AHPA Advocates for Comprehensive Hemp and Cannabis Reform

Graham Rigby is president and CEO of the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA). With over 20 years of experience in health, wellness, and nutrition, Rigby has led innovation and product development at New Chapter, Organic India, Care/of, and Infinite Garden. He also helped launch the AI-driven insights platform, IngredientAI, for the supplement industry. Rigby holds a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He is passionate about the role of botanicals, nutrition, and technology in holistic health and is committed to fostering innovation, integrity, and sustainability across the herbal products landscape.

Area Code 420 (AC 420): What are the AHPA efforts and strategy to address the provision in last year’s spending bill that would limit the amount of THC per container to 0.4 milligrams?

Rigby: AHPA has been active in the cannabis space since 2010. As hemp products and hemp-derived products became much more prevalent from around 2010 through to the 2018 Farm Bill, we’ve been actively helping both foster responsible regulation and commerce as well as identify some of the common terms and language that describe these products.

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to day on all our content.

We published our Hemp Lexicon in 2021 to establish standardized terminology and foster clear, consistent communication across the industry and regulatory agencies. Why do these definitions matter right now? Because as the White House, CMS, and other agencies evaluate the marketplace, legislative actions are creating major disruptions.

Specifically, Section 781 of the Agriculture Appropriations Bill that was attached to the reopening of the government last year had significant impacts on floral hemp in particular — and floral hemp is where the cannabinoids that we know as CBD are extracted from.

AC 420: Isn’t THC a natural cannabinoid?

Rigby: Yes, THC is a natural cannabinoid found in floral hemp, but at very low percentages relative to other cultivars of the plant, which is what makes it hemp versus cannabis. That was set at 0.3% in the 2018 Farm Bill, to a level that would scale with the dose. What happened in the intervening years since 2018 is that there was a prevalence of larger dose format products, such as beverages, that delivered higher THC amounts but still stayed within that Farm Bill definition of 0.3%.

AC 420: How are government leaders responding?

Rigby: Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who had been one of the major backers and advocates for the 2018 Farm Bill, championed the legalization of non-impairing cannabinoids and hemp, a crop that he supported for much of his career. That said, I do not think he envisioned a world where there were 5 and 10-milligram THC products that conformed to the Farm Bill definition, so he tried to close that — as he described it — “perceived loophole” by redefining hemp through the Appropriations Bill last year.

Unfortunately, that did have significant impacts on all hemp products, both floral hemp cannabinoids as well as industrial fiber and grain products. Consider a 16-ounce bottle of hemp seed oil, which is a conventional food and an industrial hemp grain product. Under the new definition of hemp, trace amounts of naturally occurring THC might mean that it will not pass compliance.

Because of these shared challenges, a coalition has formed between like-minded groups supportive of hemp, including AHPA, who are advocating to protect the legal status of and access to cannabinoid products. We have been working closely with industrial hemp groups that also have similar concerns. Though industrial hemp wasn’t the intended target behind the redefinition of hemp, that category also faces unintended consequences, nonetheless.

AC 420: I think you’re saying AHPA would support legislation for hemp-derived CBD to be lawfully used in supplements, foods, and beverages.

Rigby: Absolutely. We have, over the past several months, met with many congressional leaders who have taken an active role in this space. Last fall, Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon introduced a bill looking to establish a clear regulatory framework for hemp-derived CBD. We were actively working with his office to clarify the role of these products in the marketplace, especially non-impairing products that are currently labeled as dietary supplements within the CBD space. Dietary supplements could be a permanent, legal regulatory pathway for those products.

AC 420: I think there have been other Washington folks advocating for hemp.

Rigby: Congressman Morgan Griffith from Virginia introduced a hemp bill, and we worked closely with his office to help him understand both the history and the broad impact his legislation could have. His bill looks to address some of the concerns arising from the Appropriation Bill by right-sizing THC limitations to allow for ongoing commerce of hemp-derived products.

In addition, Congressman Andy Barr from Kentucky has been working on a bill that he hopes to introduce in the very near term. His legislation looks to standardize regulations at the farm level to alleviate burdens on growers, resolve compliance and extraction bottlenecks at the processing level, and establish clear safety and labeling standards for finished goods across both the industrial fiber/grain and hemp cannabinoid sectors.

Ultimately, since the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, domestic growers have faced compliance obstacles and administrative burdens, and alleviating those pressures for American farmers is a top priority for us.

AC 420: What does AHPA hope will happen?

Rigby: What AHPA’s been supportive of, and what we’re pushing for, is a comprehensive bill that looks to address a lot of these issues, not just milligrams per container piece.

We think there’s an opportunity to set forth responsible commerce in a bill that is meant to govern finished products. The Farm Bill typically doesn’t govern finished products regulations — that’s something that falls under the jurisdiction of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate HELP Committee, rather than the Agriculture Committees.

I think there’s a real opportunity here to organize responsible regulation and legislation through Congress. Cannabis sativa is an amazing plant. While industrial hemp represents one significant facet, we must also consider the broader medical cannabis sector, where AHPA has long advocated for modernized regulatory frameworks.

AC 420: Looking back at cannabis, I assume that AHPA did support cannabis rescheduling from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3, and medical cannabis.

Rigby: Absolutely. We’ve been pushing for cannabis rescheduling and working with key medical cannabis advocates for many years. This shift is a monumental step forward because it validates the plant’s therapeutic value and lifts the research restrictions that have held the industry back for decades. There are well-known therapeutic benefits to medical marijuana and cannabis, so it’s great to see this administration open to that and taking action.

AC 420: I believe FDA is still pushing for reform of the GRAS notification system. What are your thoughts on what will happen, or what should happen?

Rigby: That’s a great question. I think pathways to innovation are a critical component behind the rapid growth of dietary supplements and health and wellness products at large, but GRAS also covers functional foods and beverages. So, clarity around how to ensure the safety of ingredients within those is obviously paramount as these industries grow.

One of the areas we’ve been working on — and we met with FDA recently to discuss — is GRAS, which they are working with OMB but don’t have a lot to report yet. We do anticipate some updates from FDA later this year regarding GRAS. Beyond that, FDA is interested in modernizing and finalizing the NDI guidance.

FDA held a public meeting in March, welcoming a host of experts to provide their input on dietary supplement ingredients. The focus of a lot of the comments made at the meeting were regarding the agency’s current interpretation of Paragraph E — that is, the definition of “dietary substance,” especially as it directly impacts probiotic companies or companies making ingredients through emerging technologies like cell culture or precision fermentation.

FDA signaled an interest in evaluating their interpretation of Paragraph E for some of these emerging technologies. This shift could open up the NDI process for these ingredients, rather than forcing companies to rely on the GRAS food pathway as they have since 2016.

We’ve had ongoing conversations on this, and AHPA has a lot of members who sell both conventional foods and products marketed as dietary supplements, thus using the GRAS pathway. However, having these ingredients that are GRAS and used in foods can make them NDIs that don’t require notification to the agency. Understanding these intersections is vital for our industry, and we’ll provide significant comments when those updates come forth.

As it relates to ingredients, I think most consumers don’t think about regulatory structures and regimes. As an example, they may love to have ashwagandha in a sports drink or in the capsule that they take at night without ever worrying about the compliance frameworks behind those products. So, it’s up to us to work with the agency on responsible regulation that allows for safe ingredients to find consumers regardless of the form factor they’re consuming it in.

AC 420: AHPA used to have a Cannabis Committee.

Rigby: We still do, and the committee has been meeting frequently to keep members up to speed. There’s obviously quite a bit going on right now, with several bills being considered on both the House and Senate sides, leading to a lot of recent activity.

We’ve had both the CMS program introduce a pilot program for reimbursement for full-spectrum CBD products, as well as then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary himself issued a memo basically saying that only products manufactured, marketed, and labeled as dietary supplements will be eligible for reimbursement.

We think it is a helpful signal that the agency is thinking about access to these products, especially non-impairing full-spectrum CBD products, that consumers can and have been experiencing benefits for the past several years. It’s under a framework of enforcement discretion from the agency, so it’ll be great to codify that through legislation to provide those products with a much more assured regulatory framework and pathway with which to be overseen for years to come.

AC 420: On a personal note, did you ever envision being in a position with AHPA that you’re in right now?

Rigby: May 2026 marked my one-year anniversary since taking the helm of AHPA. In a way, it’s funny for me. I was at a point in my career a few years ago where I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. I initially had a phone conversation with Michael [McGuffin], and what became a running joke with him was that he was going to work for another “10 to 15 years.” He also said the exact same thing when asked about succession planning back when I was on the AHPA Board of Trustees.

At the time, I joked back to Michael, “Will it be another 10 to 15 years? Because I think your job’s pretty cool, and I’m kind of looking for a new challenge. In response, he laughed and said, “It’s absolutely 10 to 15 years.” So, I figured, “Okay, great” — and I went off and continued doing my thing elsewhere.

It’s obviously sad and tragic that I came into my role at AHPA with Michael’s untimely passing, but the responsibility of the position is something that I really take with great pride, and I know it’s a huge privilege to represent the organization and the herbs themselves.

Being able to extract all that I’ve learned on the industry side and then deploy that through advocacy when I’m in congressional offices and can talk through what responsible regulation looks like is something I enjoy immensely.

I know that it’s a huge responsibility because a lot of companies are depending on successful legislation to ensure that they can continue, or that farmers can plant this crop. The stakes are very high and we take it very seriously. I love it. Thank you for asking — it’s something that I look to do for many years.