Reefer Madness Sweeps The Senate...Again
The GOP's war on weed, brought to you by the alcohol lobby.
Reefer madness has once again swept through the prudes and the religious nuts in the Texas Senate, courtesy of the alcohol lobby. Last week, the Senate held an interim hearing on the “dangers of THC,” in preparation to ban it statewide in 2027. I watched the hearing a few days late, but I’m catching up, so let’s talk about it.
I’m going to include a few videos, the first one showing how much of a non-issue this is in a state of 32 million people, including 7.5 million children.
Don’t worry, I did the math for you.
In the last five years:
THC exposure accounted for 0.033% of all calls to Poison Control.
0.002% of all EMS responses statewide.
0.032% of all hospitalizations.
According to the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, there have been 19 THC-related deaths in the last five years, which is astounding, since no THC deaths have ever been previously recorded in human history. More than likely, they’re attributing the overdose of another drug with THC in the system, or a fatal car accident, as THC-related, and not some teenager smoking themselves to death (because that’s impossible).
Interestingly, this is what the Texas Senate is focusing on when:
We have 963–1,162 drunk driving deaths per year in Texas.
10,647 per year in Texas attributable to excessive alcohol use (liver disease, alcohol poisoning, chronic disease).
Cigarette smoking alone kills 28,000 people each year in Texas.
Heart disease is the #1 killer of adult Texans.
Gun violence is the leading cause of death for Texas youths.
It’s almost like the Republicans in the Texas Senate are completely ignoring the real issues while making up imaginary issues to appease the lobbyists and religious fundamentalists.
Plus emotional manipulation.
This is a frequent tactic used by Republicans in the Legislature. They fly in some poor mother to tell her sob story about how THC ruined her teenager’s life.
They flew in Ted Cruz’s dad when they wanted to ban communism in Texas schools. They flew in some poor sap from New York when they wanted to ban gender affirming care. It’s just what they do.
In my 40-something years of life, I never even heard of “canabis psychosis” until a few years ago, from Republicans who wanted to ban it. I had to Google if it was a real thing. It is. And it’s actually very serious, and I in no way want to downplay the teenagers impacted by it.
The Republicans’ own invited witnesses, Katharine Neill Harris, a drug policy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, testified that THC can increase the risk of psychosis in people who are already predisposed to it. That is a very different claim than THC causing psychosis in an otherwise healthy person, and Harris said so directly, in the same hearing, to the same committee.
So yes, cannabis psychosis is real. It’s also a risk-factor problem. Committee members spent hours treating a predisposition risk like a population-wide time bomb, to justify banning a product for 32 million people to protect a much smaller, already-vulnerable group. There are better, more targeted ways to do that than prohibition.
The mom:
Aubree Adams testified for 12 minutes, and by the end, there wasn’t a dry eye in that committee room. However, her family’s nightmare is not evidence that THC is a “weapon of mass destruction” for 32 million Texans. It’s evidence that a small population, people already vulnerable to psychosis, are at real and serious risk from heavy THC use. That’s it. And Republicans in the Senate are conflating the issues.
Adams closed her testimony with “THC has the highest transition rate to schizophrenia among all drugs, including meth.” I went and checked. She’s right. A meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin found cannabis-induced psychosis converts to schizophrenia at about 34%, higher than amphetamines at 22%, and way higher than alcohol at 9%.
But read it carefully. That 34% is the transition rate among people who already had a psychotic episode triggered by cannabis. It is not the rate at which THC causes psychosis in a random Texan smoking a blunt on his couch. It’s the rate at which an already rare, already severe reaction worsens. Adams’s own testimony is a case study in exactly the population Katharine Neill Harris was talking about. People with an underlying vulnerability, whose lives get set on fire by a drug that, for the other 99% of users, does approximately nothing.
Adams also cited a Wall Street Journal piece about her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, “The Rise and Fall of the Napa Valley of Cannabis,” as proof that legalization brought homelessness, organized crime, and violence. It’s a story about an oversaturated legal market, stacked state, county, and city taxes, and a legal industry that collapsed under its own weight while the black market undercut it on price. It’s a business story. It is not a public health study, and it does not say what she told the committee.
I don’t doubt Aubree Adams believes every word she told that committee. But the Texas Senate isn’t supposed to write statewide drug policy off ONE family’s worst years, especially when the state’s own health department handed them the actual numbers, and those numbers show exactly how rare her family’s experience is.
Lois Kolkhorst has reefer madness.
The same Lois Kolkhorst who has spent years gutting maternal health care access in this state, and Texas now has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country to show for it. Keep that in mind while she lectures you about protecting Texans from a plant.
Kolkhorst pulls up a Wall Street Journal chart on drug-induced psychosis transition rates and reads off that cannabis ranks number one. Then she says, and I’m not paraphrasing, “It’s like 50%. I mean, it’s like off the charts.”
It’s not 50%. The actual peer-reviewed number, from a meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin, is 34%. Kolkhorst rounded up by 16 points, because she’s a liar.
Then she asks the doctors, “Is cannabis the driving force behind schizophrenia and bipolar disorders?” And here’s the sleight of hand. She took a number about a small, already-vulnerable group and used it to answer a question about 32 million Texans.
To his credit, Dr. Lucia actually gave a real answer. He said broad, casual availability might be “unmasking or causing” mental illness in kids, one where the vulnerability was already there, and cannabis exposed it.
I’ll give her one thing, because I’m not interested in being the mirror image of what I’m criticizing. The potency argument is real. Average THC content in seized cannabis went from 4% in 1995 to 15% in 2021. Allen PD’s own testing found products running 7% to 78% THC, with some smoke shops selling 99% THCA concentrate. Texas hemp law caps THC at 0.3%. Nobody’s following that law, and that’s an actual regulatory failure worth fixing.
It’s just not the same thing as “cannabis is driving a statewide epidemic of schizophrenia,” and Kolkhorst spent the hearing treating both claims like they carry equal weight.
Charles Perry has reefer madness.
Keep in mind, this is the same Charles Perry who thinks children in public schools are using kitty litter. He said he plans to file another THC ban bill for 2027, regardless of what this hearing turns up.
Perry compares the current hemp market to K2, the synthetic cannabinoid that actually did kill people and got banned outright in the 2010s. “This is the modern-day K2,” he says. It isn’t. K2 was random synthetic chemicals sprayed on plant material, chemically unrelated to THC, built specifically to dodge drug tests, with a toxicity profile closer to poison than pot. Comparing legal hemp-derived THC to K2 is like comparing beer to antifreeze because they’re both liquids you can drink.
But the real tell comes near the end. Perry notes that EMS calls for THC went down while poison control calls went up, and DSHS’s own presenter told him the data suggests people are just handling more of it at home instead of calling an ambulance. Then Perry says the quiet part out loud, “I knew that was going to be the narrative that comes out, and it’ll still be the narrative, because truth doesn’t matter.”
A sitting state senator, chairing testimony from his own state health department, telling the room that the truth doesn’t matter because he already knows what he’s going to say regardless. That’s the whole hearing in one sentence.
Perry declares the entire industry a lie, compares it to a poison that killed people, and announces he’s filing the ban bill before the hearing is complete.
I’ve known hundreds of stoners in my life.
Maybe thousands. Whole holidays’ worth of family and friends who’ve been high since Nixon was president. I’ve watched people go through entire decades of daily use, the way other people drink coffee. Willie Nelson is eligible for Medicare twice over and still touring. Snoop Dogg built an entire media empire on being publicly high since the Clinton administration. And in my 40-something years, “cannabis psychosis” wasn’t a phrase I’d ever heard until Republicans needed a new reason to ban a plant.
That doesn’t mean it’s fake. It’s real, and for the people it hits, it’s devastating, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise just to win an argument. Despite that, there’s a real, serious case for legalizing weed statewide and regulating the hell out of it.
Cap the potency.
Test the products.
Keep it away from kids, the same way we’re supposed to keep alcohol and cigarettes away from kids.
That’s a policy conversation worth having, and Texas hasn’t had it, because having it would require admitting the current unregulated hemp market is the actual problem, not THC itself.
What Texas is doing instead is banning the plant while cigarettes kill 28,000 Texans a year, alcohol kills tens of thousands more, heart disease is the state’s number one cause of death, and nobody in that committee room said a word about any of it. They ignored an actual, ongoing, thousands-of-bodies-a-year body count, because tobacco and alcohol have lobbyists, and weed, for now, mostly doesn’t.
They pick the fight they can win instead of the one that’s actually killing people, and it’s about as Republican as it gets.
112 days until the November election!
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Dear God--The theatrics with these people is endless. Bathroom bills, vouchers, communism, reefer madness...Funny, Kolkhorst brags that she and secretary Kennedy are both MAHA pals...does she not know he's the biggest dope-head druggie of them all?