Your Weed Seeds Could Become Federal Contraband on Dec. 11, Even If They Barely Contain THC.

From December 11, a cannabis seed’s legal status depends on the THC of the plant it came from. Seed banks are moving US orders offshore, breeders are turning to clones and tissue culture, and home growers in states without legal weed may have the hardest time adjusting.

In October, Herbies, an online seed marketplace that ships to growers in the United States and abroad, released a new strain and named it after a federal statute. The strain, Section 781, comes in photoperiod, autoflowering and fast-flowering versions, and its listing puts its THC at up to 33%. Section 781 the statute, the provision of last year’s shutdown-ending spending law that rewrote the federal definition of hemp, says that from December 11 a viable seed from any plant above 0.3% total THC is no longer hemp. Whether the seeds of Section 781 will qualify as hemp under Section 781 depends not on their advertised potency, but on the THC content of the plants that produced them. And Herbies says it doesn’t test those plants.

Irene Burya, Herbies’ head of public relations, told High Times that the company does not test the plants its seeds come from, and from December 11 that is the plant the law talks about, since, weirdly enough, a seed’s status depends on the total THC of its mother. “The THC figures on our listings show the expected potency of the strain, not lab results for the parent plant,” she said. The United States accounts for about half of Herbies’ sales, and its US orders ship from inside the country. “We’re waiting to see how the rule will be applied before deciding what changes,” Burya said.

Four weeks before the change, there is still no guidance, or even a clue, on how the federal government plans to enforce the new rule. Some of the businesses that depend on the old one have already started to adjust, by moving US orders offshore, moving genetics into clones and tissue culture, and leaving home growers in states without legal cannabis to work out where their seeds will come from.

The Absurdity of a Seed Being Judged by Its Mother

For most of the last half century, American drug law treated the cannabis seed as part of the plant. Before 2018, the Controlled Substances Act exempted only seeds that had been sterilized, so anything that could sprout was marijuana. The 2018 Farm Bill took hemp, defined as cannabis at or below 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight, out of the Controlled Substances Act, and a seed, which carries almost no THC of its own, passed that test without effort. That is how the 2018 edition of an omnibus farm law with roots in the 1930s opened the door to a federal cannabis seed trade, and to a national network of breeders and seed banks shipping throughout the country.

What began as a commercial bet, with some risk of being shut down by the DEA or the Justice Department, was legitimized in January 2022, when the DEA made it crystal clear in a letter to the attorney Shane Pennington that marijuana seed under the delta-9 limit met the definition of hemp, and that the same went for tissue culture and other genetic material. High Times explained the DEA’s reasoning to growers at the time. Later that year, a second response, to the California attorney Omar Figueroa, repeated the position. On those two letters, seed banks built a national mail-order business.

Now Section 781, enacted last November and taking effect next month, moves the test from the seed to its mother. From December 11, hemp excludes “any viable seeds from a Cannabis sativa L. plant that exceeds a total tetrahydrocannabinols concentration (including tetrahydrocannabinolic acid) of 0.3 percent in the plant on a dry weight basis.” The THC that counts, in other words, is the mother’s. The date comes from the one-month delay Congress approved in September, which let only the provisions on cannabinoids the plant cannot produce take effect on November 12 and left everything else, the seed clause included, for December, as the Congressional Research Service confirms.

Until December 10, a pack of five seeds that promise high THC can travel from a US warehouse to an address in Ohio as hemp. From December 11, whether the same pack still qualifies as hemp depends on the THC content of the plant that produced it, a result the seller may never have measured.

A seed excluded from hemp is generally treated as marijuana under federal law. Outside applicable medical-marijuana exceptions, that means Schedule I controls. Shipping controlled marijuana across state lines without federal authorization can violate federal drug distribution laws.

A Number on the Label, Pointing the Wrong Way

The only THC figure attached to most seeds describes the plant the seed might become, and buyers read it that way. In a Herbies survey of 432 of its US customers, run from September 1 to October 12, only 12.7% identified the plant that produced the seed as the measure Section 781 uses, and 50.7% said they did not know. In the full results Herbies shared with High Times, 75.5% read a listing’s THC number as the potential of the future plant. The survey covers Herbies customers who chose to answer, unweighted, so it wouldn’t be right to take it as a measure of what American growers as a whole think. But it is a fair way to understand how people who usually buy seeds by mail are used to reading what they shop for. And, of course, they are buying potency: Herbies told High Times that 67.5% of the seeds its US customers bought between September 2025 and August 2026 came from strains listed at 25% THC or more.

Proving compliance may be a challenge of its own. The law looks at the plant that produced the seed, not the THC potential advertised on the packet. A seed qualifies only if its mother came in at or below 0.3% total THC, which makes the mother a hemp plant. Naturally, most people who buy seeds by mail are not shopping for hemp: THC is the first thing they look at, ahead of yield or flavor.

The sellers have started moving anyway. A red countdown on Seeds Here Now’s homepage runs toward its last day for US orders, in the first week of December. After the cutoff, a banner warns, “US orders become international orders.” Shipping from abroad doesn’t put seeds beyond federal reach, though: imports face their own controls. Live clones, as the company reads the law, are not affected by the seed change. That reading opens what is likely to become the “clone loophole,” and it may set the direction for how plants get reproduced from now on. There’s a Spanish saying for that, hecha la ley, hecha la trampa, something like “every law comes with its own loophole.”

The Clone Loophole

The industry will probably lean even harder on clones, and for production it already does: uniform product is what the market pays for, so most licensed cultivators grow their crops from clones. Seeds have kept a different job, which is bringing new genetics in. In a 2022 Cannabis Business Times survey of commercial cultivators, 53% acquired new cultivars as seeds, against 27% who sourced them as cuttings or tissue culture, and some genetics companies say seeds have been gaining ground again because clones can carry diseases such as hop latent viroid. Section 781 could sharply restrict the interstate seed trade that supplies new genetics.

Other sellers already ship clones across state lines on the premise that a fresh cutting tests under 0.3% THC. Clones may become a more important way to move genetics, provided they qualify as hemp under the new rules, and a live cutting needs insulated boxes, heat packs and a nursery behind it. More reliable in some ways, but far less practical than a pack of seeds that only needs an envelope.

Brothers Grimm Seeds, a Colorado breeder founded three decades ago, is taking the same exit. The company is launching a tissue-culture business in Oklahoma, its chief executive, Laura Campanella, told Cannabis Business Times, because the statute never mentions tissue culture or clones. “I’m not sure what the future of Brothers Grimm looks like,” she said. Tissue culture was already how some breeders stored their genetics; now it is also a way to ship them.

“I’m not sure what the future of Brothers Grimm looks like.”

Laura Campanella, CEO of Brothers Grimm Seeds, to Cannabis Business Times

What they are using is an asymmetry in the law itself. A seed is judged by its mother. A cutting taken from that same mother, genetically identical to her, is judged by its own THC, and in a lab a rooted clone a few weeks old is a different thing from the flowering plant it was cut from. Whether that difference holds under a total-THC test that counts THCA is still an open legal question. Missouri’s cannabis regulator said in January that it had been weighing DEA guidance indicating clones may no longer be considered marijuana because of their low delta-9 levels, and that the new federal definition could change the status of both seeds and clones.

Walls Around the Genetics

So Missouri might be the place to follow to see where all this entanglement ends. Its licensed growers live under what the industry calls the immaculate conception rule: a licensee can stock its first plants from anywhere during its first year, and after that new genetics must come from other Missouri licensees or from seed the state approves. In the year leading up to January, the state fined at least seven cultivation facilities for bringing in seeds, clones and tissue cultures from out of state, with settlements of up to $500,000. Licensed cannabis has always lived behind walls like that. Section 781 extends them to every home grower who buys a seed by mail. If genetics cannot cross state lines, value will shift to whoever already holds a mother plant inside the line, and to whoever holds the license to keep one. Licensed operators with mother rooms and tissue-culture labs in legal states are on the less damaged side of that shift.

The people with the least room to adjust are the ones who buy a few seeds a year and grow at home. In Herbies’ report, published on November 4 and based on three of its customer surveys, 96% of the US buyers who answered a January and February survey said their seeds arrive by mail or parcel, and 88% were over 35. In states without legal recreational marijuana, 62% said a strain they could no longer order online would be very difficult or impossible to find locally, compared with 30% in states where it is legal. By Herbies’ count, 47% of its US customers live in states where recreational home growing is prohibited. Those figures come from one retailer’s customers and a company with a stake in the outcome, and they should be read that way.

Legal cannabis is no guarantee of a legal seed. New Jersey and Washington allow adult-use sales but not home cultivation for recreational consumers, and where home growing is legal, the seed still has to come from somewhere. Ohio allows adults a limited number of plants at home, and per resident, Herbies told High Times, it had about seven times as many Herbies seed buyers as California in the company’s US orders from September 2025 to August 2026. After December 11, a pack of seeds excluded from the federal hemp definition, mailed to one of those buyers from another state, is a federal controlled substance in transit, and no Ohio statute can change that.

If you grow at home and buy by mail, the date that matters most may come a week before December 11: the one your seed bank set for its last US shipment.