VAPOR TRAIL

After a cannabis product turned up at my kid's school, I rode into the Wild West of unregulated pot.

- Doug Henry

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I found an empty THC cartridge package by the court after one of my son's high school basketball games. Cannabis vapes are illegal for everyone in Texas, where I live, much less for minors. I scooped up the box, which displayed a California Republic bear and the brand Gold Coast Clear. Later, around the dinner table, 1 asked my two teens, "So, does anyone know anything about this company?"

After blank stares and an awkward silence, I decided to seek answers myself and hopefully shed light on what exactly had been inside. I'm hardly naive about the possibilities. As a medical anthropologist, I've spent 18 months trying to understand how society is adapting to cannabinoids-cannabis' psychoactive components-by talking to growers, retailers, cops, consumers, and chemists.

In 2018's Farm Bill, Congress federally legalized growing what's commonly known as hemp-cannabis plants with less than 0.3 percent THC, the compound that gets users high. But there was no regulation of products derived from hemp. Entrepreneurs and chemists jumped through this loophole, turning low-THC hemp into molecules that legally replicate, mimic, and even exceed THC's effects, creating a situation where it can even be cheaper to get THC from hemp than marijuana. That makes such cannabinoids, in the words of one of my college students, "just like regular weed, but better."