6 December 15-21, 2022 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents making the CBD extracted from industrial hemp legal in all 50 states. (Hemp is a source of fibers for cloth and other materials, and its seeds produce oil also used in cosmetics and other industries.) The ruling allowed hemp’s transport across state lines for commercial purposes while also acknowledging the right of states to create their own hemp-regulation schemes, something Texas lawmakers have been doing in fits and starts for years. In 2015, Texas enacted its Compassionate- Use Act, the state’s first legal use of low-THC products for patients with intractable epi- lepsy, and expanded the state’s cannabis pro- gram in 2019 and 2021 to include other medical conditions. Taylor returned to the Houston area and opened a retail store with his family. They now operate a 5,000-square- foot processing facility in Dayton where they take hemp from other growers and use a pro- prietary system to manufacture legal prod- ucts such as CBD tinctures, CBD topicals, CBD smokables and edibles, CBD pre-rolls and CBD-infused coffee and tea. All are made without employing solvents. In five-star reviews TayCo Farms show- cases on its website, customers praise the Taylor family’s CBD products. “By far the best CBD flower I’ve had from Dayton to San Antonio!” writes CBD user Larry Scherer. “Very friendly and knowledgeable staff. The chocolate kicked in faster than any edible I’ve ever had in 20 plus years, a must stop and try place.” Another reviewer writes she started going to TayCo Farms when her husband was in hospice, seeking an alternative to morphine and methadone. “The gummies are his go-to for liver pain as he waits for a transplant,” the reviewer says. “The tincture oils help tre- mendously with back pain, sciatica and neu- ropathy.” As TayCo Farms points out on its website, while CBD does not produce the ef- fects of THC, the World Health Organization reported in 2018 that it can leave users feeling balanced and relaxed. It can also cause them to fail a drug test if their employer has a no-tolerance drug pol- icy. This is because hemp contains a small percentage of THC, as Taylor warns on TayCo Farms’ website. After winning the High Times award, Tay- lor, who is now 23, sought to snag another one at the third annual Taste of Texas Hemp Cup awards on Dec. 10 in Austin. He was one of nearly two dozen Texas producers who submitted their CBD-infused smokable and oral hemp products for consideration in nine different categories. This year, the Taste of Texas Hemp Cup introduced the Texas hemp concentrates and flower competitions for the Best Texas Hemp Concentrate award. Six farmers who turn flowers into concentrates participated, in- cluding TayCo Farms. The Texas hemp farmers who won this year’s awards received a “trayphys,” which is basically an engraved wooden tray that can be hung on the wall or used as a rolling tray. But the number of such farmers is dwin- dling, says Liz Grow, a co-founder of Grow House Media and the Taste of Texas Hemp Cup. That’s because “Texas lawmakers can’t get it right, and they’re blocking our farmers at every turn for economic opportunities,” she says. (To be fair, the number of acres be- ing cultivated for hemp has been declining elsewhere since around 2019, Forbes reports. The pandemic is partly to blame, but farmers also were unable to sell some of their crop be- cause of oversupply. Businesses are reluctant to jump into a regulatory environment so dis- jointed that many banks still won’t do busi- ness with hemp-related companies.) While advocates hope Congress can im- prove the market with new rules in the up- coming 2023 farm bill, Texas farmers still face unsettled and contradictory regulations coming out of Austin. The latest block came from the Texas Supreme Court in June, when the court upheld a rule from the Texas De- partment of State Health Services banning the manufacture or processing of hemp prod- ucts intended to be smoked. While the regu- lations issued by the Texas Department of State Health Services helpfully defining “smoking” as “burning or igniting a sub- stance and inhaling the smoke or heating a substance and inhaling the resulting vapor or aerosol.” They don’t specifically define which products are forbidden, an agency spokesperson wrote in response to a question from the Observer. So, let’s play hemp farmer and take a stab at guessing what’s banned: Pre-rolled joints of low-THC hemp would obviously be out. Vape cartridges also appear to be banned. But what about loose buds of low-THC cannabis packaged as tea or a diet supplement? If users have to roll it up or stuff it in a pipe them- selves, can it still be made in Texas? It seems so. Liz Grow says that since the court’s ruling, makers have simply quit en- couraging people to smoke their products. Pre-rolled joints have become “CBD sticks” and the hemp flower “is the hemp flower. Do with it what you will.” If you were to decide to touch a lighter to a CBD stick or think hemp flowers look lovely set aflame in a bong, no worries. The court’s ruling didn’t apply to possessing smokable products or retailing buds for rolling. Texas companies simply can’t produce smokable hemp products — whatever they are — which explains why two of the four companies that sued the state to challenge the ban have packed up and moved their smokable hemp division from Dallas to Oklahoma. “Our farmers are able to grow craft hemp, but they can’t sell it in Texas and have to send it out of state,” Grow says. “They got the rug pulled out. This event is significant for that. People want cannabis and craft hemp in Texas.” *** T he contradictory nature of the ban on smokable hemp is another step in Texas’ odd one-foot-in and one- foot-out Hokey Pokey approach to canna- bis reform. As entrepreneurs rush to get their cannabis businesses off the ground, they speed ahead of regulators or look for loopholes in the regulations only to find themselves either in court or out of busi- ness. For example, there’s a continuing bat- tle over the question of whether manufacturers can legally lard their prod- ucts with delta-8 THC or other variations on the THC molecule that also get users high but are different in chemical structure from the more common — and specifically regulated — delta-9 isomer. Delta-8, which also produces a high in us- ers, occurs naturally in cannabis plants in tiny amounts but can be chemically derived from CBD found in hemp. Producers argue that the 0.3% limit on delta-9 doesn’t apply to delta-8, and many have rushed to push out products containing delta-8 (to the chagrin of even some marijuana advocates, who fear the downside risk of putting too much faith in the unregulated hands of chemists producing delta-8). State authorities argue that the pro- ducers are wrong, and a bill before the Legis- lature would clear things up by lumping all THC isomers together, limiting all THC con- tent to 0.3% and sinking Texas-based delta-8 makers. Consider also the state’s “compassionate use” program for medical cannabis, which arguably is neither especially compassionate nor useful. The state has a limited list of ail- ments OK’d for officially sanctioned CDB treatments, though that list seems to grow a bit with every session of the Legislature. Meanwhile, retailers sell a wide variety of CBD-laden products freely to all comers, in- cluding pet owners who think Fido might benefit from a healing dose of hemp. Even hemp growers who try to follow the rules can find themselves out of business and in trouble if local law enforcement decides to work them over. As the Observer reported in April, Sky & Hobbs Organics in Navarro County had a state license to produce low- THC cannabis, but that didn’t stop authori- ties there from raiding the business and charging one of the owners with felony pos- session. Though the charge was later dropped, the business is no more. Finally, some Texas cities, including Dal- las, are adopting policies that call for an end to arrests for minor marijuana possession. This November, Denton voters approved an ordinance intended to curtail arrests by city police for possession of small amounts of marijuana. The votes were barely tallied be- fore the town’s city manager declared that Denton couldn’t fully follow the ordinance voters approved because it contradicts state law. On Dec. 8, Hays County Criminal Dis- trict Attorney Wes Mau requested an opin- ion from Attorney General Ken Paxton on whether a similar ordinance approved by voters in San Marcos is made void by state law. All of this leaves the Texas cannabis indus- try struggling in a regulatory scheme that’s less a gray area than one that’s black-and- white plaid, where being on the right side of the law depends on place, the attitudes of lo- cal law enforcement and the latest set of reg- ulations handed down by state agencies or OK’d by the courts. Added to this mix are ea- ger entrepreneurs and advocates looking for an edge in business or attempting to push along the state’s slow dance with reform, of- ten, it seems, without regard to the fact that marijuana reform is a political process not amenable to being rushed. Do Texans really think that local voters should be able to tell state-licensed police of- ficers to not enforce some state laws passed by the Legislature? It’s a safe bet that a sizable number of legislators don’t, and background information included in Mau’s letter to Pax- ton cited precedents that don’t appear to sup- port San Marcos or Denton voters. Is it plausible that state regulators in- tended only to limit naturally occurring delta-9 THC, but were fine and dandy with flooding the state with delta-8, as if what law- makers objected to was a molecule’s struc- ture, not its effect? One curious result of all this is that hemp growers and CBD product makers often say they wish the state would regulate them more: not strictly, necessarily, but clearly, uni- formly and fairly. “It’s heart-breaking,” Grow says. “Texans are suffering, and lawmakers aren’t listening to us.” In the late 1700s, Founding Father George Washington cultivated large amounts of hemp on his plantation at Mount Vernon, Virginia. Washington was initially interested in developing hemp as a cash crop but, as the website MountVernon.org points out, he changed his mind and focused on the industrial side to use hemp “to meet the needs of his own plantation” for rope, thread for canvas and sacks and for repair- ing fishing nets. Today, Washington might have focused on the cash crop instead. In 2020, the smokable hemp market was worth up to $80 million and fivefold growth was predicted, according to a Sept. 2, 2020 Hemp Industry Daily re- port. A year earlier, total sales of all U.S. hemp-derived CBD consumer John Anderson Hemp is already legal in Texas. Sort of, maybe. Unfair Park from p4 >>p8
