The New York Times
This drug makes you high and is legal (maybe) across the country
Texas has one of the most restrictive medical marijuana laws in the country, with sales being allowed on prescription only for a few conditions. That did not stop Luke Gilkey, CEO of Hometown Hero CBD, in Austin. His company sells joints, stumps, gummy bears, vaping devices and tinctures that offer a relaxation height. In fact, business is also thriving online, where he sells with many marijuana laws to many people in other states. But Gilkey said he is not a banned person and that he is not selling marijuana, just a close relationship. He offers products with a chemical compound – Delta-8-THC – extracted from hemp. It differs only slightly chemically from Delta 9, which is the major psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Subscribe to The Morning Newsletter of the New York Times. And it seems that the small distinction in the eyes of the law can make a big difference. Under federal law, the psychoactive Delta 9 is expressly prohibited. But Delta-8-THC from hemp is not a void that some entrepreneurs say they can sell themselves in many countries where hemp ownership is legal. The number of customers entering Delta 8 is incredible, Gilkey said. “You have a drug that raises you substantially, but is completely legal,” he added. “The whole thing is comical.” The rise of Delta 8 is a case study of how diligent cannabis entrepreneurs are pulling hemp and marijuana apart to create countless new product lines with different marketing angles. They build brands from different strengths, flavors and strains of THC, the intoxicating substance in cannabis, and downtown, the non-intoxicating compound often sold as a health product. With Delta 8, entrepreneurs also believe they have found a way to take advantage of the country’s broken and complicated laws on the use of marijuana for recreation. However, it is not quite that simple. Federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, are still considering their enforcement and regulatory options. “Dealing with Delta-8-THC in any way is not without significant legal risk,” said Alex Buscher, a Colorado attorney specializing in cannabis law. Yet experts in the cannabis industry have said that sales of Delta 8 have indeed exploded. Delta 8 is ‘the fastest growing segment’ of hemp-derived products, says Ian Laird, chief financial officer of New Leaf Data Services, which tracks the hemp and cannabis markets. He estimates consumer sales at at least $ 10 million, adding: “Delta 8 has really come out of nowhere over the past year.” Marijuana and hemp are essentially the same plant, but marijuana has a higher concentration of Delta-9-THC – and as a source of intoxication, it has been a major focus of entrepreneurs as well as state and federal lawmakers. If Delta was discussed at all, Delta 8 was an esoteric, less powerful by-product of both plants. That changed with the 2018 Farm Bill, a huge federal law that legalized, among other things, widespread hemp farming and distribution. The law also specifically allowed the sale of the by-products of the plant; the only exception was Delta 9 with a high enough THC level to define it as marijuana. Because Delta 8 was not mentioned in the legislation, entrepreneurs jumped into the gap and started extracting and packaging it as a legal edible and smoky alternative. Exactly what kind of high Delta 8 delivers depends on who you ask. Some see it as ‘marijuana light’, while others see it as ‘pain relief with less psycho activity’, says David Downs, senior content editor for Leafly.com, a popular source of cannabis news and information. Either way, Delta 8 has become ‘extraordinarily emerging’, Downs said, reflecting what he calls “ban ruin interregnum”, where consumer demand and business activity are exploiting the holes in rapidly evolving and broken law. “We get reports that you could walk into a truck stop in banned states like Georgia, where you look at what looks like a weed bud in a pot,” Downs said. The bud is sprayed with hemp with Delta 8 oil with high concentration. Joe Salome is the owner of Georgia Hemp Co., which began selling Delta 8 locally in October and shipping nationwide – about 25 orders a day, he said. “It went down tremendously,” Salome said. Its website announces Delta 8 as ‘very similar to the psychoactive brother THC’, offering users the same relief from stress and inflammation, ‘without the same frightening climax that some may experience with THC.’ Salome said he does not have to buy an expensive state license to sell medical marijuana because he feels protected by the farm bill. “It’s good,” he said, explaining that it is now legal to “sell all parts of the plant.” The legal landscape is contradictory at best. Many states are allowed more than the federal government, which considers marijuana to be an illegal and extremely dangerous drug under the Controlled Substances Act. In 36 states, marijuana is legal for medicinal use. In 14 states it is legal for recreational use. But at one point, under the farm bill, the federal government opened the door to the sale of hemp products, even in countries that did not legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Only a few states, such as Idaho, ban hemp altogether, but in others, Delta 8 entrepreneurs find a receptive market. Advocates for Gilkey believe the farm bill is on their side. “Delta 8, when derived from hemp or extracted from hemp, is considered hemp,” said Andrea Steel, co-chair of the cannabis business group at Coats Rose, a law firm in Houston. She stressed that the legality also depends on whether Delta 9 exceeds the legal limits. Steel noted that when made into a Delta 8 product, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to filter all of the Delta 9 out of hemp. “When another fold is added,” she said, “many labs cannot demarcate between Delta 8 and Delta 9.” Lisa Pittman, the other co-chair of the cannabis business group at Coats Rose, said the authors of the farm bill may not have considered the consequences of the law in reading the issue. Pittman said the ultimate question of the legality of a product depends on other factors, including how the Delta 8 is manufactured and manufactured. Advocates specifically said that the DEA’s ruling on the issue suggests that Delta 8 could be illegal if made ‘synthetically’ rather than organically. There are currently lawsuits over the interpretation of the DEA rule. Gilkey said he paid $ 50,000 in legal fees to make sure he didn’t break the law. A veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, Gilkey, worked in a medical unit on boats from San Diego. He ‘saw very difficult things’, he said, and ‘was not happy about the war on drugs.’ He ran a business in Austin that sold e-liquid for vaping devices. In 2019, he started his current business focusing on selling downtown. Late last spring, he said, he started getting calls from Delta 8. “I said, please explain to me what it is,” he recalls. Gilkey, whose business supplies products to other stores across the country, sees a big opportunity. After consulting the advocates, he started using full-scale packaging gums and vape pens and other products using Delta 8 which he said he had obtained from a major hemp supplier. “It’s about to become mainstream,” he said. And this is just the beginning. “There’s a Delta 10 at work,” Gilkey said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company