CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In North Carolina, there’s no special license needed or registration required to sell hemp or hemp products, including CBD.

It’s why consumers need to study up on what they’re buying.

Queen Hemp Company, a Charlotte-based grower, says one of the biggest challenges to winning over customers is distinguishing its products from many widely sold competitors that don’t always work.

Companies are not required to test CBD products and display results on the packaging, like FDA-regulated drugs.

The lack of regulation and accountability is one of the reasons a 2017 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found more than a quarter of hemp products sold online had significantly less cbd levels than promised.

“A lot of people think it's snake oil. And that is only because there's a lot of different products out there that don’t really have what they say they have in them,” Queen Hemp Company owner Gail Syfert says.

The USDA has said there's an insufficient amount of DEA-registered labs to test all the hemp produced in the U.S. and won't require hemp to be tested in DEA-approved labs until at least January 2022.