CBD industry and the FDA, which has not to date established a regulatory pathway making it legal to sell Cannabidiol (CBD), a compound found within industrial hemp, officials from state regulatory agencies overseeing consumer products sounded off on the problems that persist due to the fact that FDA does not regulate or impose standards on the CBD products already on the market which are being consumed by millions of Americans.
 
State regulators are beginning to make clear that, due to the perceived risks associated with CBD products having no federal regulatory standards to meet due to the fact that they still cannot be legally sold as dietary supplements, they must enforce standards of some kind at a state level to prevent consumer harm. This could be detrimental to CBD companies selling products across state lines, due to the fact that they tentatively will have to navigate through a patchwork of standards state-by-state, some of which may even have the potential to contradict one another.
 
They made their opinions on the issue known during a webinar hosted by the Natural Products Association, a trade group representing the dietary supplements industry.
 
Lisa Ramsey, an employee of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and consumers Services (VDACS), said that due to the fact that the federal government is not monitoring ingestible CBD products to ensure that they adhere to standards, similarly to the actions taken for other dietary supplements, the Virginia government has elected to take action in lieu of pending FDA guidelines.
 
“In Virginia, we felt like without FDA taking the lead we needed to do something to help ensure products are being created in Virginia are created safe and presented honestly to the consumers of Virginia and beyond Virginia,” Ramsey said.
 
“Our Governor issued a policy directive to the Agency [VDACS] while we were waiting on FDA action on cannabis-derived products or related state legislation. The VDAC was directed to treat hemp-derived extracts intended for human consumption as approved food additives,” Erin Williams, an employee of VDACS Industrial Hemp Program’s Office of Policy, Planning, and Research, added.
 
Louisiana Speaker of the House Clay Schexnayder added that “it only takes one bad product that would cause a major hiccup in moving forward hemp and it would be a wave that would be hard to reel back in and is something that a synthetic product or manmade product that got in a natural hemp product would be bad.”
 
Recently, an unnamed FDA spokesperson told FoodNavigator-USA that “substantial progress” has been made in forging a path toward regulation for ingestible CBD products, however, the details of that path, and a projected timetable, are unclear.
 
Daniel Fabricant, PhD, president and CEO of Natural Products Association, is one of many questioning the accuracy of the FDA spokesperson’s claims due to a lack of incoming information.
 
“What progress has the FDA made?” Fabricant said. “It’s pretty clear that the states don’t think the agency is doing enough to keep consumers safe. Consumers who stand to benefit from this new industry deserve to know that the products they use are safe, but we could see even more confusion in the marketplace with a patchwork of state laws. We look forward to hearing the FDA’s plan to bring certainty and transparency to the growing CBD marketplace.”
 
NPA is among those petitioning the FDA to set a safe level of daily consumption for CBD products, and has been doing so for three years. Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a provision that would require the agency to perform a Health Hazard Evaluation and set a safe level of CBD for consumers to use daily in a process identical to that of red yeast rice, which allows a natural product to contain a level of a drug ingredient that the FDA has determined to be safe.