A key GOP lawmaker says he plans to take Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials to task over their failure to enact regulations for hemp-derived products like CBD in the marketplace.
In a recent interview conducted by the U.S. Hemp Roundtable, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said that he would leverage his authority as the new chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to put the head of FDA on the spot about the ongoing regulatory lapse.
“I want to bring the FDA commissioner in front of the committee, and this is one of the things that we want to talk about,” Comer, who helped champion federal hemp legalization through the 2018 Farm Bill, said. “It’s not just their lack of action with respect to CBD and other types of hemp—it’s their inaction regarding a lot of areas of their jurisdiction.”
“We’ve got an agency here that has a big budget, they have a lot of employees, but it doesn’t seem like they’re getting a lot of their work done, and they have a huge backlog,” the congressman said. “So I want to bring them in and ask them what the problem is.”
Comer, who previously served as Kentucky’s agriculture commissioner, said he’s been clear with FDA that lawmakers “want hemp to be regulated like a nutraceutical or whatever to where we can have credible hemp companies and where consumers, when they purchase hemp, they know exactly what’s in that hemp and it’s not…