TEXAS vs THC
I often agree with my conservative friends in the Texas legislature, but more than anything I’m a believer in personal freedom. It’s time to have a real discussion about the fight over hemp, which threatens to destroy thousands of small businesses across Texas and hurt a lot of our veterans as well.
“I joined the Coast Guard in April of 2011.”
Connie Perkins’ military job included steering a 25-foot defender… but a back injury made the constant bouncing on the water unbearable.
“My entire body was in pain,” she confessed. “And my medical records are probably this big, it’s insane. So the Coast Guard’s fix was, Well here’s some pain medicine, we’ll get you through with muscle relaxers.”
“I had a seizure in 2018 because of a mixture of all of these medications… and that was my wake-up call.”
She found an alternative… she’s now a loyal customer of Sublingwell… one of the 8,000 stores that have opened across Texas since hemp products were legalized six years ago.
Gummies… CBD… even flowers that may look just like the illegal stuff, but it has a smaller legal level of THC…
“It helps pain and anxiety and it’s just a completely different ball game than prescriptions,” added Perkins.
But now the author of that farm bill says he wants to close the so-called Hemp loophole that allowed all these stores to open.
“He saved countless lives post-2020 and he needs to know that. And he’s part of the bill to try to ban what he wrote,” said Scott Stubbs.
Banning THC in Texas is going to be one of the lieutenant governor’s top priorities.
“You’d be putting a lot of folks like us out of business. Lawmakers claim they are for small businesses when they are about to shut down thousands,” affirmed a store owner in a KWTX news story.
“It took 88 years to end hemp prohibition. I’m in disbelief to even think that they’re considering it,” continued Stubbs.
Wayne: “You guys don’t look like drug dealers.”
Erin Stubbs: “No, nothing could be further from the truth… I’m a suburban mom.”
Erin Stubbs and her husband Scott learned about hemp and its medical powers the unfortunate way… they watched his dad suffer from prostate cancer…
And they have studied the power of what’s called “the god plant”.
I know firsthand how these products can help reduce pain.
Seven years ago, a 70-mile-per-hour head-on car accident in West Texas almost killed me.
Instead, it left me with horrible neuropathy in both my feet at night…
Taking hydrocodone forever wasn’t the answer… this kind of stuff was.
Don’t worry I don’t plan to smoke this product… but only because it’s called cheetah piss…
“I’d say my pain is seven.”
Senator Charles Perry doesn’t know it… but he has given me relief through his farm bill too.
I’ll be the first to admit there are problems with the current law… a lot of gas stations are illegally selling hemp products without a required license, especially drinks with illegal levels of THC.
It was an easy purchase of hemp in an unlicensed gas station close to our headquarters.
But it took weeks to get the state of Texas to give us a new headline…
Since March of 2021 we learned the State Health Service has done 135 inspections of licensed hemp shops…
Seventeen were caught selling products with higher levels of THC than allowed…
Last year a Houston pediatrician warned legislators some stores were actually selling to children.
“When you give these products to someone with a developing brain, especially in adolescents you drastically increase the likelihood that they will become addicted to these products.”
Well, we can stop that without shutting down all these stores for adults.
But we didn’t find a single case where licensed stores got in trouble for selling to children.
I have a solution for lawmakers don’t ban these stores… make it a felony to sell these products to children… we enforce cigarette and alcohol laws, don’t we?
And here is the reality… there is overwhelming support for legalizing weed in Texas.
Imagine if we could direct cops to worry about harder drugs… not something already legal in half the country now.
“Fentanyl is flooding our streets right now, do you know how many people that kills? That one of the pain medications they put me on.”
Connie says a ban will likely force her and a lot of other people… including our veterans to find relief somewhere else, maybe on the black market.
“This is not okay, this is not okay.”
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