About The Loophole

Last Update: January 2025

Let’s finally talk about the elephant in the room.

The Cannabis plant has over a hundred cannabinoids, but Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the one that gets all the attention because it’s the one that gets you high.

Even our farm is defined by THC because hemp is just a subset of Cannabis, defined by being under .3% THC. This is a legal distinction, not a botanical one, because hemp and Cannabis are botanically the same plant.

We have worked very hard for eight years now to grow plants and make products that focused on other cannabinoids, like CBD and CBG, because we wanted to stay within the letter and spirit of the law, and because they have enormous health benefits on their own.

But late last year, everything changed. When the government was shut down, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans put new hemp regulations into the bill that reopened the government. That language is now law.

The new regulations, they say, are intended to “close the loophole” around hemp. The existing drug laws were written to ban delta-8 THC (the “delta” part is just a way of describing the molecule). After hemp was legalized, some clever science nerds found a way to convert CBD into delta-9 THC (a molecule that does not exist in the plant) to get around the law.

At Milk Barn Farm, we grow plants as naturally as possible and process them as minimally as possible, to create natural botanical tinctures. But others went wild with delta-9, and THC products began appearing in stores. You may have seen them, especially in states without recreational Cannabis.

We should be clear here that we think the prohibition on Cannabis is incredibly stupid. It was created for racist reasons (Nixon did it to go after black and brown people, he literally said so) and selective enforcement has been used to persecute minority communities for over 50 years. Not to mention just keeping the benefits of this amazing plant out of reach.

All that said, there was a loophole, and Congress could have closed it by simply treating all deltas of THC the same. Instead, they banned all “lab-derived Cannabinoids,” which is more extreme, and they didn’t stop there. The law also set a maximum of 0.4 mg THC per container.

Previously, the limit was the standard 0.3% THC. That’s arbitrary, but at least it’s consistent. Changing from 0.3 to 0.4 doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is, because the pervious limit was a percentage of total weight, and beer is heavy.

Beer is what this is really about. Because THC beverages were showing up next to the beer in stores, with 5-10 mg of hemp-derived THC per can. Alcohol companies really did not like that. Alcohol consumption is way down among young people, but you know what’s up? THC Edibles. And why compete when you can just make the competition illegal? So the booze merchants went to their Republican friends in the Senate and they set a THC limit so low it may just wind up destroying the CBD industry.

Here’s how drastic the change is: our 60 mL tincture bottles hold about 56 grams of liquid. 0.3% of that is 168 mg. So our allowed THC went from 168 to 0.4. It’s an even bigger drop for a beer because it’s heavier! 

The new limit is so low, it’s practically beyond the reach of the common lab tests, which have a +/- variance of about 0.4 mg. It’s almost as if they picked that number because it’s too low to measure.

I’m writing this in January 2026. As of now, the new regulations are law, passed by Congress and signed by the president. But the law also had language that delayed implementation for a year, so they don’t go into effect until November.

There is activity by some in Congress to change things, by extending the deadline or changing the law, but any change will have to be passed by both houses and signed by the president and, in this age of fascism and dysfunction, I’m not optimistic.

We’re stuck in a horrible in-between moment. Milk Barn Farm may have to stop selling our hemp products in November, a casualty in a war between booze sellers and delta-9 drink companies that we weren’t even part of.

So we’re doing something we’ve never done before. Partly as an act of protest, partly because we might as well while we still can: we’re selling a CBD+THC tincture.

Because here’s the thing we’ve known all along: CBD works better when combined with THC. They both come from the same plant, after all. In true full spectrum formulations, they create an entourage effect that is stronger than any one of them alone.

Our new tincture has a 1:3 ratio of THC:CBD, just enough hemp-derived THC to help the CBD do its job, melting away stress, reducing anxiety, and producing a happy, calm effect. Something we all could use these days.

Unlike all our other tinctures, it is slightly intoxicating. A 1 mL dose contains 2 mg of THC and 6 mg of CBD. We think it feels like a glass of wine, depending on your tolerance. So we’ve put a childproof cap on it, included a warning on the label, and are only selling it to people over 21, just to be careful. At 120 mg of THC per bottle, it’s well below the 0.3% THC limit, which is still allowed until November, when we’ll stop selling it.

We’re calling our new CBD+THC tincture The Loophole. Get it while you can.

(Special shout out to our friend Lucy Bellwood for illustrating our goat Hershey for the label.)

The future is unclear, but if you have been helped by CBD, we encourage you to contact your representatives and tell them so, and demand they work to undo the hemp regulations that were passed in November 2025.

We’ll keep you informed as things progress.

Ever forward,

– Derek, Heather, and the Milk Barn Farm heartbeats