Rosario Dawson says a THC beverage helped her father through cancer treatment. This November, a change in federal law could pull most drinks like it off the shelf.
Rosario Dawson’s father did not want to take the pills.
He had been diagnosed with cancer. He was in California, where a doctor could sit with him and go through the stack of medications he was on, the ones he distrusted, the ones he worried were doing their own damage to his liver and his kidneys. He took some of them off the pile. What he replaced them with, Dawson says, was “THC hemp products.”
“I can’t stress enough what that felt like for my dad,” Dawson says. “He was already doing so much to his body in the medical space, and he’s already very distrustful of that space. The fact that he could just have a [THC] beverage that could make him feel relaxed, that helped with his appetite, that could help him rest, that helped with his pain. All of those things are just giant. They’re tremendous.”
That is where she starts when you ask her about the fight she’s in right now.
Dawson is one of six public figures in Real Drinkers, a campaign from the THC beverage maker Cann against a change in federal law that would pull most hemp-derived THC drinks off shelves this November. Cann says she was not paid to participate. She is an investor in the company and has served on its board for more than four years.
The provision takes effect on November 12 and caps finished hemp products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. A standard Cann has two milligrams. Unless Congress replaces that rule first, the hemp version of the drink stops qualifying as legal hemp.
The campaign is why we’re talking. Her father is why she said yes.
Two Milligrams
Here is what most people miss about the product. It barely gets you high.
A standard Cann has two milligrams of THC. A single gummy at a dispensary can run 10, 50, a hundred. The drink is the floor of the entire category, the least intoxicating thing on the shelf, closer to a light beer than to anything sold in a jar.
“You’d have to drink quite a lot to have a crazy experience,” Dawson says. “And that’s true of almost anything. If you drink too much alcohol, if you even take too many Advil, you could do harm.”
Cannabis culture does not usually reward the low number. The flex is potency: the 40 percent flower, the dab, the hundred-milligram edible that puts you on the couch for six hours. “It’s gotten really potent out there,” Dawson says. Cann went the other way on purpose. For a category built on more, it is a strange thing to sell. It turned out to be something a man going through chemo could actually take.
For a category built on more, it is a strange thing to sell.
Ask Dawson what she likes about it and she talks about control, not about getting high.
“It’s super low dose, and you can really monitor yourself and pace yourself, and you can kind of dip your toe into a space that maybe you’ve been curious about, but has been off-putting because of just the way that it has been packaged and delivered,” she says.
The can does what the flower and the gummy can’t. The dose is printed on it, so nobody is estimating. It wears off faster than an edible. Nobody around you has to smell it.
“It’s nice to have an alternative that isn’t something as scary sometimes as taking a gummy, which, if you take too much of that, can be really, really intense and that can be a really long experience,” Dawson says. “Or if you’re smoking, it’s smelling it for everybody, and it becomes something that can be quite intrusive.”
Who It’s For
Her father was not the only person Dawson watched reach for this.
“I know for some of the younger folks that I’ve shared Cann with, especially if they’re more sober curious, they’re maybe more health-minded, they’re naturally already drinking less and wanting to not drink as much, but they also want to have an alternative,” she says.
Then there are the people who can’t drink at all.
“For a lot of older folks, people like my dad and people I know who are nursing injuries or are just a little older, they’re on medications and they can’t drink at all because of those medications and the complications that can come from it,” Dawson says. “They’re just grateful that they don’t have to completely be sober all the time if they don’t want to, that they can enjoy an adult experience and still kind of be measured when it comes to their health.”
What she is describing is not the stoner. It is the person cannabis culture spent decades ignoring, because they were never going to smoke a joint or eat a hundred milligrams and lose the night. They wanted the equivalent of a glass of wine. Something social, dosed, predictable.
What she is describing is not the stoner. It’s the person cannabis culture spent decades ignoring.
“You’re going to have the kind of same normal lift in social experience as you would normally do having a beer or a glass of wine,” she says. “It goes through your system pretty quickly.”
The Dispensary Didn’t Want It Either
The store that was supposed to be cannabis’ home never wanted this drink in the first place.
Jake Bullock, Cann’s co-founder and CEO, spent years trying to make a two-milligram beverage work inside licensed dispensaries across seven states and Canada. The format rarely found its customer there.
“People do not go in dispensaries for a two-milligram drink,” Bullock says. “‘Two milligrams? I’ll have to drink 50 of them. My customers want a 100-milligram Cann and they want to pay eight bucks for it.’”
So the drink lived where its customer already was: in liquor stores, in groceries, in gas stations, on the hemp side of the line rather than the dispensary side. That is the shelf where it found its broadest audience. It is also the shelf that the federal change now threatens.
The product too weak for the dispensary is now too legal for the gas station.
The people who lose the drink are not the ones with a hundred-milligram tolerance and a dispensary account. They are the sober-curious, older adults, and people on medications that make alcohol difficult or unsafe. The mildest thing on the shelf goes first, and it takes them with it.
Ask Dawson why this matters beyond her own family, and she describes how people actually change their minds about cannabis. Somebody hands it to them.
“For a lot of people who’ve had a change of heart, or re-looked at their biases, it’s because their cousin or their daughter or their uncle gave them a salve that had hemp in it, and their pain went away,” she says. “Or they had a lot of anxiety and they relaxed.”
The reaction she hears most is surprise. That one drink did not “suddenly make me kind of crazed, which is what so much of the lore is out there,” as she puts it.
None of those people were chasing a high. The smallest dose in the category was the one that reached them, and it reached them in a can that looked enough like a seltzer that they weren’t scared of it.
Come November, if Congress does nothing, that can comes off the hemp shelf.
“There are sober people out there who don’t drink,” Dawson says, “but that doesn’t mean that alcohol should not be accessible to people who do want to, as long as they’re doing so responsibly.”
She has spent a decade arguing about who cannabis prohibition cost. Now she is arguing for two milligrams in a can, on behalf of the people who came to it last.
Editor’s note: Dawson describes her father’s personal experience using cannabis products for symptom relief during cancer treatment. Individual accounts are not scientific evidence, and cannabis is not a treatment for cancer. For what the research does and does not show, see our explainer on cannabis and cancer. Nothing here is medical advice. Talk to your doctor before using cannabis alongside any treatment.
