Montmartre, the stretch of twisty cobblestoned streets sweeping up to the Sacr\u00e9-Coeur Basilica and its commanding view of Paris, has been a favorite on both the tourist and bohemian circuits for generations. If you were ever herded through Europe\u2019s second-most visited city by a guidebook-clutching friend or as part of an organized tour, you likely swung through Montmartre. If you visited sometime in the past year, as I did, you may have strolled past one of the few places where you can legally buy cannabis in France, a country where high-THC cannabis is strictly prohibited and legalization is still a distant dream.<\/p>\n
From the outside,\u00a0Deli-Hemp<\/a>\u00a0vaguely resembles a hip cafe serving fourth-wave coffee. Inside, there\u2019s the minimalist\u2019s aesthetic of egg-white walls and unpainted wood. But then there are the trimmed buds \u2014 unmistakably cannabis \u2014 in deep greens and purples, displayed underneath glass bells on a row of wall-mounted, bare-wood shelves. When I lift a bell to take a sniff, out wafts a wave of familiar terpenes: pine, lemon, and, from the bud labeled Tangie, sweet-and-sour tropical citrus. Oil extracted from plants like these are also available by the bottle, or, for a couple of euro, dropped into an espresso pulled from the machine behind the counter.<\/p>\n Whether this is all legal, exactly, depends on whom you ask \u2014 if you ask, say, French authorities in certain cities where such establishments have had their wares seized, the answer is a firm non. But on this weekday afternoon in Paris, Deli-Hemp\u2019s door is wide open and nobody seems the least bit concerned.<\/p>\n Recreational cannabis is still banned in Europe and what medical marijuana there is on the continent and in the U.K. is heavily restricted. Yet finding, buying and consuming weed in Europe is an activity that\u2019s slowly becoming increasingly familiar \u2014 and increasingly comfortable.<\/p>\n Unlike the cannabis found in one of\u00a0Barcelona\u2019s hundred-plus underground clubs<\/a>\u00a0that would compete for top-shelf status in California, the cannabis sold at Deli-Hemp and a handful of other weed boutiques in France is the kind you can buy in the United States, in all 50 states, not only in dispensaries but in smoke shops, bookstores, online and at pop-ups in Brooklyn. That is to say, Deli-Hemp and a few other brave merchants in France are selling hemp: cannabis sativa with 0.2% or less THC, the legal threshold separating legal hemp and outlaw cannabis in the European Union. (They also sell it, with a straight face, with an admonishment printed on the label that these very smokable buds are not for smoking.)<\/p>\n And though wary English merchants yanked\u00a0CBD flower<\/a>\u00a0from their shelves despite great strides in public acceptance and legal protection for medical cannabis in the past year, other CBD products such as oils and salves are in shops in both high streets and low corners in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n Fueled by the entrepreneurial excitement spilling over from the United States (as well as a few\u00a0very high-profile cases of children with \u201cuntreatable\u201d epilepsy treated with CBD<\/a>\u00a0oil), the CBD craze has landed in Europe. Just how long it will last \u2014 and in what form \u2014 nobody can say for certain.<\/p>\n \u201cThe main challenge right now for entrepreneurs is the lack of specific and coherent regulation about hemp-derived contained CBD products,\u201d said Laurene Tran, a former lecturer at Paris\u2019s elite university Sciences Po and executive director of\u00a0ACTIVE<\/a>, a trade association supporting both the hemp and medical cannabis trades in Europe.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all a bit chaotic,\u201d said Steve Moore, the London-based political operative enjoying a second act as a drug-policy reform maven and the \u201cstrategic council\u201d at the U.K.\u2019s still-new\u00a0Centre for Medicinal Cannabis<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s getting a bit too big, a bit too exuberant. There are products of a very dubious provenance and quality, nobody knows what\u2019s in them. Someone\u2019s going to have to impose some regulations, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n Both hemp activism and related commercial activity have long histories in Europe. Industrial hemp grown on the continent has been legally cultivated and exported as seed and fiber to the United States throughout the drug prohibition era. In Glastonbury, the famous festival town in the heart of England, hemp products have been for sale, openly, on the main merchant strip since the 1990s, where a puckish 52-year-old whose legal name is Free Cannabis also sells CBD flower.<\/p>\n But the CBD craze means awareness and demand on a level never before seen \u2014 and with it, a flood of competing information and bold products making bolder claims. Amid the accompanying confusion and ambiguity that comes with quick shifts in the law and how it is enforced, mixed signals are coming fast and steady.<\/p>\n In summer 2019, the British Home Office \u2014 the national ministry charged with enforcing drug laws \u2014 ordered a company to eradicate \u00a3200,000 worth of hemp destined for CBD oil extraction, despite the fact that the company had been in business since 2016 and would have paid \u00a3480,000 in taxes on millions\u2019 worth of revenue from that crop. Then, a month later, that same office authorized an upstart hemp farm in Jersey to grow the same plant for the exact same purpose.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is all very strange,\u201d said penalized hemp farmer Patrick Gilette, who estimated his company, Hempen, had racked up more than \u00a32.4 million worth of sales, in an interview with the Guardian. \u201cNo one in the Home Office up until the end of last year ever said to us: \u2018Stop what you are doing, this is illegal.\u2019 They allowed us to get started and then after a perfect year \u2014 wet spring and hot summer \u2014 we had a bumper crop which they made us destroy last Tuesday. It doesn\u2019t make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n European merchants have also demonstrated the same lack of concern for product safety and efficacy seen among CBD-sellers in the United States. The U.K.\u2019s Centre for Medicinal Cannabis, a set up by pro-drug policy reform veterans of the pre-Brexit Conservative government, recently tested a random assortment of CBD products available for sale in the country and found that many contained THC, and many more had levels of CBD well out of line with the figure printed on the label.<\/p>\n Over in France, the government and local police departments have inconsistently applied the country\u2019s 0.2% THC limit, claiming that CBD products for sale in retail outlets could not contain any THC at all. However, Deli-Hemp and a handful of other French shops still remained in business in July, when Cannabis Now visited, and still were as of this fall.<\/p>\n After that, or later in 2020, well, who can say? European drug-reform activists and entrepreneurs are pushing their respective governments to (for once) follow U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s lead. It was Trump who signed the\u00a02018 Farm Bill<\/a>, which put in place a framework for building consistent regulations around hemp and CBD. But even then, uncertainty and ambiguity remains, as regulators including the FDA have still been slow to keep up with the pace of the market.<\/p>\n Outposts like Deli-Hemp and a growing number of companies in the United Kingdom are a gamble that clarifying laws will pass and explicitly allow for hemp production and CBD consumption. And, even if those laws don\u2019t pass, there appears to be enough public interest to keep a business afloat before the gendarmes decide they\u2019ve had enough.<\/p>\n The French merchants followed the example set by retailers in Switzerland and in Italy, countries where strict interpretations of drug-control laws that did not mention CBD or provided THC limits led to \u201ccannabis caf\u00e9s\u201d selling CBD flower. So far, their survival appears due to a mixture of general ignorance and confusion about CBD, as well as laissez-faire enforcement. There doesn\u2019t appear to be any public demand for a crackdown.<\/p>\n The same is true in the U.K. In Britain, CBD appears to inhabit a sort of ambiguous space between a \u201cnovel food\u201d and an off-license, un-prescribed medicine. Merchants import either hemp or hemp products from abroad and add them to products for a significant markup \u2014 and for now, there isn\u2019t sufficient interest or resources to stop it.<\/p>\n \u201cEnforcement is tough,\u201d said Moore. If the Home Office suddenly decided that all CBD products had to go, such an edict would be unenforceable.<\/p>\n In this, European CBD is strikingly similar to its American cousin, down to the public uncertainty about whether any of this actually does anything or if it\u2019s just a hype-fueled wellness fad, like crystals or whatever Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop are selling this week.<\/p>\n I pondered this with the CBD-infused coffee slowly pulsing rather than cranking through my veins and brain. Climbing the steps towards Sacre-Coeur, elbowing through the crowds and street artists, I felt \u2014 well, just fine. The smoke wasn\u2019t quite as pleasant. The buds in the three-gram can I bought for \u20ac30 were dry, a little harsh, and lacked the sharp terpenes the display buds radiated. But even so, there I was buying and smoking CBD flower in Paris, something that nobody could do all that long ago. At this rate, can Barcelona-style THC cannabis clubs be far behind?<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, have you seen CBD stores while traveling abroad? <\/p>\n Originally published in Issue 40 of Cannabis Now.\u00a0LEARN MORE<\/a><\/em> <\/p>\n The post Let Them Eat CBD<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Montmartre, the stretch of twisty cobblestoned streets sweeping up to the Sacr\u00e9-Coeur Basilica and its commanding view of Paris, has been a favorite on both the tourist and bohemian circuits for generations. If you were ever herded through Europe\u2019s second-most visited city by a guidebook-clutching friend or as part ofContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,136,2273,296,85,12916],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41766"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41767,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41766\/revisions\/41767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: Let Them Eat CBD<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"