The Texas Department of State Health Services has formally extended the emergency rules governing consumable hemp products through March 30, 2026, as reflected in the February 6, 2026 Texas Register. These rules—first adopted in October 2025—remain in effect without substantive change. No new restrictions were added. No permanent rules were finalized.
This matters because the state had a choice. It could have locked in final rules and forced the issue legally and politically. Instead, it chose to extend temporary authority. That is not an accident. It is a pause.
The emergency extension keeps the current guardrails in place, including age-based sales restrictions, while avoiding a permanent regulatory position that would invite immediate legal challenge and legislative backlash. In plain terms, the state is holding its ground without planting a flag.
What this action does not do is just as important. It does not settle the future of hemp regulation in Texas. It does not expand enforcement authority. It does not criminalize new conduct. It does not resolve disputes over testing standards, product categories, or agency overreach. It simply preserves the status quo—briefly.
That brief preservation is the opportunity.
Emergency extensions are breathing room, not absolution. They create time for the industry to show whether it can operate credibly under scrutiny or whether the state will feel justified in tightening the vise. Every regulator and elected official understands this distinction, even if they do not say it out loud.
This is the moment when voluntary compliance stops being a philosophical preference and becomes a strategic necessity.
Certified training programs, documented age-gating, truth in labeling, truth in testing, verified brands, and clean supply chains are no longer just internal best practices. They are evidence. They are proof points that can be shown to the Governor’s Office and to legislators who are still persuadable. They answer the only question that really matters right now: Can this industry govern itself responsibly if allowed to continue operating?
Everything done during this window will be noticed. Good conduct compounds. Bad conduct will be amplified and used as justification for permanent restrictions that will be far harder to undo. There is no private behavior in this environment. There is only behavior that strengthens the case for rational regulation, or behavior that hands opponents exactly what they want.
Texas has not slammed the door. It has left it cracked open.
Whether that crack becomes a stable regulatory framework or snaps shut into overreach depends on what the industry does next. This window is real. It is short. And it should not be squandered.
The continued use of emergency rule renewals, rather than adoption of final rules, is not accidental and it is not merely procedural housekeeping. It reflects a deliberate choice by the agency to avoid locking itself into a permanent regulatory position while legal, political, and policy variables remain unsettled.
Final rules carry consequences that emergency rules do not. Once finalized, they invite immediate judicial review on a fuller record, expose the agency to greater litigation risk, and signal institutional confidence that the policy is both lawful and durable. By contrast, emergency renewals preserve flexibility. They allow the agency to maintain interim guardrails while avoiding a definitive commitment that could be overturned, enjoined, or politically repudiated.
The repeated reliance on emergency authority is therefore a tacit acknowledgment that the regulatory environment remains unstable. It suggests that DSHS understands its position is being watched closely by courts, the Legislature, and the Governor’s Office, and that moving too aggressively or too permanently could backfire. Emergency renewals buy time. They keep the status quo intact without forcing a showdown.
Politically, this matters. The absence of final rules signals that the industry has not lost the argument, even if it has not yet won it outright. The state is not declaring the matter settled. Instead, it is holding space—narrow space, but real space—while broader questions about statutory authority, public safety, economic impact, and administrative overreach continue to percolate.
That pause creates what amounts to breathing room, and breathing room only has value if it is used deliberately.
From a strategic standpoint, this is the window in which the industry must demonstrate maturity, seriousness, and good faith. Everything being done now—certified compliance education, standardized training for owners and employees, verified brand programs, age-gating protocols, and documentation of best practices—is not just about internal improvement. It is evidence. It is proof of concept. It is the answer to the unspoken question regulators and legislators are asking: Can this industry govern itself credibly if given the chance?
This is particularly relevant for engagement with Greg Abbott’s office and with legislators who remain persuadable rather than hostile. Emergency renewals create space for education. They allow time to show—not merely assert—that the industry has taken concrete steps to address safety, youth access, product integrity, and transparency. They also allow elected officials to absorb that information without having to immediately defend a yes-or-no vote.
At the same time, the moment comes with discipline requirements. The industry should assume that everything it does is being observed—by regulators, by lawmakers, by opponents, and by the press. There is no such thing as a private experiment right now. Good behavior compounds. Bad behavior will be amplified and weaponized. Compliance efforts that are real, documented, and independently verifiable strengthen the case for reasonable regulation. Sloppy conduct, internal infighting, or opportunism weaken it.
Legally, the signal is equally clear. Emergency renewals suggest that the agency is aware its footing is not yet secure. That awareness creates leverage, but only if the industry continues to build a record showing that education, certification, and verification are not theoretical aspirations but operating realities. Courts care about facts on the ground. Legislators care about political risk. The Governor’s Office cares about both.
In short, emergency rule renewals are the state pressing the pause button—not out of generosity, but out of caution. The industry has been given time, not absolution. Used wisely, this period can materially improve the odds of a durable, lawful, and rational regulatory framework. Used poorly, it will be cited later as proof that the opportunity was squandered.
The work now is not defensive panic. It is methodical proof-building. And in this environment, proof has a way of moving people who were previously content to sit on the fence.
For years, kratom existed in a regulatory gray zone—debated, periodically regulated, but rarely confronted through full-scale state enforcement. That equilibrium broke on February 6, 2026, when the Texas Attorney General filed suit in Ellis County seeking an ex parte temporary restraining order, temporary and permanent injunctions, and civil penalties against two smoke shop operators accused of selling illegal kratom products .
The State’s opening claim is blunt and unambiguous:
“Kratom is addictive and deadly.”
According to the petition, Texas health officials and lawmakers are no longer dealing with traditional botanical kratom, but with what the filing describes as “potent and dangerous concentrations of synthetic alkaloids” that bear little resemblance to the plant historically consumed in Southeast Asia .
The lawsuit alleges that products sold at Smokey’s Paradise retail locations contained 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) at levels that “significantly exceed[] the 2% statutory limit” imposed by the Texas Kratom Consumer Health and Safety Protection Act. In some cases, laboratory testing allegedly found 7-OH making up “96% of the tablet”—a concentration the State characterizes as “forty-nine times the legal limit” .
Even more consequential is the State’s allegation that several products contained mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, a compound the petition states “is not a natural alkaloid present in botanical kratom leaves” and “must be synthetically produced” . Under Texas law, the presence of synthetic alkaloids alone is sufficient to render a kratom product illegal.
The petition identifies specific branded products allegedly purchased by investigators and sent for independent laboratory testing, including Dozo Perks 7-OH tablets, 7OHMZ 7-OH tablets, 7Tabz 7-OH tablets, 7O’Heaven 7-OH liquid shots, and Tahi Mahji tablets .
The State does not frame these allegations as technical violations. Instead, it situates them squarely within an opioid-risk narrative. The filing describes 7-OH as “a potent mu-opioid receptor agonist with pharmacological properties similar to morphine and fentanyl” and warns that products containing concentrated 7-OH can cause “respiratory depression, physical dependence, and withdrawal symptoms characteristic of classical opioids” .
From a legal standpoint, the enforcement posture is as aggressive as the rhetoric. The Attorney General argues that when a statute is violated, courts need not weigh competing harms. Citing Texas precedent, the petition states that “the status quo can never be the continuing violation of a law,” and that the State’s “inability to enforce its duly enacted laws clearly inflicts irreparable harm” .
That framing matters. It allows the State to seek immediate injunctive relief without the delays typically associated with protracted litigation. In practical terms, it means retailers can be ordered to stop selling an entire product category before any final ruling on the merits.
For legislators, the lawsuit provides something equally valuable: a ready-made factual record. The petition assembles poison-center data, FDA warnings, DEA classifications, and laboratory findings into a narrative that recasts kratom not as an herbal supplement with compliance problems, but as an emerging synthetic opioid threat. Once that framing is adopted, legislative outcomes tend to follow.
The implications extend beyond kratom alone. Regulators do not evaluate retail compliance in isolation. Stores alleged to sell illegal synthetic products are more likely to be viewed as systemic risks, a perception that can spill over into inspections, licensing decisions, and enforcement priorities affecting other product categories, including hemp-derived THC.
The Ellis County case is therefore best understood not as an isolated dispute, but as a template. It shows how kratom enforcement is likely to proceed and how legislative debates will be shaped going forward. The State has moved past warnings and into injunctions, past regulation and toward elimination.
For an industry accustomed to regulatory ambiguity, the message is suddenly precise. The kratom debate has entered its endgame, and the first decisive move has already been filed in court.
Texas lawmakers who once pushed for a total ban on hemp-derived THC products are now signaling a shift toward regulating the market instead of outlawing it — setting the stage for major hemp policy changes in the 2027 legislative session.
Earlier attempts by state leaders — especially a high-profile push to ban all consumable hemp THC products — failed to become law in recent legislative sessions. Instead of outright prohibition, elected officials are increasingly talking about building a regulatory framework that could offer clarity, safety standards and oversight for THC-containing hemp products.
At a recent cannabis policy conference, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle acknowledged that the status quo — where intoxicating hemp products occupy a legal gray area — isn’t working for businesses, public safety officials or consumers. Republican Rep. Drew Darby (R-San Angelo) said his view evolved after hearing testimony from veterans, small business owners and everyday Texans about the role hemp plays in their lives and livelihoods.
“I was predisposed toward prohibition,” Darby said, “but seeing the real-world impact — people finding relief, small businesses investing their futures — transformed how I think about this. Regulation, not prohibition, is the answer.”
The shift comes after years of debate in Austin over how to handle intoxicating hemp products like delta-8, delta-9 and THCA flower. Lawmakers previously advanced a bill that would have banned nearly all consumable THC products, but Governor Greg Abbott vetoed that measure, saying an outright ban was too extreme and could face legal challenges.
Lawmakers and industry stakeholders now expect the next step to be developing a comprehensive regulatory system — something akin to how alcohol and tobacco are overseen — instead of trying to ban hemp-derived THC outright. That could include standardized testing, age verification requirements and clear labeling rules designed to protect consumers while keeping the billions-dollar hemp market alive.
As Texas observers look ahead to 2027, many within the cannabis industry see this emerging regulatory approach as a practical compromise that could offer long-sought clarity for producers, retailers, and consumers alike — especially after years of contention over how hemp products should be treated under state law.
In a surprising move this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to launch a federal review into the health effects of cellphone and wireless radiation, a topic long dismissed by government science. At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly removed longstanding webpages that said cellphone radiation posed no known health risk.
Kennedy’s decision has reignited debate over whether everyday wireless technology — from cell phones to Wi-Fi — may contribute to cancer or other health issues. Official federal agencies like the FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Cancer Institute have previously maintained there’s no solid evidence that radio-frequency (RF) radiation causes disease, and those existing statements are still up on some sites. But the removal of old FDA safety pages suggests a shift in tone and could clear the way for new research and possible policy changes.
Critics say this might just reopen old arguments without leading to real regulation, while supporters argue it’s a long-overdue reassessment of decades of research and lobbying influence. The new federal review — backed in part by the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative — aims to examine gaps in the science and push beyond outdated conclusions.
Whether this marks a genuine turning point in how wireless technology is regulated — or simply stirs up more controversy — remains to be seen, but one thing’s certain: the cellphone radiation debate is back on the front burner.
The Texas Supreme Court’s hearing in Texas Department of State Health Services v. Sky Marketing had the calm, deliberate feel of a court doing what courts are supposed to do: strip away the noise, ignore the moral-panic political theatrics across the plaza in the east wing of the Capitol, and read the statute because that’s what matters. The case arrives dressed in administrative-law vocabulary—standing, sovereign immunity, ultra vires, temporary injunction mechanics—but everyone in the room understood the real stakes. Texas legalized hemp in 2019, a regulated market formed in reliance on that law, and then an agency announced a reinterpretation that snapped the market’s spine. The question now is whether that kind of regulatory whiplash can be insulated from judicial review by calling it a “clarification.”
I’ve watched this dispute evolve since the beginning, from district court record-building to today’s argument. That history matters because what looks like a narrow legal fight from a distance is, up close, a case about institutional limits and whether agencies may do by administrative maneuver what the Legislature would not—or could not—do by statute. And this case potentially sets the stage for a challenge to the latest iteration of government by gaslight—the DSHS proposed permanent hemp rules (see previous article.)
The justices’ questions signaled an important choice point. They were not there to referee policy preferences about delta-8, hemp-derived intoxicants, or the cultural anxieties legislators like to launder through “for the children” messaging. They were there to test the boundaries of delegated authority, the coherence of the State’s standing theory, and the legitimacy of using regulatory communication as a substitute for formal rulemaking.
The State’s Framing: “Longstanding Efforts” and a “Clarification”
Arguing for the State, Ryan Scanlon, in his capacity as Assistant Solicitor General, opened with a familiar frame: Texas has long tried to control THC, “the high-inducing substance naturally found in the cannabis plant,” and Texas’s hemp program was never meant to be “a legally permissible vehicle for the proliferation of synthetic and intoxicating forms of that drug.”
That opening is not accidental. It tries to position the case as a continuity story—Texas doing what Texas has always done—so that the agency’s 2021 action reads as inevitable maintenance rather than a material shift. Scanlon pushed that theme hard. On the merits, he argued the Commissioner did not “place delta-8 on the schedule,” because delta-8 is simply “a form of THC,” and “THC has always been on the schedule.” What happened, he insisted, was “a clarification.”
The legal strategy underneath that word choice is obvious. If it was only a clarification, then the case starts to look like an attempt to litigate policy through injunctive relief, rather than a challenge to an agency action that exceeded statutory authority. If it was only a clarification, the State wants the Court to treat the economic disruption as either irrelevant or not fairly traceable to the Commissioner’s action. If it was only a clarification, the injunction looks like an improper universal freeze of “the effectiveness of the amendments,” instead of a conventional restraint on unlawful enforcement.
The justices did not accept that premise as a given. They treated “clarification” as a claim that must survive contact with consequences.
Standing: The State’s Escape Hatch Meets the Real World
Scanlon leaned heavily on standing and sovereign immunity. His core point was that the Commissioner sets the schedules but does not enforce the criminal law. Without criminal enforcement authority, the State argued, challengers cannot establish standing to sue this official, and sovereign immunity bars the suit.
The Court immediately started probing the reality behind that doctrinal posture. One justice asked the basic question any regulated business would ask: if a party may be prosecuted for violating the rule, does it matter who initiates it? Scanlon answered that it does matter, invoking this Court’s 2020 reasoning in Abbott—if the official you sued cannot bring a criminal prosecution, you may lack standing.
That line of argument has a certain internal elegance, but it runs into the way regulation actually works in Texas. Modern regulatory harm does not wait politely for an indictment. It arrives through licensing consequences, market signals, official statements, and the chilling effect of uncertainty.
Justice Rebeca Huddle went straight to that point. “What about the civil side?” she asked. “Don’t they have authority to revoke a license, issue monetary penalties? What about them?”
Scanlon conceded there is civil authority, but then tried to escape it: those allegations, he said, were not pleaded, and in any event the civil licensing scheme “has nothing to do with the Controlled Substances Act.”
That answer prompted something close to the central standing issue in this case: if the Commissioner’s scheduling decision changes what products are treated as lawful, how can the State insist there is no traceable injury to regulated businesses? Justice Crosby pressed that logic, noting the respondents’ evidence that they lost money because they could no longer market certain products. Scanlon’s response was essentially that licensing only applies once the product is already a legal hemp product—and therefore scheduling cannot be the cause of their injury.
The bench treated that as a merits question wearing a standing costume. If the whole fight is whether the Commissioner’s action reclassified what counts as a legal hemp product, then saying “licensing only applies to legal hemp products” just restates the dispute. You can’t resolve standing by assuming your own conclusion.
A separate justice sharpened it further: the Court recognizes “standing for a pocketbook injury,” and if businesses are “losing money because of something your client did,” why isn’t that enough? Scanlon tried to cabin pocketbook standing to rate cases and reimbursement settings where the agency action directly sets a number. He argued this case lacks that directness.
That answer did not appear to satisfy the bench’s concern, because the Court kept returning to consequence: the economic disruption was not hypothetical; it was immediate; and it tracked the agency’s public posture. When Scanlon was asked whether the Commissioner had “threatened enforcement,” he responded bluntly: “The Commissioner has not threatened enforcement.”
That is where the State’s standing theory begins to look like an attempt to convert regulatory power into accountability-free power. If an agency can announce a new interpretation that chills the market, triggers compliance retreat, and collapses investment, and then claim there is no standing because it did not personally make an arrest, the Court is left endorsing a model of governance where the most economically destructive tools are the least reviewable.
The justices’ questions suggested they understand that trap.
The Court Tests the “Clarification” Story
The most important pressure the Court applied today was conceptual. The justices kept returning to the mismatch between the State’s description of its action and the industry’s lived reality.
Justice Bland asked one of the most consequential questions: what is the State’s best argument that treating delta-8 as controlled does not conflict with the definition of hemp in the Texas farm bill?
Scanlon’s response was to double down: delta-8 wasn’t “placed” on the schedule; it is THC; THC was always scheduled; the Commissioner merely clarified after federal changes.
Then came the chemistry and process discussion. Bland asked whether delta-8 is derived or extracted from the cannabis plant. Scanlon answered with a layered explanation: not directly from hemp, he suggested, but from CBD extracted from hemp, with a synthesis process described by CDC and FDA. In other words, delta-8 in commercial form is typically manufactured through chemical conversion rather than extracted as-is at scale.
Scanlon leaned on the DEA observation that in a natural hemp plant under the delta-9 threshold, delta-8 appears only in trace amounts; therefore, when Texas law talks about THCs in hemp, it is talking about naturally occurring trace presence, not manufactured potency.
That framing is politically useful—“trace amounts good, manufactured intoxicants bad”—but it has a legal problem: the Legislature wrote a definition that includes derivatives and isomers and drew the line at delta-9 concentration. If the Legislature intended to prohibit conversion manufacturing or to outlaw certain isomers regardless of delta-9, it had ample opportunity to say so. The State is now asking the Court to infer a narrower legislative intent from federal agency commentary and chemical process descriptions.
That is precisely the sort of move Texas courts scrutinize when assessing ultra vires conduct.
Taylor’s Presentation: Calm, Clear, and Commanding
When Amanda Taylor rose for Sky Marketing, the tonal shift in the courtroom was immediate. Some advocates respond to questions as if they’re being interrupted. Taylor responded as if the justices were doing her a favor by letting her show her work. She framed the case where it belongs: “the bounds of the agency authority expressly delegated by our Legislature.” Policy debates about hemp might be “interesting or controversial,” she said, but the Court’s job is to say what the law means and apply it.
That opening did two things at once. It reduced the State’s moralizing posture to background noise, and it invited the justices to act like judges rather than referees in a culture fight.
Justice Bland asked the key threshold question: is the Commissioner’s decision subject to judicial review? Taylor answered without flinching: yes. Then she did what excellent appellate lawyers do: she took the State’s statutory hook—subsection G—and narrowed it to its actual scope. Subsection G, she explained, addresses the decision whether to conform with federal scheduling changes; it does not authorize the Commissioner to “unilaterally modify the schedule and make it inconsistent with existing Texas law.”
Taylor’s most effective moment came when she confronted the “clarification” label. If the State truly believes no legally significant change occurred, why is the action ultra vires? Taylor’s answer was crisp and procedural: subsection G permits only one type of change—conform or decline. Any “alteration other than the federal conformance change” must proceed under subsection B, which requires notice and hearing on the modification itself, not merely on an objection.
Then she layered in the additional statutory failures: missing findings, failure to notify other agencies with overlapping authority within ten days, and lack of required approval by the Executive Commissioner of HHSC. “None of that occurred.”
Her delivery was exactly what you want when you’re asking a court to enforce limits on agency power: clear, smooth, unruffled, and relentlessly grounded in the statutory roadmap. She sounded like someone who had read the whole record, not just the parts that make her point.
The Legislature’s Hemp Line: Delta-9 as the Bright Line
Taylor also anchored the case in the 2019 hemp framework in a way that forced the Court to confront the Legislature’s design. The statute, she argued, says hemp and THC in hemp are not controlled substances, with legality limited by delta-9: above 0.3% delta-9 is marijuana; below is hemp and not controlled.
That matters because the State’s position tries to smuggle in a different legality test: not the delta-9 threshold, but a broader concept of “THC isomers and analogs” depending on origin or manufacturing method. Once you move away from the statute’s bright line and toward agency-driven categorization, you effectively rewrite the Legislature’s compromise.
Justice Young pressed on delegation—this is an area where the Legislature delegates heavily, so why do we need the statutory limits Taylor was invoking? Taylor’s response was grounded in the 2019 statute’s explicitness: the definition includes derivatives and isomers, and it defines processing and manufacturing in a way that contemplates a regulated consumable market, including conversion and manufacturing.
She also addressed the State’s “synthetics” obsession with a controlled burn. “This lawsuit is not about synthetics,” she said. The State used that word “throughout the State’s brief,” but Sky Marketing did not seek relief tied to that language. This case was brought by businesses and consumers producing and using “legal consumable products made from naturally derived substances.”
That was not mere positioning. It was a strategic narrowing designed to keep the Court from being pulled into a broader political fight the State would prefer to litigate in moral terms.
The Injunction and the Court’s Discomfort with a Universal Freeze
Another line of questioning the Court pressed with particular care concerned the form of the temporary injunction itself. One justice focused on whether the order had slipped from party-specific relief into something broader, noting that it appeared to restrain the “effectiveness of the amendments,” rather than simply prohibiting their enforcement against the plaintiffs. Framed that way, the concern was not semantic but structural: whether the injunction operated in rem rather than in personam.
Taylor met the question head-on. The injunction, she explained, was prospective relief designed to prevent ongoing harm while the merits are litigated, not a judicial repeal of the statute or rules. The language may have been broad, but its function was conventional: to restrain unlawful enforcement of an ultra vires action pending judicial review. She pointed the Court to precedent recognizing that courts routinely prevent continued harm from invalid agency action without purporting to legislate for nonparties.
The State countered that the injunction crossed a constitutional line. By enjoining the “effectiveness” of the scheduling amendments, it argued, the trial court had issued relief that functioned universally, not merely against the named defendants. That, in the State’s telling, transformed a routine injunction into a policy freeze—precisely the sort of relief Texas courts have grown wary of in recent years.
What made the exchange consequential was not the labels, but the Court’s evident concern with how injunctions operate in practice. Texas courts have repeatedly cautioned against orders that look less like dispute resolution and more like administrative suspension. The justices’ questions reflected that unease.
In rebuttal, Scanlon appeared less prepared on this ground. He acknowledged that he had not fully briefed the universal-injunction issue and asked for the opportunity to address it later. That moment lingered, because it reinforced a pattern already visible in the argument: a reliance on formal categorization where the Court was probing functional effect.
The critique of the State’s presentation crystallized there. Scanlon’s advocacy was confident and technically fluent, but it repeatedly assumed that doctrinal labels—“clarification,” “no enforcement authority,” “separate licensing scheme”—were sufficient answers, even when they failed to account for what actually happened to the regulated community. As the bench pressed on scope and consequence, the answers drifted toward procedural abstraction.
Taylor, by contrast, made the Court’s work easier. She offered clean handles rather than evasions: a statute with a clear roadmap, identifiable procedural failures, and a theory of harm that aligned with how regulation actually operates in the real world. That difference in approach mattered, because the Court was plainly less interested in how the injunction was described than in whether it functioned as a proper exercise of equity.The Hearing’s Quiet Theme: Consequences Count
Perhaps the most telling aspect of the argument was how frequently the justices returned to consequences—economic injury, compliance whiplash, and the real-world effects of regulatory signaling. The State tried to confine the case to the absence of criminal enforcement and the formal separateness of licensing from scheduling. The bench kept tugging back toward what happens when an agency speaks and the market believes it must obey.
Taylor captured the point in her standing discussion, emphasizing that the agency’s website statement operates as a threat and that the State has not disclaimed intent to enforce. The record, she noted, showed “immediate economic disruption” once the policy was announced: businesses stopped selling products; reputations were harmed; layoffs were considered.
When the Chief Justice closed the argument, the case was submitted with the sense that the Court had identified the case’s true center of gravity: not whether delta-8 is controversial, but whether the law permits an agency to accomplish a substantive change under the banner of refusing a federal change, without following the statutory procedure for changing Texas law.
Why This Case Matters to the Structure of Texas Government
Texas has lived for years inside a mismatch: the Legislature wrote a definition and a bright line in 2019, the market organized itself around that line, and then agencies and political actors tried to claw back ground through reinterpretation and enforcement posture. That conflict will not end until either the Legislature redraws the statute clearly or the courts enforce the boundaries of delegation.
If the State’s theory prevails, agencies gain a path to reshape statutory meaning through public posture and interpretive maneuvers, insulated by standing doctrine so long as they avoid being the official who files charges. That model expands administrative power while shrinking accountability.
If Sky Marketing’s theory prevails, the Court reaffirms something Texas needs right now: delegated authority has limits, and those limits still bind even when politics gets impatient.
Amanda Taylor argued that position with clarity, smoothness, and a calm command of the record and the law that never wavered. Ryan Scanlon, serving as Assistant Solicitor General, offered a theory that was formally neat but repeatedly struggled to match consequence with characterization. The justices noticed. They pressed. They circled back. They kept asking the same question from different angles until the contradiction could no longer hide behind labels.
Let’s hope that kind of judicial rigor still counts where it matters.
Author
The author was an initial plaintiff and later a witness in this case at the district court level and assisted in recruiting some of the plaintiffs and counsel. At the time, he served as Executive Director of the Texas Hemp Federation and worked closely with the former leadership of Hometown Hero, whose parent company, Sky Marketing, is the named respondent here.
That perspective is offered not to personalize the outcome, but to explain why the Court’s questions resonated so strongly. The author has seen, under oath and in real time, how regulatory ambiguity is created and how quickly it can destabilize manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers, and retailers operating in good faith. The issues before the Supreme Court today are the same ones the trial court confronted years ago, and they remain the right ones.
High Times publisher Josh Kesselman is calling out what he sees as a coordinated fear campaign against cannabis, driven less by public health concerns than by market pressure.
n a recent interview with TMZ, Kesselman pushed back hard against viral stories claiming cannabis use is causing people to vomit violently, a phenomenon often described online as “scromiting.” According to Kesselman, the timing is not accidental.
“Yeah, that’s big alcohol going nuts on us,” he said. “That all really kicked in once those beverages hit.”
Kesselman was referring to the rapid rise of THC beverages, including cannabis seltzers, sodas, and tonics, a category that has grown quickly as alcohol consumption in the U.S. continues to decline. He framed the backlash not as a moral or medical debate, but as a business one.
“Big alcohol is our biggest foe right now that we know of,” Kesselman said. “And it’s just about money and nothing else.”
At the center of Kesselman’s criticism is the contrast between how cannabis risks are portrayed and how alcohol’s well-documented harms are treated.
“Imagine this,” he said. “Big alcohol’s out there telling people that weed’s going to make you puke. Alcohol saying another product might make 0.3% of people possibly puke if they smoke too much of it.”
Kesselman did not deny that cannabis can cause adverse reactions in some users. But he challenged the selective outrage and sensational framing.
“Like, dude, I have puked so many times from drinking,” he said. “I have ‘scromited’ by drinking too freaking much and then trying to eat my way out of it, which doesn’t work.”
For Kesselman, the issue is not whether cannabis has risks, but whether those risks are being discussed honestly or exaggerated to slow competition.
“The truth of the plant and what it does for our community, that’s what matters,” he said. “The truth ain’t about scromiting.”
“Compete fairly or get in the game”
Rather than calling for protectionism or special treatment for cannabis, Kesselman made a straightforward argument: let consumers decide.
“Let’s compete fairly,” he said. “If people like weed better, let them buy the weed.”
His message to alcohol companies was blunt.
“If you’re so concerned about it, make your own beverages,” Kesselman said. “Get into the weed game. Compete with those guys. You’ll do better anyway. But stop trying to hold the rest of us back.”
He also acknowledged that consolidation pressures do not come only from alcohol, noting that large agricultural interests and even major cannabis companies may benefit from heavier regulation that limits who can participate.
“Some of the big cannabis companies will be in there too,” he said. “Because they want it all to be regulated and given just to them.”
Context: CHS is real, but panic sells
Kesselman’s comments echo arguments High Times has made previously about the way cannabis harms are covered in mainstream media.
In December, High Times published “Big Alcohol Says Weed Will Make You Puke? Hmm…,” which examined the surge of alarmist reporting around Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome, or CHS. The article made clear that CHS is a real and documented condition, while also showing how it is rare, often misrepresented, and frequently stripped of statistical context in headlines designed to shock.
That piece also traced how the term “scromiting” originated on social media rather than in medical literature, and how dramatic language tends to travel faster than nuance.
Kesselman’s TMZ comments extend that critique, shifting the focus from media dynamics to market dynamics.
“This is about money,” he said. “Nothing else.”
A familiar pattern
Cannabis replacing alcohol is not a theoretical threat. Survey data, sales figures, and cultural trends have shown a steady shift, particularly among younger consumers, toward cannabis as a substitute for drinking. As that shift accelerates, Kesselman believes pushback is inevitable.
“We just want everyone to be merry,” he said. “And healthier, with the spirit of cannabis.”
For High Times, the position remains consistent. Acknowledge real risks. Reject hysteria. Follow the incentives.
Or, as Kesselman put it more bluntly: stop trying to scare people and start competing.
As the hemp industry approaches the Department of State Health Services’ public comment hearing, the broader context deserves attention. Texas’s system of administrative law was built for moments exactly like this one. The Open Meetings Act, the Public Information Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act reflect a deliberate choice by the Legislature to require transparency, discipline, and accountability when agencies exercise delegated power. Those statutes exist to ensure that regulation proceeds through law rather than impulse, pressure, or improvisation.
Texas adopted this framework after learning hard lessons about secret government and unchecked discretion. The Legislature responded by insisting on process: notice, public participation, reasoned explanation, and a record capable of review. Administrative authority in Texas flows through statute and executive direction, and it carries obligations along with power. Agencies earn legitimacy by following those rules, especially when public controversy and political pressure intensify.
That institutional understanding shaped how many of us learned the Capitol. As a former staffer to Sen. Chet Brooks, who was Dean of the Senate when I worked there in the late 1980s and early 90s, I was taught that transparency statutes function as working tools rather than symbolic commitments. Administrative law preserved legislative authority over time by binding agencies to clear procedures and defensible reasoning. Process mattered because outcomes endure only when built on lawful foundations.
The current DSHS hemp rulemaking places those principles squarely at issue.
The comments submitted by the Texas Hemp Federation and CRAFT address the structure and justification of the proposed rules rather than the concept of regulation itself. The proposal expands financial burdens, inspection authority, and scientific consequence while weakening procedural guardrails that support predictable compliance and judicial durability. That combination raises questions about delegation, justification, and adherence to administrative discipline.
Delegated authority frames the analysis. DSHS regulates hemp pursuant to legislative grants set out primarily in Chapter 443 of the Health and Safety Code. Rulemaking that reshapes market participation through large fixed fees, expanded inspections, and testing definitions that determine legality requires a clear, evidence-based explanation tying each mechanism to a statutory objective. The proposal provides little of that connective tissue. Regulatory structure without demonstrated nexus drifts away from implementation and toward policy substitution, a function reserved to the Legislature.
The proposed fee structure illustrates the point. Manufacturer and retail fees set at levels disconnected from documented program costs operate as threshold barriers rather than calibrated cost recovery. Such structures narrow the regulated market through attrition, reduce visibility, and concentrate enforcement risk. Texas law places taxation authority with the Legislature, and sound administration requires agencies to disclose the basis for substantial financial impositions. Transparency in this context supports both legality and effective oversight.
Inspection authority presents similar concerns. The proposal enlarges access without defining triggers, scope, documentation limits, or escalation pathways. Inspections function best as predictable compliance audits governed by published standards. Undefined discretion produces variance across inspectors and agencies, destabilizes compliance planning, and erodes trust. Texas administrative law developed precisely to prevent enforcement regimes that depend on informal expectations rather than written rules.
The testing framework carries the greatest consequence.
The proposal redefines “total THC,” expands analyte obligations, and removes acceptance and notice provisions that previously stabilized the compliance environment. Laboratory results determine legality under this structure, which places the testing system itself at the center of the regulatory architecture. Method selection, reporting conventions, treatment of measurement uncertainty, and acceptance criteria directly shape enforcement outcomes. Clear decision rules and standardized disclosure support fairness and predictability. Ambiguity produces variance and manufactured noncompliance.
Defining legality through “total THC” while leaving method fitness and interpretive rules unspecified allows identical samples to yield divergent results based on analytical technique and conversion assumptions. Enforcement outcomes then depend on internal expectations rather than published standards. Administrative law addresses this problem by requiring agencies to specify how scientific measures translate into legal conclusions.
Measurement uncertainty underscores the issue. Uncertainty functions as a legal boundary condition. Agencies bear responsibility for articulating how uncertainty is calculated, applied, and audited. Clear rules produce consistency across laboratories and inspectors. Silence transfers decision-making to ad hoc interpretation.
Public participation also plays a central role. The Administrative Procedure Act requires meaningful opportunity to engage, including practical access to hearings and submission processes. Participation improves rule quality by surfacing operational consequences and testing assumptions before they harden into enforcement. Durable rules emerge from records that reflect genuine engagement rather than procedural minimalism.
Executive direction further clarifies the limits of this rulemaking.
Governor Greg Abbott issued Executive Order GA-56 with defined objectives. The order directs agencies to strengthen age verification, testing integrity, and enforcement within the lawful hemp market while preserving a regulated channel that remains visible and auditable. That instruction carries weight within Texas’s single-executive system. Agencies serve under the Governor’s authority and remain accountable to it.
The current posture of DSHS suggests responsiveness to sustained pressure from Charles Perry and Dan Patrick rather than adherence to the Governor’s directive and statutory limits. Senate rhetoric has framed hemp as an industrial fiber program and characterized the cannabinoid market as industry indulgence. That framing conflicts with the statute enacted, the definitions adopted, and the regulatory framework that followed.
Despite a clear legislative record, Perry has repeatedly asserted that HB 1325 authorized hemp solely for industrial fiber. He has presented that view as legislative intent rather than personal interpretation and dismissed the lawful cannabinoid market as industry excess. The statute, its definitions, and subsequent implementation tell a different story. His public statements reflect preference rather than enacted law.
State agencies serve the people of Texas. They also operate within a political environment that invites pressure. Texas maintains a single executive authority. The Governor occupies that role. The Lieutenant Governor wields significant influence within the legislative branch. Executive power remains vested elsewhere. Governor Abbott’s recent veto provided a vivid reminder of where that authority resides. Agencies that align enforcement posture with legislative grievance rather than executive direction assume institutional risk.
Recent history confirms the point.
In Sky Marketing v. Hellerstedt, DSHS faced a temporary injunction after pursuing a de facto Delta-8 ban through administrative maneuvering rather than legislative authorization. The district court focused on process failures and absence of delegated authority. That case remains pending before the Texas Supreme Court. The procedural lesson endures regardless of outcome. Courts examine records.
For that reason, we filed detailed comments and will testify. Administrative records preserve standing. They document who engaged, who explained consequences, and how agencies responded. The industry’s nickname for the Department—Dirty DiSHeS—did not arise in a vacuum. Prior experience informs present caution. The record will speak if litigation follows.
For the hemp industry, these issues carry immediate consequence. Texas’s transparency statutes and administrative law framework structure how regulation acquires legitimacy. Agencies strengthen consumer protection by keeping lawful commerce visible, enforceable, and predictable. Rules grounded in statute, executive direction, and sound process endure.
Texas built this system intentionally. The veto pen remains warm and the boot print across Dan Patrick’s backside is still fresh evidence Gov Abbott means business. The durability of the rules that follow depends on whether the Department remembers its role, its limits, and the authority under which it acts.
Shortly before 10 p.m. on a Friday night in early January 2026, a man walked up to an Austin
smoke shop with a bright yellow notice already peeled and ready in his hand.
Security footage shows the moment clearly. He does not hesitate. He does not enter the store. He
does not speak to staff. He presses the notice flat against the glass, steps back, raises his phone to
take a photograph, and walks away.
The store is open. Customers are inside.
That detail alone separates what followed from anything resembling legitimate enforcement.
By the time employees noticed the notice, it had already done what it was designed to do. Printed
in bold red lettering, it declared a “Violation of Texas SB 2024.” It warned that vapor products
manufactured in China were prohibited, cited federal import and labeling laws, listed a slate of
popular vape brands, and threatened seizures, fines, and “full regulatory enforcement.” It
instructed the business to leave the notice posted and warned that removing it could result in
penalties under state law.
To anyone approaching the door, the message was unmistakable. This business was breaking the
law.
But there was no issuing agency. No inspector name. No badge number. No citation ID. No
phone number. No instructions for appeal or verification. Nothing that would allow a business
owner, customer, or regulator to confirm that the notice was real. “It didn’t feel official at all,” said Taylor, an employee at Smoke ATX who was working that night. “There was no officer, no badge number, no contact. Nobody came inside. A customer was actually the one who told us it was there.”
That absence is not a technicality. It is the point.
The notice asserts that vapor products manufactured in China are illegal under Texas law. That
claim, while rooted in a real provision of SB 2024, is presented without context and in a way that
overstates the law’s reach.
While SB 2024 is broader than some early summaries suggested and does prohibit the marketing
or sale of certain e-cigarette products that are wholly or partially manufactured in, or marketed as
being manufactured in, China, the statute does not authorize instant or anonymous enforcement.
Application of the law is administrative and agency-driven, requiring official determination,
documentation, and formal notice. Nothing in SB 2024 permits unidentified individuals to
declare a violation by taping a warning to a storefront or threatening penalties without inspection
or due process.
By framing the issue as an immediate and universal violation, the notice collapses legal nuance
into fear. It presents a complex, administrative statute as a simple on-the-spot offense, replacing
legal specificity with a sweeping accusation that most consumers, and many retailers, are not
equipped to fact-check in the moment.
“That’s why it felt like it was meant to scare people,” Taylor said. “Not just us. The public.”
The video reinforces that conclusion. The man posting the notice does not behave like an
inspector. There is no inspection. No inventory review. No request for invoices or certificates of
analysis. The interaction lasts seconds. The only thing he verifies is visibility, that the notice is
clearly posted, and that he has photographic proof it was there.
That photograph matters. It suggests the goal was not compliance, but confirmation that
intimidation had been deployed.
In an industry already navigating political hostility, shifting rules, and public confusion, even a
brief suggestion of illegality can have outsized consequences. Customers hesitate. Employees are
forced into explanations. Trust erodes faster than facts can catch up.
Smoke ATX removed the notice after management reviewed it. No products were pulled. No
operations stopped. No follow up ever came. “We’ve never received an actual enforcement notice from a Texas agency,”
Taylor said. “Nothing like that.”
They were not alone. During reporting for this story, multiple shop owners referenced hearing
about similar incidents at other locations. One described a bald guy lurking around storefronts
late at night. Security footage reviewed by Blazed shows the same individual approaching shop
entrances, placing the yellow notice on the glass, photographing it, and leaving without entering.
What matters is the method.
Anonymous warnings. Official looking language. No accountability. No due process.
This is not how regulation works. It is how intimidation works.
When unofficial actors successfully mimic enforcement, they blur the line between law and
theater. Customers are left assuming guilt. Businesses are left defending themselves against
something that does not formally exist. And legitimate regulators inherit the confusion created by
someone else’s scare tactic.
Who benefits from that confusion remains an open question. The motives could be ideological,
political, competitive, or purely performative. Blazed is not asserting a specific actor or intent.
What can be said with certainty is that whoever posted the notice relied on fear rather than
authority, and on assumption rather than law.
Real enforcement does not operate this way. It does not hide its name. It does not flee the scene. It does not require anonymity to function.
It walks in the front door.
What happened that Friday night was something else entirely. The performance of authority,
stripped of accountability, deployed just long enough to plant doubt and disappear.
And in a regulatory environment already clouded by misinformation and politics, that kind of
manufactured fear does not protect the public.
It poisons trust.
SB 2024 creates a criminal offense for marketing, advertising, offering for sale, or selling certain e-cigarette products. The statute operates through criminal law, not an informal regulatory or notice-based system.
It expands what counts as an “e-cigarette product.”
The law applies to any consumable liquid or material that is aerosolized or vaporized in a device, whether or not it contains nicotine, with narrow exceptions for prescription medical products.
It bans sales based on packaging and marketing features.
Products are prohibited if their containers depict cartoon-like fictional characters, celebrities, food or candy imagery, symbols primarily used to market to minors, or trade dress mimicking youth-marketed products. (§ 161.0876(b)(1))
It bans sales based on device shape or appearance.
Devices designed to resemble pens, markers, phones, smart watches, earbuds, cosmetics, clothing, backpacks, or toys are prohibited regardless of contents. (§ 161.0876(b)(2))
It bans products manufactured in or marketed as manufactured in China.
This is explicit, categorical, and independent of any federal “foreign adversary” designation. (§ 161.0876(b)(3)(A))
It bans vapor products containing or marketed as containing cannabinoids and certain other substances.
This applies only in the context of aerosolized or vaporized delivery and includes cannabinoids, alcohol, kratom, kava, mushrooms, tianeptine, and derivatives. (§ 161.0876(b)(4))
It increases the penalty to a Class A misdemeanor.
Violations are punishable by up to one year in jail and/or a $4,000 fine. (§ 161.0876(c))
Inside the judging, the winners, and why Texas growers held their own.
The Blazed Texas Flower Challenge brought together serious heat from across the country. Twenty one entrants. Five judges. One simple scoring system designed to cut through hype and get straight to the flower.
Each entry was scored from 1 to 5 across four core categories: Aroma, Taste, Visual Aesthetics, and Efficacy. No gimmicks. No brand bias. Just the plant, presented as-is. As one of the five judges, I can say this confidently: the overall quality level was high. There were no throwaway entries. Even the lower rankings showed care, intention, and solid cultivation fundamentals.
But a few stood out immediately, and by the time the scores were tallied, Texas growers had made it clear they belonged at the very top of the field. How the Judging Worked All flower was evaluated blind. Judges worked independently, focusing on consistency across categories rather than chasing one standout trait. Loud aroma without flavor did not carry the day.
Pretty buds without effect did not either. The highest scoring entries delivered balance. Clean terp profiles. Proper cure. Flavor that translated from nose to exhale. And effects that matched expectations.
First Place Winner Raw Gas Club – Animal Mintz
Animal Mintz took the top spot for good reason, and its win carried extra weight. In a national field, a Texas-grown entry rose to first place, setting the tone for what would become a strong showing from in-state cultivators. This evenly balanced hybrid brought everything together in one jar.
From the moment it was opened, the aroma hit with sweet mint, cookie dough, and a sharp edge of diesel and pine. The flavor followed through cleanly, with a minty cookie inhale and a lightly nutty vanilla finish. Visually, the flower checked all the boxes. Forest green buds, bright amber hairs, dense trichome coverage, and a sticky resin coat that spoke to proper harvest timing and cure.
The effects sealed it. A heavy cerebral onset that eased into full-body relaxation without immediately knocking you out. Potent, but not sloppy. With reported THC levels in the mid to high 20s, it delivered long-lasting relief and deep sedation when leaned into. This was a complete flower. No weak links.
The Rest of the Podium Second place The Dope Co. – Super Buff Cherry Third place Geremy Greens – Koolato Third place marked another big moment for Texas.
Geremy Greens secured a podium finish with Koolato. This one deserves special mention. Koolato was my personal top flower of the competition. The terp profile stood out, the structure was dialed in, and the overall presentation showed real grower intention. Geremy Greens also grows a Texas Shoreline cultivar that I would love to see in future competitions. If Koolato is any indication, that one could be special. Beyond the Podium: Depth of the Field Just outside the podium, the competition remained tight, with several entries separated by only fractions of a point.
Fourth place went to Loud Puff with Scented Marker, a standout that impressed judges with its distinct terpene profile and overall balance.
Fifth place saw a three-way tie, underscoring just how competitive the field was this year. Dank Fil A earned its spot with Dank Poison, while A Treez delivered a strong showing with Wid Bill OG. Rounding out the tie was Moon Man, whose Pink Gumbo brought enough flavor and effect to keep it firmly in the top tier. The runner-up category featured a deep bench of quality cultivators. Sixth place was shared by Wyatt Purp and Endozondo, both of whom submitted flowers that consistently scored well across aroma, taste, and efficacy.
Seventh place went to Legend Cannabis Co. with Legend Candy, a clean and well-executed entry that hovered just outside the top six. Eighth place was another three-way tie, with Happy Cactus (Dante’s Inferno), Haze Connect (Dumb Gas), and EZ Grown (Sherb n Runtz) all landing in striking distance of one another. Each brought something different to the table, but all demonstrated solid cultivation and curing practices. Ninth place followed the same pattern, with 3GCC (Northern Haze) and Gruene Botanicals (Turbo Glue) finishing neck and neck.
Rounding out the top ten was Errganix with Jokers Candy, a respectable finish in a crowded and competitive lineup. Finally, several entries earned honorable mention for their effort and presence in the field. Green Diamond, JK Distro, Reggie & Dro, Looper, and Dope Pros all contributed to the overall depth of the competition and helped make this year’s Blazed Texas Flower Challenge one of the most competitive to date.
When you step back and look at the full field, one thing is clear: the margin between placements was thin, the quality bar was high, and Texas growers were not just competitive, they were leading the charge.
A Texas Takeaway Two of the top three finishers were Texas growers, and that matters. It shows that craft cultivation here is not just catching up, it is competing nationally.
Clean grows, strong genetics, and real attention to detail are becoming the norm, not the exception. The Blazed Texas Flower Challenge proved one thing clearly: when the plant is judged honestly, Texas flower belongs in the conversation. And based on what I tasted, this is only the beginning.
The Blazed Gummy Challenge: How It Works The Blazed Gummy Challenge is the next evolution of Blazed product competitions, built to evaluate one of the fastest-growing segments in the cannabis and hemp-derived market: edibles. Much like our Flower competitions, this challenge is designed to be structured, consistent, and experience-driven, while recognizing that gummies are consumed differently than flower and evaluated with more context around formulation, dosing, and intent.
The Goal The goal of the Blazed Gummy Challenge is simple: To identify the best gummies on the market based on quality, effectiveness, flavor, and overall experience across multiple dosage tiers and formulations.
This is not a popularity contest. It is an evaluation of how well a product performs for its intended audience.
Judging Panel • 5 total judges •
Judges include industry professionals, experienced consumers, and trusted Blazed contributors Because gummies are not blind-tested, judges are aware of brand, dosage, and formulation details.
This allows for more informed evaluations, particularly when it comes to potency accuracy, ingredient quality, and intended use. Each judge scores every entry independently.
Gummy Categories To ensure fair comparisons, gummies are divided into three distinct categories based on potency and formulation.
Low Grade Category: 5–25mg Designed to reflect everyday, approachable gummies. This category focuses on:
• Entry-level and moderate potency products • Gummies intended for casual or newer consumers • Balance, consistency, and overall enjoyability
High Grade Category: 50–100mg Built for experienced consumers who expect stronger, more pronounced effects. This category highlights: • Higher potency formulations • Effect clarity, strength, and duration • How well flavor and texture hold up at higher doses
Mushroom Category: 5–50mg A dedicated category for gummies formulated with mushroom compounds.
This includes: • Functional or psychoactive mushroom formulations • Balance between effects, flavor, and texture • How clearly the product delivers its intended experience Scoring System Each gummy is scored on a 1–5 scale in the following categories:
Judges are encouraged to consider how well each gummy delivers on its stated purpose and target consumer. Scores from all five judges are averaged to determine final rankings. Consumption and Evaluation Guidelines To maintain consistency and responsible judging:
• Judges follow standardized dosing guidelines
• Products may be evaluated over multiple sessions
• Judges document onset time, peak effects, and duration
• Adequate spacing between samples is required This approach ensures gummies are evaluated thoughtfully and responsibly. Final Results and Recognition Top-performing gummies in each category will receive:
• Industry credibility earned through consistent evaluation Recognition is based on performance, not hype. Why This Matters Gummies have become a primary consumption method for a large segment of cannabis consumers. As the market grows more crowded, thoughtful evaluations matter more than ever.
The Blazed Gummy Challenge exists to spotlight products that execute well, respect the consumer, and deliver on their promises. If you are entering, know this: We are judging the gummy, not the marketing.
To submit you gummy brand, simply purchase a display Ad for sale.
For nearly half a century, Steven Spielberg has used cinema to rehearse humanity for a moment he has never fully shown on screen: official extraterrestrial disclosure.
His protégé, J. J. Abrams, inherited this framework—and in Super 8, echoed it with near-surgical precision. When viewed alongside Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the similarities are not homage alone. They form a blueprint.
The Train Derailment: A Disclosure Trigger
In Super 8, the story detonates when a catastrophic train derailment shatters the calm of a small American town. The military swiftly arrives, sealing off the area, controlling information, and reframing the incident as a public safety concern.
In Close Encounters, the same mechanism is deployed—decades earlier.
The climactic contact event at Devil’s Tower is made possible only after a manufactured emergency: the public is told a train derailment spilled toxic chemicals, justifying evacuation. This false flag clears the area for the rendezvous while Roy Neary and others move toward the truth.
Two films. Same narrative lever.
The train derailment is not chaos—it is logistics. Domestic Normalcy Meets the Impossible
Spielberg and Abrams both anchor disclosure not in the skies—but in the living room.
Super 8
As morning routines unfold, TV news reports the derailment. Children bang toys in the background. When Joe Lamb enters the house, Charles is transfixed by a small black-and-white television broadcasting the crisis.
Close Encounters
Roy Neary watches the same kind of broadcast—alone, desperate, drinking Budweiser—as his family life collapses. The derailment near Devil’s Tower interrupts domestic despair, not adventure.
In both films:
The television is small
The image is grainy
The family is fractured
The truth arrives quietly, not spectacularly
Disclosure doesn’t crash through the roof. It leaks in through the TV.
Toy Trains, Fractions, and Repetition
Spielberg’s visual language is obsessive—and deliberate.
Roy Neary explains fractions to his son using toy train cars, just before offering a choice between Goofy Golf or Pinocchio. The banging of toys punctuates the moment—echoing later scenes of domestic unrest.
In Super 8, Joe Lamb paints model trains in his spare time. The derailment becomes personal before it becomes cosmic.
Model trains are not props.
They are preconditioning tools—symbols of control, order, and derailment. Abrams doesn’t just salute Spielberg here. He repeats the lesson. Loss of Family as the Cost of Truth. Both films are built on trauma. Joe Lamb loses his mother in a sudden industrial accident. Roy Neary loses his family—and eventually leaves Earth entirely. In both cases, disclosure costs something permanent.
This theme deepens when viewed alongside Spielberg’s later autobiographical work, The Fabelmans, where parental divorce is revealed as a defining wound. The same absence echoes through E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with Elliott’s father quietly gone—off in Mexico with another woman.
What will that day look like?
Contact is never free.
Truth rearranges families & Children as the Disclosure Constant
Across Spielberg’s universe—and Abrams’ continuation—children are always ready.
E.T.
Super 8
Close Encounters
Even Taken
Adults panic. Institutions lie. While Children adapt. If disclosure happens, Spielberg suggests, it will not break the young—it will expose the old.
Disclosure Day 2026: Cinema or Conditioning?
The question is no longer if disclosure will come—but how it will be framed.
Will it arrive: As a Spielberg-directed return to the genre by cinema’s greatest architect of UFO storytelling?
Or as another government-aligned narrative, laundered through Hollywood to guide public reaction?
Spielberg’s filmography already includes: Close Encounters, E.T. , War of the Worlds , Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, A.I. Transformers, Men in Black (producer), Amazing Stories, & Taken to name a few.
Decades of preparation. Decades of normalization.
Final Thought
Spielberg never taught us to fear aliens. He taught us to fear being lied to. If Disclosure Day comes, it won’t look like a blockbuster. It will look like a news report…playing softly in the background…while families argue in the next room. The only remaining question is whether Spielberg will finally show us the moment he’s spent a lifetime preparing us to see.
The better question is simpler and more unnerving: what happens when a President decides the machinery already sitting on the table should finally be used the way it was built to be used—and staffs the relevant agencies with people who don’t confuse delay with virtue.
According to the Washington Post, Trump has been discussing an executive order aimed at reclassifying marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz in the room and Speaker Mike Johnson on the phone opposing it. Reuters reported the same expectation and the market reaction, while noting the decision was not yet final.
The story here is not magic presidential power. The story is tempo, personnel, and a rescheduling docket that already exists—complete with the scientific recommendation, the proposed rule, and the procedural knots that kept it from crossing the finish line.
What an executive order can and cannot do
A President cannot personally rewrite the drug schedules by proclamation. The Controlled Substances Act does not hand the Oval Office a Sharpie and a scheduling chart. It hands the executive branch a process, and it places the legal “move the substance” act inside DOJ and the DEA, with HHS supplying the scientific and medical backbone.
What the President can do is command priorities inside the executive branch. He can set deadlines, change leadership, direct litigation posture, and tell DOJ and HHS that the rescheduling project is no longer a file that sits under a coffee mug until the next election. The Post’s reporting makes that managerial theory of power explicit: Trump can’t unilaterally reschedule marijuana, but he can direct the Justice Department to push through the rulemaking—potentially even by bypassing the ongoing administrative hearing.
That distinction matters because it turns the pundit question—“Can he?”—into the real-world one—“How fast will his agencies move, and how clean will the record be when the lawsuits start?”
The rescheduling file is already open and already thick
This did not begin as a Trump brainstorm. It began when President Biden asked for a review in October 2022. HHS conducted its scientific and medical evaluation and, in August 2023, recommended moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III.
In May 2024, DOJ/DEA published a notice of proposed rulemaking to transfer marijuana to Schedule III. That is the formal start of the legal act that changes the schedule: notice-and-comment rulemaking, the kind that lives forever in the administrative record and gets dissected in court.
This is the part commentators routinely skip: the government already did the hardest, slowest work—assembling the scientific recommendation, moving it through DOJ, and publishing a proposed rule. That means Trump isn’t trying to invent a pathway. He’s trying to accelerate a pathway that already exists.
The statutory lever Biden pulled and Trump can yank harder
The Controlled Substances Act sets up a two-agency structure. DEA (through DOJ) has scheduling authority, but before DOJ can move, it must get HHS’s written scientific and medical evaluation and recommendation. The statute then makes HHS unusually powerful in one specific way: HHS’s recommendations are binding on the Attorney General “as to such scientific and medical matters.”
DOJ itself emphasized this constraint in a 2024 memo responding to questions about marijuana rescheduling, noting again that HHS’s scientific and medical determinations are binding on DOJ in the process.
In other words, the science call is already on paper, already transmitted, and already baked into the proposed rulemaking record. Trump doesn’t need to “prove” marijuana has accepted medical use from scratch. He needs his administration to finish the regulatory job that has been marinating in procedure.
Where the Biden process got bogged down
Rulemaking is where Washington goes to “act” while remaining emotionally committed to not acting.
After DEA proposed rescheduling, the agency moved into a hearing posture. A Federal Register notice set the hearing process in motion for the proposed Schedule III transfer.
Then the process hit administrative turbulence. By early 2025, credible policy and legal analysis described the hearings as postponed or cancelled pending an interlocutory appeal and related procedural issues. The Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law tracks that the hearing scheduled to begin in January 2025 was postponed while an appeal was resolved.
This is the “legal limbo” the Post is talking about when it describes a White House considering bypassing the administrative hearing.
So Trump isn’t stepping into a pristine process. He’s stepping into a stalled one, and that stall creates a political opportunity: declare the delay unacceptable, then order DOJ and DEA to produce a final rule on a faster internal schedule.
Why courts sometimes stop executive branch power, and why rescheduling is a different animal
Every serious executive power story eventually meets its natural predator: the federal judge with a calendar.
When courts crush executive action, they usually do it for two reasons. The first is that the President tried to exercise power Congress never granted. Youngstown Sheet & Tube is the canonical case: Truman seized steel mills during the Korean War, and the Supreme Court held he lacked constitutional or statutory authority to do it.
The second reason is procedural: the executive branch claims it is acting under a statute, but it tries to shortcut the legally required process, or it produces a record so thin it fails basic administrative-law review. That is the kind of vulnerability that haunts immigration “big moves,” including the Obama-era DAPA litigation, where courts accepted arguments that the program likely exceeded statutory authority and ran afoul of required constraints, freezing it before it could take effect.
Trump knows this terrain because he has lived it. His original 2017 travel ban was rapidly blocked, revised, and fought through the courts until the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the third iteration in Trump v. Hawaii.
Marijuana rescheduling does not resemble Youngstown in its core authority question, because Congress delegated drug scheduling authority to the executive branch through the CSA. The Congressional Research Service summarizes the two routes clearly: Congress can schedule by statute, or the Attorney General (delegated to DEA), in conjunction with HHS, can schedule via the administrative process in the CSA.
That does not make it immune. It simply shifts the likely battlefield from “you have no authority” to “you did not follow the law’s process” and “your rule is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.” Courts reviewing agency action look for reasoned decisionmaking, not vibes. State Farm is a classic reminder that agencies must provide a rational explanation grounded in the record when they act.
That is why the Post’s “bypass the hearing” detail is both the accelerant and the hazard. Speed helps Trump politically. Sloppiness helps his challengers legally.
The Guardrails Myth, and the People Who Actually Pull the Levers
This is where the conversation stops being academic and becomes operational, because Washington has always been run less by constitutional theory than by human beings with badges, budgets, and signature blocks.
During Trump’s first administration, a comforting storyline took hold among donors, columnists, and the “I read The Federalist Papers once on a plane” set: the grownups were in charge. The President would be “managed.” Serious national-security types, conventional Republicans, and institutionalists would keep the guardrails up—protect the system from Trump’s own impulses, or at least sand down the sharp edges before they reached the rest of us. That “adults in the room” idea wasn’t a fringe whisper; it became a mainstream way of reassuring anxious elites that the state would remain on autopilot even if the cockpit was chaos.
Trump’s first term was what happened when that fantasy met a President who treats dissent as disloyalty and disloyalty as a firing offense. The result was not a calm, disciplined executive branch. It was churn. High turnover became a defining feature, and nowhere did the revolving door spin faster—or more publicly—than in the communications and press operation, which cycled through leadership at a rate that made prior administrations look monastic. Brookings tracked the rapid succession of communications directors and press secretaries; Axios, among others, documented the same “revolving door” pattern in real time.
That history matters because it explains what “personnel is policy” really means in Trump-world. The first-term model—hire people to restrain him, then punish them when they try—left behind a trail of burned reputations, abrupt departures, and cautionary tales that every ambitious appointee in Washington has been studying ever since. The institutionalists who thought their job was to manage the President discovered that, in this White House, the job description is simpler: execute the President’s priorities, on the President’s timeline, and don’t confuse your conscience with a veto.
The second-term environment has only intensified that lesson—not just through political appointments, but through the broader effort to “optimize” government itself. Trump signed orders pushing agencies toward workforce reductions and reorganizations tied to the “Department of Government Efficiency” effort associated with Elon Musk, a campaign framed as cost-cutting and anti-waste but experienced inside agencies as disruption with real institutional casualties. Government Executive reported on orders requiring agencies to plan layoffs and coordinate workforce reductions through DOGE.
And people did not merely grumble. They left. In February 2025, resignations by federal technologists connected to the former U.S. Digital Service became a national story because the departing staff described the DOGE shift as incompatible with protecting core systems and public services; the Associated Press covered the resignations and the language of the protest letter, and Politico reported the same episode as an internal revolt over how DOGE was being carried out. The Washington Post simultaneously reported sharp concerns about DOGE’s access to sensitive data and the legal and security alarms it triggered, along with litigation and judicial intervention.
In any other country, a wealthy private actor barreling through state systems, slashing capacity, and grabbing data would invite vocabulary Americans are trained to avoid saying out loud. Here we call it “efficiency” and argue about the font on the organizational chart. Either way, the practical takeaway is the same: the second-term executive branch is structured—and scarred—by the memory of what happened to people who mistook themselves for guardrails.
That brings us back to marijuana rescheduling, because this is not a policy that executes itself. If the White House decides to push Schedule III quickly, it will be done by the people sitting at the choke points.
Pam Bondi, as Attorney General, sits atop DOJ and therefore above DEA in the chain of command, and DOJ publicly documents her swearing-in. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as HHS Secretary, controls how aggressively HHS defends and reinforces the existing scientific and medical evaluation that already undergirds the rescheduling effort. HHS documents his swearing-in. Terrance C. “Terry” Cole, as DEA Administrator, leads the agency that ultimately issues the final rule that changes the schedule; DEA documents his swearing-in. Mehmet Oz, as CMS Administrator, doesn’t decide scheduling, but he matters to the politics and downstream health-policy posture that will be used to sell and normalize the shift; his confirmation and swearing-in are documented in public reporting and official coverage.
One detail has to be stated cleanly because precision is armor in a fight like this: Sara Carter is not the sitting ONDCP Director. Her nomination was withdrawn, and contemporaneous public materials identify Jon E. Rice as the senior official performing the duties of director in an acting capacity.
None of this “guarantees” rescheduling. Courts exist. Procedure exists. Opposition exists. But it does change the internal physics. Trump’s first term trained Washington that appointees hired to “manage” him do not last. His second term has added a broader lesson: disruption is not an accident; it is a governing style. In that context, when the White House decides a stalled rulemaking must move, the people in the relevant seats are far less likely to treat delay as a virtue—and far more likely to treat it as insubordination.
How the move would unfold in the real world
Assuming Trump issues the order described in the Post and Reuters reporting, the near-term mechanics are straightforward.
The White House would frame the executive order as a directive to DOJ and HHS to complete rescheduling expeditiously. The legal work would not be done by the President’s signature; it would be done by the final rule published by DEA/DOJ.
HHS’s role would largely be to stand behind the existing scientific and medical evaluation and to ensure the record remains coherent. Because the CSA makes HHS’s scientific and medical determinations binding on DOJ “as to such scientific and medical matters,” HHS is not window dressing in this process; it is the statutory spine.
DOJ and DEA would then have to decide how to resolve the existing hearing posture and produce a final rule. The final rule is where the schedule actually changes. The administrative posture matters because it shapes the record that courts will review. The Moritz Drug Enforcement and Policy Center timeline and other legal analyses reflect that the hearing has already been postponed and the proceeding snarled by appeal.
This is why the “bypass the hearing” concept is so politically attractive: it treats the stalled hearing track as a problem to be cleared, not an altar to be worshiped. It’s also why opponents will sue. They will argue the agency failed to provide required process, ignored objections, or violated the APA. Trump’s DOJ will argue the core statutory prerequisites were satisfied—HHS delivered the scientific recommendation and DEA followed rulemaking requirements—while insisting the executive branch has discretion to manage its internal proceedings and move to final agency action.
If Trump’s team moves carefully, it can publish a final rule quickly while keeping the record defensible. If it moves recklessly, it may still publish a final rule quickly, but it could lose the first emergency motion in federal court, buying opponents months of delay and a narrative that the administration cut corners.
Why this feels inevitable, even though it is not automatic
The strongest argument that Trump can pull this off is not ideological. It is bureaucratic.
The rescheduling project already has the fundamental prerequisites: a written HHS recommendation, a published NPRM, and a process that is already deep into the administrative pipeline.
The strongest argument that Trump will try is political: this is a high-salience move that can be framed as modernizing federal policy without “legalizing marijuana,” and it can be pitched as freeing research while shifting enforcement focus toward fentanyl and other lethal drugs. That framing fits neatly inside Trump’s preferred “tough on the real poison” posture, while offering real economic and regulatory consequences for the cannabis industry.
The strongest argument that he could still get slowed down is legal: the rule has to survive judicial review. Authority is the easy part here because Congress built a lane for the executive branch. Procedure is the hard part because courts can freeze agency action when the record looks rushed, incomplete, or internally contradictory.
That is the whole story. Not whether Trump owns a magic pen. Whether the executive branch he commands can move fast, stay inside the statutory guardrails, and absorb the litigation that comes with trying to make federal marijuana policy match the country it governs.
Before algorithms decided what Americans should think, before podcasts became corporate, and long before “alternative media” was a marketing category, there was Austin, Texas—hot, strange, conspiratorial, and wide open. Out of that chaos emerged Alex Jones: a bullhorn-wielding public-access firebrand who helped define a new era of outsider broadcasting and permanently altered the landscape of independent media.
I knew Alex in those early Austin days, when the city was still a weird crossroads of musicians, hackers, paranoids, libertarians, activists, pranksters, and true believers. This was a time when public-access television wasn’t a joke—it was a weapon. Cable studios, camcorders, and late-night airtime gave anyone with nerve and vision a chance to hijack the signal. Alex Jones didn’t just hijack it—he overclocked it.
Public Access as a Launchpad
In the mid-1990s, Alex Jones became a familiar and unavoidable presence on Austin public-access TV. Shirt sleeves rolled up, veins popping, voice cranked past eleven, he delivered monologues that blended government overreach, covert operations, corporate corruption, and historical revisionism into something closer to performance art than journalism. Whether you agreed with him or not almost didn’t matter—you watched.
Austin at the time was fertile ground for this kind of energy. The city incubated pirate radio, zines, underground magazines, access television personalities, and late-night call-in chaos. Alex understood instinctively that attention was currency. He also understood something many traditional journalists missed: people wanted narratives that challenged official stories, especially after Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, and the expanding surveillance state of the Clinton era.
Public access wasn’t a stepping stone for Alex—it was a proving ground.
The Birth of InfoWars
What began as a local broadcast evolved into something much bigger. InfoWars grew from a scrappy Austin operation into one of the most influential—and controversial—alternative media platforms in modern American history. Long before YouTube demonetization, shadow bans, or platform censorship became mainstream topics, Alex was building his own infrastructure: websites, radio syndication, mailing lists, direct-to-consumer sales, and loyal audiences that bypassed traditional gatekeepers entirely.
This was pioneering work. Love him or loathe him, Alex Jones proved that you didn’t need a newsroom, a network, or institutional approval to reach millions. He demonstrated that outrage, narrative framing, and direct audience connection could outperform polished suits and teleprompters.
Many who later built podcasts, Substacks, and independent media brands—knowingly or not—walked through doors Alex kicked open.
The Performance and the Persona
Alex Jones is not subtle. He never was. His genius—and his downfall—lies in his amplification. He treats broadcasting as confrontation, not conversation. The Alex Jones persona is part preacher, part carnival barker, part political street fighter. It’s a style rooted as much in wrestling promos and talk radio as in investigative journalism.
That approach made him unforgettable—and also dangerous to himself. As InfoWars grew, so did scrutiny, backlash, lawsuits, and cultural warfare. The same refusal to self-edit that fueled his rise also hardened him into a symbol: for supporters, a truth-telling rebel; for critics, a cautionary tale of unchecked rhetoric.
Alex Jones July 2001
In Weird Magazine terms, Alex Jones is a media cryptid—a creature born of the American subconscious, impossible to ignore, impossible to fully categorize.
Austin Origins, American Impact
It’s important to remember that Alex Jones is not a coastal media invention. He’s an Austin original—shaped by Texas independence, Southern distrust of authority, and a city that once thrived on letting weird experiments run wild. Austin gave him the runway; America gave him the megaphone.
Whether history ultimately remembers him as a pioneer, a provocateur, or a warning sign, one fact remains indisputable: Alex Jones helped redefine what independent media could be. He proved that outsiders could build empires, that public access could scale to global reach, and that belief—right or wrong—moves audiences more powerfully than neutrality ever has.
Weird Magazine, InfoWars, and the Print Underground (2002–2012)
What often gets lost in the digital retelling of the InfoWars story is its deep print-media footprint, particularly within Austin’s alternative press ecosystem. From 2002 through 2012, InfoWars articles and Prison Planet editorials from the Alex Jones camp appeared consistently in the pages of both the Austin Para Times and Weird Magazine—long before algorithm-driven distribution reshaped media economics.
This was not incidental exposure. It was a cross-pollination of underground media cultures: public-access television, pirate radio, print magazines, and early web publishing all feeding the same audience hungry for narratives outside institutional consensus.
No YouTube, no social media, no instant access to information.
During this period people listened to radio, waited for Wednesdays at 7pm on cable channel 10 to watch the Alex Jones show, not because you knew what was coming; but you watched the show to see what wasn’t coming! You never knew what tirade of anti government, spit of rage Jones was about to launch into at any moment. And often it was comical full of satire and humor with just enough edge that the point was made like no other late night talk show host had ever delivered before or since.
During this period, Alex Jones frequently shared and promoted Weird Magazine on his local Austin public-access programs, highlighting coverage that profiled his investigations, editorials, and worldview.
In the summer of 2012, that relationship formalized.
Alex Jones hired (me) Russell Dowden to manage and produce InfoWars Magazine July 1st 2012 , bringing the underground print ethos into a dedicated, national-facing publication. From 2012 to 2014, Dowden served as General Manager of InfoWars Magazine, or advertising executive overseeing production, operations, and editorial execution or managing advertising sales during a critical growth phase for the brand.
At a time when many media outlets were abandoning print entirely, InfoWars Magazine represented a deliberate counter-move—physical media as ideological artifact, designed to be collected, shared, and passed hand to hand. The magazine bridged Alex Jones’ broadcast persona with long-form editorial content, mirroring the earlier Weird Magazine model that had proven alternative ideas could survive—and thrive—outside corporate publishing structures.
This period stands as a reminder that InfoWars was not built solely on outrage clips or viral moments. It was also built on ink, paper, late-night layout sessions, and Austin’s long tradition of do-it-yourself publishing—a lineage that Weird Magazine helped establish and sustain.
Final Transmission
Weird Magazine exists to document the fringes before they become the center. Alex Jones came from the fringe and dragged it onto the main stage, kicking and screaming. His story is inseparable from Austin’s lost era of analog rebellion and America’s ongoing information war.
You don’t have to endorse the message to acknowledge the impact.
And you can’t tell the story of modern alternative media without saying his name.
For the first time, the nation’s biggest cannabis corporations—multi-state operators with headquarters, licenses, and major market share in Illinois and other key states—are lining up for a limited number of medical cannabis licenses here. These are the companies that dominate Chicago’s cannabis economy and reach deep into markets across the country. They are not unknown quantities. Their names appear again and again in court dockets, OSHA files, enforcement notices, ethics decisions, and class-action complaints.
If Texas chooses to let them in, it will be importing that history along with them.
DPS’s Scoring System: A Framework Without a Process
The Texas Department of Public Safety has published what it claims is a scoring rubric for Compassionate Use applicants. In reality, it is a handful of headings—security, financial responsibility, operations, and technical capability—devoid of detail. The document does not explain what constitutes a strong submission in any of those categories. It does not say how points are assigned, what makes a deficiency fatal, or whether out-of-state violations are considered at all.
Nowhere does DPS tell Texans whether a history of mislabeling products in Illinois matters. Nowhere does it say whether pesticide violations, unaccounted-for inventory, or OSHA findings from other states affect an applicant’s standing. There is no guidance on how regulators will treat companies accused of gaming potency limits, misclassifying products to evade state caps, or letting contaminated products reach patients.
The public is effectively asked to take DPS’s word for it that the agency is doing its job. That might be acceptable if DPS had a track record of transparent, scientifically grounded decision-making in this space. It does not.
The Armstrong Labs Warning Texas Has Not Heeded
The Armstrong Labs episode remains the clearest example of what happens when DPS makes critical decisions behind closed doors. A lab favored by law enforcement used a testing method that critics, attorneys, and the Texas Forensic Science Commission all said could convert THCA into delta-9 THC during analysis—transforming lawful hemp into apparent contraband. Retailers were raided, products were seized, and businesses collapsed, not because those businesses set out to break the law, but because DPS chose a contractor whose methodology could not withstand scientific scrutiny.
The Forensic Science Commission’s involvement underscored how serious the problem was. But DPS never gave Texans a full accounting of how it selected that lab, why it trusted that method, or how it planned to prevent similar failures in the future. It simply closed the door and moved on.
That kind of opacity might be survivable in a small program. It is reckless in a licensing round involving some of the largest and most legally exposed operators in the American cannabis industry.
The Illinois MSOs: A Record of Misconduct That Leads the Nation
To understand the risk Texas is facing, it is necessary to start where so much of the American cannabis business is headquartered: Illinois. The state has become a hub for multi-state operators, and the misconduct tied to those operators is now a matter of public record.
Cresco Labs, based in Chicago, is at the center of multiple lawsuits in Illinois accusing it of manipulating labels and product classifications to evade THC limits established under state law. In Matthews v. Cresco Labs and related cases, plaintiffs allege that Cresco mislabeled certain vapable oil products and deliberately classified infused products as “concentrates” so they could carry higher THC levels than Illinois law allows. These cases go to the heart of market integrity: if a medical cannabis company will not tell the truth on its labels, it cannot be trusted to protect patients or comply with dosage limits.
Green Thumb Industries, another Chicago-based giant, is facing its own THC-potency class action in Illinois, with plaintiffs alleging that GTI and its subsidiaries misrepresented the strength of their products. The company has also appeared in enforcement actions beyond Illinois. In New Jersey, regulators fined Green Thumb and Verano for rule violations, including failures around packaging, testing, and record-keeping. Together, these cases paint a picture of operators that routinely push or cross regulatory lines and then resist accountability when challenged.
Verano, also rooted in the Chicago market, shows up repeatedly in litigation and enforcement records. It was a co-defendant in an $860 million lawsuit tied to a failed acquisition, a case that highlighted aggressive, boom-time deal-making and the fallout when stock prices collapsed. Verano has been fined in New Jersey and has faced scrutiny in other states over compliance and rule adherence. It has settled complex litigation with another operator, Vireo Growth, after years of dispute, underscoring how much time and money these companies are willing to expend fighting over deals rather than focusing on stable, compliant operations.
PharmaCann, whose parent entity is organized as an Illinois LLC based in downtown Chicago, has faced worker-safety enforcement from OSHA and disciplinary action in Maryland. OSHA cited PharmaCann for potential workplace hazards at a greenhouse in New York; the company paid a fine to settle the case. In Maryland, regulators issued a consent order addressing violations of company code of conduct, including misappropriation and related misconduct. This is an operator that has struggled not just with regulatory compliance, but with internal culture and control.
Ascend Wellness, another major player with a strong Illinois footprint, has found itself simultaneously entangled in litigation and ethics concerns. In Illinois, Ascend has been hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging its vape products misled consumers—part of a broader wave of potency and labeling suits hitting the state’s largest operators. Separately, the Illinois Office of Executive Inspector General found that a deputy director of the state’s cannabis regulation office accepted employment with Ascend while still serving in his government role, flagging the kind of revolving-door risk that can erode public trust in any licensing regime. Ascend has also drawn enforcement in Massachusetts, where regulators have named it alongside other national firms in disciplinary actions.
These are not marginal actors. Cresco, Green Thumb, Verano, PharmaCann, and Ascend together represent the core of Illinois’s MSO tier. Their violations span mislabeling, misclassification to evade potency caps, worker-safety hazards, rule violations in multiple states, and ethics concerns involving former regulators.
They are also exactly the kind of companies now looking toward Texas.
Curaleaf and Trulieve: National Patterns of Risk
Outside Illinois, other large MSOs with designs on national expansion—including into Texas—have compiled their own disturbing records.
Curaleaf has been accused in Oregon of one of the most notorious mislabeling blunders in the industry: selling products advertised as CBD that in fact contained significant THC. The company settled at least ten lawsuits, paid regulatory fines, and endured a license suspension over the incident, then paid an additional $100,000 to resolve a separate class-action suit. More recently, a former regional compliance director has alleged in federal court that Illinois regulators flagged “systemic diversion” at Curaleaf’s Litchfield, Illinois facility, citing vast amounts of unaccounted-for inventory. That combination—dangerously mislabeled products in one state and suspected diversion in another—should alarm any regulator.
Trulieve has become a national case study in how worker-safety failures can turn deadly. In Holyoke, Massachusetts, a 27-year-old employee died after an occupational asthma attack triggered by inhaling ground cannabis dust. OSHA cited the company; Trulieve ultimately settled with a reduced fine after the agency withdrew some of its initial citations. The Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission later imposed a $350,000 fine for noncompliance connected to that death. The incident has helped spur new workplace-safety legislation for the cannabis sector in Massachusetts and is widely recognized as the first officially reported occupational asthma death in the U.S. cannabis production industry.
This is the caliber of operator lining up at Texas’s door: companies with histories that include worker fatalities, systemic diversion allegations, pesticide penalties, mislabeling scandals, ethics violations, and repeated efforts to stretch or evade state rules.
DPS has given no public indication that it views any of this as relevant.
How Texas Conservatives Once Understood Good Government
This failure of process would sting less if it did not contradict forty years of Texas conservative doctrine. When I was young—long before I stepped into policy or politics—I absorbed a mantra that shaped Texas Republican identity: government should be run like a business. It was the rallying cry of the era, a promise of efficiency, accountability, transparency, and discipline.
Ross Perot built an entire political movement around this ideal. His charts, his data obsession, his blunt insistence that government should be audited, measured, and forced to justify its decisions—these were the qualities Texans admired because they reflected the sensibilities of a state that expected competence.
Texas governors echoed the theme whenever an agency faltered. Ann Richards invoked business discipline when restructuring TDCJ and modernizing mental health oversight. George W. Bush reorganized agencies around performance metrics and measurable outcomes. Rick Perry spoke frequently about efficiency reforms in workforce development, procurement, and human services. Greg Abbott has demanded data-driven performance from state agencies and has publicly rebuked those that failed to meet clear operational standards.
For decades, Texans were told that government must be transparent, accountable, and grounded in expertise—because those are the principles that guide successful businesses.
DPS has abandoned all of them.
No business evaluates multi-billion-dollar proposals without publishing evaluation criteria. No business refuses to examine the track record of a potential partner. No business exposes its advisors to suspicion by refusing to define their roles. No business hides its scoring methodology from its own stakeholders. And no business treats the past behavior of applicants as irrelevant to future performance.
Ross Perot once said, “If you see a snake, don’t appoint a committee—kill the snake.” DPS is simply refusing to open the box.
An Agency Built to Interdict, Not to Regulate
There is a deeper structural problem. DPS is a law enforcement agency being asked to run a highly technical licensing program for a plant it has spent decades trying to intercept and destroy.
For generations, the mission of Texas DPS has been to stop drug trafficking, enforce criminal statutes, and treat cannabis as contraband. Training, culture, and institutional memory have all reinforced the same bedrock assumption: marijuana is bad, and the people who cultivate, process, or distribute it are on the wrong side of the law. In recent years, federal agencies and some state and local departments have begun to adjust to a world in which cannabis is regulated, taxed, and—in many cases—treated as medicine. DPS has not undergone that transformation. Texas never created a dedicated health or science-oriented cannabis regulator. It simply handed the job to the state’s primary law-enforcement agency and walked away.
At the same time, the Legislature that made this decision is populated by talented people whose backgrounds are in law, business, real estate, entertainment, consulting, and advocacy—not in pharmaceutical manufacturing, lab science, agricultural regulation, or medical program design. Expecting them to build a sophisticated, transparent licensing regime without dedicated subject-matter expertise was unrealistic from the outset.
Layered on top of this design flaw is the predictable gravitational pull of insider dealing that follows every limited-license cannabis program. Wherever a small number of highly valuable licenses are at stake, politically connected players look for an angle. Texas has already seen early evidence of attempted preferential positioning and overlapping business relationships. None of this is surprising. What is surprising is that DPS and legislative leadership chose to build a system that invites suspicion by shrouding the entire process in secrecy.
A law-enforcement agency with a cultural bias against cannabis, operating without true regulatory expertise, following a blueprint written by non-technical policymakers, and administering a closed-door licensing process is not equipped to keep powerful MSOs in check. It is, instead, exactly the kind of environment those companies have learned to exploit.
What a Well-Regulated Licensing System Would Look Like
A sound licensing regime in Texas would start by acknowledging reality: the companies applying for licenses have long, complicated histories, and those histories matter. A competent regulator would publish detailed scoring criteria in advance, explain how out-of-state violations affect eligibility, and specify how issues like mislabeling, potency fraud, OSHA findings, and diversion allegations will be weighed.
It would separate advisors from decision-makers and make both roles visible to the public. It would release redacted versions of applications, publish scores and the reasoning behind them, and provide written explanations to both successful and unsuccessful applicants. It would subject MSOs with heavy violation histories to enhanced oversight once licensed, with regular audits, surprise inspections, and public reporting of compliance events. And it would treat patients, caregivers, and Texas small businesses as stakeholders rather than bystanders.
That is what a serious state does when it confronts national operators with this kind of record.
Texas Cannot Pretend Not to Know Who These Companies Are
The time when Texas could plausibly claim ignorance about MSO misconduct is over. Illinois has documented mislabeling and misclassification schemes tied to major operators. Oregon, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, New York, and other states have issued fines, consent orders, and disciplinary actions that describe in detail how these companies have behaved when they thought no one was looking too closely.
Texas now knows—or should know—that many of the MSOs seeking licenses here have treated rules in other states as obstacles to be navigated rather than standards to be honored. DPS and the Legislature cannot say they believe in running government “like a business” while ignoring the most basic business principle of all: you evaluate a partner by its track record.
If Texas chooses to hand the keys of its medical cannabis program to companies with this history, without transparent standards, without serious scrutiny, and under the supervision of a law-enforcement agency unprepared for the job, the outcome is not hard to predict. It will look like Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Jersey, and every other state that thought it could keep these operators in line without doing the hard work of real regulation.
The harm will not fall on Cresco, Green Thumb, Verano, PharmaCann, Ascend, Curaleaf, or Trulieve. They have already built systems to absorb fines, settle lawsuits, and move on. The harm will fall on Texas patients, Texas workers, and Texas businesses who were told they could trust a program overseen by DPS.
Companies do not reinvent themselves at the Texas border. Their past follows them. The only question now is whether DPS and the Legislature will pretend not to see it—or finally take it seriously enough to protect the people they serve.
