Intoxicating hemp products can still be bought in New Jersey stores for now.
Most provisions in a new law that would restrict which stores can sell the products have been put on hold amid a lawsuit from multiple companies; the only part of the law that remains in effect is an age limit; customers must be 21 years old to buy these products.
“There should be required standards,” said Adam Terry, CEO of Cantrip, one of the companies suing New Jersey. “There should be a way to check how are people pulling their samples, how are they making sure that a sample that’s on their website is representative of the product that people are purchasing. These are important questions that the answer cannot simply be, ‘We don’t know the answer to these questions, and therefore we’re going to ban everything that helps people.’”
One of the controversial aspects of the law is that it seeks to regulate hemp, which is federally legal, unlike cannabis, which is not. The law would put up additional barriers to out-of-state companies trying to sell to New Jersey customers.
“The issue of out-of-state manufactured hemp products, intoxicating hemp products, was never going to be enforceable because of interstate commerce,” says cannabis attorney Bill Caruso. “The court ruled that, in fact, was the case. And so that when New Jersey developed its regulated market, it could not prevent the importation of out-of-state hemp-derived products.”
