Streetside: Nobody seems to know if CBD is legal in Kansas
Perched behind the counter at Into the Mystic, Eddie Smith — gray beard, wavy hair, a black shirt beneath a soft black vest; Dr. Jacoby minus the menace — radiates a vaguely guru-like spiritual positivity.
“I love those singing bowls,” Smith says to a customer browsing his Mission, Kansas, shop. “I just love the way they move energy around the room.”
In addition to crystals and candles and Tibetan prayer flags and books about herbal alchemy, Smith’s shop sells cannabidiol, or CBD. People use CBD — it’s sold in oil, lotion, powder, tincture, and pill form — to relieve arthritis, anxiety, and various other medical conditions. If you live in the Kansas City area, you might have noticed an influx of places retailing CBD in recent years: head shops and alternative medicine outlets, as well as businesses like The CBD Store, which are devoted almost exclusively to the product.
Last May, a Mission Police Department detective walked into Smith’s shop and seized about $4,000 worth of CBD products. His offense? Selling CBD that contained trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis that gets you high. Much of Smith’s CBD inventory came from American Shaman, a local company that manufactures the product. But American Shaman — and, by extension, Smith’s shop — was abiding by a federal law, part of the 2014 Farm Bill, that says CBD is legal so long as it contains .03 percent THC content or less.
Kansas authorities, though, seemed to be taking the view that products containing any amount of THC were illegal.
“After the raid in Mission, rather than fight Kansas, we decided to start making oil with zero THC,” says Vince Sanders, CEO of American Shaman.
The company now supplies all its Kansas stores with this product. (It distributes its products nationally and has over 60 storefronts in 11 states.) Smith began stocking his shelves with the non-THC CBD. Things returned to normal.
Then, in late January, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt handed down an opinion on the matter of CBD in Kansas. Following a tortured and mazelike examination of state and federal laws, Schmidt declared that, “Under Kansas law it is unlawful to possess or sell products or substances containing any amount of cannabidiol.” (Part of Schmidt’s rationale seemed to be a 2016 proclamation by the DEA that lumped cannabidiol in with marijuana, despite mountains of scientific studies contradicting this view.)
“So, we went from being allowed to sell .03 percent, to being allowed only to sell zero percent, to now where we have the AG saying, ‘Actually, you can’t sell it at all,’” says Sean Pickett, attorney for American Shaman. “The AG doesn’t understand the law, and we’re sending him a letter explaining our position. While we fight this, we’ll be sourcing all our Kansas CBD products from juniper instead of cannabis, but anything seized by authorities will be subject to civil litigation due to [the store’s] economic loss. And if any shop owner is arrested, there will be a filling.”
The ACLU of Kansas has also called for lawmakers to step in and settle the matter. In the meantime, Schmidt’s opinion puts shops like Into the Mystic, which generate a not-insignificant percentage of their income from CBD, in a precarious position. Interestingly, Schmidt’s opinion seems to have been solicited by the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office.
“We were getting calls from citizens asking us whether it was legal to possess CBD or not,” says JOCO prosecutor Steve Howe. “Our interpretation [last May] was that products containing any THC at all were illegal. After that [the raiding of Into the Mystic], we asked for the attorney general’s opinion on it, because we wanted more clarity on the law. And, as you saw, what we heard back is that CBD is a controlled substance and therefore illegal under current law.”
Smith says his lawyer has called around to counties all over the state, and none are actively enforcing the law as interpreted by Schmidt — except Johnson County, where his store sits. But he’s still selling CBD (the non-THC variety) despite Schmidt’s opinion. A glass case full of oils of various flavors rests beside the register, and near the entrance sits a rack of CBD-infused edibles.
“The whole goal of this shop is to get people off pharmaceuticals,” Smith says. “Whether through CBD, yoga, meditation, human connectivity classes, or herbs. CBD healed my arthritis. It helps people with chronic pain. I’m not going to deny my customers that.”
Howe says his office is still evaluating how to proceed now that Schmidt has weighed in.
“We haven’t closed any shops, and we haven’t executed any search warrants,” Howe says. “I don’t know what he [Smith] is selling over there right now. I’m not going to say right now how we’re going to move forward on this.”
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