Truth will rise above falsehood as oil above water, according to Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote and Spain’s greatest novelist.
When it comes to crude oil, the government seeks to know the truth about its extraction and containment, about the safety of each container and the shipment of its contents throughout the world, about its many mixtures and blends, about its relationship to the Earth and its chain reaction to the environment.
However, regarding CBD oil, falsehoods threaten to flood the truth and attract government intervention. There are too many unsubstantiated claims and too few claims of absolute clarity to maintain the status quo.
Raising concerns about this issue is not a false alarm, particularly when the Federal Trade Commission can disrupt the cannabis industry and the Food and Drug Administration could destroy it. Consumers can just as easily demand the government to mandate what only a minority of companies currently provide: transparency.
Growers who volunteer everything, except trade secrets, are those who may enjoy the greatest economic growth. Retailers who value accuracy may develop a positive reputation — and a rich valuation — because of what they value most: authenticity.
I do not want growth to slow or stop.
I want the cannabis industry to flourish without regulations that stymie how growers farm their fields or plant their crops and harvest their flowers.
I want what is practical, in lieu of ruthless practitioners who want to further police the cannabis industry; in lieu of oversight by the ever-watchful eye of a police state, where the pursuit of happiness is secondary to making government happy; in lieu of propaganda that vilifies our industry, while it depicts all government agents as paragons of virtue.
I want us to police our profession like the professionals we are — like the professionals we must be.
The alternative is too costly to entertain, because it comes at the expense of our collective reputation. It makes us look too senseless to behave sensibly, as if we are more like mad scientists than champions of scientific ways to treat depression, among many other things. It also makes us look seedy (pun intended) as it strengthens the arguments of prohibitionists and is an argument against the use of cannabis in general.
We must take control of this matter, because consumers have a right to answers. The burden is ours to bear, not theirs to carry, because the moment people have to ask for the obvious — when the obligatory is too onerous for a company to oblige — that is the moment when a business begins to go out of business.
Let us avoid that scenario by supporting greater regulation from within than from without, so we can prove to the public that we can govern ourselves.
Let us do so by way of the wisdom we possess, whose privileges are the result of our toil, tears and sweat.
Let us labor to do right, lest we forfeit our rights.
Kat McCool is the director of operations for Headway BioSciences, a distributor of CBD products. From 2005 to 2017, she owned and operated two successful yoga studios in a suburb of Austin, Texas. She sold her most recent studio, Flow Yoga, in 2017. A graduate of Texas State University and a published author, she lives with her son in Denver, Colorado.