The drug testing industry has been able to successfully downplay its accuracy problems in the past, but their complete inability to differentiate the ingestion of products that contain hemp seasoning, hemp-seeds, or hemp-seed oil from marijuana use is the biggest threat ever posed to the industry. The widespread availability of hemp containing products that cause a false positive, including everything from hemp-seed oil nutritional supplements to hemp-seed candy, cookies, cheese, bread, cooking oil, and general seasoning, puts the government drug testing programs in an utterly indefensible situation, according to Theodore Shults, MS, JD, Editor of the scientific substance abuse testing publication directed at physicians who administer drug tests, MRO Alert (published by the American Association of Medical Review Officers in Chapel Hill, NC). He states,"How can the government defend its mandatory drug testing programs while allowing the importation and distribution of hemp products that can cause a positive urinalysis? Today products can be purchased at the supermarket, health food store, or by mail order which when consumed will essentially result in a covered employee being sanctioned, evaluated for substance abuse and most likely terminated from employment." According to the MRO Alert, federally mandated drug testing will likely now fail the Supreme Court's constitutional test of reasonableness, and many experts predict that it is only a matter of time before federal drug testing programs will be challenged on this. The court would then probably enjoin employers from taking any adverse employment action on a positive marijuana test unless there is independent probable cause to suspect illegal marijuana use, essentially crippling the testing programs.

In a closed door session of the Department of Health and Human Services Drug Testing Advisory Board and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, strategies to resist the hemp-seed onslaught were laid out. These varied form the use of warning labels on hemp products to ordering employees to avoid certain foods as a condition of employment and attempts to increase the pressure on Congress to make all hemp products illegal. These all raise numerous practical and legal problems. Drug testing proponents also worry that measures that give individuals knowledge of the hemp-seed problem, also gives users an automatic defense. In the meantime, the strategy appears to be denial of the problem. The recommendations to the Medical Review Officers who evaluate positive test results is to strictly follow the guideline that states the only acceptable alternative medical explanation for a THC positive urinalysis is a prescription for Marinol even though it may cost innocent people their jobs, their livelihoods, their good reputations, and their rightful unemployment and disability benefits.

For the second time in six months, a jury overturned a military court marshal after hearing evidence that hemp oil may have caused the positive tests, exonerating Corporal Kevin Boyd and Master Sergeant Spencer Gaines. The Department of Defense realizes that now there is not only a problem of prosecuting future urinalysis cases, but also, there could well be new appeals filed on old cases based on this new defense. Boyd's attorney, Captain Todd Wallace, said that the combination of the growing body of evidence illustrating the forensic inadequacies of commercial drug-testing and the precedent set by his client's acquittal could pose serious trouble for the military's random drug testing program. "It's going to be tough on any government prosecutors because anyone who turns up positive on a test will argue this defense." Gaines's attorney similarly noted, "In the event that there are any marijuana smokers who missed the point, a smart marijuana user would be inclined to buy this stuff [hemp oil] and have it in his refrigerator in the event he pops positive on a urinalysis."