Decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana has consistently appeared on local ballots across the state over the past three years.
Bastrop, Lockhart and Dallas became the latest Texas cities last November to pass such measures. They joined cities like Austin, San Marcos, Killeen, Elgin, Denton, and Harker Heights, which had previously passed decriminalization ordinances.
However, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has taken issue with these local changes, arguing that they violate state law.
Paxton sued several of the cities saying that they have no right to instruct police not to enforce Texas drug laws concerning possession and distribution of marijuana. And now a state appeals court has ruled in Paxton’s favor on two of these lawsuits.
Katherine Neill Harris, a fellow in drug policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, joined Texas Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: First, can you tell us a little bit more about the movement to decriminalize marijuana on a municipal level, what these types of ordinances actually do?
Katherine Neill Harris: Sure. So the organization, Ground Game Texas, spent a lot of time doing the groundwork to build support for these measures in these cities that you mentioned. Voters in these localities overwhelmingly voted to cease enforcement of marijuana prohibition laws.
For example, in San Marcos, that ordinance passed with 80 percent. So this was something that certainly had a lot support in these cities where the ordinances passed.
Yeah, I notice a lot of these cities are college towns, San Marcos, of course. We’re looking at Denton here. A lot, but not all for sure.
What about the appeals court? What do they have to say about two of these cases that Ken Paxton brought, the ones in Austin and San Marcos?
So both of those cases had been dismissed by district court judges in Travis and Hays County.
This appeals court, it’s the 15th Circuit Court of Appeals. It is a new court that was established during the 2023 legislative session. And it hears specifically cases that challenge constitutional law. The judges are appointed by the governor.
So it’s a slightly different court than some of the other courts that might have previously heard a case like this. And they said that the ordinances conflict with state law and thus cannot be enforced.
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Well, what about people in Austin and San Marcos? Does this mean that police in those cities, once again, will begin arresting people for small amounts of marijuana?
It’s hard to say what the practical effects will be, because prior to these ordinances, there was already a deep decline in enforcement of marijuana possession laws, in part because of the 2019 state law that legalized hemp and the difficulties for law enforcement in distinguishing between hemp and marijuana.
So there’s already sort of a decline in enforcement, and it’s just hard to see right now whether we’ll now see an uptick.
You know, beyond that, I wonder how the state might enforce local police enforcement, right?
Yeah. And that’s one issue that just, again, from a practical standpoint, there’s a bit of a difference between a locality putting an ordinance to voters and saying, officially, “we’re not going to enforce this state law” versus, you know, local discretion and local de facto policies, right?
So police on the ground have a lot of discretion that the state can’t really control from their position.
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What does this mean more broadly for marijuana decriminalization efforts in Texas going forward?
Well, it’s certainly frustrating for the voters in these localities that approve this measure. And I think a lot of them see it as sort of a disenfranchisement.
There’s also kind of a broader context, again, where the state is sort of trying to push back against localities who might be, in their eyes, sort of bucking state law, state authority. And I think this is part of that larger conflict that we’re seeing.
I also think, though, that the other part of this is that at the state level, we have several bills coming down the pipeline around hemp regulation because that market has kind of been out of control in the state. And so it remains to be seen how they’ll rein that in.
But I don’t think a decriminalization bill for marijuana has much of a chance session.
