Sacramento Bee: California hemp products can get you as high as cannabis. How did this happen?

SOURCE: Sacramento Bee

EXCERPT:

“This is the most extreme thing I have ever seen,” said Jim Keddy, executive director of Youth Forward, a group that promotes youth training and empowerment programs with tax revenues from cannabis sales.

Keddy and his team do scouting trips to see where they can buy hemp that can get them high.

Keddy recently purchased hemp gummies with THC at a store within eyesight of Sacramento’s Inderkum High School in Natomas. Later, I did as well. His jar of tropical-tasting fruits looked like a knock-off of Hawaiian Punch. My blue gummies were shaped like an ear.

“They all mimic popular candy and snack brands,” he said. “Legally, stores can be selling them to kids. And they are.”

The public health department said that industrial hemp products with high levels of THC can only happen with the addition of illegal “synthetic cannabinoids” and urges reports to be submitted to the department by email, at FDBIH@cdph.ca.gov.

Pediatrician Lynn Silver, whose Public Health Institute has tracked the cannabis and hemp industries, contends that California’s hemp bill legalized some pretty powerful products.

How? The active THC ingredients in legal cannabis gummie weigh next to nothing — no more than 10 milligrams. An ounce of water, by comparison, is more than 23,000 milligrams. So even if a teaspoon of hemp extract has only 0.3% of THC in it, that is more than enough to create a mind-bending gummy, Silver said.

“A hemp edible can have more THC in it than a cannabis edible,” she said. The state public health department has “the authority to regulate appropriately. They didn’t use it for whatever reason. Which is why we need a fast legislative fix now.”