Alabama Cannabis Coalition announces push for hemp ban repeal | ALreporter.com

The controversial legislation, signed by Gov. Kay Ivey last year, set major restrictions on the state’s hemp industry, sparking claims of monopoly protection

By

Alex Jobin

Published on January 16, 2026 at 8:16 am CST

With the 2026 Legislative Session now underway, the Alabama Cannabis Coalition (ACC) has announced that they will be actively advocating for the repeal of House Bill 445—the controversial legislation that Governor Kay Ivey signed into law last year, setting major restrictions on Alabama’s hemp and CBD industry.

“The Alabama Cannabis Coalition will be actively advocating throughout the 2026 Legislative Session for the repeal of HB445, standing firmly in support of citizen access, free markets, and the protection of Alabama’s Hemp Industry,” the group announced in a press release earlier this week.

ACC is specifically encouraging members of the public to join the group at the State Capitol on Tuesday, January 27, to pressure state lawmakers to repeal HB445.

In a written statement provided to APR, ACC Founder and President H. Marty Schelper detailed the organization’s grievances with the legislation, including the process by which the bill was constructed and passed during last year’s session.

“During committee hearings, we listened as demonstrably false and misleading information about hemp was presented to legislators who lacked a fundamental understanding of the plant,” Schelper said of the 2025 session. “Public speakers were limited to two minutes—120 seconds—to rebut repeated inaccuracies. Carmelo Parasiliti spoke on behalf of the hemp industry. Despite requests, no quantitative data was ever provided to support claims that hemp products were harming children. To this day, such data has not been produced.”

“The rhetoric relied on buzzwords—’guardrails,’ ‘bad actors,’ and ‘protecting the children’—yet the Alabama Hemp Industry was not the problem,” Schelper continued. “As the end of the session approached, HB445 was rushed through. On May 6, 2025—exactly four years to the day after SB46 [the bill establishing legal medical cannabis in Alabama] passed—HB445 cleared the Legislature. Despite overwhelming public opposition and citizens pleading for a veto, Governor Kay Ivey signed HB445 into law on May 14, 2025.”

Schelper said she believes that HB445 was passed despite public opposition because the Alabama hemp industry “posed a direct threat to the tightly controlled medical cannabis system created by SB46.”

“It competed with it. It exposed its failures. And it undermined the justification for an unimplemented, cartel-style model,” Schelper told APR. “If SB46 was ever to be implemented, the hemp industry had to be eliminated.”

Even with HB445 now codified in state law, Schelper and the ACC have not given up on fighting for hemp access in the state, hoping to leverage people power to win the legislation’s repeal.

“In 2026, we are returning to Montgomery with citizens for our Annual Lobby Day,” Schelper stated. “Citizens will speak directly to their representatives and tell their stories—how legal hemp provided relief when the state failed them.”

“The people have spoken. They are being ignored, or their interests are being sacrificed to protect entrenched systems, industry monopolies, or competing lobbies,” she added. “The only clear winners of HB445 were hemp-derived THC beverages—ironically the very products legislators claimed to be concerned about.”

Schelper said that ACC will continue “relentlessly” advocating for “citizens’ rights, bodily autonomy, free markets, and access to a plant that never should have been criminalized or monopolized in the first place.”

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