Long before the effort to legalize marijuana gained traction, I saw a patient who was formerly a heavy marijuana pipe smoker. He was atopic but had no prior food allergies. He had smoked "many hundreds" of buds with the seeds but had had no experience with low-THC hemp until he ate hempseed-crusted catfish, whereupon he developed diffuse hives with dyspnea and dysphonia that responded to epinephrine and antihistamines.
Scratch testing with hempseed and IgE testing (by colleagues at the Mt. Sinai Jaffe Food Allergy Institute) were consistent with an allergic response. We published this first reported case[1] of an ingestion reaction to hempseed and wondered whether this was another case of inhalational sensitization leading to an ingestion reaction (as most commonly occurs with oral allergy syndrome).
Marijuana Across America
Fast-forward 16 years, and a lot has changed. For decades, all forms of cannabis had been illegal. Although hemp did not contain enough of the psychotropic THC—at less than 0.3%—to produce a "high," it was otherwise indistinguishable from marijuana, so it too was banned until 2000, when hempseed importation was permitted.
Last year, hemp cultivation was legalized by Congress, and the Drug Enforcement Administration recently clarified that hemp and its derivatives are legal
