Directed by JT Barnett, the new High Times series Texas Cannabis Chronicles opens inside one of the fastest-moving and most politically contested cannabis markets in America, where farmers, veterans, patients and small operators are bracing for a crackdown they say could wipe out an entire industry.
The biggest cannabis story in America right now is not happening in California, and High Times is making that case in a loud way.
This week, we dropped Episode 1 of Texas Cannabis Chronicles, a new documentary series directed by filmmaker JT Barnett that throws itself straight into one of the most chaotic and politically loaded cannabis fights in the country. The opening episode, “The War on Texas Cannabis Has Begun,” frames Texas not as a side plot in the national cannabis story, but as the place where the next big battle over hemp, medicine, regulation and political power is already underway.
Barnett, who introduces himself on camera as a producer known for finding stories “where business power and chaos collide,” positions the series less like a distant explainer and more like an embedded dispatch from inside a state on the brink. “The biggest story I could chase down was in my own backyard,” he says early in the episode. That backyard, as the film quickly makes clear, is a Texas cannabis economy that grew fast, created real livelihoods and is now facing an aggressive push from politicians and regulators who seem determined to shrink it, box it in or wipe major chunks of it off the map.
That tension gives the episode its spine. Barnett and the people he follows are not just talking about weed in the abstract. They are talking about small farms that turned cotton fields into hemp fields, veterans who say cannabis helped when opioids failed, parents finding products that …
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Author: High Times / High Times
