An antique shop on Heber City’s Main Street was raided by an officer from Utah’s Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing (DOPL) for selling CDB oil and other medicinal products.
The officer walked into Aspen Grove Rustics to hand a surprised owner, Ed Hendershot, a subpoena dated 21st December 2017. The subpoena addressed to Medical Vangaurd, the division of the shop that sells supplies for medical kits and other medicinal drugs, sought records and invoices for sales of all prescriptive drugs including CBD Oil and Heparin that the store had been giving out since quite some time to its customers.
Within two months, CBD products accounted for a third of his sales, Hendershot, a retired firefighter and EMT, remarked. In fact, even as sales for CBD sky-rocketed ever since he started selling them, he thought it was completely legal to do so. Even his supplier had told him that it was legal in all 50 states across the country.
Upon being raided, Hendershot said that although he didn’t maintain any such sales record, he would remove the products from the counter until further notice. After this, the officer walked out with four bottles of CBD oil, a bottle of heparin, and a blood thinner medicine, roughly amounting to $400, despite not being in possession of a warrant to do the same.
When contacted for comments, DOPL spokesperson Jennifer Bolton refused to comment on either the confirmation or denial of the active investigation on Medical Vanguard.
Until further notice, Aspen Grove Rustics has to settle with the sales from their mainstream business but the raid has certainly left them baffled. More than half-a-dozen of his customers have come in asking about CDB ever since he stopped selling the product. CDB, or nonpsychoactive cannabis oil, in particular, owes its widespread popularity to its uncanny ability to cure anxiety, insomnia, seizure, and other chronic ailments. No wonder the legal status of CBD is always a burning topic among its suppliers, sellers, and consumers more so because there is no straightforward answer to its question.
As of 2018, both variants of CBD, the nonpsychoactive hemp-derived and the marijuana-derived, are completely legal in 8 states for both recreational and medical purposes. 46 states (including the 8 mentioned above) require you to produce a prescription if you seek CDB for medical use. Further, about 17 of these states have specific rules and regulations pertaining to the THC-levels in CDB and the condition for which it is being sought.
Utah is one of these states and it governs its CDB sales as per the “Charlee’s Law” passed in 2014. This governing law allows only people with an intractable epilepsy condition to possess CBD oil extracts with less than 0.3% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and at least 15% cannabidiol (CBD) by weight in a sealed container obtained from a state-licensed laboratory only under prescription signed by a neurologist.
