Introduction
Major changes are taking place in the hemp industry in Poland, mainly due to the various changes proposed by the Ministry of Health in the latest draft amendment to the Drug Addiction Act. I have been warning for severals years for the problems related to the lack of adequate regulation regarding legal products from ‘cultivated hemp’ and ‘fibrous hemp’, as they are called in the language of Polish legal acts, which, for the sake of simplicity, I will simply call ‘CBD products’.
I am probably also the only author who has discussed this topic in the specialized scientific press and you can read my text here.
It was actually quite simple to come up with a set of ideas for regulating the cannabis market. The problem is that no one in the Polish government has listened to the experts for a long time. And that is the case this time too.
Concerns about regulating industrial hemp
The draft amendment to the Law on Combating Drug Addiction by the Ministry of Health emerged in mid-2024 and is already in the consultation phase. It can be expected that it will soon be submitted to the Sejm, the Lower House of the Polish National Assembly. It contains valuable provisions on substitution therapy, which the addiction treatment community has been waiting for, and which non-governmental organizations have long sought. But alongside these measures are also extremely worrying regulations regarding hemp. According to the drafters, the aim of these provisions is to tighten regulations on the cultivation and trade of fibrous hemp.
“In Poland, the European regulations regarding hemp were not particularly well received, because in practice they form the basis for the liquidation of the hemp industry in our country in its current form”
According to the currently applicable art. 45 section 3 of the Drug Addiction Control Act, hemp cultivation can be carried out, among others, for textile, cosmetic, pharmaceutical and food purposes. The main hemp products sold in hemp shops are inflorescences (flowers) and oils (inflorescence extracts). The problem is that the flowers are used for smoking (this is the main form of cannabis consumption, including Indian cannabis – sold in pharmacies as a pharmaceutical raw material). Oils are not a food product according to European legislation in compliance with EU food safety procedures. Since 2019, the New Food Catalogue (Novel Food) includes CBD and other cannabinoids, as well as products containing them, plant extracts and synthetic cannabinoids. This means that all these substances and products containing them cannot be placed on the market as food or as ingredients in food products.
Of course, oil producers have submitted several hundred applications to register their products as food, but the European Commission is still in the process of assessing their safety (for several dozen). This is handled by the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA).
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