“We would NEVER!” laughs Estella Castro. “25 years ago, me and you would not be chilling on the Eastside at 7:04pm.”
Estella has greeted me on the front porch of her Cesar Chavez Street shop, in a converted house that her mom owns. She’s wearing a satin baseball jacket with the logo of her business, Austinite Cannabis Co., and has a tattoo of a green weed leaf on her knuckle. After being welcomed with a preroll and a cannabis beverage, I ask her to remember what the area was like a quarter-century ago.
“This was a rough neighborhood, especially where my husband lived on Fourth Street. If you were a white person, you were probably here to buy drugs. It was a working family, Mexican neighborhood until they moved the airport and then Cesar Chavez became the way to get Downtown from there. This is gentrified.”
That Estella and her husband Charles Castro own a consumable hemp business on the Central Eastside is poetic. Charles, raised nearby across from the Scoot Inn, went to prison on a specious marijuana charge as a young man in the early 2000s (his fingerprints were found on an empty brick weed bag in a trash can). Meeting Charles, who has an extraordinarily warm, caring nature, it’s tragic to think he was ever exposed to the prison system.
His stay in the state penitentiary, though short, was tough on the family. One week before going in for a half-year in Huntsville, he and Estella’s first son was born premature, weighing 3.6 pounds.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” Estella says, reflecting on that period.
That son now helps run the family businesses. In addition to the two hemp shops they operate locally, and a busy trucking company, the Castros also own two licensed medical marijuana dispensaries in southern Oklahoma that are tightly regulated by state agencies, including a seed-to-sale inventory tracking system called Metrc.
For her local stores, which exist in an environment with significantly less regulations, Castro says she follows many of the same policies as her businesses in Oklahoma – like selling flower only in pre-packaged 3.5-gram containers. One difference, though, is that Texas allows for a much more inviting atmosphere than almost all medical and recreational marijuana states. At Austinite Cannabis Co., there is no waiting room, and customers are allowed to enjoy the hemp flower, beverages, and edibles they buy in the dispensary’s back patio, which also hosts a variety of community events.
To Castro, it’s important for her businesses to keep a “clean report card” so she’ll be considered for a marijuana dispensary license in Texas when that time comes.
“Marijuana will be here in two years – mark my words – but it will be all about who has access to the licenses,” she predicts, noting that she’d like to be involved in the creation of a state equity program. “I want to be in a position to say: I’m a minority and my husband went to prison for this plant. In other states, the license holders are a lot of white males with deep pockets. I don’t have that capital – this is all hustle and grit.”
Castro says Texas’ consumable hemp market isn’t as lucrative as it was several years ago due to oversaturation, but her motivation isn’t money – it’s medicine. She lives with a serious illness: interstitial lung disease caused by the rare autoimmune condition polymyositis. She has to undergo chemo and biotherapy every six months and take anti-rejection medicines that make her sick. To combat those effects she takes Rick Simpson Oil, a full-spectrum cannabis extract that relieves otherwise agonizing effects and helps her body get rest so she can continue to fight the next day, all the while providing others with access to medicine.
“I enjoy getting to know people that are really critically ill like I am and helping them,” she says. “I know my lung disease is coming up on me and I need a double-lung transplant so I want to leave a legacy behind. I want strains named after me, I want bills named after me, I want my husband to still get a license after I’m gone so he can fight for all the things we’re fighting for.”
This article appears in April 18 • 2025.