Gov. Greg Abbott signed a new law Monday that clears up which CBD products are legal in Texas and will also allow local farmers to grow hemp as a crop.

The law, which received bipartisan support in the state Legislature, goes into effect immediately. 

It will allow Texas to set up a federally approved program for farmers to grow hemp as an industrial crop, including procedures for sampling, inspection and testing. It also expands the kind of hemp products that can be legally purchased in Texas to include any hemp or hemp-derived products containing less than 0.3 percent of THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive compound found in cannabis plants.

This includes cannabidiol, or CBD, products. While Texans have found oils, tinctures and other CBD goods on store shelves for years, those that contained even trace amounts of THC were technically illegal here. Now, as long as these products are derived from hemp, contain less than 0.3 percent THC and meet other labeling and quality standards, they are legal.

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Yesterday, Oakland became the second U.S. city to decriminalize psilocybin despite federal prohibition. Passage of the resolution takes a first step toward nullifying federal prohibition in practice and effect. The Oakland city council voted unanimously to decriminalize the adult use and possession of “magic mushrooms” containing psilocybin along with other entheogenic, or psychoactive, plants and fungi.

Over Memorial Day weekend, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) made an important update to its website. Hemp-derived CBD products may now be carried on airplanes, but only under certain circumstances. The important update has been needed after the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp and its derivatives federally. The lag in update has likely confused users of both medical marijuana and CBD oil.

Because government is the antithesis to freedom, industrial hemp has been banned nationwide since 1937 ostensibly due to the plant’s similarities to marijuana. Many have speculated that this move was also due to the fact that cannabis is in direct competition with the pharmaceutical industry by providing far safer alternative treatments as well as directly competing with the petrochemical industry. However, all this changed in December after President Donald Trump signed the Agriculture Improvement act of 2018, legalizing industrial hemp on a national scale. But thanks to a police state, dependent on locking people in cages for a plant, three truckers in Idaho are facing down horrific prison sentences for carrying it.

For one great-grandmother, her trip to the most magical place on earth turned into a nightmare.

Federal legalization of hemp arrived in the U.S. late last year and expanded an industry already booming because of the skyrocketing popularity of CBDs, a compound in hemp that many see as a health aid.

The president of a Colorado hemp company says more than 17,000 pounds of his legal product has been confiscated by police in Oklahoma. Four contractors, transporting the plants from Kentucky to Colorado, remain under arrest. On Wednesday, it appeared police in Pawhuska, Oklahoma may have scored one of the biggest drug busts of all time. But, Jamie Baumgartner, president of Panacea Life Sciences in the northern suburbs says it’s his hemp.

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