Recreational marijuana may still be illegal in Texas, but its close relative, recreational hemp, is everywhere.
More than 5,000 stores across the state sell joints, gummies and drinks loaded with T.H.C., the intoxicating ingredient in cannabis. In some towns, retailers of T.H.C. products outnumber fast food restaurants.
By the end of this week, Gov. Greg Abbott must decide whether to sign what might be the nation’s broadest legal prohibition on intoxicating hemp-derived products, potentially making Texas a leader in the fight against the intoxicant, whose vocal opponents include Texas’s hard-right lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, and California’s liberal standard-bearer, Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Lobbyists opposed to the ban — passed by the Republican-dominated State Legislature last month — have bombarded Mr. Abbott with messages urging a veto. They have stressed the number of jobs created by the nascent industry, whose sales in the state exceed $4 billion a year, industry experts say. And they have highlighted the use of T.H.C. products to cope with post-traumatic stress, chronic pain and other ailments, particularly among military veterans.
The lieutenant governor has accused the industry of peddling drugs.
“They want to hook a generation of young people,” Mr. Patrick said in a news conference at the Texas Capitol last month, standing over a table filled with T.H.C. products.
The fight in Texas highlights what is becoming a national tug of war over how to handle a wave of new hemp products that have been developed since the 2018 farm bill was passed, legislation that was pushed by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and signed by President Trump. The law has had dramatic, unintended consequences.
At the time of the bill’s passage, Mr. McConnell said he was merely championing a farm product from his state, a “distant cousin” to marijuana, he insisted, which would be used for rope, clothes, even a pen, and maybe “hemp-infused beer.”
Instead, an entire edibles industry emerged, yielding economic and political surprises.
In Florida, where some 12,000 stores now have licenses to sell consumable T.H.C. products, Republican lawmakers voted to adopt strict limits last year. Then Gov. Ron DeSantis, a fellow Republican, vetoed the measure.
Hemp-derived T.H.C. products have become popular even in states with robust markets for legal marijuana, which tends to be highly taxed and heavily regulated. In Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, pushed for stronger regulation of hemp, which is competing with legal marijuana. He was blocked by Democratic lawmakers and the progressive mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, who argued that the effort would harm businesses locked out of the legal cannabis boom.
Washington has limited sales of hemp intoxicants to cannabis dispensaries. In California, Mr. Newsom adopted emergency regulations last year that temporarily banned intoxicating hemp products, and he has recently sought to make them permanent. Like Mr. Pritzker, Mr. Newsom has argued that hemp is too accessible to minors and poses more of a public health risk than regulated cannabis.
In Texas, where cannabis is not a legal recreational alternative, Democrats have attacked the T.H.C. ban, which private polling suggests is unpopular.
“This bill is insane,” said State Representative James Talarico, an Austin Democrat who is flirting with a run for U.S. Senate next year. “We are now going backwards to the days of prohibition.”
At the same time, Texas’s limited number of medical marijuana dispensaries have supported the ban, which passed alongside an expansion of the state’s medical marijuana program.
In an interview, Mr. Patrick said he had become energized about hemp-derived intoxicants after hearing from a number of ordinary Texans, in particular a delivery man who brought a new set of drums to Mr. Patrick’s home a year ago.
“He said it was all over the school, and everyone was doing it,” Mr. Patrick recalled of the man, a fellow drummer and father of two girls who did not immediately recognize the lieutenant governor. “That really got my attention.”
Mr. Patrick has since derided the products as being marketed at children, labeled in misleading ways and packed with mind-altering substances. He has been particularly focused on the number of stores located near schools. The state has no minimum age for buying hemp-derived products.
Hemp businesses have proliferated by offering a high while ostensibly staying within the bounds of the 2018 federal law. States like Texas followed with their own “industrial hemp” programs soon after.
Federal law requires that hemp products have less than 0.3 percent Delta-9 T.H.C. — a level thought to be below that which would usually induce a high. Initially, many hemp products featured another compound, cannabidiol, or C.B.D., which does not cause a high.
But in the ensuing years, businesses have focused on T.H.C., and putting more of it into a wider array of products while staying within the federal limits. For industry supporters, the openness of the law is a feature, not a loophole.
“Obviously they meant to spur innovation,” Cynthia Cabrera of the Texas Hemp Business Council, an industry group, said of Congress.
Such innovation has meant that, at shops around Texas, some products contain 5 or 10 milligrams of T.H.C., which can cause some intoxication in adults, while others may have 60 times that.
“These are meant to get you messed up,” said Christian Jefferson, the manager of the TSL Club in Houston, as he looked at a package of 20 “high-potency” gummies, with 600 milligrams of T.H.C. each.
The shop, which recently opened near downtown Houston, has the look and feel of a boutique marijuana dispensary, with white walls and floors, pre-rolled joints and display boxes with hemp-derived cannabis flower. Mr. Jefferson said he had recently visited marijuana dispensaries in Colorado, seeking to emulate their model.
He said his shop followed the law and only sold products with less than the legal limit of T.H.C. by weight. But some smoke shops, he suggested, were less scrupulous.
“It’s those shops that make us look bad,” he said.
Enforcement of the legal limits on T.H.C. has been scattershot. Some local police departments have found violations and made arrests.
“We seized one of the larger warehouses,” said Chief Steve Dye, of the Allen Police Department, which conducted raids around Dallas this week along with Drug Enforcement Administration agents.
But, for the most part, the industry is self-regulated. Producers pay private companies to test the T.H.C. concentration, and there is little state enforcement.
Sheriff Brian Hawthorne of Chambers County, in East Texas near the Louisiana border, said the small town of Winnie along Interstate 10 had seen a rapid influx of new stores — more than the number of fast food restaurants.
“Our convenience stores have turned into head shops,”he said.
Whenever his deputies have had a reason to test T.H.C. products, he said, they come back over the legal limit.
In Congress, the few efforts to undo the 2018 legislation and ban hemp with detectable amounts of T.H.C. have mostly stalled. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has not issued regulations either, “despite continuous pleas from the industry the last seven years,” said Justin Swanson, the president of the Midwest Hemp Council.
Regulation has instead been left to the states. “Generally, states have gone in an ‘open markets’ direction,” said Karmen Hanson, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures. But, he said, more states are considering limits as research emerges about potential harmful effects of T.H.C.
Some in the hemp industry would welcome regulation.
In the East Downtown area of Houston, cans of Wonder Water and other T.H.C. beverages rolled off a new canning machine on a recent weekday at 8th Wonder Brewery and Cannabis.
“The industry hates us because we came out against all the smoke shops, against all the vapes, against the high, high T.H.C. products,” said Ben Meggs, the chief executive of Bayou City Hemp, which bought the brewery, one of the city’s largest, in 2023.
Mr. Meggs and a partner, Jeromy Sherman, left jobs in the oil and gas industry to start the company. Now, they are lobbying Texas leaders to pass age restrictions and milligram limits on the amount of T.H.C., rather than a ban. Their products have between 2.5 and 10 milligrams of T.H.C. per serving.
The company had been planning a major expansion, Mr. Meggs said: A $15 million production facility west of downtown that would increase their production by a factor of 10 and help the company “scale nationally.”
But, for now, the pending ban has put those plans on hold.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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