Whenever a bad story or a bad experience with cannabis is related, there’s a good chance edibles are involved. A 10-year-old who took edibles to school, mistaking them for Easter candy; dogs stoned to sickness on careless owners’ gummies; otherwise responsible and careful adults losing days after ignoring instructions, product labels, and common sense and eating several servings’ worth of weed in one sitting.
This is partially because, with cannabis legal for adults in nearly three dozen states, and with the 2018 Farm Bill legalizing the production of hemp and the sale of hemp products—which can also get you stoned, and, as long as they’re derived from hemp, can also be marketed and sold online, not restricted to dispensaries—there are more edible cannabis products than ever before in America.
But at least some of cannabis edibles’ mixed reputation is deserved.
Product safety and product consistency is an ongoing issue. And as a recent lab study commissioned by CBD Oracle found, some of these edibles are a lot stronger than they let on, and up to 3.7 times stronger than the edibles sold in state-regulated cannabis dispensaries. And these are the federally legal edibles—which, the same review found, were sold in-person and online without any age verification.
The best known active ingredient in cannabis is the cannabinoid tetrahydracannabinol, or THC. More accurately, it’s Delta-9 THC. Lesser known but more popular these days is Delta-8 THC, so named for a difference in carbon bonds.
You can get Delta-8 THC from hemp, which is why gummies containing Delta-8 THC have appeared in smoke shops, vape shops, and other merchants coast-to-coast. But since “hemp” is cannabis with 0.3 percent or less Delta-9 THC by dry weight, you can also get Delta-9 THC from hemp.
And, provided you extract enough of it, and provided the final product is less than 0.3 percent THC, you can then manufacture and market edibles with enough Delta-9 THC to get you high, as some enterprising edibles makers have discovered.
Ingenious and industrious, those same edibles makers aren’t quite so fastidious about product labeling.
In the past, CBD product-makers have been dinged for sloppy labeling, with CBD contents far above or below the advertised levels. Similar issues are plaguing hemp-derived Delta-9 edibles, as CBD Oracle’s review and analysis of 53 top-selling Delta-9 hemp-derived products found.
CBD Oracle bought 53 products from 48 different brands manufactured in 18 states, including states that still prohibit adult-use cannabis, including Texas and Tennessee, as well as legacy legal states like California and Colorado. Testing lab InfiniteCAL analyzed the products’ THC content.
Nearly half the products were mislabeled, with THC content more than 15 percent higher or lowered than the labels’ stated dosage. Some products were extremely strong, with up to 40 milligrams of THC per individual serving—four times stronger than the 10 mg/THC serving limits imposed on state-regulated cannabis edibles. And nearly every product was sold, either online or in person, without the buyers’ age verified.
Okay, but so what? According to legal experts, including top cannabis attorneys, the problem is that this latest study is just the latest demonstration that the 2018 Farm Bill has had unintended consequences.
The idea behind the legislation, signed by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) with a hemp pen before passed over to former President Donald Trump, was to legalize a non-intoxicating source of fiber and fuel: “rope, not dope,” as the slogan went.
But since Americans seem much more interested in getting a lift than they are in hemp clothes, hemp building material, or hemp anything else, product makers responded to market forces and came up with new and novel intoxicants.
That was not the idea. And now that Delta-9 product makers are pushing the limits even more with inaccurately labeled super-potent products sold without age verification, there’s an undeniable and quantifiable problem that’s just waiting for some ambitious, public-safety minded lawmaker to come along and punitively “solve.”
“We honestly never thought intoxicating products would be produced from hemp when we were advocating for legalization,” as Erica Stark of the National Hemp Association told CBD Oracle. Most lawmakers tell her, rightfully, that they were under the impression “hemp was never about getting high.”
After both the Delta-8 THC craze and this latest development have demonstrated otherwise, Congress is slowly coming to grips with the fact that it legalized a whole new class of intoxicants.
“Now the FDA needs to figure out how to regulate the industry,” Stark added.
Of course, at least some of these issues would be solved if lawmakers in the U.S. Senate would seriously consider another proposal.
Edibles with hemp-derived Delta-9 are popular because they’re more readily available and because they’re cheaper than heavily regulated cannabis edibles. That could change if Congress ended federal marijuana prohibition and legalized cannabis nationwide.
Until then, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, hemp will find a way.
