AUSTIN - The Texas Supreme Court recently held that a ban prohibiting the processing and manufacturing of smokable hemp products is not in violation of the Texas Constitution.
Court records show four Texas hemp companies challenged the ban as unconstitutional. A trial court agreed and the Texas Department of State Health Services appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
Article 1, Section 19, of the Texas Constitution guarantees that no “citizen of this State shall be deprived of life, liberty, property, privileges or immunities, or in any manner disfranchised, except by the due course of the law of the land.”
On June 24, the high court reversed the trial court’s judgment, holding that the hemp companies do not assert the deprivation of an interest substantively protected by the Texas Constitution’s due-course clause.
The 2018 Farm Bill classified “hemp” as an agricultural product, essentially authorizing each state to decide how to regulate hemp.
Texas' hemp plan permits Texans to cultivate, handle, transport, export, process, manufacture, distribute, sell, and purchase hemp products within the state.
“But as an exception to this otherwise broad authorization, the plan expressly prohibits the ‘processing’ or ‘manufacturing” of hemp-containing products ‘for smoking,’” the opinion states.
“The Hemp Companies assert that the state’s ban against the manufacturing and processing of smokable hemp products in Texas violates the Constitution’s due-course clause because the ban has no rational connection to any possible governmental interest and its realworld effect is so burdensome as to be oppressive in light of any governmental interest.”
Justices found that the hemp companies complain that Texas law does not permit them to manufacture or process products that Texas law prohibited for nearly a century.
“Considering the long history of the state’s extensive efforts to prohibit and regulate the production, possession, and use of the Cannabis sativa L. plant, we conclude that the manufacture and processing of smokable hemp products is neither a liberty interest nor a vested property interest the due-course clause protects,” the opinion states. “It is, instead, ‘purely a personal privilege’ that the people’s elected representatives in the legislature may grant or withdraw as they see fit.”
Case No. 21-1045