Four stakeholders in Ohio’s hemp-derived beverage market filed a lawsuit on March 6 in the state’s Supreme Court to stop what they call Gov. Mike DeWine’s “lawless executive overreach.”
The stakeholders are asking the high court to undo DeWine’s line-item veto of a carve-out for “drinkable cannabinoid products” (DCPs) that would have allowed hemp beverages to continue to exist in Ohio’s marketplace through the end of 2026, as intended by Ohio lawmakers with the passage of Senate Bill 56.
When the Ohio Legislature sent the governor that legislation in December, the goal was to align the state’s hemp laws with those of a forthcoming federal ban on intoxicating hemp products, which will take effect later this year.
Although Ohio lawmakers originally planned to create a permanent program for DCPs to be sold at places like grocery and liquor stores, they instead amended S.B. 56 to align with the federal ban by establishing a temporary program to allow businesses to continue to sell hemp beverages containing up to 5 milligrams of THC in Ohio until Dec. 31, 2026.
This would have provided a one-year off-ramp for companies to move their product inventory through the supply chain while they transition their businesses.
However, DeWine line-item vetoed that provision when he signed the bill in December, making it so that hemp-derived beverages would become prohibited by March 20 in the Buckeye State.
“A carve-out to allow the further sale of intoxicating hemp beverages for most of 2026 will create confusion for consumers and a lack of conformity with federal law,” DeWine wrote in his line-item veto message. “Further, purveyors of intoxicating hemp often market their products as an alcohol substitute, even claiming health benefits. The facts are that THC is not analogous to alcohol, is metabolized differently than alcohol, and does not intoxicate in the same way as alcohol does. This can mislead consumers into thinking these products will have the same effect on them as alcohol, when there is no way to guarantee such claims, thus creating safety issues.”
But industry stakeholders who filed the March 6 lawsuit believe DeWine’s veto was unconstitutional because it deletes 17 sections – spanning 15 pages of legislation – rather than a line.
In turn, the plaintiffs’ complaint seeks relief via a writ of mandamus that would force Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose to honor the original carve-out for hemp-derived beverages that would have extended through the end of the year.
The plaintiffs in the case include Cincinnati-based Fifty West Brewing Co. and Urban Artifact; Grove City-based Sarene Craft Beer Distributors Ohio; and Cycling Frog, an out-of-state distributor from Seattle with a principal place of business in Delaware, Ohio.
“The veto is pure policymaking and executive overreach,” the plaintiffs, referred to as “relators,” argue in the lawsuit. “Governor DeWine turned a sales window into a ban. He rewrote S.B. 56 – through clever deletions – so that it means the exact opposite of what the people’s representatives hammered out in the democratic process. … Governor DeWine’s purported line-item veto is null and void under any reasonable interpretation of ‘item.’”
Without court intervention, the relators argue that they will face potential criminal enforcement actions for possessing millions of dollars’ worth of inventory that they purchased in good faith before the governor’s veto, resulting in lost investments and sales. They also claim DeWine’s veto will force them to lay off dozens of employees, including 40 workers at Fifty West alone.
An Ohio-based beer manufacturer, self-distributor and retailer, Fifty West launched its hemp beverage line, Sunflower, in August 2024. The company invested more than $500,000 in the infrastructure to support its hemp-beverage business, including multiple vehicles for distribution, upgrades to its facility operation and numerous investments in equipment to support this line, according to the lawsuit.
In addition to naming the secretary of state as a respondent, the lawsuit names Ohio Division of Cannabis Control Superintendent James Canepa and Ohio Division of Liquor Control Superintendent Jackie DeGenova.
The relators also requested the court to grant a peremptory writ of mandamus, and if needed, an alternative writ, compelling these two superintendents to begin drafting policies that align with the hemp-derived beverage carve-out provisions that lawmakers included in the original S.B. 56 version they sent to DeWine’s desk.
These policies would put certain consumer safety and public health guardrails in place, including testing and labeling standards for DCPs.
The relators believe that had the temporary program for hemp-derived beverage products not been included in S.B. 56, which also makes substantial changes to the state’s voter-approved adult-use cannabis laws, then it would not have passed.
When lawmakers debated the legislation in November, House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati, even offered concerns that a one-year off-ramp for hemp beverages wasn’t long enough.
“That is a massive market for jobs. It’s a huge consumer market,” he said. “Businesses need to be able to plan. These are small businesses. They don’t have a ton of capital. And so, they needed a commitment from the Legislature that we were going to create a safe and regulated market for these incredibly desirable products that people are buying that are fueling the craft brewery industry.”
Under S.B. 56, Ohio lawmakers vowed to revisit their state laws on hemp beverage products should federal law shift. That said, there are now proposals in both the U.S. House and Senate to delay the federal intoxicating hemp product ban until November 2028.
The relators in the Ohio lawsuit argued that DeWine’s veto was “unmoored from the plain text and original public meaning” of Article II, Section 16 of the Ohio Constitution.
Rather than reflecting a “constitutional exercise of power,” the relators argued that the governor’s veto represents his “persistent desire” to write (or rewrite) legislation. The lawsuit points to DeWine’s unsuccessful attempt to incorporate a 90-day ban on intoxicating hemp products in October, when he declared a “state of emergency” on the matter.
“Governor DeWine thought he knew better than the people of Ohio,” the relators argued. “So, he ‘line-item’ vetoed every reference to the hemp-beverages sections in S.B. 56, struck the entire chapter that created a regulatory framework for hemp beverages, and deleted 15 pages of legislation. As one of the delegates to Ohio’s Constitutional Convention of 1912 put it in arguing for the current language limiting the governor to vetoing only ‘items,’ not ‘sections,’ ‘You can take the life out of any bill by cutting a section out of it.’”
