Big companies rule the the EU through lobbyism, as I can tell from own experience.

I have discovered through research that the cannabis plant, especially industrial hemp is also food and contains an extensive amount of nutrients, for instance all essential proteins and omega fatty acids.
Until now, the carriers of these valuable nutrients, namely the leaves and leafy blossoms have been wasted and simply left on the field during retting.
It was already common knowledge that industrial hemp also contains valuable health ingredients, the cannabinoids – yet never seen as food.

The pharmaceutical industry has an eye on these valuable cannabinoids and wants to make sure they are classified as a pharmaceutical and not as a freely available plant ingredient.

The pharmaceutical lobby soon began to spread the message that cannabis was a dangerous drug which if anything could only be turned into something positive and useful by the pharmaceutical industry.

Politicians who were not able to distinguish between high THC levels in marijuana and low levels of THC in industrial hemp soon began to pass everything that contained any THC whatsoever over to pharmaceutical companies.

This is how the whole legalization fight emerged – it is once again simply a matter of profit for the big pharma players.

Nobody even considered making the valuable nutrients in industrial hemp available to humans.

Only my invention brought about this idea that hemp is food. My invention is to press raw hemp juice which contains ALL healthy naturally occurring ingredients of the hemp plant to be consumed by humans.

Since the juice production also yields press remnants which contain the hard to digest fibers of the plant, nutritious cattle feed would also be an additional value created when producing the juice.

I got this invention patented in order to ensure the pharmaceutical industry would not get a hold of this new discovery and could therefore not restrict the wider general public from access to this healthy nutrition.

As a member of the European Industrial Hemp Association I sadly have to witness with many other enthusiastic hemp advocates that the the pharmaceutical industry is currently working hard on Brussels to restrict the free access and right to process industrial hemp as a food.
Their aim is to exclusively handle Cannabinoids and use it in medicine. Therefore, they are trying to get single cannabinoids patented and now claim everything that contains these patented cannabinoids, such as CBD or THC, cannot be categorised as food but as a pharmaceutical.

This claim is equally grotesque as claiming lemons could only be used as medicine due to the vitamin C they contain or tomatoes are medicine because of the glutamate they contain.

Tomatoes contain within their matrix of natural ingredients a substance called glutamic acid or glutamate, a common neurotransmitter. However, this does not make a tomato a medicinal product, or a pharmaceutical prescription drug or subject to governmental permission. Glutamate, since it was discovered in tomatoes, did not even make it a novel food. The level of glutamic acid in tomatoes is not monitored either.

It looks like bureaucrats in Brussels do not invest enough time into gathering information, hence they simply rely on information provided by the pharma lobby itself.

We would be better off if every country within the EU would decide for itself. Specialized politicians, under democratic control, would then debate a EU wide solution.

A result of this would be a more transparent process as opposed to the current process in Brussels. In which big corporations and their lobbyists are breathing down EU bureaurats necks in order to dictate that except for hemp seeds nothing else of the hemp plant shall be food for general consumption. This happens far off from any direct nation-state supervision or monitoring.