Directed by JT Barnett, the new High Times series Texas Cannabis Chronicles opens inside one of the fastest-moving and most politically contested cannabis markets in America, where farmers, veterans, patients and small operators are bracing for a crackdown they say could wipe out an entire industry.

The biggest cannabis story in America right now is not happening in California, and High Times is making that case in a loud way.

This week, we dropped Episode 1 of Texas Cannabis Chronicles, a new documentary series directed by filmmaker JT Barnett that throws itself straight into one of the most chaotic and politically loaded cannabis fights in the country. The opening episode, “The War on Texas Cannabis Has Begun,” frames Texas not as a side plot in the national cannabis story, but as the place where the next big battle over hemp, medicine, regulation and political power is already underway.

Barnett, who introduces himself on camera as a producer known for finding stories “where business power and chaos collide,” positions the series less like a distant explainer and more like an embedded dispatch from inside a state on the brink. “The biggest story I could chase down was in my own backyard,” he says early in the episode. That backyard, as the film quickly makes clear, is a Texas cannabis economy that grew fast, created real livelihoods and is now facing an aggressive push from politicians and regulators who seem determined to shrink it, box it in or wipe major chunks of it off the map.

That tension gives the episode its spine. Barnett and the people he follows are not just talking about weed in the abstract. They are talking about small farms that turned cotton fields into hemp fields, veterans who say cannabis helped when opioids failed, parents finding products that worked for their kids and a market the episode describes as supporting roughly 50,000 jobs in Texas. Then comes the counterforce: bans, political theater, federal pressure, lobbying and a regulatory turn that threatens to crush one of the state’s most important product categories.

The film doesn’t pretend neutrality about what is happening. It has a point of view, and it is not shy about it. At one point Barnett says SB 3 was “a killer by design meant to destroy an industry legalized in Texas in 2019 and federally in 2018.” Later, the episode argues that the new state rules taking effect March 31 will ban smokable hemp products, including THCA flower, while leaving edible products alive under tougher testing and packaging requirements.

That is where the documentary gets interesting. It is not only trying to tell a Texas policy story. It is also trying to tell a High Times story, one about what happens when a plant that clearly helps people gets caught between culture war politics, moneyed interests and the old American instinct to criminalize first and explain later. Barnett leans into that hard, promising a season that will “expose the corruption,” “celebrate the resilience” and ask whether “corporate giants, VC money, and corrupt politicians” will be allowed to shut the industry down.

There is also a bigger strategic point buried in the episode: Texas matters because what happens there will not stay there. Barnett says as much when he warns that this is not just a Texas story but “a global movement.” The series promises to follow farmers, veterans, lawyers, entrepreneurs and activists across eight episodes, while also digging into how corporate interests are allegedly pushing to outlaw hemp even as some players quietly position themselves to benefit from narrower medical markets.

That is one reason putting Barnett at the center works. He is not playing the polished host who floats in to summarize everyone else’s pain. He comes across more like a guy who knows he is standing inside a real fight and wants viewers to feel the stakes. “These are real lives, real stakes, all facing the collision of politics, money, medicine, and freedom,” he says near the end of the episode. That line is basically the mission statement for the whole thing.

And the timing is not accidental. Episode 1 lands just as Texas businesses brace for the March 31 rule changes, a deadline the film presents as a turning point for smokable hemp, small operators and the larger legal gray zone that built Texas cannabis into what it is. In that sense, the series is not dropping into a settled issue. It is dropping into an active war.

For High Times, that is the smart play. Texas is messy, political, weirdly American and packed with contradictions: a huge consumer base, a booming hemp market, a limited medical program, a state government pulled in different directions and an industry full of people who do not want to go back quietly. If California was the first big legalization laboratory, Texas may be becoming the country’s most combustible cannabis battleground.

And Barnett is clearly treating it that way.

Episode 1 is now live on the High Times YouTube channel, with new installments set to roll out soon. If the opener is any indication, Texas Cannabis Chronicles is not here to do soft-focus cannabis optimism. It is here to document a fight.

And in Texas, the fight has already started.

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Ohio’s new law is already in effect. South Carolina’s Senate went with a narrow regulate-it-don’t-ban-it model. Texas is about to wipe smokable hemp off shelves while squeezing the rest with tougher rules and steeper fees. Same plant, same loophole, three very different state responses.

The hemp fight did not move in one direction this month. It split three ways.

In Ohio, lawmakers let a ban on intoxicating hemp take hold after opponents failed to qualify a referendum for the ballot. In South Carolina, senators decided not to ban hemp THC outright, but to shove it into a much tighter retail box. And in Texas, regulators are about to take aim at one of the market’s hottest categories (smokable hemp and THCA flower) while leaving edibles standing under heavier restrictions and much higher costs.

That distinction matters. Too often, these stories get flattened into one generic “hemp crackdown” narrative, as if every state is doing the same thing with slightly different branding. They’re not. What’s happening instead is more revealing: states are choosing their own model for how much hemp they can tolerate, where they want it sold and which version of the market they’re willing to let survive.

Ohio chose the blunt instrument. South Carolina chose containment. Texas chose to go after smokables first.

Ohio

Ohio is the clearest example of a state deciding the intoxicating hemp experiment has gone far enough.

As reported by the Statehouse News Bureau, the campaign to block Senate Bill 56 fell short of the signatures needed to put the law before voters. That cleared the way for the measure to take effect on March 20, and outlets including the Ohio Capital Journal reported that the new law bans intoxicating hemp products, including THC and CBD beverages.

That is not some minor regulatory adjustment. It is a market reset.

The same Ohio law also changes the state’s voter-passed marijuana framework, but the hemp piece is what makes the message so unmistakable. This is what it looks like when lawmakers decide the loophole got too visible, too profitable and too hard to defend. Hemp operators and advocates quoted in local coverage warned that businesses would close, workers would lose jobs and consumers would be pushed either out of state or back into the unregulated market. The Ohio Capital Journal quoted hemp farmer Joey Ellwood saying roughly 6,000 Ohio businesses could be affected.

There is also litigation already in motion. A group of plaintiffs, including Saucy Seltzer and Uncle Arnie’s, filed suit in Franklin County seeking emergency relief, arguing they would face irreparable harm if the law took effect. Meanwhile, the beverage fight is still alive in another lane: companies, including Fifty West Brewing, challenged Gov. Mike DeWine’s line-item veto that stripped out language preserving some THC beverage sales. That fight matters because it shows how politically awkward the drink category has become. Lawmakers, regulators and governors increasingly seem willing to carve out drinks, kill drinks or box drinks in depending on what coalition is yelling loudest that week.

The larger point is simpler. Ohio did not just tighten the screws. It made a choice. It chose to treat intoxicating hemp less like a category that needed guardrails and more like a category it wanted gone.

South Carolina

South Carolina went in a different direction, and that difference is important.

Rather than try to wipe hemp THC off the map, the state Senate moved a compromise bill that keeps some products legal while sharply narrowing where they can be sold and under what conditions. According to The State and local TV outlet WLTX, senators ultimately agreed to allow certain low-dose THC beverages to remain on the market, but only under a much more restrictive retail structure.

The broad outline is this: drinks with 5 milligrams of THC or less could still be sold in places like grocery stores or gas stations, but they would need to be kept behind the counter and sold by businesses with the appropriate licenses. Stronger drinks and gummies would be pushed into liquor stores, and bars and restaurants would be shut out of on-premises sales. Marijuana Moment captured the basic posture well: this is not legalization in the broad retail sense, and it is not prohibition either. It is restriction, channeling and control.

That may sound more moderate than Ohio’s approach, and in some ways it is. But nobody should mistake it for laissez-faire. South Carolina lawmakers are still drawing a hard line around access, dosage, format and point of sale. They are telling the market, in effect, that hemp THC can stay, but only if it behaves itself and only if it starts looking a lot less like a convenience-store free-for-all.

It is a meaningful choice, too. South Carolina is not saying “no” to hemp. It is saying “not like that.”

And that may end up being the model a lot of other states try next, especially those that are uncomfortable with outright bans but equally uncomfortable with gummies and drinks being sold too widely, too casually or too visibly.

Texas

Then there is Texas, where the state is about to take a major swing at the smokable side of the hemp business.

As reported by KUT, new rules adopted by the Texas Department of State Health Services take effect on March 31 and effectively ban the sale of smokable hemp and extracts by changing the way THC is measured. The key move is that Texas will now count THCA in the total THC calculation, which cuts directly at the flower products that became wildly popular across the state.

That matters because THCA flower is not a side hustle. For many retailers, it is the business. KSAT reported that one San Antonio operator said 70% of their sales come from smokable products. Another business owner said shops centered on flower would likely shut down. And the pain does not stop with smokables. KUT also reported that the new rules impose steep annual fees — $5,000 per retail location and $10,000 per manufacturing facility — while the state has more than 9,100 registered retail locations selling consumable hemp products.

So Texas is not banning everything. Most edible hemp products remain legal under the new rules. But that does not make this a soft move. It is still a major restructuring of the market, one that takes out a huge category and makes the rest more expensive to operate. Businesses and advocates quoted in the coverage warned that the result could be exactly what we have now heard in state after state: more pressure on legitimate operators, less access for consumers and more room for the illicit market to step in.

Which is the irony baked into so much of this. States keep presenting these measures as efforts to create order. Sometimes they do create order. They also create shortages, closures, confusion and fresh opportunities for the people operating outside the rules entirely.

That is especially true when regulators go after the most popular products first.

The Bigger Picture

Put these three states side by side and the real story comes into focus.

This is no longer just a debate over whether the 2018 Farm Bill opened a loophole. That part is over. Everyone knows it did. The fight now is over what happens next: who gets to sell hemp THC, what kinds of products are politically survivable and whether states want a broad-access market, a tightly managed one or no meaningful intoxicating hemp market at all.

Ohio answered with prohibition. South Carolina answered with containment. Texas answered with a targeted strike on smokables and a heavier cost structure for what remains.

Same plant. Same legal mess. Three different futures.

And that may be the most important thing to understand right now: the hemp market is not heading toward one national outcome. It is being carved up state by state, ideology by ideology, category by category. Some lawmakers want it dead. Some want it domesticated. Some want it around, but only in the safest-looking packaging possible.

What none of them seem willing to do anymore is pretend they do not see it.

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This January, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) is considering a proposed ruling that could restrict the rights of Texans to access hemp products that they have come to rely on. Even after a similar ban was vetoed by the governor last year, new proposed regulations would effectively ban smokable hemp products entirely […]

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Reggie & Dro, San Antonio’s premier dispensary and social club, has top-quality hemp THCA flower so you can celebrate 420 in style.

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Bye-bye, Dry January. Millions of weed smokers say adios to winter’s worst with a breathtaking selection of lucky green across the USA and Canada this St. Patrick’s Day. Legalization in over 20 states offers ever more affordable alternatives to booze. The California outdoor is perfectly cured. Your favorite musician has a new strain.  Maryland has […]

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Including New Mexico’s biggest medical shop.

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Cannabis reform could arrive in nine states this year. Yet some remain far more likely than others to make it a reality.

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Including the Depp South’s biggest medical shop.

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Hometown Hero is celebrating the start of the holiday season by offering a huge 30% off discount on their high-quality hemp products.

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The city of Dallas, Texas will soon discuss whether or not to add a measure on the November ballot that would decriminalize small amounts of cannabis.

Recently in a news release, Dallas Councilmember Chad West announced that the Dallas Freedom Act will be proposed on June 26. “Voters in our city and across the country want to decriminalize marijuana,” said West. “Our already burdened police should focus their attention on serious crime, not arresting people with small amounts of marijuana. Bringing this to voters through a City Council-proposed Charter amendment instead of a petition will save the city time and resources.”

The proposal was accelerated through a petition which collected more than 50,000 signatures through the help of Ground Game Texas. If passed into law, it would prevent police from giving tickets or arresting people for possessing less than four ounces of cannabis through Class A or Class B misdemeanors.  “Voters in our city and across the country want to decriminalize marijuana,” said West. “Our already burdened police should focus their attention on serious crime, not arresting people with small amounts of marijuana.”

Ground Game Texas has assisted numerous other Texas cities in passing decriminalization, such as Austin, Denton, Killeen, and San Marcos. However, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently sued some of those cities (specifically Austin, Denton, Elgin, Killeen, and San Marcos) for passing decriminalization bills at the end of January. “I will not stand idly by as cities run by pro-crime extremists deliberately violate Texas law and promote the use of illicit drugs that harm our communities,” Paxton said. “This unconstitutional action by municipalities demonstrates why Texas must have a law to ‘follow the law.’ It’s quite simple: the legislature passes every law after a full debate on the issues, and we don’t allow cities the ability to create anarchy by picking and choosing the laws they enforce.”

Former Ground Game Texas executive director, Julie Oliver, accused Paxton of fighting against the will of the people. “Ken Paxton’s lawsuits represent an anti-democratic assault on the constitutional authority of Texas Home Rule cities to set local law enforcement priorities,” said Oliver at the time. “In each of the cities sued, a supermajority of voters adopted a policy to deprioritize marijuana enforcement in order to reduce racially biased law enforcement outcomes and save scarce public resources for higher priority public safety needs.”

The Dallas Observer asked West how he thinks Paxton would react if Dallas decriminalized cannabis. “I would hope the attorney general would support and respect the strong will of Dallas residents on this issue. However, based on past actions, I am not optimistic,” West said.

Alongside West, councilmembers Adam Bazaldua, Jaime Resendez, and Zarin Gracey are also in support of decriminalization in Dallas. Bazaldua said in a recent press statement that it’s essential to give voters a chance to pass the bill. “For the past four years I have advocated for our council to implement this kind of initiative,” said Bazaldua. “Our jails are overfilled with predominantly Brown and Black males serving sentences for a substance that is making others millions of dollars in more than 30 states across the country. It’s past time we take action against this injustice.”

Bazaldua initially proposed decriminalization in 2021, which led Dallas law enforcement to stop arresting people if they were in possession of less than two ounces of cannabis, however, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) has continued to make arrests, according to Resendez. “Despite the positive steps taken by the city and DPD in recent years, marijuana-related arrests continue, and racial disparities persist,” Resendez said. “Although marijuana use is comparable across racial lines, Black and Latino individuals are disproportionately arrested and punished. Decriminalization is the best way to address this disparity.”

Gracey also added that decriminalizing is mainly about righting the wrongs of the War on Drugs. “Decriminalizing marijuana is not just about changing laws; it’s about rectifying decades of injustice and ensuring that our legal system is fair and equitable for all,” Gracey said.

Oliver was replaced as Ground Game Texas executive director by Catina Voellinger in April, although no reason was presented by the organization. “We’ve built a very strong and mighty team that’s greater than the sum of its parts, right?” said Voellinger after she took the position. “So the main message is that Ground Game is a force, and we’re not going anywhere. None of our programs have ceased. We’re not going to back out on any of the things we’ve committed to. And we’re excited about the future and growing this movement.” 

Recently there have been two ongoing lawsuits against the city of Killeen, which remain unaffected by the recent change in executive director position at Ground Game Texas. “I thoroughly enjoyed working with Julie and I’ll continue to work with her,” said Bell County Commissioner Louie Minor. “I don’t know what her plans are, but I know that she’s dedicated to bringing change to Bell County and all over the state. The impact of Julie and Ground Game has been statewide; but here in Bell County, they were instrumental in getting a more progressive voice in elected positions and giving residents a chance to vote on issues that they care about.”

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