Behind the colorful packaging designed to appeal to young people on the shelves of many North Carolina vape shops lurks a dangerous lack of transparency, public health advocates and law enforcement agencies caution.
Many consumers, they say, have no idea if the gummies and other edibles they’re purchasing contain legal CBD, high-dose psychoactive Delta-8 or something more harmful.
For years, those retailers have functioned in a murky, regulatory gray zone, a market that Gov. Josh Stein describes as “the Wild West.”
Now Stein and others are pushing for more order in the largely unregulated cannabis industry, which generates an estimated $3.2 billion in annual revenue, according to the 2023 U.S. Cannabis Report.
Stein created the 27-member North Carolina Advisory Council on Cannabis in June 2025 and put Lawrence Greenblatt, state health director and chief medical officer at the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, and Matt Scott, the Robeson County district attorney, at the helm.
Their task is to develop a comprehensive approach for regulating cannabis sales that creates a safe market for adults while also protecting children. They issued an interim report several weeks ago in advance of the scheduled April 21 opening of the General Assembly short session.
“Last year, I charged this group with developing a comprehensive solution to the unregulated sale of cannabis that is grounded in public health and public safety, with a special focus on keeping young people safe,” Stein said in an April 2 statement. “This report provides the General Assembly with guidance and makes clear that a well-regulated market, including both oversight and enforcement authority, is a safer market for our state.”
One of the council’s recommendations is to create a legal, tightly regulated market for marijuana and hemp products for adults 21 and older. They suggest that lawmakers establish a state-licensed retail system with a 30 percent excise tax on cannabis sales that then could be used, in part, to fund public health programs and other community investments.
Additionally, they suggested development of regulating hemp and marijuana products based on the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive component of cannabis. This is the compound that produces the “high,” or intoxicating effects that can lead to altered perception and potential impairment. Many people, especially in states where marijuana has been legalized, ingest or smoke THC products for relaxation, recreational enjoyment and help in managing some medical conditions such as nausea, anxiety, chronic pain and insomnia.
In North Carolina, marijuana is still illegal for recreational and medical use, even though 24 states have legalized it for recreational use and 40 allow it for medical purposes.
Over much of the past decade, legalizing marijuana for medical purposes has been a perennial political issue at the General Assembly. Nonetheless, lawmakers resistant to the idea have won out so far.
In recent years, there also has been a focus on hemp-derived products with a push to bring more regulation to the industry. The Cannabis Council offered some recommendations on that front, too, like establishing safety measures for packaging regulations, potency limits and testing.
“The state now faces a choice about whether to continue allowing this marketplace to operate without comprehensive oversight or to establish a regulatory framework designed to protect the health, safety, and well-being of North Carolinians,” the council’s interim report says. A final report is due in December.
Candy bar look-alikes
In February, the heads of the State Bureau of Investigation and Alcohol Law Enforcement shared some of their insight into what’s happening across the state with the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety.
ALE Director Bryan House said his division has seen a marked increase in the number of complaints about vape and smoke shops statewide.
Because the stores are not required to be licensed by the state to sell those products, the law enforcement agencies say they can only guess how many there are in North Carolina. SBI Director Chip Hawley estimated that there were anywhere from 12,000 to 14,000.
House said when the ALE gets a complaint about a vape shop, they typically open a case and put an emphasis on those that involve a young person who has become sick or overdosed.
At the stores, House said they’ve seen “THC products that are unlawful, the psilocybin edibles which now we’re seeing, candy bars that look like something a kid would have in their lunchbox that have a hallucinogenic drug in there — with no age restriction whatsoever on purchasing those items at these stores.”
In 2025, House said, ALE tested 351 samples from shops and stores, and 319 of them came back with results above the legal limit. More than half of those involved Delta-9 THC, which causes an intense high. Delta-9 THC can be derived from marijuana plants. It also can be concentrated from legal hemp plants, which contain Delta-9 in small quantities and can be batched to create enough to cause a high.
“Many of these samples are mislabeled and involve cases with underage use and often some sort of overdose or sickness,” House told the lawmakers.
“With that said,” House added, “I’ll say marijuana is being sold openly in North Carolina, primarily in unpermitted vape and tobacco shops often intentionally mislabeled as hemp and frequently sold to young people. That is a fact.”
More shops are popping up close to schools, House said.
But it’s not just young people feeling the effects of mislabeling of the products.
“We are seeing law enforcement officers consume products that have been purchased at these stores and are testing positive on drug tests, which is compromising their certification to be a law enforcement officer,” House said. “We’re seeing military members go through the same thing, being determined to be unfit for duty because they are consuming products that they are purchasing at these vape shops.”
‘We’ve done a little bit’
Rep. Carson Smith (R-Wilmington), a member of the state House of Representatives, suggested that law enforcement agencies work together to bring recommendations to lawmakers.
“We’ve done a little bit on it, but we are way behind,” Smith told Hawley during his presentation on SBI needs. “These shops are selling stuff that’s legal, stuff that’s illegal, stuff that should be illegal. And, quite frankly, stuff on the shelves that we don’t even know where it’s produced or what’s in it.
“We’ve done a little, but this is a problem that we’ve got to tackle. And I think if the law enforcement community across the state speaks with one voice to us, I think it might help us push some things through.”
The heads of the SBI and the ALE said they needed more people and higher pay, in general. House offered some ideas for what he called “short-term low-hanging fruit.”
As it is, ALE has very limited authority over vape shops that are primarily focused on age restrictions and tax compliance issues. While they don’t have the power to regulate the day-to-day operations of all vape stores, the division's officers can investigate those selling illegal, unapproved or untaxed products.
House said the division needs more resources, suggesting 36 more agents to help with that and with alcohol regulation, the main thrust of their job.
“If a cannabis regulation policy were adopted, we would need enforceable statutes, inspection authority, adequate resources to enforce the law consistently,” House said.
New hemp definition
Many looking at tighter regulations over hemp-derived products also are watching the federal government.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the federal budget approved by Congress last summer, narrows the definition of what counts as legal hemp. That is set to take effect this November. There’s uncertainty about what impact that will have on the states; it’s a federal law, and state law enforcement officers do not have the ability to enforce that on a wide scale.
The ALE and other agencies have limited options for enforcing federal law. They can if they are working with federal agencies on joint task forces that focus on such issues. They also can investigate a case and present it to federal prosecutors, who can choose to adopt them on a case by case basis.
House said he had been asked by several lawmakers how the narrower hemp definition will play out in North Carolina.
“The short answer is I don’t know,” House said. “But how it will affect our day-to-day, widespread enforcement, I don’t know that it will, because we don’t have that ability to enforce federal law.”
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.