Three launches in one month from names you know, followed by a bipartisan bill in Congress. Everybody is moving at once because the deadline is finally close enough to force a decision.
July has been busy. B-Real put his name on a multistate hemp gummy. Rachel Wolfson launched a flower and edible line. Cann, the beverage company with half of Hollywood on its cap table, released its first drinks with no THC in them at all.
Then, on July 22, one day after B-Real’s launch, two members of Congress introduced a bill to rewrite the rule all three are launching into.
Read together, it becomes something more interesting than a product roundup. Fifteen weeks out from November 12, when federal hemp law starts counting THCA toward total THC and caps finished products at 0.4 milligrams per container, all three moved within the same month. Not because they agree, but because the runway got short enough that sitting still stopped being an option.
Here’s what dropped, and why each one is a bet.
B-Real Takes INSANE National
Few people in this plant’s history have a longer paper trail than B-Real. Cypress Hill put weed on MTV in 1991. Dr. Greenthumb went from an alter ego on a 1998 record to an actual licensed dispensary operation in California. The man has been doing this since before there was a this.
He has also been steadily working out how to exist outside California, where a state license stops being useful the second you cross a border. Last year, he went upstream into genetics, releasing Insane OG through Amsterdam’s Barney’s Farm and unveiling it at Mary Jane Berlin. Seeds travel where flower can’t. That was the point.
Now the same logic is being applied to edibles. On July 21, he and KANHA released the KANHA x INSANE Gummy, a limited-edition Sour Black Cherry hemp THC edible. It is the first multistate hemp product to carry the INSANE name, which is the whole story in one sentence: a legacy California operator using the hemp lane to reach markets where his licensed cannabis products cannot go.
KANHA is the flagship edibles brand from Sunderstorm, founded in 2015, and it has run a hemp-derived line alongside its licensed catalog for a couple of years. The announcement does not pretend the timing is neutral. It frames the drop against policy fights in Washington and pitches the product as a demonstration of “responsible, quality-focused hemp THC access.”
That is a brand planting a flag in a regulatory argument. Which, given the calendar, is the only honest way to read it.
Rachel Wolfson Names It Lobos
Wolfson is the first and only woman in the main Jackass cast, with writing credits across the last three installments, including Jackass: Best and Last, which landed June 26 and closed out twenty-five years of the franchise. She got there because Johnny Knoxville saw a bit she did about her mother, who happens to be the judge who sentenced O.J. Simpson, and slid into her DMs.
The cannabis part is not a recent addition. She was doing weed memes and stand-up in the late 2010s, ran Chronic Relief, a podcast where comedians talked about cannabis and mental health, and has spoken publicly for years about cannabis, comedy and mental health. She has been the reliable answer to a specific question in this industry, which is whether a woman can be the funny stoner and not the decorative one.
Her new line, Lobos, consists of THCA flower and a live resin THC gummy, made with Kush Queen. That partner choice is worth a beat. Kush Queen sponsored Chronic Relief back when it was running. This is a longstanding relationship that turned into a product, not a licensing deal handed to a face with a following.
It also means she went straight at the two categories with the most exposure on the calendar. THCA flower and hemp-derived edibles are exactly what November 12 was written for.
Cann Plays It Two Ways
And then there is the drop that is not weed.
Cann launched in 2019 out of Los Angeles, built by Luke Anderson and Jake Bullock around a microdosed can, two milligrams of THC and four of CBD, aimed at people cutting back on alcohol rather than people chasing a ceiling. It worked. The cap table filled with famous names, Rosario Dawson among them, who joined the board in 2021.
On July 9, the company announced its first 0MG collection. No THC. Zero.
Trade press read the timing immediately, with BevNET headlining it as Cann going THC-free ahead of November. The math is unforgiving: beverages sit at anywhere from two and a half to ten milligrams a serving, and the incoming cap is measured in fractions of a milligram. A can of almost anything does not clear it.
But calling that a retreat gets it wrong. The 0MG line reads as insurance, not necessarily a pivot. Cann’s other bet is in Washington.
On July 22, Representatives Andy Barr of Kentucky and Angie Craig of Minnesota introduced the Lawful Hemp Protection Act, a bill that would scrap the per-container cap and replace it with a real regulatory framework. Federal age gates at 21 with ID verification. Labeling and packaging standards. A ban on synthetic cannabinoids. A made-in-America requirement. Serving limits set by the FDA through rulemaking, defaulting to five milligrams per serving for ingestible products if the agency does not act within a year.
A two-milligram Cann lands comfortably below that fallback serving limit.
That is the whole strategy in one line. Cann has always argued that low-dose is a different product from a hundred-milligram gummy, and the company’s position has been that it wants regulation rather than an exemption: taxes, age limits, distribution rules, warning labels, the whole apparatus. The bill would write that distinction into federal law. The Hemp Beverage Alliance has lined up behind it and asked Congress to fast-track it.
So while two artists launched into the storm, one company built a lifeboat and started lobbying to change the weather.
The Date Everyone Is Actually Talking About
On November 12, Section 781 of P.L. 119-37 takes effect. Congress slipped it into the spending bill that ended the shutdown last fall, and High Times has been tracking it since December.
The change is small on paper and enormous in practice. Federal hemp stops being defined by delta-9 THC alone and starts being defined by total THC, which counts THCA. Finished consumable products get capped at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. THCA flower routinely tests in the twenties. A ten-milligram gummy is orders of magnitude past the line. The U.S. Hemp Roundtable puts the share of existing hemp cannabinoid products that fall outside the new definition at roughly 95 percent.
Calling it a ban is shorthand and not quite right. Nothing gets prohibited by name. A definition narrows, and most of an industry falls out the bottom of it. The practical effect is the same.
Several bills to delay, soften or replace the provision have been introduced. None has passed. A Farm Bill amendment to push the date was ruled out of order earlier this year. Barr-Craig is the most comprehensive attempt yet and it has industry behind it, but a bipartisan regulatory bill with fifteen weeks on the clock is a hard ask in any Congress. State law varies, and state-licensed cannabis programs are untouched by all of this, which is its own part of the story.
So Why Launch Now?
Four answers, and they are not mutually exclusive.
You bet Congress blinks, which is no longer abstract now that there is an actual bill behind the argument. You treat the runway as the entire business and call it a limited drop, which the INSANE gummy already is. You build brand equity now and reformulate later, which is exactly what Cann’s 0MG line makes possible. Or hemp was always the on-ramp and licensed cannabis was always the destination.
Cann is running the most explicit hedge: keep the THC business alive through legislation while building something that survives without it.
B-Real is the most interesting case because he is standing on both sides of the line at once. Dr. Greenthumb’s is licensed and state-bound. INSANE just went multistate through hemp. Whatever happens in November, he has a foot in the room that survives it.
What all three launches have in common is that none of them is a passive licensing deal. These are people and companies that have been in this a long time, making a call about where the market goes next, with real money and real names attached.
Fifteen weeks from now, we find out who read it right, and whether Congress bothered to show up.
