Grits for Breakfast 10/29/2020
https://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2020/10/hemp-law-radically-reduced-pot.htmlReaders will recall that the Texas Legislature last year legalized "hemp" without a way for prosecutors to distinguish between legal hemp and illegal marijuana, which come from the same plant. To successfully prosecute, police would need to test the plant's THC levels, but few jurisdictions have the equipment to perform the task, much less staff to handle the extra work.
The result: marijuana arrests and prosecutions plummeted statewide, with many jurisdictions eschewing them altogether. Grits dubbed it the
Great Texas Hemp Hiatus. The Texas Department of Public Safety now has technology to perform the testing, but not sufficient staff; they have refused to provide testing for misdemeanor marijuana possession cases.
In this light, the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence was given an "interim charge" to study the questions raised by the hemp law, but COVID has prevented much progress. So they
solicited written testimony, due next week, in lieu of holding a hearing. I wrote a short,
two-page missive on the subject on behalf of Just Liberty. Anyone interested should give it a read. Here's a notable excerpt arguing that, when pot arrests declined, many good things happened:
police focused on other duties, jails avoided extra prisoners during COVID, court caseloads shrank, taxpayer-funded hemp testing was (largely) avoided, and counties avoided paying for some indigent defendants’ lawyers. Commercial hemp was legally harvested and sold. And nobody cared. Not really. There has been no hue and cry. If anything, the public hue and cry favors full-blown pot legalization.
In the meantime, more than 40,000 Texans who would otherwise have been arrested in FY20 avoided prosecution for pot possession, which meant they not only avoided a criminal record but also had more money to support their families when the COVID crisis hit. Would anyone be better off if 40,000 extra families, many of them already losing income from a virus-caused economic depression, were saddled with fines, court debt, probation and drug testing fees, etc.? Not at all! Everyone is better off because those prosecutions didn’t occur.
Aggressive marijuana enforcement does more harm than good and the natural experiment conducted in Texas over the last year shows that there are no negative consequences when it suddenly stops. There’s no need to “fix†the hemp law or spend millions more on specialized testing.
