Episode 2 of High Times’ Texas Cannabis Chronicles goes inside the machinery of the crackdown, where the Lieutenant Governor called hemp operators “terrorists” and a multibillion-dollar industry waits to find out if its legal business becomes a crime.
If Episode 1 of Texas Cannabis Chronicles showed the explosion, Episode 2 takes you inside the machine. The second installment of the High Times documentary series, directed by filmmaker JT Barnett, trades the wide shot for the engine room: the lobbying, the lawsuits, the agency rule-writing, and the political muscle quietly working to shrink what has become one of the largest cannabis markets on earth.
The episode’s title comes from its sharpest moment. At a Capitol hearing, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick floated the idea that the people behind Texas hemp products might be running something sinister. “We have no idea who’s making this product,” he says. “Are they terrorists? Is this a terrorist money-laundering scheme?” The operators in the room were stunned. “We were just called terrorists by the Lieutenant Governor of Texas,” one says, still processing it on camera.
That’s the temperature of the fight Barnett is documenting. And the people he follows aren’t abstractions. They’re the founders of an Austin hemp company, the advocates working the Capitol on lobby day, the shop owners who built legal businesses on the back of a 2019 law, and the lawyers promising to sue the state, in their words, “into oblivion.”
How Texas Got Here
The backstory the episode lays out is real. In 2019, Texas passed HB 1325, legalizing hemp in line with the federal 2018 Farm Bill. The state didn’t expect what happened next. The hemp market exploded into a business that operators in the film describe as supporting tens of thousands of jobs and billions in revenue, sold across more than 8,000 locations statewide. Texas, almost by accident, became one of the biggest consumable-THC markets in the country.
Cynthia Cabrera, chief strategy officer for Austin-based Hometown Hero, walks through that history in the episode. Lukas Gilkey, the company’s founder and a former Coast Guard drug-task-force veteran, has become one of the most visible faces of the industry’s legal fight. Their company is at the center of the most consequential court case in Texas hemp right now.
One thread the film hammers, and that holds up, is the distinction politicians keep blurring. Operators argue that the products sold in licensed Texas shops are not the synthetic cannabinoids that have been illegal under state law since 2011. “It’s really disingenuous to call the products that are being sold in this industry synthetic,” one operator says, “when it is literally the exact same products that are being sold in the Texas Compassionate Use Program.” The conflation of legal hemp-derived THC with illegal synthetics is, the film argues, a rhetorical move that makes a ban easier to sell.
The Episode’s Thesis: It’s About Who Controls the Market
Barnett is explicit that Episode 2 isn’t a hero-and-villain story. “This episode’s not about villains,” he says. “It’s about systems. Systems that reward consolidation, punish independence, and quietly transfer opportunity.” The argument the film builds is that once hemp went mainstream in Texas, the fight stopped being about farmers and small business and became about power: who gets to decide what’s legal, who can operate, and who gets shut down.
The episode points at two interest groups it says don’t love hemp: the alcohol industry, which competes with it, and the licensed marijuana industry, which offers THC through a tighter licensing system that hemp sidesteps. Out of that, the film argues, comes the familiar language of “public safety” and “protecting the children,” deployed to justify narrowing the market. It’s a pointed claim, and it’s presented as the filmmaker’s argument rather than settled fact, which is the right way to frame it.
“One election cycle you’re compliant, the next cycle you’re a criminal.”
Texas Cannabis Chronicles, Episode 2
Where the Fight Actually Stands
Here’s the context worth adding to the episode, because the legal picture has moved fast. Patrick’s signature total ban, Senate Bill 3, passed the legislature in 2025 but was vetoed by Gov. Greg Abbott that June, with Abbott citing the likelihood it wouldn’t survive a court challenge. What came next was a quieter route to the same end: the Texas Department of State Health Services wrote new rules, effective March 31, 2026, that set a 0.3% total-THC limit, imposed child-resistant packaging and testing requirements, and hiked licensing fees from a few hundred dollars to as much as $10,000 per facility. Operators call it a ban by regulation. As Gilkey put it, “they did a ban with their own regulatory scheme.”
Those rules are currently blocked. A Travis County judge issued a restraining order, and the most recent extension keeps the smokable-hemp rules on hold until at least late July 2026. Meanwhile, the Texas Supreme Court handed down a split decision in early May: it restored the state health agency’s authority to treat delta-8 THC as a controlled substance, overturning a long-standing injunction Hometown Hero had won, while the broader rule package stayed blocked. The episode references that Supreme Court turn as the moment the state gained ground. It’s an accurate read, even if the overall ban hasn’t taken effect.
In other words, the war the series is documenting is still live. Smokable hemp is legal in Texas today only because a court says so, and that protection has an expiration date unless the litigation extends it. Every shop owner, farmer, and distributor in the film is operating in exactly the gray zone Barnett describes, where compliance is real but temporary, and the rules can be rewritten by the next ruling or the next session.
Why It Matters Beyond Texas
The reason this series works is the same reason Texas matters: what happens there won’t stay there. Texas is the test case for whether a state can build a massive hemp economy and then dismantle it through agency rule-making rather than legislation, sidestepping the veto that killed the outright ban. If it works in Texas, the playbook travels.
Episode 2 ends on that cliffhanger, with the industry waiting, as Barnett puts it, “to see whether regulation wins out or whether prohibition comes back wearing a different suit.” On the current timeline, that question gets answered in a courtroom this summer.
If you missed the opener, Episode 1, “The War on Texas Cannabis Has Begun,” sets up the whole fight: the farms that turned cotton fields into hemp, the veterans who say cannabis worked when opioids didn’t, and the political machine moving to shut it all down.
Episode 2 of Texas Cannabis Chronicles, “Called ‘Terrorists’ by the Texas Lt. Governor,” is live now on the High Times YouTube channel, with six more episodes to come.
