Two Paths Forward for Cannabis in North Carolina
The debate keeps getting lost in the wrong question. Here's the one that actually matters.
Walk into almost any conversation about cannabis regulation in North Carolina and it won't be long before someone raises the distinction between hemp and marijuana. One is legal. One isn't. One comes from a plant with less than 0.3% delta-9 THC. One doesn't. The conversation spirals from there — into farm bills, into molecular chemistry, into the particular legal fiction that allowed an entire retail industry to emerge in this state over the past several years.
That distinction, while real, is increasingly beside the point.
Federal law passed last year effectively collapses it. A new total-THC standard — one that counts THCA, which converts to THC when heated — means that most of what is currently sold as legal hemp flower becomes a federally controlled substance in November 2026. The legal architecture that separated hemp from marijuana is being dismantled at the federal level, whether North Carolina acts or not.
So the relevant question is no longer "is this hemp or marijuana?" The relevant question is simpler and more consequential: what does North Carolina do next?
There are two paths. Only two. And the clock is running.
Path One: The General Assembly acts.
In June 2025, Governor Josh Stein commissioned the North Carolina Advisory Council on Cannabis — a bipartisan body of public health officials, law enforcement, agriculture representatives, and policy experts — to study the landscape and recommend a path forward.
Their interim report (PDF), released earlier this year, is serious and honest work. It does not minimize the public health concerns around cannabis. It does not pretend the current situation is acceptable. What it recommends — their "Option 5" — is a regulated adult-use market with age restrictions, product testing standards, labeling requirements, licensing for retailers, and meaningful enforcement authority.
The report's own language about the current situation is blunt: North Carolina's cannabis marketplace has been characterized as a "Wild West" landscape where intoxicating products are available to all ages, without potency limits, standardized testing, or clear labeling.
They're right. And the remedy they propose is not legalization without guardrails. It is the opposite — a framework that brings an existing market out of the shadows and into a structure where it can be regulated, taxed, and held accountable.
If the General Assembly acts on this framework in the current short session, here is what becomes possible: retailers who have been operating responsibly for years can obtain licenses and continue operating legally. Products are tested and labeled accurately. Minors are protected by law rather than by the goodwill of individual store owners. Farmers who grow hemp have a legal market for their crop. The state collects tax revenue. Consumers know what they're buying.
This is not a radical outcome. It is what a well-functioning regulatory system looks like.
Path Two: Nothing happens.
This is the path of least political resistance, and it is the one North Carolina has been on for three consecutive legislative sessions. Each time hemp regulation has come up, the House and Senate have failed to agree. Each time, they have gone home without a bill. Each time, the deadline has gotten closer.
If nothing happens in this session, November arrives and the federal standard takes effect. Some retailers will close. Others — particularly those who were never operating with much concern for standards to begin with — will continue, absorbing fines as a cost of doing business, running cash operations, waiting to see how serious enforcement turns out to be.
The people who bear the cost of this path are not primarily the retailers. They are the customers who found a product that helps them and will now have to find it through channels that are unregulated, unreliable, and potentially more dangerous. They are the employees whose jobs disappear. They are the farmers whose market collapses. They are the North Carolina communities that lose a business, a tax base, and an economic opportunity while neighboring states — Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina — build regulated industries of their own.
And paradoxically, the businesses least likely to be harmed by Path Two are the ones that were least concerned with operating responsibly. The ones most exposed are those that built transparent, above-board operations — because they have the most to lose and the clearest paper trail.
That is not how regulation is supposed to work. It is the predictable outcome of choosing to do nothing.
What this has to do with hemp and marijuana
Here is the honest answer: very little, at this point.
The hemp-versus-marijuana distinction was always a legal construct, not a scientific one. The plant is the same. The molecule is the same. The experience, for many users, is the same. The distinction was useful — it created a regulatory opening that allowed a legal industry to emerge and allowed many North Carolinians to access cannabis products for the first time.
But that opening is closing. Federal law is moving toward treating THC as THC, regardless of which plant it came from or what percentage it registers at on a dry-weight basis.
The question before the General Assembly is not how to preserve that distinction. It is whether to replace it with something real — a genuine regulatory framework that serves the public interest — or to let the federal deadline arrive and leave the consequences to sort themselves out.
PhenomWell Hemp Dispensary has operated in Salisbury, North Carolina since 2019. We have carded customers, maintained product standards, paid our taxes, and built the kind of business we would want in our community. We know what responsible operation looks like because we have been doing it for seven years.
We also know that seven years of responsible operation does not protect us from a federal deadline that treats THCA flower the same as any other Schedule I substance. Only state action does that.
The Advisory Council has done the work. The report exists. The short session is the last window before November.
The question is whether anyone in Raleigh is going to pick it up.
PhenomWell Hemp Dispensary is located at 704-B Jake Alexander Blvd. W., Salisbury, NC 28147. We have been open since March 2019.