Texas House gives preliminary green light to medical marijuana expansion

AUSTIN — The Texas House gave preliminary approval to a bill Wednesday that would considerably expand the Texas Compassionate Use Program for the medical use of low-THC cannabis by including several additional groups of Texans while raising the THC limit from .5% to 5%.

Fort Worth Republican Rep. Stephanie Klick’s House Bill 1535 would include patients with PTSD, not just in veterans as originally filed, chronic pain that would otherwise be treated with an opioid and patients with any type of cancer.

It additionally includes patients with debilitating medical conditions as defined by the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) and would create a medical cannabis research program under the Texas Health and Human Services. The bill now seeks approval from the Senate.

As originally filed, HB 1535 included PTSD, but only in veterans. During the committee hearing on April 7, doctors, medical marijuana advocates and numerous others who believed their condition should qualify for the program supported the bill while asking for all forms of PTSD to be included.

A 25-year veteran, David Bass, told the House’s Public Health committee that he suffered from PTSD and chronic pain. While acknowledging that he qualified under the bill as originally filed, he also said that PTSD qualifications for medical cannabis should reach beyond veterans.

“My PTSD is no different than a firefighter or a police officer who has PTSD, or a person who was abused or sexually assaulted,” Bass said on April 7. “Their symptoms and experiences are the same as mine.”

“Believe it or not, the number is actually higher for survivors of sexual assault than it is for veterans, and we need to include them in that,” Klick said.

As Klick points out, experts say roughly 50% of people with PTSD in the U.S. are survivors of sexual or physical violence with sexual violence alone representing about 30% of PTSD cases.

The state’s compassionate use program (TCUP) was originally created in 2015 for patients with intractable epilepsy. Four years later, Klick had another bill pass, HB 3703, which expanded the program to include Texans with seizure disorders, multiple sclerosis and terminal cancer among other conditions.

Now, Klick has HB 1535 which has the potential to be the broadest expansion of the compassionate use program up to date.

Morris Denton, CEO of medical cannabis company Texas Original Compassionate Cultivation, said the amendment to include all forms of PTSD was the right thing to do. However, Denton said it’s hard to say to what degree this bill would impact the number of Texans in the compassionate use program registry, which was at 3,811 as of December.

As it currently stands, that number trails Oklahoma’s 365,000-plus people enrolled in December, as reported by the Texas Tribune. Texas also trails neighboring states Louisiana and New Mexico.

“What we have seen in the past is that there are multiple things that impact whether or not a patient wants to come into the program,” Denton said. “… We had a big expansion in 2019 theoretically in terms of going from a very one very narrow condition to a much broader number, and yet it didn’t open the floodgates, so we’ll see what happens moving forward.”

Denton said some factors that impact a patients’ decision to register for the program include not having a qualifying condition and whether the amount of THC and CBD is sufficient to treat patients under the cap. The third factor is an individual’s view on medical cannabis as a form of medication, Denton said.

Denton called the bill’s 5% THC limit a “dramatic increase” and another positive step forward.

“As long as the Legislator continues to make positive steps forward and as long as we continue to prove that those steps were the right steps to make, then we’ll eventually get to the point where it’s a full medical market with no limitation on the THC,” Denton said. “And the doctors would have the ability to treat anyone with any condition just based on their experience, knowledge and know how.”

The bill now heads to the Senate, where Klick’s 2019 expansion bill easily passed, though it was stripped of the provision to create a research program to study the effectiveness of medical cannabis for various conditions.

Rep. Klick’s office did not immediately return a request for comment, noting that she was busy chairing the Public Health committee at the time.