On a recent morning, the shelves at Lancaster County Marketing were lined with CBD root beer, cotton candy lollipops, hemp honey and muscle salve, and pre-rolled CBD joints with names like Electra and Special Sauce. A 300-pound bag of locally harvested cannabis leftovers, on the way to being turned into precious CBD oil, filled the office with a distinct, pungent odor. Across the driveway, the standard stallion that carried CEO Ruben Leal to work grazed near the small buggy.
Leal, 29, is a cannabis visionary who lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania's cannabis capital. But it's hard to be farsighted these days, despite CBD's proliferation in everything from sodas to bath bombs. For Leal, convincing the Amish community, and sometimes himself, that selling hemp-derived products is still a good idea is almost a full-time job.
Cannabidiol (CBD) is one of the compounds found in the hemp plant. To the layman, hemp may look the same as marijuana. Both fall under the category of cannabis. However, hemp contains less than 0.3% delta-9 THC (the psychoactive compound in marijuana that gets people high). (For comparison, dispensaries sell marijuana with more than 20% THC). CBD has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, with people using it to treat seizure disorders, arthritis and joint pain, anxiety, and insomnia.
Hundreds of years ago, hemp was a major cash crop in Pennsylvania, immortalized in Lancaster town names such as East Hempfield and West Hempfield. Recent excitement about CBD came to Lancaster about five years ago. That's when the 2018 federal Farm Bill legalized the cultivation, processing, transportation and sale of hemp nationwide. Farmers rushed to grow it in Pennsylvania and across the country, lured by the promise of huge profits.
Hemp's advantage of being harvested by hand made it a particularly promising crop for the Amish, who largely shun modern technology. Lancaster County is home to the largest Amish settlement in the country, with more than 44,000 people, according to records compiled by Elizabethtown University.
As Lancaster's Amish farmers turned to cannabis, Leal saw a business opportunity. He founded Lancaster County Marketing in 2020 to partner with local Amish producers to process, distribute and market their products to the wider world. He liked that the name he chose included the anonymity of “marketing.”
His sisters did most of the planning (“Amish women cook, so they know how to mix things up,” Leal said), and he made business connections. Two other companies were founded around the same time to prepare for disasters. One is a company that sells nutritional supplements, and the other is a company that sells zeolites, a substance known for its absorption properties.
“I’m very interested in natural medicine,” he said. “I don't like to use the word drug because it's about the pharmaceutical side of things. But you could also call it a treatment.”
Pennsylvania's cannabis cultivation turns out to be an exaggerated gold rush. The massive CBD production boom in 2019 saturated the market, leaving many farmers with no buyers for their produce, said Erica Stark, executive director of the National Hemp Association and president of the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council. said. Jeffrey Graybill, an agriculture educator at Pennsylvania State University, said some farmers were not paid and their plants simply died in their fields.
The state allowed just 290 acres to grow hemp this year, compared to more than 4,000 acres in 2019, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. The majority of Lancaster's Amish farmers are once again choosing tobacco as their cash crop, Graybill said.
Leal said he has not personally tried marijuana and does not believe recreational marijuana should be legal. However, he has found CBD and other hemp products to be beneficial.
He continues his dream of selling CBD nationally and turning Lancaster into a major player in the cannabis industry. For now, he works out of a low-rise building in Christiana, where he conducts transactions using a landline phone, a paper desk calendar and an email-only device called the Mailbug, which has no internet connection. . Messages can be passed in person or written on sticky notes. He doesn't have a cell phone.
He said the company would also consider moving into the business of magic mushrooms, another plant medicine with currently popular health benefits, if it made sense from a profit standpoint. (Currently, it is not legal to grow or sell mushrooms in Pennsylvania.)
Riehl currently works with 10 local farms. Last year, he sold about 5,000 pounds of hemp flower and 26,000 pounds of so-called CBD biomass, the leftovers from the prime harvest that can be ground into CBD oil. He sells most of his products wholesale to buyers on the East Coast and a small amount to retail customers. His storefront also sells homemade smoking devices and hot thermos flasks with a sign that says, “If we all have bongs, weed can all get along.” Only about 1% of his cannabis customers are Amish, but he hopes that number is higher.
“There are still people in the community who are completely against it. They think it gets you high, it's psychoactive, and it's not good,” Leal said. “I think it's the same on the outside. It's just that some people don't understand the concept of hemp.”
Despite the Farm Bill, CBD products exist in a legal gray area. Josh Horn, co-chair of Fox Rothschild's Cannabis Practice Group in Philadelphia, said the Food and Drug Administration has pointed out that the way CBD is often sold by injecting it into food and beverages is illegal. said. Seller is also not allowed to make medical claims about it.
“People have been living in this gray area for quite some time,” Horn says. “As long as you don't push the envelope too much and don't draw too much attention to yourself, the FDA will probably leave you alone.”
Mr. Leal also gave an interview to the Daily Mail last fall, but said he was conflicted about drawing attention to his business because of his religious beliefs. He agreed to reveal his name to the Inquirer, but asked that his photo not be published for religious reasons. However, for business reasons, he decided to speak to the press.
He also recently met with lawmakers in Harrisburg, calling for an increase in the percentage of THC allowed in cannabis plants and clarification of state regulations for cannabis products. Stark said there are no state or federal regulations regarding the labeling, testing or safety of these products.
Mr. Leal sometimes worries that local law enforcement will suddenly decide his product is illegal. Last year, the Lancaster County District Attorney's Office sent a memo to Leal's company warning it was illegal to sell products containing delta-8, another cannabinoid extracted from CBD. Reel decided it wasn't worth the risk and stopped selling it.
He hopes the cannabis industry will stabilize soon and his company can really take off.
“I don't like the black market,” Leal recently explained, “because it's not stable.”
