NC can protect kids from hemp, but a ban would bring new dangers | Opinion
During nearly fifteen years in law enforcement — including serving as chief of police in Fletcher and as a senior officer in Charlotte — I learned that there are no shortcuts to public safety. Time and again, I watched well-intentioned policies promise to eliminate dangerous drugs through tougher enforcement, only to create new dangers that were often harder to control. That experience is why I believe North Carolina should approach today’s debate over consumable hemp with both urgency and perspective.
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A coalition of my colleagues in law enforcement recently sent a letter to legislators expressing concerns about North Carolina’s legal hemp market and urging them to act on legislation currently before the state House. I agree with them on one fundamental point: North Carolina should not allow children to purchase intoxicating hemp products. We need a minimum purchase age, meaningful safeguards, and stronger oversight of this rapidly evolving market.
Where I disagree is on the remedy. The recent law enforcement letter argues that achieving those goals requires a sweeping prohibition that would effectively eliminate much of North Carolina’s legal hemp market, all while creating predictable — even if unintended — consequences of its own.
As police officers, we’ve seen this story before.
For decades, drug prohibition promised to reduce access to dangerous substances, improve public safety, and protect young people. Instead, it predictably created illicit markets, empowered criminal organizations, and consumed enormous law enforcement resources, all while leaving consumers with fewer protections in the form of meaningful testing, labeling, or quality controls. The lesson should be clear: prohibition often creates more problems than it solves.
That doesn’t mean regulation is unnecessary. In fact, North Carolina’s hemp marketplace clearly needs stronger rules. Products should not be marketed toward children. Sales should be restricted to adults 21 and older. Retailers should be licensed. Products should undergo rigorous laboratory testing and carry accurate labels. Regulators should have the authority to inspect businesses, remove unsafe products from shelves and impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate the law.
Those measures improve public health and safety. Blanket prohibitions do not.
When we push previously legal products into the illicit market, demand rarely disappears. Instead, the market becomes completely unregulated. We lose the ability to impose age checks, testing requirements, product recalls or basic accountability on sellers. Rather than making these products harder for young people to access, prohibition often makes them easier to obtain.
It also places the enforcement burden back on police, giving officers the additional task of policing a marketplace that regulators are better equipped to oversee. Law enforcement should be focused on violent crime and other serious threats facing our communities — not determining whether a package of gummies exceeds an arbitrary THC threshold or investigating products that were lawfully sold just days earlier.
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Fortunately, North Carolina doesn’t have to invite those consequences in order to protect children. Lawmakers already have options to establish a 21-and-over purchase age without coupling it to a broad criminal prohibition. Senate Bill 328, which would prohibit the sale of hemp-derived consumables to anyone under 21, has been awaiting action in the Senate for more than a year. Whether lawmakers ultimately choose that bill or another regulatory framework, they don’t have to force a choice between protecting children and preserving a marketplace that can still be effectively regulated.
Other states — including Minnesota, Louisiana, and Alabama — have demonstrated that robust regulation, including licensing, testing, packaging standards, labeling requirements, and meaningful enforcement against bad actors, can provide stronger consumer protections than simply banning products outright.
As someone who has spent a career in law enforcement, I believe we should learn from experience rather than rush to repeat it.
If an outright ban on most consumable hemp products were the best or only way to protect children, I would support it. But history tells us prohibition is not a path to public safety. By enacting strong age restrictions, rigorous product standards, and meaningful oversight of the legal marketplace, North Carolina can protect young people and all consumers, hold irresponsible businesses accountable, and avoid repeating the mistakes that have accompanied prohibition for generations.
Antoine M. Ensley Sr. is a former Chief of Police in Fletcher, North Carolina, a former police manager with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, a graduate of the FBI National Academy and the UNC School of Government, and a longtime advocate for child welfare and juvenile justice reform.
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