After a protracted battle with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, North Carolina launched its hemp pilot program in 2017. A friend told James Gallagher that she was moving back to Western North Carolina from Colorado, where she grew hemp, to participate.
Gallagher was intrigued, though not enough to uproot his life. He’d worked for a friend’s medical marijuana operation in California in the mid-aughts. But he’d been back in Asheville for more than a decade, working in real estate. He was in his late 30s with a family.
Then his friend watched his cats while his family went on vacation, and left an array of CBD products to try. Gallagher gave some out to friends and family members. “Within like 10 or 12 days, people are calling us: ‘These are incredible. Where did you get these? Can you get any more of them?’” he said.
A few months later, he read about the opening of Asheville’s first CBD dispensary. “A lightbulb went on in my head,” Gallagher said.
Along with business partners, Gallagher opened Asheville Dispensary in October 2018 and Carolina Best Distribution a month later—just before Congress passed the Farm Bill. His dispensary was the third to open in Asheville. Within a year, there were 12, he said.
The Assembly spoke with Gallagher about hemp’s evolution in Asheville.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Assembly: Tell me about what happened when you first opened the dispensary.
James Gallagher: I’d started networking and realized that Colorado and Oregon had been going full steam at that point with CBD flower. And then a friend of mine started bringing freight trucks full of CBD flower in these big, round barrels. And they smelled just like, like, you know, fresh marijuana. It blew my mind. To be able to have something legally that smelled and tasted good—even if it, like, relaxed you and mellowed you out, but didn’t really produce the psychoactive high—it was that novelty alone. That was powerful.
By 2019, a lot of the hype started to fade because there’s a ceiling on how much the products were selling when they didn’t have a psychoactive effect. We weren’t making any money. And then I remember hearing about delta-8 in June 2020. We acted on that pretty quickly and got ahead of almost all the regional stores here in town.
Tell me how that happened.
I worked a lot with David Saylor, who owns the CBD Plus franchise. He had come from the vape industry before he got into CBD, and he and I partnered a lot. And in June 2020, someone sent me delta-8 THC, and explained to me what it was, and I said, “Put it into a vape.”
What happened next?
By 2021, you could actually put delta-9 distillate in a gummy. Another year later, [Earthy Now President] Ander Schreiner had me come out to dinner and was like, “[Attorney] Rod [Kight] is writing this piece [that says that] when it’s finished and cured and done right, [THCA-rich hemp] was really made legal several years ago, and no one’s realized it.” People trust Rod. Sure, he’s pro-cannabis—but he’s pro-cannabis within the constraints of the law. That gave me the safety that I felt.
What have your interactions with law enforcement been like?
We are fortunate here in Asheville. My flagship location is directly across the street from the police station. They were interested, curious, but there was never any issue.
How did that freedom affect your decisions on things like delta-8 and THCA?
We’re not being persecuted here, and we have reasonable police, and if there’s a good legal standing, we are willing to go early in some of those areas. That helped us a lot, because people would come to us because they always knew we had cutting-edge products when new cannabinoids were coming to the market.
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