What’s changed recently

What happened. The North Carolina House was set to vote on House Bill 328 on August 4. Instead members tabled it. Hundreds of hemp business owners and employees filled the legislative building to lobby against it, and one chain, Apotheca, closed all fifty-plus of its North Carolina locations for the day so staff could go. The Senate had already passed the bill 37 to 6 on July 2. It is a conference report, which means the House can accept or reject it but cannot amend it.

What the bill would do. Cap finished hemp products meant to be eaten or inhaled at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container, and ban synthetic or chemically converted cannabinoids. In practice that removes most hemp-derived gummies, THC beverages, vapes, delta-8 products, and THCA flower from legal sale. It also sets a 21-and-up age limit with ID checks, and addresses kratom and xylazine separately.

The timing is the point. That 0.4 mg cap is the federal standard arriving November 12, 2026, under the hemp redefinition signed last November. HB 328 would have brought it to North Carolina early and enforced it under state law. Tabling the bill does not stop the federal rule. It only means North Carolina will not get there first, and will not have its own enforcement machinery ready when the date comes.

The governor wants a third option. Gov. Josh Stein pushed back on the bill on August 4, arguing the legislature should build “a safe and well-regulated adult THC market that protects kids” instead, and criticizing the bill for legalizing kratom while, in his reading, lacking meaningful age protections. That is the same fork Congress is at: prohibit these products, or regulate them. There is a bipartisan federal bill making the regulate-instead argument, and a fight in the Senate this week over whether to delay the November date at all.

Why a Georgia site is covering North Carolina. Georgia’s hemp shops, smoke shops, and THC beverage sellers face the same November 12 deadline, and Georgia has not passed its own version either. North Carolina just ran the experiment of putting the question to a vote, and the answer was that the industry can still mount enough pressure to stop a bill that law enforcement leadership publicly backed. That is worth knowing before the Georgia General Assembly takes the question up.

What is not settled. The bill is tabled, not dead. Lawmakers can revive it or file something similar, and the reporting is that nothing moves before November. Anyone in Georgia reading this as a reprieve should keep the two things separate: the state bills are contested, and the federal deadline is on the calendar regardless.

The number. The Department of Public Health counted 44,854 active registered patients in the first days of August, up from 36,595 in late June. That is more than 8,200 new patients in about five weeks, and roughly a 22% increase over that stretch. A separate count published August 5 put the figure at 44,889. Both come from DPH, and the small gap is just a difference in when the number was pulled.

The practical part: applications are taking longer. DPH told the Georgia Recorder that processing has gone from about one week to as much as four weeks. Department spokesperson Nancy Shirek said the team is working to process applications as quickly as possible while still reviewing each one accurately. Nothing about eligibility has changed. There are simply far more applications in the queue than the program has ever handled.

What that means if you are applying. Build the delay into your plan. Your physician’s certification goes to DPH, and the card comes after DPH verifies it, so the wait starts once your doctor submits, not once you decide to apply. If you are timing a card around a treatment schedule, a work situation, or a supply you are trying not to run out of, give yourself the month. Our how to get a card walkthrough covers the steps in order.

Why the surge. SB 220 took effect July 1. It replaced the percentage-based potency cap with a milligram system, added flower and vaporization for patients 21 and older, opened dispensing at independent pharmacies, added lupus and inflammatory bowel disease to the qualifying list, and relaxed the “severe or end-stage” requirement on several conditions. The registry grew slowly for a decade under the old rules. It has not grown slowly since.

A projection, clearly labeled as one. Gary Long, CEO of the producer Botanical Sciences, estimated Georgia could eventually reach 300,000 to 400,000 patients, reasoning from the roughly 4% enrollment rates seen in established medical states. That is an industry forecast, not a state target and not a measurement. Worth knowing because capacity follows enrollment: state law lets the Commission add a dispensing license for every additional 10,000 patients past 25,000. Worth treating as a forecast all the same.

How this fits what we published before. In late July the same DPH series passed 41,500. This is that series continuing, not a new source or a new way of counting. The Access to Medical Cannabis Commission keeps its own “active” tally that runs lower, so if you see a smaller number elsewhere, check which agency is speaking before assuming one of them is wrong.

What was done. Researchers at the MIGAL Galilee Research Institute and Tel-Hai University in Israel made ethanol extracts from four cannabis chemovars, three with balanced THC to CBD ratios and one CBD-dominant. They dripped those extracts onto three enzymes in a dish and measured how much activity was suppressed. The enzymes were acetylcholinesterase (AChE), butyrylcholinesterase (BChE), and beta-secretase 1 (BACE1), all of which are involved in processes associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

What they found. All four extracts inhibited AChE at levels comparable to galantamine, an approved Alzheimer’s drug. Three inhibited BChE at substantially lower concentrations than galantamine required. All four reduced BACE1 activity, by 47.9% to 65.3% at the highest concentration tested. One extract, labeled C3, was then tested in PC12 cells exposed to amyloid-beta or hydrogen peroxide, and it significantly improved how many cells survived.

Here is the part the headline leaves out. PC12 cells come from a rat adrenal tumor. They are a standard, convenient stand-in for neurons in early screening work. They are not neurons, they are not human, and a dish is not a brain. Nothing in this study was given to an animal, let alone a person. There is no dose, no absorption, no question of whether any of this crosses the blood-brain barrier, and no clinical outcome of any kind.

It also is not the first time. Cannabis extracts inhibiting cholinesterases in vitro has been reported before, in more than one lab. Replication is genuinely useful and this study is a reasonable addition to that line of work. It is not a discovery, and treating it as one inflates what a screening assay can tell you.

Where Georgia comes in, honestly. Alzheimer’s disease is on Georgia’s qualifying conditions list, and SB 220 relaxed the “severe or end-stage” wording on several conditions. So this research touches a real Georgia patient population. What it does not do is support choosing one product, chemovar, or THC-to-CBD ratio over another. The extracts here were ethanol preparations made for laboratory testing. They are not what is on a dispensary shelf, and the concentrations used in a dish do not translate to anything you could dose.

The evidence that does involve patients. For dementia specifically, the trial worth reading is LiBBY, a federally funded Phase 2 study that found a low-dose CBD-dominant oil reduced agitation in 120 people with advanced dementia. That one had human participants, a control condition, and a measured outcome. It is also about agitation, a symptom, and not about slowing the disease. Neither study says cannabis treats Alzheimer’s, and anyone telling a family otherwise is ahead of the evidence.

The new number. SAMHSA released the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health on July 27. Among adolescents aged 12 to 17, 8.7% reported using cannabis in the past year, and 5.0% — about 1.3 million kids — in the past month. Across everyone 12 and older, past-year use was 21.2%, or 61.6 million people.

The comparison being quoted doesn’t hold. Most of the coverage sets 2025’s 8.7% against 14.2% in 2011 — the year before the first adult-use states came online. It’s a tidy story and you should not repeat it. NSDUH switched to multimode collection (web plus in-person) during COVID, and SAMHSA’s own reports state that “estimates based on multimode data collection in 2021 and subsequent years are not comparable with estimates from 2020 or prior years.” The agency says the difference between an old figure and a new one could be a change in behavior, a change in how the question was asked, or both. Pairing 2011 with 2025 is exactly the comparison SAMHSA tells readers not to make.

Inside the window where the numbers are comparable, the picture is quieter. Past-year use among 12-to-17-year-olds ran 10.9% in 2021 and 10.4% in 2024 — SAMHSA’s 2024 report described that as “no change.” The drop to 8.7% is a one-year move in the newest release, not a four-year slide. The past-month series is the steadier one: 6.1% in 2021 down to 5.0% in 2025.

And 2025 was down for nearly everyone, which is worth pausing on. Young adults 18–25 went from 35.0% to 33.7%. Adults 26 and older, the one group that had been climbing (17.3% in 2021, 21.7% in 2024), came in at 20.6%. Total past-year use fell from 22.3% to 21.2%. When every age group in a self-report survey moves the same direction in the same year, a survey-year effect is at least as plausible an explanation as four separate behavior changes. One release is not a trend.

The conclusion still stands — on other evidence. The claim that legal access sends teen use soaring has now failed in survey after survey with methodology that is consistent across the period: Monitoring the Future and the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey both show adolescent use at or near multi-decade lows, and the state-comparison studies — including a JAMA Pediatrics analysis of roughly 898,000 students across 47 states — find no increase tied to legalization, with one large study finding a modest decrease. NSDUH 2025 is consistent with all of that. It just isn’t the knockout number the headline implies.

Why this matters in Georgia. We are not an adult-use state, and nothing in this survey speaks to Georgia’s registry directly. But “what about the kids” is the argument raised against every expansion here — it was raised against SB 220’s vaporization and flower provisions this spring. Patients and families making that case in front of a legislator are better served by the surveys built to track youth trends over time than by a single dramatic pairing that the issuing agency has disclaimed.

The honest version, in one line. Adolescent cannabis use is low and has been drifting lower through the legalization era, across multiple independent surveys. That is a real and useful finding, and it holds up. It does not need a 14.2% to stand next to.