You grow what?

“Qué tipo de cultivo están cultivando aquí?” I asked the men. “What type of crop are you growing here?”

We were huddled in the frigid and rundown trailer where these North Carolina farmworkers cooked and ate their meals. I was just starting some research for a book, visiting labor camps to introduce myself. It was early in March of 2022 and unseasonably cold. Two buzzing space heaters, sharing a single wall outlet in classic fire-hazard style, were all that kept us from shivering.

“How do you say in English,” one of the men replied, practicing his emerging second language. He broke eye contact momentarily, the way people do when searching for a word, before answering. “Marijuana.”

“Really?” I thought he was pulling my leg. “You’re growing marijuana.”

“For… medicine. Marijuana for medicine.” He answered as plainly as if I had asked his shoe size. He wasn’t kidding.

I was pretty sure, and would later confirm, that North Carolina did not allow anyone to grow marijuana in this state—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.

Another of the men thrust a phone in front of my face. I noticed his brown fingers were weathered far more than mine, despite his being much younger. He used one to point to a photo. It showed endless rows of tiny potted cannabis plants filling a greenhouse, their jagged edged leaves recognizable to even to a fiftysomething like me with (almost) no experience smoking weed.

“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 grower 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? One thing came to mind. There are two thousand labor camps like this across the state and farmworker advocates often give them nicknames. For me, this one would forever be Camp 420.

“You’ve seen Narcos, right Dad?” my daughter Greta asked the next day, referring to the popular Netflix series set in the violent world of drug trafficking. I had called to ask her, as a member of a generation more worldly than my own when it comes to marijuana, what she thought of my discovery.

“If that farm was growing weed,” she continued, “they would not let some friendly white dude roll into camp for a chat. Guys with guns would see to that.”

I appreciated her skepticism but remained concerned. The workers had referred specifically to marijuana several times. A few days later I relayed my experience to Caitlin Ryland, who heads the Farmworker Unit at Legal Aid of North Carolina. Few lawyers in this state know as much about the world of migrant farmworkers here than she does. Caitlin too was doubtful.

“It’s probably hemp,” she speculated.

Greta and Caitlin were both right. I knew the name of the grower these guys worked for, and it took me no time at all to find it on a list of registered processors with the North Carolina Industrial Hemp Program. He was one of more than 1,200 farmers growing hemp in this state since doing so was legalized in 2017.

Whew.

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It’s little surprise the distinction between marijuana and hemp gets lost in translation, as it were. 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. Another well-known cannabinoid is cannabidiol, or CBD. But THC is the one that gets you high, which can get you in trouble if you do so in a state like North Carolina.

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, dope, bud, ganga, herb, roach, puff, or any of dozens of other street names, including my very favorite, broccoli. And you definitely cannot legally grow, sell, or possess it in the Tar Heel state.

I’ve consumed nearly every consumable crop grown in North Carolina, including lots of sweetpotato, peppers, and cucumbers. But I’ve ingested almost no tobacco, thanks in part to some bullies in the woods at Grant Elementary School in Fairview Heights, Illinois where I grew up. They blocked my favorite path to school one morning until I took a drag from a cigarette, telling me it would taste like candy. I found a new way to school after that. I smoked marijuana just a few years ago, in Washington, DC where doing so is legal. It had no discernible effect other than to burn my throat so badly I swore off it for good.

Learning about hemp production in North Carolina intrigued me. I wasn’t about to smoke it, but I knew marijuana-based edibles were sold in other states. Were there hemp-based edibles available here? Yes, and it didn’t take me long to find them.

There are retail stores all over now hawking “CBD” and “Delta 8” products, which I knew little about, other than their derivation from hemp. There are six such stores in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, all within walking distance of where my wife Becky and I live.

One day I strolled into the Cannabliss Dispensary in Carrboro. The folks behind the counter there are as proud of their knowledge as they are their products, and they didn’t mind I was more interested in the former than the latter. A young woman named Madison patiently explained the difference between marijuana and hemp, what CBD and Delta 8 are all about, and the dozens of products they sold: smokable buds, tinctures and oils, and edibles. Most of those products contains either CBD or Delta 8 or both.

Every cannabis plant naturally contains both CBD and a form of THC known as Delta 9—so called 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 THC. The reverse is true for marijuana. While THC is known for getting you high, CBD attaches to entirely different receptors in the brain and is known more for its purported medicinal and relaxing effects.

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 THC attaches to the same brain receptors as does Delta 9 THC, but apparently the attachment is not quite as strong. Many cannabis users experience a slightly less high high when consuming Delta 8. But the main thing is this: that high is legal in North Carolina.

Eyeing some boxes of small chocolate squares at the Cannabliss Dispensary, I asked Madison to select two of each for me to take home. Becky is a huge fan of chocolate and was, like me, mildly curious about edibles. These edibles were made in Colorado, but the store also sells edibles made from hemp grown in North Carolina–maybe at the very farm I visited. Madison also gave me a sheet of guidelines for how much of this chocolate one should consume, based on prior experience and what not. She urged me to read it. I paid $31.07 for my Whitman’s Sampler of edibles and headed out. And then she reminded me 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. In any event we threw away the Delta 8 chocolates and decided to one day try the Delta 9.

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After a few weeks we’d all but forgotten about our edibles. After an early dinner one day, poking through our pantry for something sweet, I noticed the box of chocolates and held them up 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 an entire Xite Dark Chocolate Mini with 15 grams of Delta 9 THC and 15 grams of CBD–I first read the labels to be sure we had tossed all the Delta 8 stuff we didn’t trust. 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, I figured. By 7:00 there was still nothing. I concluded these were duds 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 it. This happens often at our house, and she did so patiently and perfectly. Just seconds later, after resuming the movie, Becky paused it yet again.

“I feel dizzy, or something,” she said. “Will you get me some water?”

When I came back she was lying down and suddenly–and I mean suddenly–my own throat went dry as desert sand.

“My throat is parched!” I said before handing her the glass of water. She downed half of it and I immediately downed the rest before going to refill the glass.

“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, and seriously stoned.

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 apparently rather common.

An hour or so into our stonage, things went from profoundly hilarious to very 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 minds just weren’t working right. After a couple of hours we wondered if they would ever be the same again. And when Becky complained she could not feel her arms, I realized that if she did not regain feeling I would need to get her to a hospital. But how? I could not operate my phone and driving a car was out of the question. All I would be able to do was run to our neighbor’s house and pound on the door and ask them to call 911. I was trying to put on my shoes when Becky, thankfully, could again feel her arms.

By midnight, we had come down from our high enough to turn off the lights and drift to sleep.

I should have read those instructions. The 15 milligrams of Delta 9 THC we had is far more than any first-time user of THC should ever consume—especially after drinking alcohol. I should have also thought twice about the 0.3% thing. While a product legally made from hemp can only contain that much THC in proportion to its other ingredients, you can still put enough THC into a small square of chocolate to get someone dangerously stoned.

There is apparently no law in North Carolina around how much Delta 9 THC you can pack into a single edible. Colorado, by contrast, has a “per serving” limit of 10mg of THC, which is considerably less than the 15mg in each of the chocolates Becky and I innocently popped into our mouths. Weirdly, what happened to us in North Carolina was less likely to have happened in Colorado, a state where recreational use of marijuana is legal.

“We NEED regulation,” Amado remarked from behind the counter of the Cannabliss Dispensary. I had gone back to share our experience and ask more questions of him and Josh, another expert on all things cannabis.

“It’s the lack of regulation killing this industry,” Amado lamented. “There is so much bad information out there, so much lack of basic understanding.”

Indeed there is. In North Carolina, and federally, we are overly fixated on the seemingly benign 0.3% thing–such a tiny number! We don’t even bother bother to set a limit on how much THC goes into a consumable product.

It’s no wonder there are so many CBD and Delta 8 stores popping up all over. If you know what to ask for, there’s plenty on those shelves to bring on some serious stonage.

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There’s more about farmworkers, the crops they grow, and the lives they lead at michaeldurbin.com. You can also follow me on Threads (michdurb) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/michael.durbin.501)