Inside the THC drinks industry's fight for its life

In November 2025, as those clowns in Congress scrambled end the longest government shutdown on record, they passed legislation to effectively ban hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) at the federal level. Powerful trade groups like the Consumer Brands Association, the Beer Institute, and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States lobbied for prohibitionary language; hemp’s strongest soldier in the Senate, Rand Paul, made a dramatic-ish last stand to try to strike it. But it remained in the bill President Donald Trump signed on November 12th, which started a 12-month countdown to the booming, multi-billion-dollar category’s de facto federal death sentence.

Now, Christopher Lackner is hoping to win a stay of execution. The past year has been a rollercoaster for the founder and president of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, riding highs like record attendance at the trade group’s annual conference in July and lows like the Congressional ratfucking in November. With the hemp-derived THC industry on the federal chopping block, he remains remarkably bullish on the nascent category’s prospects. He joins The Fingers Podcast today to talk about the HBA’s quest to clear its name on Capitol Hill, the complicated relationship between the hemp drinks sector and traditional beverage-alcohol industry, and of course, what’s to be done about what one independent newsletter about drinking in America referred to as the THC business’

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