Italy’s Constitutional Court hears the first challenges to the country’s hemp flower ban on 21 October. A third challenge, published on 16 September, frames the question more sharply than the two being heard. All three ask whether Italy can punish trade in hemp flower under its drug laws when the flower has no drug effect.
The ban came through Article 18 of a 2025 emergency security decree, in force since 12 April 2025. It took hemp flower and the products made from it, oils and extracts included, out of the 2016 law that had built Italy’s industrial hemp sector, and placed them under the penalties of the national drug laws. Growing hemp for industrial purposes is still allowed. Importing, processing, selling, transporting or shipping the flower is not.
“The judicial reality surrounding Article 18 is substantially more complex than the idea that the 2025 reform simply resolved every legal question concerning industrial hemp flowers,” says Mattia Cusani, President of Canapa Sativa Italia. “Courts and defence teams are repeatedly confronting issues of actual psychoactive effect, concrete harmfulness, constitutional proportionality and compatibility with EU law.”
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The Brescia case
Courts in Brindisi and Trani referred the first two challenges. The third came from Brescia in July, and its publication gives interested parties until 6 October to join the proceedings.
The Brescia case concerns packaged hemp flower seized from two shops. Public laboratory tests found nineteen of the twenty samples were ordinary industrial hemp, high in CBD with THC too low to measure. One small sample will be judged separately.
For the rest, the outcome depends entirely on whether the ban holds. Before 2025, Italian courts required proof that a product could actually get someone high before treating it as a drug. Article 18 removed that test, so handling the flower is now punished under the drug laws simply because it is hemp flower. The Brescia judge calls this an absolute presumption of dangerousness, and points out that a product which really is psychoactive was already covered by the drug laws.
Among other things, the court asks the Constitutional Court whether it is legitimate to punish conduct that harms no one, whether drug-law penalties are proportionate for a product with no drug effect, and whether the presumption behind the ban is reasonable. It also asks whether businesses that invested under a law the state itself passed in 2016 deserved some protection when the ban arrived overnight, with no transition period, and raises the questions of freedom of enterprise and the free movement of goods inside the EU.
“The Brescia referral is therefore important not only as an individual case, but as part of a broader judicial pattern now emerging in Italy,” Mattia says.
Tracking the ban
Canapa Sativa Italia has been tracking how the ban is applied in practice. As of 17 September, its records cover 34 published cases in 13 regions, with 22 documented returns of seized goods and 6 dismissals. The association stresses this is a collection of documented cases and not a national statistic.
“We have spent the last months building an Observatory on the real judicial application of Article 18, collecting seizure and release orders, review decisions, criminal proceedings, Supreme Court rulings and constitutional questions arising across Italy,” Mattia says.
In August, a judge in Latina refused to keep a seizure of around 2,200 plants in place because police had relied on a field drug test that could not show how much THC was present, and a judge in Velletri ordered around 8,880 plants released. In Aprilia, product that turned out to have no drug effect was held for 59 days, 31 of them after the prosecutor had already ordered it returned.
Difficult to measure
According to Canapa Sativa Italia, Italy publishes no national figures on how many seizures, lab tests, dismissals or returns the ban has produced, or what enforcing it costs. Before the ban, trade association estimates cited in parliament put the sector at around €500 million in annual turnover, 10,000 permanent jobs and roughly 3,000 businesses. A wider study commissioned by Canapa Sativa Italia, which includes indirect effects, put the figure at around €1.94 billion. Nobody has published a comparable estimate of the damage since.
A separate case is pending at the EU Court of Justice, asking how far a member state can ban parts of a hemp crop that EU law recognizes. It concerns Italy’s rules as they stood before Article 18, so it does not rule on the ban itself.
Article 18 remains in force, and no court has ruled it unconstitutional.
“The sector has been hit hard and part of the investment has either moved or stopped. But companies have not carried on because they do not believe in the State. They have carried on because they believe in the rule of law,” says Mattia.
“Article 18 is in force, but it is the Constitution itself that provides the instruments to test its legitimacy. Three courts have already asked the Constitutional Court to do so. The Constitution is not an obstacle to politics, it is the limit that makes political power legitimate,” he adds.