After lawmakers blunted expansion for years, Texas\u2019 medical marijuana industry is slated to see more marijuana operators coming online, current ones opening more facilities and more Texans enrolling in the program this year. <\/p>\n
In September, Texas officially rolled out the most significant expansion<\/a> of its medical marijuana program, the Texas Compassionate Use Program, since its launch in 2015. The expansion adds new qualifying conditions such as chronic pain, inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn\u2019s disease, traumatic brain injury, and terminal illness. It also added more treatment options like prescribed inhalers, higher THC limits, and better dispensary access across the state. The expansion will also increase the number of marijuana distributors from three to 15. <\/p>\n Lawmakers enacted these changes after distributors in the program said strict state regulations on THC amounts, locations, cultivation, and more hampered the program\u2019s growth and, in fact, contributed to them losing patients<\/a> to cheaper, more accessible, and diverse hemp products<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cWhat made TCUP expensive in the past was the fact that you had this niche program with a huge regulatory burden on top of it. Now, as you expand the program, the cost of regulation becomes a smaller percentage, and therefore the marginal cost of products will come down over time,\u201d said Nico Richardson, CEO of Texas Original, a Central Texas medical marijuana company. <\/p>\n The Texas Department of Public Safety reported<\/a> that by the end of 2025, 135,470 patients were listed in the Compassionate Use Registry by their physicians, about 32% more than the previous year<\/a>. Distributors are attributing it to the news of the budding expansion. <\/p>\n The law immediately benefits the state\u2019s three dispensing organizations, Texas Original, goodblend, and Fluent. Since these companies mostly sell their products online, none of them have opened more storefronts yet, but they have created more satellite locations across the state to store their products, allowing products to be cheaper and delivered to customers faster. Before the law, companies would have to return the product to the original dispensary every day, raising overhead costs.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are planning to have a satellite location in all 11 public health regions within the next six months,\u201d Richardson said. <\/p>\n Texas Original has also moved from a 7,700-square-foot facility to its new 75,000-square-foot headquarters in Bastrop to cultivate more strains of marijuana and expand their product options.<\/p>\n Austin-based Goodblend has opened its first satellite location in San Antonio that allows for same-day pick-up and plans to expand further into Texas to reach remote locations. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are also working on a slew of new products and formats as it relates to vaporization and hopefully have something down the pipe in the next six months,\u201d said Jervonne Singletary, goodblend\u2019s spokesperson. <\/p>\n And, more medical marijuana operators will soon join the existing three. One of the most heralded parts of the expansion is the addition of 12 licensed dispensing organizations by April 1, as outlined in House Bill 46<\/a>. <\/p>\n The first phase<\/a> is underway with DPS awarding nine businesses with conditional licenses. These nine businesses are not authorized to cultivate, manufacture, distribute, or sell any cannabis products until the department grants final approval, said Sheridan Nolen, Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson.<\/p>\n The dispensing organizations will be assigned a health region. \u201cAdditionally, House Bill 46 does not allow dispensing organizations to operate more than one satellite location in a single public health region until they operate at least one satellite location in each public health region,\u201d Nolen said.<\/p>\n Most of these distributors operate in cannabis markets outside of Texas and are expected to leverage existing resources to get a quick start here. <\/p>\n \u201cAfter being awarded a Conditional Dispensing Organization License in December, we continue to work collaboratively with key stakeholders on all required next steps in the process,\u201d said George Archos, founder and CEO of Chicago-based Vernano, which will serve public health region 10<\/a> in West Texas. \u201c\u2026We look forward to putting plants in the ground that are grown in Texas, by Texans, and delivered to patients across the state, in accordance with the law.\u201d<\/p>\n These new marijuana distributors have up to two years after final approval to become fully operational in Texas, but Singletary expects it might be a little after nine months to a year. <\/p>\n She said once those additional businesses get up in running, she expects the prices on medical marijuana products that can range from $40 to $70 to continuously drop based on what she has seen in other states that have undergone an expansion like Florida. <\/p>\n All of these changes are great on paper, but distributors say the one hurdle that is holding the program back from its full potential is the medical providers themselves.<\/p>\n Awareness among medical providers <\/p>\n One of the key cogs of the Texas Compassionate Use Program when it was first created was medical providers, but very few have registered to prescribe medical cannabis, limiting the options Texans have had to enter the program. <\/p>\n Richardson said there are around 80,000 board-certified physicians in Texas, and only 800 are registered in the TCUP program. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re absolutely laser-focused on doctors, because they are really the patients\u2019 first entry point into the program, by asking your physician if you qualify,\u201d Singletary said. <\/p>\n To become registered to prescribe medical cannabis in Texas, a provider must visit the Texas DPS registry portal<\/a> with their Texas Medical Board license, American Board of Medical Specialties certification, and driver\u2019s license to complete the application. <\/p>\n Among the reasons for the sluggish enrollment is a lack of awareness about the program among medical providers. <\/p>\n Richardson said state agencies have mostly been hands-off in spreading awareness of the program, leaving it up to distributors<\/a> to boost the number of subscribers.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is all we have done for the past seven or eight years is educate doctors on the fact that the program exists. DPS hasn\u2019t had a campaign out there to bring doctors into the program. This has pretty much been a Texas Original effort,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Also, most medical providers didn\u2019t see a need to register, since most of their patients weren\u2019t eligible. <\/p>\n Matthew Brimberry, an Austin-based doctor and medical director of the Texas Cannabis Clinic, said he didn\u2019t join the state\u2019s medical program until 2019, when the list of qualifying conditions expanded from only those with intractable epilepsy to include terminal cancer. <\/p>\n Other reasons why medical providers are hesitant to join the program include workload and lack of knowledge around the benefits of cannabis. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s another electronic health system portal that you have to register patients into, which can be a hurdle when you are already dealing with so many portals,\u201d Brimberry said. \u201cAlso, the nature of the medicine itself, there is not a lot of education on it. Being a medical provider, you aren\u2019t going to recommend something you don\u2019t know about.\u201d <\/p>\n Brimberry said no health field has taken the lead on prescribing medical cannabis, leaving it up to providers who have a specific interest in it to advocate for it. <\/p>\n To get around this problem of having a small pool of providers to choose from, local medical marijuana distributors have been using telemedicine<\/a> to connect patients with specialized providers across the state, but Singletary said in an ideal world, patients would be visiting any doctor to learn more about medical marijuana. <\/p>\n \u201cI am happy there is an alternative route for folks that might not be comfortable talking to their physician about this. But I want to see more Texas doctors in the program,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n New opportunities on the way<\/p>\n In December, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to expedite the reclassification of marijuana from a Schedule I drug, alongside heroin and LSD, to Schedule III, like ketamine and some steroids. <\/p>\n In 2023, the federal Department of Health and Human Services determined marijuana has acceptable medical use after finding that health care practitioners across 43 jurisdictions are authorized to recommend the medical use of marijuana to more than 6 million registered patients for at least 15 medical conditions. <\/p>\n The rescheduling doesn\u2019t make recreational marijuana legal across the nation. However, it changes how it\u2019s regulated, removing barriers <\/a>to scientific research <\/a>and reducing the industry\u2019s tax burden<\/a>, and improving access to banking services<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cThe thawing of the capital market, better banking, and better relationships with the IRS will free up some capital for more investment, create new products, and drive down costs, so this rescheduling, which we still don\u2019t know a lot about yet, is potentially a big opportunity,\u201d Singletary said. <\/p>\n This changing view of marijuana from the Trump administration might also signal the rest of the Republican Party\u2019s warming toward full legalization. <\/p>\n \u201cWe finally have a federal government, which is frankly 10 years behind the times right now, recognizing the medical benefits of medical cannabis, and we\u2019ve known this for a long time,\u201d Richardson said. \u201cI think we have reached the point where denying this no longer makes any sense at this point.\u201d <\/p>\n The cannabis industry views the expansion in Republican-led Texas as a model for other southern states to expand their cannabis programs, and Texas\u2019 large geographic size and economic infrastructure could make the state a national hub for medical marijuana. . <\/p>\n \u201cMost of the structural problems of the TCUP program have now been solved. Whether it\u2019s access through satellite locations, it\u2019s better and available products that patients were looking for, just know it\u2019s a viable and growing program right now,\u201d Richardson said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After lawmakers blunted expansion for years, Texas\u2019 medical marijuana industry is slated to see more marijuana operators coming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119904,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[918,1562,3328,4750,287,1564,27,29,293,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-119903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-economy","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-marijuana","11":"tag-medical-marijuana","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-state-government","14":"tag-texas","15":"tag-texas-headlines","16":"tag-texas-legislature","17":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}