Game Over in Texas? House Approves Bill to Ban Intoxicating Hemp Products

No more delta-8 THC. No more delta-10 THC. No more chemically altered THC extracts.

“If it gets you high, it is not legal anymore,” Texas House Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, said while offering a floor amendment May 21 that, after more than two hours of debate, ultimately restored provisions to a Senate-passed bill that aims to ban consumable hemp products containing any amount of THC or other intoxicating cannabinoids.

Under Senate Bill 3, which the upper chamber passed in a 24-7 vote in March, would prohibit manufacturing hemp products containing any amount of a cannabinoid other than nonintoxicating CBD or CBG, delivering a knock-out blow to an estimated $8 billion state industry that employs some 50,000 workers.

The Texas House State Affairs Committee had provided a substitute for S.B. 3 that would have instead created a rigid regulatory framework for hemp products containing THC rather than an outright ban.

Oliverson, a board-certified anesthesiologist, was not interested in entertaining the counter option.

“No more legal gray zones,” Oliverson said during Wednesday night’s House floor session. “We are not banning hemp. We are banning high. This amendment will preserve the right to grow industrial hemp and sell nonintoxicating CBD and CBG under current state and federal law. But if it gets you high, it is not legal anymore. We will not be allowing the sale of THC-based intoxicants in any forms.”

Oliverson’s position aligns with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who championed S.B. 3 as the top leadership figure in the Senate.

In addition to prohibiting intoxicating hemp products, S.B. 3 would make it a third-degree felony to manufacture, deliver or possess with intent to deliver consumable hemp products with intoxicating cannabinoids. It would also be a third-degree felony to falsify laboratory reports or to possess, manufacture or sell the products without a license or registration.

Those convicted of third-degree felonies in Texas face two to 10 years imprisonment and up to a $10,000 fine. Under current Texas law, possessing 4 ounces or less of cannabis is a misdemeanor with the possibility of up to one year behind bars.

The House voted, 88-53, to adopt Oliverson’s amendment, choosing prohibition over regulation, after much of the evening’s debate centered on the state’s veterans having access to products that many of them use to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental or physical health conditions. Although Texas has a low-THC medical cannabis program, the Texas Compassionate Use Program (TCUP), that program is severely limited.

With the amendment in place, House lawmakers passed the underlying legislation, 95-44. They are expected to adopt a third reading of the bill on May 22 before officially sending it back to the Senate for a final sign-off before it can arrive at Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

After Wednesday’s House passage, Lukas Gilkey, the CEO of Austin-based consumer-packaged goods brand Hometown Hero, said in a video post on X that he expects Abbott to sign the legislation.

“Immediately, we are going to be prepping for a lawsuit,” Gilkey said. “The Texas Hemp Business Council has resources allocated for this specific purpose. So, this is something that’s going to impact all of us. … The fight is not over.”

Hometown Hero is just one of more than 6,000 Texas-based businesses that sell edibles, inhalable products and other popular form factors containing delta-9 THC, delta-8 THC or other compounds derived or created from hemp.

Oliverson said Texas lawmakers and Abbott never intended to permit manufacturing and selling hemp “intoxicants” when they adopted House Bill 1325 in 2019, which authorized the commercial production of industrial hemp following the federal legalization of hemp in the 2018 Farm Bill.

However, after five years of Texans having access to consumable hemp products, prohibition is not the solution, Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, said May 21 on the House floor.

“It is 2025, and we’re still rehashing parts of Reefer Madness from the 50s and 60s,” he said. “We thought that we had gotten past this, that we’ve grown, that we’ve gotten smarter, learned more, built more knowledge, and we’re past this. But here we are back again, trying to go backwards in time.”

While Wu acknowledged that THC is a compound that children should not consume, he said the dangers are “way far overblown,” adding that THC has caused zero fatalities in a nation that continues to struggle with the abuse of deadly alternatives.

“The point is that many people, yes, they do self-medicate with THC because it makes their lives better, and we should support this,” he said. “You know why? Because if they were not self-medicating with THC, they would be self-medicating with alcohol and opioids.”

After the House moved forward on the Senate’s prohibition version of S.B. 3, industry veteran Thomas Winstanley, the executive vice president of Edibles.com, condemned the legislation.

Winstanley, who spent six years working with Massachusetts-based multistate operator Theory Wellness, spearheaded Edible Brands’ entrance into the hemp-derived THC marketplace via Edibles.com’s e-commerce platform for deliveries earlier this year. Edible Brands is the parent company of Edibles Arrangements.

While S.B. 3 may aim to address a “real consumer health issue” in Texas—unregulated products—the legislation’s cure is worse than the disease, Winstanley said in a statement provided to Cannabis Business Times.

“Is there a need for a thoughtful policy that codifies a sustainable and regulated path forward? Absolutely. But does S.B. 3 accomplish that? No,” he said. “In fact, it does the opposite, fueling the very risks it claims to eliminate by pushing safe, regulated products out of reach and creating a vacuum that will be filled by unregulated, illicit alternatives.”

While several House members pointed to the state’s veteran community as one that supports access to consumable THC hemp products, and, more broadly, cannabis legalization, Rep. David Lowe, R-North Richland Hills, spoke in support of the ban.

Lowe, an Army veteran who served four tours overseas, including two combat deployments to Afghanistan, told his colleagues in the House that he doesn’t take the issue lightly after suffering greatly from PTSD.

“Some are using veterans with PTSD as a reason to oppose this bill,” he said. “As someone who has lived through the darkness of war and its aftermath, I say this sincerely: Stop using veterans like me as a vehicle to push your unregulated hemp products.”

Rep. Josey Garcia, D-San Antonio, took issue with those remarks.

The first woman, active-duty veteran to serve in the Texas House, Garcia committed to the U.S. Air Force through the Delayed Enlistment Program at 16, going on to serve deployments in Cameroon and Iraq, including as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Garcia said her staff fielded hundreds of emails and letters this legislative session from veterans asking to legalize THC.

“Out of hundreds of emails that I had, there’s only one that I saw that was from a veteran asking us to ban THC, and we all got that letter on our desk today,” she said “One thing that has me very concerned when we’re talking about supporting our veterans, a lot of you walk around calling yourself patriots, and you wear the pin on your chest to represent a very free country that we live in … those of us who have chosen to wear the uniform have done so with the inherent knowledge that we are giving up our lives for our freedoms.”

Garcia called S.B. 3’s prohibition policy a bait-and-switch maneuver by lawmakers who say they’ll support veterans only to create legal ramifications for those who choose an alternative to pharmaceuticals as a means to “quiet the nightmares” of their service.