A crowd of hundreds came to hear arguments over a proposed THC ban Tuesday, forcing a committee meeting to relocate testimony to the main Texas Senate chamber. More than 170 people signed up to speak, and disruptions from the gallery at one point prompted senators to clear the room of spectators.
“We’ve got to get the genie back in the bottle,” said Sen. Charles Perry, who authored the legislative bill SB3.
Over the last decade, thousands of CBD shops have opened across Texas, selling cannabis products with varying levels of THC, which has a psychoactive effect. When federal (The Hemp Farming Act of 2018) and state (House Bill 1325 in 2019) laws legalized hemp with agricultural uses in mind, they differentiated it from illegal forms of cannabis by defining it as having 0.3% “delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol” (THC) or less. The laws didn’t explicitly cap other forms of THC, like delta-8 and delta-10, which aren’t naturally found in large quantities…