South Dakota
Law banning sale of some near-pot products takes effect, but won’t prevent every legal high • South Dakota Searchlight
As of today, several varieties of intoxicating hemp products are illegal to sell or produce in the state of South Dakota.
That doesn’t necessarily put them out of reach for South Dakotans.
It also doesn’t mean death for the market in alternative intoxicants that’s emerged across South Dakota and the nation in part thanks to a loophole in the 2018 federal farm bill, which legalized hemp.
‘Fake weed’ ban will take effect Monday as lawsuit against it proceeds
Even if all the products now banned through the actions of the South Dakota Legislature last winter are pulled from store shelves in the state – an open question as the law takes effect – buyers can purchase them online with little fear of repercussion, as their possession isn’t prohibited through the new law.
The law targets synthetically produced delta-8, delta-9, delta-10, THC-O, THC-P and HHC. Each are chemical cousins of delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the high-inducing compound in cannabis flowers.
Sellers or producers of the hemp-derived products could be charged with a class 2 misdemeanor – the lowest-level crime in the state, punishable by up to 30 days in jail.
But the testing necessary to prove any product violates the law has limits and requires wait times for local law enforcement. The state’s largest policing agencies have no immediate plans to prioritize enforcement.
That puts the onus on retailers to follow a law that would cut into revenues or force them out of business.
A federal lawsuit from Pierre-based Hemp Quarters 605 is also in play. The company attempted to block the new law as an unconstitutional overreach that interferes with the interstate commerce permitted under the federal farm bill. But U.S. District Judge Eric Schulte declined to issue a preliminary injunction.
Even without the injunction, though, the company’s lawsuit will proceed and could eventually upend the law.
Caleb Rose of Rapid City owns Black Hills Vapors and recently founded a trade group called South Dakota Retailers for Better Alternatives to advocate for stores that sell hemp-derived products.
Rose said he planned to pull the targeted products from the shelves of his West River stores, but the lack of certainty could mean other retailers opt to ignore the new law.
“I think everybody in town and everybody in the state is going to have to make their own calls and consult their lawyers on what they want to do,” Rose said.
Testing complications
Questions of enforcement are tied to product testing. A can of gummies on a retailer’s shelf might say “delta-8,” but prosecutors would have to prove the product is illegal beyond a reasonable doubt.
Doing that requires testing, which for the newly illegal substances involves a waiting period for local officers and prosecutors. There are field tests for some felony-level narcotics like methamphetamine, and some agencies can test for the presence of the active ingredient in traditional cannabis, but there are no such tests for products like hemp-derived gummies or delta-8 vape pens. For those, police would rely on the state Department of Health lab.
That lab can distinguish between delta-8, delta-9 and delta-10 THC, according to spokesperson Tia Kafka.
But there is no test that can show with certainty that the chemicals present in any particular product are naturally or synthetically derived. To run afoul of the new law, the offending chemical must have been altered from its original state. In theory, products with high levels of the chemicals would be legal if they were naturally derived.
Kafka said that shouldn’t prevent police from making a call on enforcement. Delta-8 is only found in small amounts naturally, so Kafka said high levels of those compounds would be enough to show that they’ve been modified and are therefore illegal to sell.
Even if a product claims to contain unaltered, unadulterated delta-8, Kafka wrote that testing can help triangulate an intoxicant’s origin.
Products with synthetically produced hemp chemicals “often have contaminants from the chemical reaction which can be an indicator that a product is not 100% natural,” Kafka said.
The legalization of hemp and medical marijuana has already slowed the pace of cannabis testing at the state lab, though. In 2020, the state conducted 807 tests for cannabis. Last year, the lab did 99.
“Following legalization of industrial hemp and medical cannabis, state laws changed significantly leading to reduced cannabis testing,” she said.
Law enforcement awaits guidance
It’s unclear if the new law will spur more law enforcement interest in lab testing, but agencies have given no indication that enforcement will become a priority.
Decisions on enforcement come at the local level, Attorney General Marty Jackley said.
There are no plans to push for investigations of shops or hemp products from the state level just because they’re sold in hundreds of stores, he said.
No business can be searched or spot-checked for compliance with the law without probable cause and a warrant, he said.
“What I can tell you is the Legislature took certain action. They made certain conduct illegal,” Jackley said. “Law enforcement’s job is to enforce that. We don’t do anything special with respect to that.”
In the Hemp Quarters 605 lawsuit, court records show that the Hughes County State’s Attorney’s Office does not intend to immediately prosecute the company’s owners for violations of the new law.
Sioux Falls Police Department spokesperson Sam Clemens said his agency awaits guidance from the Minnehaha County State Attorney’s Office on what kinds of enforcement actions it might need to take to enforce the new misdemeanor.
Minnehaha County State’s Attorney Daniel Haggar has not offered guidance on enforcement, though. He told South Dakota Searchlight that his office will evaluate any cases brought by police to determine if prosecutions are necessary.
Katy Urban, spokesperson for the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office, offered a similar response by email. She wrote that prosecutors in Rapid City will consider the merits of any case presented to them by police agencies.
Rapid City Police Department spokesperson Brendyn Medina, meanwhile, said his agency awaits enforcement guidance from the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office.
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Even if law enforcement were to doggedly investigate the sale of newly illegal products, plenty of other avenues for a legal high remain, both for sellers and users.
Other non-hemp products include kratom, kava and magic mushroom hallucinogens, the latter of which are produced with different mushrooms from the federally illegal fungus psilocybin. Some classes of non-alcoholic, hemp-derived beverages, available in bars, restaurants and grocery stores around the state, will also remain available.
Joshua Williston manages a Chasing Clouds vape and smoke shop in Sioux Falls, and said late last week he’d remove the now-banned products from the shelf by July 1. Chasing Clouds is a chain store, and he said anything unsold and illegal today will be shipped off for sale in states without a ban.
Williston expects customers who relied on those products will either get medical marijuana cards, buy recreational marijuana on the black market or find other ways to get high.
“It’s probably going to slow business down, but it ain’t gonna stop,” Williston said. “It’ll pick back up in other areas, because once it’s no longer an option, people will just find other things to substitute it with.”
Sponsor: Federal fix needed
Rep. Brian Mulder, R-Sioux Falls, was the new law’s prime sponsor. He told South Dakota Searchlight he understands his bill’s practical limitations, but that he’s hopeful most retailers will reduce the supply of near-pot intoxicants by complying with the law.
He’s also hopeful because of ongoing discussions in Washington, D.C., about the next federal farm bill. Congress has debated the next version of that bill for more than a year, and a provision added by the U.S. House Agriculture Committee in May aims to close the loophole that created the market by drawing a legal distinction between hemp grown for chemical extraction and hemp grown to produce things like food or fiber.
Congress has already extended its deadline for passage of the farm bill once. The deadline for passage is now September.
“However quickly that could go into law, it might be moot here in South Dakota for us to try to address anything else,” Mulder said.
Requests for comment sent to all three members of South Dakota’s congressional delegation on the farm bill and hemp went unanswered.
Mulder, who works with an organization called Volunteers of America that offers chemical dependency services, said lawmakers in South Dakota want to do what he thinks the federal government meant to do with the 2018 farm bill.
The feds didn’t mean to legalize weed with a loophole, he said.
“We were trying to deliver something that was the true intent of the 2018 farm bill, where hemp products were being sold for fiber, fabrics, building materials and some of the therapeutics made with CBD,” he said.
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The existing water treatment plant for the Minnehaha Community Water Corp. on June 9, 2026, south of Dell Rapids, S.D. (Photo: Bart Pfankuch / South Dakota News Watch)
DELL RAPIDS, S.D. – Scott Buss can only imagine what this town north of Sioux Falls might have looked like – and how many jobs and taxes would have been generated – if there wasn’t a local shortage of available water.
Buss, executive director of the Minnehaha Community Water Corp., sat in the conference room of the rural water system based in Dell Rapids recently and ticked off the industrial and agricultural projects turned away due to a lack of water.
After hitting its limit on how much water it can provide a few years ago, the rural system has had to turn away proposed projects valued at hundreds of millions of dollars that offered an untold number of new jobs, he said.
The rejected projects include the Agropur Cheese plant that eventually opened in Lake Norden. A few proposed hog farms and dairy expansions in northern Minnehaha County were also stalled, Buss said.
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Other proposals, most of which never came to fruition in South Dakota, included the $1.5 billion Gevo corn-based jet fuel plant, the $5oo million Wholestone Farms hog processing plant and a data center that at some point all eyed the Dell Rapids area for development.
“All the water rights are spoken for between Dell Rapids and Sioux Falls, so there was no more water to be had in Minnehaha County,” Buss told News Watch in an interview in June. “With all the (residential) development that was coming in, we realized that our well capacity and our treatment capacity was limiting our ability to take on new high water-use customers.”
Buss and the nonprofit corporation’s board of directors aren’t waiting around to potentially miss out on more opportunities.
In a unique arrangement, the corporation is partnering with the neighboring Big Sioux Community Water System to the north on a $170 million expansion project called Shared Resources. The expansion, started three years ago, will use new wells into the Big Sioux Aquifer to generate 8 million gallons of water more per day starting this fall.
“It’s going to be a huge and great benefit for Big Sioux and Minnehaha water,” said Jodi Johanson, director of the Big Sioux system based in Egan. “This project is going to make sure that down the road we have enough water for the future.”
2 systems get stronger together
The Minnehaha water corporation is still able to bring on new residential and retail customers who consume part of the 9.2 million gallons of treated water it can provide on a daily basis.
The system was formed by a group of farmers and landowners in the 1970s but sought a reliable way of providing more and cleaner water to residents of Minnehaha County outside of Sioux Falls who relied exclusively on individual wells. The system started with about 1,200 customers but has grown to more than 5,500 now in seven cities, mostly north of the Sioux Falls metro area.
Given the limits on water from the aquifer, and balancing the water needs of consistent housing and retail growth in northern Minnehaha County, the water system had to say no to developments that request 1 million or more gallons of water per day, Buss said. A million gallons per day is equivalent to the water consumption of about 4,300 homes, he said.
Billions needed to keep South Dakota taps flowing
South Dakota water systems will increasingly turn to the Missouri River to provide water for future population, agricultural and industrial growth. But plans will require billions of dollars and decades of construction to keep taps flowing freely.
As with other rural water systems in South Dakota, the aquifers the systems rely on for their water are either running low or are legally tapped out, or both.
In the case of Minnehaha water corporation, the Big Sioux River Aquifer has gotten drier, but state law is also preventing it from taking more water from the aquifer.
In 1996, the state Water Management Board allocated water rights, or withdrawal limits, to systems that take groundwater from the aquifer, Buss said.
Those limits have now been reached, meaning that Minnehaha water cannot take any more than the 7 million gallons per day it is drawing now.
The system also receives about 2 million gallons per day from the Lewis & Clark Regional Water System, making its daily maximum capacity of about 9.2 million gallons per day, which it sometimes reaches, especially during spring planting season or hot summer months.
Directly to the north, the Big Sioux Community Water System produces up to 2 million gallons per day for about 2,400 customers in Moody and Lake counties as well as some in Brookings County and in western Minnesota, Johanson said.
The system still has room within its water rights to draw more water, making it an attractive partner for Minnehaha water.
Though Big Sioux Community Water System has not turned away any large projects, it needs more water to serve a boom in residential growth in the region, Johanson said.
In the area around Lake Madison, near Madison, developers are considering projects that could someday bring 500 new homes and a new nine-hole golf course, she said.
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The system also serves a number of dairies that use significant water and provides water to the Dakota Ethanol plant in Wentworth, which is undergoing an expansion. Farmers in the region are also using greater quantities of water to deliver chemicals onto their land, Johanson said.
“This is our first expansion,” she said. “We’re looking forward and we’re trying to find the solution before we face a problem.”
Federal government and customers pay the way
The biggest Shared Resources ticket item is a new $80 million water treatment plant that is nearly completed on 240th Street a few miles north of Dell Rapids.
A 20-inch pipeline from the plant to the east will end at a 1.5 million gallon water tower, and a 24-inch pipeline to the west will terminate at a ground-level storage tank with a 4 million gallon capacity.
Six new wells will draw the water, and the storage tanks will provide both pressure and the ability to adapt to changing demands without service interruption, Buss said.
As with most modern water projects, the costs will be shared by government and end users. The systems are funding the project with $49 million in grants from the Biden-era American Rescue Plan Act and $121 million in low-interest loans from South Dakota’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund.
The two systems are sharing the cost of the project loans commensurate with how much water they will receive, meaning Minnehaha will pay 65% of the costs for its 5 million gallons per day while Big Sioux will kick in 35% for its 3 million gallons more per day.
Minnehaha water is assuming $87 million in new debt and Big Sioux will take on $42 million in new debt, Buss said.
The average residential consumer in both systems that uses about 7,000 gallons per month will see their bill rise to $135 a month, roughly double the cost in 2020.
“It’s a big project, and it’s a good example of how two systems can work together to have some economies of scale,” Buss said.
Ratepayers will see a significant increase in their monthly water bills. The average residential consumer in both systems that uses about 7,000 gallons per month will see their bill rise to $135 a month, roughly double the cost in 2020, Buss said.
A big project, but even more water needed
But both systems view the Shared Resources project as a temporary fix and both are looking toward proposed projects that will tap the Missouri River for more water in the future.
Buss said his system has applied for 10 million gallons more water per day from Lewis & Clark, which has two expansion efforts planned.
Minnehaha water has simultaneously applied to receive 10 million gallons per day from the proposed Dakota Mainstem Regional Water System, a potentially $10 billion project to carry Missouri River water to more than 50 communities and organizations across eastern South Dakota and parts of Minnesota and Iowa.
The dual application effort is to make sure Minnehaha water can rely on taking in more water from at least one of the two systems as they come online, Buss said.
Johanson said Big Sioux has also signed on to accept water from Dakota Mainstem, even if it takes 20 to 40 years for the water to begin flowing.
To ensure that steady supply of high-quality drinking water, four major projects are in progress to take more water from the Missouri River – including WEB Water in the northeast, Lewis & Clark and the proposed Dakota Mainstem in the southeast as well as the proposed Western Dakota Regional Water System in western South Dakota and the Black Hills.
The projects are part of a wide-scale increase in water service capacity now underway in South Dakota, where water managers of several systems are implementing plans to serve the state for the next 40 to 50 years.
Regional rural water systems such as Minnehaha and Big Sioux are critical components of those projects because they provide water to communities and individual customers at the end of the delivery system.
Alicia Deschepper, zoning administrator for Moody County, said the water system expansions should allow for more growth to occur in Moody and Minnehaha counties, which are seeing new single-family housing developed at a rapid rate.
“I think it will be a great thing for our county and hopefully enable us to bring in more bigger businesses as well as more homes,” Deschepper said.
South Dakota News Watch is an independent nonprofit. Read, donate and subscribe for free at sdnewswatch.org. Contact content director Bart Pfankuch: 605-937-9398/bart.pfankuch@sdnewswatch.org.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) – The South Dakota Department of Public Safety said a nine-year-old girl from Waterloo, Iowa, is dead following a fatal Hughes County crash on Saturday.
This crash happened on Saturday, July 4, near the Spring Creek Recreation Area about 15 miles northwest of Pierre.
Preliminary crash information suggests a utility vehicle driven by a 37-year-old Iowa man was driving south on Spring Creek Drive. He attempted to turn around and rolled the vehicle.
A 16-year-old boy was also in the vehicle and was hurt, while the driver was not hurt.
The South Dakota Highway Patrol is investigating the crash.
Copyright 2026 Dakota News Now. All rights reserved.
RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – Beginning July 7, six Little League All-Star teams from across South Dakota will compete at Collins Field during the 2026 South Dakota Little League State Tournament.
For many players, it’s the biggest stage they’ve experienced. Every pitch, hit and catch could help extend their summer and earn a trip to regional competition.
Rapid City will be well represented with both Canyon Lake and Harney Little League taking the field, while teams from Pine Ridge, Pierre, Brandon Valley and Sioux Falls round out the tournament.
The weeklong event also brings families, coaches and fans from across South Dakota to the Black Hills, creating a busy week at the ballpark filled with community support and hometown pride.
When the final out is recorded on July 12, one team will leave Rapid City carrying a state championship trophy—and a chance to keep its postseason journey going.
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Copyright 2026 KOTA. All rights reserved.
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