Standing in front of the seven justices of the North Carolina Supreme Court, attorney Benjamin Kull interrupted his oral arguments with an unexpected prop. Pulling out a plastic baggie of something that looked a lot like marijuana, he all-but dared the justices to have him searched or arrested.

They didn’t. And that proved Kull’s larger legal point, at least in his telling: Nobody in the room — not the experienced law enforcement officers providing security, not the state’s most vaunted legal minds — had any idea if what he was holding was illegal pot or perfectly legal hemp.

The two plants look and smell exactly the same; their only difference is in microscopic chemical composition. And so when North Carolina legalized hemp several years ago, the State Bureau of Investigations itself sa

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