“Oh, man, you’ve ruined a lot of lives in the state.” That’s some of the tough words a Huntsville small business owner had to say to the lawmakers who passed the smokable hemp ban.
Jason Pauls has been running the Green Lady Dispensary with his family since 2019. He said he’s expecting to lose 80% of his income with the new hemp ban.
“We’ll never bring that income back up to that level without those products again,” Pauls said. “What we’re going to do to move forward is to continue to provide the community with the wellness they deserve.”
HB445 bans smokable hemp, like flowers, buds and pre-rolled cigarettes, some of the biggest sellers for many specialty shops. It also prohibits several products with synthetically produced THC from hemp, like gummies, drinks and more.
It is now a Class C felony, punishable up to 10 years in prison, to sell or possess any of these products.
Pauls said he opened his store in 2019 with mainly CBD products, because he wanted to help people. His average clientele is people over 55 years old struggling with chronic pain, mental health illnesses and cancer diagnoses.
“We have terminal cancer patients that can’t take prescription medications because they upset their stomach, they have no appetite,” Pauls said. “These products here at the Green Lady have let them overcome that.”
The Bowers family has a similar experience running three CBD American Shaman stores in in north Alabama.
“It is every day normal Alabamians, who you couldn’t pick out from the crowd that they would partake in this kind of stuff,” owner Julianna Bowers said. “They are the ones who have been on medications for decades, and they’re finding some serious side effects with these medications, or that it’s not helping them anymore, and so that they are trying something more natural, something that is safe for their liver or kidneys, and that they can just feel better and live happier and get better sleep.”
They were helping older people treat their pain when the ban went into effect on July 1.
The store had its largest day of sales on June 30. They sold over $20,000 of products compared to an average day of $5,000. Bowers had a TikTok go viral when the ban went into effect.
On July 1, they had their lowest day for sales with $400 in revenue. They expect to lose 40% – 60% of their income. While neither business plans to lay anyone off, advocacy group Alabama Wellness Collective believes this law could lead to approximately 2,000 layoffs or 87% of the state’s retail hemp industry.
READ MORE: Alabama hemp store moving out of state because of new THC law: ‘We thought we’d be OK .. we weren’t’
Pauls said the day the law went into effect was particularly difficult. He had to tell a long-time customer that they were no longer carrying a particular product. It was helping a veteran treat decades-long PTSD and insomnia.
“My first phone call yesterday was a 78-year-old veteran who can’t take pharmaceuticals, who has finally found something that gives him the relief he’s been looking for for 50 years,” Pauls said. “He was in tears. ‘What am I going to do now? What am I going to do now?’ And that’s heartbreaking.”
Not only are many products off the shelves, Pauls and Bowers are both worried about the price increase of what will be left.
While smokeable hemp is outright prohibited, some other forms of federally legal synthetic hemp, like Delta-8, -9 and -10, are allowed. However, Bower says the law is vague and hard to understand.
“We’ve had an attorney look over the law for us, and he says that there are a lot of contradictory places in the law where we can still sell Delta-9 THC, but it’s still unclear,” Bowers said. “It also mentions that intoxicating compounds cannot be sold. He even told us, ‘I can’t even tell you how to move forward, because it doesn’t clearly state.’ The ABC board has still not given us any guidance at all. So I took everything off the shelves that we deemed as not compliant.”
She knows that there can be a maximum of 40 mg of Delta-9 THC per package, but each edible has to be wrapped in its own package.
For example, a container with four 10-mg gummies would normally be loose in the container, but Alabama law requires that each edible must be wrapped in plastic.
“Who is going to manufacture these compliant edibles?” Bowers asked. “From what we understand (…) each individual edible has to be wrapped within the package, which costs more money, costs people extra time, results in more materials wasted, and more waste in the landfill. And so per price per gummy goes up for the consumer as well. These are edibles that people depend on on a daily basis. So when they went from paying $1 or $2 per edible to now having to potentially pay $3.45 per edible.”
Plus, these businesses are required to register their products with the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) Board. A 10% tax will be levied on retail sales.
These owners are worried about customers buying these products out of state, where the laws are more lenient.
“They’re taking a billion-dollar-a-year industry tax revenue and throwing it out the window when they could be using this money to help, for example, the children in schools,” Pauls said. “It can be used in so many different ways.”
He desperately tried to reach out to lawmakers to reconsider.
“I have begged senators and congressmen in this state to come and spend a day in our store,” Pauls said. “I beg them, before you make any decisions, come spend a day in our store. Look at our demographic, look at the people who come in here and talk to these customers, and see why they’re using these products. And I never even got a phone call or an email back.”
The ABC Board regulations take effect Jan. 1, 2026.
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