Texas Should Restrict Intoxicating Hemp Products While Expanding Medical Marijuana Access, Agriculture Commissioner Says (Op-Ed)

“It’s just not worth the time, hassle, and expense for law enforcement to bust someone smoking a joint.”

By Sid Miller, Texas Agriculture Commissioner

Just down the street from the Austin headquarters of the Texas Department of Agriculture is a trailer selling consumable cannabis products; the sole purpose of these products is to inebriate. When did the Texas legislature debate recreational marijuana and ultimately vote to legalize it?

The answer is, they didn’t. Thanks to loose legal language and generous interpretations of the law, an unregulated market for recreational marijuana has sprung up across Texas.

Texas has, over the past few years, legalized hemp farming and processing, as well as creating and then expanding a compassionate use program for those who benefit from cannabis as medicine. When passing these laws, legislators sought to define intoxicating marijuana, which remains illegal in most cases. The resulting definition has led to the problems we face today.

The process of testing cannabis for the level of intoxicating THC is costly and complex. Local police must send samples to one of the few labs which does the testing and wait through a long backlog for a result. Unless you are dealing with massive quantities from transnational criminal gangs, it’s just not worth the time, hassle, and expense for law enforcement to bust someone smoking a joint in a city park or sneaking a dime bag into a concert.

As a result, many local authorities have largely stopped enforcing marijuana possession laws. Either the time and cost of investigating and prosecuting most cases simply isn’t worth it on limited police budgets, or they are run by leftists who want to thwart Texas’s marijuana laws.

On top of that, the levels of intoxicants permitted by the law are equally difficult to police. This has led to a flood of unregulated “consumer products” such as vape pens, edibles, chocolates, and even raw cannabis “buds” being sold at retail establishments across the state.

What’s worse, there are no consumer standards, safety inspections, or chemical analysis of these products to determine their level of intoxicants or even their basic safety.

I strongly support hemp as a commercial product. I strongly support medical marijuana and our state’s compassionate use program. In fact, I want to see it expanded to include far more medical conditions than it currently does. Everyone who can benefit from it to help with their legitimate medical condition should have it available to them. I also strongly support robust research into cannabis so we can best use it as medicine and for a myriad of consumer products.

While I do not support recreational, retail marijuana for all, it’s up to the legislature to fix the legislation on the books and, while doing so, have a robust and transparent debate about whether or not to expand its availability. That has not yet happened.

I have received a lot of messages asking me to come out against Dan Patrick’s efforts to curtail the unregulated and unsafe market that I have described. I will not. That’s not how the law works. The Lieutenant Governor is right to go after these unregulated and often illegal businesses.

Even if the legislature voted to legalize recreational marijuana tomorrow, that legislation would create a legal market with rules, guardrails, checks and balances. What we have now is the wild west.

These products are potentially dangerous. In many cases, we don’t even know who the manufacturers are, where these products are coming from, or what kinds of chemicals and unsafe additives may be part of the production process.

Texas needs clear and understandable laws. Texas Republicans need to be rowing in the same direction in order to achieve this goal. That is why I stand with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick while expecting the legislature to do its job.

An eighth-generation Texas farmer and rancher, Sid Miller is the 12th Commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA). A twenty-six-time world champion rodeo cowboy, he has devoted his life to promoting Texas agriculture, rural communities, and the western heritage of Texas. Commissioner Miller will be available for television, zoom, and phone interviews.

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Photo courtesy of Brendan Cleak.