What People Are Really Smoking: France’s Over-the-Counter “CBD”
I haven’t smoked in nearly eight years. No relapse, no nostalgia, no vape as a crutch: the matter is closed for me, and I therefore have no personal stake in what follows, neither as a consumer nor as a seller. That is precisely why I feel free to write about it.
What caught my attention was the testimony. For months now, social media has been carrying videos of consumers telling the same story: they bought “CBD” in a perfectly legal shop, complete with storefront, card reader, and a salesman’s smile, and they ended the evening in a panic attack, in tachycardia, sometimes in the emergency room. Here are two examples out of hundreds, perhaps thousands.
These accounts pose a logical problem. Real CBD does not do that. So what are these people smoking?
CBD cannot produce these effects
A quick refresher for those who, like me, look at this market from the outside. Cannabidiol is one of the cannabinoids found in hemp. Unlike THC, it is not psychoactive: no high, no hallucinations, no paranoia. That is its entire commercial pitch, in fact: relaxation without intoxication. French law permits products derived from hemp varieties containing no more than 0.3 percent THC, a threshold far too low to feel anything at all.
Someone who smokes a compliant CBD flower may find the taste unpleasant or the effect disappointing. What he cannot do is end up on all fours talking to the walls. When dozens of people describe violent episodes, hallucinations, or hospitalizations after using a product bought in a shop, only two explanations remain: either every one of them is lying, or the product is not what it claims to be.
The second explanation is documented. By French customs themselves.
Spraying: the real face of over-the-counter “CBD”
The method is crooked in its simplicity. You take legal hemp flowers, grown in the European Union, with their lab reports in order. Then you spray them with synthetic cannabinoids, molecules manufactured from chemical precursors smuggled in from Asia. But the Asian chemist and the neighborhood shop never speak to each other: between them sits a link that gets far too little attention, that of European wholesalers and importers. They are the ones who buy the precursors, run the spraying or farm it out, issue the certificates of analysis that the retailer will simply pass along, and blend the adulterated product into otherwise legitimate catalogs. The flower keeps its natural appearance, its certificate of origin, and its compliant THC level. Its actual composition bears no resemblance to any of it. The shop owner is often the last link in a chain of which he sees nothing but the invoice.
The molecule of the moment is called EDMB-4en-PINACA. The joint Customs/DGCCRF laboratory in Paris analyzed it for the first time in May 2025. Its psychoactive effects are estimated at roughly one hundred times those of CBD, and a single inhalation can be enough to trigger hallucinations, severe agitation, a panic attack, or cardiac rhythm disturbances requiring hospitalization. In 2025, these adulterated products already accounted for about 30 percent of the synthetic cannabinoids analyzed by the laboratory, and 274 kilograms were seized within a few months across the country. One important clarification, so as not to slide into sensationalism: that percentage covers samples analyzed by customs, meaning products already flagged as suspicious, not the full range of flowers sold in France. It does not mean that three shops in ten are cheating. What it does mean is that within a few months this molecule has claimed a dominant share of the fraud market, which is worrying enough on its own.
None of this is new. It is a cycle. Remember HHC, the semi-synthetic molecule that flooded the shops in 2022 before the French medicines agency classified it as a narcotic in June 2023. No sooner was it banned than its cousins took over: H4CBD, HHCPO, THCP. Every scheduling decision calls forth a new molecule, slightly modified and legally untouched. As I write these lines, 10-OH-HHC circulates in a gray zone, pharmacologically close to the banned HHC but not yet scheduled itself. The chemist always moves faster than the statute book.
Here is the detail that should chill everyone: roadside saliva tests and standard urine screens do not detect these molecules. Identifying them requires liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry, available only in specialized laboratories. In other words, you can drive under the influence of a psychoactive substance one hundred times more potent than CBD and pass the roadside test without a problem. No street dealer ever offered that kind of after-sales service.
And for the shops that stay clear of spraying, another deception remains, more mundane but far more widespread: flowers stripped chemically of their natural cannabinoids and terpenes, then rebuilt with CBD isolates and synthetic aromas, and sold under prestigious strain names that correspond to no genetic reality whatsoever. Less dangerous, every bit as dishonest.
The state did not open these shops: it lost to them
This is where I have to be honest about my own initial hunch. Watching these shops sprout on every street corner while the humblest village fundraiser drowns in permit applications, one is tempted to see a design behind it: the state quietly dispensing a soft drug to its population, without saying so, without legalizing it, buying social peace while keeping up its electoral posture of firmness.
The facts tell a different story, and it is hardly more flattering.
CBD shops do not exist because the state wanted them. They exist because the state tried to ban them and lost. Twice. In November 2020, in the KanaVape ruling, the Court of Justice of the European Union held that France could not prohibit the sale of CBD lawfully produced in another member state: free movement of goods. The government pressed on, issuing an order in late December 2021 banning the sale of raw flowers and leaves. The Conseil d’État suspended that text in January 2022, then struck it down for good later that year.
Such is the legal reality: these shops are the offspring of a courtroom defeat, not of some Machiavellian plan. France was forced to open a market it did not want, by European law it ratified itself. Regular readers of this blog will recognize the pattern: this is hardly the first time Paris has discovered that it handed its sovereignty to Brussels and then acted surprised on camera.
But defeat does not excuse what followed. Once the market was imposed, the state had a choice. It could have built a regulated supply chain: mandatory batch testing, traceability, licensing of retail outlets, inspection capacity. It did none of that. The DGCCRF inspects with the staff it is given, which amounts to almost nothing across thousands of shops. No legal obligation of independent testing weighs on sellers. The honest merchant relies on his wholesaler’s certificates, which he cannot verify; the dishonest one sprays; and the customer can tell no difference between them.
Negligence or complicity: the hypothesis that holds
So let us restate the hunch, stripped of its conspiratorial version. No, the state is not deliberately handing out disguised drugs. But yes, it knowingly tolerates a market it knows to be infiltrated by powerful psychoactive substances, because the status quo suits it.
Consider the political arithmetic. Legalize cannabis? Unthinkable: part of the electorate would never forgive it, and no government has the nerve to open that debate head-on. Ban the shops? Impossible: European law has already said so twice. Enforce serious controls? Expensive, invisible, electorally worthless. That leaves the fourth path, the one that requires no courage at all: let it run, schedule the molecules one at a time eighteen months late, and publicize each seizure as a victory.
For the consumer, the practical outcome is indistinguishable from the conspiratorial hypothesis: unidentified psychoactive substances sold openly downtown, with a storefront, a card reader, and Google reviews. No trafficking network ever achieved that degree of establishment. Meanwhile, the state fully owns its two official drugs, tobacco and alcohol, which it taxes, regulates, and labels. Over-the-counter “CBD” has become France’s third drug: the one nobody claims, nobody taxes in proportion to its risk, and nobody controls.
And the reasoning has to be carried to its conclusion: if this gray market endures, it is because it suits everyone, at every level of society. The state collects VAT and payroll contributions from a sector worth several hundred million euros, the very sector it fought in court. Commercial landlords fill the empty downtown storefronts that big-box retail on the outskirts had left behind. Banks and payment processors take their cut on every transaction. Honest operators make a living, dishonest ones prosper, and consumers get their product. The gray status suits precisely because it is gray: no supervisory authority, no licensing, no designated official, and therefore nobody accountable for anything. This is not a conspiracy. In a sense it is worse: an equilibrium in which every level takes its share and no one signs their name.
I have written here before about how the cartels destabilize the Republic from below. The gray CBD market shows the other side of it: how regulatory inaction builds, from above, a legal distribution channel for clandestine chemistry.
The first victims are the ones who were trying to quit
The cruelest part of this story is the profile of the victims. Who walks into a CBD shop? Rarely the partygoer chasing a thrill. Far more often it is the anxious person trying to sleep, the cannabis smoker in withdrawal who wants to keep the ritual without the substance, the stressed forty-something who refuses to take anxiolytics. People, in other words, who are specifically trying to steer clear of drugs.
I know what quitting feels like. I wrote about my own experience with tobacco on this blog years ago. I know how fragile those moments are, how tempting the substitute product is, how much trust we place in anything wearing a reassuring label. Imagining that these people, at the most vulnerable point of their effort, unknowingly receive a full agonist of the cannabinoid receptors more brutal than anything they were running from, that alone should be enough to name the scandal.
And when something goes wrong, there is no recourse. The label says nothing. The seller, often acting in good faith, does not know himself what he is selling. The supplier’s analysis, where one exists, covers a batch that may not be the one in the bag. The victim cannot even prove what she consumed, since standard screens do not detect the molecule.
What should be done, and why no one will do it
The solutions are hardly beyond human ingenuity. Mandatory batch testing by an accredited independent laboratory, with results displayed in the shop and accessible by QR code. Traceability from the field to the counter. Real resources for the DGCCRF and customs, and penalties with teeth: immediate administrative closure and criminal prosecution for administering harmful substances, not a token fine. And this deserves saying, because it does the trade credit: these are the very measures the hemp industry’s own trade bodies have been demanding. The Union des professionnels du CBD and the French hemp organizations have spent years calling for a strict framework, European harmonization, and stronger enforcement, precisely to drive out the bad actors who ruin everyone else’s reputation. Some serious retailers already publish their lab results; the point is not to condemn an entire profession, but to make mandatory what the honest ones already do voluntarily and are begging to see enforced. When an industry pleads with the state to regulate it and the state does not show up, the question of complicity answers itself.
And then there is the option that even part of the CBD trade now supports: regulated legalization of cannabis, which would drain the speculation on synthetic molecules overnight. When the natural product is legal, tested, and labeled, spraying EDMB onto flowers pays nothing at all. That is the final paradox: partial prohibition does not protect the public, it subsidizes clandestine chemistry.
But none of this will happen, because every one of these measures requires saying a sentence the French political class refuses to utter: “psychoactive substances are circulating legally in our streets, and we must choose between regulating them and fighting them.” As long as that sentence remains unspeakable, the state will go on doing what it has done best on this file for a decade: losing in court, scheduling the molecules of the day before yesterday, and leaving its population to serve as test subjects for backyard pharmacology.
Electoral posturing, it seems, is worth more than public health. The testimony will keep piling up on social media, and every video will say the same thing: what people are smoking in French shops, nobody knows, not even the state.