A few years ago, researching a book about farmworkers in rural North Carolina, I visited a labor camp and got an unexpected answer when I asked what crop the men were growing. What follows is an audio essay about the surprisingly thin line between hemp and marijuana, the H2A guest worker program that brings hundreds of thousands of Mexican men to American farms each year, and what happens when a curious writer and his wife ignore the instructions that came with their THC edibles.
Listen here (it’s just under 19 minutes) or read the text version that follows:
The story begins in a place most people never see: a farm labor camp, in eastern North Carolina.
On the night of my visit, in March of 2022, it was unseasonably cold–just above freezing.
The workers and I huddled at a wooden picnic table inside a mobile home, or trailer, where the men cooked and ate their meals.
It was an old trailer. Glancing at the floor, I noticed how most of the linoleum tile 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 three electric space heaters—a classic fire hazard.
The camp was at the end of a dirt road, deep in a thick grove of pine trees.
There are thousands of labor camps like this across the southeastern United States, 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, a book about farmworkers. After introducing myself to the men, 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 most crew leaders, Mingo speaks English reasonably well.
“How do you say in English,” the 60-year-old man replied, his pot-belly pressed against the edge of the table.
“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.
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.”
I wondered: Do these guys know growing marijuana here is illegal? Even for medical purposes?
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.
“You’ve seen Narcos, right Dad?” she asked, referring to the popular Netflix series. 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.
“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 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 could make someone high.
With the marijuana scare out of the way, I could get back to my research.
The agricultural economy of the Southeastern United States has always depended on a steady supply of artificially low-cost labor.
For more than 200 years, enslaved men, women, and children did much of the farmwork in North Carolina and surrounding states.
After the Civil War, it was mostly Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers who did this work. Their way of life was only marginally better than slavery.
When automobiles and highways came along, Black and poor white workers, no longer tied to one farm, moved from one to another, migrating up and down the East Coast as the seasons changed.
After millions of Black Americans relocated to northern states in the mid twentieth century, and poor white farmworkers found better-paying jobs, workers from Mexico began tending North Carolina’s fields, often without work authorization.
In the late 1980s, sweeping immigration reform provided amnesty to nearly three million undocumented residents of the United States.
Predicting that many undocumented farmworkers, once authorized, would leave their jobs for better-paying work, lawmakers also created the H2A visa program.
Also known as the guestworker program, it allowed citizens of other countries to perform agricultural work in the US for up to one year.
Many newly authorized farmworkers did in fact ditch their farm jobs, leaving many growers short-handed. So they turned to H2A workers to fill the void.
Now, four decades on, they still do.
Every year, more than 400,000 agricultural workers, most 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.
Here, H2A workers plant, cultivate, and harvest one crop more than any other: tobacco.
North Carolina produces more tobacco than any other state, and it’s been grown here since around 1650—well before the colony of Carolina was split into North and South.
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.
And, like tobacco, no other state produces more of this crop, either.
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.
This is not the only farm I would visit that’s now smaller than it used to be.
While life is hard for farmworkers, it’s not easy for many of the growers who hire them, either.
Most farming operations in North Carolina are still run by families, and some farms have been in the same family for one or even two centuries.
But with increasingly intense competition and ever-rising costs, not to mention the growing uncertainty of weather conditions, the number of family farms around here gets a little smaller each year.
There are other pressures too. With the decline of smoking in the United States, so declined the need for North Carolina’s number one crop.
Some tobacco 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 cannabis sativa. 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.
The bottom line for farmers 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 dispensaries all over the state now, with signs in their windows for “CBD” and “Delta 8.” There are six dispensaries within walking distance of where my wife Becky and I live, just outside Chapel Hill.
One day I strolled into one to ask some questions.
A woman 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 Delta 8?
Every cannabis plant naturally contains a form of THC known as Delta 9. Every plant also contains CBD.
And it turns out one can do some chemical engineering on CBD to create a synthetic form of THC known as Delta 8.
Eyeing some boxes of small chocolate squares at the dispensary, I asked the woman helping me to select two of each for me to take home.
She 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.
I left the store newly educated but also let down. 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?
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 CBD tincture like one I had seen at the store.
I also asked the men how they came to be farmworkers. Mingo answered first.
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, and does not return home until 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.
When the worker at Mingo’s camp showed me the tincture produced with their hemp, it reminded me of the edibles in our pantry.
Back at home one night after dinner, hunting for something sweet, I dug out the chocolates 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. 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.
So much for skipping alcohol.
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 all the time at our house.
A short while later, it was Becky who 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 drank half and I immediately drank the rest.
“Whoa,” I said. “We both — THelt FIRsty at the same time.”
Becky started laughing 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 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 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 assured her that everything was okay. 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.
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 struggled to remember how to put on 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 dispensary.
This was all on me.
The 15 milligrams of THC in each of those chocolates was way 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.
It’s no wonder there are so many dispensaries 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 one evening 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 men were all doing, but first to share some advice.
“Si alguien te pregunta qué cultivos cultivan ustedes,” I said. “If someone asks 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.
We talked for a while longer.
I asked the men if they looked forward to going home, immediately realizing what a pointless question that was. Of course they did.
But there was remarkably little emotion as they nodded their heads, maybe because they knew they’d be right back here, two thousand miles from their wives and kids, in a couple of months.
I wished Mingo and his crew a safe journey back to Mexico, shook all their hands, and made my way back to my car.
And then I did something no H2A farmworker can ever do at the end of their day.
I went home to be with my family.
Michael Durbin 