Update: On October 14, a Franklin County Common Pleas judge temporarily blocked the Governor’s executive order banning the sale of intoxicating hemp products, following a lawsuit by retailers of the product. The executive order will be paused for 14 days as a result.

Cleveland businesses are bracing for a serious financial blow as Gov. Mike DeWine’s ban on “intoxicating hemp” products goes into effect today. Many are also skeptical whether the new rules will stop kids from ingesting the THC-product.

The ban applies to a large quantity of substances often seen in smoke shops, gas stations and cannabis boutiques, commonly referred to as delta-8 products. In an emergency order declaring a public health threat, DeWine gave sellers five days to pull the products off their shelves.  

The thinking? Protect kids from a largely unregulated product that sits somewhere between true marijuana and milder hemp, both of which are legal. Because of the gray area the intoxicating hemp products exist in, it’s technically legal to sell them to anyone, regardless of their age.  

“These products are legally marketed to kids, sold to kids and ingested by kids in Ohio,” DeWine said in a press release. Ohio poison centers are seeing more young children poisoned by delta-8 in recent years, but the numbers are dwarfed by cases of marijuana exposure. 

Many Cleveland businesses say, though, that they choose not to sell the substance to anyone under age 21 — and would invite more regulations to enshrine that in law. Kids who do ingest intoxicating hemp are most likely consuming products their parents or another older person bought, said Mo Dayem, a Cleveland-area board member at the Ohio Healthy Alternatives Association, a trade association for those in the hemp industry.  

Dayem, who owns several vape shops around the state, said businesses like his can’t control who ingests their products once they’re out the door. The same challenge exists with state-licensed marijuana dispensaries, he added. 

“[If] you’re going to ban hemp because the kids can get their hands on it — well, you might as well ban the marijuana-derived edibles also,” Dayem said.   

The state isn’t doing that, which is part of Dayem’s, and other vendors’, skepticism. He feels the decision to crack down on hemp derivatives will decimate small businesses — and ultimately benefit state-licensed marijuana dispensaries, whose trade organization embraced DeWine’s announcement as a way to address “dangerous” hemp products. 

Some members of the Ohio Healthy Alternatives Association are suing the DeWine administration over the new ban. Dayem said he is not a plaintiff. 

Poisoning numbers tick up — as a result of both marijuana and delta-8 

In 2018, the federal farm bill made it legal to grow and produce hemp, a type of cannabis plant that is different from marijuana. Hemp has very low levels of delta-9-THC, which makes people feel high and is more concentrated in marijuana. 

Compounds extracted from hemp can be chemically converted into substances like delta-8-THC, a slightly different chemical that can also create a high. Sales of these intoxicating hemp products skyrocketed across the country between 2020 and 2023, according to the Cannabis Business Times.

Around the same time, the marijuana market was also expanding. Michigan legalized recreational marijuana in 2018. Ohio voters passed an initiative to make weed legal in 2023. 

As the legal pathways for both intoxicating hemp and marijuana grew, the number of kids consuming them grew, too. 

“Anytime a product becomes more widely available in a household, we usually see rises in exposures in children,” said Dr. Shan Yin, the medical director of the Cincinnati Drug and Poison Information Center. “… That’s what we see in Ohio.”

In DeWine’s announcement of the ban, he said that the number of kids aged 19 or younger who were exposed to delta-8 or delta-9 more than doubled between 2021 and 2024. The largest chunk of those poisonings are amongst kids aged zero to five, according to Ohio Poison Centers. Most of them have to go to the emergency department after ingesting the substance.

Delta-9, which often indicates legal marijuana, is responsible for the majority of those poisonings, Yin said. The delta-8 substance that DeWine recently banned is present in far fewer cases. 

Some of that could be due to underreporting and data collection challenges, Yin said. When a parent or hospital reaches out to Ohio Poison Control, the call could easily get coded as a marijuana poisoning if the parent doesn’t explicitly state that delta-8 was the culprit, Yin said. And it’s nearly impossible for doctors to differentiate between delta-8 and delta-9 at the hospital.  

“While we have seen rises in delta-8, the numbers are in general not that high,” Yin said. “But they could definitely be mixed in with our total numbers for THC exposures in children.”

Both intoxicating hemp and marijuana can produce a range of health effects on kids, depending on how much they took, Yin said. On the mild side, a child may appear high. On the extreme side, a child can become comatose and need to be intubated. Delta-8 is generally less potent than marijuana, he added. 

Most poisonings – whether from delta-8 or marijuana – are the result of children ingesting edibles, he added.

“Almost all of the ones that are reported to Poison Center occur at homes, at people’s homes, and are unintentional,” Yin said. “Just children getting into things.”

Will the ban work?

Dr. Hannah Hays, medical director of the Central Ohio Poison Center, spoke at DeWine’s press conference last week about her major concerns with the number of children exposed to delta-8 in recent years. She cited a study she recently authored that found more than one-third of cases reported to poison centers that involve intoxicating hemp result in a serious medical outcome. 

“Supporting a ban on intoxicating hemp products is a critical step in preventing future poisonings, protecting Ohio’s children, and ensuring that our state truly becomes the best place for children’s health,” Hays said. 

Yin said that while DeWine’s ban might not bring down poisonings from marijuana, it will likely drop the number of delta-8 poisonings in kids. 

“I mean, if you ban something, then it becomes much harder to get,” Yin said.

Business owners are skeptical. Some say residents will now order the intoxicating hemp products online. Others say the ban will just push the industry even further under the table, sending people to get products from dealers who don’t operate with a business license.   

Sam Abdelqader, manager of a corner store in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood, said he worries he will soon see people selling the intoxicating hemp products outside his store. 

“And that will create security problems for us and for the customers,” he said. 

What the ban means for local businesses

Many Cleveland smoke shops, including Dayem’s, began as vape shops. 

Over time, though, both Cleveland and Ohio have turned up the heat on the industry. In April, Cleveland passed a new law mandating stores that sell tobacco products to get an annual license. In 2019, the state added a tax to nicotine vapes. That drove a lot of customers to purchase online from out of state, Dayem said. 

“When that happened, we had to, either … shut down and terminate the employment of all of our staff members,” Dayem said. “Or option two was to look for other products to bring in.”

Around the same time, hemp-derived cannabinoids like delta-8 were growing in popularity and options. Dayem, and others, began stocking them. They were popular. 

They were also unregulated — one of DeWine’s major complaints.

“When voters chose to legalize marijuana, they voted for a highly regulated market that only allows sales at licensed dispensaries to those 21 and older,” the governor said in a press release. “Intoxicating hemp completely bypasses these laws.” 

That’s not for lack of trying on the part of the industry, Dayem said. Many businesses that sell intoxicating hemp products have their own strict 21 and up rules in place, he said. Dayem saids he gives employees annual training on how to enforce the age limits. Omar Jamal, who runs a smoke shop in Cleveland Heights, tells employees to card anyone who looks younger than 25 who enters the store and all customers at the register. 

“It’s the safest to protect us from underage sales, because … 90% of the items in a smoke shop, you have to be 21 years of age to purchase,” Jamal said.

Multiple bills currently under consideration by Ohio’s legislature would turn the age-limit for intoxicated hemp products into law — and add regulations, such as testing requirements, to the products. Dayem testified in favor of one of them in April. The legislature has not passed any yet. 

So he was frustrated to hear DeWine’s strict new ban. Between 50% to 60% of Dayem’s sales are generated from hemp-derived products that will soon be banned, a number he believes is common across the industry. Without those sales, he estimates his stores can only survive for a couple of weeks — less than the 60-day ban DeWine implemented. His 150 employees are worried, he said. 

“They’re saying, ‘Hey, should I be looking for a new job?’” Dayem said. 

Other stores face even grimmer numbers. Erik VanSwearingen runs a “cannabis boutique” in Cleveland’s Hingetown neighborhood. He estimates the state banned about 90% of what he can sell. 

“I’m pretty much going to have maybe 10 items on the shelf,” VanSwearingen said. 

Starting last Thursday, he ran a “Mike DeWine sucks” sale to get rid of the soon-to-be banned items: 40% off your purchase. 

“Thank your local + state politicians for destroying local small businesses,” the sign said.