Silke Jasso
If a House committee doesn’t put it on the calendar by Thursday, the controversial medical marijuana bill will die in the Texas Legislature.
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House Bill 2107 has made some inroads this session, appearing to finally have enough votes to pass in the House. But the Calendar Committee, headed by Republican Todd Hunter (R-Corpus Christi) and including six co-authors of the bill, needs to put the bill on the floor.
“We have already clogged up [the Calendar Committee’s] phones to where they can’t get any work done,” said Cara Bonin, executive director of Houston National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), to the Houston Press. “So now we’re emailing them, asking them to vote the bill out onto the floor so we can actually have our representatives show us what they’re made of. For so many years, our representatives have gotten to avoid having a public record vote on how they feel about medical marijuana because it never made it that far.”
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Even if the bill stalls, proponents have been emboldened by its progress this year. More “boots on the ground” in Austin combined with in-person meetings with lawmakers have taken the bill further than it’s ever gone before.
