Some Texans fear a looming THC ban could return them to opioids, illegal options

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Wesley Barnes, 55, a Gulf War veteran, has battled chronic pain and PTSD since his exposure to sarin gas overseas. After leaving the Army in 1994, he spent years dependent on prescribed opiates.

“There’s really nothing at the VA to help with pain or anxiety that isn’t addictive,” said Barnes from his home in Onalaska, about 30 miles east of Huntsville. “I was a zombie on a couch.”

Barnes qualified for Texas’ medical marijuana program, also called the Compassionate Use Program, shortly after its expansion in 2021. He paid $600 in doctor’s visits to sign up, and he paid another $600 to $800 a month to buy legal medical cannabis.

“The doctor assured me he could prescribe me enough,” Barnes recalled. “I said, ‘Sure, you can, but I can't afford it.’”

Barnes briefly turned to purchasing cannabis illegally before discovering he could treat his pain with legal hemp products. He could buy for $40 what cost him $220 on the street.

“Don’t make me go back to the black market,” Barnes said.

Now, as Texas looks to ban hemp products while expanding the state’s medical marijuana program, some chronic pain patients like Barnes say they do not plan to participate in the Compassionate Use Program even if retail THC products become illegal. Their concerns center on the high cost, dosing inflexibility, and civil rights issues raised by the legal alternative.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s veto is the last remaining hurdle for a bill that would ban all products containing tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, likely spelling the end for the state’s short-lived hemp industry.

Senate Bill 3, which prohibits the possession of consumable hemp products that contain any synthetic cannabinoid, often known as delta-8, was a priority this legislative session for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who often denounced the effects of the drug on children. Patrick did not respond to The Texas Tribune’s requests for a comment.

Hemp users, retailers, growers and some Republicans have been urging Abbott to axe the bill. Asked whether Abbott would veto SB 3 by the June 22 deadline, his press secretary Andrew Mahaleris said the governor is still reviewing all pending legislation.

As a concession of sorts to veterans and THC users with chronic conditions, House Bill 46 also passed this legislative session, expanding the types of products, number of dispensaries and qualifying health conditions for the medical marijuana program, as well as reducing some of the costly regulations on dispensaries.

Jervonne Singletary, community relations manager for Austin medical marijuana company Good Blend, said the new rules should translate into lower prices for customers.

“With any limited program at the start, it’s expensive, and then when it slowly expands overtime, and more locations come online, and more operators come online, more cultivation spaces come online, then naturally the prices of the medicine come down,” she said.

Accessibility of hemp-derived THC

William Macbrohn, a 57-year-old Air Force veteran living in San Antonio, worked as a warehouse manager at Habitat for Humanity until psoriatic arthritis prevented him from doing his job.

“I’m in pain 24/7. On a good day, I’m at a five or a six. I mow the lawn and I’m done for two days,” Macbrohn said.

Macbrohn only uses consumable hemp products at night to help ease his pain enough to fall asleep. He found them after years of searching for a product that he believed was neither physically addictive nor had unpredictable mental effects like Ambien.

“Finally, all this time that I've been suffering, I found something that'll help that’s not a synthetic chemical … and they're going to go and take it away,” he said.

Macbrohn qualifies for the state’s Compassionate Use Program but has avoided signing up for it because he regularly carries a concealed gun. He believes carrying a weapon and having a medical marijuana card would be illegal under federal law, though not Texas law. “I don’t want to take that chance,” said Macbrohn, who believes concealed-carrying and using consumable hemp while it’s still legal is permissible.

The issue of the federal legality of both using state-level legal marijuana and owning a gun remains a gray area nationwide. The 2021 case of an El Paso woman convicted of federal crimes for both owning firearms and illegally possessing marijuana was overturned by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in January as “inconsistent with our history and tradition of firearms regulations.” However, the U.S. Department of Justice has appealed cases with similar facts to the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the issue broadly.

Macbrohn’s commitment to abiding by the law extends to the potential hemp ban. Possessing consumable hemp products under the bill would be an expungeable Class C misdemeanor punishable with a fine up to $500 and no jail time.

“If they ban it, then I guess I'm done,” he said.

For the time being, Macbrohn is stockpiling consumable hemp products.

Donna Maniscalco, a 62-year-old Navy veteran living in Lometa, served nearly 19 years as a chaplain's assistant before being discharged for medical reasons in 2009. Stationed for a time in Keflavik, Iceland, where she was repeatedly “picked up by the wind and just literally thrown,” she developed spinal injuries that surgeons have declined to operate on.

Maniscalco says that consumable hemp products allow her to maintain a normal lifestyle and to garden, which helps her mental health. Without them, she’d “probably be in bed all day.”

Maniscalco, like Macbrohn, is also concerned that putting her name on a list could infringe on her right to carry a firearm.

Maniscalco said that if the ban goes into effect she may move in with her parents who live in upstate New York where cannabis and consumable hemp products are widely legal and available.

“I don’t want to go,” she said, “I have friends here. I have two sons and a daughter here. I love the long growing season. I love Texas.”

Barnes said among the allures of hemp products is that they come in different strains that create an ultra-personalized treatment option. Meanwhile, with the medical marijuana program, doctors are prohibited from prescribing cannabis doses higher than 10 milligrams at a time, forcing “the price higher for someone who has more pain,” Barnes said.

Can medical marijuana expand quickly enough?

HB 46 expands the state’s medical marijuana program by including more popular products such as prescribed inhalers and vaping devices and adding nine dispensers to bring the total to 12. It also adds traumatic brain injuries, chronic pain, Crohn’s disease, and terminal illnesses to the list of qualifying conditions.

But the bill's biggest change that could lower prices for consumers will be allowing medical marijuana distributors to store their products in various satellite locations instead of having to drive across the state to return the product to the original dispensary every day.

This has made products more expensive and limited where the medical marijuana program can reach.

Singletary said prices should decline now that medical marijuana companies can stock products overnight in designated locations.

But, she clarified she doesn’t expect medical marijuana to be as accessible as hemp immediately. More than 8,000 retailers in Texas now sell hemp-derived THC products. Before starting the expansion process, the medical marijuana industry will need a few months after the law goes into effect on Sept. 1 to clarify some of the technical details of the new legislation, Singletary said.

“Hemp exploded overnight,” she said, “but we are going to have measured growth.”

While hemp might become illegal in Texas, it still will be federally legal, meaning mail-order hemp products will still be an option for some, but Singletary said she doesn’t feel the need to compete with this industry.

“There are millions of Texans who want quality, regulated products in the state and don’t want to trust mail-order hemp, so the folks who feel like that is the option for them, I respect their decision, I truly do, but those who want doctor prescribed cannabis that’s produced in the state that is regulated, tested, and validated, then come to our program,” she said.

Regulation versus a ban

Since the wave of recreational marijuana legalization began with Colorado and Washington in 2012, large scale studies have repeatedly found that marijuana use in general increases when cannabis is legal. Other studies have shown that use decreases when cannabis becomes criminalized, suggesting Texas will likely follow a similar path despite some users saying they plan on circumventing the THC ban.

For more than a century, government officials and public health experts have debated the efficacy of cannabis prohibition in achieving a variety of aims.

Civil rights attorneys argue that drug criminalization comes with a civil liberties cost. A 2020 ACLU report found that “more than six million [marijuana related] arrests occurred between 2010 and 2018” and that "Black people are 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, notwithstanding comparable usage rates."

Kirsten Budwine, a policy attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said, “This is not just bad policy, but a step backward into the failed logic of the War on Drugs … What it really does is turn a regulatory issue into a criminal one.”

Decades of studies affirm the utility of cannabinoids in treating chronic pain. A 2017 review of over 10,000 studies found “substantial evidence” that cannabinoids are good for treating chronic pain and “moderate evidence” that extensive cannabinoid use impairs memory and attention.

Medical experts agree that incidences of cannabis-induced psychosis like the ones Patrick has referenced in press conferences, do occur, especially when exposing high-THC products to a broad population without safeguards.

Last year, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine responded to growing concerns about the expansion of cannabis use in the country by calling for unregulated hemp-derived products to be “regulated in the same manner as other intoxicating cannabis products” at the federal level. The report also called for public education campaigns about the risks of cannabis and for states to prevent underaged people from buying the drug, rather than outright policy bans of THC products or the criminalization of cannabis possession.

Users and the hemp industry had told Texas lawmakers that they would welcome regulations to the hemp industry to address those concerns, rather than a complete ban.

Barnes fears that the new era of illegal hemp could create even more dangers than before.

“Do they want me to have to go back to some guy on the street corner and hope it doesn't have fentanyl in it? Or get shot for 200 bucks or whatever?” he said.

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