Lawmakers in the House and Senate reached an agreement yesterday on FY 2020 funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The bill provides $2 million for research, policy evaluation, market surveillance, issuance of an enforcement discretion policy and appropriate regulatory activities for products under FDA jurisdiction that contain cannabidiol (CBD) and meet the federal definition of hemp.
This bill is part of a package of annual spending bills for Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 to avoid a government shutdown scheduled for Dec. 20 if Congress doesn’t pass the legislation. The House and Senate are expected to pass the bills this week, but the White House hasn’t publicly indicated if the President intends to sign the spending bill into law.
The legislation instructs FDA to report to lawmakers in Congress within 60 days of enactment on the agency’s progress toward obtaining and analyzing data to help determine a policy of enforcement discretion and the process in which CBD meeting the definition of hemp will be evaluated for use in products. It also directs FDA to perform a sampling study of the current CBD marketplace to determine the extent to which products are mislabeled or adulterated and report back within 180 days of enactment.
The final hemp-CBD language in the bill is a watered-down version of language included in an earlier Senate version of the bill, which directed FDA to
issue a policy of enforcement discretion with regard to certain products containing CBD meeting the definition of hemp. Under that earlier report language, this policy which have remained in effect until FDA established a process for stakeholders to notify FDA for use of CBD in products that include safety studies for intended use per product, and FDA made a determination about such product.
