Inside the Channel Island where a 10-year-old can legally buy THC edibles

Sark sits in the English Channel, seven miles east of Guernsey and about fourteen from Jersey. France is close enough to see on a clear day. There are no cars on the public roads. People move by bicycle, horse and cart, or tractor. The 2022 census put the resident population at 562.

On the high street you can buy cannabis cookies, fudge and chocolate. The products are made on the island and sold across Guernsey and Jersey. They are, under local law, legal. Flower and resin are not. That distinction is the whole story.

Not the UK, and not Amsterdam

Sark is a Crown Dependency in the Bailiwick of Guernsey. It has its own parliament, Chief Pleas, and its own relationship with the Crown. It is not part of the United Kingdom, and it is not in the EU. Guernsey and Jersey write their own drugs laws. Those statutes are cousins of the UK Misuse of Drugs Act, but they are not the same text, and they have not been rewritten for modern cannabis products.

That matters. In England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, THC in a brownie is still a controlled drug. On the Channel Islands, over-the-counter CBD foods are treated differently. Jersey’s Misuse of Drugs (General Provisions) Order 2009 allows CBD products that contain a small proportion of cannabinol and cannabinol derivatives, provided there is no visible plant material. Guernsey’s framework is built on the Misuse of Drugs (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law 1974. The plant, the resin and unlicensed THC remain controlled. A food that looks like a biscuit, and is argued to sit under a percentage rule, is the grey area.

Some of those biscuits are not mild. Products sold on Sark have been reported at almost 35mg of THC — a dose in the same range as a strong recreational edible in a regulated North American market, not a typical UK high-street CBD gummy.

The bakery, Island Alchemy, says it is working within the law. Batches bound for Guernsey and Jersey go through the state laboratory before sale. That is quality control of a sort. It is not the same as a licensed recreational market with age gates, milligram caps and child-resistant packaging written into statute.

Gary Tucker, the American businessman behind the expanding Channel Islands trade, has compared the local rules with the United States. “Every US state that has legalised it has their own set of regulations, and that covers packaging, testing, everything,” he told ITV News. “Whereas here, we’re just kind of like… it’s basically no different than a bar of soap.”

How a kitchen became a supply chain

Jade started three years ago in her own kitchen. She was a stay-at-home mother looking for extra cash. Her daughter introduced her to people who had oil; she put it in fudge to see how it went. It sold. The range grew. She now talks about running at full capacity, with a second oven on the way, and shipping across the Channel Islands.

Cookies are the bestseller. They are, she says, the strongest product in the islands at the moment. “We have a wide range of customers. I’m surprised every day,” she told ITV News. “I think it’s only going to get more accessible to everybody, and less of a taboo subject.”

Tucker puts Channel Islands edible sales at roughly £2 million a year — a trade figure, not a government statistic. On an island of a few hundred people, that is not a cottage hobby. Sark’s smallness is part of the pitch: it is easy to start something, watch it closely, and send it to the larger islands. The money, the operators argue, stays in the islands rather than leaking to an illicit market.

None of that makes Sark a cannabis holiday destination in the Dutch sense. There are no coffee shops. You still cannot legally take the products into the UK. Visitors ask. The answer is no. Possession of THC products on the mainland remains an offence.

The age gap is not new

Because the relevant Channel Island drugs laws date from the 1970s and have been patched rather than rebuilt, there is no statutory minimum age for these products. Asked whether a ten-year-old could walk into a Jersey shop and buy them legally, Tucker told ITV News: “Correct, legally.” Shops say they would refuse a child. The statute does not require them to. “They can come in here, buy any of the THC products and walk out and eat it on the street,” he said.

That gap is older than the cookies. In August 2024, BBC Guernsey reported that CBD products can be sold to under-18s in Guernsey and Jersey unless a shop sets its own rule. Bailiwick Botanicals in Guernsey said under-18s were already trying to buy, and asked Health and Social Care to close the loophole. The States’ chief pharmacist said guidance was being updated through the Misuse of Drugs Advisory Group.

Two years on, the statutory gap is still there — now attached to products far stronger than a mild CBD oil. Self-regulation is not the same as a law. Alcohol, tobacco and nicotine already have age limits. These edibles do not.

Percentage rules, milligram doses

The medical concern is not only who can buy. It is how much they can buy in one cookie.

Dr Kirsty Ross, who prescribes medicinal cannabis, has set out the basic split: CBD does not get you high; THC crosses the blood–brain barrier and does. “That’s the controlled drug bit. That’s the bit that we need to be careful with,” she told ITV News. Her worry is “unbridled access to infinite THC products.”

A rule written as a share of the whole food can still deliver a large absolute dose. Make the bake bigger, keep the percentage, and the milligrams of THC rise. At the top of that range, Ross has warned, you are looking at amounts that sit in prescribing territory, sold as a snack.

That is why “legal THC on Sark” is a slippery headline. Herbal cannabis is still prosecuted. In 2025 a Sark worker received a suspended prison sentence in Guernsey for importing cannabis flower through the post. Guernsey’s own guidance is blunt: cannabis and cannabis resin are Class B; THC in its pure form is Class A; unlicensed possession, cultivation, supply and import remain criminal. The edible trade is not a repeal of those offences. It is a product category that slipped through a statute written before cookies were a delivery system.

A community that did not ask to be a test case

Sark’s reputation is tradition, dark skies and an unhurried high street. Some islanders first feared an Amsterdam-style change. Jade is still there. “I’m still here and operating, so I haven’t been marched out yet,” she told ITV News.

Residents in Jersey and Guernsey have been less relaxed about the age point. “Shocking,” one parent said, when asked about children buying THC on the high street. “I do not want my daughter going into the shop at ten years old and buying a THC product legally.” Others want GP prescriptions before any sale, or a simple rule: available, but well regulated.

The operators say they want clearer law, not a return to pretending the demand is not there. “The war on drugs has essentially failed and drugs have won,” Tucker told ITV News. “What we have to do is regulate and control.”

The Government of Jersey has said work is underway to review and, where necessary, strengthen its legal framework. Jersey has, separately, been inching toward a wider debate on personal cannabis use. That debate and this loophole are related, but they are not the same file. One is about whether adults should be criminalised for flower. The other is about whether a 35mg cookie should sit on a shelf with no age limit because the 1974 and 1978 texts never imagined it.

What this is not

It is not UK legalisation. It is not a safe way to bring edibles home on the ferry. It is not proof that Sark has “legalised weed.” Flower still gets people into court. Children are not, in practice, the core customer — shops say they turn them away — but the statute does not require them to.

What it is: a small jurisdiction running a live experiment in cannabis food, on 1970s hardware, next door to a UK market that still treats THC as a criminal problem. If Jersey and Guernsey write age limits, milligram caps, packaging rules and honest labelling into law, Sark’s kitchen becomes a regulated island business. If they do not, the Channel Islands keep a high-street product that looks recreational, tests like a medicine, and can legally be sold to anyone tall enough to reach the counter.

For a place that has always done things a little differently, that is a lot of weight for 562 people to carry.