4 January 18 - 24, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Legal Haze Should Texas hemp shop owners be surprised when the law comes after their business? By Jacob Vaughn C ase Wegner, 32, rolled up to a gas station in Navarro County late one night in January 2021, over- worked and on prescription medication. Sitting at the fuel pump, he started to fade out of conscious- ness. Hours later, as the sun rose, Wegner was awakened at the gas pump by a state trooper standing outside his window. The officer asked to search Wegner’s car, and he consented. Inside the car, the officer found five 1-li- ter lab jars of delta-8 distillate (enough to make 5,000–6,000 delta-8 vape cartridges) and about 10,000 delta-8 gummies. Wegner was licensed to sell hemp in Texas through his company Delta Remedies, so he didn’t think all the delta-8, an arguably legal ver- sion of the chemical in marijuana that gets users high, was a problem. He was wrong. Wegner ended up going to jail that day. He was charged with misdemeanor posses- sion of marijuana and DUI because he ad- mitted to taking some delta-8 edibles. He claims he didn’t have any marijuana in his possession, only the delta-8. The charges were mild considering how much product Wegner had in his possession at the time. The pandemic had the court system backed up, so he didn’t have his first court appearance until a year after the arrest. “That whole year I’m freaking out because they confiscated everything I had in that ve- hicle,” he said. When he finally got his day in court about a year later he was given one year of proba- tion for the DUI and six months pretrial di- version on the marijuana charge. Pretrial diversion is an alternative to prosecution that diverts people away from traditional criminal punishment and into certain programs. He was happy with what he thought was the outcome. But four months into his pro- bation, he was on his way to Abilene from Midland and got pulled over for speeding. By this time, he had switched industries, working in solar power. The police told him he had a first degree felony warrant out for his arrest for manufacturing and delivery of a controlled substance over 400 grams. “Next to murder in Texas, that’s just about as bad as it could get,” he said. Un- known to him, the state had charged him with the felony in May 2022, according to Navarro County court records. He bonded out the next morning in Abilene. “I’m like, ‘What the heck is going on?” Wegner re- called. “I’m thinking this entire time, ‘There’s some kind of mistake here,’” Wegner said. “They’re [the police] not seeing it as a mis- take. They’re coming at me with as much as they possibly can.” He completed his year of probation, but every month he must drive from Abilene to Corsicanna to deal with the felony charge because the case keeps getting reset. The first offer he got from the state was five years’ deferred probation. His attorney at the time told him not to take the deal. Now, the state is coming at him with a minimum 10-year sentence. Wittingly or not, people in the hemp in- dustry have been risking getting slapped with felony charges for years now, and it looks like it’s starting to catch up with them. Hemp businesses in Texas and across the country have been getting into trouble with the law in recent months and the trend shows no sign of slowing down. In mid-January last year, police busted into Michael Sims’ South Carolina hemp shop, Crowntown Cannabis. Sims operates three shops in North Carolina and one in South Carolina, selling a variety of products, including delta-9 and delta-8 THC. Delta-9 THC is the common psychoactive com- pound in weed that gets users high. The 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp across the country, defining it broadly. Maybe too broadly, it turns out for Weg- ner and others like him. Specifically, the 2018 Farm Bill defines hemp as “the plant Cannabis sativa L. and any part of that plant, including the seeds thereof and all derivatives, extracts, canna- binoids, isomers, acids, salts, and salts of iso- mers, whether growing or not, with a delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol [THC] | UNFAIR PARK | Illustration by Sarah Schumacher >> p6
