Recent headlines in both The New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine have created some confusion, said Jonathan Miller, an attorney in the firm Frost Brown Todd who is also general counsel for the roundtable, a hemp industry group.
Recent news reports obfuscate the issue
The Times headline read; “This Drug Gets You High, and Is Legal (Maybe) Across the Country.” The story was about how while Delta-9 THC is on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s schedule one list of controlled substances, Delta-8 THC is not. While Delta-8 does not have the same intoxicating power as does Delta-9, it still has some. Some erstwhile CBD marketers, such as the Texas company profiled in the NYT article, seem to have viewed this as a way to sell an intoxicating product out of the quasi-legal, supplement-like sector of the market that CBD and/or hemp extract products now find themselves.
The Rolling Stone article, which flew under the headline “How Some THC Is Legal — For Now,” lays out a similar scenario. That article quotes Harvard Medical School professor Dr Peter Grinspoon as saying that Delta-8, “has a portion but not all of the psychoactivity as Delta-9.”
The hemp industry at the moment is working to secure a firmer and more clear regulatory basis than was provided by the 2018 Farm Bill for industrial hemp cultivation and the products derived from it. Miller said the industry wants to nip in the bud any blurring of the lines between non intoxicating products marketed for certain health properties and those meant primarily to get people high.