Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) cautioned fellow lawmakers on the Senate floor Wednesday against unregulated cannabis products designed to look like popular candies and snack foods, urging Congress to enforce upcoming restrictions on hemp-derived intoxicants.
Holding up visual comparisons of standard snacks alongside knockoff edibles—including products resembling Sour Patch Kids, Nerds, and Fritos—Ricketts argued that manufacturers are intentionally packaging intoxicating hemp compounds to appeal to children and broaden their market share.
“We have a drug problem in this country today, and right now there is an industry that is targeting our children with lookalike products with intoxicating levels of THC,” Ricketts said during his remarks.
Ricketts traced the emergence of these products to a loophole created in the 2018 Farm Bill. While that legislation legalized industrial hemp by limiting Delta-9 THC content to 0.3% by dry weight, manufacturers began chemically converting CBD oil into other psychoactive compounds, such as Delta-8 and Delta-10 THC, which remained unregulated under federal law.
To illustrate the real-world impact, Ricketts cited a local case in Nebraska where a three-year-old and a four-year-old were hospitalized for THC poisoning after consuming lookalike edibles found in their mother’s purse. He noted broader national health data showing a ten-fold increase in THC poisonings among children under five between 2016 and 2023, along with a tripling of hospitalizations during that same period.
“In 2024, that was 620 children under the age of five poisoned,” Ricketts stated. “Of those children being poisoned, 100 have been hospitalized and ended up on ventilators. This is a serious health risk problem.”
Congress previously passed a provision in an appropriations bill to close the loophole by applying the 0.3% THC limit to all forms of the compound, giving manufacturers until November 12 to bring their products into compliance. However, a proposed extension in the current continuing resolution would push that enforcement deadline to December 11.
Ricketts and Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) have co-sponsored an amendment to strip the proposed extension from the resolution, allowing the November 12 deadline to remain in place. Addressing concerns regarding potential economic impacts on hemp growers, Ricketts pointed out that hemp accounts for roughly 0.0056% of total U.S. farmland and asserted that non-intoxicating applications like CBD oil research and industrial textiles would remain unaffected.
“We gave the industry till November 12th to adjust,” Ricketts said. “One month more is not going to make a big difference in doing this… let’s close this loophole and keep it closed.”
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