The Austin Chronic – New to the Texas Medical Market: RSO Products and Delicious Chocolate
Texas Original expands with full-spectrum edibles
By Kevin Curtin, Fri., March 1, 2024
Valentine’s Day proved a fitting occasion for multiple medical dispensaries in Austin to roll out new menu items that pair cannabis and chocolate – to which I say: Lower your bow, Cupid; I need no convincing to eat chocolate that gets me high.
In the modern world of edibles, it’s easy to sleep on cocoa confections. After all, for most of us over the age of 30, our first THC-eating experience was likely the ubiquitous “pot brownie” – an earthy-tasting chocolate baked good with inexact dosage (in lieu of milligrams, we simply described them as “strong” or “weak”). Since then, gummies and candies, which are fast-acting and low-calorie, have come to dominate roughly 3/4 of the U.S.’ nearly $10 billion annual edible market, which also includes a growing beverage component. But chewing up a gummy or sipping a THC seltzer doesn’t really feel like you’re treating yourself in the same mouthwatering way that biting into a chunk of decadent chocolate does.
As a patient in Texas’ Compassionate Use program, I procured several new chocolate products this month. Among them, Texas Original’s first medical cannabis chocolate product: Belgian Dark Chocolate Bites. The jar, which costs $70, includes 20 hexagon-shaped chocolates that each contain 10mg of THC. The clerk at the dispensary noted that it takes about 45 minutes to feel the effect, so I ate two of them while at a friend’s birthday party in anticipation of an unanxious night’s sleep a few hours later.
I judge the taste and presentation of edibles by the standard of “would I be satisfied if this was some random non-cannabis snack that I impulsively bought at Trader Joe’s,” and the Belgian Dark Chocolate Bites passed. They are super solid texturally, as dark chocolate is firmer than milk chocolate, so there’s an initial crunch before it softens with a rich depth of flavor. I was starting to feel pretty uplifted as I sang karaoke at the party – a passionate version of Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” if you must know – and, by the time I returned home, I had a body-high so pronounced that I remember telling my cat, “I’m really noticing how my skin feels right now.”
But above all I was restful and relaxed and slept like a baby. Actually, I slept better than a baby, because our actual baby woke me up at 5:20am. This is when I noticed that, seven and a half hours after consumption, I still felt fantastic. I suppose that’s because edibles with significant fat content, while taking longer to hit you, also have more of a long-term effect.
The only thing I regret about the experience was pigging out on a bunch of assorted chocolates from a heart-shaped box left over from V-Day. I guess eating chocolate that gets you high doesn’t preclude you from wanting to eat chocolate while you’re high.
The most intriguing aspect of Texas Original’s chocolates is that they’re the first product in Texas’ medical market that uses RSO. Unlike a lot of three-letter acronyms in cannabis, RSO isn’t a dizzying combination of prefixes and suffixes only discernible to organic chemistry majors, like Resinonia-Smokeadosious-Oxidank or something. It plainly stands for “Rick Simpson Oil.”
If you’re unfamiliar: Rick Simpson is the rare person who discovered a potential medical breakthrough and did not try to monetize it. Instead, he freely taught others how to make it and gave the oils away until Canadian authorities eventually raided and seized his home.
An engineer by trade, Simpson sustained a head injury in 1997 while working at a hospital that left him with debilitating tinnitus and dizziness. When prescription medicine proved ineffective, he found better results using cannabis. Years later, when he developed skin cancer, Simpson crafted a concentrated cannabis oil that he applied to his lesions, and he claimed it cured his cancer. That led to him becoming both an activist and a Johnny Appleseed-like figure for an oil recipe that uses specific solvents and techniques to preserve the whole-plant profile of marijuana with all the cannabinoids, terpenes, flavonoids, chlorophyll, and compounds.
Most edibles, tinctures, and vape cartridges use distillate, the process for which removes basically everything except the intended cannabinoid in a high potency. Meanwhile, the complete-spectrum RSO is praised for a theoretical “entourage effect,” where the plant compounds are believed to work together to increase the health benefits of the THC.
Texas Original’s director of marketing, Francesca Neely-Dickey, says that one of the most common requests they’ve gotten from patients is natural, full-plant products.
“They want something strain-specific, they want something full-spectrum, and they want something as natural as possible,” she says, noting the RSO oil is made from the Blue Dream plants Texas Original grows in their Manchaca facility.
Along with the chocolate bites, Texas Original also recently began providing patients with an RSO tincture, which is an extract that users can administer under the tongue with a dropper. Neely-Dickey expects more RSO products to come as the dispensary continues to evolve its menu.
While its anticancer benefits are largely anecdotal and lacking clinical trial data, RSO remains a popular treatment for cancer – which is one of the qualifying conditions of Texas’ medical cannabis program. But Neely-Dickey points out that there are other patient needs that make RSO a good addition to their product line.
“Unlike distillate, which only has the purified cannabinoids in it, RSO gives you more of a balanced effect and it’s a little less intense,” she says. “For some of our patients who are sensitive to THC, the distillate can be too much for them. RSO is more of a product that mimics the effects of smoking flower, so it’s really beneficial for those patients.”
