Houston Chronicle Editorial: We recommend Susan Hays for Texas Agriculture Commissioner

The race for Texas agriculture commissioner is smokin’ — maybe not by any popular political science metric as Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office in three decades — but certainly by a measure that college students, people with severe back pain, and perhaps Willie Nelson himself can understand. “I have no fear of saying ‘Hell, yeah, I consume cannabis.’ I have no problem saying that publicly,” Democratic candidate Susan Hays told the Chronicle recently. Hays, 53, lives in Alpine, where she and her husband purchased land several years ago to grow hemp and hops. Her background is as an attorney and lobbyist, including her 2019 work helping craft the Texas law allowing any hemp product with less than 0.3 percent THC.

Like the Republican incumbent, Sid Miller, she has made medical marijuana legalization central to her campaign. Hays said she’s taken a close look at other states’ cannabis policies and determined that the successful ones have a well-balanced “three-legged stool” of medicinal access, decriminalization and legalization, all working together to curb the black market and ensure people remain safe. “You have to think of cannabis regulation holistically,” she told the editorial board, speaking of her frustration with Texas’ piecemeal approach and widely-varying regulations. Miller, 67, for his part, penned an op-ed in July calling for the expansion of medical marijuana use, writing that the history of U.S. cannabis prohibition “came from a place of fear, not from medical science or the analysis of social harm.” It’s a thoughtful and welcome essay, and we could have used more of the guy who wrote it — assuming it was Miller — in the past eight years. Yet even on this issue, where there’s some agreement, Hays offers a more comprehensive plan for enactment.