North Carolina’s cannabis policy sits in a gap that’s growing harder to defend. The state has no medical program, no adult-use framework, and no meaningful regulation of the intoxicating hemp-derived products already stacked on convenience store shelves from Asheville to Wilmington. Gov. Josh Stein’s appointed advisory council made that contradiction explicit last week, releasing an interim report that calls the current situation neither true prohibition nor functional regulation.

The North Carolina Advisory Council on Cannabis, which Stein convened in 2025, approved the document Thursday after months of public meetings. The core finding is blunt: North Carolina’s unregulated intoxicating cannabis market creates identifiable risks that a structured legal framework would reduce. The council is recommending the state move toward what it describes as “robust” regulations covering adult access to THC products, with enforcement authority to match.

Stein backed the report publicly and directly. “Our state’s unregulated cannabis market today is the Wild West and is crying for order,” he said in a press release. He framed the path forward around youth protection and consumer safety, not revenue projections or social equity, though those considerations typically follow in any serious legislative process.

The policy problem the report identifies is real and specific. North Carolina is one of roughly 10 states that still prohibits cannabis entirely, including for medical use. That prohibition hasn’t kept THC products out of the state. It has just kept them unregulated. Intoxicating hemp-derived cannabinoid products, many marketed as legal delta-8 or delta-9 alternatives, are sold in vape shops, gas stations, and online storefronts with no uniform manufacturing standards, no required testing, and no consistent labeling requirements. Some operators apply voluntary protocols. Most don’t have to.

The parallel to what California looked like before 2016 is obvious to anyone who watched that transition. The difference is that California at least had a medical framework going back to 1996, which created a base of licensed operators and some institutional knowledge about compliance. North Carolina is starting from a more chaotic baseline. The hemp market has essentially filled the vacuum left by prohibition, and it’s done so without the traceability or testing requirements that even California’s most criticized legacy operators eventually had to meet.

The council’s report cites an estimate that North Carolina residents spent approximately $3 billion on illegal marijuana in 2022, ranking second in the nation. That figure is a few years old, but the structural conditions that produced it haven’t changed. If anything, the proliferation of minimally regulated hemp-derived THC products has made the overall market larger and harder to map.

From a technology and compliance standpoint, this is where new state frameworks consistently struggle. Building a seed-to-sale tracking system or a point-of-sale compliance layer for a mature market like California or Colorado is complicated enough. Doing it for a state that’s starting with no licensed operators, no existing testing infrastructure, and a legacy hemp market that will need to be either folded into or displaced by the new system is significantly harder. Vendors will show up with promises. Legislators will hear pitches about platforms that can onboard a thousand retailers in 90 days. The operational reality will be messier.

That’s not a reason to delay legalization. It’s a reason to build the regulatory framework carefully before the tech procurement process starts, rather than letting vendors shape the compliance requirements around what their software already does.

Stein’s framing, whatever its political purpose, at least prioritizes getting the structure right. “Let’s get this right,” he said. “Let’s protect our kids and create a safe, legal, and well-regulated market for adults.” That’s the kind of language that either precedes a thoughtful rollout or gets used to justify indefinite delay, depending on what the legislature does with it.

The General Assembly is Republican-controlled, which creates an obvious obstacle. The council’s report is addressed to that body. Stein can convene advisory groups and release reports, but he can’t pass legislation unilaterally. North Carolina’s path to legalization runs through a legislature that has shown little appetite for it, regardless of what a governor-appointed commission recommends.

What the report does accomplish is putting a documented, expert-backed framework in front of lawmakers at a moment when the cost of inaction is increasingly visible. The hemp products are already there. The illicit market is already there. The argument that prohibition is preventing cannabis access in North Carolina is not credible. The question the council is forcing is whether the state wants to keep collecting none of the regulatory benefit while absorbing all of the public health risk, or whether it wants to build something that actually works.

For California operators watching this, the North Carolina situation is a reminder of what a genuinely unregulated market looks like. The compliance overhead in California is real and often punishing for small cultivators. But the alternative isn’t a free market. It’s a convenience store selling unlabeled gummies next to the energy drinks, with no testing data and no accountability when something goes wrong.

North Carolina has enough information to act. Whether its legislature will is a different question.