Some Easley residents — myself included — were a bit taken aback when a store called Upstate Hemp popped up downtown a few months ago.

Its logo, which looks, for all the world, like a marijuana leaf, called to mind visions of black lights, psychedelic posters and multi-flavored rolling papers of the “head shops” of the late 1960s.

But this is no head shop. It’s a store dedicated to the dispensing of the oil of marijuana’s non-psychoactive cousin, industrial hemp, which users say eases their pain and anxiety but doesn’t get them high.

Now, I’m not taking a position on whether the stuff works or not, although there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that it does. The research hasn’t been done yet.

But I thought it was worth noting that not only is such a store in operation in downtown Easley, but there’s also a facility in

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