The Missouri Senate passed a bill Tuesday night that would ban intoxicating hemp THC products from general retail, capping a nine-hour floor fight that exposed deep fractures between legislative leaders and the farmers most directly affected by the vote.

The bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Dave Hinman of O’Fallon, would prohibit hemp products from containing more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container. That limit tracks language embedded in the federal spending bill Congress approved last year, which includes a provision setting a national ban expected to take effect in November. But Missouri’s version goes further. Even if Congress reverses course and allows these products to remain on the market, Hinman’s bill would require them to be sold exclusively through the state’s licensed marijuana dispensaries.

If Congress delays the federal ban by a year or two, Missouri would still prohibit all intoxicating hemp products except beverages.

The bill now returns to the House, which can either accept the Senate’s changes or request a conference committee to work out differences before sending anything to the governor.

Hinman framed the outcome as a net positive. “I had just a good opportunity over in the Senate to work with several of the senators to get some of the things that they wanted to get on there that I think actually benefit the bill,” he told the Missouri Independent Wednesday morning. “So I’m very happy with the things that were done last night and look forward to bringing that to the House tomorrow.”

The bill also includes provisions to protect marijuana consumer privacy and cannabis workers’ right to organize, additions negotiated during the Senate debate.

The path to final passage was anything but clean. The Senate spent most of Tuesday working through a competing bill sponsored by Republican state Sen. David Gregory, which would have made the hemp ban effective the moment the governor signed it. Democratic state Sen. Karla May of St. Louis blocked that measure with a filibuster that ran nearly seven hours.

May’s objection centered on the bill’s reach beyond federal requirements. Under both proposals, hemp-derived cannabinoids would be classified as marijuana, pulling them into the state’s licensed dispensary system rather than treating them as a separate category. “They claim they’re mirroring the federal regulation,” May said during the debate. “There’s some things in there that’s going far beyond the federal regulation, such as hemp-derived cannabinoids will be put under the marijuana umbrella and have to be sold in dispensaries.”

By late evening, it was clear Gregory’s bill couldn’t clear the chamber. “We spent pretty much from 11 a.m. until really 9 p.m. trying to figure out where we wanted to go, trying different things,” Hinman said. “We couldn’t get everyone really to agree, and so the senator [Gregory] suggested, ‘Let’s just go back to Hinman’s bill and go with that.’”

In an unusual procedural step, senators reconvened the Senate Fiscal Oversight Committee around 10 p.m. to advance Hinman’s bill. That same committee had previously declined to vote on it.

The vote was 25 to pass. For hemp farmers watching from Jefferson City, that number carried a specific weight.

“Hemp farmers were there and were excluded from every negotiation over the very crops we grow,” one farmer’s statement circulated after the vote. “Let that sink in. The Constitution didn’t fail us. 25 senators did.”

The exclusion of hemp producers from the final negotiating sessions drew sharp criticism from Republican senators as well, a notable split given that the bill and its primary opposition both came from within the GOP. The concern was procedural as much as substantive: a bill that restructures an entire agricultural market was shaped in closed-room talks that left out the people growing that market’s primary input.

That tension matters because the stakes for hemp operators are concrete. Businesses that built retail supply chains around delta-8, delta-9 beverages, and similar hemp-derived products would face a hard stop under this bill if the federal ban holds. And if Congress delays or reverses, those products would still be channeled into the dispensary market, a distribution system with its own licensing costs, compliance requirements, and retail limitations.

For California operators watching this play out, the Missouri vote is a data point in the ongoing national argument about where hemp THC products belong in the regulatory framework. The federal spending bill’s November deadline has pushed state legislatures to either align with Washington or carve out independent positions. Missouri is aligning, and then some.

The licensed cannabis industry in states with mature dispensary infrastructure, including California, has generally favored restricting hemp-derived intoxicants to licensed retail. The argument is consumer safety and market equity. Hemp producers see it differently. Products that have been legal since the 2018 Farm Bill are being reclassified mid-market, and the people growing the underlying crop were not at the table when it happened.

The House will take up the Senate-amended bill shortly. Whether leadership accepts the changes or pushes for a conference will determine how much of Tuesday’s negotiated language survives.