4 days ago
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November 12, 2024 | 09:13 pm
TEMPO.CO, Rome - Italy's flourishing "cannabis light" industry risks being uprooted this year when Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni pushes a bill through parliament to deflower a crop that is legal across much of Europe.
The looming legislation is part of a broad range of measures being introduced by Meloni's arch-conservative coalition, looking to burnish its credentials as the defender of public morality and traditional social structures.
While marijuana production is illegal in Italy, parliament eight years ago authorized trade in hemp, a cannabis variety that is grown for its industrial and non-psychoactive uses.
Meloni's government says the 2016 law was too lax and wants to ban any product deriving from the hemp flower, infuriating local entrepreneurs who say the move could cost thousands of jobs and imperil millions of euros of investments.
"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," said Alessio Amicone, who founded a company that grows and sells cannabis products called Canapando.
"They are waging a war on a substance that is not a drug," he told Reuters.
Hemp contains very low levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), meaning it can't make you high unlike marijuana, which comes from a separate variety of the cannabis family.
By contrast, it contains higher concentrations of cannabidiol (CBD), known for its potential therapeutic effects, such as reducing anxiety, pain, and inflammation, which mainly derives from the inflorescence -- the flowering part.
But the government's anti-drug department likens products made from the flower to recreational drugs, saying in a statement they "could pose risks to public safety or road safety". As a result, it has decided to ban their sale.
Producers contest this, saying the aromatic flowers have a negligible psychotropic component - one that affects how the brain works - and are a vital ingredient for their supply chain that spans food, textiles and cosmetics.
The hemp lobby Federcanapa says 70%-80% of the income from hemp cultivation is derived from the flower.
"Producing without the inflorescence is like saying you can only grow wheat by decapitating the ear. What sense does that make from an economic perspective?" said Stefano Masini, head of the environment unit at Italy's farming lobby Coldiretti.
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