Despite strict laws, Texas is awash in intoxicating cannabis [View all]

If you want to get high in Texas, your options are almost limitless. This law-and-order state of guns, God and capital punishment is awash in cannabis.

Today, Texas has more than 7,000 cannabis dispensaries, almost twice as many as California. Add to that: 24-hour cannabis delivery, mobile pot trucks, cannabis vending machines, and mail-order cannabis.

"Texas has become known as the biggest open recreational market in the country. 'Open' meaning no regulations," says Nico Richardson, CEO of Texas Originals, which sells only medical marijuana.

It's confusing because recreational marijuana is still illegal in Texas. The socially conservative legislature—which also shuns casino gambling—has voted it down year after year. And yet, with its exploding market for largely unregulated consumable hemp, Texas has inadvertently become the new Republic of THC.

It started in 2018 when Congress passed a farm bill that legalized hemp by declaring it was not marijuana. Marijuana is high in tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the psychoactive component that gets you high if you smoke or eat it. Hemp is low in THC. The next year, Texas and other agriculture states passed their own laws that allowed farmers to grow hemp for paper, clothing and bedding.

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/10/nx-s1-5220336/despite-strict-laws-texas-is-awash-in-intoxicating-cannabis

If I lived in Texas, I'd be high too. It's the only way I could tolerate the place!