When Matthew Rollins’ customer got sick after eating the Diamond Shruumz spiked candies he sold at his Port Wentworth Alt Vape shop, he removed the product from the shelves. Other retailers were not so responsible, as the product was still reportedly being sold at hundreds of stores even after the Food and Drug Administration announced a nationwide recall.
Over the summer, dozens of people were hospitalized after ingesting the candies, whose name suggests magic mushroom-like, psychoactive qualities.
The spotty regulation and enforcement of spiked products — edibles, smoking vapors, skin creams and others — is becoming more of an issue as consumer demand grows and the stores that sell alternative substances and those products proliferate. The number of shops selling them has ballooned from some 700 in 2021 to about 1,300 in metro Atlanta alone, market research by the Alternative Products Expo found.
They are serving a range of customers for uses ranging from recreational to medicinal to helping those trying to shake an addiction. But their composition often is untested by authorities or might even be kept secret from customers as “proprietary,” devised in a lab.
The health risks might not be known until well after something happens to a large number of people, as occurred with Diamond Shruumz. Even the most widely used alternative substances, derivatives of cannabis, rest on “scant to no research” on their health effects despite becoming increasingly powerful, the National Academy of Sciences warned this fall.
Even as some local and state governments try to regulate these substances, their efforts often have gaps. And many producers stay a step ahead of regulators, tweaking formulas ahead of legislative crackdowns.
Georgia has just passed two new laws in such an attempt, regulating the cannabis plant called hemp and the Asian leaf kratom, which some use to self-treat pain, anxiety or withdrawal, and others think is dangerous. The kratom law, House Bill 181, tells producers and sellers the type of ingredients they can use, and sets criminal penalties for violations. But it says nothing about any agency keeping tabs or enforcing it.
In a trip to one store, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter purchased a mini canister of vaping liquid containing at least five different cannabis extracts; bags of gummies containing more kinds of cannabis extracts; a bag of gummies with tryptamine compounds — the exact recipe undisclosed — formulated to mimic the effects of magic mushrooms; and a one-sip pouch of Mind Bender “Mad Honey” containing brain-enhancing nootropics compounds. Some of their exact recipes and active ingredients are withheld as a trade secret.
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Even those who disagree on whether alternative products should be legal might agree that the retail scene where they’re sold is a wild west.
“None of those (alternative) products have been approved” by federal health authorities, no matter how official their packages look, said Dr. Merrill Norton, a former clinical associate professor of pharmacy at the University of Georgia who is concerned about the products’ potential for misuse. He said he’s done his own testing and found the products’ ingredients lists often don’t match reality.
“Buyer beware,” Norton said.
“The fundamental issue is, a lot of people are creating intoxicants to replace alcohol, and in many cases they’re healthier,” said Josh Kappel, an attorney who favors both legalizing and uniformly regulating mushroom microdosing. “But the FDA doesn’t know what to do about it.”
What’s out there? Who’s taking it?
Perry Mack, manager of the Rising Cloud vape shop in Johns Creek, was harried as he raced to replace newly illegal types of hemp products in his inventory. He’s frustrated that the Georgia Legislature tried to intervene at all.
“We do our due diligence,” Mack said. “Vape shops are supposed to be the arbiters, the gatekeepers.”
Some retailers who spoke to the AJC said they do their own independent testing to ensure that products they sell their customers are not dangerous and also conform to the promises made on the packages.
Mack heard what happened with Diamond Shruumz. But from Mack’s perspective, bad actors shouldn’t stanch the freedom of the good ones. Mack said alternative products “saved my life.” He’d been hospitalized with crippling panic attacks, and doctors gave him strong prescription drugs for depression and anxiety that didn’t help, he said. What did help was when a friend gave him one of the products Mack now sells. That was part of his motivation to get in the business, and become a guide for others, Mack said.
“Everybody wants less government,” Mack said. “People should decide what’s helpful for them.”
Of course, not all products have such lofty goals as saving a life. In Johns Creek, 10 minutes up the road from Mack, another vape shop has a twist. The Lions Vape & Smoke sells slushies spiked with cannabis compound Delta-8 to moviegoers headed to the cinema a few steps away. The shop said only adults 21 and older could enter, as such shops often do.
Mack said his clients run the gamut from professionals to young adults to seniors with sicknesses.
The industry marketing is designed to appeal to that broad range of customers.
“If your target customer is your soccer moms, you’re going to want it to be a bit warmer, a bit more inviting,” said Jeff Sunga, business development manager at DisplayDispensary.com, which markets glass cases and other display products to the cannabis industry. “Or, if you are going to be in, say, a university, you want it to feel some more of like the smoke shops or the head shops, and utilize the right colors, but elevating it by using (sharp-looking) displays.”
Cannabis the OG
The anchor products in vape shops often are the ones derived from cannabis.
Cannabis is a genus of plants that includes both marijuana and hemp. Both include the compounds CBD and THC, but hemp has much tinier amounts of THC, the substance that causes pot’s high.
In 2018, the federal “Farm Bill” removed hemp from the federal schedule of illegal drugs. Marijuana remains illegal for recreational use in Georgia, so producers started seeing what they could make in laboratories with the hemp plant’s extracts.
These hemp products are federally regulated, but there are gaps. The regulation is different for different substances — edibles, inhalable substances such as vapes, or absorbent ones such as skin creams or bath bombs.
For example, a manufacturer can assert that its edibles are legal because substances in them are “generally recognized as safe,” with experts to say so, said Andrea Golan, a lawyer in the cannabis industry. But if anyone’s checking, it’s sporadic, she said. “There’s just no enforcement resource.”
The report from the National Academy of Sciences this fall called many of the cannabis-related products “largely unregulated.”
Credit: Katelyn Myrick
Credit: Katelyn Myrick
As states like Georgia now step in with their own laws, they run into confusion, too. Altogether there are more than 100 different cannabinoid compounds beyond marijuana’s signal THC-9. And as soon as one is restricted, entrepreneurs are trying to see if new combinations will work.
Georgia’s new hemp law, Senate Bill 494, requires testing for at least seven of the compounds. It clamps down on the compound THCA, which had been used as a substitute for THC. It sets a minimum age of 21; sets up new requirements and restrictions for growers, producers and sellers under the state Department of Agriculture; and requires a warning label for the THC in the products. They can’t be sold near schools, and they can’t be in drinks. They can’t be packaged to be “attractive to children.”
The new law will, for the first time, require hemp retailers to register with the state; up to now, no one knew where they all were.
Georgia cannabis advocates are challenging the law in court, calling it a quagmire of regulation and “prohibitionist.”
Meanwhile, inventors are looking for a new product.
Chris Gerlach is one. His company, Synergy Life Science, has a laboratory in an office park in Buford. To navigate the quicksand of changing local laws, he’s paying hefty sums attempting to get a sterling seal of approval from nationally recognized scientists, hoping it will keep his newly invented product above the fray. His invention is called Cannabidieth-21; it is soluble in water rather than oil, which he says makes it more powerful and safer.
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
“We’re not a company that (says): ‘Oh, there’s a legal loophole. Let’s make Delta-8 in a bathtub and start selling it,’ like 90% of the industry does,” Gerlach said.
Is it ALL bad medicine?
Separately, many studies on possible health effects of substances in the products are underway. Scientists are looking into anecdotes that cannabinoids help with anxiety, chronic pain or addiction; or whether psychedelics help with PTSD.
For those who use a substance daily or near daily, cannabis outpaced alcohol as of 2022, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
“Many people in society are fed up with alcohol, but still want something that makes them feel good, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Josh Kappel, the attorney who supports the products but thinks they need uniform regulation. “The FDA needs to create a clear pathway for novel alternative products or novel substances to be regulated and provided to the public in a safe manner.”
In Georgia, Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens, proposed state legislation on tobacco vapes this year that passed the House but failed in the Senate. He thinks next year it will be “a pretty significant topic” when the Legislature convenes again. As to other products in gas stations and shops? Who knows.
“I think there are a number of products, tobacco and otherwise, that consumers suspect what they’re getting has been regulated and tested, but many times that’s not the case.” Gaines said. “And that’s something we’ve got to get ahold of.”
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