Senate Rookie Blazes New Frontier with Film
that He Shoots in Bid to Make Cannabis Legal
Capitol Inside
April 20, 2021
Most Texas lawmakers are content to send out a press release and maybe even hold a news conference to promote legislation that they're sponsoring on an issue with some degree of public interest. Some will occasionally get an aide to hammer out an op-ed for the local newspaper to pitch a proposal that the voters back home might want to read about.
And then there's one - State Senator Roland Gutierrez - who will round up a crew to shoot a movie about a bill that he's authored and really wants to pass.
Gutierrez released his first film on Tuesday with the YouTube premier of Legalize Texas - a 40 minute documentary that he made to make a case for a marijuana industry in the Lone Star State. The San Antonio Democrat has a way to accomplish that in Senate Bill 140 - one of several measures that Democratic lawmakers have filed for consideration in the 2021 regular session.
Gutierrez, who's listed as the executive producer in the film's credits, contends in the doc that the legalization of cannabis for recreational and medical use would generate $3.6 billion in additional tax revenues while creating 30,000 jobs in agriculture, retail and distribution of the products.
"it's time that we change the paradigm on cannabis," Gutierrez says in the opening scene, "because quite frankly we've been lied to for about 50 years."
Gutierrez traveled to Canada and Colorado where he and his fellow filmmakers tour a manufacturing plant near Denver that specializes in cholate products that are infused with THC and CBD in some cases as well. The scenes inside the business 1906 New Highs give Gutierrez and crew an opportunity to show how marijuana edibles are based on advanced pharmaceutical knowledge and research and made with equipment that's state of the art.
The movie makes a point of how the industry in Colorado is heavily regulated with 25 percent of the sales at licensed retail dispensaries taxed by the state government there. Gutierrez says in the film that 36 states have passed laws to make recreational or medical marijuana or both legal and taxable as a source of much-needed funds to spend on infrastructure in Texas.
The Gutierrez team's next stop was Killeen - where the legislator interviews several veterans about the successful use of cannabis products to treat maladies that they brought back from wars like post traumatic stress syndrome and chronic pain and suffering from injuries suffered during assignments in the military. Killeen is an Army town where Fort Hood is headquartered.
"The question that Texans need to ask themselves is why not us?" Gutierrez says in the documentary.
Gutierrez doesn't attempt to answer the question of why Texas is sitting on its thumbs while states like Colorado are sucking massive amounts of money from a Lone Star State that prides itself on being backwards. New Mexico Governor Michelle Lynn Lujan Grisham, who's also a Democrat, signed legislation last week that will have recreational cannabis dispensaries operating even closer to Texas by the spring of 2022.
The answer is Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick - the Republican Senate president who's shown no interest in marijuana legalization despite the damage that he would be doing to the Texas economy by using his power to kill the bills that would accomplish that single handled. The prevailing sentiment at the statehouse is that bills that the Legislature would vote to make recreational and medical marijuana legal here if Patrick would give the nod.
Gutierrez spent close to $200,000 on the making of the educational film on pot based on expenditures that are listed on the web site Transparency USA. The records show that Gutierrez paid the film's director Nicco Vasquez and three others who are listed as producers from his campaign account about $180,000 combined.
Legalize Texas won't be up for any Oscars on Sunday night or in 2022 when Gutierrez will be running for a second term in the upper chamber where he's a freshman this year. But Gutierrez may take heart in the fact that another native of the Alamo City - Robert Rodriguez - shelled out the same basic amount on his first movie El Mariachi. The low-budget black-and-white film that Rodriguez shot with a hand-held camera captured the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993.
Rodriguez, a longtime Austin resident, has been one of Hollywood's most successful directors and writers in the past 30 years after securing get $7 million to make his second film Desperados with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek in the lead roles.
