It was not an answer I was expecting.
It was unseasonably cold in March of 2022, just above freezing, on the evening of my visit to a farm labor camp in eastern North Carolina.
We huddled at a wooden picnic table inside an old mobile home, or trailer, where the men cooked and ate their meals. Glancing at the floor, I noticed how most of the linoleum floor had been scuffed away, exposing the wood below. I wondered: How many decades does that take?
More concerning was the single wall outlet, where the men had plugged in several electric space heaters brought in from the sleeping trailers—a classic fire hazard. They were buzzing like mad and were all that kept us from shivering.
The camp was hidden deep inside a grove of pine trees at the end of a dirt road. The interstate was so close you could hear it, but the trees were so densely packed that’s all a passing driver would ever see. There are thousands of these housing facilities across the state, many of them out of public view, where farmworkers live while separated from their families back in Mexico.
I was researching a book I would later write. Summoning my not-so-great Spanish, I began this interview with my usual ice-breaker.
“Qué tipo de cultivo están cultivando aquí?” I asked the men. “What type of crop are you growing here?”
The crew leader answered right away. I’ll call him Mingo—short for Domingo. Like all crew leaders, Mingo speaks a little English.
“How do you say in English,” the 60-year-old man replied, his pot-belly pressed against the edge of the table. Mingo broke eye contact momentarily, the way people do when searching for a word, before answering.
“Marijuana.”
I thought he was pulling my leg.
“You’re growing marijuana,” I repeated back.
“Marijuana for medicine,” he added.
Mingo answered my simple question with a simple answer, as if I had asked his shoe size. He did not seem to be joking.
I was pretty sure, and would later confirm, that North Carolina did not allow anyone to grow marijuana—for any reason. There was pending legislation to become one of the last states in the US to allow the production and sale of medical marijuana, but nobody in this deep red state was holding their breath. Growing marijuana in North Carolina was against the law.
Another of the workers thrust a phone in front of my face. It showed endless rows of tiny potted cannabis plants in a greenhouse, their jagged and pointy leaves instantly recognizable.
“Cuántas plantas hay?” I asked. “How many plants are there?”
“Siete mil,” one of them answered. “Seven thousand.”
“¿Un día? Un millón. Eso es lo que dice el patrón” “One day? A million. That’s what the grower says.”
I wondered: Do these guys know growing marijuana here is illegal? Even for medical purposes? Did the owner of this farm bring them up from Mexico as a shield, so they would get busted after a raid instead of him?
Poking at those photos, spreading my fingertips to zoom in on the cannabis plants, I was struck by the symmetric elegance of those spiky leaves. And then, by this: What the hell was I to do with this information?
The next day I called my daughter, Greta. As a member of a generation more worldly than my own when it comes to marijuana, I wanted to know what she thought of my discovery. She was dubious.
“You’ve seen Narcos, right Dad?” she asked, referring to the popular Netflix series set in the violent world of drug trafficking. I told her I knew the show.
“If that farm was growing weed,” she continued, “they would not let some friendly white dude roll in for a chat with the workers. Guys with guns would see to that.”
I understood her skepticism but remained concerned. The workers had referred specifically to marijuana several times.
A few days later I relayed my experience to an attorney I knew at the Farmworker Unit at Legal Aid of North Carolina. Few lawyers in this state know as much about this world as they do, and she too was doubtful.
“It’s probably hemp,” she speculated.
Hemp? I decided to check it out. I knew the name of the farmer that Mingo and his crew worked for, and found it right away on a list of registered processors with the North Carolina Industrial Hemp Program. This farm was one of more than 1,200 growing hemp in this state.
This was a major relief. Mingo and his crew were not growing a crop that would make someone high—or so I thought at the time.
In any event, with the marijuana scare out of the way, I could get back to my research.
Every year, more than 400,000 agricultural workers, virtually all of them men, ride a bus from their hometowns in Mexico to a farm in the United States. Around 25 thousand step off the bus in North Carolina.
They are authorized to work here, for up to one year, by the H2A visa program. Hence, these men are often referred to as H2A workers, or guestworkers.
In this state, H2A workers plant, cultivate, and harvest one crop more than any other: tobacco. It’s been grown in North Carolina since around 1650—well before the colony of Carolina was split into North and South. It remains the number one crop in North Carolina, and no other state grows more of it.
These days, most crops grown on a large scale can be planted, cultivated, and harvested entirely by machine. Not tobacco. Human hands are still required for some of its cultivation, especially the midseason removal of its flowers and stems, a job known as “topping and suckering.”
This is often done on the hottest days of the year, exposing workers not only to heat stroke but also to green tobacco sickness, in which dangerous levels of nicotine enter a person’s body through the skin.
Another crop requiring human hands is the sweet potato, which must be harvested by teams of stooping farmworkers, quickly, before the hot sun damages their tender skin.
Because North Carolina has so many tobacco workers, and farmers must rotate crops to keep their soil healthy, it’s little surprise that the number two crop in this state is the sweet potato.
Mingo’s farm used to grow tobacco. Its labor camp once housed more than 40 men—five times the current crew of eight. This explains the number of abandoned trailers I had noticed here, some of them being reclaimed by Mother Nature, with collapsed roofs and vines filling rooms once occupied by men.
With the decline of smoking in the United States, so declined the need for tobacco farmers. Some growers got out of farming altogether. Some increased their production of sweet potatoes, or grains, or both. Some, like the grower at Mingo’s farm, started growing hemp.
Thinking back to that false alarm on my first visit to Mingo’s camp, it’s little surprise the distinction between marijuana and hemp got lost in translation. Both plants are rightly known as cannabis, belonging to the formal genus by that name, and both are strains of the cannabis sativa plant. The practical distinction has to do with the level of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, in any given plant.
THC is just one of the many elements, or cannabinoids, of cannabis. But it’s the one that gets you high. Another well-known cannabinoid is cannabidiol, or CBD. It’s known for supposed therapeutic effects.
I think of the THC level of cannabis like the sugar level of apples. It varies by type. Granny Smith apples, my least favorite, have less sugar than, say, Fuji apples—which might explain why that one is my very favorite.
The bottom line for hemp growers is this: If the leaves and stems of a cannabis plant contain less than 0.3% THC, then it’s hemp and you can both grow and sell it in North Carolina. If the THC content is greater than that, then it’s marijuana, also known as mary jane, weed, grass, reefer, pot, bud, herb, roach, puff—the list goes on. Whatever you call it, you cannot legally grow, sell, or possess marijuana in the Tar Heel state.
Learning about hemp production in North Carolina intrigued me. I had no interest in smoking it, but I knew so-called edibles, made with THC extracted from marijuana, were sold in other states. Were there hemp-based edibles available here? Indeed there are. And it didn’t take me long to find them.
There are so-called smoke shops all over the state now with signs in their windows for “CBD” and “Delta 8.” There are six such smoke shops, or hemp stores, all within walking distance of where my wife Becky and I live in Carrboro, just outside Chapel Hill. One day I strolled into one to ask some questions.
A clerk behind the counter patiently explained the difference between marijuana and hemp, and described the various products they sold. These include smokable buds, which are just dried pieces of a cannabis plant, tinctures and oils made with extracts of cannabis, and edibles made with extracts as well. These include both gummy candies and chocolates.
So what is CBD and Delta 8 exactly?
Every cannabis plant naturally contains both CBD and a form of THC known as Delta 9. It gets that name because if you peer deep inside one of its molecules, you’ll see a double bond at its ninth carbon atom.
Hemp, the type of cannabis plant you can legally grow in North Carolina, has lots of CBD and very little Delta 9 THC. The reverse is true for marijuana, which has more THC and less CBD.
So what is Delta 8? It turns out one can do some chemical engineering in a lab to synthesize a variant, or isomer, of Delta 9 THC known as Delta 8. This version of THC has the distinctive double bond at its eighth carbon atom—hence the name.
Delta 8 attaches to the same brain receptors as does Delta 9, but apparently the attachment is not quite as strong. Many cannabis users experience a slightly lower high when consuming Delta 8 as compared with a comparable dose of Delta 9.
Eyeing some boxes of small chocolate squares at the smoke shop, I asked the woman helping me to select two of each for me to take home. My wife Becky is a huge fan of chocolate and was, like me, mildly curious about edibles.
The woman also gave me a sheet with guidelines for how much of this chocolate one should consume, based on prior experience with THC. Knowing I had almost no such experience, she urged me to read it. I paid for my Whitman’s Sampler of edibles and headed out. And then the salesperson reminded me, again, to read those guidelines.
I left the store newly educated but also let down. My expectations of getting high from our edibles had all but vanished when I considered this one fact: Our chocolates were produced from hemp with only 0.3% THC. How much of a psychoactive effect could I expect from edibles made from that? To me it seemed like drinking cough syrup for the alcohol.
Continuing our research at home, Becky and I learned there is some concern over Delta 8 and how it is produced. Some of the proprietary methods may introduce residual constituents that could have unknown consequences on one’s health. Looking closely at the wrappers on our chocolates, I noticed that all but one contained Delta 8. The other contained naturally occurring Delta 9, albeit only the tiny amount allowable by law.
Not wanting to risk it, we decided to throw away our Delta 8 chocolates. But we kept the ones made from Delta 9. I stashed them into a corner of our kitchen pantry.
On one of my visits to Mingo’s camp, I asked if he knew what was made with the hemp grown at his farm. He gestured to one of the other workers who produced a small brown bottle of oil, opened it, and pantomimed its relaxing effect. It was a tincture like one I had seen at the store.
I also asked the men how they came to be farmworkers. Mingo answered first. In the late 1980s, the same legislation that established the H2A visa program also provided amnesty to nearly three million undocumented residents of the United States. Many of these were farmworkers, and many of those farmworkers promptly left their jobs for other lines of work. This left many growers short-handed, so they turned to H2A workers to fill the void.
Domingo Álvarez was one of those workers. In 1996, at the age of 24 with kids all under age 5, he left his job as a truck driver in Mexico and began his career as an H2A farmworker. When I met him in 2022, he had been coming north for 26 years.
Every February, Mingo boards a bus in Mexico, an H2A visa in his pocket, and returns in November. Other than Christmas, he has been absent for every holiday and birthday and other special event his kids can remember. Now they’re in their thirties, some with kids of their own.
His experience is not unique. I would meet many such H2A dads, separated from their families for most of every year, all so they can support them.
There are so many ways I am more fortunate than an H2A farmworker. My line of work pays better, and has always included advancement opportunity. I face few health or safety risks when I go to work each day, and I live in far nicer housing. What I am most grateful for, though, is the simple fact I have never had to leave my family just to support them.
When the worker at Mingo’s camp showed me the CBD tincture produced with their hemp, it reminded me of the Delta 9 chocolates in our pantry.
Back at home one night after an early dinner, hunting for something sweet in the pantry, I got them out and showed them to Becky.
“Wanna try these?” I asked. She said sure. We decided to not drink any alcohol, so we could be sure to detect any effect of the trace Delta 9 THC content of the chocolate.
At 6:00pm we each enjoyed a Dark Chocolate Mini with 15 milligrams of Delta 9 THC and 15 milligrams of CBD. The chocolate was quite good.
By 6:30, however, we felt nothing. Surely half an hour should be long enough for some effect to kick in. By 7:00 there was still nothing. An hour into our experiment, I concluded these edibles were doing nothing and poured my first of two glasses of wine.
We put on the movie Dune and began watching. I found the plot too complex to follow so paused it after twenty minutes and asked Becky to summarize—this happens often at our house.
A few minutes later, Becky paused the movie.
“I feel dizzy, or something,” she said. “Get me some water?”
When I came back she was lying down and suddenly–and I mean suddenly–my own throat went as dry as desert sand.
“My throat is parched!” I said before handing her the glass of water. She downed half and I immediately downed the rest.
“Whoa,” I said. “We both thelt firsty at the same time.”
Becky started laughing uncontrollably at my word fumble and then, realizing my spoonerism, I did too. We were suddenly, simultaneously, as giddy as little kids.
The next couple of hours were the weirdest of our lives. Again and again, one of us would say something that cracked us both up, as when Becky asked for yet another cup of water and I fetched her a bottle instead, and she remarked that I hadn’t brought it in a cup as she’d requested.
“Whattya want?” I replied without missing a beat. “Egg in your beer?”
Tears rolled down her face as she squeaked out a response. “What does that even mean??!!
The thing is, once we stopped laughing at something, neither of us could remember what had just cracked us up only seconds before. I can attest to what I’ve quoted here only because I grabbed a pad of paper and started scribbling notes. The short-term memory loss was profound, as were the waves of thirst, as was the literally painful laughing, as when I attributed our condition to “stonage,” a word I thought I had coined on the spot but is actually rather common.
An hour or so into our stonage, things went from profoundly hilarious to scary. That’s when the laughter stopped, replaced by hallucinations.
“I can see you sitting there writing,” Becky said to me with a look of genuine fear on her face. “But there is another you, next to you, like a chalk figure after they remove a dead body from a murder scene.”
I jotted that down then moved to hold her and assure her everything was fine. Then Becky’s hair turned from dark brown to light brown and doubled in length. For a moment I was with an entirely different woman. I am not making this up.
Our brains just weren’t working right. After another hour or so we wondered if they would ever be the same again. And then, Becky complained she could no longer feel her arms.
That’s when my utter confusion turned to panic. Becky needed to get to a hospital. But how? I could not operate my phone, not even to call 911, and driving a car was out of the question. The best I might do is run to our neighbor’s house and pound on the door for help.
As I was struggling to put on my shoes, wondering if I should just go in my bare feet, Becky said she could again feel her arms. My panic subsided.
The effect of the THC continued to slowly wear off. By midnight, we had mostly come down from our bewildering high, enough to turn off the lights and drift off to sleep.
In the days that followed, my mind back to normal, it became abundantly clear what a mistake it was to ignore that instruction sheet from the hemp store. This was all on me.
The 15 milligrams of THC in those chocolates was more than a first-time user should ever consume—especially when combined with alcohol.
I should have also thought twice about North Carolina’s legal limit of THC in a product being “only” 0.3%. It seems like such a miniscule amount. But as a percentage, it does not limit how many milligrams of THC one can pack into a single edible.
Colorado, interestingly enough, has a “per serving” limit of 10 milligrams of THC, which is a full one-third less than the 15 milligrams in our chocolates. So what happened to us in North Carolina was less likely to have happened in Colorado, a state where recreational use of marijuana is legal.
It’s no wonder there are so many hemp stores popping up all over states like this. If you know what to ask for, there’s plenty on those shelves to get you seriously stoned.
At the end of my year of book research, I went back to Mingo’s camp. It was cold again, after topping more than 90 degrees at the peak of the growing season. The sun was just setting as we moved out of the crisp air and back to the picnic table inside.
I went to see how the workers were all doing, but first to share some advice.
“Si alguien te pregunta qué cultivos cultivan ustedes,” I asked. “If someone asks you what crops you grow,”
I could see a smile forming on Mingo’s face.
“Respuesta hemp,” I said. “Marijuana? No.”
“Okay,” Mingo answered, with no hint of concern. Did he know the difference between marijuana and hemp all along? I didn’t press it.
One of the workers then pulled something out of a plastic grocery bag and placed it on the table.
“A gift for you,” said Mingo.
It was the top ten inches or so of a cannabis plant, full of buds and tiny leaves, just starting to dry. One of the men rattled off instructions for what to do with it, instructions I could not follow.
I thanked the men for their gift, talked for a while longer, then wished them a safe journey back to Mexico as I made my way in dark back to my car.
On my drive home, north on Interstate 40, that cannabis was all I could think about—mostly because its cloying smell was so intense. Its oily aroma filled the car.
Then I remembered hearing a story of a truck full of hemp being pulled over by the police, who presumed it was marijuana.
This got me thinking: what if my car were stopped by the police, for speeding or anything else, and they smelled this hemp—if that’s what it actually was—in my car?
I stopped at the next gas station and pretended to need gas, pulling next to a gas pump and its adjacent trash receptacle. I quickly threw away the cannabis and got back in my car.
The stench was still there, so I rolled down my windows as I accelerated up the onramp to the interstate.
Then I did something no H2A worker can ever do at the end of their day. I went home to be with my family.
There’s more about farmworkers, the crops they grow, and the lives they lead at michaeldurbin.com.
Michael Durbin 