The Playbook: 2 Bills, 18 Lies and the Power Grab Behind Texas’ Medical Cannabis Monopoly
Gotta hand it to him, he "seen his opportunity, and he took it."
Post Veto Meltdown at Press Conference
IT was breathtaking. In the aftermath of Governor Greg Abbott's veto of Senate Bill 3, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick orchestrated a press conference that deserves recognition—not for its policy insights, but for its unwavering commitment to fabrication. Patrick's performance brimmed with hyperbole, bristled with misinformation, and advanced legally dubious claims about Texas hemp products and the businesses that sell them. His rhetoric sought to terrorize audiences, demonize an entire industry, and cast the Governor as marijuana legalization's unwitting accomplice.
Yet what emerged from that press conference—perhaps for the first time in such crystalline relief—transcends mere political spin. Patrick has not simply stumbled into error or "fudged the facts." He has constructed an entire legislative campaign upon a foundation of demonstrably false, defamatory, and incendiary claims.
Building a comprehensive political strategy around so many disprovable assertions requires deliberate effort and an almost superhuman, sustained commitment to deception. Patrick has achieved exactly that. For years, he cloaked his prohibitionist agenda in public safety rhetoric and moral posturing. This morning, however, the mask slipped. The press conference exposed the architecture of his disinformation operation: nearly every substantive claim he advanced proved false, misleading, logically fallacious, or outright defamatory.
So what drives Dan Patrick's escalating campaign of mendacity? Why does he persist as his narrative crumbles under scrutiny? The answer likely resides in the politics of fear, power, and strategic distraction—coupled with what appears to be systematic protection of entrenched interests within Texas's Compassionate Use Program. Unable to prevail through science, economics, or legal argument, Patrick has retreated to culture war theatrics, manufactured moral panic, and conspiratorial accusations.
What follows is a comprehensive examination of Patrick's mendacious greatest hits—eighteen fabrications, fallacies, and fantasies that reveal not just careless rhetoric, but calculated deception
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Patrick's Greatest Hits: Eighteen Lies, Fallacies, and Fantasies
1. "Greg Abbott wants to legalize marijuana in Texas."
Patrick deploys both straw man argumentation and calculated misdirection here. Abbott's veto supported regulatory reform, not legalization—a distinction as clear as the difference between traffic laws and banning automobiles. Patrick fabricated a position the Governor never embraced to incite opposition and deflect responsibility for his own legislative failures. This represents classic false attribution, creating an enemy that exists only in Patrick's imagination.
2. "Everything sold in these shops is illegal today."
This sweeping generalization crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. Most hemp products operate within federal legality under the 2018 Farm Bill, much as most drivers operate within speed limits despite the existence of traffic violations. Noncompliant products do not define an entire industry any more than speeding drivers invalidate automobile ownership. Patrick's hasty generalization reveals either profound ignorance of federal law or deliberate misrepresentation.
3. "Federal law allows us to ban all hemp products."
Patrick misinterprets the law with stunning confidence. Federal courts have ruled that blanket bans of hemp-derived cannabinoids likely violate federal preemption and commerce protections. Patrick ignores inconvenient jurisprudence, preferring his own constitutional interpretation to actual judicial precedent—a dangerous precedent for any elected official.
4. "California and Colorado banned THC because it's dangerous."
This false analogy would be laughable if not so cynically deployed. Both states maintain comprehensive adult-use marijuana programs, regulating rather than prohibiting THC—precisely the approach Patrick claims impossible. It's akin to arguing that speed limits prove cars are banned. Patrick's sleight of hand transforms regulation into prohibition, revealing either breathtaking ignorance or deliberate deception.
5. "The Allen drug bust proves everything is illegal."
Patrick weaponizes tragedy through appeals to emotion while engaging in arguments from ignorance. No toxicology reports or laboratory confirmations have been publicly disclosed regarding the Allen incident. Confiscation does not constitute conviction, and anecdote cannot establish industry-wide culpability. Patrick exploits grief to advance policy through fear rather than facts.
6. "The hemp industry is run by terrorists or cartels."
This conspiracy theory represents perhaps Patrick's most reckless fabrication. He offers zero evidence for this inflammatory slander against lawful Texas businesses. Such accusations without proof constitute defamation designed to incite rather than inform. Patrick's guilt-by-association reasoning would make every industry suspect based on theoretical bad actors.
7. "You can't regulate 8,000–9,000 shops. Only banning will work."
Patrick's false dilemma ignores Texas's regulatory success stories. The state successfully oversees far more liquor stores, tobacco retailers, and pharmacy outlets. The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission manages 54,000 licensed premises with 650 employees—more than 83 locations per regulator. If Texas can regulate alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals, hemp presents no unique challenge.
8. "Abbott's regulations are a taking, but my ban isn't."
This blatant contradiction reveals Patrick's legal reasoning in shambles. Outright prohibitions trigger takings claims far more readily than operational regulations or zoning restrictions. Patrick's constitutional analysis collapses under elementary scrutiny, suggesting either profound legal ignorance or cynical manipulation of property rights concerns.
9. "Regulation equals legalization of high-potency THC."
Patrick deploys both slippery slope reasoning and false equivalence. Federal law's 0.3% delta-9 THC limit applies regardless of state regulatory frameworks. Patrick conflates safety standards with endorsement, much like arguing that speed limits endorse reckless driving. Regulation and legalization represent fundamentally different approaches to market control.
10. "Kids are walking into trains or shooting parents because of gummies."
Patrick's post hoc reasoning weaponizes tragedy while providing no evidence linking these incidents to legal hemp products. Correlation without causation cannot justify policy, particularly when anecdotal evidence lacks verification. Patrick's appeal to fear exploits parental anxiety while ignoring the complex factors behind such tragedies.
11. "Texans don't want cannabis legalization."
This false consensus substitutes Patrick's preferences for actual public opinion. Polling consistently demonstrates broad majorities support medical cannabis and regulated hemp across party lines. Patrick apparently believes his voice represents millions of Texans who disagree with him—a curious form of democratic representation.
12. "Shops are all near schools and part of an orchestrated cartel."
Patrick's pattern recognition runs wild, seeing conspiracies where market forces operate. Retail locations follow existing zoning laws and commercial real estate availability. No evidence supports coordinated placement or cartel control. Patrick's patternicity—the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random information—transforms ordinary business decisions into sinister plots.
13. "We can't test these products—nobody knows what's in them."
This circular reasoning reaches absurd heights. Regulation exists precisely to address testing concerns through mandatory laboratory analysis and quality control. Patrick's regulatory nihilism solves problems by eliminating oversight entirely—like addressing food safety by shuttering the health department.
14. "Abbott's proposal lifts the 0.3% THC limit."
Patrick states the demonstrably false with remarkable confidence. The 0.3% delta-9 THC threshold represents federal law, not state preference. Abbott's regulatory framework cannot and does not override federal standards. Patrick's misrepresentation of federal law borders on the bizarre.
15. "We've been sued before and we don't care."
This admission of reckless governance should alarm any fiscal conservative. Courts have already invalidated laws similar to SB 3, and ignoring judicial precedent constitutes fiscal and legal negligence. Patrick transforms taxpayer-funded legal defeats into badges of honor—a curious approach to stewardship.
16. "This industry is coordinated and scripted, not mom-and-pop."
Patrick's ad hominem attacks dismiss thousands of small Texas retailers operating independently. His motivated reasoning refuses to acknowledge legal businesses exist within this sector. Patrick apparently believes small business owners transform into criminal masterminds upon entering the hemp market.
17. "Regulation will lead to lawsuits about how many products you can buy."
Patrick's reductio ad absurdum ignores successful regulatory models across multiple industries. Purchase limits operate effectively in alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical markets without generating endless litigation. Patrick's slippery slope argument lacks any foundation in regulatory experience.
18. "If we don't ban hemp, families will be destroyed and kids will die."
Patrick's manufactured moral panic represents perhaps his most cynical fabrication. No public health epidemic stems from legal hemp products, and Patrick weaponizes grief while exploiting parental anxiety to deflect from policy failures. This appeal to fear transforms hypothetical concerns into imminent catastrophe.
The Pattern Emerges: What Is Patrick Protecting?
The sheer volume, frequency, and deliberate nature of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick's falsehoods about the hemp industry defy explanation as mere political hyperbole or policy disagreement. What we are witnessing transcends exaggeration—it constitutes a campaign of systematic deception, and the pattern demands closer scrutiny.
Patrick's public statements—asserting that "everything in these shops is already illegal," that "federal law allows us to ban all hemp," and that "hemp products are fueling terrorism"—are not simply factually incorrect, they are strategically incorrect. They echo the hallmarks of classic disinformation campaigns: emotionally charged, legally flawed, and endlessly repeated despite contrary evidence from law enforcement, medical experts, and the legislature itself.
So why lie?
Because the lies are not the end goal—they are the cover story. What they obscure is a coordinated effort to dismantle an open, federally legal hemp marketplace in order to protect a far more exclusive and politically connected alternative: the Texas Compassionate Use Program, or TCUP.
Here, the pattern crystallizes. Patrick's legislative partner, Senator Charles Perry, expedited HB 56, which quietly embedded a clause shielding passive cannabis investors from public disclosure. Meanwhile, the TCUP expansion bill, HB 46, handed the Department of Public Safety complete control over license issuance and operational rules—despite DPS's role in executing Patrick's earlier hemp raids using discredited forensic testing methods.
If this were merely about THC regulation, we would expect a consistent approach to both hemp and medical cannabis. But Patrick's behavior reveals the opposite strategy. He suppresses hemp—widely accessible, unmonopolized, and decentralized—while expanding TCUP, a program he and his allies can tightly control, staff, and profit from.
The throughline is control. The prize is exclusivity. And the campaign of misinformation? That's merely the smoke screen obscuring a far more lucrative game.
The question is no longer whether Dan Patrick is lying. The question is: What is he protecting—and for whom?
A Curious Expansion of Power—and Protection
Something fundamental shifted in the Texas Capitol this spring. While Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick raged from the dais about hemp's alleged evils—accusing legal retailers of poisoning children, funding terrorism, and destroying public safety—another, quieter drama was unfolding. One that may illuminate why Patrick's attacks have reached a pitch that borders on obsessive. Because behind the moral panic lies something far more familiar in Texas politics: power, profit, and protection.
The new Compassionate Use Program expansion bill, HB 46, presents itself as reform—adding more licensees, expanding qualifying conditions like chronic pain, and increasing patient access. But examine the legislative fine print, and a different narrative emerges: one in which key insiders are being strategically positioned to benefit, while the agency executing this scheme—the Department of Public Safety—is granted expansive, largely unchecked authority.
And DPS has already demonstrated its willingness to take orders from the top.
In early 2024, DPS reversed its own internal cannabis enforcement policy, instructing officers to pursue felony search warrants based on questionable tests from Armstrong Forensic Laboratory—despite multiple rebukes from the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which found Armstrong's methodology both unscientific and legally unsound. These disputed tests became the foundation for coordinated raids on hemp retailers across the state—operations that aligned perfectly with Patrick's political campaign to destroy the hemp market ahead of the SB 3 vote. As if choreographed, DPS played enforcer to Patrick's ideological narrative, with the pace and timing seemingly set to create material for Patrick’s sermonizing during the legislative session.
But when it comes to HB 46, DPS isn't merely enforcing someone else's policy—it's rewriting the playbook.
The law grants DPS the authority to license twelve new medical cannabis operators, with the first three licenses due by October 2025. These aren't simple retail storefronts—they're vertically integrated operations with exclusive rights to cultivate, process, and dispense medical cannabis under state protection. In an industry potentially worth hundreds of millions, a license represents a golden ticket to virtually guaranteed profits. And the agency that Dan Patrick already weaponized now controls access to the vault.
Which makes the next detail—uncovered by Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson—all the more revealing.
According to Tomlinson's reporting, Patrick’s Deputy General Counsel—one of the his top legal advisors—maintains law school friendships with a lobbyist who happens to be the registered agent of a newly formed cannabis company, one that would be eligible for the licenses DPS will soon award. That company is Blissful Cannico, a firm with no operating history but apparently robust political connections. Neither the company nor its relationships were disclosed publicly before the bill's passage—a curious oversight for legislation creating such valuable opportunities.
Also slipped into HB 46's final version? A seemingly innocuous provision exempting passive beneficial owners from disclosure requirements. That means financial backers who do not "actively manage" a licensee can remain completely anonymous—making it nearly impossible to trace who ultimately profits from DPS's licensing decisions. In other words, it's now perfectly legal in Texas to own a substantial stake in the state's medical marijuana industry without ever revealing your identity to the public.
Call it what it is: a carefully constructed roadmap to graft.
With DPS controlling both enforcement and licensing, with anonymous investors shielded from scrutiny, and with political allies conveniently positioned to benefit, Dan Patrick's crusade against hemp begins to make perfect strategic sense. This isn't merely about ideology—it's about clearing the competitive field. Eliminating low-barrier competition in the hemp space ensures that a tightly controlled, politically protected medical cannabis monopoly can expand unchallenged and unobserved.
And the public? They're left chasing red herrings about "weed in gas stations" while the real deals get negotiated behind closed doors, far from public scrutiny or accountability.
Calculated Deception in Service of Monied Interests
Lieutenant Governor Patrick's press conference represents more than a nadir in Texas cannabis policy discourse—it exposes the institutional corruption lurking beneath prohibitionist rhetoric. His remarks systematically distort facts, ignore established legal precedent, and weaponize moral panic to serve narrow economic interests. While accusing others of poisoning children and undermining Texas values, his own campaign of systematic deception poses the far greater threat to honest governance and informed public discourse.
Patrick's strategy no longer merits characterization as mere political hyperbole or principled policy disagreement. The documented fabrications reveal calculated mendacity designed to eliminate market competition while preserving regulatory capture for preferred interests. The legislature, media, and public should respond accordingly—not to Patrick's manufactured moral panic, but to the economic corruption his crusade serves to protect and enable.
This transcends drug policy. This is a sophisticated shakedown wrapped in culture war rhetoric, executed with the precision of a political operative who understands that sometimes the most effective way to hide a robbery is to stage a moral panic. Patrick's hemp crusade isn't about protecting Texas families—it's about protecting Texas insiders from competition, transparency, and accountability.
The architecture of deception now stands fully exposed. The question confronting Texas is whether its citizens will demand better from their elected officials, or whether Patrick's calculated mendacity will become the accepted standard for political discourse in the Lone Star State. Because if this level of systematic deception can succeed in service of private enrichment, what other "moral crusades" might follow? And what other markets might be quietly carved up while the public argues about manufactured controversies?
The hemp industry may be Patrick's current target, but the precedent he's establishing reaches far beyond cannabis policy. It's a blueprint for how entrenched interests can use government power, manufactured outrage, and deliberate misinformation to eliminate competition and enrich allies—all while wrapping the entire scheme in the flag of moral virtue.
And that brings us to the biggest lie of all: The Texas Republican Party platform declares that "Texas Republicans support free markets, limited government, and individual liberty.” It defends capitalism based on competition, transparency, and minimal regulation—not insider dealing and rent-seeking. Government is supposed to be a referee, not a player in the game. Yet Patrick’s scheme to shut down hemp retail and channel the cannabis economy into the hands of the few isn’t capitalism—it’s cronyism of the worst kind. So, here’s a question for the man who RINO hunts, are you really even a Republican, Dan? Or are you something else?
Texas deserves better. The question is whether Texas will demand it.