Stacy Allen lives in a white wooden house with a perfect lawn and a labradoodle in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. She’s a mum of two and a successful photographer. About once a week, after her two children have gone to bed, she’ll take a bite of what looks and tastes like an ordinary wine gum dusted in sugar. It contains a derivative of cannabis and it makes her feel, well, pretty good.

Within the hour she’ll start relaxing, the troubles of the day edged out by a wave of contentment as cannabinoids bind to the receptors in her brain. “I feel like it’s just a way to unwind,” Allen, 41, tells me as we sit on her cream sofa. “Just like having a glass of wine.” In short, she’ll get a little bit high.

Despite living in a conservative southern state, far from the liberal enclaves of California and Colorado, this is all, via a patchwork of state laws, completely legal.

Thirteen years since cannabis was first legalised in Colorado and Washington for recreational use, the United States is embracing weed in all its forms.

While on a federal level, weed is classified as a Schedule 1 (class A) substance along with cocaine and heroin, about half of all states have legalised it for recreational use; so, provided you are 21 or over, you can buy it in dispensaries much as you would pick up a bottle of wine or a pack of cigarettes at a supermarket.

Today more people use cannabis daily or nearly daily in the US than drink alcohol. Last year cannabis sales topped $35 billion (£26 billion), which cannabis policy groups estimate generated $4.4 billion in tax revenue. Eighty per cent of Americans live in a county with at least one dispensary, and 15 per cent are regular users. With this has come an enormous shift in how Americans perceive weed. In 1995 only 25 per cent favoured legalisation. Today about 70 per cent do. Even the harshest critics of cannabis accept that the genie is not going back into the bottle.

All the while, alarm bells about the strength of the drugs that are being released on the market, and the lack of regulation that exists due to the different state laws around cannabis, are sounding among some medical professionals.

Still, it is abundant. Even in states where weed isn’t legal, such as Alabama, you can buy products infused with delta-8 or delta-9 THC, compounds that can be derived from cannabis that will get you just as high, if not higher, than smoking a joint. They’re widely available owing to a loophole in legislation created in 2018, when the Agriculture Improvement Act removed hemp from the list of Schedule 1 controlled substances, effectively legalising its production, after extensive lobbying from cannabis and hemp firms. Hemp is defined as cannabis plants and derivatives containing less than 0.3 per cent THC — tetrahydrocannabinol — the psychoactive component in the plant.

In the UK, CBD gummies are now widely available from shops including Boots and Holland & Barrett, but legally they must contain less than 0.2 per cent THC.

Within the weed market, gummies — sweets infused with cannabis concentrate — are one of the fastest growing sectors, making up roughly 15 per cent of sales. Tens of millions are sold every year. Their strength and effect varies enormously: some contain high levels of THC, others just CBD — cannabidiol oil — a non-psychotropic extract of the cannabis plant that doesn’t give a high but users say helps ease anxiety, pain, depression and insomnia. Gummy products are packaged in ever more accessible and non-threatening exteriors: organic, berry- flavoured, inscribed with their intended effects — soothing, inspiring, invigorating.

Today’s new cannabis consumers are not ageing hippies or teenagers trying their first joint. They’re more likely to live in a suburb of Florida or New Jersey than the inner city. They’re older people, who take gummies or smoke a vape for aches and pains. And they are women in their thirties and forties who, after the kids have gone to bed, take a bite of a cannabis-laced sweet and bliss out on the sofa.

As a teen, Allen never smoked weed. Like most students at her high school in Alabama, she was raised religious and conservative during the Just Say No era, when cannabis was considered a gateway drug to ruin. “I was such a rule follower,” she says. “We thought it was definitely bad.”

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She was in her late thirties when she tried weed for the first time, smoking a joint on holiday with her husband and family in Colorado. Later they bought a bar of chocolate containing THC. She didn’t enjoy it — the drug made her paranoid.

After that, she says, she was “kind of scared”. But then, about a year ago, she found a brand of weed gummies she liked and started ordering them online, where they could be legally shipped to Alabama since they contained less than 0.3 per cent THC.

Her children, who are 16 and 14, know about the gummies. At first they were not impressed. When they’d been on a family holiday to New York, where weed is legal, they’d thought the smell on the street was disgusting. But she and her husband explained that the way they consumed it was different, and lawful, and they understood.

To Allen, a bite of a gummy leaves her high but in control — relaxed and introspective. And while once she would have been an outlier, she now sees gummy use among other mums at the school gate and even in her extended, conservative family.

“It’s a different form of relaxation,” she says. “I feel like alcohol makes you a little silly and more outgoing, whereas the gummy just makes you slow down, I guess.”

Some evenings she’ll have her friends over and instead of drinking a glass of wine, they’ll have a half or quarter of a gummy and sit on the veranda and chat. Afterwards, she sleeps very deeply.

Becca McGee, Allen’s friend and her hairdresser, takes a gummy almost every evening. Unlike Allen, she doesn’t drink at all. Instead she’s “California sober” — she only takes cannabis. It helps her relax and feel present around her children, who are 16, 7 and 4. The eldest knows she takes cannabis, the youngest two don’t. At home, she keeps her gummies in a specially purchased safe bag that she hides at the top of her wardrobe — far more secure than her parents ever left the spirits cabinet, she says.

When McGee has friends over, she sometimes makes them a “cocktail” of a drink infused with THC. As her children grow older she wants them to see weed as just something else that adults do to relax. “I would rather it would be very normal, just like they could see someone drink a glass of wine,” McGee, 36, who runs a podcast called Gag Order, says at her salon in Birmingham.

As the number of consumers expands, cannabis companies are working overtime to refine their products to a mass market, open up new demographics to cannabis and sell, sell, sell.

Deep in an industrial state in Ridgefield, New Jersey, a gummies brand called Wyld is succeeding, remarkably, at exactly that. The biggest gummy firm in the United States, Wyld’s USP is that its products are organic, highly regulated (it says each gummy passes extensive quality controls) and made with only about a dozen ingredients. The gummies are packed in an origami paper box and have flavours such as boysenberry and pomegranate. They have varying levels of THC (between 1 and 10mg) and CBD in each one, according to what you want: to sleep, to be “playful”, to focus or to be “balanced”. The boxes look a bit like something a pair of expensive earrings would come in.

“If you’re going to sleep, we have gummies for sleep. If you’re going out to a party, it’s something that kind of gives you a little more energy — we have a little bit of everything,” says Joshua Sisco, Wyld’s director of sales for New York and New Jersey, as he shows me around the factory. “And that’s where we see the industry going as a whole. It’s no longer just about getting high, it’s about what kind of experience you want to have while you are consuming.”

Every day before work Sisco blends two Wyld gummies into a vanilla protein shake. It doesn’t make him feel stoned, he says, but helps with the pain from the myriad injuries he accrued over years playing American football. His mother, a medical assistant who had never taken cannabis before, apparently began to sleep properly for the first time in years when she started taking gummies. “Now she’s sleeping a full six to eight hours every night — she’s a whole different person,” he says.

The production process works like this: first, a distillate of cannabis flower that is roughly the colour and texture of honey is mixed with water, tapioca, fruit concentrate and sugar before being heated. Pectin is added, and it sets. The gummies are then cut into shape and rolled in more sugar inside a machine that looks like a cement mixer.

“You can make 4,000 of them in 15 minutes,” says Crystal De Leon, 29, the plant manager. In front of her, half a dozen employees dressed in white coats with hairnets are counting gummies into plastic containers, ready to be shipped across New Jersey and sold for about $22 (£16) apiece.

Selling gummies today is, according to Aaron Morris, co-founder of the company, an “operational nightmare”. The regulations that govern the sale of cannabis are ever changing, shifting by the month or week according to the caprices of state law — for example, packaging rules change all the time and the type of warning label required on gummies varies from state to state. Because it is federally illegal, it is a crime to bring cannabis over state lines, even between two states where you can buy it for recreational use. That means a company such as Wyld, which sells across the country, needs a production facility in each of the 16 states where it operates.

“We commit federal felonies by the day, by the hundreds if not the thousands,” Morris says, laughing. He adds: “But there’s no real ability for the federal government to shut it down. So the cat’s out of the bag.”

In the United States federal law generally takes precedence over state law, but the government doesn’t crack down on cannabis sales, mostly due to practical considerations, and the fact that it would be difficult, expensive and politically unpopular to enforce.

Morris believes it is just a matter of time before weed is legalised at a federal level. He says it will soon be grown like any other agricultural product, as prevalent and as cheap as tomatoes. “The only bipartisan subject in this entire country is it turns out everyone likes cannabis.”

Yet it’s not fun for everyone. Layla, a mother of one in Brooklyn, tells me how her weed consumption morphed from something relaxing to a habit that was getting in the way of her life. She had taken gummies and THC tinctures on and off throughout her late twenties and early thirties, often microdosing during the day. When she got pregnant, she dropped the habit and didn’t miss it. But once she stopped breastfeeding she began again, this time microdosing gummies. It didn’t take long before she started to notice the effects.

Now she had a child to take care of and a business to run, it became clearer that the gummies were taking a toll. The more she did them, the more her tolerance rose. She took more, she was hungry all the time and slow, difficult to talk to. She gained weight.

“I felt I wasn’t parenting the way I wanted to,” she says. “And honestly it just wasn’t fun. My husband got annoyed when he couldn’t have actual conversations with me. I wasn’t laughing with it, I was just existing and overeating. It was a weird situation.”

A few months ago she stopped and today says she feels more present and alert. The weight she gained has fallen off.

The question of how dangerous modern cannabis products actually are when consumed in small doses, by adults, is one being worked out in real time, by a process that essentially amounts to a vast uncontrolled trial of millions of people across the United States.

For many, the biggest concern is the link between schizophrenia and cannabis consumption. Yet scientists are deeply divided. Dr Johannes Thrul, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who studies substance use disorders, argues that there is no concrete evidence that using cannabis can cause schizophrenia in someone who had not been predisposed to it.

“This question of, is it truly causing it in the absence of any other risk factors like genetic risk, I think to me the data has not shown that,” he says.

Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol, and ingesting the drug through eating a gummy is less dangerous than burning and smoking it, he argues. Yet he also acknowledges that cannabis is addictive, and that early use tends to lead to a higher risk of developing cannabis use disorder.

“I would never recommend somebody in their teenage years use cannabis, and especially not heavily,” he says. “We know it is not as addictive as tobacco and alcohol, but that doesn’t mean it’s not addictive. It is.”

At the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Dr Yasmin Hurd has spent years researching the impact of cannabis — whether smoked or eaten in gummies — on the developing brain. And she is sounding the alarm.

Hurd says that compared with the weed flower that so many people were imprisoned for selling or possessing before legalisation, many of the current legal products on the market are far stronger. “The cannabis products out there are so potent and so dangerous compared with products sold in the past,” she says. “It’s just shocking.”

Since legalisation, cannabis use has increased dramatically in the US — in 1990 less than a third of adults admitted to having tried marijuana; now it’s closer to half. And despite the popular belief that it isn’t addictive, Hurd says, it absolutely is. Patients with cannabis use disorder regularly check themselves into rehab across the country.

“THC is not a benign chemical. “We’re pounding our receptors with those high concentrations of THC, and the higher the concentration the more toxic they are for cells.”

Hurd is particularly concerned about the impact of potent tetrahydrocannabinols such as delta-9, which is sold widely even in states where buying weed is illegal, and is also used in gummies.

“When people think about cannabis, they think about this plant and… the hippies and free-loving people — something like that,” Hurd says. “It’s not the case today. It’s a huge industry and that industry has created a cornucopia of products in which you can consume cannabis and cannabinoids. This is not cannabis any more.

“It’s not that cannabis is a bad thing. It’s how it’s been mutated and morphed and sold to the public as being no different from alcohol, and it’s not true. It’s really a disservice to the public.”

Despite these concerns, many involved in the cannabis industry tend to argue that America-wide legalisation is coming soon. Michael Dundas does not agree. A lawyer who has worked in the cannabis business for a decade, he has watched as a “steamroller” of legalisation — recreational and medical — moved across the country.

He points out there has been pushback from more conservative lawmakers from both parties, as well as from law enforcement agencies. “My prediction is that we’re going to see zero movement on cannabis during the Trump administration.”

Back in Alabama, Allen is sitting in her back garden playing with Eames, the labradoodle. For her, taking cannabis has helped her relax at times of high stress, and to sit and be introspective. Many of her friends take gummies too.

“I was even at lunch recently with someone I felt was a very conservative mom, and then she and her husband started opening up about doing gummies — and they have teenagers too,” Allen says. “More women do it than you realise. It’s just like anything — talking about it removes the shame. Then other people will be, like, ‘Oh, I do them too.’ It’s not a big deal.”