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The Notice Nobody Was Supposed to Notice

Written by Jay Maguire on . Posted in Texas Legal & Regulatory News. No Comments on The Notice Nobody Was Supposed to Notice

Friday, tucked between a scratch-ticket rulebook and a batch of wastewater fines in the back pages of the Texas Register, the Department of State Health Services quietly finished a fight it started five years ago. The notice — 51 TexReg 4597, filed June 25, signed out by DSHS General Counsel Cynthia Hernandez under interim Commissioner Imelda Garcia — reinstates the agency’s 2021 modifications to two entries in the state’s Schedule I: tetrahydrocannabinols and marihuana extract.

If that sounds like administrative housekeeping, understand what the housekeeping accomplishes. Since November of 2021, when Judge Jan Soifer enjoined those definitions in the Sky Marketing case, the entire Texas delta-8 market has operated under the protection of that injunction. On May 1, the Texas Supreme Court took it away, reversing the courts below and siding with the agency. The mandate issued June 5. Friday’s notice is DSHS closing the loop — republishing the definitions exactly as they stood before the injunction, as though the intervening five years were a rounding error.

They were not a rounding error. They were the years this industry was built in.

What the Definitions Actually Say

The reinstated tetrahydrocannabinols entry sweeps in every THC naturally contained in the cannabis plant except one thing: up to 0.3 percent delta-9 in hemp as defined by the Agriculture Code. It then reaches further, to synthetic equivalents, derivatives, and isomers with similar chemical structure and pharmacological activity, and it names the cis and trans variants at multiple positions before adding the kicker — because chemical nomenclature isn’t internationally standardized, compounds of these structures are covered regardless of the numerical designation of atomic positions. That last clause exists for one reason: so nobody can renumber their way out of Schedule I.

The marihuana extract entry does parallel work on the processing side. An extract containing any cannabinoid from any cannabis plant is Schedule I unless it’s derived from hemp and holds under 0.3 percent delta-9 on a dry weight basis — and even then, separated resin, crude or purified, gets no exemption at all.

Read the two entries together and the state’s position is stark. Naturally occurring hemp material and genuinely hemp-derived extracts under the delta-9 threshold remain outside the schedule. Everything else in the family — delta-8, delta-10, THC-O, THCP, HHC, and above all anything converted or synthesized, which as a matter of practical chemistry describes most of the commercial delta-8 ever sold in this state — now sits inside it.

This Is an Enforcement Story, Not a Paperwork Story

Here is the part that needs saying without any softening: this notice will be read by police chiefs, sheriffs, and district attorneys as a permission slip.

Five days before it published, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee staged its interim hearing on THC, and I use the word staged advisedly. The witness table was cast like a morality play: the Allen police chief who ran the North Texas raids, a sheriff, a DA, a traveling anti-THC activist who called the products a weapon of mass destruction, and a committee vice-chair who invoked Nancy Reagan by name, promised a new ban bill for January, and expressed his hope — out loud, on the record — that the state’s new fees would put most of the industry out of business. That was the season premiere of Reefer Madness, Texas edition. Friday’s notice is the prop department handing the cast real ammunition.

An officer who wanted to seize delta-8 in 2023 had to reckon with an injunction and a genuinely murky legal landscape. That officer now has a published Schedule I listing, a Supreme Court opinion behind it, and a political climate in which raids make careers rather than end them. Chief Steve Dye told the committee his labs found seized products testing far above their labels; expect that playbook — seize, test, charge — to travel. There remain real defense arguments about how the schedules interact with the Health and Safety Code’s penalty groups and the hemp statutes, and good lawyers will make them. But an argument made from a defense table is a categorically worse position than an argument never made at all. Retailers and distributors should plan for enforcement and let the lawyers’ arguments be their parachute rather than their plan.

Look at Your Shelves This Week

For anyone holding inventory, the practical assignment is an unsentimental review, done promptly and documented as you go. Walk the warehouse with the definitions in hand. Anything containing or marketed as containing delta-8, delta-10, THC-O, THCP, HHC, or any other THC isomer or analogue belongs in the flagged column. So does anything produced by chemical conversion — delta-8 made from CBD is the textbook case. So does any extract, distillate, or concentrate whose paperwork can’t actually demonstrate hemp origin and sub-threshold delta-9 on a dry weight basis, and any separated resin product, which the exemption pointedly declines to cover. THCA flower and pre-rolls were already casualties of the March 31 total-THC rules and belong on the same list.

For everything flagged, pull the certificates of analysis and read them skeptically: is the lab accredited, does the method measure total THC post-decarboxylation, does the supplier’s story hold up. Where the chemistry is synthetic or the paper trail is thin, quarantine the product and get advice from qualified counsel — and I’ll offer the standing caveat, with affection: I’m a strategist, not a lawyer, and nothing here substitutes for the real thing.

A word, too, for the kratom and mushroom sectors, who may be feeling like spectators: you’re not. Nothing in Friday’s notice touches mitragynine or amanita. But anyone who watched the July 7 hearing noticed its shape — a committee that has learned it can prosecute an entire product category through interim charges, curated witness lists, and administrative reclassification, without ever passing a bill. Hemp is the test case. The machinery being assembled will not be dismantled when it finishes with THC.

The Case We Get to Make

Now the better news, because there is some, and it isn’t decorative.

Prohibitions born of administrative maneuver are less durable than prohibitions born of statute, and this one arrives wearing its weaknesses openly. The Governor vetoed the ban the Legislature passed and asked for regulation instead — that veto message remains the most authoritative statement of Texas policy on this subject. The committee’s own invited expert, Baker Institute drug policy fellow Katharine Neill Harris, told the senators to their faces that they were conflating cannabis with mental illness and homelessness. The sheriff they called, Chambers County’s Brian Hawthorne, testified that what rural Texas actually needs is mental health deputies and telehealth, not a ban. And Senator Charles Perry’s confession that the fee structure is designed to bankrupt registrants — “the cost of doing business is going to get so high that most of them will go out of business, I hope” — is the kind of quote that wins lawsuits and editorial boards alike.

That is raw material, and the interim is when it gets shaped. The committee accepts written testimony, and the record being built right now is the record the 2027 session will legislate from. Businesses that can walk into that fight with clean inventories, accredited lab results, and documented compliance are the living rebuttal to the claim that this industry can’t be regulated because it can’t be trusted. The argument that wins this — the only one that ever has — is that regulation demonstrably works and prohibition demonstrably doesn’t: it forfeits the testing, the labeling, the age-gating, and the tax revenue, and hands the market to people who don’t return phone calls from the state.

The next six months decide whether these products return to Texas shelves as legal, regulated items or disappear into the same gray market the state claims to fear. Get your houses in order, and get your stories on the record — preferably before someone with a badge asks for them.

Sources: Texas Register, Vol. 51, July 10, 2026, at 4597–4604 (TRD-202602610); Sky Marketing Corp. v. Texas Dep’t of State Health Servs. (Tex., opinion May 1, 2026; mandate June 5, 2026); Texas Senate Committee on Health & Human Services interim hearing, July 7, 2026.

The Parable of the Two Molecules

Written by Clay Moore on . Posted in Cultivation.

On a quiet morning in a town that could be anywhere—though, in truth, it sits under a
blazing Texan sun—two figures stand at a crossroads. One is an old farmer, face lined
with decades of toiling in the fields, familiar with the gentle hum of wind through
cannabis leaves. He smiles easily, remembering a time when all he had was the plant,
its naturally occurring Delta-9 THC dancing beneath the sun, a secret he could trust.
The other figure, a young chemist in a crisp white lab coat, fresh from a makeshift
laboratory hidden behind a steel door, cradles a vial of something new, something
strange: a synthesized cannabinoid conjured not by nature, but by human ingenuity.

They meet by a rickety wooden sign that reads: “HEMP—0.3% THC LIMIT.” It’s a relic
from a not-so-distant past, a guideline that changed the course of everything. On one
side of the sign, fields of hemp sway under legally sanctioned skies, their Delta-9 THC
content tightly bound by regulation. On the other side, a world of possibility and
confusion blooms—hemp-derived molecules twisted, converted, and reshaped into
something both eerily familiar and unstintingly new: Delta-8, THCP, HHC, and more.

The farmer remembers a hypothetical: If you could hop into a time machine—say, back
to 2018—and whisper in the ear of a president, “Legalize cannabis outright,” would all of
this tinkering have been necessary? Would there be a room full of chemists bending
molecules to comply with laws rather than to discover truth? One timeline might have
yielded an abundance of natural Delta-9 THC, openly grown, studied, and enjoyed
without the shadowy dance around percentages. But in the timeline we have, clever
minds spotted a legal loophole and seized it. Thus, a new era was born.

The chemist, for their part, isn’t some cartoon villain. They are a seeker of knowledge.
They might say, “Nature is wondrous, but so is the human mind. If we can create a
molecule that offers therapeutic benefits that Delta-9 can’t, why not do it?” Yet the
farmer counters, “If we’d just started by legalizing the original plant, would we have even
bothered? Isn’t Mother Nature’s original blueprint enough?”

People come from all corners to argue. Some say these synthetic cannabinoids have
opened doors: they’ve allowed consumers in places like Texas to experience something
close to the Delta-9 high without openly defying the law. They’ve ushered in a future
where new pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals might arise—substances that could help
ailments where old solutions fell short. Others warn of unknown dangers. Unregulated
synthetics have sent people reeling into hospital beds, their minds spinning into worlds
they never wanted to see. Safety data is thin, and no one’s quite sure what happens
when these new molecules dance in human biology over the long term.
In the distance, smoke rises from another battlefield. Texas lawmakers threaten to end
all THC sales—Delta-9, Delta-8, and everything in between—citing confusion, public

safety, and unforeseen consequences of the hemp loophole. Thousands of shop
owners face ruin. Consumers who rely on these cannabinoids for relief may lose their
access entirely. This ban wouldn’t just target the chemists and the labs; it would also
strike at the humble farmers and their fields of green. One might ask: Whose fault is this
tightening noose? The natural Delta-9 that sparked fear long ago, or the synthetic
creations that emerged only because Delta-9 was kept at arm’s length?
And what of medicine? The Texas Compassionate Use Program (TCUP) only permits
naturally occurring cannabinoids. There’s a sanctity, it seems, in what the plant chooses
to provide. Yet, shouldn’t we at least ask if the new synthetics deserve study and
scrutiny in clinical environments? Could they be tamed, understood, and perhaps one
day trusted? Or should they remain at the edges, a wild frontier too dangerous to bring
into the doctor’s office?

These questions swirl like smoke in the twilight air. The farmer and the chemist watch
the horizon. They know lawmakers, lobbyists, patients, and business owners are all
involved—everyone is shouting, everyone is pushing, everyone is pulling. It’s a war of
definitions: What is natural? What is safe? What should be allowed? And beneath these
questions lies an even deeper one: Who are we to decide what belongs in our bodies,
and at what cost?

By now, we are all standing at that crossroads, squinting into a future fogged by
uncertainty. Does the “natural” inherently mean safer, better, more ethical? Or does
human innovation hold a torch that illuminates pathways nature never considered? If
time were reversed, would we just legalize Delta-9 THC and spare ourselves this maze
of molecular modifications? Or would we still crave something new, different, and
perhaps better?

scientist experimenting with cannabis in the lab made with AI

In the end, the figures fade, and we are left with the riddle itself. Just as Hamlet once
pondered “To be or not to be,” we are left wondering: to inhale the old ways or embrace
the new; to trust nature’s leaf or trust the alchemy of the lab; to ban them all or find a
delicate balance.

We stand, each of us, at that same dusty crossroads, knowing there is no easy answer.
In our hesitation, we discover that we are not truly debating chemistry or law. We are
asking who we are as a society—our values, our hopes, our fears. And perhaps, in that
silent pause, we will learn something about existence itself.

The Future of Chemically Derived Cannabinoids

Written by shayda Torabi on . Posted in CBD News & Business.

Every now and then a customer walks into my CBD store, RESTART CBD, and asks for a product or cannabinoid that we don’t currently sell. And as a business owner, I take the ownership of filtering through all the requests we get and ultimately deciding on what product to put on the shelf. That paired with tracking industry trends, requires businesses to stay on top of consumer demands.

While consumers ask and demand, that doesn’t always necessarily mean that businesses need to deliver. It’s why Walmart and Target both exist, in reality, they sell similar products, but they also have two different target demographics.

So with that information in mind, I am constantly filtering what customers are looking for and balancing that with what I’m interested in and willing to sell.

For example, we get asked from time to time if we sell Kratom, which we do not at my store. My brand focuses on selling high-quality cannabinoids vs a more broad smoke shop store type approach. We can’t be everything to everybody, and I think that’s an important piece of discernment for today’s story.

On the other hand, we get asked for products like HHC and THC-P, which are naturally occurring cannabinoids but are more mysterious with less known information about the long-term effects.

It’s interesting because in our industry there are a dozen or so cannabinoids on the market, but the cannabis plant has over 100 different phytocannabinoid compounds and just because we don’t know enough about something doesn’t mean we should demonize it, does it?

This takes me back to when Delta 8 THC hit the market back in 2019, we didn’t know enough about it and everyone was reluctant to introduce products to the market. But a few years later, not that we aren’t still facing some of the same battles, there is more adoption and acceptance of the minor cannabinoid.

So as a brand, how do you determine what is the best product to put on the shelf? And even more critically to consider is what is the quality of the product you are looking to put on the shelf because 80% of something is different than 90% of something, etc.

We now see the emergence of chemically derived cannabinoids. This does get confusing because even though the cannabinoid is naturally occurring like CBN, for example, there is a whole market emerging for chemically creating and synthesizing these cannabinoids.

And thanks to the chemistry you can create a lot of cannabinoids with a lot more stability than when produced naturally, which is an integral part of repeatability for a consumer.

Is it right, is it wrong?

I understand the concern from within the industry, from the purists, the full plant people, and the cultivators, struggling with this recent shift in the market.

I remember having a conversation with a friend who is cultivating hemp here in Texas and he was asking if as a retailer I sell more hemp flower vs Delta 8 flower, and the reality is consumers want the Delta 8 experience.

My advice to the cultivator was to get creative and pay attention to where the market is going if he wants to move his products because consumers are driving the demands.

I also look at the fragility of our industry, without proper avenues for operation we’re left to interpreting the law and getting creative with what some would call loopholes.

I don’t fully think cannabinoids like Delta 8 THC or HHC are outright loopholes, but I do believe that we have yet to bust the door wide open and are just getting a crack at what is to come.

Ultimately we have a choice, as operators, as consumers, as an industry and until we can look at the whole picture instead of just one frame at a time, we’re neglecting the realities and all I’m trying to do is to get us to be on the same page.

A regroup if you will. Texas is heading into our next legislative session in 2023 and the smokable hemp ban just got reinstated for manufacturing and processing.

Will we go another year introducing more minor cannabinoids? We flinch at the idea of chemically synthesized Delta 8 but what about nonpsychoactive cannabinoids like CBN? Where does the line get drawn? And what is this going to do to cultivation of you can produce everything stably in a lab?

I don’t have a definitive answer on what is going to happen or can even speculate on what could happen. Especially with so much up in the air still with the Delta 8 lawsuit still open and an upcoming legislative session.

But as always, I encourage the continuation of this discussion and invite you to tune into my recent episode with Tyler Roach of Colorado Chromatography, one of the leading manufacturers of HHC and CBN amongst other cannabinoids. We dive into the future of chemically creating cannabinoids and what impact that will have on our industry, you can listen at tobeblunt.buzzsprout.com.