Bill Would Slap Color-Coded Labels on Booze, THC, Kratom Drinks

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Picture a congressman standing in his kitchen, turning six different beverage cans around in his hands, hunting for fine print small enough to require reading glasses. That's reportedly how Rep. Nick LaLota, a Republican from New York's first district, described his own encounter with the modern beverage cooler, where a seltzer, a THC drink, a kratom tonic and a hard cider can all sit next to each other looking nearly identical. He couldn't tell at a glance which cans would just quench his thirst and which would get him high, buzzed, or both.

That moment of squinting at a can turned into legislation. H.R. 9913, the Safe Sips Act, is LaLota's answer to a beverage aisle that has quietly filled up with intoxicating options that look like ordinary sparkling water. Rather than writing separate rules for cannabis drinks, alcohol and kratom beverages, the bill treats them as one category with one problem: consumers can't tell what's in the can without real effort. So it proposes a single, unified labeling standard covering all of them at once.

The timing isn't incidental. Congress is already tied in knots over how to regulate hemp-derived THC drinks nationally, with competing bills fighting over taxation, dosage caps and whether these products should even remain legal. The Safe Sips Act doesn't try to settle that fight. It sidesteps the legality question entirely and focuses on something narrower and, LaLota would argue, harder to object to: making sure people know what they're about to drink.

What the Safe Sips Act Actually Requires

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H.R. 9913 was introduced by Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY) and has been referred to both the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Ways and Means Committee, a dual referral that reflects how the bill touches both consumer product regulation and tax-adjacent enforcement questions. The core mechanism is straightforward on paper: any drink containing THC or other intoxicating cannabinoids, alcohol, kratom compounds, or other intoxicating substances would need to carry one single designated color on its packaging, regardless of which of those substances is actually inside.

The placement matters as much as the color itself. The bill requires that color to appear specifically at the point of dispensing -- the bottle cap, the can's lid, the cork, or the pour nozzle -- the exact spot a person's hand touches right before the liquid reaches their mouth. That's a deliberate design choice. A label on the side of a can can get buried under graphics or turned away from view on a shelf, but a cap is unavoidable.

Because color alone doesn't work for everyone, the bill also requires a separate, non-color identifier: text, a symbol, a raised pattern, or some other tactile feature that lets blind or colorblind consumers identify an intoxicating beverage without relying on sight. That detail keeps the bill from being purely cosmetic and pushes it toward genuine accessibility.

The bigger idea here is unification rather than differentiation. Instead of assigning different colors to alcohol, THC and kratom separately, which would require consumers to memorize a small color-coded chart before every grocery run, the bill wants one universal signal. Any oddly colored cap becomes an instant red flag, no matter what's actually inside it, which simplifies the mental math for a shopper standing in front of a cooler full of look-alike cans.

Who Enforces It and When It Kicks In

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Two federal agencies would split enforcement duties under the Safe Sips Act, following the substance lines that already govern how these products are regulated elsewhere in federal law. The Department of Health and Human Services would oversee the cannabinoid and kratom side, delegating that work to the FDA. The Treasury Department would handle the alcohol side, delegating to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, better known as the TTB, which already regulates alcohol labeling and packaging standards.

That split isn't unusual. It mirrors how these categories are already treated in separate regulatory silos, with the FDA handling food, dietary supplement and drug-adjacent products while the TTB handles anything containing alcohol. The Safe Sips Act doesn't try to merge those agencies or create a new one. It just asks both to write compatible rules aimed at the same visual outcome.

The clock on all this moves slower than the bill's news-cycle urgency might suggest. Once signed into law, the responsible agencies would have two years to finalize the actual rules -- the specific color, the specific tactile or symbolic standard, and the enforcement mechanics. That's the drafting and rulemaking phase, complete with the public comment periods federal agencies are typically required to run.

Actual compliance wouldn't be required of manufacturers, distributors or sellers until four years after the law takes effect. That's a long runway, but it's consistent with how other major federal labeling mandates have rolled out historically, giving beverage companies time to redesign packaging lines, retool cap molds, and clear out existing inventory rather than forcing an overnight scramble. Anyone expecting color-coded caps at the grocery store next year would be waiting considerably longer than that.

Why LaLota Says He Wrote the Bill

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LaLota's public case for the bill leaned heavily on his own experience as a confused consumer rather than on abstract policy language. Around July 29, 2026, he posted a series of explanatory videos to social media walking through exactly what prompted him to write the Safe Sips Act, and the framing was consistently personal rather than technical.

In his telling, the modern beverage market has blurred a line that used to be obvious. Some of these drinks can get you high and drunk, he said, and some of them don't do either, but you genuinely can't tell which is which just by glancing at the shelf. That's a fair description of what's happened to the beverage cooler over the past few years, as hemp-derived THC seltzers have adopted the same sleek can designs, the same fruity flavor names and the same slim aluminum format as ordinary sparkling water and hard seltzer brands.

In one video, LaLota lined up six different beverage cans across his desk to make the point visually. He said it took him real time turning each one around, hunting for fine print, before he could sort out which ones contained THC, which contained alcohol, and which were just flavored water. If a sitting member of Congress needs a few minutes of label-hunting to figure that out, his argument goes, an average shopper grabbing a six-pack on their way to a barbecue has essentially no chance.

Notably, LaLota isn't using the bill to argue that hemp THC drinks should be banned or that kratom beverages shouldn't exist. He's pitched Safe Sips strictly as a consumer-safety and accessibility measure, which is likely a deliberate strategy to keep the bill out of the more polarized fight over whether these products should be legal at all.

One Bill Among Several: The Bigger Federal Mess

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The Safe Sips Act didn't emerge in a vacuum. It landed in the middle of what can fairly be called a chaotic patchwork of competing federal proposals on hemp and THC beverages, all surfacing within months of each other in 2026, each taking a different angle on the same underlying problem.

Rep. Andy Barr introduced a bipartisan bill around July 22, 2026 that takes a notably different approach: rather than focusing purely on labels, it would keep hemp-derived THC products federally legal while layering on per-milligram THC taxes and its own labeling requirements. That's a direct contrast with the harder-line approach favored elsewhere in the House.

That harder line shows up in the 2026 Farm Bill, which the House passed 224-200 on April 30, 2026, and which still contains language banning hemp-derived intoxicants outright. That provision now sits with a November 12, 2026 deadline pending in the Senate, meaning the fate of hemp THC drinks nationally could be decided through farm policy rather than through any of these standalone beverage bills.

Further back, the Wyden-Merkley Cannabinoid Safety and Regulation Act, introduced in December 2025, took yet another approach, proposing federal THC beverage limits of 5 milligrams per serving and 10 milligrams per container alongside its own standardized labeling scheme.

Lay these bills side by side and a pattern emerges even amid the disagreement. Lawmakers can't agree on whether hemp-derived THC drinks should remain legal, how they should be taxed, or which agency should police them. But labeling and dosage caps keep resurfacing across nearly every proposal, suggesting a rare point of consensus: whatever else happens, shoppers need clearer information than they're currently getting.

Whatever ultimately happens to hemp-derived THC's legal status in the Farm Bill standoff, the labeling question is shaping up as the one corner of this fight where lawmakers across party lines and competing bills seem to actually agree on something. Barr's tax-and-label approach, the Wyden-Merkley dosage caps, and LaLota's color-coded caps are different tools aimed at the same target: making sure a shopper can tell what's in the can before they crack it open.

None of that means quick relief for confused consumers. Even in the best-case scenario where the Safe Sips Act clears both committees, passes both chambers, and gets signed into law without changes, the bill's own timeline pushes real compliance out four years from enactment, on top of whatever time it takes to actually pass in the first place. Anyone picturing color-coded bottle caps showing up at their local grocery store next summer is picturing a timeline that doesn't exist yet.

Until any of these bills actually clear Congress, the only reliable method remains the one LaLota complained about on camera: turning the can around and reading the fine print. Given how tangled the broader federal fight over hemp THC has become, and how variable state law already is on cannabis beverages, kratom drinks and their sale, that fine-print habit is worth keeping regardless of which bill, if any, eventually moves. Anyone buying or selling these products should also check their own state's specific rules, since what's legal and how it must be labeled can differ sharply from one state line to the next.