Can You Smoke CBD? You Can, But It’s Not Legal Everywhere

Cannabis and hemp are members of the same plant family, and they’re very similar. The one distinction is crucial, though.

• Cannabis contains lots of psychoactive THC, which is why marijuana is sourced from the cannabis plant.
• Hemp contains lots of non-intoxicating CBD, but very little THC. That’s why CBD is extracted from hemp to produce CBD products valued for their apparent health benefits.

Everyone knows that you can smoke marijuana flower to enjoy its psychoactive and reported health benefits. Since hemp is so similar, hemp flower can be smoked as well. Indeed, some producers offer products like raw flower and pre-rolled CBD joints for sale.

Depending on where you live, however, smoking hemp — which is essentially smoking CBD — may not be legal. More specifically, it’s fine in the US, but illegal in the UK.

That might sound odd. Hemp plants contain so little THC that the products created with hemp’s CBD are legal for sale and use in Britain. The problem stems (no pun intended) from what many call a “loophole” in British laws regulating marijuana and CBD products.

In a nutshell, a 1971 law says that all forms of the flowers taken from Cannabis sativa plants (the family that includes cannabis and hemp) are controlled substances, even though the CBD extracted from hemp flowers has been legalised. Why the disconnect? It’s simple; the old law was never updated.

There’s hope for Brits who want to smoke CBD, though. A 2023 court decision ruled in favor of a company that was importing raw hemp flower, saying the flower was not a “narcotic drug” because of its low THC content. The law still remains in place, but the Home Office says it will be “providing greater clarity” in the future (without going into details).

So yes, you can smoke CBD; you just can’t do it legally in the UK just yet. In the future, however, that may change.

If this sounds intriguing, read on to learn more.

THC and CBD

We’ve been using both terms, but for those who aren’t quite sure about what they are or why they matter, let’s start with a quick refresher.

THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol) are two of more than 100 plant compounds known as cannabinoids. They’re found in both cannabis and hemp plants but at different levels. Cannabis (and the marijuana it produces) is loaded with THC and hemp has very little; cannabis has only low levels of CBD but hemp has bountiful amounts.

Both cannabinoids appear to provide substantial health and wellness benefits. But once it’s inside the body, THC also interacts with the brain to create the psychoactive effects that marijuana is known for. CBD’s interactions occur primarily in other parts of the body, so it doesn’t make users high.

Those interactions actually come in the form of delivering messages through the body’s endocannabinoid system (ECS) receptors, which regulate most key bodily functions, but the details aren’t crucial for the rest of this discussion.

Where the Cannabidiol in CBD Products Comes From

Hemp’s high cannabidiol content makes it ideal for producers who create CBD products.

It’s theoretically possible to source CBD from cannabis. It’s present in such small amounts, however, that an enormous number of cannabis plants, and more processing to lower THC content, would be required. Sourcing cannabidiol from cannabis wouldn’t make financial sense, either; producers could make more money from the plants by harvesting marijuana from them.

Hemp is an ideal CBD source for another reason: its very low THC levels. British law prohibits the sale of CBD products containing more than 0.2% of the psychoactive cannabinoid, and hemp plants are cultivated to ensure that they stay below that level. (In the US and most European countries, the THC maximum is a bit higher, 0.3%.)

Cannabis has been smoked for millennia, and the flower and leaves of the cannabis plant have been used to infuse foods or beverages for just as long. There was never an enormous consumer market for hemp since it’s not intoxicating, and its apparent health benefits weren’t discovered until a few decades ago and only became widely known in the last ten years.

Once CBD was legalised, the drive to create cannabidiol delivery mechanisms was on. Those efforts focused on extracting cannabidiol and creating consumer products with it, rather than selling the raw hemp to be smoked or turned into edible products.

Several existing extraction processes have been modified to allow the removal of CBD from hemp. The best available for commercial purposes, supercritical CO₂ extraction, requires specialized equipment and is very expensive. It’s used by most major CBD producers to source the cannabidiol used to create their products.

One of those products is CBD vape juice, used in the same way that nicotine juice is used in vape pens or vaporizers to “replace” tobacco smoking. CBD juice is completely legal under UK laws (and those of almost all other nations).

Smoking raw hemp is another way to ingest cannabidiol, of course, but it wasn’t on the radar of most producers. That could be because hemp smoking had no lengthy and storied history, it would require convincing an entirely new market of health-conscious consumers to start smoking — or because smoking hemp was illegal in nations like the UK.

Hemp, CBD, and the British Legal Landscape

The history of laws affecting the sale and use of CBD is long and complicated.

Pre-2017

The use of cannabis was banned in the UK and most other Western nations in the 1900s. The laws applied equally to cannabis and hemp since they belong to the same plant family, and because nothing was known about the potential health and wellness benefits of hemp or its byproducts. In effect, hemp was caught up in the 20^th century “marijuana scare.”

In the latter stages of that century, the possible medicinal benefits of marijuana were discovered. Soon after that, the apparent beneficial effects of CBD became known. The new information led to the slow, gradual legalisation of medical and/or recreational cannabis use in many nations, followed by the faster and more inclusive legalisation of CBD.

2017-2021

Speed isn’t always a good thing. The sale and use of CBD became legal in the UK in 2017 when cannabidiol was removed from the official list of “controlled substances.” However, there was no thoughtful revision of British law to regulate the new industry that was created in a flash.

All the government did was rapidly establish a very limited baseline for producers to meet:

• CBD had to be sourced from industrial hemp that was grown to existing EU standards.
• CBD could contain no more than 0.2% THC.

That was essentially it, although there were a few other general rules about CBD product labelling and advertising. The market grew quickly with very few restrictions.

The government made another attempt at setting up a CBD regulatory framework in 2020. All producers with CBD products on the market had to apply for a “Novel Foods” authorisation from the Food Standards Agency by mid-2021 (because CBD wasn’t regulated as a drug, but as a food), complete with a voluminous and expensive laboratory evaluation of their products.

Until receiving approval, those products could stay on the market — but any new ones couldn’t be marketed or sold until receiving Novel Foods authorisation showing that they were safe and met the legal THC limit.

Post-2021

Perhaps the new framework was a good idea, but the execution certainly hasn’t been ideal.

By late 2024, only two existing products had received the required authorisation, largely because of immense bureaucratic backlogs. All pre-2021 products could still be sold as long as their application was still pending. And many new products have hit the market, with no one enforcing the requirement that they file for Novel Foods authorisation.

In a nutshell, the landscape has been flooded with CBD products of all types. And there was another issue the UK government never considered.

Britain’s 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act officially landed all flower harvested from the plants in the cannabis family on the nation’s list of controlled substances. It didn’t make any distinction between cannabis and hemp — and that law remained in place even after CBD products were legalised in the UK.

That essentially made it illegal to smoke hemp (or as many think of it, illegal to smoke CBD) despite the nation’s new stance on CBD products. Few people gave that contradiction much thought until 2023.

A British company selling hemp flower was charged in 2020, under the existing law, with importing hemp flower from Italy. The company was forced out of business but took its fight to court. And in 2023, they won their case in the Court of Appeal.

The court ruled that the company had broken no UK law, saying hemp flower is not a “narcotic drug” if its THC content is lower than 0.2%. The verdict was praised by those in the CBD industry, but it’s not a binding change to existing regulations. Industry leaders are calling for a revamp of current laws to clarify the legal status of raw hemp flower.

That may or may not happen. When contacted by ITV News for comment, the Home Office responded with two seemingly contradictory statements.

One said that the government had “no plans” to change laws governing “the flowers of the cannabis plant…irrespective of THC content.” Yet the other said there were plans to “provide greater clarity…on the controlled drug content of consumer CBD products.”

What does that mean? Anyone’s guess is as good as ours.

But here’s the bottom line. Yes, you can smoke CBD. Yes, hemp flower is sold by some British vendors. No, it’s not legal to smoke hemp flower in the UK. And whether the existing situation will change anytime soon is yet to be determined.

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