The November 12 deadline just moved

Where Hemp Stands in North Carolina

Short version: the federal deadline that would have cleared most of our shelves on November 12 just got pushed back.

Early Saturday morning, the Senate voted 90-6 to move it to December 11. The House still has to sign off when it gets back from recess later this month, so nothing is carved in stone. It's one month, not a reprieve. But it's the first time Congress has moved in our direction at all, and December 11 is also the day government funding runs out — which means this comes up again in the same package. That's worth something.

If you want to do one thing after reading this, do this one: find your legislators and call them. North Carolina has no ballot initiatives. Calling is the best thing you can do.

We may have won a battle while making the war harder

The hemp community stopped the NC House from passing the Senate's THC ban. That was a real win. But we seem to have poked the bear.

A group of law enforcement officers held a press conference in Raleigh last week asking that possession of THCA flower be made a crime. And in Washington, our own Senator Ted Budd must have screened Reefer Madness right before he walked onto the Senate floor. He filed an amendment to strip the delay out of the funding bill, then gave a speech calling intoxicating hemp a public health crisis that threatens our children, our workforce, and military readiness. It looked like something out of 1937.

That little hemp ban tucked into last year's must-pass bill wasn't a drafting mistake in a big document. There's serious money behind it.

What the law actually says

I want to be careful here, because there's a lot of bad information going around, including some I repeated myself.

The law on the books right now — Section 781 — caps finished hemp products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. Not per serving. Per container. A single 5mg gummy is more than twelve times that. A ten-milligram beverage is twenty-five times. A jar of twenty gummies is two hundred and fifty times over.

There are bills in Congress that would replace that with something workable — 5mg per serving, 50mg per container for edibles, an age-21 minimum, third-party testing. That's the framework the industry is asking for, and it's the one you may have heard described as "what Congress is going to allow." It isn't law. None of those bills have passed.

The correction here is about timing. Congress isn't saving hemp in a form we can't use — Congress hasn't saved hemp at all. Not yet, and maybe not ever. As written, the federal law doesn't leave much of anything standing anywhere — not the flower, not the gummies, not the seltzers, and it reaches a lot of ordinary CBD too.

Where North Carolina is uniquely exposed is the part I want to be very clear about, because it holds true even if we win.

Say Congress passes the framework the industry is asking for — 5mg per serving, 50mg per container, age 21, real testing. Headlines say hemp is saved. And it would be, for a lot of people. But that framework legalizes low-dose products: beverages, light gummies. It does not legalize flower, and it does not legalize the higher-dose products. In states with dispensaries, that's fine — those products stay available through a licensed channel, and now customers get the low-dose stuff at the grocery store too. Those states end up with both.

We're one of twelve states with neither medical nor adult-use marijuana. There is no licensed channel here. So in that same scenario, North Carolina gets seltzers and nothing else. The flower this store was built on has nowhere legal to exist in this state, because we never built the place for it to go.

That's the whole problem in one sentence: a federal fix that saves hemp everywhere else is still an industry-killer here, unless the General Assembly acts. And a short session, when no new bills are allowed, is not where dramatic action usually happens.

This is not the fight you think it is

Here's the part that surprised me.

The delay didn't come from the hemp lobby outmaneuvering anybody. It was put into the funding bill at the White House's request. The President personally called Senator Budd about it. When Budd moved to strip it out, the motion to kill his amendment came from a Democrat, Amy Klobuchar, and it passed 61-32 with Republicans on both sides.

I'm not going to pretend I understand every motive in that room. The same policy shop that wrote Project 2025 wanted hemp gone, and now this administration has spent capital to push the deadline back. People contain multitudes, apparently.

But it does mean something for you, practically: you do not have to pick a team to make this phone call. If you're a conservative in Rowan County who uses THC for your back or your sleep, calling your representative isn't crossing any line. Your president's people asked for this delay. Your senator fought it. That's the actual shape of the thing.

There is real opposition, and it isn't grassroots. Large publicly traded marijuana, alcohol, pharmaceutical, and tobacco companies have limitless resources and a clear interest in hemp disappearing.

What I actually think

I think North Carolina had it closer to right than people give it credit for. Cannabis, hemp, marijuana, THC — whatever you want to call it — should be regulated, adult-use only, tested and safe, fairly taxed, and otherwise easy to get. It helps a lot of people.

They keep saying "Wild West." I don't see it. Our customers are good people and don't deserve to be criminalized. Yes, we need age gating and a few other rules. But most people get their products from responsible stores. I seriously doubt there are shops selling to thirteen-year-olds, as one officer claimed. I'd like to see the sources. If it's that bad, hold a hearing — look at it honestly instead of inflating the problem while refusing to discuss sensible regulation.

Once upon a time cannabis was legal, and then it wasn't. We tell stories about how that happened. Was it William Randolph Hearst needing newsprint? DuPont and the plastics business? Harry Anslinger keeping his job by criminalizing a race? The stories are probably tidier than the truth. But we're watching something like it happen again, here and across the South.

Polls show North Carolinians want THC legal. The market shows it too — we're in our eighth year, and grateful for every one of them. This is hotly contested in the legislature and barely contested among the people. That gap is the whole story.

The era of legal hemp in North Carolina has been built by small businesses. We started with almost nothing and reinvested as we grew. Whatever comes next, in a few years, will probably look very different.

I'm not giving up. I've called my representatives and written them and told them what this looks like from where I stand — one of about sixteen thousand hemp workers in this state. They need to hear from consumers, not just from us. Right now, the people who want a ban can get one by doing nothing at all.

There are somewhere between one and two million North Carolinians who use these products. The other eight million mostly don't mind. That's a majority, and it's silent, and silence is being counted as consent.

Find your legislators here. It takes four minutes.

We also made a video about it. There's a song. It's about a minute.

— Sam, PhenomWell Hemp Dispensary