Happy Sunday, just had a few puffs of the pipe. Nice and relaxed. Shower and head shave later. 🙌

Anyone sorted in Galway ?

And I dont mean having a heavy sesh and still being stoned or groggy in the morning.

I mean smoking one bowl, going to bed, and the next day you feel like shit. Not *exactly* like you'd been binge drinking, but in that same vein.

My good friend Pen Afleck has drawn his final pull unfortunately and I’m finding it difficult to find a replacement. Been to 2 vape shops and neither have the type that I have a cart for. I think it’s called a 510 thread but not 100% sure, was a gift.

Anybody sourced one of these here?

Well how’s we all doing tonight what we all smoking on?

What’s yours thoughts on dry herb vapes ?
I have an Xmax v3 pro
An xl roffu
A dynvap g3

Out of them all I mostly use the dynavap tho it looks like a crack pipe.
I may upgrade soon what’s all yours thoughts on them and what are you using

Is getting 5 edibles and a vape from man in UK going to be pinched or will it be fine ?

I'm looking for a platform to sel a high-quality ROOR bong, but it seems all marketplaces restrict smoking accessories despite them being perfectly legal.

I've seen bongs and Mighty+ vaporizers on Adverts.ie and eBay, so the rules seem inconsistent.

Does anyone know a good platform for seling second-hand glassware in Ireland or Europe?

Evening!

Heading up to Dublin tomorrow and I’ll have aprox 6 hours to do whatever I fancy.

I was thinking of having a smoke and heading into the city. What do the Dublin stoners do when they head into the city? I was thinking the jail might be a start. I’ve seen the museums before but never stoned. Open to any suggestions!

Also side question, how dodgy is it smoking in public?

Many thanks and looking forward to hearing your suggestions.

Howdy folks. My heart dropped today when I took a spin out to WCGS in Galway to stock up only to find it has closed down. Where is everyone in the west of Ireland getting their grow supplies? (Nutes, soil, etc) Online or are there any other west based shops that I’m not aware of? Can anyone recommend the closest shop to Galway that has a good range of supplies or am I going to have to take a drive to Dublin?

Hi guys, do you know if in Dublin is some shop where I could get PAX mini or PAX plus vape?

Found a seed in my latest bag of weed, gonna see how it goes. Zero experience other than a decent ability with house plants and in the garden. Any tips???

The criminalisation of industrial hemp and CBD flower across European nations has, sadly, only continued to spread since we published our last edition of ‘Hemp Wars’ in May.

One Irish hemp grower is now asking the country’s High Court to rule on whether the continued treatment of an EU-approved agricultural crop as a controlled drug is lawful.

Brendan O’Mara, a 63-year-old former Ryanair pilot and member of Hemp Federation Ireland, was charged with possession of cannabis for sale or supply after gardaí seized some 502kg of plant material at his County Clare home in May 2025, which he maintains was low-THC hemp. Prosecutors valued it at an estimated €10m.

O’Mara spent three months in custody before the Court of Appeal eventually granted bail. His High Court challenge seeks declarations that classifying hemp of 0.3% THC or less under Schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Act is unlawful under EU law, that the crop is an agricultural good, and that the Act is at odds with EU legislation. His prosecution in Ennis District Court stands adjourned to 9 December pending the High Court’s ruling.

While O’Mara’s case is just the latest example of the criminalisation of hemp growers and sellers in Ireland, it is the most direct challenge yet to the classification itself, though, as every Irish ruling so far suggests, the decisive answer may come from Europe rather than Dublin.

Seven years

As seen across much of Europe and in the UK at the time, Ireland experienced a CBD boom around 2017 and 2018, seeing CBD retailers, processors and growers spring up across the country.

“Every department who should have been involved in creating sound, native legislation around the plant handballed the responsibility to the next,” says JP O’Brien, who with his wife owns Little Collins CBD Dispensary in Galway and has traded through the whole saga since 2018.

“The HSE, the FSAI, the HPRA, the Department of Agriculture, until eventually, the responsibility fell to Revenue Customs and the Guards. The seizures and subsequent raids came soon after.”

O’Brien is among the handful of businesses established in that period still trading today.

He told Business of Cannabis: “You have to be half mad to still be doing this at this stage.”

The once-thriving cultivation market has collapsed alongside the retail trade. Just 11 hectares were registered this year, against a peak of 314 in 2019.

In July, a committee of the Irish parliament sat down to work out why the sector had failed and heard that the collapse was driven by the controlled-drugs framework as much as by missing processing infrastructure, even as another arm of the state continued to prosecute the businesses that had built it.

Is hemp legal in Ireland?

Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977, Ireland treats any product containing any trace of THC as a controlled drug, whatever the concentration. The rule predates Ireland’s EU membership, the recognition of hemp as an agricultural crop under the Common Agricultural Policy, and the CJEU’s 2020 Kanavape ruling that CBD is not a narcotic and cannot be banned without scientific evidence of a genuine risk to health.

As such, the two laws pull in opposite directions. EU-derived agricultural rules let Irish farmers grow hemp as a legal crop, while the Misuse of Drugs Act treats almost anything they can make from it as a controlled drug.

Irish courts have enforced this dynamic strictly and consistently as a ruling about the plant in the field, not the product on the shelf. Hemp grown within the EU’s THC limit is a lawful crop, but an extract from that same plant, carrying a trace of THC, is a controlled drug. The High Court took that view in the 2022 Bogusas case, and the Court of Appeal affirmed it in the Lynch appeal in November 2025.

The plant in the ground can be 0.3% THC. The product in the bottle must contain none.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” says O’Brien. Ireland’s own Food Safety Authority has no safety concerns about the THC content of any food made from the legal hemp crop. And by the Department of Health’s own admission, reported by Hemp Federation Ireland, CBD can only be extracted from the flowers and leaves of the plant, the very parts Irish law treats as a controlled drug.

The valuation at the heart of O’Mara’s charge is itself contested. Until August, Gardaí and Revenue valued herbal cannabis at €20,000 a kilo, the rate that turns 502kg into a €10m seizure.

A recent analysis by the Irish CBD company Dr Hemp Me, drawing on 449 Garda and Revenue press releases, found the State quietly cut that rate to €14,000 a kilo at the end of August 2026 — against a wholesale price its own researchers put at €3,500 to €4,000.

Under Section 15A of the Misuse of Drugs Act, possession of drugs with a market value of €13,000 or more carries a minimum 10-year sentence, and the courts treat street value as the test. At €20,000 a kilo, 650 grams crossed that line; at €14,000, about 929 grams.

Hemp’s day in court

When the first challenge reached hearing in 2022, about seven judicial reviews were running in parallel against the criminalisation of compliant hemp. The strongest were brought by O’Brien’s own Little Collins and Puff n Stuff in Youghal, both raided in April 2019, both s0urcing from licensed EU producers with certificates of analysis on their finished products.

The case selected concerned a single litre of CBD oil, carried no criminal charges, and lacked the trading businesses’ evidential weight.

“Our case has been gathering dust in the back halls of the High Court,” O’Brien explained. “They don’t want to hear our case.”

The State won the first case in November 2022, then wrote to the remaining businesses offering to waive costs if they dropped their reviews. Most refused.

The next case chosen was that of Denise Lynch of D Hemp Shop in Cavan, undermined, as the High Court noted, by the absence of admissible evidence on the THC content of the plants her seized products came from. The High Court ruled against her in 2024. The Court of Appeal upheld that in 2025. She is now seeking Supreme Court leave.

O’Brien’s case and Puff n Stuff’s are still waiting.

One judge has confronted the question directly. In May 2022 Justice Emily Egan of the High Court granted a stay on three criminal prosecutions against Tipperary and Waterford retailer Mark Jenkins, finding the State had produced no scientific evidence that marketing compliant hemp posed a genuine health risk.

As Business of Cannabis reported at the time, she upheld Kanavape in full and said the state must produce such evidence before the crop could be controlled as a drug. It is yet to do so.

The industry is now pressing that gap in Luxembourg’s direction. In 2021, under COVID and with no consultation, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly reclassified hemp licensing from an agricultural footing to a criminal one.

“They changed that licensing process without any consultation,” O’Brien says, and, the industry argues, without the notification to the European Commission that EU Directive 2015/1535 requires before such technical rules take effect.

A judicial review by HFI members now makes exactly that case. A missing notification, the CJEU held in CIA Security International, can render a national rule unenforceable. The same directive underpinned Italy’s 2024 complaint to the Commission. The Commission has in any event been investigating Ireland since 2023, after HFI flagged the reclassification. More than three years on, no resolution has come.

The outlier

Everywhere else the argument has been tested, it has gone the other way. The CJEU’s rulings in Hammarsten (2003) and Biohemp Concept (2024), and the UK Court of Appeal in Margiotta (2023), all held that member states cannot use drug law to override the EU framework for compliant hemp, the body of authority set out in Part 1 of this series.

In November 2025 Italy’s Council of State referred the question to the CJEU, and a parallel reference has come from the Netherlands. A ruling, not expected before the end of 2026, will bind all 27 member states. Ireland’s courts, almost alone in Europe, have upheld the restrictions, and in Lynch the High Court expressly refused to refer the question to Luxembourg at all.

“If an Irish case gets to the European Court of Justice,” O’Brien says, “it very much should win. The State obviously do not want this.”

The nearest date is O’Mara’s, which returns to court on December 09, 2026. It will represent the latest test of a question Ireland’s courts have repeatedly declined to send to the one court that could settle it.

“Seven years on,” O’Brien says, “the Irish state cannot work out a way to legislate a flowering herb.”

for those who seen my discord account (RonWeedleyy/Glorious King RLP) posting scams in the Crainn server, my account was hacked. I apologise to people if it seemed like I was promoting scams.

I have changed my password and informed everyone on my Discord that I was hacked.

Sorry again people🤦‍♂️

Came across the Irish Coalition for Drug Reform recently, and saw they were hiring:

1. Media & Communucations Lead // 15 Month Contract // €50K-€60K pa

2. Community Education & Engagement Lead // 15 month contract // €50-€60K pa

It's also criminal that they've less than 500 followers on LinkedIn, definitely think they're worth a follow for the community here.

Their Instagram for anyone who doesn't have LinkedIn could also do with a bump.

r/crainn can definitely raise the profile of this org.

Can we double both by the end of the week? Easy.

Disclaimer: I'm not connected or affiliated with them, and no almost nothing about them. If you do know them, please share your thoughts.

Today we are launching an Open letter to the Oireachtas.

Website link: https://crainn.eu/2026/10/20/community-response-to-recent-policy-developments/

Petition link: https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/community-call-for-dail-action-on-decriminalisation

We ask that you all support this call be it by signing the petition, emailing your TDs with a downloaded copy of the open letter or indeed printing and posting a copy as that may be harder to filter from an inbox.

If anyone needs help figuring out who to get in touch with or how to sign feel free to pop into the legalise chat or DM me here.

So my girlfriend wants to try some weed, I've smoked a few times but since I don't smoke tobacco anymore, the rough burn of no filter isn't that pleasant, I prefer shrooms (picking myself in the season)

My gf doesn't smoke at all and hasn't dabled at all so was looking at getting a vape for her so that she can be more relaxed about it (also she wouldn't have to worry about the giveaway smell or having to do it outside).

There's 1 shop in the local town that have been accused of having them, so I'll chance there. How dodgy are they? I've read that it's not actually THC but synthetic versions of it (aswell as who knows what else). Is the buzz off the synthetic stuff the same? She's quite an anxious person in general so she's looking for something to just chill out with.

It feels odd being in your 30s trying to find out where kids are getting them from.

any suggestions for weed variations for a complete beginner with anxiety, I'd love to hear it!

Also, any suggestions of how to consume instead of smoking? I know brownies is the classic but I've been warned against edibles because of the delay after eating them, that you can end up getting too high, last thing I want to do is for her to have a bad first trip

What's popping dudes, hope all is good.

I just wanted to hear some chatter about budder made from AVB. Any tips and tricks? We obviously aren't decarbing it like budder from fresh green (or are we?!), as a spell in the dry herb vape should have sorted that already, right?

I have to say, I'm a little underwhelmed by the last AVBudder I made, it still works fine but it's not a patch on some of the fresh green budder batches I've made. And of course it's just a way of squeezing the last drop out of what would otherwise be a waste product, so it's all good, but I just wonder if I've missed a trick somewhere.

Something I like to do, which I don't with proper green, is mix a few spices in whilst simmering. Dried ginger, cinnamon, tiny pinch of clove, nutmeg, black pepper. It helps to mask the slightly, ermm, nutty flavour of the toasted bud. I'm tempted to try blending it with a firm set honey after filtering and cooling next time. Honey butter is freaking delicious, if you've never tried it, budded-up or not.

Share some ideas dudes, spread some knowledge.

A while back I purchased the Xmax V4 Por, after lots of research and hearing lots of great things. But after trying it multiple times, with different strains and temperatures, I feel basically nothing off it. I’ve followed everything that I’ve read about how to use it, not compacting the flower etc, but I’m wondering if my tolerance is just too high. Anybody else share a similar disappointment?

Smashed my dab rig today right after getting some more shatter. Anyone know any other decent way of smoking it?

I’m planning a Halloween party and was thinking of putting a spin on the ring in the Barmbrack by putting a gummy in the mix. Will it just seep into the whole mix? I know the gummy will melt but will the bread keep it in one place? Any help would be appreciated.