Texas lawmakers have passed a bill to significantly expand the state’s medical marijuana program, sending it to the governor.

Just days after the legislation from Rep. Ken King (R) advanced through the Senate, with amendments that watered down the original House proposal, bicameral negotiators worked out a compromise over the weekend and then each chamber gave final approval on Sunday.

The measure now heads to the desk of Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to potentially be signed into law.

The final version of the bill—which cleared the House on a 138-1 vote and the Senate by a vote of 31-0—would expand the state’s list of medical cannabis qualifying conditions to include chronic pain, traumatic brain injury (TBI), Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory bowel diseases, while also allowing end-of-life patients in palliative or hospice care to use marijuana.

The measure would additionally allow patients to access a wider range of cannabis product types—including patches, lotions, suppositories, approved inhalers, nebulizers and vaping devices.

And, it would mandate that the Department of Public Safety (DPS) increase the number of medical cannabis business licenses from the current three to 15. It would further allow dispensaries to open satellite locations.

House lawmakers on Friday had rejected the Senate’s changes to the bill, which largely scaled back the scope of the proposed expansion to the medical marijuana program.

The version passed by the House last month would have extended the currently limited list of medical cannabis qualifying conditions to include chronic pain, glaucoma, TBI, spinal neuropathy, Crohn’s disease or other inflammatory bowel disease and degenerative disc disease. It would also have allowed military veterans to become registered cannabis patients for any medical condition—and authorized the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) to further expand the list of qualifying conditions.

But those provisions were removed in the Senate State Affairs Committee before the bill reached the floor of that chamber.

Rep. Tom Oliverson (R) suggested there was an agreement around adding chronic pain with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), the presiding officer of the Senate. While Patrick disputed the characterization of their conversation, the lieutenant governor and lawmakers ultimately reached a deal to reinsert the condition into the bill with an amendment that passed on the Senate floor, among others.

Whereas the Senate version had said that chronic pain patients could only access medical cannabis if they had first tried opioids for 90 days, the final version crafted by the conference committee does not contain such a stipulation. And, under the agreement, TBI is being added back in as a new qualifying condition as well.

Lawmakers on Sunday passed resolutions adding Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory bowel diseases back into the bill as well, which Sen. Charles Perry (R) said on the floor were “inadvertently left out by the drafter late last night.”

Under the final bill now heading to the governor’s desk, patient registrations would be good for one year, with up to four refills of a 90-day supply. Medical cannabis packages, containers and devices would be allow to include up to 1 gram of total THC, with a 10 mg/dose limit.

Lawmakers also adopted resolutions on Sunday to clarify that a physician “may prescribe more than one package of low-THC cannabis to a patient in a 90-day period.”

While DSHS could not on its own add new qualifying conditions as would have been the case under the original House bill, the final version would allow physicians to petition the department to report to the legislature that cannabis appears to be beneficial for a condition, and then lawmakers could potentially act to expand the program.

The bill also includes protections mandating that patient information is confidential and may only be accessed by the department, registered physicians and dispensaries.

Regulators would be mandated to promulgate rules for the expanded program by October 1.

“For 10 years, most patients have been excluded from participating in the Compassionate Use Program,” Heather Fazio, executive director of the Texas Cannabis Policy Center, told Marijuana Moment. “We’re happy to see that the legislature is finally expanding the program in a meaningful way.”

(Disclosure: Fazio supports Marijuana Moment’s work via a monthly Patreon pledge.)

If ultimately signed into law, the bill would build upon Texas’s current, limited medical marijuana program, which allows patients with one of eight qualifying condition access certain non-smokable cannabis products containing no more than 0.5 percent THC by dry weight.

This comes in the background of a highly contentious debate over another piece of legislation that was sent to Abbott last month to ban consumable hemp products containing any amount of THC, even though federal law permits hemp products containing up to 0.3 percent THC by dry weight.

Democrats have attacked the bill as an assault on personal liberty and gone after Patrick, the lieutenant governor, for his zeal around the ban.

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Marijuana Moment is tracking hundreds of cannabis, psychedelics and drug policy bills in state legislatures and Congress this year. Patreon supporters pledging at least $25/month get access to our interactive maps, charts and hearing calendar so they don’t miss any developments.

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A recent poll found that four in five Texas voters want to see marijuana legalized in some form, and most also want to see regulations around cannabis relaxed.

Meanwhile in Texas, a House committee approved a Senate-passed bill last month that would prohibit cities from putting any citizen initiative on local ballots that would decriminalize marijuana or other controlled substances—as several localities have already done despite lawsuits from the state attorney general.

Under the proposal, state law would be amended to say that local entities “may not place an item on a ballot, including a municipal charter or charter amendment, that would provide that the local entity will not fully enforce” state drug laws.

While several courts have previously upheld local cannabis decriminalization laws, an appellate court comprised of three conservative justices appointed by the governor has recently pushed back against two of those rulings, siding with the state in its legal challenge to the marijuana policy in Austin and San Marcos.

Despite the ongoing litigation and advancement of the House and Senate bills, Texas activists have their targets set on yet another city, Kyle, where they hope put an initiative before voters to enact local marijuana reform at the ballot this coming November.

Separately lawmakers have also advanced measure to support research on the therapeutic potential of ibogaine with the aim of encouraging federal approval of the psychedelic.

That bill, SB 2308, would create a grant program through the state Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) to provide funding for clinical trials exploring ibogaine as a potential treatment option for people suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) and other serious mental health condition

Last month, meanwhile, the Texas House also passed a pair of bills designed to ensure speedy access to psychedelic-assisted therapy in the event of federal approval from Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Texas City’s Marijuana Decriminalization Law Saved Nearly Half A Million Dollars As Arrests Plummeted, Report Shows

Photo courtesy of Brian Shamblen.

Once stigmatized and outlawed, psychedelics are moving from the counterculture to the mainstream. From Prince Harry’s use of psilocybin to National Football League quarterback Aaron Rodgers’s adventures with ayahuasca, our media is awash with accounts of their professed benefits.

Hundreds of universities around the world are now engaging in psychedelic research. And psychedelic legalization initiatives are taking hold.

Psychedelics are becoming big business. Just as private capital flooded the cannabis sector years ago, a psychedelic gold rush is underway.

Wealthy entrepreneurs are investing in the psychedelic industry while biotechnology startups are raising capital and running clinical trials on novel psychedelic molecules. Venture capitalists are eyeing the prospects of a new lucrative mass market.

Three causes for concern

To date, most debates about psychedelics have offered little critical analysis of their relationship to the political economy of modern capitalism and broader power structures. In our new book Psychedelic Capitalism, we make three central claims about the so-called psychedelic renaissance.

First, the medicalization of psychedelics is likely to restrict access and reinforce existing health and social inequalities.

Second, the corporatization of psychedelics will enable economic elites to dominate the market while appropriating the vast reservoir of knowledge built up by Indigenous communities, public institutions and underground researchers.

And third, rather than representing progressive drug reform, the limited legalization of select psychedelics for medical use will help to entrench and sustain the drug war and the criminalization of most drug use.

Ignoring community knowledge

Across North America, we’re seeing a medicalization of psychedelics, where a range of problems are presented as treatable by these substances. This is happening in a way that boosts corporate control of the process and pushes aside community and Indigenous knowledge.

We have seen this scenario play out in Australia. Substances such as psilocybin and MDMA are legally available, but only through a doctor’s prescription and at great financial cost—raising questions about equity, access and who these therapies are for.

Framing psychedelics as pharmaceutical commodities and individualized health-care solutions reinforces the prohibitionist narrative that these substances are unsuitable for use outside of the medical context. This narrative shifts attention away from how medicalized use might perpetuate a neoliberal ideology—locating mental “disorder” within an individual, rather than addressing more systemic causes such as poverty, inequality and social exclusion.

It also disregards centuries of traditions created by Indigenous community use, as well as the values of the psychedelic underground.

A system built on expensive individual therapy, medically trained gatekeepers and hyper-controlled clinical access is not the model that most advocates have envisioned.

A pill-only model for productivity and happiness

The foundations of psychedelic capitalism were largely created by public innovation at the public’s expense and are now in the process of being taken over by private capital.

Psychedelic conferences increasingly resemble corporate trade shows. The psychedelic tourism industry continues to expand and cater to elite clients. For-profit companies like Mind Medicine and Compass Pathways are eliminating psychotherapy from their treatment protocols and embracing a “pill-only” model favored by Big Pharma.

Psychedelics, including microdosing and psychedelic-assisted therapy, are marketed as a way for the general population to extract more work out of their already overworked lives, and to be happy about it in the process.

Companies are competing to capture intellectual property to harness profits from existing compounds and erect legal barriers around new chemicals and their applications.

The for-profit ketamine industry already offers a glimpse into the future of corporatized psychedelic therapy. This includes a lack of attention to risks, deceitful marketing and little consideration to therapeutic care.

There has been a surge of new patent applications (and granted patents) in the U.S. on substances such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, 5-MeO DMT and mescaline that seek to secure exclusivity, monopolize supply chains and privatize knowledge that already exists in the public domain.

Psychedelics have been swept up into the well rehearsed capitalist playbook where private players are fabricating exclusionary rights over what are ultimately the products of collective human struggle and intellectual achievement.

Medical legalization of psychedelics

The medicalized approach to psychedelic mainstreaming also connects to drug law and policy.

Across North America, the biomedical approach is the main influence on drug law and the primary avenue for psychedelic access in most jurisdictions. This approach is widely supported by psychedelic capitalists who have a financial stake in medical legalization and want to limit legal access to anything outside of the medical-pharma frame.

In the United States, places like Oregon and Colorado have more holistic legal models that include elements of community control to prevent corporate capture. But most state initiatives remain limited in scope and are centered around medicalized therapy, particularly for military veterans. Even in Oregon, which has been lauded for its progressive drug policies, there has been an unmistakable drift toward medicalization.

Canada’s cannabis industry exemplifies how processes of legalization can become intertwined with the interests of corporate-dominated industries.

As Michael Devillaer, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences and author of Buzz Kill (2024), has explained, the cannabis industry has prioritized profit maximization, product promotion and increased consumption at the expense of public health concerns.

What is best for public interest?

As the medical legalization of psychedelics deepens, we are likely to see the intensification of criminal penalties for recreational and other uses.

In fact, police seizures of psychedelics like psilocybin in the U.S. have increased in recent years. Global arrests for the transportation of compounds such as ayahuasca, iboga and peyote have also increased.

These problems are likely to be exacerbated by systems of bifurcated scheduling, where a drug product is placed in a different class from the active ingredient or substance.

For example, if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were to approve psilocybin for depression or MDMA for PTSD, it is likely that only FDA-approved medicinal psilocybin and MDMA products would be rescheduled, while the substances themselves would continue to be prosecuted as restricted narcotics.

It is in the public interest to move beyond a myopic focus on medical legalization to a more open, decriminalized model of public access. An approach like this would not only mitigate the threats associated with corporate capture, it would also reduce the harms associated with criminalization and the war on drugs.

Community-controlled decriminalization is a better path to mainstreaming psychedelics than relinquishing power to the medical industry and pharmaceutical cartels that provide monopolized services to primarily affluent customers.

And treating drug use and dependence as a public health issue and incentivizing harm reduction and support services for at-risk populations would go a long way to mitigating the tragedies of the drug war.

“This was an easy case to make, which is probably why the plaintiffs didn’t file an opposition to the motion for summary judgment.”

By James Brooks, Alaska Beacon

A federal magistrate judge has ruled that the state of Alaska did not violate the U.S. Constitution when it acted to limit intoxicating hemp products in 2023.

In an order published May 23, Magistrate Judge Kyle Reardon granted summary judgment in favor of the state and against the Alaska Industrial Hemp Association, which sued two years ago in an attempt to overturn regulations imposed by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.

The court order means intoxicating hemp products, common in many other states, will remain illegal in Alaska unless sold through a licensed marijuana retailer.

“It was rewarding to be part of the process developing the regulations, and I was happy when we successfully defended against the motion for a preliminary injunction in 2023,” said Assistant Attorney General Kevin Higgins, by email. Higgins represented the state in the case.

“I’m not patting myself on the back too hard though,” he said. “The Division of Agriculture was motivated by public safety concerns when it took measured action to regulate an emerging industry. This was an easy case to make, which is probably why the plaintiffs didn’t file an opposition to the motion for summary judgment.”

An attorney representing the plaintiff did not answer a request for comment on Wednesday.

Alaska legalized the sale and use of marijuana for recreational purposes in 2014. The state subsequently created a tightly regulated market in which only licensed businesses may grow, process and sell marijuana.

Under a 2018 federal law and a state law enacted in 2021, cannabis plants that contain less than 0.3 percent THC—a common psychoactive chemical—were considered hemp, not the more tightly regulated marijuana.

Even though those hemp products contain only small amounts of psychoactive chemicals, they could be extracted, processed and turned into intoxicating products that were available at convenience stores, gas stations and other stores not restricted by the state’s marijuana regulator.

While hemp products are federally legal, marijuana remains federally prohibited, and social media companies frequently restrict marijuana advertising, giving an advantage to the hemp market.

Marijuana retailers urged action, and a task force organized by Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) recommended that the state enact regulations to limit intoxicating hemp products.

The Alaska Division of Agriculture enacted those in 2023, leading to the lawsuit that was resolved this month.

Plaintiffs had argued that the division’s regulations violate the constitution’s supremacy clause, violate the dormant commerce clause, constitute a regulatory taking and are void for vagueness.

In each case, Reardon ruled against the plaintiffs and in favor of the state.

Early in the legal dispute, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason rejected a request for a preliminary injunction, allowing the state to enforce its regulations as the case progressed.

Already this year, enforcement officers from the Division of Agriculture and Alaska Alcohol and Marijuana Control Office have seized products from three businesses in Anchorage and one in Fairbanks.

Trevor Haynes, president of the Alaska Marijuana Industry Association and manager of a Fairbanks marijuana business, said that while the association has issues with the way the state is regulating hemp, it’s good that the state’s regulations for intoxicating hemp products were preserved in court.

“That is one way to stop the development of a gray area where people will…basically sell marijuana under the guise of hemp,” he said.

He was critical of the state’s decision to require hemp retailers to sell products that contain absolutely no psychoactive substances. Removing all traces requires costly, specialized equipment and generally isn’t economically feasible for small-scale Alaska businesses.

“I have a business that’s purely a hemp business and so I understand it from both sides. It’s unfortunate, and there might be a better solution, but [the regulations are] certainly a way to ensure that there’s no gray area where intoxicating hemp, aka marijuana under another name, can be produced in the state and sold in the state.”

This story was first published by Alaska Beacon.

DEA Promotes Claim That Marijuana Could Be More Likely To Cause Psychosis Than Meth

Photo courtesy of Kimzy Nanney.