Texas Moves Toward Unleashing Free Market on Pot Legalization
Committee-passed legislation would treat pot plants like jalapeños.
Texas legislation aims to replace drug mules, pictured carrying marijuana in September 2014 on the Mexican side of the border near Rio Grande City, with a legal and unregulated supply chain.
Everything’s bigger in Texas – including its legislators’ plans for marijuana legalization.
A bill that would make Texas the fifth state to legalize the drug doesn’t propose strict regulations or a state bureaucracy to enforce them. Instead, it would simply repeal state-level prohibition and open the door for an unbridled free market.
The idea – a significant divergence from states where legalization has been accompanied by frameworks to tightly regulate sales of the drug – appears surprisingly popular in the conservative state.
The Texas House of Representatives' Criminal Jurisprudence Committee passed the bill in a 5-2 vote on Wednesday night and it may be debated on the floor next week.
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READ: Republicans Rally to Legalize Low-THC Cannabis Everywhere]
“The debate has changed and people aren’t afraid to vote for it,” says state Rep. David Simpson, the Republican sponsoring the bill.
The East Texas legislator introduced the bill earlier this year with repeated references to the Bible, turning heads as he used the language of social conservatism to sell pot legalization. “All that God created is good, including marijuana," he
said. "God did not make a mistake."
Simpson says constituents hoping to use the drug as medicine spurred him to action, and he sees no reason to jail people for possessing the plant or to block farmers from growing industrial hemp. He says ending prohibition would have the added benefit of undercutting criminal drug cartels.
“A lot of Republicans don’t want government interfering with how much you can eat or drink or which doctor they can see – they want freedom,” he says. "And mine is a medical freedom bill and they do like it.”
Heather Fazio, Texas political director for the Marijuana Policy Project, one of the most prominent national advocacy groups pushing for legalization, says she was pleasantly surprised by the committee vote.
Fazio says the bill “basically strikes all marijuana offenses from Texas statutes, so marijuana would be akin to the jalapeño plant,” with regulations for produce applying to pot entrepreneurs.
“People could just start businesses and start selling their products,” she says. “The free market would naturally work out testing mechanisms and verification for consumer protection and things like that, so that we can make sure we know the products are contaminate free and we know the different levels of potency. All of that would happen naturally.”
MPP and other reform groups generally push to treat marijuana like alcohol. MPP opened up shop in Texas after a survey it commissioned with Public Policy Polling
found 58 percent of Texans supported doing so.
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Simpson says his bill likely would stand a good shot on the House floor, but there’s no guarantee it will come up for a vote. It’s not yet on the House schedule. He says the chamber’s calendar committee must decide if it should be scheduled for debate by Tuesday, and debate would then need to happen by Thursday.
