When Georgia Meloni was elected Prime Minister of Italy in 2022, someone on LinkedIn asked me what I thought. I replied that electing a Fascist never turns out well, and someone chimed in “she’s just a little bit fascist, not to worry.”
Well, she just unconstitutionally banned industrial hemp in Italy, all of it. Thousands of stores wiped out, many farmers too, just before the planting season. A long-legal and useful crop, hemp (canapa) artifacts 11,000 years old have been found outside Rome, and she grew hemp for Royal Navy sails. Farmers even get subsidies for growing fibre hemp.
Strangely, despite its two top executives being Italian and with an office in Rome, the European Industrial Hemp Association (EIHA) has taken a back seat on this existential crisis for Italian hemp to others.
Is this illegal banning of hemp just to get CBD off the shelves in anticipation of imminent approval of EIHA’s Novel Foods application for their members’ CBD products? That would explain a lot. Time will tell.
“The reasons for the intervention raise strong doubts of constitutionality, as well as of compatibility with European Union legislation,” according to a statement from attorneys Giacomo Bulleri and Carlo Alberto Zaina, who represent Federcanapa, a national hemp association.
“This decree instantly criminalizes an entire agro-industrial sector with no logic, no science, and no transitional period.” They argue the law is unconstitutional under Article 25(2) due to its vagueness and the lack of legal certainty around which activities are criminalized. Federcanapa is the fiber farmer’s group.
Forming a fash-friendly party (Brothers of Italy), Mussolini lovers never went away, they just went quiet for decades. But now they’re in power. Of all the countries in Europe, Italy had the least drop in support for Trump’s recent fascistic tendencies.
Under Meloni the nation went from double the amount of signatures needed to get adult-use marijuana legalization on the ballot a few years ago to now illegally banning hemp.
Why is the nation so resistant to legalization? The various mafias make most of their profits off Cannabis and they own Parliament and it appears some of the legalization groups. So yeah, the usual: money.
Read more at: https://hemptoday.net/italian-government-invokes-emergency-powers-to-ban-hemp-flowers-immediately/