4 December 15-21, 2022 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Hemp Hokey-pokey Texas’ awkward dance with cannabis reform catches hemp farmers producing “smokable” products on the wrong foot. by Christian MCPhate T ristan Taylor always thought he’d be a preacher. He liked to talk, so he’d been told growing up that he’d be either behind the pulpit or in front of the camera as a politician spewing promises he wouldn’t keep. Standing 6-foot-1 and weighing 360 pounds, Taylor dreamed of playing in the NFL as an offensive lineman. In 2016, a trau- matic injury on a high-school football field near Houston ended that dream. He recalls a neurologist telling him he wasn’t going to the NFL and probably should pick up a golf club. He overcame the resulting memory issues and a speech impediment with help from cannabis-based products, something Taylor had never messed with when he was on the field. “It helped me cope and sparked a jour- ney to help other people,” he says. Taylor’s journey led to him to cofound TayCo Farms with his family in the small town of Dayton, northeast of Houston. It is, he says, the first company on the cannabis market to offer 100% solvent-free, mass- produced hemp-based CBD products that contain no more than 0.3% THC, the chemical in marijuana that gets users high. (CBD, short for cannabidiol, is another chemical found in cannabis that doesn’t produce a high but can help alleviate a wide range of ailments including anxiety, epilepsy and pain, users say.) TayCo uses low heat and pressure to extract CBD from hemp plants instead of using solvents like carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, propane, butane or ethanol. The process led to him becoming one of the youngest Texas hemp farmers to win rec- ognition from High Times Magazine’s The Hemp Cup: People’s Choice 2022 for the Tay- lor family’s R.S.O. Capsules. TayCo Farms developed R.S.O Capsules, also known as “Rick Simpson Oil,” based on the CBD oil created by Rick Simpson, a Cana- dian cannabis advocate and engineer who sought a way to treat his health issues with marijuana. “There’s very little it can’t do,” Leafly, a cannabis news website, claimed in a June 9, 2022, report, “and a lot it can do for both patients and stoners.” Taylor and his sister were stoners, he says, and about three years ago they decided to get involved with the cannabis business with their mother. They saw the Texas hemp mar- ket as the legal foundation for a larger medi- cal marijuana market should the day ever come when lawmakers listen to the majority of Texans who believe the state should ex- pand its medical marijuana program. When he was 18, Taylor discovered the cannabis business in Colorado, which along with Washington was one of the first two states to decriminalize the use and posses- sion of recreational marijuana in 2012. After his NFL dream ended, Taylor thought of join- ing the military, but a friend persuaded him to go to Colorado, where Taylor found a job at a hemp company that specializes in CBD oils, CBD tinctures and CBD and delta-8 THC gummies. The federal government decriminalized hemp containing no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC as part of the 2018 Agriculture Im- provement Act, | unfair park | >>p6 John Anderson Liz Grow and Sarah Kerver are two of the organizers of the 3rd Annual Taste of Texas Hemp Cup held Dec. 10 in Austin.
