4,516 people logged what they drank for three weeks. On the days they had a THC beverage, their odds of also drinking alcohol fell by roughly half. The finding held for 23 of the 36 products tested, and moved the same direction in every one.

The largest real-world study of hemp THC beverages has published its numbers, and the clearest thing in it has nothing to do with sleep, pain or productivity.

It’s beer.

MoreBetter, a Philadelphia research firm that has run observational studies on consumer products since 2016, tracked 4,516 people across 36 products from 23 brands, at doses between 1 and 10 milligrams of THC. Each participant logged seven days before touching any product, fourteen days on it, then answered an exit survey. Every person served as their own control, measured against their own pre-use baseline. The fieldwork ran in two waves across 2025, so the results are new rather than the research. The company published the full dataset free on its Real-World Data Exchange platform and prepared a findings summary exclusively for High Times, breaking out the numbers behind each measure.

On a participant’s ordinary day, before any of this started, the modeled probability that they would drink alcohol was 22.9%. On days they drank one of these beverages, it was 10.9%.

Two Measurements, One Direction

What gives that number weight is that it doesn’t come from asking anybody about it. It comes from what people logged, day by day, about what they actually drank, run through a model that compares each person to themselves.

The exit survey asked the question directly, and the answers point the same way. Two-thirds said they were consuming less alcohol. Fifty-six percent called the drinks a regular replacement for it. Those are people describing themselves, which is a weaker kind of evidence, but they line up with the behavioral measure instead of contradicting it.

The tightest number in that group is the health one. An 86.6% average with a floor of 80% across every single product means the belief holds no matter which drink somebody picked up. Worth being precise about what that measures: it’s what people think, not what is true. Nothing in this study tested whether these products are safer than alcohol.

The eleven-point gap between the health answer and the social one is the more interesting detail. People are more confident about what these drinks do to their body than about how showing up with one plays in a room.

Fifty Days Later

The obvious question about a two-week study is whether anything survives it. MoreBetter went back and asked.

Fifty days after the study period ended, the company surveyed participants from 18 of the 36 products about how their relationship with alcohol had changed. It got 1,420 responses. Setting aside the 249 who weren’t drinking alcohol before any of this began leaves 1,171 people who were. Those results are not on the public dashboard; MoreBetter provided them to High Times on the record.

Two things to hold onto there. A third of respondents reported no change at all, which is the honest headline alongside the 63%. And this is people recalling their own drinking seven weeks later, on a narrower base than the main dataset, which makes it softer evidence than the daily logs. It points the same direction anyway, and the gap between 63% and 2.4% is not a close call.

MoreBetter also says a portion of the original group has continued into a second and now a third cohort, the third of which is currently open, spanning 12 to 18 months between the first and the present one. The point is to see whether consumption patterns and substitution behavior hold up over that kind of stretch. Those results don’t exist yet.

What It Actually Feels Like

The experience these numbers describe is mild and short, which is the whole design premise of the category and now has some evidence under it.

Duration is the most consistent thing in the entire dataset. Thirty-six products, 23 brands, doses spanning a factor of ten, and every one of them landed between two and 2.9 hours. The standard deviation is 0.2 hours. Whatever else varies in this category, how long it lasts does not.

Feeling high is the opposite. It swings from 18.8% of use days to 81.5%, which is what a 1 to 10 milligram spread would predict, and it means the 53.3% average describes almost nobody’s actual product. Half the people buying in this category are not particularly trying to get high, and the products know it.

The onset figure needs an asterisk. Participants picked from bands rather than clocking themselves, so 26.9 minutes is a center of mass, not a stopwatch reading.

And the hangover number, which the industry will want to run with, is a share of use days rather than a share of people. There was no alcohol comparison group in this study, so it cannot be read as better or worse than a hangover from drinking. MoreBetter says so itself, in writing, which is not something most industry-funded research bothers to do.

The Productivity Number, Handled Carefully

Participants reported roughly 36 more minutes of productive time on product days than on their own non-product days, a jump from 5.64 hours to 6.24. That reached significance for 20 of the 36 products, and every significant result was positive.

The companion measure is messier and deserves the scrutiny. The probability of reporting a productive day rose 12.5 points on average, but that only held for 13 of 36 products, and one product moved 15 points in the other direction. The accurate version is that for about a third of the products tested, people were more likely to report a good day, and for one of them the reverse was true.

Both are estimates people made about their own hours, not measured output.

How to Read Any of This

This is observational, not a clinical trial. There is no placebo arm and no separate comparison group; the comparison is each participant against their own pre-use baseline, which is a real method with real limits. People chose to enroll and chose their product through what MoreBetter calls a semi-blinded process. Almost everything here is self-reported, including the alcohol logs behind the headline finding. This describes what a large group of people reported while drinking these products. It does not establish that the products caused any of it.

One caveat matters more than the rest, and it comes from MoreBetter rather than from us. When a finding is significant for 23 of 36 products, the headline average covers only those 23. Products that showed no significant change are left out of the average, not counted as zero. Quote the twelve-point drop without the coverage number and you have overstated it. That warning is printed in the company’s own summary, in bold.

Who Paid For It

MoreBetter says it funded the Infused Beverage Study primarily itself, with partial funding from the beverage brands whose products were tested, and that those brands had no influence over protocol design, data analysis or published findings.

Twenty-three brands participated: BRĒZ, Cantrip, Nowadays, Uncle Arnie’s, Willie’s Remedy+, Woodstock, Medterra, Rebel Rabbit, Snoop Dogg’s Iconic Tonics, Herbal Oasis, Cornbread Hemp, Stiiizy, 1906, Sober(ish), Wims!, Hippie Water, Squared, Hightail, Kava Haven, 23rd State, Drippy, Good Feels and Rexis Biotech.

None of that makes the data bad, and the company reports 17 peer-reviewed publications across 12 university research partnerships behind it. It does mean some of the companies that helped pay for the study sell the products the study is being used to defend, and anyone citing these numbers in a policy fight should say so. Nothing is broken out by brand, so no figure here belongs to any individual participant.

The Products in This Study Are About to Stop Being Legal

Section 781 of Public Law 119-37 caps finished hemp products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container, applied to the whole package rather than a serving. It takes effect November 12.

The products in this study run from 1 to 10 milligrams per serving. The weakest one carries more than twice the legal ceiling for an entire container.

None of the 36 would survive it.

That date is still moving. The Senate has passed a stopgap that would push most of the new restrictions to December 11, and the House hasn’t taken it up. Until it does, November 12 is the law. We’ve been tracking the whole fight here.

Some brands have already made their bet. Cann pulled the THC out of part of its lineup, while B-Real and Rachel Wolfson launched into the same market with full-dose product. One side is reformulating for the rule on the books. The other is betting Congress changes it first. NielsenIQ data cited by MoreBetter puts the category at $239 million in tracked retail sales over the 52 weeks ending June 27, up 135% year over year, which is what the 0.4 milligram number is aimed at and why the fight has pulled in everyone from trade groups to Rosario Dawson.

Every figure in this article, and the several dozen measures that didn’t make it in, are free at rwdexchange.com/community. Verify a phone number or email, enter the code, then open Community Insights and the Infused Beverage Performance Data dashboard. No cost, no trial period, no card. Everything is filterable by seltzer, soda, sparkling beverage, functional tonic, and spirits, shots and mixers, and MoreBetter asks that anyone using the figures credit the source.

The data arrived after the vote.

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Nearly every consumer category now delivers or ships. Cannabis was one of the last to catch up, and the shift is changing who buys THC and how.

Most of what Americans buy now arrives without anyone leaving the house. Dinner comes in twenty minutes. Groceries are ordered on a phone and left at the door. Prescriptions refill automatically. Convenience has become the baseline expectation across nearly every retail category, and consumers notice immediately when a product fails to meet it.

Cannabis was one of the last categories to catch up. For most of the legal era, buying THC meant driving to a dispensary, waiting in line, and paying in cash. That is changing, and platforms like Edibles.com are part of the reason why. Launched in March 2025 and based in Atlanta, the wellness-focused marketplace ships vetted, third-party-tested hemp-derived THC products directly to consumers across more than 30 states, including many where no dispensary exists.

Why Cannabis Retail Can Be Inconvenient

The dispensary model was not designed around the shopper. It was designed around compliance.

State cannabis programs are built on a controlled point of sale, because a controlled point of sale is what makes seed-to-sale tracking work. The ID check at the door, the product held behind glass, the cash-only counter, the limited delivery radius… each of those features exists to satisfy a regulatory requirement, not a consumer one. The result is a retail experience that has little in common with how Americans buy anything else.

The industry has spent years trying to reduce that friction. Curbside pickup, order-ahead apps, and express lanes have all been deployed to shorten the trip. In Los Angeles, one operator has opened a fully automated dispensary where the entire transaction runs through machines and a mobile app, eliminating the counter altogether.

Those experiments improve the in-store experience. They do not eliminate the store. Under state cannabis law, the trip remains a structural requirement in most markets, and delivery—where it exists at all—is generally limited to licensed operators serving a defined local area.

How Hemp Changed the Delivery Equation

Hemp-derived THC products operate under a different framework, and that framework permits something state cannabis programs structurally cannot: shipping.

The 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp at the federal level, defined as cannabis containing no more than 0.3% Delta-9 THC by dry weight. Products meeting that standard can move through the mail and cross state lines. For consumers in states without adult-use or medical programs, that has meant access to tested, trusted THC products for the first time—delivered, discreetly, without a dispensary in the equation.

The category’s growth reflects that. Hemp-derived THC beverages have moved into grocery chains, liquor stores, and even arena concessions. A five-milligram hemp drink is now sold at Chicago’s United Center for roughly the price of a beer, a placement that has drawn opposition from the alcohol industry. NielsenIQ’s April 2026 tracking put THC beverage sales at $239 million over the prior 52 weeks, an increase of 135% year over year in measured retail channels.

That growth is less a story about the products themselves than about where and how they can be purchased.

Convenience Depends on Curation

Delivery alone does not make a category convenient. Getting the box to the door is the simpler part of the problem.

The harder part is everything that happens before it ships. A dispensary offers one thing an open online market does not: a budtender who has already reviewed the product and can direct a customer toward something appropriate. Remove that person and the work does not disappear; it shifts to the shopper, who is now responsible for evaluating lab results, comparing formulations, and assessing brands with no clear basis for comparison.

That is the gap Edibles.com is built to address. Every product on the platform is vetted and third-party tested before it is listed, and the assortment is organized by the outcome it supports—sleep, energy, relaxation, or social occasions—rather than by strain or potency. The roster includes established names in the category, including Wyld, Wana, Camino, and Papa & Barkley. The company also operates a retail location in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood.

“We’re not marketing ‘getting high’; we’re marketing better sleep, less stress and overall functional outcomes,” Edibles.com says. “That’s the bridge between cannabis and wellness.”

The premise is straightforward: the selection work has already been done. For a consumer without a dispensary nearby, and without a budtender to ask, that pre-vetting is the difference between a functional marketplace and an overwhelming one.

Who Is Actually Buying

The consumer driving this shift is not the traditional dispensary customer.

Edibles.com describes its core audience as canna-curious and canna-familiar shoppers, people with little or no prior THC experience, or some experience and a growing interest in using these products intentionally. 

The company reports that women over 40 represent a significant portion of its customer base, a demographic that has historically been underserved by dispensary retail and is often more comfortable ordering online than shopping in person. These are consumers who are now able to participate in regulated hemp THC for the first time, as they are mostly in states where legal regulated marijuana laws don’t exist. 

For that consumer, the appeal is not novelty or potency. It is access, discretion, and the confidence that the product has been tested and labeled accurately. Delivery is not a convenience feature for this shopper. It is the entire reason the purchase happens at all.

The Regulatory Picture

The framework enabling direct-to-consumer hemp shipping is currently under review. Section 781 of the 2026 appropriations act, signed in November 2025, revises the federal definition of hemp to a total-THC standard and caps finished hemp-derived cannabinoid products at 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container, with an effective date of November 12, 2026. 

Bipartisan proposals to delay or replace the provision are pending in both chambers, and the outcome will determine what can be shipped and where. High Times has covered what the deadline means for the category in detail.

What the rules will not change is the expectation. Consumers have been trained by every other retail category to assume that products come to them. Cannabis and hemp businesses will build around that expectation or lose customers to the ones that do.

The convenience revolution reached cannabis late, but it is not going to leave.

Photos courtesy of Edibles.com

Sponsored Content Disclosure: This article was published as part of a paid partnership with Edibles.com and is not independent editorial content. Claims about the company’s products, testing, shipping reach, customer base, and wellness positioning were provided by Edibles.com and have not been independently verified by High Times. Hemp-derived THC laws vary by jurisdiction, and product availability is subject to change.

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