Time
Japan’s budding CBD industry may be about to lose its high.
The Japanese government passed a series of revisions late last year to its once-murky narcotics laws, and as proposals for eventual implementation of those reforms are hashed out, questions loom over what the changes will mean for the country’s flourishing—and until now freewheeling—industry of cannabis-derived products.
According to several draft regulations, which were unveiled last month and are undergoing public consultation until June 29, to enforce some of the latest amendments to the Cannabis Control Act, the government plans to severely restrict how much THC—the psychoactive element in cannabis—legal CBD products can contain.
While regulating THC limits for hemp and CBD products is common practice around the world—it’s capped at 0.3% in some U.S. states, for example—Japan’s proposed new cap of 0.001% for oils (and even lower for beverages and products in other forms) has been slammed by advocates and experts as unrealistic and likely a death knell for Japan’s CBD industry, effectively banning the substance altogether, as some regional neighbors like China have recently moved to do.
Read More: CBD Tends to Perplex Regulators. Hong Kong’s New Ban Reinforces Asia’s Strict Drug Approach
“If this goes through, I would say … 90% of the businesses will go out of business,” Toshiki Inoue, the founder of cannabis brand Chillaxy, tells TIME, adding that “close to none” of the CBD products being sold in Japan will be able to adhere to the 0.001% THC limit.
Read the full report at https://time.com/6990492/japan-cannabis-crackdown-cbd-thc-limits-market-impact/
