Sheetz Convenience Stores to Sell CBD Vape Products

Will Offer CBD Products in 140 Stores in Pennsylvania

“The stores will offer both isolate and full-spectrum products like topical rubs and patches, tinctures, vape pens, oral pouches, capsules, pet products, and more.”

Original Source Fox 43

Ummm. This sounds like good news.

But I’m not sure if this signals the beginning or the end of CBD and CBD vape products.

First off, I think Sheetz stores are pretty good – they’re not WaWa – but pretty good.

Anyway – Sheetz, Inc. annouced that their Pennsylvania stores will start stocking CBD products – including topical ointments, pet CBD, edibles and CBD vape pens. Some of these products will apparently contain THC.

This is rather surprising because, as far as the FDA is concerned, the only lawful CBD products are topicals (you’ll note that CVS said they are only selling topical lotions and ointments). It’s hard to imagine that Sheetz didn’t run it past their legal department first.

So for a multi-billion-dollar company to have a press release that defies the FDA is interesting to say the least.

I’m sure more than a few good civil servants in that agency saw this story.

Sheetz: Good News or Bad for CBD Vape?

So either the Sheetz family has balls the size of the Allegheny mountains or they are ignorant of the current legal status of CBD.

I’m really not sure if this is good news or not. I tend to think it’s bad for a few reasons. But let me present the (very weak) positive side.

On one hand, there are a lot of people who feel that the CBD genie is out of the bottle so far that there is no stuffing him back. And that the more popular CBD gets, the harder it will be for the government to take it away.

The people who hold this view have the shortest memory imaginable. They can’t even think back to November of 2018 when hemp was illegal. Industrial hemp was banned for 80 years! There was this other thing called prohibition. Ring a bell?

They also don’t understand how powerful agencies like the FDA are. The FDA have a mandate to protect the public and they take it extremely seriously. Further, they would much rather err on the side of caution. And the cautious thing to do would be to make CBD available by prescription only. Don’t think it can’t happen (can you say Epidiolex?).

Or perhaps the CBD-genie-out-of-the-bottle folks think the FDA doesn’t have the resources. They don’t need them.

A warning letter from the FDA is a good cure for constipation.

So when I see stories like this, I cringe.

Getting CBD at the local gas station has become a rather unfunny joke for us in the industry. It’s a kind of meme illustrating how massively unregulated CBD and CBD vape products are right now. If we get a few people sick from bad CBD, the FDA will shut it down.

Conclusion

So it will be very interesting to see if Sheetz actually goes forward with this. The FDA would LOVE to make an example of somebody.

Will that happen or will the people be able to buy CBD and CBD vape along with their chili dog and Monster Energy drink? Stay tuned!

John Astrab