Back in November of last year, I wrote about hemp and CBD laws here. I have been teaching quite a bit on the subject lately and wanted to follow up that post with an examination of how legal use of hemp products may affect marijuana prosecutions in North Carolina. The state of hemp. As I outlined in the prior post, hemp products are legal under state and federal law. This is apparent to anyone that visits a hemp store, where you can purchase everything from CBD-infused gummy bears, lotions, or drinks, to hemp flowers, also known as “buds” of the plant. Hemp flowers are indistinguishable from marijuana flowers—they look the same, smell the same, and apparently taste the same. Just like dried marijuana flowers, the dried hemp buds can be smoked, vaped, or eaten. Ingesting legal hemp (in whatever form) does not cause a user to become impaired but does provide a dose of the popular compound cannabidiol, abbreviated CBD. Many hemp stores also sell paraphernalia used to smoke it, like rolling papers and pipes. Can you tell hemp from marijuana? Not very easily. No field test exists of which I’m aware, and traditional chemical analysis of cannabis typically only looks for the presence of THC, which is present in both marijuana and hemp. To distinguish hemp from marijuana, a chemical analysis that provides quantified levels of THC must be done. From what I understand, this is not a common test, and neither the State Crime lab nor most local crime [...]
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