A Travis County judge temporarily blocked Texas from enforcing new hemp rules that had effectively pushed smokable THCA flower and pre-rolls off shelves. For now, the fight is back in court, and back in business.
Texas tried to shut the door on smokable hemp. A judge just cracked it back open.
A Travis County district judge has temporarily blocked Texas from enforcing the part of its new hemp rules that effectively banned smokable products such as THCA flower and pre-rolled joints. The ruling gives hemp operators a short-lived but very real reprieve after state regulators moved to measure “total THC” in a way the industry says would have wiped out a huge chunk of the market.
For now, those products can be sold again in Texas while the case moves forward. The next hearing is scheduled for April 23.
What changed? Texas Department of State Health Services rules that took effect March 31 began counting THCA toward the legal THC limit, a move that effectively made many smokable hemp products noncompliant.
The case is not really about whether Texas can regulate hemp. Even the plaintiffs say the state can. The fight is about whether regulators went past regulation and into prohibition without lawmakers explicitly doing it themselves.
That distinction matters in Texas, where hemp policy has turned into a long-running tug of war between lawmakers, regulators, operators and consumers. Last year, Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed a broader bill that would have banned most hemp THC products outright. Instead, the state moved toward tighter agency-driven rules. Those rules added packaging, labeling and recordkeeping requirements, locked in a minimum purchase age of 21 and dramatically changed how THC is calculated for compliance.
World Travel & Tourism Council, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
For smokable hemp businesses, that last part was …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
