New spending bill that reopened the government could ban over 95% hemp products

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WTOC) - Government workers are being paid again.

SNAP benefits are returning in full.

But the hemp industry faces a potential collapse after the bill that reopened the government included a ticking time bomb on the consumable market.

A new law will ban over 95% of hemp extract products, which will affect not just recreational usage, but medicinal and industrial as well. This closes what congress called a “loophole” in the 2018 Farm Bill, which unintentionally allowed products containing THC, a psychoactive compound, to emerge nationwide.

WTOC spoke with former NFL defensive lineman Henry Ostaszewski, who owns Blue42 Organics. He works with around 40 hemp farmers in Georgia — including in the coastal empire — and he says this new ban will wipe out the landscape these farmers depend on.

“Well currently as it’s written we would go out of business,” said Ostaszewski. “All you have to do is go on social media and you can see every cannabis company every hemp company out there is asking for a call to action. For the states that don’t have legal recreational cannabis, it puts it back into the black market, so now you have the potential of it getting laced with fentanyl.”

The U.S. Hemp Roundtable estimates that this ban nukes a 28.4-billion dollar industry, and could wipe out more than 3-hundred-thousand jobs. Products like hemp milks, seeds, or clothing will no longer be available to sell due the plant’s ties with THC.

Ostaszewski says farmers he knows who work with hemp products want to see the product be regulated, but not to this extent. The effects will take place on November 12, 2026.