Earlier this month a reporter from WEKU, the public radio station in Richmond, interviewed me about the federal deadline that will pull most hemp-derived products off the shelves. The story ran on WEKU and on WFPL in Louisville, and some of you may have heard it.
I was glad to be interviewed, and to her credit the reporter did include my point that this business needs regulation.
What didn’t make the final cut was the harder and more useful story, the one that has been missing from ten months of coverage: bad actors and badly written law wrecked this market long before Congress got around to it. The companies that played it straight are about to be punished alongside the ones that didn’t.
So let me tell you that story here.
How “hemp” became intoxicating
There are two ways of making hemp-derived CBD intoxicating.
First, chemists found a way to make products that get people high while technically meeting the letter of the law. The central step is to rearrange CBD — the good, non-intoxicating, healing cannabinoid — into inebriating molecules. Acids such as sulfuric, hydrochloric, or phosphoric, plus heat, convert CBD into THC isomers, particularly Delta-8.
In plain terms: labs take legal CBD and turn it into THC look-alikes that can get you very stoned.
This was challenged in court, and in 2022 the Ninth Circuit held that hemp-derived Delta-8 fell within the 2018 Farm Bill’s definition of hemp. Once that legal theory was clear, “stoner hemp” flooded in. It is why you can buy intoxicating gummies, vapes, and beverages online and at gas stations across the country. From there the sketchy operators, and a few legacy brands, moved past Delta-8 to Delta-10, HHC, and THCP — and to high-THCA flower sold as hemp, which converts to ordinary THC the moment you heat it.
The second way needs no lab tricks at all. The 2018 Farm Bill set its 0.3% limit on a dry weight basis — the percentage applied to the weight of the plant biomass. Apply that percentage to the weight of a finished gummy instead, and you can pack a full intoxicating dose into a legal product simply by making the candy heavy.
The math is worth understanding, because it is only division. A Cannabuzz Northern Lights gummy weighs 6 grams — 6,000 mg — and contains 15 mg of THC. Fifteen divided by 6,000 is 0.25% on a dry weight basis, so it passes. A Cornbread Hemp Blood Orange Bliss gummy carries 10 mg of THC in 5 grams, or 5,000 mg. of candy. Ten divided by 5,000 is 0.2%, so it passes as well. Both sit comfortably under the 0.3% ceiling, and at that ceiling a 5-gram gummy could legally hold 15 mg. Ten or fifteen milligrams of Delta-9 THC is plenty to make a grown adult stoned.
That is the loophole, and a great many brands are built on it.
By comparison, a Mt. Folly gummy weighs 3 grams and carries 2 mg of THC alongside 50 mg of CBD — roughly a tenth of the THC in the gummies designed to get you high. Ours will help you sleep. Taken as directed, they will not make you stoned.
Where that leaves us in December
The law Congress passed last November redefines hemp two ways. It caps a finished product at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container — not per serving, but per package. It also bans cannabinoids that the plant doesn’t make: Delta-8, HHC and similar lab made synthetic THC look-alikes. I have no quarrel with regulating this industry. The correct limit is one that stays close to the plant — somewhere around 1.5- 2 milligrams per gummy. This is what full-spectrum hemp grown for CBD actually contains. It is what our gummy contains. The regulatory cap doesn’t distinguish between a company selling a 15 mg THC candy as a “wellness” product and a farm-based company selling a full spectrum organic Kentucky hemp product. The upcoming regulations capture and eliminate both.
What we’re doing about it
Sticking to our word, because we never used the loophole in the first place. At Laura’s, we’ve introduced Sleepy Caramels — plenty of CBD plus CBN, the sleep cannabinoid, and no THC at all. Our CBD caramels and chocolates, which ship as soon as the weather cools a little more, have CBD and the other entourage cannabinoids, and no THC either.
