Yes, You Can Smoke Hemp. And Yes, It’s Gaining Popularity

Kelsy Raap of Green State Gardner cuts some hemp flowers for smoking. (Emily Corwin/VPR)

When Congress legalized hemp farming at the end of last year, CNN’s Harmeet Kaur wrote: “… if you try to smoke hemp, you’ll probably just end up with a headache.”

Kaur may not be spending enough time in Vermont.

Advocates have been at pains to differentiate marijuana, the psychoactive cannabis flower people smoke, from hemp, marijuana’s non-psychoactive relative. But increasingly, Vermonters are smoking hemp buds in the same way Americans have smoked marijuana buds for a hundred years.

“Oh my gosh, they did not do good research,” Kelsy Raap said when I told her about the CNN story.

Raap and her family own Green State Gardner, a cannabis garden store and CBD retailer. There, employees carefully cultivate hemp flower specifically for smoking. That old headache myth? Raap said that’s a relic from the days when hemp plants were only cultivated to make fibers for textiles.

Read the rest of the story at VPR’s website.