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Ask most hemp executives about the pending November 12th THC cap, and you’ll get some version of dread. Ask Thomas Winstanley, and you get this:
“There may be some pain in there. But that doesn’t mean when a new Congress comes in in January that all of this stuff is just wiped clean.”
November 12 is the day Section 781 takes effect, the federal provision tucked into last year’s spending bill that will cap finished hemp-derived products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container and effectively wipe out most of the consumable hemp category. As President of Edibles.com, the wellness-focused hemp marketplace owned by the parent of Edible Arrangements, Winstanley would seem to have every reason to treat that date as a cliff. He doesn’t.
He’s been to the Hill enough times this year to read the room, and what he hears is a Congress whose education on hemp policy is catching up fast. He’s also still trying to convince the cannabis industry he came from that he isn’t the enemy.
I spoke with Winstanley about how a six-year veteran of one of the East Coast’s most respected craft cannabis operators ended up running a hemp-derived THC platform out of Atlanta, what he’s actually hearing in those congressional meetings, and why he thinks the cannabis and hemp industries are reading each other completely wrong.
From a Two-Store Medical Operator to the Edibles.com Pitch
Winstanley joined Theory Wellness back in 2018, when the company had two medical dispensaries in Western Massachusetts and was getting ready to flip to adult-use sales. The job was a startup job, which meant he did pretty much everything. Performance marketing. E-commerce. Packaging. Branding. “Whatever needed to be done,” as he put it.
Theory became the sixth recreational dispensary in Massachusetts, and because it sat closer to New York City than any other adult-use store at the time, it caught a tourism wave. The company expanded fast into Maine, Vermont, and New Jersey. By the time Winstanley left, Theory was running roughly 18 dispensaries across six or seven states and had stacked up a list of industry firsts, including one of the first outdoor recreational cultivation farms on the East Coast.
He’s especially proud of the beverage work they did. Theory’s Hi5 brand launched in 2021 and sold a million units in its first six months in Massachusetts. That success led to another first: a beverage-only dispensary, tucked under the Hi5 brand inside an old car dealership outside Boston. The idea came to him on a site walk.
“Beverages take up so much inventory space,” he said. “I asked the co-founders, could we ever just throw a really small door here that’s just under our Hi5 brand name, under the same license, and have it be a place where you could buy a bunch of beverages, bodega-style? It was one of my favorite SKUs we ever made.”
When the Edibles.com opportunity came up, Winstanley said the conversations had to clear a philosophical bar before he’d say yes. “Just because you have a URL doesn’t make a business,” he told them. He wanted to know whether the team was committed to building responsibly, or whether this was going to be a pump-and-dump play. After a series of long talks, he was convinced they were on the same page.
He joined in July 2024 and promptly disappeared. Nine months of stealth. He moved his family from Massachusetts to Atlanta, and old colleagues kept asking why he’d left the industry. “I was like, just wait and see.”
Wellness, Not Recreation
Edibles.com launched publicly in March 2025 as a curated marketplace for hemp-derived THC gummies, beverages, and topicals. Customers don’t shop by cannabinoid acronym. They shop by outcome: sleep, relaxation, energy, recovery.
That approach is working. Sleep has been a top category since day one.
“Thirty-three percent of Americans have some form of sleep issue,” Winstanley said. “Melatonin is no longer in vogue. Magnesium has started to fill that gap. From my experience running medical programs at Theory, hemp has been a democratizing force for access. These products are getting into markets that regulated THC probably will never reach.”
The wellness positioning was a deliberate fork in the road. Early in the project, Winstanley pushed Silber on a question he wanted answered before they went any further. Were they going wellness, or were they going recreational? Ultimately, they were more aligned than opposed to this approach, paving the way to bring the brand to life.
“I said, I want to go wellness. If we treat this like a party product, we’re going to have a lot of problems, and it’s going to be a little disingenuous. That’s not what this business should be, and I don’t think it’s what hemp should be either.”
The principles that came out of that conversation: low dose only, respectable brands only, and only partners who already had real consumer trust to lean on. None of which describes most of what Winstanley saw when he moved south from regulated New England.
“In Georgia, in every gas station, there are 5,000-milligram gummies sold with acronyms for cannabinoids I have never heard of in my entire life,” he said. “That is a concern to me. That’s the cognitive dissonance of hemp we’re trying to bridge.”
The November 2026 Cliff
The cognitive dissonance is also the political problem.
The McConnell provision was signed into law in November 2025 with a 365-day implementation window. The U.S. Hemp Roundtable estimates that when enforcement begins, the change will wipe out roughly 95 percent of existing hemp-derived cannabinoid products, more than 300,000 jobs, and $1.5 billion in state tax revenue.
Government relations sits in Winstanley’s portfolio as President, and he says the tone of his DC meetings has shifted noticeably.
“With every visit I make to DC, it becomes more clear that members of Congress who didn’t know what was happening a year or two ago, their education is now coming up very quickly,” he said. “Every visit seems to be less exposition on context and more directional toward solution. We are no longer setting up the problem with the industry. The conversations are very much solution-oriented.”
He’s realistic about the near-term disruption. Inventory will get managed down. Sales will pause. Some operators will pack it in. But he doesn’t read November as the end of the story so much as the beginning of the next chapter, with a new Congress, new Senate, and new House seated in January.
He pointed to a handful of signals he reads as bullish for the longer arc. A federal CBD wellness study program. Ongoing cannabis rescheduling discussions. More THC cap-related bills introduced in this Congress than in U.S. history. A recent statement from President Trump urging Congress to come up with a better solution than the McConnell language. “The Mitch McConnell language is a cure way worse than the disease that exists today,” Winstanley said.
He was also blunt about what happens if Washington does nothing.
“If we don’t do anything, in 18 months we are literally handing over the entire industry to the black market. I go to those gas stations. I scan the QR codes. They don’t exist. There’s no one to go after when things go awry. These products are not domestically produced.”
Where Section 781 Stands Right Now
June 2026 update. Winstanley’s read of the moment lines up with where serious hemp operators have publicly landed five months out from enforcement. Most are no longer betting on a clean federal repeal. Three live tracks are doing the work instead.
Legislation. Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley introduced the Cannabinoid Safety and Regulation Act (S. 3474) in December 2025. It would scrap Section 781 and replace it with a regulated framework: 5mg of THC per serving, 50mg per container, 21-and-over, mandatory testing, packaging standards. The bill has not moved out of committee as of this writing.
Litigation. State-level suits are the only courtroom action moving the needle. In Texas, the Texas Hemp Business Council and Hemp Industry & Farmers of America won a temporary restraining order in April against DSHS rules that mirrored the federal ban, and the back-and-forth between district and appeals courts has continued into the spring. In Ohio, two county courts have blocked enforcement of SB 56 for specific plaintiffs. None of this changes the federal November 12 deadline. It buys time at the state level.
Executive action. President Trump’s December 18 executive order directed federal agencies to develop regulations for hemp-derived THC and expand research. It does not repeal Section 781 — only Congress can — but hemp advocates read it as a signal that the administration prefers regulation over prohibition.
What no one is talking about loudly enough: payment processors, insurance carriers, and commercial landlords are already pulling back from hemp-derived THC ahead of November 12. Even if Congress fixes the law in January, some of the commercial damage is already done.
A Supplement-Style Lane for Low-Dose THC
When I asked him what good regulation would actually look like, Winstanley pointed to the dietary supplement framework as the closest available parallel, with some caveats. Like melatonin or caffeine, cannabinoids can be misused in excess. But a thoughtful low-dose OTC lane is, in his view, both feasible and overdue.
When his team reviews federal bill text, they push for a few specific guardrails. Only bioavailable, naturally occurring cannabinoids, which would rule out the synthetic novel cannabinoids flooding gas stations. No caps on non-intoxicating cannabinoids like CBD. Per-serving caps on Delta-9 THC in the 3-to-5-milligram range. Total active cannabinoid disclosure on packaging, but with some flexibility rather than overly pedantic caps that could choke product development. And no caps on topicals, where bioavailability requirements are fundamentally different from edibles.
A Message to the MSO Crowd
Winstanley talked about his former side of the aisle. He’s been called a turncoat, sometimes jokingly and sometimes not, by cannabis operators frustrated that hemp companies don’t carry the 280E tax burden that has squeezed margins in regulated cannabis markets.
“I’m the first person to acknowledge the imbalance in regulatory frameworks,” he said. “But what I don’t recede from is my whole onus of being in this industry is safe access to THC. I care if it’s gas station weed. I do not care if it’s sending my mom a case of canned seltzers because she loves them.”
What he keeps trying to tell MSO operators is that hemp-derived, low-dose, OTC products are not a competitive threat to high-dose vapes, infused pre-rolls, or flower sold in dispensaries. They are a complementary lane with much better capital efficiency than building out another 100,000-square-foot indoor cultivation facility.
“There’s a symbiotic opportunity between the economic growth of the category,” he said. “If three- or five-milligram single-serving gummies exist, that’s not going to take away the market share of a cannabis operator selling vapes at a higher dose. Why aren’t more operators participating on both sides?”
18 Months Out
Before we wrapped, I asked him where he wants Edibles.com, and the broader category, to be in 18 months. His answer was more policy north star than business plan.
“I hope we are having this conversation around universal low-dose THC access to every American that wants it,” he said. “I hope there’s some form of mutual understanding with regulated cannabis to know that we’re not necessarily a threat, but an opportunity. The future of THC regulation is not going to be about hemp or cannabis. It’s going to be about dosing, form factors, and where points of commerce exist for those.”
He’d also like to see what he called a Renaissance of entrepreneurs continue. “One of the most amazing things about hemp is that the formulation and entrepreneurial spirit that existed in hemp has been absent in some parts of regulated cannabis. Nobody really cared about a one-to-one or one-to-three THC-to-CBD ratio gummy, because people just wanted to get stoned. That’s also cool. But there is an OTC lane for low-dose cannabinoids, and we should not restrict that if it’s in the best interest of consumer health.”
Winstanley isn’t pretending November 12 will be painless. But he’s betting that a Congress now fluent in the policy, and an industry finally speaking in terms of dosing instead of acronyms, will get this right on the other side of it. For him, that’s the job now: not building a hemp brand that survives the cliff, but making the case that solid ground lies beyond it.
Thomas Winstanle is President of Edibles.com, an Atlanta-based wellness-focused e-commerce marketplace for hemp-derived THC products owned by Edible Brands, the parent company of Edible Arrangements.
