COLUMBUS, Ohio – After smoking hemp one morning in 2020, a 55-year-old man struck an Ohio State Highway Patrol trooper around 5 p.m. that afternoon at a speed between 10 and 15 mph, causing injuries that ended the trooper’s career.
Edward Balmert said he smoked the hemp, a plant that’s similar to marijuana but almost entirely lacks the psychoactive component that gets users high, to ease pain from his arthritis. He said the incident was an accident, not the byproduct of intoxication.
State attorneys won convictions against Balmert, of Lorain, for aggravated vehicular assault and operating a vehicle while under the influence of metabolites of THC (the psychoactive component of marijuana) that police detected in his system. However, he was acquitted of a charge of operating a vehicle while intoxicated by a drug. He was sentenced to a mandatory minimum of two years.
Balmert asked the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn the convictions, a matter up for oral arguments next week.
The court’s eventual ruling could reshape rules of the road in Ohio around an unregulated substance that exists in non-intoxicating forms but has become increasingly available at gas stations, smoke shops and bars and restaurants as “THC-infused” seltzers or “intoxicating hemp.”
The case comes as lawmakers have considered, but not passed, a crackdown against the hemp industry. As the governor has emphasized in press conferences spotlighting the subject, teenagers can currently walk into gas stations in Ohio and walk out with their pockets stuffed with THC-infused candies marketed like popular brands.
Crash
Around 5 p.m. on June 9, 2020, Balmert was exiting the freeway in Lorain County. He wasn’t wearing corrective lenses as he was supposed to. A state trooper stood in the intersection, wearing a reflective safety vest, directing traffic with two colleagues. Turning left off the highway, Balmert swiped the trooper on his driver’s side. Court records say the trooper was taken to the hospital via ambulance and that the crash caused “her to have limited function in her arm, and continued brain trauma.”
Balmert stayed at the scene and cooperated, voluntarily submitting a urine sample and undergoing a sobriety test and disclosing his hemp use that morning. Officers testified that Balmert was impaired. A state crime lab analyst found Balmert’s urine sample indicated about 316 nanograms of THC metabolite per millimeter in his blood, over the legal limit of 35 nanograms.
Smoking hemp, as Balmert testified, eases symptoms of his 20-year fight with arthritis and an immune-suppressing medication he takes for it. He smoked that morning when he got out of bed, and said he wasn’t high at the time of the crash. He said he bought the hemp at “a store,” but court records don’t offer more specificity.
He’s arguing that hemp use wasn’t the “proximal cause” of his crash. In other words, he’s saying state prosecutors failed to prove that the increased THC concentrations found in his system caused the poor vehicular handling behind the crash.
Both the Ohio Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the DUI Defense Lawyers Association filed arguments in support of Balmert. Prosecutors, they argued, are overcharging Ohioans as they regularly ignore the requirement of proof that intoxication from a drug directly caused a crash. They say that nationally, metabolites produced by legal hemp and CBD products have been inaccurately reported as “marijuana metabolites” in police analysis of blood and urine after crashes.
A sheriff’s deputy who responded to the incident as a “drugs recognition expert” acknowledged that THC can remain in a person’s system well after a two-to-four-hour high wears off. It’s especially true for chronic users, and Balmert testified to his daily use.
Attorneys with the Lorain County Prosecutor’s Office, however, say the law defines the point where an individual cannot safely drive a vehicle. Balmert’s conviction must be upheld, they say, given the high THC content found in his urine surpassed that threshold.
“The resulting injuries suffered by the trooper were a natural and foreseeable consequence within the scope of risk he created by driving a vehicle at a statutorily prohibited level of marijuana metabolites – a level at which the legislature has deemed a person a danger to operate a vehicle,” the prosecutors wrote.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost submitted a brief siding with prosecutors. The facts are clear, he said: Balmert smoked a substance, hit a trooper, and had THC in his system. Case closed.
What is hemp?
Both marijuana and hemp are varieties of the cannabis sativa plant. Since 2018, congress removed hemp – defined as cannabis plants containing less than .3% Delta-9 THC concentration on a dry weight basis – from the federal Controlled Substances Act. Hemp has textile uses and can be processed into CBD products, which are usually non-intoxicating.
However, a murkier industry has since emerged in which the Delta-8 THC isomer from hemp plants is sold as “intoxicating hemp products,” according to researchers at the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University.
It’s a hot market. Cannabis Business Times estimated the Delta-8 market went from about $200 million in 2020 to nearly $2.8 billion in 2023.
Lawmakers have floated different approaches on intoxicating hemp. Some say it should be banned altogether. Others want a 21-and-up law. And others want an age requirement plus limiting its sale to licensed marijuana dispensaries.
But the lack of consensus, coupled with split opinions among Republicans on whether to restrict the adult use recreational marijuana program enacted by voters in 2023, has led to a stall on the subject thus far in the current legislative session.
Jake Zuckerman covers state politics and policy for Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
Ohio Supreme Court will hear arguments on man who hit a trooper with his car at a low speed after smoking hemp. Read More
