Government crackdown on hemp hurts Missouri patients, small businesses | Opinion

The Veterans Affairs’ pill pipeline almost killed me, and I am not special. I live with mental health issues and chronic pain from multiple injuries over my years in the Seabees. What I was handed wasn’t healing — it was chemical management: antidepressants for mental health, sleep meds for the nights, anxiety meds layered on top, opioids for the pain, then more pills to counteract the side effects of the pills they already had me on. None of it fixed the problem. It just edged me closer to the same cliff too many veterans go over. The Veterans of Foreign Wars describes exactly this trap.

People argue about whether it’s 22 veteran suicides a day, if that number is higher, or if it’s a different total that looks better in a report. Either way, Missouri families know what those numbers really mean. They mean funerals in small towns. They mean empty chairs at VFW halls. The risks aren’t speculative. The Food and Drug Administration itself warns that antidepressants can increase suicidal ideation in some patients, particularly early in treatment. Veterans live with those risks layered on top of trauma, pain and isolation, often while prescriptions are stacked instead of reevaluated.

Hemp-derived products gave me a different option. Not a miracle. Not a buzz. Not an escape hatch. A tool that helped me manage pain and mental health without being numbed into oblivion or chained to prescriptions that kept escalating. After the 2018 farm bill federally legalized hemp, that option opened up for veterans and older adults across Missouri and the whole country who were tired of being told their only choice was to swallow another drug cocktail and hope it didn’t turn on them.

My wife and I didn’t stop at using hemp products. We joined the hemp industry because we knew we weren’t the only ones stuck in that loop. We became hemp farmers and manufacturers here in Missouri, growing the crop and testing it at multiple stages. Hemp is already regulated agriculture under U.S. Department of Agriculture oversight, not some unregulated gray market. Through an initiative we call A Thousand Ripples, we set aside our first fruits to help provide cannabinoid therapies to Missouri veterans and active cancer patients who can’t afford them, because relief shouldn’t be reserved for people with money and perfect insurance.

Marijuana industry pushes government to eliminate competition

This is where Missouri’s story matters nationally. Since 2022, the marijuana industry has openly pushed to eliminate hemp as a competing market, and state governments have been its chosen tools. Legislative language has repeatedly targeted hemp — not because of documented public safety failures, but because hemp threatens established cannabis interests. At the same time, investigations by the Missouri Attorney General’s office into hemp businesses, often initiated after complaints originating from the marijuana industry, have turned regulatory disagreement into law-enforcement pressure.

That is the weaponization of Missouri’s justice system against a lawful agricultural industry, and it mirrors a broader national trend where enforcement is being used to pick winners instead of writing clear rules.

Now that same playbook is being scaled nationally through a hemp ban slipped into a federal funding bill at the last minute. This does not make Missouri safer, and it does not make the country safer. What it does is create regulatory whiplash that crushes farmers and small manufacturers, while pushing consumers back toward expensive prescriptions or an underground market where nothing is tested and nobody is accountable. Public health research consistently shows that prohibition-style crackdowns shift demand rather than eliminate it, strengthening illicit markets instead.

That is why on Jan. 12, my wife Kara and I are going to Washington, D.C., with the Hemp Industry and Farmers of America fly-in. We are asking for a 24-month extension on enforcement so fair, practical and responsible rules can be written without wrecking livelihoods midstream. Agriculture does not run on political deadlines. Neither does responsible manufacturing. We support clear labeling, third-party testing, child-resistant packaging and strict age gating for ingestible products. That is what doing this right actually looks like.

Rushed bans don’t protect Missouri veterans. They don’t protect older patients. They definitely don’t protect kids, no matter how many times politicians say otherwise. They protect nobody except the chosen marijuana industry elites, the black market and systems that keep people cycling through prescriptions because safer alternatives get wiped off the shelf.

I am asking readers to contact Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, and their U.S. representative and demand they listen to Missouri veterans, older adults, farmers and small businesses who are trying to do this the right way. Prohibition is not the answer. Real regulation is.

John Grady is a Missouri veteran, hemp farmer and manufacturer based in Rosebud, Missouri. He served in the U.S. Navy Seabees and works with veterans and cancer patients seeking safer alternatives for pain and mental health management.