Carts, Wax, and Oh, My: The New World of Marijuana Extracts

The advent of cannabis legalization across the country has led to a proliferation of new types of cannabis products. There are skin patches, food and drinks (for humans and pets), vaporizer or “vape” cartridges (or “carts”), and different concentrate or extract products (“dabs”, “wax” or “shatter”, among other names). [Click that last link and scroll down to see a chart listing the different forms of extracts and their names.] The products can be made from lawful hemp, or from illegal marijuana alike. The illegal versions have found their way into North Carolina, and questions abound regarding how to handle these cases. The questions most commonly involve wax and cartridges, so this post takes a look at the issues surrounding those cases (leaving the skin patches and edibles for another day). Probable Cause and Extracts. Just as law enforcement and trial courts have a hard time distinguishing smokable hemp from marijuana for purposes of probable cause (discussed here), the same issues arise with extract products. Simply put, the sight or odor of these products may not be enough for probable cause, because there are hemp and marijuana versions of all of them. They cannot be distinguished from one another without a lab showing quantified levels of THC—a test our state and local crime labs aren’t performing. Traditionally, crime labs only test for the presence of THC, and both legal hemp-based products and the illegal marijuana products will produce a positive result. The situation is even more complicated than trying to tell raw [...]