Hey @cassandrajar a little correction on your story today. “Recent legislation” didn’t ‘require’ testing of marijuana for possession charges. Jurisdictions should have been doing it all along. 1/

How can the State deprive someone of their liberty for possessing a controlled substance without proving that substance possessed was beyond a reasonable doubt on the CSA list? By testing. Better jurisdictions did test, because #dueprocess. 2/

Other jurisdictions would “prove” that dried herb was marijuana by having a cop testify that “in my experience that substance looks and smells like marijuana and is marijuana.” Easy smeasy! And unjust. 3/

The legalization of hemp (= cannabis w/delta-9 THC <0.3% by dry weight) happened in 2019, but so did a Tx Ct of Criminal Appeals opinion Ex parte Saucedo which came out in June. There, a guy goes to jail for a probation violation after a possession plea for a white powder 4/

Testing doesn’t come back until months & months after his plea (I’ll get back to crime labs). Ooops! That white powder was not meth, but something else not on the Controlled Substances list (maybe his dealer cheated him? Who knows, but it’s not a crime) 5/

The Court ruled he should be freed. This caused a ripple among the DAs because it meant no more “in my experience as a law enforcement officer, that’s marijuana” for those who were throwing due process to the side all along. 6/

Now, back to the crime labs: they are GROSSLY underfunded. You know how we’ve been talking about rape kits stacked up untested for decades? (Ask @Victoria4Texas for the deets on that — she works her tail off trying to solve the problem) 7/

The labs can’t test 4 THC potency at scale (to tell “hemp” from “marijuana”). They also can’t readily test for mystery substances in vape pens (think the latest dangerous ‘designer drug’ imported from China or made by some dude in his basement who flunked out of high school) 8/

What’s a bigger threat to public safety? Mystery chemicals in vape pens sold in the black market? Rapists? Or a plant? Capt. Eddie Garcia and the Public Safety Committee have some thinking to do. 9/

That is not to say cannabis should not be tested before consumers purchase it. That 2019 hemp law requires testing consumable hemp products for adulterants and safety. But Texas’s MMJ law does not require third-party independent testing — standard in other states. #txlege 10/

Public safety requires testing of consumable cannabis but Texas law doesn’t always. Our laws and law enforcement should target those selling product with dangerous pesticides or adulterants (vitamin E acetate anyone?) but that requires adequate funding for crime labs. End/