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Texas Advocacy for Hemp: Life Rafts vs. Torpedoes

Written by Jay Maguire on . Posted in Legislative. No Comments on Texas Advocacy for Hemp: Life Rafts vs. Torpedoes

 

The Texas Legislature is not kind to perceived bad industries that show division. Lawmakers, especially those in the governing party, are well-practiced in divide-and-rule. When they see infighting, they exploit it. When they see an industry that can’t even align on its own interests, they stop taking it seriously. That is why survival in this fight depends entirely on solidarity.

 
And yet, Bayou City Hemp just made the worst possible mistake. By circulating a flyer in the Capitol calling for a ban on all smokable hemp—without even informing their own trade association leaders—they didn’t just undermine the industry’s collective voice. They handed prohibitionists exactly what they wanted: proof that even we aren’t convinced of our own legitimacy.

It’s as if, seeing the torpedo in the water, Bayou City launched their own life raft, hoping to save themselves before the ship went down. But that’s not how this works. The prohibitionists don’t see them as allies—they see them as easy targets. The second the industry collapses, Bayou City’s raft won’t be spared. It will be machine-gunned like the rest. And in the process, they’ve weakened the entire industry’s argument for reasonable regulation. Instead of presenting a united front to lawmakers, they’ve reinforced the very narrative prohibitionists are pushing—that this is an industry that cannot regulate itself and therefore must be banned altogether.

 

If they truly believed in this course of action, they should have done it the right way—resigning from the board, stating their case within industry discussion groups  and working with the professional advocates and advocacy groups—who are expert at understanding the political landscape, the unwritten rules, and finding ways to win when weaker sisters panic—to find a compromises and creative solutions. For example, the main knock on our industry right now is the largely unproven allegation that we sell and market to kids. While we can all agree that mimicking brands of children cereals and candies is a bad look, there’s no Joe Camel-level duplicity happening here but the narrative is established and refuting it costs more energy than we any benefit we’d derive from engaging in the “I know you are, but what am I?” tropes that so often ensue in similar circumstances.

 

The answer: we’ve been working diligently to identify and refine technologies that make it much less chancy when it comes to age gating—as an upcoming article in Special Legislative issue of the Texas Hemp Reporter will demonstrate, harnessing the power of AI and facial recognition tightens up on the one area of weakness we all admit we have—consistent carding of customers and retail clerks who are 100% compliant and on the ball every single transaction.

 
As you’ll see from the machines, we can show law makers we’ve got it figured out and seek collaboration on areas of alignment, not mindless deflection to other players in industry when we feel out own interests threatened. This is just one example of what Bayou City might have done. Instead, they’ve set the stage for a circular firing squad within the industry, betraying the broader interests they had at least an arguable duty to represent and doing the prohibitionists’ work of undermining credibility for them.
Now is the time for discipline, not desperation. If we want lawmakers to treat this as a mature, responsible industry worthy of negotiation, we need to act like one. Anything less, and we are simply making the case for our own demise.