Filed Under: Math Is Hard
Andrew Smith says he tried to explain the law.
The officers allegedly moved the decimal point.
On October 26, 2023, Smith was hauling about 216 pounds of hemp flower from Oklahoma to a customer in Asheville, North Carolina. According to his federal lawsuit, he had Certificates of Analysis from Tennessee-accredited laboratories showing that the shipment complied with state and federal THC limits.
Smith was also a licensed Tennessee hemp grower who sold and distributed hemp, tobacco and vape products around the country.
None of that prevented what happened in Sevierville.
Law enforcement pulled Smith over for an alleged moving violation and window-tint issues. According to his complaint, officers began questioning him about what he was carrying instead of simply citing him and sending him on his way.
Smith told them.
Hemp.
He produced the lab reports.
According to the complaint, the officers ignored the paperwork and mocked him by saying that “meth dealers also usually insist they are selling something legal.”
Then came the math lesson.
Smith alleges officers told him the legal THC limit for hemp was 0.03 percent.
It was 0.3 percent.
That is not a rounding error. It is a tenfold mistake in the legal threshold Congress used to separate federally lawful hemp from marijuana.
Smith says he tried to correct them.
The officers allegedly pressed ahead.
According to the complaint, law enforcement used a MobileDetect roadside test on Smith’s cargo. Smith alleges the test could not reliably distinguish legal hemp from illegal marijuana because it could not differentiate among certain forms of THC.
Nobody needed a test to determine whether Smith was carrying cannabis. He had already said he was.
The legal question was whether the flower crossed the delta-9 THC threshold that separated hemp from marijuana under federal law.
Smith says MobileDetect could not answer that question.
The officers seized the entire shipment anyway.
Smith spent time in jail and says he suffered a substantial financial loss. The hemp was not returned to him.
The case did not end with the traffic stop.
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Smith was charged with drug-related offenses and later alleged that prosecutors continued the case without reliable evidence establishing that the seized flower had been illegal marijuana when police took it.
His lawsuit also points to a warning that reached Tennessee prosecutors several months later.
According to the complaint, a March 6, 2024 Brady disclosure letter from the district attorney general for Tennessee’s Sixth Judicial District described another case involving a driver accused of transporting marijuana from California to North Carolina. Lab results in that case reportedly showed the material was legal hemp.
Smith alleges, upon information and belief, that District Attorney General Jimmy Dunn and other prosecutors received the letter because the earlier case closely resembled his own.
The prosecution continued.
Smith says his charges were not dismissed until September 13, 2024, roughly six months after the warning letter.
By then, Tennessee law enforcement had already received a fairly expensive lesson in what happens when cannabis-looking products are assumed to be illegal.
In 2018, Rutherford County authorities launched Operation Candy Crush and raided 23 stores selling CBD products.
The prosecutions collapsed, and the raids later produced years of civil litigation.
The litigation eventually reached the Sixth Circuit, which concluded that CBD alone was not enough. Without evidence about the source of the product or its THC concentration, officers lacked probable cause to treat the products as illegal controlled substances.
Smith’s lawsuit argues Tennessee had already been warned about the same basic mistake.
His version came with more paperwork.
He says officers had laboratory reports in front of them, misunderstood the governing THC limit and relied on a roadside test that could not reliably determine whether the shipment was actually marijuana.
The complaint also raises another problem.
Putting hemp in an evidence room does not necessarily freeze its chemistry in place.
Smith argues that heat, oxygen and ultraviolet light can accelerate decarboxylation, which converts THCa into delta-9 THC. His complaint says hemp should be stored under cool, dry and dark conditions to slow that process.
That becomes important when THC concentration is the very thing prosecutors need to prove.
Smith alleges that police failed to preserve the hemp properly after taking it. He says he began contacting authorities within days of the seizure and warned that improper storage could alter or destroy the evidence before reliable testing occurred.
Months later, in May 2024, additional testing was performed.
By then, Smith argues, the evidentiary value of the hemp had already been compromised.
His federal civil rights lawsuit followed in February 2025.
The most recent ruling came on September 14, 2026, when U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Varlan considered Dunn’s motion to dismiss in Smith v. Dunn.
Smith did not win everything.
The court dismissed all official-capacity claims and threw out his unlawful-seizure claim because it was filed outside the applicable statute of limitations.
Dunn and the unidentified prosecutor defendants were protected from Smith’s malicious-prosecution claim by prosecutorial immunity.
The case is still alive.
Varlan allowed Smith’s malicious-prosecution claim to proceed against unidentified police officers and sheriff’s deputies involved in the case.
The stay was lifted, and trial is currently scheduled for July 6, 2027.
None of that proves Smith’s allegations.
The September ruling did not decide whether his hemp was legal, whether officers knowingly misstated the law or whether anyone deliberately ignored evidence. The court was deciding which claims could continue, not who ultimately wins.
The allegations moving forward are remarkable enough without embellishment.
Smith says he was hauling hemp with lab paperwork showing compliance. He says officers mocked the paperwork and misstated the legal THC threshold by a factor of ten.
He says they used a roadside test that could not reliably resolve the legal question in front of them.
Then they seized roughly 216 pounds of product and put him in jail.
The federal government had already drawn the line at 0.3 percent.
Smith says the officers moved it to 0.03.
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