Earlier this week, the governor of Texas signed House Bill 1325, which fully legalized industrial hemp as an agricultural crop along with all products derived from it, which now makes CBD oil a fully-legal item in Texas.
Until literally last weekend, finding & buying CBD was this weird pseudo-black-market guessing game. Some head shops (the kind with glass water pipes for tobacco use only & high-dollar grow lights for your, uh, tomatoes) quietly had a small sign or neon light in the window among the Bob Marley stickers; a very few stores boldly emblazoned it on their website; most shop workers glared at me for even asking or practically slammed the phone down when I called around.
As one does when having trouble procuring an item, a couple weeks ago I fired up Amazon to look for CBD cartridges. Zip. Nada. Just the batteries and power chargers for vape pens … but not the substance itself. Not one bottle of tincture, no pain creams, nuthin’ at all.
On a hunch, the night this bill was signed I checked Amazon again, while signed into my account. DOZENS of varying hemp oil products now available. Vape this, oil that, gummies galore. Someone at Amazon does a good job tracking & updating relevant local legislation - there’s an enormous amount of data involved, to update individual user settings on the fly like that with same-day turnaround. I am impressed.
Naturally, the governor is positioning the bill as boosting rural areas by promoting agricultural profits. Something of a fig leaf, but not entirely without merit especially as cotton dwindles due at least partially to increased public awareness of how pesticide- and water-intensive cotton farming can be. Hemp isn’t either (that’s why they call it “weed” yanno) so I’m sure it’ll be easier to grow here in hot, bone-dry except while flooded, thin-soiled Texas.