Largely by accident, Texas built a market for intoxicating hemp. In the 2018 farm bill, Congress attempted to legalize the cannabis sativa plant for non-intoxicating purposes, but by exempting hemp from regulation under the Controlled Substances Act, inadvertently spawned a largely unregulated market for intoxicating hemp products that skirted the poorly drafted federal rules. Then, in 2019, Texas adopted state House Bill 1325, authorizing hemp agriculture and CBD. Liberated producers concentrated small amounts of THC, converted compounds into intoxicating variants, and sold potent gummies, vapes, and drinks at retail—often in kid-friendly packaging and lollipop shapes.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, State Senator Charles Perry, and law enforcement have pressed for years to close the regulatory gap between intoxicating and non-intoxicating hemp, arguing that the lack of clarity has inadvertently legalized recreational marijuana. The 2025 legislature passed a state ban on consumable hemp products with any amount of THC, but Governor Greg Abbott vetoed it, endorsing alcohol-style regulation instead. Two special sessions reached no compromise between Abbott and the legislature on what to do. Through executive order, Abbott directed the Department of State Health Services to regulate the market administratively. The hemp industry is challenging those rules in court.
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Last November, Congress undid “farm bill legalization;” the revised law is set to take effect on December 11, though some in Congress would still like to find a way to preserve the hemp industry. For its part, Texas should not wait on the feds. It should ban intoxicating hemp-derived THC outright, regardless of whether Congress acts.
The case for using state authority rests, first, on what the past six years have demonstrated about the capacity to enforce any bright line short of a ban and, second, on what THC does to people who consume it.
The only real difference between what gets called “marijuana” and what gets called “hemp” is an arbitrary threshold. The 2018 farm bill and Texas’s 2019 HB 1325 both defined hemp as a cannabis-derived compound with a concentration of so-called “delta-9” tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) of no more than 0.3 percent on a dry-weight basis. Any greater a percentage is defined as marijuana. The former is legal; the latter is not. That means the legality of a given compound depends entirely on THC percentages based on lab testing—not how a product looks to the naked eye or how it is used.
No state has been capable of regulating a commercial THC market safely. Texas is no different. The Department of Public Safety warned lawmakers in 2019 that its crime lab could not even measure whether THC concentration in marijuana exceeded 0.3 percent . After enactment of Texas’s law, several district attorneys stopped prosecuting low-level marijuana cases, citing the same reason.
Things haven’t improved since. According to Rice University’s Baker Institute, labs often can’t determine how a manufacturer produced a given variant; manufacturer-required “certificates of analysis” are frequently falsified, if they exist; police often find products mislabeled or deliberately misleading; and manufacturers invest and market new variants faster than laws can restrict them.
Confusion reaches consumers. A legal, ten-milligram hemp-derived gummy is about as intoxicating as a ten-milligram gummy made from traditional marijuana, but the legality of the former sends a message that it’s safe, mild, or medicinal. Intoxicating delta-8 products may be labeled simply “hemp,” misleading consumers who associate hemp with non-intoxicating CBD. Manufacturers add “wellness” and “science” labels and shelve products next to familiar snacks and drinks. Edibles’ delayed effects make overconsumption easy.
Commercial availability changes behavior. The Texas Poison Center Network has fielded nearly 11,500 THC-related calls since 2021, with roughly 40 percent involving children twelve or younger. Annual calls rose from under 700 in 2018 to 2,400 in 2025.
Evidence of THC’s deleterious effects on human beings is piling up. A 2025 JAMA Psychiatry study found that medical and recreational cannabis laws produced significant increases in cannabis-use disorder and poisonings. A separate, longitudinal study on adult twins saw a roughly 20 percent average increase in cannabis-use frequency attributable to recreational legalization. Frequent use and high-potency products are strongly associated with greater risks of developing psychosis and mental illness.
THC presents exceptionally high risks for the 1 million Texans with serious mental illness. As my colleague Stephen Eide has written, nearly half of seriously mentally ill adults use marijuana—almost three times the general-population rate—and their rate of cannabis-use disorder runs more than five times as high. Continued use reduces adherence to psychiatric medication and produces more severe relapses, more hospitalizations, and longer stays.
Marijuana users with serious mental illness also commit violence at higher rates than those who don’t use or don’t have mental illness. A 2019 meta-analysis found that seriously mentally ill cannabis users had approximately three times the odds of violence. The association was substantially larger for those with cannabis-use disorder.
Texas cannot absorb a less stable mentally ill population. It lacks sufficient addiction treatment, psychiatric beds, and jail space. Federal investigators have pressed Texas over delays in competency restoration. Every additional psychotic episode strains an already over-burdened system.
Defenders point to some evidence of economic boost from legalization. A 2025 Whitney Economics study commissioned by the Texas Hemp Business Council estimated 53,300 jobs supported, $5.5 billion in direct revenue, $2.1 billion in wages at stake, and 4,500 businesses. But gross revenue is not the same thing as net social benefit. Products that generate emergency visits, hospitalizations, child poisonings, police calls, and family crises impose enormous costs, too. If Abbott wants a Texas that’s friendly to enterprise, he should encourage hemp owners to pursue work that doesn’t leave Texans at higher risk of addiction-driven homelessness, violence, and storefront encampments—those are all bad for business.
Hemp defenders further argue that a ban would push consumers toward unregulated illegal sellers. But many users would simply quit, cut back, switch to CBD or alcohol, or enter the state’s medical program. And Texas has already run such an experiment. In 2011, gas stations and smoke shops sold K2, a synthetic cannabinoid, because it was federally unscheduled. Texas banned it. K2 did not vanish, but it became a lesser problem.
If Washington reverses course or delays again, Texas’s 2027 legislature should ban intoxicating hemp-derived THC. The state can preserve non-intoxicating CBD, FDA-approved cannabinoid medicines, and the Compassionate Use Program. But it needs to ban a product that’s just marijuana by another name.
Texas has welcomed many residents from New York and California in recent years. It shouldn’t import these states’ failed drug policies, too—least of all now, when both those blue enclaves have started admitting how bad the situation has become.