Legal Japan’s crackdown on hemp and CBD

While regulating THC limits for hemp and CBD products is common practice around the world—it's capped at 0.3% in some U.S. states, for example—Japan's proposed new cap of 0.001% for oils (and even lower for beverages and products in other forms) has been slammed by advocates and experts as unrealistic and likely a death knell for Japan's CBD industry, effectively banning the substance altogether, as some regional neighbors like China have recently moved to do. "If this goes through, I would say … 90% of the businesses will go out of business," Toshiki Inoue, the founder of cannabis brand Chillaxy, tells TIME, adding that "close to none" of the CBD products being sold in Japan will be able to adhere to the 0.001% THC limit. The proposed rules could go into effect as early as October, and the potential dramatic shift has rattled players in Japan's rapidly growing CBD industry, which has grown sixfold between 2019 and 2023 from a market size of 4 billion JPY to 24 billion JPY (more than USD150 million).

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