, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.sat down this week in a packed room at the state Capitol to hear testimony on whether to ban some psychoactive hemp products from being sold in the state, he already knew what was coming.
“I told these retailers, ‘If you guys screw this up by being cute and getting people high off it, there will be consequences,’ ” he said during a Texas Senate State Affairs Committee interim hearing on consumable hemp on Wednesday. “I'm disappointed, but I’m not surprised that we are here today.”in the wake of Perry’s legislation — an enabling statute that followed a similar federal farm bill the year before.
The difference in the legal and illegal products lies in the plants from which they come. Hemp and marijuana plants are both cannabis plants. Marijuana plants have high THC. Hemp has low THC. Meanwhile, Texas rakes in taxes and fees as retailers thrive among increasing public calls for better research on and access to potential health benefits of low doses of THC and its non-psychoactive relative, CBD.
They also expressed deep concern about how the brightly colored, sweet-tasting gummies, chocolatey brownies, and fizzy drinks in bright-colored cans are enticing to young people and sold in locations that are easy for them to find. The notion of better standards and more resources to enforce the law, however, was an idea that few people — from retailers to consumers, doctors to chemists to law enforcement to the lawmakers themselves— argued with during the five-hour discussion in Austin.
Texas health and law enforcement officials painted a complex picture of their attempts to separate the legal from the illegal, to find useful ways to enforce vague laws with no dedicated staff, and to protect the rights of businesses owners and consumers to defend their access to a legal product. But their staff is stretched, said Tommy Stevenson, who leads the Texas Department of State Health Services’ consumer protection division. With the agency’s six enforcement officials, he said, the state could do a visit to every retailer about once every five years. Another six are being trained to join them and that will help drop that to three years, he said. Most of the enforcement right now is complaint based, he said.
“We had a conversation about that in 2019, and we were clear that in Texas we do not want to legalize pot,” said Perry, who supports the state’s limited medical marijuana program but not wider expansion of marijuana laws. “The impact of a ban would be far reaching and devastating,” Mary Tello, Co-Founder Green Haus Wellness in Austin, told senators. “Banning delta products would not only jeopardize businesses like mine but also undermine the economic and social fabric of our community. I urge policymakers to consider broader implications, and work toward solutions to support both public health and economic vitality.
The state has no jurisdiction over the out-of-state labs used to test the consumable hemp products for the legal limit of delta-9 and so no way to verify the results — and no legal requirement to test the levels of any other THC compound in the products, Richardson said. As a result, many products enter the market with THC levels well over the legal limit, he said.
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