Trump's insane reversal is set to make your 4/20 celebration a federal crime

If you’re celebrating 4/20 today, consider marking the occasion with a drink — a THC-infused beverage that’ll get you buzzed without all the sloppy, soppy effects of alcohol.

There are a few reasons a "cannabis cocktail” might just be this year’s optimal option. For starters, even if you live somewhere where marijuana is super illegal, you can still find THC drinks — because the majority derive their THC from hemp, which was legalized in all 50 states by the 2018 Farm Bill. They hit faster than edibles, come in seltzer, juice, tea and mocktail form, and are sold everywhere from Target to gas stations to vape shops to, yes, liquor stores and bars.

In terms of bang for your buck, the price of drinkable cannabis is roughly $5 to $10 a can, about the same as craft beer, but without the attached hangover. Or the reputation for being precious.

So bottoms up — because it’s that time of year!

And because, by this time next year, it’ll probably be a federal crime.

The impending recriminalization of hemp-derived THC drinks stands as an almost too perfect example of the insane arbitrariness of America’s byzantine drug laws. Seven years after signing the aforementioned bill that made hemp legal during his first term, this past November, Trump signed another bill — a spending package, not even a drug law — that garnered lots of headlines for ending the longest government shutdown in American history. But buried in the fine print was a provision that will, as of Nov. 12, make any product with more than 0.4 mg of THC illegal under federal law. It effectively outlaws not just THC drinks, 95 percent of which contain at least 5 to 10 mg of THC, but every other “intoxicating hemp” product on the now -legal market. The law sets the threshold so low, in fact, it will even criminalize hemp-derived products with mere trace amounts of THC incapable of getting anyone high, including CBD lotions, lip balms, dog treats and more.

Virtually every CBD and hemp-derived THC product will become a Schedule I controlled substance, same as marijuana. And heroin.

It is dumb that our longstanding drug laws pretend that pot is as addictive as black tar heroin. It’s doubly dumb that this legal reversal will, yet again, treat your favorite THC and elderberry-infused tea the same way.

It’s not public health advocates who led us to this change. The frontlines do not include, for example, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who in 2025 stated that alcohol causes “100,000 cases of cancer in the United States each year and 20,000 cancer deaths” — figures that led him to call for alcohol labels to include warning of increased risk for cancers of the liver, esophagus, mouth, larynx, breast and colon. Nor did it involve researchers from the CDC, who cite excessive drinking as the cause of nearly 180,000 deaths in this country each year.

It was not a rollback that Americans in general — whose alcohol consumption in 2025 hit the lowest rate since Gallup began tracking it in 1939 — were asking for. In national surveys, about 75 percent of Americans say hemp should remain legal, a figure outpaced by the near 90 percent of Americans who say marijuana should at least be legal in medical form. Asking for this least of all were members of Gen Z, who drink less than prior generations and whose supposed teetotaling, polls suggest, has been greatly exaggerated — it’s just that cannabis is what they’re mostly drinking instead.

It was, instead, Big Alcohol groups that lobbied for this, including the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Beer Institute, Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. and Wine America. Not unrelatedly, as the conservative Cato Institute notes, recent years have seen “a surge in hemp-related lobbying from Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors, Bacardi, and other big companies that compete directly with the upstart THC beverage industry.”

Then there’s the corporate cannabis industry, or Big Weed — a term that, full disclosure, I didn’t even know existed until I started writing this but promise to get plenty of future mileage from — which also lobbied for the bill and doesn’t look kindly on the new untethered-by-rules competition. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who notably pushed the hardest for the law that legalized hemp back in 2018, was the key Congressional figure behind the measure. Ironically, he spent years proselytizing about hemp to farmers in his home state of Kentucky, per a 2015 Politico article headlined “Mitch McConnell’s Love Affair with Hemp.” In 2014, he even put out a press release touting his role as “the author” of a provision that launched hemp pilot projects around Kentucky, calling them “a means for job creation and economic development.” There is a straight line connecting that bill, and McConnell’s help advocacy to the bill that legalized hemp four years later. Now that the hemp industry is worth somewhere between $7 and 28 billion dollars and employs roughly 330,000 people, he’s decided to burn it all down.

And look — there are valid reasons why modifications to the legal hemp law would be worth investigating. Legalization was intended to make hemp accessible for industrial use in things like fiber, rope and textiles, and maybe even some CBD wellness stuff. Nobody, least of all McConnell, seems to have anticipated that people would be creative enough to extract and convert compounds from hemp that can get people really high. Certainly, McConnell could not imagine the dizzying array of psychoactive products that would yield, all of which are subject to little oversight and even less quality control. (Hemp and marijuana are from the same plant but the former has less than 0.3 percent THC. I’m not going to get into the delta-9, THCA, HHC-ness of it all here, because a million stoners and others have already done that on YouTube, so go there if you need more deets.) This is the “loophole” so often cited as the justification for the hemp ban. And groups that oppose legal hemp argue that without regulation, what’s to stop kids from getting their hands on the intoxicating hemp products on store shelves?

But abrupt bans on things people have grown accustomed to accessing don’t really work. We should know this as a country, because we’ve done it before. Multiple times, actually. (There’s a whole historical period called the Prohibition Era for a reason.) If the ban is motivated by a fear of the lack of quality control and regulations on hemp-derived THC products, I’m not sure the way to solve that problem is helping create an underground black market. I mean, I get that America has a long and seemingly proud history of blanket criminalizing things it is forced to think too hard about. It’s a tendency that springs directly from its indifference to collateral consequences and incuriosity about things like science. But the old "think of the children"routine comes off as stale in a country that’s considering resurrecting a draft for 18-year-olds. Not to mention wantonly killing children abroad.

I should mention that efforts to stop this thing are kicking into high gear, and they’re being led by alcohol distributors — who also distribute and profit from THC drinks. The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America even launched a whole microsite advocating for regulation over prohibition. And this past Dec., Trump issued an executive order (hear me out) calling for marijuana to be recategorized as a Schedule III drug, and ordering that CBD remain not just legal, but made accessible to Medicare and Medicaid recipients. None of that can actually be legally mandated with an executive order, but what’s a Constitution or a Congress these days, really? This is, after all, a White House that, during its first term, got caught freely and illegally handing out uppers and downers to every staffer who asked. Never forget!

Just last year, the cannabis drink market hit a new high, bringing in roughly $1 billion dollars in sales. With those kinds of returns, they’re betting on staying in business. So throw back one of those beverages today. In just a few months, you might need a dispensary, a dealer or a time machine — but for now, you just need a reason. Might as well make it 4/20.