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Cannabis retailer INSA bought dozens of hemp products off the shelf and found that they’re often mislabeled, marketed to kids, and more potent than allowed.
Chris Madsen, dean of students at Springfield High School, is no stranger to marijuana. He knows some students smoke before school, going quiet during morninghomeroom and landing in his office when their behavior gives them away.
But since 2022, a more worrisome form of the drug has crept onto campus, Madsen said.
He has witnessed as many as 10 incidents since September where students were so “blasted” they had to be shuttled to Baystate Medical Center in an ambulance. They suffered from anxiety attacks, vomited, and were unable to speak in full sentences — nothing like the high from a typical marijuana joint.
The culprit? Intoxicating hemp.
Easy to buy at gas stations and corner stores across Massachusetts, hemp products can resemble the candies that they are sold alongside. Some allege they are marketed to children, unexpectedly potent, and not subject to age verification.
“The kids will say it’s a Rice Krispie treat they found on the ground, but it’s not,” Madsen said. Hemp products “can be tough for the nursing staff to diagnose, and it makes our job of keeping these students safe more difficult. It’s everywhere.”
The alarm at Springfield High only adds to the concerns about hemp, a pocket of the marijuana industry that has grown exponentially in recent years.
Hemp was legalized federally in 2018 to aid its commercial use in textiles, construction, and industrial agriculture, and it typically has a low concentration of THC, the intoxicating compound weed is known for. By law, manufacturers are not allowed to infuse hemp with enough chemical compounds to cause psychoactive effects or change its composition to replicate a marijuana high.
But that law is often ignored.
Intoxicating hemp can be easily found in corner stores across Massachusetts, including with new synthetic compounds such as delta-10 and HHC. Hemp consumption has led to a spike in hospitalizations and poison control calls nationwide and spurred bans in states including Virginia and California. Massachusetts legislators are now considering ordering the removal of edible products like hemp-derived gummies from store shelves and moving hemp beverage sales into liquor stores.
A new white paper from Easthampton-based cannabis operator INSA shows that the public health concerns maybe well-founded. The company — which faces stiff regulations as a licensed cannabis business — purchased dozens of hemp products at eight stores in Boston, Framingham, Pembroke, Springfield, and Worcester and tested them at Green Analytics laboratory in Framingham. It revealed that hemp products are often mislabeled and more intoxicating than the law permits.
Nineteen of the 21 smokable hemp products violated the federal limits for intoxicating compounds and contained unsafe levels of pesticides and other contaminants, based on Massachusetts regulations for the legal cannabis market. Some packs of the hemp gummies had 500 mg of THC per serving, 100 times the state’s 5 mg limit, according to the study. And the THC in a “Trippy Diamonds” cannabis vape cartridge sold over the counter was 80 percent delta-8, a psychoactive compound that is illegal in Massachusetts, the study reported.
The report touches on research that shows over-intoxication from hemp carries risks including “strokes, seizures, and psychosis.”
It also reiterates fears among highly regulated cannabis dispensaries and growers that unlicensed hemp is siphoning away business from the legal market. Licensed cannabisoperators are heavily taxed in Massachusetts and held to testing and age verification that hemp products are not. And while cannabis sold at dispensaries must be plainly packaged and kept in child-safe containers, hemp edibles come shaped as bears, rings, and gummy worms, often with “colorful packaging, catchy product names and cartoon imagery,” according to the report.
Take Stoner Patch Dummies, one product INSA found with the same neon branding and bubbly font as the popular candy, Sour Patch Kids.
“These products present a real and present danger to Massachusetts consumers, especially children, which danger will only amplify as more and more manufacturers, who face negligible risks of enforcement or penalties, flood the market with greater quantities of untested products,” reads the report, authored by the Boston law firm Foley Hoag.
Not every store that sells hemp products does so openly, said Steve Reilly, co-owner and director of government relations at INSA, which commissioned the white paper.
While buying products for the study, Reilly found one corner store that sold empty hemp cartridges at the register, while the owner offered full ones from his car. Others displayed hemp chocolates alongside rolling papers and glass bowls for smoking and marijuana buds at the counter — a practice that is illegal in Massachusetts, but rarely enforced.
“Why would we do all this with legalization if we allow illegal sales to undermine the market?” Reilly asked. “You don’t need to change the law. You just need to enforce it.”
Above-board hemp farmers and manufacturers argue that there are many good players who abide by the federal limits.
Christopher Lackner, president of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, said his members, who manage 140-some brands, commit to including warning symbols, chemical compound labels, and QR codes that link to product safety results on packages.
“We have no interest in confusing the consumer,” Lackner said. “We want to empower them with information that allows them to make a smart choice.”
But concerns abound about where intoxicating hemp products come from and where they end up.
There have been documented ties between the illicit marijuana market and Chinese organized crime, and hemp products often bear addresses from faraway states, including California and Maryland. (Licensed products are required to be sold in the same state where the cannabis isgrown and manufactured.) Social media is littered with ads for hemp products that can be bought online.
Consumers are rarely equipped to distinguish the good from the bad in hemp products, and it can even be hard to know just how potent a hemp product will be, said Jeff Rawson, founder of the Institute of Cannabis Science in Massachusetts.
When testing products himself, Rawson saw that potency of hemp edibles and pre-rolls purchased outside of dispensaries deviated from the products’ labelling by as much as 34 percent. By Rawson’s calculations, consumers are four times more likely to get an accurate product in a dispensary than a smoke shop or gas station.
Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe
“With hemp, you can get a horribly mislabeled product, or even a blank” label, he said.
Slowly, hemp is being regulated in Massachusetts. The City of Springfield is working on an ordinance to ban “gas station weed,” and the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a bill earlier this month to charge local health boards with enforcement of illicit hemp products.
The law would put hemp beverages under the jurisdiction of the Cannabis Control Commission and direct local boards of health to monitor the sale of illicit hemp products and remove them from shelves if necessary.
In the past, the Globe reported that health officials have encouraged retailers to “self-enforce” regulations on illegal hemp products. But Cheryl Sbarra, the head of the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards, recently told the Commonwealth Beacon that not all towns have the resources to sniff out illicit hemp sales to the same degree.
“What would happen is uneven enforcement, which is not good for public health,” she said.
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.
“}]] Cannabis retailer INSA bought dozens of hemp products off the shelf and found that they’re often mislabeled, marketed to kids, and more potent than allowed. Read More
