As N.C. looks at ban
“I don’t want our infrastructure and everything that we have built up to this point to go away,” Lacy told lawmakers at a May hearing. “I will have to fire people.”
Smokable hemp is lucrative partly because farmers just need to dry the hemp flowers. Other products require a complicated, costly process for extracting CBD oil.
Jamie Schau, who analyzes CBD markets for the research firm Brightfield Group, said the market for smokable hemp flower is projected to grow to $70.6 million in 2019, up from $11.7 million in 2018. However, she said stigmas around smoking help keep smokable hemp at only about 1.4 percent of the overall market.
Smokable hemp is especially popular in the South, where no states have legalized recreational marijuana and many haven’t legalized medicinal marijuana, said Eric Steenstra, president of advocacy group Vote Hemp. Still, its popularity has been a surprise, he said: “Nobody really anticipated that anybody would want to smoke (hemp).”
Last month, police in Four Oaks charged Amanda Furstonberg, 32, with marijuana possession after they saw her smoking what she says was hemp.
“They had me in tears,” she said.
Furstonberg started smoking hemp after a February car accident left her with chronic back pain..
“Within three and five seconds of being able to smoke it, I could tell that my body was starting to feel so much better —the throbbing was going away,” she said.
Police Chief Stephen Anderson defended his officers, saying he believed Furstonberg disguised marijuana as hemp.