COLUMBUS, Ohio – Gov. Mike DeWine wants gummies, candies, vape cartridges and other low-level THC products that he says are marketed to children off the shelves of Ohio’s gas stations and corner stores and into regulated marijuana dispensaries.
The products — which are legal but unregulated — are packaged in bright colors with design elements and fonts that could appeal to children, DeWine said last week. Some of the products conjure other candy or sugary cereals that many children have tried.
“These products are absolutely being designed and marketed to kids,” DeWine said at a Wednesday press conference, when he again called on the legislature to pass a ban.
DeWine held up a package of a product he said a 15-year-old was able to buy recently in Springfield, with bright colors and cartoon sneakers on the outside. A tour of Ohio gas stations and corner stores would show a variety of similar products, including some that borrow images from mainstream candymakers.
They contain what’s known as delta-8-THC, and some members of the Ohio General Assembly already have started the work to heed the governor’s call.
House Bill 86, a proposal that would enact changes to the recreational marijuana law voters passed at the polls in November, includes provisions moving most of delta-8 and delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol products out of settings where teenagers could potentially buy them to the state’s licensed marijuana dispensaries, where they would only be available to people aged 21 and older.
State Sen. Stephen Huffman, a Dayton-area Republican, said he’s also going to introduce a standalone bill, in case HB 86 doesn’t pass.
But what is delta-8? Can it get people high? How is it the same and different as traditional marijuana? Read on for answers.
READ MORE: Gov. DeWine again calls on legislature to end delta-8-THC sales in gas stations, corner stores
Delta-8 is considered hemp
Delta-8-THC products emerged after Congress passed the 2018 Farm Bill, allowing states to create commercial hemp and cannabidiol, or CBD. The legislature created Ohio’s hemp program a year later. DeWine signed the bill.
Hemp plants and marijuana plants are the same species of the cannabis plant.
The difference is the level of THC. A product or plant is considered hemp if it contains a maximum of 0.3% THC on a dry-weight basis. Anything above that level is considered marijuana. As long as it remains below that THC threshold, products containing delta-8 are considered hemp.
The distinction is important. Hemp and marijuana are regulated differently in Ohio, and in the case of delta-8, the law is silent.
State lawmakers, when they created the hemp program, envisioned growers cultivating plants to make twine and rope, textiles and clothing, hemp seeds people can add to food and a building material known as hempcrete.
Hemp was also prized for CBD, or cannabidiol, a product that doesn’t create a “high” and which users believe contains positive health benefits.
Policymakers never predicted how delta-8 would take off in ensuing years.
Can delta-8 get someone high?
Yes, but delta-8 is often called “weed light,” compared to other cannabis products. It’s marketed as a product that won’t get consumers as high as they could get on delta-9, another form of THC that can be manufactured as hemp.
Some people are cautious about taking no more than one serving size of delta-8 because they want to feel like they’re in control, members of the hemp industry have told The Plain Dealer / cleveland.com.
That said, others may take more than one serving size to maximize their high. DeWine is specifically worried about young people in this group.
“Delta-8 is somewhat less potent,” said Gary Wenk, an emeritus professor of behavioral neuroscience at Ohio State University. “So if you’re going to have 10 milligrams of delta-9, you would probably need 20 to 25 milligrams of delta-8″ to produce the same high.
However, a person’s reaction to delta-8 will vary, based on drug tolerance, gender, age, whether a woman has been through menopause and other factors, he said.
“It gets really complicated,” Wenk said. “So when you ask the question, ‘What’s this going to do to me?’ I have to ask you, ‘Well, who are you? Man? Woman? Young? Old?’”
Dangers of children consuming delta-8
The effects of consuming THC – whether it’s delta-8 or delta-9 – aren’t the same for adults and kids, said Wenk, the OSU professor.
“The younger the brain, the more harm is done,” he said. “When the brain is developing, it is very vulnerable to the actions of THC. Now when the brain gets older, we see less. And even teenagers’ brains are vulnerable to the dysfunction and alteration in maturation that delta-9 and delta-8 can produce.”
In clinical trials involving delta-9, which is molecularly similar to delta-8, children who used cannabis around the years of puberty were more likely to use continuously, all day long, on a daily basis, Wenk said.
“What we’re finding is that there’s less self-regulation to their behavior in the young children, which is doubly worse because the brains of 21-year-olds can probably handle that a little bit better than the brains of 8-year-olds,” he said.
According to data from the Ohio Poison Control Center, there have been at least 257 reports of delta-8 poisoning over the last three years.
In 2023, there were 102 reported poisonings, including 40 involving children under the age of six. Ninety percent of these children required emergency care or were hospitalized after ingesting the intoxicating hemp, said Lance Himes, assistant director of the Ohio Department of Health.
Are there any benefits to taking it?
As with marijuana, there isn’t a lot of peer-reviewed, scholarly research on the benefits of hemp products.
In a study published last year in the Journal of Cannabis Research, users self-reported that they experienced feelings of relaxation, euphoria and pain relief. They also experienced difficulty concentrating, short-term memory loss and an alerted sense of time.
“Participants generally compared delta-8-THC favorably with both delta-9-THC and pharmaceutical drugs, with most participants reporting substitution for delta-9-THC (57%) and pharmaceutical drugs (59%,)” the study said.
What do the products contain, besides delta-8?
Many delta-8 product labeling lists ingredients. But no government agency, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ensures they’re safe. The market is largely unregulated, said Kevin Boehnke, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Chronic Pain & Fatigue Management Center, who studies therapeutic applications of cannabis.
In the hemp marketplace – especially among products purchased online – there are fewer testing requirements for pesticides, solvents and other contaminants, as well as potency testing to verify the products contain the quantities on the label. State-licensed marijuana dispensaries have more-rigorous testing requirements, he said.
“This is variable by companies, as some companies have many different cannabinoid product lines, and if some of those products meet requirements to be sold in dispensaries then it is more probable that the other products made by that company meet a similar standard,” he said. “But there is a lot of variability.”
Differences between delta-8 and delta-9 THC
Delta-9-THC is what people think when they see the word “THC.”
Delta-9 is the technical name that’s increasingly used to distinguish it from delta-8 and other cannabis-derived products, said Columbus lawyer Greg May, who represents marijuana and hemp clients and has been following state and federal regulation for years.
As with delta-8, delta-9 can also be considered hemp if its THC concentration is under 0.3%. Delta-8 is a different molecule, but it’s nearly identical to delta-9, May said.
READ MORE: Ohio bill would move hemp products from gas stations and grocery stores to marijuana dispensaries
Most delta-8 products contain synthetic THC
Naturally, hemp plants create very little delta-8, said Theresa Daniello, a marijuana patient advocate and educator from Geauga County.
In the last few years, the market for CBD products boomed and then crashed, leaving people sitting on hemp and CBD. And they started experimenting.
“Somebody came up with the idea of taking CBD and synthesizing the molecule into a delta-8 molecule,” Daniello said. “So suddenly all of these people became chemists all across the United States and started synthesizing CBD into delta-8, and then started selling it to people at gas stations.”
Daniello would like to remove delta-8 from all shelves, including prohibiting it at marijuana dispensaries. She said that synthetic delta-8 needs to be studied further, because not much is known about what it does in the human body’s endocannabinoid system, which regulates several functions.
What does the industry say?
The industry says that many of the products DeWine has come across and publicly displayed are not sold by legitimate retailers. Products with knockoff packaging are manufactured by companies that have been sued for trademark infringement, said Chris Voudris, a managing partner a Vapor Haus, which owns a handful of stores in the Dayton area.
“At our shop, we only sell hemp products to 21+ and ID everyone who purchases a hemp product,” he said in a statement. “This is no different than the tobacco products that we sell. The businesses who are good actors in the industry are doing these things already. As in many industries, there are bad actors who do not follow appropriate guidelines but that will not stop with banning the product.”
In a December interview with cleveland.com / The Plain Dealer, two Northeast Ohio business owners said that their small, independent businesses will struggle to stay open if the products are sold in marijuana dispensaries, since there would be fewer places for people to buy them.
H/T: www.cleveland.com
