Is Marijuana Legal in Texas Now?
No. Marijuana is not legal in Texas now. Recreational marijuana is still illegal in the state today, and possessing less than 2 ounces is still a Class B misdemeanour. The only legal marijuana in Texas is the narrow medical exception, the Texas Compassionate Use Program, which allows only low-THC cannabis for patients who qualify. Nothing about that changed this week.
What changed is a filing. On Monday, the first day lawmakers could prefile bills for the 2027 session, Texas Democrats filed three bills that would legalize marijuana for adults 21 and older, and the headlines from that filing are what sent people to Google asking whether Texas had just legalized it. A filed bill is a proposal, not a law. The record is plain: the 90th Texas Legislature does not even convene until January 12, 2027, and in the last session only 1,213 of the 8,719 bills filed passed both chambers. Legalization bills have been filed in Austin before and every one of them died there.
The Democrats behind the bills present them as the majority Texans already want. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has expressed support for legalizing recreational marijuana and has said she wants Texas voters to decide it, and the bills' supporters point to a University of Houston poll from January 2025 in which 62 percent of Texans, including 53 percent of Republicans, backed legalizing the sale and possession of recreational marijuana. Houston voters moved the same way just last week, approving a measure that makes misdemeanour marijuana possession the lowest possible enforcement priority for the city's police.
The common-sense point sits underneath the headlines: a law protects you only when it is a law. Until both chambers pass a bill and it takes effect, the old law is the only one a police officer or a judge can apply, no matter how many bills sit in the filing pile or how the election went.
So the consequence is direct. Anyone in Texas who reads the filing headlines and acts as if marijuana is legal now, carrying it, buying it or growing it, is still exposed to arrest under today's law, and even if one of these bills passed next year, no licensed store could open before the state starts issuing licences, which the bills set for November 1, 2028 at the latest. Which leaves the question the whole filing now hangs on: if the Republican Senate will not pass legalization, will Texans ever get the deciding vote they were promised?
The bills themselves are specific. House Bill 362 by Representative John Bucy III of Austin and House Bill 369 by Representative Joe Moody of El Paso, both titled the Texas Regulation of Cannabis Act, would let adults 21 and older possess and transport up to 2 ounces, including no more than 15 grams of concentrate, and grow up to 12 plants at home in a locked area that cannot be seen from a public place. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation would licence growers, stores, transporters and testing labs, a 20 percent retail tax would sit on top of the regular sales tax alongside a 15 percent tax on sales from growers to retailers, and the revenue would be split with half going to the Permanent School Fund, a quarter to veterans' assistance, 15 percent to drug treatment and 10 percent to local governments. Cities and counties could regulate hours, locations and numbers, but could not ban licensed businesses outright. Senate Bill 237 by Senator Carol Alvarado of Houston takes a different road: a 2.5-ounce limit, no new excise tax, and no licensed grower, store or lab in a county unless that county's voters approve it in a local election. We covered the filing itself here.
The road from filing to law runs through the one chamber the midterms did not flip. Democrats will control the Texas House and the governor's office for the first time in decades, but Republicans kept the Senate 19 to 12, and every bill needs both chambers. Even the voters-decide route Hinojosa favours would have to take the form of a constitutional amendment, which needs a two-thirds vote in each chamber before it reaches the ballot, and Democrats do not have two-thirds in the Senate. The officer of the Senate is also uncommitted: Lieutenant Governor-elect Vikki Goodwin, who will preside over that chamber, said on Saturday that the choice between expanding the medical program and full legalization still has to be talked through, telling an interviewer, "There's been conversations about, do we expand our TCUP, the Texas Compassionate Use Program, which is medicinal marijuana, or do we legalize it altogether? So we still need to have conversations about that." If a bill did survive all of that, it would take effect on September 1, 2027, with state rules due by July 1, 2028 and licensing under way by November 1, 2028.
"I am in favor of treating THC like alcohol."
That is where Texas stands tonight: the law has not moved, the bills have, and the lieutenant governor who will run the Senate that decides them has put her position in one line: "I am in favor of treating THC like alcohol."