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Back in early 2021, I lived up the street from a coffee truck with a weed leaf logo. I was in graduate school at the time, pacing around my apartment for days on end, starting to smoke weed almost every day.
Lockdown had taken a toll on everyone, almost everyone was still fully masked indoors, and I started doing the one thing I could think of to cope with the anxiety of it all: walking around. A lot. I would walk a 5-mile loop starting and ending on West William Cannon, where I lived at the time. Often, I would walk this loop with an iced coffee in one hand and a joint in the other, and during one of these neighborhood explorations, I stumbled upon. Besides the marijuana leaf in the logo at the time, the street sign decor and posters about suicide prevention caught my eye. Five years later, lockdown is over, grad school is long finished , and I find myself writing professionally about the hobby I picked up to cope with it all. Recently, I sat down to ask Radix House Coffee founder Roger Pilney to ask him about his story. Pilney opened Radix in October 2020, not long after a suicide attempt of his own. Before this endeavor, Pilney worked in marketing. Pilney tells me that he was struggling deeply with PTSD after having multiple people close to him pass away from suicide during his childhood and teenage years. He had witnessed horrific things and could not seem to shake the images and memories from his mind as he sat at his desk day after day. On one of these days, Pilney finally confided in two of his co-workers, a former 9/11 first responder and an Iraq War veteran, describing his hallucinations and flashbacks. On the outside, his life was calm and everything seemed fine, but he describes having the feeling of “something’s coming to get me.” His co-workers encouraged him to seek mental health support through their company insurance. Pilney was in recovery and did not drink at all. According to his recovery community, Pilney says, cannabis was dangerous. For a long time, he saw it as something that would compromise his sobriety. He tried various medications and experienced side effects that made him try other medications. “I had all these pills at my disposal,” he says. The intrusive thoughts about hurting himself still didn’t stop. He called his recovery sponsor. “I would rather you try cannabis than to kill yourself,” his sponsor said. “I can’t resurrect you, but if you relapse, I can help you get back on track.”Pilney tells me he was ignorant about the real effects of cannabis, having believed all the marketing against it telling him it would ruin his life. Contrary to what he had heard, Pilney observed that the cannabis smokers around him were earning degrees and holding down jobs and generally keeping their lives together. He realized that the majority of people “don’t know shit” about the actual healing effects of the plant. “But I wanted to learn if it could, and how it could, help me,” he says. Cannabis helped him with his anxiety, his intrusive thoughts, and the body pain that had caused him to take pills. Most importantly, it helped him with rest. Through a combination of cannabinoids and EMDR therapy, Pilney’s mental health started to improve drastically. Shortly after opening Radix House Coffee, Pilney suffered the loss of his service dog, his best childhood friend, and his father. “Every year since being open I’ve lost someone really big in my life.” Despite his continued struggles with his own mental health, Pilney stayed committed to his mission. Radix House Coffee was a way for him to spread the word about mental health and suicide prevention and the healing powers of cannabis, while serving up a variety of coffee drinks infused with THC, CBD, or on their own.“We launched the business and it was a challenging experience, from finding vendors to work with to the legal stuff to the fees associated and the insurance. I did everything on the up and up because PTSD and hypervigilance make me stick to the letter of the law.” He didn’t want to put his employees or partners at any kind of risk. The rules around THC began to change. During the buildup to last year’s session, Pilney made the decision to start rebranding. He says he already saw the writing on the wall. One of the reasons he had CBD coffee drinks in addition to THC, he tells me, is because he knew better than to fully lean into THC. Pilney laments the lack of education in the community. “I got so tired of hearing the word ‘Delta,’” he tells me. “I wanted to just scream and vomit at the same time because the word ‘Delta’ became synonymous with synthetic or fake, which it’s not.” He says that every time someone asked him about “Delta,” all he heard was: “You don’t vote, do you? You don’t stay engaged with your civic responsibilities. You don’t know that you’re getting ready to lose your rights.” Pilney tells me that he is frustrated with stoners who don’t pay attention to the politics surrounding them and he doesn’t trust them to show up to protect their rights. “When you choose not to educate yourself, you choose to be taken advantage of at some point.” He says that he sold his products barely above cost just so that he would have the opportunity to educate people and tell them about how these products saved his life. “If you love it, you should know how to protect it,” Pilney says. “Whether it’s your dog, your girlfriend, your mother, or a product you like. You need to learn how to protect what’s important to you.” Pilney rebranded the whole company in February of last year, believing that by the time the session was over, he would lose his ability to sell his product due to all the additional fees. He allowed his licenses to expire and stopped selling all THC products before the licensing price adjustments came into place. Pilney tells me that Radix House is a small business, just under a million dollars a year in gross sales. He says with his average legal insurance, his insurance, and the proposed fees, it would cost him $75,000 just for the privilege of offering the product. He just doesn’t see it as feasible, not worth the risk or the cost.If the legal frameworks start to look better, he says, maybe he’ll reconsider. He still wholeheartedly believes in cannabis. He tells me that he doesn’t feel like he got much support from the THC industry. Any support he got was from the coffee industry and from the press, he says. He is directing his disappointed customers to companies outside of Texas. “I’m not real hyped up on anybody local,” he says. “Because no one really hyped me up.” Thankfully, Pilney tells me, he focused on the coffee first. Radix House will continue to serve quality coffee and continue to support suicide prevention and animal rescue. has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.Elizabeth Bradshaw has been working in schools, bars, and restaurants around Austin for over ten years while developing creative projects such as a novel, a podcast, and most recently The Austin Chronic column. She holds a Master of Arts in Communication Studies from UT Austin.
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