The Hemp Industry Is Suing Virginia Again. Here’s the Case.

Barbara Biddle has been here before. In 2023, when Virginia first layered “total THC” restrictions onto hemp, her Leesburg store lost half its revenue and she laid off four employees. Now the state is coming for the one provision that let her business survive that first hit, and this time she’s a plaintiff, not a bystander watching someone else sue.

What’s actually being challenged

Virginia currently defines a legal hemp product as one with no more than 0.3% total THC, capped at 2 milligrams of total THC per package, unless the product carries a 25:1 ratio of CBD to THC, in which case the milligram cap doesn’t apply. That ratio exemption is the provision on trial. A clause in this year’s state budget kills it effective August 15. Kill the exemption, and the 2mg cap applies to everything. Biddle’s own estimate: that’s roughly 80% of what’s currently legal on Virginia shelves, gone in one filing.
The plaintiffs aren’t touching the rest of the budget deal. No challenge to the July 2027 recreational retail launch, no challenge to the license structure. This suit is aimed at one provision, surgically: pause the ratio elimination, leave everything else alone.

Who’s in it

Biddle, owner of District Hemp, is expected to be a named plaintiff. She’s also president of the Cannabis Small Business Association, but CSBA the organization is sitting this one out. Individual operators are carrying the suit; the trade association isn’t a party. Biddle has declined to name the rest of the plaintiff group beyond confirming it includes another retailer and some manufacturers. Representing them is Chap Petersen, a Fairfax attorney who spent four years in the House of Delegates and sixteen in the state Senate before returning to private practice: twenty years of direct exposure to how Virginia’s General Assembly writes and amends exactly this kind of statute.
Filing was expected within days as of this week, ahead of the August 15 effective date.

The Precedent Working Against The Filing

This isn’t the industry’s first swing at a Virginia hemp redefinition, and the last one didn’t go well.
In 2023, NOVA Hemp, Franny’s Farmacy, and a Virginia resident named Rose Lane sued the Commonwealth over SB 903’s total THC standard, arguing the 2018 Farm Bill preempted Virginia’s stricter rule. Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia denied the preliminary injunction that October. Part of her reasoning: the plaintiffs waited too long. SB 903 passed in February 2023, took effect July 1, and the suit wasn’t filed until September, a delay the court said undercut any claim of irreparable harm requiring emergency relief.
That case didn’t end at the district court. The plaintiffs appealed, and in January 2025 the Fourth Circuit affirmed, not just the denial of the injunction, but the underlying legal theory. The court rejected express, field, and conflict preemption arguments across the board, and held flatly that the Farm Bill leaves states free to regulate hemp sales within their own borders. States can go stricter than federal delta-9 THC standards. That’s now published, binding circuit precedent, not a district judge’s one-off ruling. The Fourth Circuit joined the Seventh in rejecting this exact preemption argument, and there is currently no circuit court that has ruled the other way on it.
Which means whoever files this new suit is walking into court in the same circuit, in front of a body of law that already told the hemp industry no on the core theory they’d need to win with. If the new complaint leans on the same federal preemption argument, and there’s no indication the plaintiffs have a different one, this is starting to look like a Hail Mary dressed up as a narrower ask. They’re not just fighting Virginia. They’re fighting a Fourth Circuit opinion that’s eighteen months old and directly on point.

This Time May Be Different

This is for two reasons. First, timing: this suit is reportedly being file before August 15, not after, the exact defect Brinkema flagged in 2023. That’s either a coincidence or someone read the 2023 opinion carefully. Second, scope: this challenge is narrower. It’s not attacking the total THC standard itself, which the Fourth Circuit already upheld. It’s attacking the removal of one specific exemption to that standard. A narrower ask is easier to grant without disturbing the settled law, but it still requires a federal court to treat a state’s tightening of its own hemp rules as something other than the “matters of health and safety” authority the Fourth Circuit already said Virginia has.