But now that farm — like many other licensed grows in states that have legalized marijuana — faces an existential threat: high-inducing cannabis compounds derived not from the heavily regulated and taxed legal marijuana industry, but from a chemical process involving little-regulated, cheaply grown hemp.
“It’s going to make our farm obsolete,” Griffis, the chief operating officer of True North Collective, testified before Michigan’s Marijuana Regulatory Agency recently. “The $3 million or so that I’ve invested … is going to be wiped out.”
At the center of the issue is THC, marijuana’s main intoxicating component. While marijuana and hemp are the same plant — cannabis — the distinction between the two is a legal one, and comes down to the amount of THC in the plant, specifically the amount of a type of THC called delta-9.