Dispensaries in Johnston County, NC: Smithfield, Selma & Clayton (2026 Guide)

Johnston County added 40,247 residents between July 2020 and July 2025, an 18.5% jump that no other North Carolina county above 200,000 people came close to matching (NC Office of State Budget and Management, county population estimates).

Six hemp dispensaries serve all of them.

Johnston County Grew Faster Than Its Hemp Retail Did

Here is the finding that shaped this guide. We divided each county's population by the number of hemp dispensaries our directory tracks in it. Wake County has one shop for every 18,254 residents. Johnston County has one for every 42,933.

Johnston residents have roughly 2.4 times fewer hemp shops per person than Wake residents do. That is not because the county is small. At 257,598 people it is the ninth largest county in North Carolina and bigger than New Hanover, which contains Wilmington.

The gap comes from timing. Johnston's population grew 51.7% between 2010 and 2025, from 169,781 to 257,598, and most of that arrived in the last few years as Raleigh's growth pushed east along I-40 and US-70. Hemp retail in North Carolina only became a real storefront category after the 2018 Farm Bill, and the shops that opened first went where the customers already were. Wake County got 69 of the shops in our directory. Johnston got six, and one of them, TotalHerbalCare in Smithfield, only opened on August 14, 2026.

Our finding: Johnston County's 18.5% growth from July 2020 to July 2025 was the fastest of any North Carolina county with more than 200,000 residents, ahead of Iredell at 13.9%, Union at 13.1%, and Wake at 11.3%. Statewide it ranked third of all 100 counties, behind only Brunswick and Franklin, both smaller counties where a smaller absolute gain produces a bigger percentage.

Practically, this means the choice in Johnston County is usually between the one shop nearest you and a drive, not between several shops on the same road. Three of the six sit within two miles of each other in Smithfield, and Benson's single shop is the only one in the southern half of the county.

Smithfield: Three Shops, Three Different Trips

Smithfield is the county seat, home to 12,817 residents as of the state's July 2025 municipal estimate, and it holds three of the county's six hemp dispensaries. They are close together but they are not interchangeable.

Nature's Releaf at 925 N Brightleaf Blvd is the established flower shop. It holds a 4.9 Google rating on 73 reviews and carries THCa flower, Delta-8, and Delta-9 products. Brightleaf Boulevard is Smithfield's main commercial artery, which makes this the default stop for anyone already running errands in town rather than a destination drive.

TotalHerbalCare at 513 Outlet Center Dr is the newest and the latest. It opened in mid-August, on August 14, 2026, as the chain's fourth store and its first outside Wake County, and it runs 9am to 11pm seven days a week. That is 98 hours a week, fourteen more than anything else in the county. It sits in the retail strip beside the outlet mall, which puts it in front of I-95 traffic as well as locals. It carries THCa flower and pre-rolls, edibles, and vapes. As of October 29, 2026 it holds a 5.0 rating on 83 Google reviews, built up in its first ten weeks rather than over a long track record.

The Holistic Company of Smithfield at 161 Venture Dr is the wellness counter. It holds a 4.9 rating on 141 reviews, the second highest review count in the county, and its range runs wider on the cannabinoid side than its neighbors: CBD, CBG, Delta-8, and Delta-9 across tinctures, gummies, and full and broad spectrum options, plus topicals and pet products. Its hours are the shortest of the three, building through the week from 10am to 6pm on Monday through Wednesday to 10am to 9pm on Friday and Saturday, then a short 1pm to 5pm Sunday.

If you are choosing between them without knowing the shops, the practical split is this. Go to Nature's Releaf for flower, TotalHerbalCare if it is late or early or you want the newest inventory, and The Holistic Company if you are shopping CBD or topicals rather than high-potency THCa.

Nature's Releaf: 925 N Brightleaf Blvd, Bldg A, Smithfield, NC 27577 | Monday to Saturday 10am to 8pm, Sunday noon to 6pm | (984) 201-3070

TotalHerbalCare: 513 Outlet Center Dr, Smithfield, NC 27577 | 9am to 11pm daily | (919) 205-1494

The Holistic Company: 161 Venture Dr, Smithfield, NC 27577 | Monday to Wednesday 10am to 6pm, Thursday 10am to 8pm, Friday and Saturday 10am to 9pm, Sunday 1pm to 5pm | (919) 938-8582

Browse all three on the Smithfield dispensary page

Selma: One Shop at the Crossroads

Selma has 7,043 residents (July 2025 state estimate) and one hemp dispensary, and its location does more work than its size suggests. The town sits at the junction of I-95 and US-70, where the eastern seaboard's main north-south route meets the road that carries Raleigh traffic toward the coast.

Hempie's at 111 S Raiford St holds a 4.8 rating on 166 Google reviews, the most reviewed hemp shop in Johnston County. It carries THCa flower, edibles, Delta-8, and Delta-9, and it is open 10am to 10pm seven days a week, an 84-hour schedule with no short Sunday. It is also the only shop in the county tagged for delivery in our directory, which matters in a county this spread out.

Hours are the clearest way to tell these six shops apart, because product ranges overlap far more than schedules do.

The gap matters more here than in Raleigh. If your nearest shop closes at 6pm on a Tuesday and the next one is 20 minutes away, the schedule decides the trip. Between them, TotalHerbalCare and Hempie's cover every hour from 9am to 11pm somewhere in the county, seven days a week.

Hempie's: 111 S Raiford St, Ste A, Selma, NC 27576 | 10am to 10pm daily | (984) 205-7511

View the Selma dispensary page

Clayton: Downtown Retail With Wake County Pull

Clayton is Johnston County's largest municipality at 32,549 residents as of the July 2025 state estimate, about two and a half times Smithfield's population. It has one hemp dispensary.

Hemp House at 308 W Main St sits in Clayton's historic downtown rather than a highway strip, which changes the visit. It carries THCa flower, vapes, and glass and accessories, holds a 4.5 rating on 39 reviews, and is open 10am to 9pm most days with an extra hour on Friday and Saturday. It is a walk-in on a block where people park once and run several errands, not a destination with its own lot.

That setting is worth understanding before a first visit. Most other shops in this guide are drive-to storefronts with their own parking, built around a trip that starts and ends at home; Forgetful Wizard in downtown Benson is the other exception. Hemp House is the kind of place people wander into after lunch. If you have never been inside a hemp shop and the idea of a highway strip unit puts you off, a downtown storefront on a block with a bakery and a barber is a gentler introduction, and the staff are used to first-timers asking basic questions.

Clayton's one-shop count is the sharpest illustration of the county's timing problem. The town has grown faster than anywhere else in Johnston County, and it sits close enough to Wake County that its retail gravity pulls the other way. Garner is roughly 20 minutes west on US-70, and southeast Raleigh not much further, which means a Clayton resident who wants a second opinion on a product or a wider selection is more likely to drive toward Wake than deeper into their own county. Our Garner, Fuquay-Varina and Clayton guide covers that western option in detail, including the two Garner shops.

Hemp House also does not maintain a website beyond an Instagram account, so its hours are best treated as a strong expectation rather than a published guarantee. It does list a phone number, (919) 359-9720, which makes a call ahead worth thirty seconds before a special trip.

Hemp House: 308 W Main St, Clayton, NC 27520 | Monday to Thursday and Sunday 10am to 9pm, Friday and Saturday 10am to 10pm | (919) 359-9720

View the Clayton dispensary page

Benson: Glass and THCa Where I-95 Meets I-40

Benson sits in the southern tip of the county, where I-95 and I-40 meet, with about 4,700 residents as of the Census Bureau's July 2025 estimate. It has one hemp dispensary, and it is the only shop in the southern half of Johnston County.

Forgetful Wizard Glass & Dispensary at 108 E Main St is a downtown storefront that pairs THCa with glass, much like the Sherlocks shops in Raleigh, Durham, and Wake Forest. Its Google profile describes a wide selection of THCa alongside unique glass and the newest smoking equipment, and reviewers also mention edibles, vapes, and concentrates such as badder, plus an owner who knows how each strain was grown. It holds a 5.0 rating on 32 Google reviews. It keeps the shortest schedule in the county, noon to 7pm Monday through Thursday and noon to 8pm Friday and Saturday, and it is closed Sunday. Its website was returning an error when we checked, so call ahead.

Forgetful Wizard: 108 E Main St, Benson, NC 27504 | Monday to Thursday noon to 7pm, Friday and Saturday noon to 8pm, closed Sunday | (919) 701-1275

View the Benson dispensary page

All Six Shops Side by Side

Ratings are the least useful way to choose between these six, because five of them sit between 4.8 and 5.0 and the differences are inside the noise. Review counts tell you more, since they track how long a shop has been serving the same customers rather than how a handful of people felt on one afternoon. Hempie's 166 reviews and The Holistic Company's 141 represent years of repeat traffic. Hemp House's 39 and Forgetful Wizard's 32 reflect small downtown shops with modest volume, and TotalHerbalCare's 83 have built up since it opened in mid-August.

What actually separates them is hours, product focus, and where they sit relative to your day. The table below ranks them by hours open per week, which in a county this spread out is the variable most likely to decide whether a trip happens at all.

Ratings and review counts reflect Google Business Profile data re-verified against live Google Maps on October 29, 2026. TotalHerbalCare's 5.0 comes from 83 reviews collected since it opened on August 14.

Driving In From Raleigh

Johnston County's shops are closer to Raleigh than most people assume. Hemp House in Clayton sits 13.2 straight-line miles from the State Capitol, which is the same distance as the nearest hemp shop in Wake Forest and the nearest one in Durham. The Smithfield cluster is a straightforward run down I-40.

Two corridors do all the work. US-70 runs southeast out of Raleigh through Garner and into Clayton, then continues to Smithfield and Selma as a business route. I-40 runs parallel and faster, dropping you at the Smithfield outlet exits in a little over half an hour from downtown Raleigh outside rush hour. From the north or south, I-95 puts Selma and Smithfield within a few minutes of the interstate, which is why two of the county's six shops sit close to those exits, and Benson's sits right where I-95 crosses I-40.

The one thing worth planning around is direction of travel. Clayton is the natural stop on a trip that is already heading east on US-70. Smithfield is the natural stop on a trip down I-40 or up I-95. Trying to combine both in one loop means backtracking, because the two clusters are on different roads and about 12 straight-line miles apart.

Distances are straight-line miles calculated from each shop's coordinates in our directory to the North Carolina State Capitol, so road mileage runs longer. They are here to rank the trips against each other, not to plan one.

The honest read for a Raleigh resident is that none of these is worth a special drive for selection alone. Raleigh has 41 hemp shops, and our Raleigh dispensary guide breaks them down by neighborhood and category. Johnston County's shops are worth knowing if you live there, work there, commute through on I-95, or happen to be at the outlets.

What Johnston County Shops Do Not Carry

Six shops cannot hold what 69 can, and the gap is not evenly spread across product types. Some categories survive a thin market fine, because every shop stocks them and the volume supports the shelf space. Others are the first thing a small independent drops, because they move slowly, need specialized storage or display, or carry a higher cost per unit than a rural counter can justify.

To see which is which, we compared the product categories recorded for Johnston County's six shops against Wake County's 69. Reading it as a percentage rather than a count matters here, since six shops and 69 shops cannot be compared any other way.

On the basics, Johnston County is fine. Every one of its six shops carries THCa flower, and its shops are likelier than the Wake average to stock Delta-8 and glass. The county's problem is the tail. Only one of the six, Forgetful Wizard in Benson, is known to carry concentrates, a category about a third of Wake shops stock, and none carries mushroom products.

If you want live rosin, shatter, or a specific brand of cartridge, plan the drive or the order. Hempie's in Selma delivers, and several Triangle operators deliver into Johnston County from outside it, which is usually more practical than a 50-mile round trip for a restock. Our Triangle hemp delivery guide covers how coverage zones, minimums, and age verification generally work.

If this is your first visit to a hemp shop anywhere, read what to expect on a first trip and what to look for in an NC dispensary before you go. You can also browse the full Triangle directory across 21 towns.

What NC Law Says, and What the Federal Deadline Changes

Every shop in this guide sells hemp-derived products that are legal in North Carolina today. Session Law 2022-32, which came from Senate Bill 455, defines hemp as cannabis "with a delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol concentration of not more than three-tenths of one percent (0.3%) on a dry weight basis" (NC General Assembly). Because that test measures only delta-9, THCa flower passes it. No card, prescription, or diagnosis is involved. North Carolina sets no minimum age for hemp products today; these shops card at 21 as store policy, so bring valid ID.

That framework has a scheduled end date, and the date is currently in motion.

Section 781 of Public Law 119-37 rewrites the federal definition of hemp "effective 365 days after the enactment of this Act," which would have been November 12, 2026 (govinfo.gov). The new definition counts total tetrahydrocannabinols including tetrahydrocannabinolic acid against the 0.3% limit, and caps final consumer products at 0.4 milligrams combined total per container.

That date has since moved for most products. Congress passed H.R. 6500 and the President signed it on September 2, 2026, making it Public Law 119-103 (govinfo bill status). Its Section 2019 holds back most of the redefinition until December 11, 2026, while a narrow slice covering cannabinoids the plant cannot naturally make still starts November 12, 2026. Our 2026 NC hemp bill tracker follows both calendars, and the P.L. 119-37 consumer guide covers what changes at the register.

At the state level, House Bill 328 would move North Carolina to a similar total-THC standard and make 21 the legal purchase age. The Senate has adopted its conference report; the House has not voted (NC General Assembly). Nothing on a Smithfield, Selma, or Clayton shelf has changed because of it.

North Carolina status, October 29, 2026: HB 328, the state hemp crackdown, passed the Senate in July but still awaits a House vote, which can now come only in the reconvened sessions of November 16 to 19 or November 30 to December 18. Today North Carolina sets no minimum age for hemp products, though many shops card at 21. Details in our NC hemp bill tracker.

For a county with six shops, that deadline lands harder than it does in Raleigh. Every Johnston County shop carries THCa flower, and for the flower-first shops it is the anchor category. A market this thin has less room to absorb a product line disappearing.

None of that changes what is on the shelf this week, and it is worth being clear about the difference. A purchase made today is lawful when you make it, and a shop operating lawfully today stays lawful until the effective date. But the federal law has no grandfather clause: after December 11, 2026, a product that no longer meets the hemp definition is treated as marijuana under federal law no matter when it was bought, and the Congressional Research Service notes it is unclear how actively that will be enforced (CRS IN12620). It also changes what shops are allowed to restock after the effective date.

The practical advice for a Johnston County shopper is the same advice we would give anywhere in the Triangle. Buy what you actually use rather than stockpiling on a rumor, keep the lab report or the batch number for anything you buy, and check the tracker before assuming a date has moved. Congress has now voted once to shift part of this timeline and may vote again, and a shop's own guess about what happens in December is not a legal source.

The Bottom Line

Johnston County has real hemp retail, just less than half as much of it per resident as Wake County. Pick by trip, not by town.

• Latest hours and newest shelves: TotalHerbalCare in Smithfield
• Most reviewed, and the only one that delivers: Hempie's in Selma
• THCa flower in Smithfield proper: Nature's Releaf
• CBD, tinctures, and topicals: The Holistic Company
• Downtown Clayton walk-in: Hemp House
• THCa and glass in the southern county: Forgetful Wizard in Benson

December 11, 2026 is the federal date that would end the current generation of intoxicating hemp products, after a signed delay pushed most of the redefinition back from November 12. Until it takes effect, the shelves in Smithfield, Selma, Clayton, and Benson look the way they look today. Browse the Smithfield, Selma, Clayton, and Benson dispensary pages for current listings, and read our NC buying guide before a first trip.