North Carolina’s Cannabis Crossroads: The Council Gets the Diagnosis Right. Now the Legislature Has to Get the Cure Right.

North Carolina’s new Cannabis Council interim report matters because it does something many lawmakers have been unwilling to do: it looks directly at the market that already exists and admits that the status quo is not working. The report describes a state with a large illicit marijuana market, a large unregulated intoxicating-hemp market, rising youth-exposure concerns, and no coherent statewide framework for testing, labeling, age-gating, or enforcement. Its core recommendation is straightforward and, in my view, correct: North Carolina should stop pretending that “hemp” and “marijuana” are meaningfully different when the consumer experience is the same, and it should move toward a regulated adult-access market with medical protections rather than cling to either prohibition or a medical-only compromise.

That is a significant development. It also creates a risk. North Carolina could use this moment to build a workable cannabis framework that protects consumers, limits youth access, and allows responsible small businesses​, including existing hemp companies and producers, to participate. Or it could take the familiar path of overregulation, closed licensing, and tax-heavy bureaucracy that enriches a few large operators while preserving the illicit market it claims to oppose. The Council’s report points in the right direction. The General Assembly now needs to finish the job without repeating the policy mistakes that have plagued marijuana programs across the country.

What ​is the ​NC Cannabis Council​?

The North Carolina Advisory Council on Cannabis was created by Governor Josh Stein in June 2025 through Executive Order No. 16. It is an advisory body, not a legislature and not a regulator. The Governor charged it with studying and recommending a comprehensive statewide cannabis policy grounded in public health and public safety, with a particular focus on protecting youth. Its membership is broad, including representatives from public health, law enforcement, the courts, the General Assembly, agriculture, the business community, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the Catawba Indian Nation. The Council’s interim report was approved on April 2, 2026, and a final report is due by the end of December 2026.

That structure is important. The Council is not purporting to hand down the final law. Instead, it is trying to answer a more practical question: if North Carolina is going to regulate the intoxicating-cannabis market that already exists, what kind of framework makes the most sense for this state? The interim report is the Council’s attempt to frame that answer before the short session, while making clear that more detailed recommendations will come later.

​T​he Council’s Findings

The report’s diagnosis is blunt. North Carolina is one of the few remaining jurisdictions without either a regulated adult-use market or a medical program, yet it already has a sprawling cannabis economy. According to the report, the state had an estimated $3 billion illicit marijuana market in 2022, ranking second nationally, while its intoxicating hemp-derived cannabinoid market is estimated at roughly $1 billion. At the same time, intoxicating hemp products are sold through vape shops, convenience stores, online vendors, and other outlets without uniform statewide standards for testing, labeling, packaging, age verification, inspections, or recalls. The report repeatedly describes this environment as the “Wild West.”

The report also emphasizes youth access and public-health concerns. It states that there is currently no statewide minimum age for purchase of intoxicating hemp-derived THC products, no mandatory child-resistant packaging, no standardized warning labels, no potency caps, no purchase limits, no licensing gate for retailers, no school-buffer rules, and no required testing for contaminants such as pesticides, heavy metals, mold, residual solvents, or byproducts from chemical conversion. It also points to rising emergency-department visits involving THC ingestion among children and youth in North Carolina.

The Council’s first major policy move is to reject the hemp-versus-marijuana divide as a regulatory foundation. Its interim recommendation is that North Carolina should adopt a unified approach based on total THC content and intoxicating potential rather than maintain separate structures based on plant source. That point is more important than it may sound. Once lawmakers understand that the same intoxicating molecule is the issue, the old political habit of treating hemp and marijuana as separate universes starts to look less like prudence and more like fiction.

The Council’s second major move is to reject medical-only as the preferred model. Its co-chairs recommend an adult-access market with protections for medical consumers, rather than a stand-alone medical program. The report gives several reasons: medical-only systems are expensive to administer, they generate less revenue, they risk strengthening the illicit market by restricting lawful access too tightly, and they can create meaningful barriers for patients, especially those in rural areas or with limited transportation. The report even says that a medical-only program is not supported by the physician and medical-practitioner members of the Council as an effective interim solution.

The report also sketches what it calls “balanced regulation.” That includes testing for potency and contaminants, public-health education, youth-access controls, restrictions on packaging and marketing that appeal to minors, resources for impaired-driving enforcement and judicial training, licensing and taxation to fund oversight, and a continued focus on justice issues such as expungement. It also notes that neighboring-state developments matter, particularly as Virginia moves toward a regulated adult-use retail market and South Carolina takes steps to regulate intoxicating hemp. Public opinion, meanwhile, appears to support reform: the report cites polling showing 71 percent support for medical marijuana and 63 percent support for adult recreational use of intoxicating THC. It also notes that the Council had received more than 3,000 public comments as of February 2026.

What the report gets right

The most important thing the report gets right is its rejection of magical thinking. North Carolina does not have a cannabis-free marketplace. It has an unregulated one. That distinction matters. Once a state already has widespread adult demand, widespread youth access, thousands of retail touchpoints, and billions of dollars in sales, the debate is no longer whether cannabis exists. The debate is whether the law will continue to ignore reality or finally organize it. On that point, the Council is exactly right: the status quo is unacceptable, and simple inaction is itself a policy choice.

The report is also right to move away from the hemp-versus-marijuana distinction. For years I have argued that cannabis policy should focus on clear regulatory objectives, not arbitrary labels. Hemp is cannabis. Marijuana is cannabis. Consumers do not experience intoxication based on a statutory label; they experience it based on molecules and dosage. The report’s unified approach is therefore sensible, practical, and far more honest than the current patchwork. That said, lawmakers should be careful not to take this insight and simply fold hemp into the kind of high-cost, overengineered marijuana regime that excludes small businesses and rewards incumbents. A unified framework is a good idea. A unified closed market is not.

The report is likewise right to prefer adult access over medical-only. North Carolina already has a real consumer market. Trying to force that market into a narrow medical box would not eliminate it. It would simply drive a large portion of it back underground or keep it in the current hemp gray zone. The better approach is to allow broad adult access while building in medical protections for those who need lower-THC options, better warnings, consultation access, and other safeguards. That is a more realistic and more humane answer than pretending only a tightly certified patient population should have lawful access.

​H​ow the report could go wrong

The report’s weakness is not its diagnosis. It is the risk that lawmakers will read it as a green light for the usual “public safety first” excesses that end up producing the wrong kind of market. A cannabis framework should absolutely protect minors, require standardized quality control, and impose clear labeling and packaging rules. That is the essence of what I have long called the Three Pillars Approach: limit access by minors, require objective quality control in production and manufacturing, and require uniform labeling and packaging so adults know what they are buying. Those are the pillars that matter. They are also the pillars the hemp industry and the broader cannabis industry can live with.

What North Carolina should not do is use “public safety” as a catch-all excuse for artificial scarcity, excessive licensing fees, unnecessary barriers to entry, potency micromanagement, or a market structure that only large well-capitalized entities can navigate. That is where many (most) marijuana programs have gone wrong. They claim to be about safety, but in practice they are also about gatekeeping. When licensing is too limited, taxes are too high, and compliance is too expensive, the result is predictable: consumers stay in the illicit market, small businesses get locked out, and regulators spend years trying to fix a system that was badly designed from the start.

North Carolina should also resist the temptation to make “intoxication” itself the target of regulation. The better approach is not to obsess over whether a product can intoxicate, but to regulate the real issues that matter: age-gating, truthful labeling, contaminant testing, consistent manufacturing standards, and responsible marketing. Adults should be able to make adult choices. The state’s job is to ensure that those choices are informed, reasonably safe, and kept away from minors. That is a more workable and more principled approach than building a new legal regime around fear of intoxication.

If North Carolina follows that path, it could build one of the better cannabis frameworks in the ​country. The pieces are all visible in the report itself: age restrictions, testing, warnings, recall authority, enforcement against bad actors, expungement, and a recognition that the current hemp and illicit markets are not going away on their own. The missing piece is economic philosophy. Lawmakers should make sure the eventual framework allows small farmers, processors, labs, brands, retailers, and other responsible local businesses to participate. A North Carolina cannabis market should not become a prize reserved for the largest corporate entities or the best-connected applicants.

What next​?

The Council’s interim report is not the final word, but it is a strong signal that North Carolina is finally beginning to ask the right question. The question is not whether cannabis should exist here. It already does. The question is whether the General Assembly will regulate it intelligently. If lawmakers act, they should build a framework around the three pillars that actually matter: minors should not have unfettered access, products should be manufactured under real quality-control standards, and adults should get clear labeling and packaging that allows informed decisions. That is how you protect consumers, create room for legitimate businesses, and reduce the illicit market without strangling the legal one.

Interested businesses, trade groups, patients, consumers, and policymakers should engage now, not after a bill is already drafted badly. The Council is still taking input ahead of its final report​ (click here to comment), and lawmakers are already being told that action may come sooner rather than later. If you care about this issue, the message should be simple: support a regulated adult-access market, insist on sensible protections grounded in age-gating, quality control, and labeling, and oppose any framework that turns cannabis into a playground for large corporate interests while leaving small businesses and consumers behind.

April 6, 2026