Opposition is mounting against the Texas legislature’s push to ban hemp-derived THC products. Senate Bill 5 seeks to prohibit intoxicating hemp compounds statewide. Sarah Stogner, the elected District Attorney of Texas’s 143rd Judicial District, calls the proposed ban unconstitutional, unenforceable, and a tool for selective criminalization.
Stogner serves a rural jurisdiction in West Texas, covering Ward, Reeves, and Loving counties near the New Mexico border. She is a former oil and gas attorney who once ran for Railroad Commissioner, but her current role as DA gives her firsthand insight into what crimes are actually prosecuted and what policies have the greatest consequences.
“My job as an elected district attorney is to seek justice. It’s not to seek convictions,” she says. “I can’t get a grand jury to indict on marijuana… sometimes I can’t even get the grand jury to indict on low levels of meth and cocaine.” She says that a range of West Texans—both Republicans and Democrats—don’t support criminalizing hemp or marijuana use. “If it’s something I’m doing in the privacy of my home and it’s to my body, the government should stay out of it.”
She points to the volume of arrests for marijuana possession in Texas—over 25,000—as evidence that enforcement efforts often lead nowhere. “I know those aren’t going to convictions,” she says. “And when you arrest without convictions,” she says, it leads to “misuse of the justice system.”
In Stogner’s view, the legal distinction between marijuana and hemp has become blurry since the 2018 federal Farm Bill legalized hemp containing less than 0.3% Delta-9 THC. Stogner says law enforcement’s response to this is to push for a total ban. “They’re being lazy and saying, ‘Let’s just ban it all because we can’t test any of it.’ But banning it is not the answer,” she says. “Legalizing it is the answer.”
Stogner also believes “someone with money is fighting to change the system” to make all hemp illegal. She sees the bills as protecting financial interests at the expense of personal freedom, public trust, and small businesses. “We went and legalized hemp–that door has been opened,” she says. She believes “you can’t undo it, so just live with it.”
She also says Texas could be a national leader in hemp production, particularly in her West Texas district. “We have all the sun you could ever want out here. We have tons of water that needs to be recycled. West Texas should be the hemp capital of the world.”
The bigger concern, Stogner says, is how laws like SB 5 could reinforce racial and socioeconomic disparities in enforcement. “If I’m a 23-year-old Black kid that just got back from deployment, and I’m hanging out with some buddies in downtown Dallas, that might end very differently,” she says. “It’s the selective weaponization” that she says she fears most.
She says that testing requirements for THC content are another issue. While manufacturers batch-test products for consistency and safety, prosecutors would need to test each individual vape pen or gummy to prove criminal intent—something Stogner says is cost-prohibitive and scientifically unreliable. Effective regulation does not require testing every pen or gummy. But according to Stogner, “to effectively prosecute it, you test every pen,” she says. She opposes that approach as impractical.
She breaks down the realities of prosecution into three categories: “good people that made a bad decision,” “career criminals,” and “people that are mentally ill, and drug addicts who need some other sort of assistance.” Hemp consumers, she says, don’t belong in any of those categories. “No one’s going to substance abuse treatment for smoking too much THC.”
Alcohol-related DUIs, by contrast, are a regular occurrence in her docket. “We have a lot of DUIs with people that are blasted on alcohol.” The science behind DUI enforcement for alcohol is well established, she says, and the dangers are clear. “Biologically speaking, you may feel totally fine, but your eyes are moving slower and differently.”
Stogner also objects to the regulatory double standard between alcohol and cannabis. “Adults should have the ability to buy what they want to buy,” she says. She believes cannabis products should be available at the grocery store, “just like you can buy alcohol, you can buy lettuce.”
Legalizing the products could even help reduce crime, according to Stogner. “What takes away that black market,” she asks. “Legalizing it and letting adults go to the store and get whatever they want.”
Stogner says there also shouldn’t be half measures with regulation since “the current laws that we have aren’t enforced,” she says. Her solution is “decriminalizing and scheduling.”
She says that an outright ban would shut down legal businesses and create further inequities. “It gives law enforcement a way to selectively target people,” resulting in what she says is “unconstitutional taking.”