In April 2025, the Italian government used emergency constitutional powers to bypass parliament and reclassify non-intoxicating hemp as a narcotic, regardless of THC content, following multiple failed attempts to decimate the industry.
When this law was put into effect in June of the same year, following no parliamentary debate and no transition period, a sector worth hundreds of millions of euros a year for the Italian economy, employing around 15,000 people directly, was gutted overnight, despite warnings that over 3,000 businesses would close.
A secondary ban on CBD oils represented a kick to the ribs of an already cowed industry. Italian hemp industry associations, alongside international lawyers, wasted no time in taking their case to the European Commission, requesting immediate intervention in what they saw as a clear breach of international law.
The EC examined the complaints but never opened formal infringement proceedings. It took Italy’s own courts to produce the binding CJEU referral, more than 17 months after the industry first raised the alarm, and seven months after the ban was already in force.
In late 2025, the Council of State, Italy’s own highest administrative court, made a referral to the EUCJ to determine once and for all whether Giorgia Meloni’s government had broken EU laws, and as such, whether state governments can act to ban hemp. Once the court responds, the ruling should be binding.
However, as we have seen consistently across the EU, member state governments bent on suppressing this legal and entirely non-intoxicating product will find ways to do so.
Over our ‘Hemp Wars’ series, we’ll be exploring the individual cases of hemp industry suppression in multiple markets, including Italy, Ireland, Greece and Germany, alongside exploring the complexities of European hemp legislation, and some changes which could finally protect the industry from persecution.
To understand why Italy’s crackdown, alongside those unfolding throughout the European Union, represents such a significant problem, it helps to understand what EU law actually says about hemp.
Cannabis Sativa L. with a THC content of 0.3% or below is a legally cultivated agricultural crop under European Union law. Farmers across the continent grow it for fibre, food, cosmetics and construction materials. Under the Common Agricultural Policy, those farmers are eligible for area-based direct payments, placing hemp alongside wheat, barley and rapeseed as a recognised and subsidised EU crop.
The legal status of hemp-derived products, things like CBD oils, extracts, supplements and flower, was seemingly settled at the highest judicial level in November 2020, when the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in the landmark Kanavape case, C-663/18.
The court ruled that CBD is not a narcotic substance, and that member states cannot prohibit the marketing of CBD products lawfully produced in another member state.
Crucially, it held that any such restriction must be justified by clear, scientifically substantiated evidence of genuine risk to public health.
That ruling has never been overturned and remains binding on all 27 member states. And yet, as Kai-Friedrich Niermann, one of Europe’s leading cannabis lawyers and legal adviser to the European Industrial Hemp Association, tells Business of Cannabis: “The EU hemp framework is a complete mess.”
Despite what, on the face of it, appears to be an unequivocal ruling by the EUCJ that hemp cannot be restricted in member states without scientific proof that it is harmful, hemp farmers and traders throughout the EU continue to face bans, asset seizures, and penalties that frequently lead to financial ruin or the closure of their businesses.
The gap between what EU-wide law says, and what member state governments actually do has proven remarkably consistent and pernicious across different countries, different governments and different legal systems.
Germany, which currently has one of the most liberal cannabis frameworks in any developed nation, provides a prime example of this nonsensical dynamic. German hemp businesses have faced persistent enforcement problems under a domestic ‘intoxication clause’ requiring operators to demonstrate their products cannot be used for intoxicating purposes.
Germany’s Federal Court of Justice interpreted this provision in 2020 as meaning a person could theoretically become intoxicated from 15 grams of industrial hemp in a single pastry. Hemp leaf tea that sat on supermarket shelves for decades has since disappeared.
“Courts, in particular, tend to interpret regulations on cannabis and hemp in an extremely prohibitionist manner, leaving little room for manoeuvre in the market,” Niermann explained.
Despite its apparent cut-and-dry ruling, the Kanavape case was a preliminary reference. It answered the specific legal questions put forward by the French referring court and established principles that national courts are obliged to follow, but it did not create a clear legislative framework for hemp.
Member states retain the ability to invoke Article 36 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (the EU’s public health derogation) to justify restrictions, provided they can frame their measures as proportionate responses to genuine health risks.
Each attempt to restrict hemp takes a different in form. Italy invoked the precautionary principle. Ireland applied the 1977 Narcotics Act. Greece has proposed to reclassify hemp flower out of the agricultural category entirely. But the results are nearly always the same.
The body of case law pushing back against hemp restrictions is not limited to Italy, and it is not new. Across multiple jurisdictions and multiple years, when governments have been forced to justify their restrictions before independent courts, they have repeatedly failed to do so. The following represents a handful of the most significant rulings, but there are many, many more.
These examples paint a stark but consistent picture. Authorities across the EU continue to penalise perfectly legal hemp businesses, either through a misunderstanding of the crop itself, or through genuine malice.
Thankfully, it also shows that when these restrictions are tested in court, they rarely survive any form of scrutiny. What it doesn’t show is the toll it takes on the hemp industry at large, and the businesses caught up in legal proceedings.
Having to prove your businesses legality in court is expensive and time consuming. This expense is placed on top of the meticulous record keeping required by business owners to mitigate the very real threat that their products will be seized or they’ll be taken to court.
More to the point, if and when the courts vindicate these businesses, rulings arrive too late to save the businesses they have sought to protect.
There are, however, reasons for optimism at the legislative level. In July 2025, the European Commission published COM(2025) 553, a proposed reform of the Common Agricultural Policy as part of the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework.
For the first time, the proposal explicitly seeks to authorise the production and marketing of all parts of the hemp plant across the EU. In September 2025, the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee endorsed the inclusion of flowers, leaves and extracts as licit agricultural products and pushed for a single harmonised THC ceiling of 0.5% across member states, a standard that would render the legal contortions across the EU untenable.
Were this enacted, the Commission would have the tools to pursue infringement proceedings against any member state maintaining restrictions incompatible with the new framework. The industry would have a positive legislative basis in court rather than relying solely on the defensive argument that restrictions violate Kanavape.
But COM(2025) 553 will not be law before 2027 at the earliest. The trilogue negotiations between the Commission, Parliament and Council, where member state governments will have a direct vote on the final text, present their own risks.
As Niermann warns, even a strengthened legislative framework may not be the end of the road: “When it comes to hemp and cannabis, Germany frequently invokes Article 36 of the TFEU and thereby restricts the European free movement of goods, citing the protection of the life and health of its own population. This, in turn, would require a legal challenge, trapping one in yet another judicial loop.”
The CJEU referral from Italy’s Council of State may move faster. A ruling in favour of the Italian industry, expected no earlier than late 2026, would be binding on all 27 member states and would give operators in Ireland, Greece and Germany an immediate basis to challenge domestic restrictions.
In the next edition of Hemp Wars, we’ll be exploring Ireland’s ongoing siege of hemp and CBD businesses in depth.
The post The War on Europe’s Legal Hemp Industry appeared first on Business of Cannabis.
Continue reading...
When this law was put into effect in June of the same year, following no parliamentary debate and no transition period, a sector worth hundreds of millions of euros a year for the Italian economy, employing around 15,000 people directly, was gutted overnight, despite warnings that over 3,000 businesses would close.
A secondary ban on CBD oils represented a kick to the ribs of an already cowed industry. Italian hemp industry associations, alongside international lawyers, wasted no time in taking their case to the European Commission, requesting immediate intervention in what they saw as a clear breach of international law.
The EC examined the complaints but never opened formal infringement proceedings. It took Italy’s own courts to produce the binding CJEU referral, more than 17 months after the industry first raised the alarm, and seven months after the ban was already in force.
In late 2025, the Council of State, Italy’s own highest administrative court, made a referral to the EUCJ to determine once and for all whether Giorgia Meloni’s government had broken EU laws, and as such, whether state governments can act to ban hemp. Once the court responds, the ruling should be binding.
However, as we have seen consistently across the EU, member state governments bent on suppressing this legal and entirely non-intoxicating product will find ways to do so.
Over our ‘Hemp Wars’ series, we’ll be exploring the individual cases of hemp industry suppression in multiple markets, including Italy, Ireland, Greece and Germany, alongside exploring the complexities of European hemp legislation, and some changes which could finally protect the industry from persecution.
A legal crop in a legal framework
To understand why Italy’s crackdown, alongside those unfolding throughout the European Union, represents such a significant problem, it helps to understand what EU law actually says about hemp.
Cannabis Sativa L. with a THC content of 0.3% or below is a legally cultivated agricultural crop under European Union law. Farmers across the continent grow it for fibre, food, cosmetics and construction materials. Under the Common Agricultural Policy, those farmers are eligible for area-based direct payments, placing hemp alongside wheat, barley and rapeseed as a recognised and subsidised EU crop.
The legal status of hemp-derived products, things like CBD oils, extracts, supplements and flower, was seemingly settled at the highest judicial level in November 2020, when the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in the landmark Kanavape case, C-663/18.
The court ruled that CBD is not a narcotic substance, and that member states cannot prohibit the marketing of CBD products lawfully produced in another member state.
Crucially, it held that any such restriction must be justified by clear, scientifically substantiated evidence of genuine risk to public health.
That ruling has never been overturned and remains binding on all 27 member states. And yet, as Kai-Friedrich Niermann, one of Europe’s leading cannabis lawyers and legal adviser to the European Industrial Hemp Association, tells Business of Cannabis: “The EU hemp framework is a complete mess.”
The mess
Despite what, on the face of it, appears to be an unequivocal ruling by the EUCJ that hemp cannot be restricted in member states without scientific proof that it is harmful, hemp farmers and traders throughout the EU continue to face bans, asset seizures, and penalties that frequently lead to financial ruin or the closure of their businesses.
The gap between what EU-wide law says, and what member state governments actually do has proven remarkably consistent and pernicious across different countries, different governments and different legal systems.
Germany, which currently has one of the most liberal cannabis frameworks in any developed nation, provides a prime example of this nonsensical dynamic. German hemp businesses have faced persistent enforcement problems under a domestic ‘intoxication clause’ requiring operators to demonstrate their products cannot be used for intoxicating purposes.
Germany’s Federal Court of Justice interpreted this provision in 2020 as meaning a person could theoretically become intoxicated from 15 grams of industrial hemp in a single pastry. Hemp leaf tea that sat on supermarket shelves for decades has since disappeared.
“Courts, in particular, tend to interpret regulations on cannabis and hemp in an extremely prohibitionist manner, leaving little room for manoeuvre in the market,” Niermann explained.
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Different strategies, same results
Despite its apparent cut-and-dry ruling, the Kanavape case was a preliminary reference. It answered the specific legal questions put forward by the French referring court and established principles that national courts are obliged to follow, but it did not create a clear legislative framework for hemp.
Member states retain the ability to invoke Article 36 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (the EU’s public health derogation) to justify restrictions, provided they can frame their measures as proportionate responses to genuine health risks.
Each attempt to restrict hemp takes a different in form. Italy invoked the precautionary principle. Ireland applied the 1977 Narcotics Act. Greece has proposed to reclassify hemp flower out of the agricultural category entirely. But the results are nearly always the same.
The body of case law pushing back against hemp restrictions is not limited to Italy, and it is not new. Across multiple jurisdictions and multiple years, when governments have been forced to justify their restrictions before independent courts, they have repeatedly failed to do so. The following represents a handful of the most significant rulings, but there are many, many more.
- CJEU, November 2020 — Kanavape, C-663/18 (France): The EU’s highest court ruled that CBD is not a narcotic, that member states cannot impose blanket marketing bans on CBD products lawfully produced elsewhere in the Union, and that any such restriction requires clear, scientifically substantiated evidence of genuine public health risk. The two French entrepreneurs at the centre of the case had spent seven years under criminal prosecution for selling a CBD vape product made from legally grown Czech hemp. Their convictions were overturned by the French Court of Appeal in November 2021.
- CJEU, October 2024 — Biohemp Concept, Romania: Romanian authorities refused to authorise a hemp company’s application to cultivate industrial hemp using hydroponic systems, on the basis that the structure did not qualify as agricultural land. The CJEU, asked to rule on the compatibility of the Romanian restriction with EU law, established a principle directly applicable to the broader crackdowns documented in this series: member states may only restrict hemp cultivation where such restrictions are proportionate and necessary to protect public health, cannot go beyond what is strictly necessary to achieve that objective, and must consider whether less restrictive alternatives — such as local controls — could achieve the same result. The proportionality test the court articulated is the same standard that Italy, Ireland and Greece have repeatedly failed to meet in their own courts. CannaReporter — CJEU rules on indoor hemp cultivation ban
- Italy, February 2023 — TAR Lazio: Italy’s Regional Administrative Court annulled a Health Ministry decree restricting hemp to seeds and stems only, finding the government had produced no evidence that the broader plant posed a risk to public health.
- Italy, October 2023 — TAR Lazio: The same court suspended a reinstated CBD oral ban, again citing a lack of supporting scientific evidence and confirming that CBD is non-psychoactive.
- Italy, September and October 2024 — TAR Lazio (twice): Two further suspensions of the same decree, this time citing an independent expert report by Professor Costantino Ciallella, former forensic medicine director at La Sapienza University, which concluded that CBD does not cause psychophysical dependence and lacks psychoactive effects.
- France, January 2022 — Council of State: The French government announced a ban on the sale of CBD flowers on New Year’s Eve 2021. Within 24 hours the industry launched a legal challenge. France’s highest court suspended the ban less than four weeks later, finding “serious doubt about the legality of this general and absolute prohibition measure because of its disproportionate nature,” and concluding that hemp flowers and leaves with THC below 0.3% did not “present a degree of harmfulness to health justifying a total and absolute prohibition measure.” The ban had lasted less than a month. Business of Cannabis — France’s highest court suspends government ban on flowers
- UK, 2022 — Court of Appeal, Uncle Herb: Britain’s highest criminal court upheld the acquittal of two online hemp flower retailers charged effectively as drug dealers for importing compliant hemp from Italy. The court confirmed that hemp flower below the THC threshold should not be considered a narcotic. As the lawyer who analysed the ruling for Business of Cannabis observed: “Why are we using narcotics legislation to prohibit a product that is not a narcotic?” The ruling turned on EU free movement law as it applied before Brexit, limiting its direct applicability to post-2020 trading.
- Italy, March 2026 — Court of Cassation, Sassari: Italy’s Supreme Court declared inadmissible a prosecutor’s appeal against an order annulling a product seizure, establishing at the highest domestic judicial level that the mere presence of hemp flower is insufficient to constitute a criminal offence. Actual intoxicating effect must be demonstrated.
- Italy, multiple courts, 2025-2026 — CSI Article 18 Observatory: Across 21 documented cases spanning prosecutors’ offices from Turin to Catanzaro, Italian courts have returned seized hemp products, dismissed charges, and issued acquittals on the consistent basis that hemp flower without proven intoxicating effect cannot automatically be treated as a controlled substance. Thirteen product returns are on record, with the most recent — 530kg of hemp inflorescences returned in Imperia — dated 8 April 2026.
- Germany, April 2026 — Amberg District Court: A Bavarian court acquitted a defendant carrying compliant industrial hemp, explicitly refusing to follow the Federal Court of Justice’s intoxication clause interpretation. The court reasoned that since adults can now legally obtain THC cannabis through social clubs under Germany’s Cannabis Act, the assumption that anyone would go to the elaborate effort of baking industrial hemp flowers to achieve intoxication is no longer realistic.
- EU, October 2025 — SCCS preliminary opinion on CBD in cosmetics: France had proposed to the European Chemicals Agency that CBD be classified as a carcinogenic, mutagenic or reprotoxic substance — a designation that would have effectively banned it from cosmetics across the EU. The EU’s own Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety found CBD safe for use in cosmetic products at defined concentrations, rejecting the reprotoxic framing. France’s attempt to restrict through the back door of chemicals classification produced the opposite of its intended result.
Is change coming?
These examples paint a stark but consistent picture. Authorities across the EU continue to penalise perfectly legal hemp businesses, either through a misunderstanding of the crop itself, or through genuine malice.
Thankfully, it also shows that when these restrictions are tested in court, they rarely survive any form of scrutiny. What it doesn’t show is the toll it takes on the hemp industry at large, and the businesses caught up in legal proceedings.
Having to prove your businesses legality in court is expensive and time consuming. This expense is placed on top of the meticulous record keeping required by business owners to mitigate the very real threat that their products will be seized or they’ll be taken to court.
More to the point, if and when the courts vindicate these businesses, rulings arrive too late to save the businesses they have sought to protect.
There are, however, reasons for optimism at the legislative level. In July 2025, the European Commission published COM(2025) 553, a proposed reform of the Common Agricultural Policy as part of the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework.
For the first time, the proposal explicitly seeks to authorise the production and marketing of all parts of the hemp plant across the EU. In September 2025, the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee endorsed the inclusion of flowers, leaves and extracts as licit agricultural products and pushed for a single harmonised THC ceiling of 0.5% across member states, a standard that would render the legal contortions across the EU untenable.
Were this enacted, the Commission would have the tools to pursue infringement proceedings against any member state maintaining restrictions incompatible with the new framework. The industry would have a positive legislative basis in court rather than relying solely on the defensive argument that restrictions violate Kanavape.
But COM(2025) 553 will not be law before 2027 at the earliest. The trilogue negotiations between the Commission, Parliament and Council, where member state governments will have a direct vote on the final text, present their own risks.
As Niermann warns, even a strengthened legislative framework may not be the end of the road: “When it comes to hemp and cannabis, Germany frequently invokes Article 36 of the TFEU and thereby restricts the European free movement of goods, citing the protection of the life and health of its own population. This, in turn, would require a legal challenge, trapping one in yet another judicial loop.”
The CJEU referral from Italy’s Council of State may move faster. A ruling in favour of the Italian industry, expected no earlier than late 2026, would be binding on all 27 member states and would give operators in Ireland, Greece and Germany an immediate basis to challenge domestic restrictions.
In the next edition of Hemp Wars, we’ll be exploring Ireland’s ongoing siege of hemp and CBD businesses in depth.
The post The War on Europe’s Legal Hemp Industry appeared first on Business of Cannabis.
Continue reading...
