AUSTIN, Texas — Lawmakers are pushing to expand medical marijuana access in Texas. Patients can get a medical marijuana prescription in the state if they have one of nine conditions, like cancer or PTSD.
In 2015, Texas passed its compassionate-use program (CUP) under the leadership of Rep. Stephanie Klick, R-Fort Worth. It was originally designed for people with intractable epilepsy. CUP was expanded in later legislative sessions to include more conditions, like cancer and PTSD.
Rep. Klick, who’s a nurse and chair of the House public health committee, is now looking to take it a step further with House Bill 1805. If it passes, it would allow doctors to prescribe medical marijuana for “a condition that causes chronic pain, for which a physician would otherwise prescribe an opioid.”
Right now, there are only three medical marijuana licenses in Texas. One of them is Texas Original, which is headquartered in Manchaca, about 10 miles south of Austin. The business cultivates, manufactures, and distributes all from one location.
Nico Richardson, the CEO of Texas Original, is all about expanding the CUP. Right now, Texas Original has about 2,500 patients. Based on data from other states with well-regulated medical marijuana programs, Richardson estimates Texas Original could help ten times that amount if lawmakers expanded the CUP.
“The system desperately needs to be expanded from a business perspective,” he said. “But more importantly, for the patients of Texas that currently don’t have access for conditions like chronic pain.”
A new survey from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs shows that 93% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans support legalization of medical marijuana.
Rep. Liz Campos, D-San Antonio, is vice chair of the House public health committee. She said she wants to work with Rep. Klick on HB 1805.
“I think it’s going to be a bipartisan issue, and hopefully we can get it across,” she said. “Chairwoman Klick is a Republican, and she’s really pushing forward, because she’s a nurse and she understands it. And so I think we are going to be successful.”
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who’s a Republican, also supports expanding the CUP.
“Let’s open it all the way up and let doctors decide who gets treated with it, and get the elected officials, bureaucrats, [and] state agencies out of making those medical decisions,” he said.
Miller added that it’s not a big agricultural crop for Texas because there are only three licenses in the state, but it’s still important to him.
“I want to help people, and this will help a lot of people have a better quality of life,” he said.
Legalizing marijuana for recreational use is out of the question, especially with Republicans in control. But that’s OK with Richardson, who doesn’t want the business to grow too fast and then fail. He supports Texas’ approach to expand the CUP little by little.
“Slowly, methodically, well-regulated,” he said.
Besides expanding the CUP to include any patient with chronic pain, Richardson also hopes lawmakers turn the THC cap into a volumetric structure, instead of its current percentage-by-weight structure.
“So right now, all of our medicine has to be under 1% by the weight of THC within our products,” Richardson said. “That’s not how our doctors prescribe the medicine; that’s not how our patients take the medicine. They dose and they prescribe based on milligrams, so actual THC. We never get a prescription for a 0.5 percent-by-weight tincture. We get a prescription for ‘10 milligrams twice a day’ like any other medicine. You don’t prescribe opioids that way; you don’t prescribe SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] that way. You prescribe based on milligram dosage.”
Richardson also hopes lawmakers expand patient access by physical location. Right now, Texas Original patients can pick up from the Manchaca location, or the business has to drive it to them. That could be as far as Lubbock or El Paso. And if the patient isn’t around to receive their medication, then it has to be driven back to Central Texas.
“We can’t use UPS or FedEx or any of the normal methodologies you’d use to send medicine to a patient. We have to do that with people driving cars. So I believe last year, we had about 500,000 miles on the road for our drivers just servicing our small patient base that we currently have here in Texas. A simple change there would provide a sea change of access for patients that live outside of the most populous metro areas of Texas.”