In April 2025, the Italian authorities used emergency constitutional powers to bypass parliament and reclassify non-intoxicating hemp as a narcotic, no matter THC content material, following a number of failed makes an attempt to decimate the trade.
When this regulation was implement in June of the identical yr, following no parliamentary debate and no transition interval, a sector price a whole lot of thousands and thousands of euros a yr for the Italian economic system, using round 15,000 folks instantly, was gutted in a single day, regardless of warnings that over 3,000 companies would shut.
A secondary ban on CBD oils represented a kick to the ribs of an already cowed trade. Italian hemp trade associations, alongside worldwide legal professionals, wasted no time in taking their case to the European Fee, requesting fast intervention in what they noticed as a transparent breach of worldwide regulation.
The EC examined the complaints however by no means opened formal infringement proceedings. It took Italy’s personal courts to provide the binding CJEU referral, greater than 17 months after the trade first raised the alarm, and 7 months after the ban was already in power.
In late 2025, the Council of State, Italy’s personal highest administrative courtroom, made a referral to the EUCJ to find out as soon as and for all whether or not Giorgia Meloni’s authorities had damaged EU legal guidelines, and as such, whether or not state governments can act to ban hemp. As soon as the courtroom responds, the ruling ought to be binding.
Nevertheless, as now we have seen persistently throughout the EU, member state governments bent on suppressing this authorized and fully non-intoxicating product will discover methods to take action.
Over our ‘Hemp Wars’ sequence, we’ll be exploring the person instances of hemp trade suppression in a number of markets, together with Italy, Eire, Greece and Germany, alongside exploring the complexities of European hemp laws, and a few modifications which might lastly shield the trade from persecution.
A authorized crop in a authorized framework
To know why Italy’s crackdown, alongside these unfolding all through the European Union, represents such a big downside, it helps to know what EU regulation really says about hemp.
Hashish sativa L. with a THC content material of 0.3% or beneath is a legally cultivated agricultural crop beneath European Union regulation. Farmers throughout the continent develop it for fibre, meals, cosmetics and development supplies. Underneath the Frequent Agricultural Coverage, these farmers are eligible for area-based direct funds, putting hemp alongside wheat, barley and rapeseed as a recognised and subsidised EU crop.
The authorized standing of hemp-derived merchandise, issues like CBD oils, extracts, dietary supplements and flower, was seemingly settled on the highest judicial degree in November 2020, when the Court docket of Justice of the European Union dominated within the landmark Kanavape case, C-663/18.
The courtroom dominated that CBD shouldn’t be a narcotic substance, and that member states can’t prohibit the advertising and marketing of CBD merchandise lawfully produced in one other member state.
Crucially, it held that any such restriction have to be justified by clear, scientifically substantiated proof of real danger to public well being.
That ruling has by no means been overturned and stays binding on all 27 member states. And but, as Kai-Friedrich Niermann, one in every of Europe’s main hashish legal professionals and authorized adviser to the European Industrial Hemp Affiliation, tells Enterprise of Hashish: “The EU hemp framework is a whole mess.”
The mess
Regardless of what, on the face of it, seems to be an unequivocal ruling by the EUCJ that hemp can’t be restricted in member states with out scientific proof that it’s dangerous, hemp farmers and merchants all through the EU proceed to face bans, asset seizures, and penalties that regularly result in monetary damage or the closure of their companies.
The hole between what EU-wide regulation says, and what member state governments really do has confirmed remarkably constant and pernicious throughout completely different international locations, completely different governments and completely different authorized methods.
Germany, which at present has one of the liberal hashish frameworks in any developed nation, supplies a main instance of this nonsensical dynamic. German hemp companies have confronted persistent enforcement issues beneath a home ‘intoxication clause’ requiring operators to display their merchandise can’t be used for intoxicating functions.
Germany’s Federal Court docket of Justice interpreted this provision in 2020 as which means an individual might theoretically turn into intoxicated from 15 grams of business hemp in a single pastry. Hemp leaf tea that sat on grocery store cabinets for many years has since disappeared.
“Courts, specifically, are likely to interpret laws on hashish and hemp in a particularly prohibitionist method, leaving little room for manoeuvre available in the market,” Niermann defined.
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Totally different methods, identical outcomes
Regardless of its obvious cut-and-dry ruling, the Kanavape case was a preliminary reference. It answered the particular authorized questions put ahead by the French referring courtroom and established ideas that nationwide courts are obliged to observe, but it surely didn’t create a transparent legislative framework for hemp.
Member states retain the power to invoke Article 36 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (the EU’s public well being derogation) to justify restrictions, supplied they will body their measures as proportionate responses to real well being dangers.
Every try to limit hemp takes a distinct in type. Italy invoked the precautionary precept. Eire utilized the 1977 Narcotics Act. Greece has proposed to reclassify hemp flower out of the agricultural class fully. However the outcomes are almost all the time the identical.
The physique of case regulation pushing again towards hemp restrictions shouldn’t be restricted to Italy, and it isn’t new. Throughout a number of jurisdictions and a number of years, when governments have been compelled to justify their restrictions earlier than unbiased courts, they’ve repeatedly failed to take action. The next represents a handful of essentially the most important rulings, however there are lots of, many extra.
- CJEU, November 2020 — Kanavape, C-663/18 (France): The EU’s highest courtroom dominated that CBD shouldn’t be a narcotic, that member states can’t impose blanket advertising and marketing bans on CBD merchandise lawfully produced elsewhere within the Union, and that any such restriction requires clear, scientifically substantiated proof of real public well being danger. The 2 French entrepreneurs on the centre of the case had spent seven years beneath felony prosecution for promoting a CBD vape product constituted of legally grown Czech hemp. Their convictions have been overturned by the French Court docket of Enchantment in November 2021.
- CJEU, October 2024 — Biohemp Idea, Romania: Romanian authorities refused to authorise a hemp firm’s utility to domesticate industrial hemp utilizing hydroponic methods, on the idea that the construction didn’t qualify as agricultural land. The CJEU, requested to rule on the compatibility of the Romanian restriction with EU regulation, established a precept instantly relevant to the broader crackdowns documented on this sequence: member states might solely limit hemp cultivation the place such restrictions are proportionate and essential to guard public well being, can’t transcend what’s strictly essential to realize that goal, and should think about whether or not much less restrictive options — resembling native controls — might obtain the identical outcome. The proportionality check the courtroom articulated is similar normal that Italy, Eire and Greece have repeatedly failed to fulfill in their very own courts.
- Italy, February 2023 — TAR Lazio: Italy’s Regional Administrative Court docket annulled a Well being Ministry decree limiting hemp to seeds and stems solely, discovering the federal government had produced no proof that the broader plant posed a danger to public well being.
- Italy, October 2023 — TAR Lazio: The identical courtroom suspended a reinstated CBD oral ban, once more citing an absence of supporting scientific proof and confirming that CBD is non-psychoactive.
- Italy, September and October 2024 — TAR Lazio (twice): Two additional suspensions of the identical decree, this time citing an unbiased knowledgeable report by Professor Costantino Ciallella, former forensic medication director at La Sapienza College, which concluded that CBD doesn’t trigger psychophysical dependence and lacks psychoactive results.
- France, January 2022 — Council of State: The French authorities introduced a ban on the sale of CBD flowers on New Yr’s Eve 2021. Inside 24 hours the trade launched a authorized problem. France’s highest courtroom suspended the ban lower than 4 weeks later, discovering “severe doubt concerning the legality of this normal and absolute prohibition measure due to its disproportionate nature,” and concluding that hemp flowers and leaves with THC beneath 0.3% didn’t “current a level of harmfulness to well being justifying a complete and absolute prohibition measure.” The ban had lasted lower than a month.
- UK, 2022 — Court docket of Enchantment, Uncle Herb: Britain’s highest felony courtroom upheld the acquittal of two on-line hemp flower retailers charged successfully as drug sellers for importing compliant hemp from Italy. The courtroom confirmed that hemp flower beneath the THC threshold shouldn’t be thought of a narcotic. Because the lawyer who analysed the ruling for Enterprise of Hashish noticed: “Why are we utilizing narcotics laws to ban a product that’s not a narcotic?” The ruling turned on EU free motion regulation because it utilized earlier than Brexit, limiting its direct applicability to post-2020 buying and selling.
- Italy, March 2026 — Court docket of Cassation, Sassari: Italy’s Supreme Court docket declared inadmissible a prosecutor’s enchantment towards an order annulling a product seizure, establishing on the highest home judicial degree that the mere presence of hemp flower is inadequate to represent a felony offence. Precise intoxicating impact have to be demonstrated.
- Italy, a number of courts, 2025-2026 — CSI Article 18 Observatory: Throughout 21 documented instances spanning prosecutors’ workplaces from Turin to Catanzaro, Italian courts have returned seized hemp merchandise, dismissed prices, and issued acquittals on the constant foundation that hemp flower with out confirmed intoxicating impact can’t mechanically be handled as a managed substance. 13 product returns are on file, with the latest — 530kg of hemp inflorescences returned in Imperia — dated 8 April 2026.
- Germany, April 2026 — Amberg District Court docket: A Bavarian courtroom acquitted a defendant carrying compliant industrial hemp, explicitly refusing to observe the Federal Court docket of Justice’s intoxication clause interpretation. The courtroom reasoned that since adults can now legally receive THC hashish by way of social golf equipment beneath Germany’s Hashish Act, the idea that anybody would go to the flowery effort of baking industrial hemp flowers to realize intoxication is not life like.
- EU, October 2025 — SCCS preliminary opinion on CBD in cosmetics: France had proposed to the European Chemical compounds Company that CBD be labeled as a carcinogenic, mutagenic or reprotoxic substance — a designation that may have successfully banned it from cosmetics throughout the EU. The EU’s personal Scientific Committee on Client Security discovered CBD secure to be used in beauty merchandise at outlined concentrations, rejecting the reprotoxic framing. France’s try to limit by way of the again door of chemical compounds classification produced the other of its meant outcome.
Is change coming?
These examples paint a stark however constant image. Authorities throughout the EU proceed to penalise completely authorized hemp companies, both by way of a misunderstanding of the crop itself or by way of real malice.
Fortunately, it additionally exhibits that when these restrictions are examined in courtroom, they not often survive any type of scrutiny. What it doesn’t present is the toll it takes on the hemp trade at giant, and the companies caught up in authorized proceedings.
Having to show your enterprise’s legality in courtroom is pricey and time-consuming. This expense is positioned on prime of the meticulous record-keeping required by enterprise homeowners to mitigate the very actual risk that their merchandise will probably be seized, or they’ll be taken to courtroom.
Extra to the purpose, if and when the courts vindicate these companies, rulings arrive too late to save lots of the companies they’ve sought to guard.
There are, nonetheless, causes for optimism on the legislative degree. In July 2025, the European Fee revealed COM(2025) 553, a proposed reform of the Frequent Agricultural Coverage as a part of the 2028-2034 Multiannual Monetary Framework.
For the primary time, the proposal explicitly seeks to authorise the manufacturing and advertising and marketing of all components of the hemp plant throughout the EU. In September 2025, the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee endorsed the inclusion of flowers, leaves and extracts as licit agricultural merchandise and pushed for a single harmonised THC ceiling of 0.5% throughout member states, a normal that may render the authorized contortions throughout the EU untenable.
Had been this enacted, the Fee would have the instruments to pursue infringement proceedings towards any member state sustaining restrictions incompatible with the brand new framework. The trade would have a optimistic legislative foundation in courtroom relatively than relying solely on the defensive argument that restrictions violate Kanavape.
However COM(2025) 553 is not going to be regulation earlier than 2027 on the earliest. The trilogue negotiations between the Fee, Parliament and Council, the place member state governments could have a direct vote on the ultimate textual content, current their very own dangers.
As Niermann warns, even a strengthened legislative framework is probably not the tip of the street: “In terms of hemp and hashish, Germany regularly invokes Article 36 of the TFEU and thereby restricts the European free motion of products, citing the safety of the life and well being of its personal inhabitants. This, in flip, would require a authorized problem, trapping one in one more judicial loop.”
The CJEU referral from Italy’s Council of State might transfer quicker. A ruling in favour of the Italian trade, anticipated no sooner than late 2026, could be binding on all 27 member states and would give operators in Eire, Greece and Germany a direct foundation to problem home restrictions.
Within the subsequent version of Hemp Wars, we’ll be exploring Eire’s ongoing siege of hemp and CBD companies in depth.
