I have a silver haze here, bud.
Unfortunately, your camera can't smell.
If I blow, you probably can smell it already.
It smells like marijuana. It looks like marijuana, but it's not
and we're the only people in the country rolling a hundred percent hemp cigars.
We're getting a tremendous reaction.
The hemp industry has exploded in Texas in the last few years.
There are flower buds, oils, vape pens,
gummies, clothes, ropes, dog treats, the list goes on.
Hemp is a strain of cannabis, the same plant as marijuana,
but it lacks the chemical compound that produces a high.
Though there's been little research in the U.S on its usefulness outside of epilepsy treatment,
many use it for things like pain or anxiety.
In 2018, federal law was changed to legalize hemp products
and the next year, the Texas Legislature followed suit.
Tracy King, Texas state representative,
has made agricultural hemp an opportunity
for farmers and locals here in Texas to continue to grow
so let's give Mr. King a warm round of applause.
What my bill does is it says that any type of hemp product
that carries 0.3% or less THC,
that it can be grown in Texas
and used in the production of a whole variety of products that use hemp.
THC or tetrahydrocannabinol
is the compound in cannabis that gets you high.
It's also now, what legally separates hemp from marijuana.
Cannabis with more than 0.3% THC is marijuana.
Anything with less, is hemp.
That small change has made a big impact.
The state crime labs cannot yet determine THC levels to say if cannabis is illegal or not,
and some prosecutors started dropping hundreds of pot cases
when the law went into effect.
Many stopped accepting new cases
that couldn't show that something that looked and smelled like marijuana
contained more than 0.3% THC.
Criminal defense attorneys watching this law take effect
now have a new defense tactic against prosecutors.
Prove what you have is marijuana, instead of hemp.
Some lawyers are starting to advertise on this angle and doing so loudly.
The legislature has changed the definition of marijuana
to require them to prove over 0.3% THC.
Good luck proving that.
Those are trees. This is pot.
I'm Brian Wilson, better known as,
Brian Wilson, The Texas Law Hawk,
and I'm a criminal defense attorney in Fort Worth, Texas.
The state is in a bad spot right now.
This law, while I think it had good intentions,
it affects everyone.
The people who are making these products, to the people that are possessing them.
Police that actually make the arrest.
And that's because they're having a hard time proving these cases.
The new law helps out defense attorneys a lot
because now we have a whole other completely separate thing to argue.
How are you going to prove this case when you don't have a lab that can prove that it's over 0.3% THC?
Good luck with that. That's what I'd say to them.
Due process?
Do wheelies!
So, today we're going to Quality Forensic Toxicology.
It is a private crime lab in San Antonio.
They are one of the ones that can actually distinguish how much THC is in a plant substance
and the state labs can do that yet.
It might be right here. It's on this side.
There it is, Quality Forensic Toxicology. We're here.
Are you working on oral fluids or urine?
So this is a bunch of tubes that are siphoning out different types of ions?
It's actually getting rid of everything it doesn't want.
Okay.
And it's only detecting the things that it does.
Okay. And one of those is THC?
Right.
The instrumentation that we use for our clinical toxicology
is not found in the normal drug identification laboratory
in the state of Texas or anywhere, really.
The day after the bill was signed,
we actually had the phone ringing in our office saying,
"Hey, can you guys do this?"
We felt it was our responsibility to see whether or not this is something that we could do.
This is where the action happens, or the magic happens.
Well, right now we have clients in the law enforcement field.
Those are the agencies that didn't really know where to go
because the state lab has not developed a test
that would adequately determine the amount of THC in a suspected hemp versus marijuana type case.
Without access to that type of technology, that type of instrumentation,
the drug identification labs were kind of left in a bind.
While some private labs have a solution for plant testing now,
it can be expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per case
and some cities and counties don't want to spend more police time
or more police resources on marijuana enforcement.
That means, many cases aren't being prosecuted or are sitting on the shelf
waiting for the government crime labs as they struggle to catch up to the new law.
Houston's public crime lab is working on a cheaper solution
to the new THC problem that can be used across the state.
Oh, I get to wear a coat.
I think we've got a method that looks like it will be reliably able to indicate
whether there is more or less than 1% THC in plant material.
That doesn't sound like a whole lot, but that's a big feat getting to that point.
We're trying to build something that's going to go in
probably 25 to 30 laboratories across the state.
Peter and other state labs plan on using existing equipment
to tell if a substance is above or below this 1% marker.
Although it's higher than the legal cutoff, it's okay with law enforcement.
But marijuana cases in the crime lab are still going to take a lot more time
and money than they did before,
and the labs will only be able to test plant material,
not liquids like in a vape pen or edibles.
Something that took 15 minutes, now takes hours.
If I'm spending time on marijuana,
that's time I don't have to spend on opioids and PCP, and pills
and all of the other stuff that comes into the lab.
The whole thing is going to be more expensive as well.
In any way you slice this, the laboratories have to have more resources.
There's no way we can keep up with what was going on before this, much less now.
It's really easy to overlook the impact that happens in these labs.
The problem is when you discount thinking about the laboratories, this is what happens.
This is a pinch point in the system that cripples everything else.
Lawmakers were warned that pot cases were going to become a lot more expensive.
Before the bill passed, Peter's lab and the Texas Department of Public Safety
told legislators that they weren't currently equipped to handle this testing
and it would cost the state millions.
We do not currently quantitate THC in samples
and so we would have to go through a validation process
and procure some instrumentation to be able to do that quantitation.
Alright. Members, any questions?
Alright, thank you very much, Brad.
At the very end, the crime lab people came up and said,
"You know we might need more money."
Well, that's not an unusual refrain during the legislative session from any state agency.
But I think a little bit of time and, this whole situation, we'll all wonder why we were so worried about
this in the beginning.
The state lawmakers pushing the hemp bill, like King, were adamant that it would not
lead to marijuana legalization or decriminalization, but some think the difficulties in enforcing this new
law might be leading the state in that direction. The number of new misdemeanor marijuana cases
filed in Texas has plummeted. Many prosecutors are now demanding lab reports with THC levels
before accepting a new case. People are being arrested for possessing legal hemp because
police think it's marijuana and cities and counties are grappling with how to handle
the hemp versus marijuana problem. In Austin, the city council has banned the use of any
city funds to pay for marijuana testing in low level cases, ones they don't want to be
pursuing anyway.
I think that us, spending extra dollars to pursue these low level cases not only isn't
right, but I think actually makes us less safe. Thank you guys.
It's not the devil's lettuce anymore. Legalization is coming in Texas a lot sooner than people think.
Is it time to decriminalize marijuana in Texas? Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick says absolutely not.
More and more Texans support decriminalization of marijuana to some extent, but figures like
the powerful Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick are strongly against it. Still, marijuana
advocates are hoping to use the hemp laws fallout as momentum for change in the 2021
legislative session. How this plays out in the future is still unclear, but for now state
labs are working to implement testing. Private labs are breaking into the industry, and new
testing technology is emerging. And hemp farming in Texas is set to start in 2020.
Tetrahydrocannabinol. Nope, hold on. I wrote it down. Tetrahydrocannabinol, that's what it is.
I've seen that one in a million times. It's hard to say!