Filed Under: Prohibition 2.0
Texas just looked at the national wave of cannabis reform and said no. Lock them up. While most of the country inches forward on weed legalization, the Lone Star State just doubled down on prohibition. House Bill 3948, recently passed by the Texas House, would make it a criminal offense to possess, sell, or distribute any THC cannabis product above 0.3 percent. It does not matter how it is made, what it is used for, or where it came from.
Your vape pen, edible, or Delta-8 gummy could now get you one year in jail. One year. For a compound that most of the country either ignores or sells over the counter. This is not a rollback. It is a state-sanctioned slap in the face. And if it clears the Senate, it will drag Texas back into the kind of dead-eyed drug war playbook we thought was finally running out of ink.
The trick is how they wrote it. House Bill 3948 disguises itself as another hemp regulation bill. Nothing controversial on the surface. Regulatory language. Consumer safety. Clean definitions. But wedged into the text is this landmine. A clause that makes any product with more than 0.3 percent total THC, even if derived from hemp, a crime.
Delta-8 is dead. THC-O, gone. Legal edibles? Felony bait. And if you are caught with it, you are now facing a Class B misdemeanor—one year behind bars and a two-thousand-dollar fine. That is what they want for a vape cart you could legally buy yesterday. And what about head shops? Done. Small hemp retailers? Fucked. These are people who built an entire economy out of the legal gray zone Texas created. Now the state is pulling the rug out from under them and calling it consumer protection.
That is the part that should piss you off the most. The lie. The suggestion that this is about safety. That this is for your benefit. If this were about health, the state would have funded testing labs, written real standards, and gone after contamination. Instead, they rewrote the definition of criminality and aimed it at small businesses, users, and anyone who dared to operate outside the state’s stagnation.
And here is the mindfuck. At the exact moment the federal government is preparing to reschedule cannabis, Texas is re-criminalizing it. One arm of the system says weed is medicine. The other is gearing up to throw people in a cell for a gummy.
This is not about science. It is not about policy. It is optics. It is political theater. It is red-state lawmakers tossing meat to a base that still sees cannabis as a crime and stoners as degenerates. They do not care about evidence. They care about enforcement. They care about votes. They care about keeping the carceral machine humming, no matter how many lives they have to crush to do it.
This bill is not unique. It is part of a national pattern. The playbook is the same in every prohibition-minded state. Just look at New Mexico. They are using water law to choke out small cannabis farms under the illusion of resource management. We covered that in detail in Dry State, Drier Future. Now Texas is running the same game, but louder. Ban the product. Burn the loophole. Blame the users. Protect the institutions that benefit from locking people up.
And if you think this will not reach you, read the Friday blog post You’re Not in Cali Anymore. One line across a state border and your edible goes from legal to contraband. Your medicine becomes evidence. Your rights vanish. The laws do not follow logic. They follow geography. And Texas just redrew the map again.
There will be arrests. There will be raids. There will be stories of teachers, veterans, cancer patients, and everyday Texans caught holding something they thought was legal. There will be heartbreak. And there will be silence. Because the state does not want a protest. It wants obedience. And it wants to make you afraid to even ask questions.
This is not a regulation. This is a prohibition in a new suit. And anyone celebrating it as progress is either lying or so high on political delusion they forgot how many lives were already ruined by these same laws the first time around.
Texas had a chance to move forward. Instead, they reached into the past, found the oldest blunt instrument they could, and started swinging. If you are not outraged by this, you are not paying attention. If you are still calling this a matter of opinion, you are complicit.
Weed is not dangerous. But the people writing these laws sure as hell are.
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