The Lone Star State has long prided itself on going its own way.
Unfortunately, Texas’s newest decision is a major step back for many in the business and the cannabis community.
Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed into law H.B. 1325, which went into effect Tuesday and would prohibit all further retail transactions of smokeable hemp products. Still, the use of smokeable hemp was not outlawed by the new law.
This new rule may come as a surprise to those who haven’t been following CBD and hemp regulation too closely, but it is part of a contiguous larger trend.
Since the federal government legalized industrial hemp and its derivatives in December 2018, states have been largely left out on a wing to order their own rules for the substances.
Legislatures and executives have found themselves in a scramble to solve problems of cannabis regulation, especially as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has sent mixed signals while largely remaining inactive on the main points of hemp and CBD guidance.
Those sectors — Hemp and CBD oil — are where the real money money in cannabis lies, and thousand of Americans have continued to report that CBD has changed their experiences for the better.
People love to use CBD and hemp for their chronic pain, anxiety, insomnia and other problems, but the police in multiple states have claimed they face an insurmountable dilemma when it comes to detecting the difference between hemp and marijuana, which remains illegal at the federal level.
It is this issue which has resulted in bans like the one Texas just enacted, but that doesn’t mean it has made doing business in the state easy.
Multiple entrepreneurs have expressed frustrations at Gov. Abbott’s choice not to veto H.B. 1325.
Cindy Sultenfuss, owner of Hemp and Herbs, told the Killeen Daily Herald that she is disappointed by the new bill, which she says interrupts the convenience of customers seeking alternatives to harmful tobacco.
“We’re going to continue to support our community as best we can within the restraints and confinements of the law,” Sultenfuss said.
"They lay out the guidelines for what's allowable in your product. What are the required testing protocols? [It’s] a lot of things that are just kind of like truth in labeling good consumer protections,” Jax Finkel of Texas NORML told KSAT.
NORML, or the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, has long been at the forefront of promoting marijuana and cannabis legal equality.
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