The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) quietly issued an advisory earlier this month clarifying rules around mailing cannabis preparations, saying that “some CBD products derived from industrial hemp can be mailable under specific conditions.”
The memo also signals that USPS will further loosen restrictions in the future in light of the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, which federally legalized industrial hemp.
For now, the current advisory, which was first reported by the marijuana law blog Kight On Cannabis, stipulates that it is legal to mail hemp-derived CBD products in compliance with research-focused provisions of the earlier 2014 version of the federal agriculture legislation.
However, postal customers must first take certain steps such as providing a signed self-certification statement and documentation confirming the hemp producer is licensed through a state agriculture department.
Hemp mailed through USPS must also contain 0.3 percent THC—a policy that’s consistent with both the 2014 and 2018 Farm Bill definitions of hemp.
“The Postal Service has received an increasing number of requests to transport CBD oil and products containing CBD in Postal Service networks,” Travis D. Hayes III, a USPS business program specialist wrote in the March 4 advisory.
The federal agency said that the new instructions are due to change, given the broader legalization of hemp and its derivatives through the 2018 Farm Bill.
“Postal employees should be aware that the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 was recently signed into law,” the memo says. “This legislation removes industrial hemp from regulation under the Controlled Substances Act.”
But the agency said that it would wait until the legislation “is fully implemented” before it will “modify the mailability criteria for CBD and other cannabis products.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is in charge of creating and implementing general regulations for hemp—instead of the Justice Department, which formerly oversaw enforcement against the crop—but it’s not clear when those rules will be formalized. Lawmakers and stakeholders have pressured the department to get the ball rolling, and it held a listening session last week to gather input from states and other interested parties.
But Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has tried to temper expectations, emphasizing the need to “proceed slowly” given the crop’s complexity and saying that USDA plans to have its regulations ready for the 2020 growing season.
“We’re proceeding very judiciously obviously because of the uniqueness of the crop hemp and its relationship to other crops that we’re not encouraging,” he said last month, referring to marijuana.
While the USPS said that it issued the advisory because it was receiving an influx of inquiries about the rules governing mailing CBD, Kight On Cannabis suggested that it was prepared as a response to a legal dispute from last year surrounding the postal service’s seizure last year of hemp-derived CBD products that had been lawfully mailed.
