Texas House backs bill to expand access to low-THC medical cannabis
AUSTIN (Nexstar) — On Monday, the Texas House voted 118-16 to advance a bill addressing perceived issues with Texas' Compassionate Use Program (CUP). House Bill 46, authored by State Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, will now head to a third reading in the House before getting sent to the Texas Senate.
'The program has been set up, but it's never been made functional or accessible,' King said.
King's concerns derive from the lack of accessibility to the program first established by the legislature in 2015.
'There are not enough dispensing organizations licensed in the state of Texas,' King said.
The three licensed dispensers are all Austin-based and current law requires secured storage at the production facility.
'The way it works today is I have to keep all that inventory in Austin, and so when we have patients in Houston and Fort Worth and Dallas and San Antonio, they order the night before. We drive the prescription to them the next morning and if they don't pick it up, we have to drive it back,' Texas Original CEO Nico Richardson said. 'That's in the high population density areas of Texas.' If we go out into the rural areas… to get on a delivery route schedule, because we need to schedule them out so that we have enough time to fill a route that can take two weeks sometimes.' Richardson says planning to get medication to rural areas can be a weeks-long process.
HB 46 would allow those companies to create secure storage facilities in other cities, expanding easy access for those who need it. The bill would also increase the number of providers.
According to an FAQ section on the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) website, 'Texas Health and Safety Code Chapter 487 requires that the department issue at least three licenses but no more than the number of licenses necessary to ensure reasonable statewide access to, and availability for patients prescribed low-THC cannabis.' HB 46 requires DPS to issue 11 licenses to increase supply.
In 2015, the Texas CUP program was started specifically for intractable epilepsy. Since then the program has slowly rolled more patients in.
Currently, doctors can approve low-THC cannabis for patients dealing with:
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Autism
Cancer
Epilepsy
An incurable neurodegenerative disease
Multiple sclerosis
Post-traumatic stress disorder
A seizure disorder
Spasticity
Under HB 46, doctors can also prescribe low-THC cannabis for:
A chronic pain condition which a physician would otherwise prescribe an opioid
Glaucoma
Traumatic brain injury
Spinal neuropathy
Crohn's disease or other inflammatory bowel disease
Degenerative disc disease
A terminal illness or a condition for which a patient is receiving hospice or palliative care
HB 46 would also lift the restriction on using a low-THC inhaler to take their medication.
'There are a lot of patients that have episodic conditions that either need immediate relief or they can't digest our medication properly,' Richardson said. 'If you ingest the medicine, it can take 30 minutes to an hour for it to become active in your system and your bloodstream. When you take it through an inhalation method, it's almost immediate.'
Richardson says the new method could help first-time users who accidentally take too much cannabis because they aren't aware of how long ingested THC takes to activate.
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