Yo, check it, in the middle of all this cannabis and CBD talk out West, hemp products are blowing up. But hold up, lawmakers are trippin’ ’cause they say these products ain’t regulated and might mess you up.
Just recently, a bunch of states started putting limits on selling psychoactive hemp products like delta-8 THC. But folks out here are also calling out the shady stuff happening with these hemp products in the market.
CBD Oracle, a company trying to make cannabis safer for everyone, decided to look into CBD gummies and other hemp stuff being sold on Amazon.com. Amazon says they don’t allow CBD gummies, but CBD Oracle’s new study says otherwise.
So peep this, Amazon doesn’t technically sell CBD products, but CBD Oracle found out that sellers on there are getting smart and not using the word “CBD” and instead using “hemp” to describe their stuff. CEO Jan Brandup said Amazon’s “hemp products” ain’t even real hemp, they just using the name to sell stuff.
“It’s crazy how people trust these products just ’cause they’re on Amazon,” Brandup said. “At best, they’ll just take your money.”
Another CEO, Mike Sill, said most of the products on Amazon ain’t worth it ’cause they lack quality and credibility due to Amazon’s rules.
“When you look for CBD gummies on there, you won’t find any legit brands,” Sill said. “Good companies like Sunday Scaries or Charlotte’s Web can’t sell on Amazon ’cause they’ll get banned.”
Sill also said some companies do “brand burning,” where they get banned from Amazon, switch names, and keep selling the same stuff. They don’t care about building a good brand or making safe products for customers; they just want that quick sale.
But wait, what’s really in these Amazon “hemp” products?
To find out, CBD Oracle bought 56 popular hemp products from Amazon and tested them. Most of the stuff was gummies (80%), with a few tinctures and creams thrown in. Some claimed to have specific dosages.
Turns out, 30% of the tested products had CBD in them, averaging around 547 mg per package. But the amount of CBD varied a lot between products. Some had as little as 28 mg while others had up to 1,582 mg. While this shows that some of these products do have hemp compounds like they say, it still breaks Amazon’s rules and might not be legal.
Oh yeah, THC is also a no-go on Amazon. But six of the tested products had THC in them, with three having delta-8 THC. Even though these products were under the legal THC limit set by the 2018 Farm Bill, some of them had a lot of THC in them. One product had 76 mg per gummy!
The majority of tested products (62.5%) had no cannabinoids at all, with over a third (43%) having no hemp either.
The lab manager at InfiniteCAL explained that hemp is usually mixed into edible products through hemp seeds or extracts taken from leaves or buds to make cannabinoid-infused goods.
Long story short, if you buy “hemp” from Amazon, it might just be an expensive jar of gummy bears with no real CBD or hemp in it.
The report also found that almost all the tested products didn’t list the correct dosage on their labels.
Looking into these Amazon products is just the start. CBD Oracle says other companies like eBay and Walmart are selling similar stuff too.
They say selling fake hemp and CBD could mess up the whole cannabis industry and set back all the progress folks have been making for legalizing weed.
Amazon needs to step up their game with these products or just stop selling them altogether. Customers can’t do much about it alone; we need better regulations to make sure we’re getting what we pay for when we buy hemp or CBD online.
So yeah, Amazon needs to do better. Customers deserve safe and honest products when they buy stuff online – especially when it comes to cannabis and hemp.