Trump Promotional Video on Cannabis
Could Be Final Nail in Texas Chair's Ban
Capitol Inside
September 29, 2025
President Donald Trump may have killed Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick's campaign to ban THC in Texas on Sunday night with a social media post that featured a video touting the immense health and healing benefits that cannabis offers senior citizens across the United States.
While Trump's Truth Social post focuses on hemp-derived CBD, it gave Americans the impression that the president is one step away from endorsing the reclassification of marijuana as a Schedule III drug with relatively low potential for physical or psychological dependence. Trump said last month that the rescheduling of cannabis could be just weeks away.
Patrick - the Trump campaign manager in Texas during all three White House bids - led an unsuccessful push for a prohibition on the sale, manufacture and distribution of cannabis products with the exception of CBD that doesn't contain a sufficient amount of THC for an intoxicating effect.
The Republican lieutenant governor ramrodded the THC ban through the Texas Senate where the GOP members march in lockstep to his orders and the House as well despite the leadership's initial support for a regulatory plan for a hemp industry that flourished since lawmakers legalized hemp in 2019.
But Governor Greg Abbott put the first nail in the THC prohibition coffin when he vetoed the Patrick ban that emerged from the regular session with votes from all but two of 108 GOP legislators in Austin. Patrick had the Senate Republicans recycle the proposed ban in two special sessions during the summer when it died in a House committee both times without a hearing or vote.
Patrick argued that Texas desperately needed to outlaw THC products derived from hemp because they were poisoning children, wrecking families and causing addiction among Texans of all ages. But the powerful Senate president and the Republican sponsor failed to produce any significant evidence to back up alarming claims that were aired initially in marijuana exploitation movies in the 1930s.
Some lawmakers contended privately that they were bamboozled into believing that Republican voters backed the Patrick prohibition. But Abbott's polling showed just the opposite when 70 percent of GOP voters endorsed the legalization and commercial sale of cannabis in a survey that he used as a guide.
What the Republican lawmakers here have discovered as the year as progressed is that THC is just as popular with GOP voters as it is with Democrats. The legalization of marijuana in heavily-Republican Missouri through the initiative and referendum process is a glaring example. The limits on cannabis purchases in the Show Me State are five times higher than they are in blue states where marijuana is legal.
Patrick has refrained from attacking the president he adores up to now on their major disagreement on THC. The lieutenant governor did not mention Trump's cannabis promotional video on Sunday night or Monday on his X platform when he posted the same picture with the president twice in a tweet on a Religious Liberty Commission that he appointed Patrick to chair. The commission conducted its third hearing on Monday at the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.
more to come ... | 
