Will Texas DPS Eat Crow(e) Again?
TCUP expansion creates scarcity where abundance already supplies Texans with high quality THC products. So who benefits from deliberately collapsing that industry so as to feed the rent-seeking oligopolies. How un-Texan.
DPS replaced a prohibition on cannabis-industry relationships with a disclosure requirement, then hired Crowe to vet prospective medical marijuana operators. Having already corrected one consequential licensing mistake, the department owes Texans an explanation of how it guarded against another.
Texas patients have been waiting since the Department of Public Safety opened its medical marijuana licensing application window in January 2023. More than three years later, the department has corrected its scoring, withdrawn conditional awards, substituted applicants, and hired an outside firm to determine whether the prospective operators can afford to open their doors and keep them open.
That firm is Crowe, which markets its services to cannabis businesses and multistate operators. Among the professionals it hired to develop that practice is Rebecca Young, formerly chief accounting officer of Trulieve, whose Texas subsidiary is awaiting final approval.
Before awarding the engagement, DPS changed the solicitation’s independence requirements. Accounting firms initially had to confirm that they had no involvement in the Texas cannabis industry or with cannabis multistate operators; under the amended language, they had to disclose that involvement instead.
Exclusion and disclosure serve different purposes. The first bars a relationship; the second leaves the agency responsible for deciding whether to accept it and under what conditions.
DPS may have had a sound reason for making that change, and Crowe may have supplied every disclosure and safeguard the assignment required. But after the department’s earlier arithmetic altered who received conditional approval to enter a restricted market, Texans are entitled to something more substantial than another invitation to trust the process.
The arithmetic already required a correction
The original application window ran from January 13 through April 28, 2023. When DPS opened another window in August 2025, earlier applicants could supplement their submissions, while new applicants entered a separate phase.
On December 1, 2025, DPS announced nine initial conditional recipients, including Trulieve TX, Inc. Three more followed on April 1, 2026.
