One End of the Range

Operators stopped asking this week whether the Texas rules changed and started asking what they cost. That is a different question, and it fails in a different way.

We asked it four ways this morning, the way a retailer would type it, and wrote down what the answers said rather than which pages they listed. Then we went looking for the sections they were quoting.

What came back

Asked what the penalties are for selling hemp THC products in Texas now, the answer gave license revocation, fines "of up to $10,000 per violation", a further "$10,000 in violation fees for each day", a criminal charge for distributing a Schedule I substance, and this: "even selling a small amount triggers third-degree to second-degree felony charges (10-20 years in prison)".

Asked a differently worded question — what happens to a retailer caught selling delta-8, the fine, the license — the answer came back with the same sentence, the 10 to 20 included.

Asked how much jail time a single gram carries, the answer named Penalty Group 2, described possession of less than a gram as a state jail felony "punishable by 180 days to two years in a state jail and a fine of up to $10,000", and added that aggregate weight counts adulterants and dilutants, so the whole weight of a gummy or a drink gets weighed rather than the milligrams inside it.

Asked instead for the minimum — the least a third-degree delivery charge could carry — the answer said two years, and in the same breath gave a third-degree felony a "maximum of 20 years".

The sections that print the numbers

Texas keeps the sentence range for each felony degree in the Penal Code rather than in the drug statute, and Chapter 12 reads in about a minute. We read four of its sections this morning on a public compilation at texas.public.law, which prints its own currency date as accessed May 26, 2025. So this is a compilation read and not an agency surface, and the figures below are quoted on that footing. Before trusting the host at all we requested a section number that does not exist; it redirected to the compilation's landing page, which told us the host discriminates and that a real section coming back is a real result.

Section 12.34, third degree felony punishment, subsection (a): "imprisonment in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for any term of not more than 10 years or less than 2 years."

Section 12.33, second degree felony punishment, subsection (a): "imprisonment in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for any term of not more than 20 years or less than 2 years."

Section 12.35, state jail felony punishment, subsection (a): "confinement in a state jail for any term of not more than two years or less than 180 days."

Each of those three carries a subsection (b) adding a fine "not to exceed $10,000". So does the first degree section. The ten thousand is common to every degree and distinguishes none of them.

Ten to twenty is a pair of ceilings

Set the first two beside each other. A third-degree felony runs two to ten. A second-degree felony runs two to twenty. The span across both degrees is therefore two to twenty, and the floor of each one, separately, is two years.

The figure that two of our four phrasings returned is not either band. Ten to twenty is the ceiling of the lower degree joined to the ceiling of the higher one, with both floors dropped. Read as a range of exposure, it overstates the minimum by a factor of five.

The fourth phrasing exposes the mechanism, because it made the opposite mistake. We asked it for the least a charge could carry and it produced the floor correctly at two years, then described a third-degree felony as topping out at twenty, where Section 12.34 says ten.

So the pattern is not that these answers are wrong about sentencing in some general way. Each one returns the end of the range the question reached for and loses the other end. Ask about exposure and you get ceilings. Ask for a minimum and you get a floor. Across four phrasings, not one returned both ends of a single degree correctly.

One answer checked out, and then stopped reading

The state jail figures did check out. "180 days to two years" and the ten thousand are Section 12.35(a) and (b) almost word for word. The aggregate-weight point checked out too, against the statute's own definition, when we read it five days ago: gethempdash.com/learn/the-exclusion-comes-first is that read, and it is also where we recorded that the ladder assigning degrees had not been opened.

What none of the four answers carried is subsection (c) of that same section, sitting one paragraph below the line they all quoted. It provides that a state jail felony is punished as a third degree felony where it is shown that a deadly weapon was used or exhibited during the offence or the flight from it, or where the person has a prior conviction from a listed set.

The number was right. The condition that moves the number to a different section was immediately underneath it.

The half we could not open

Everything above is about what a named degree costs. None of it says which degree anything is, and that is the half we cannot read.

Two sections would answer it: Section 481.103 of the Health and Safety Code, which sets out what Penalty Group 2 contains, and Section 481.116, the ladder that ties a quantity to a degree. We tried seven surfaces this morning and came away with none of their text.

• The compilation that served us Chapter 12 carries 106 sections of Chapter 481 and is missing precisely these. Its numbering runs .111, then .1131, then .119.
• Two commercial legal sites returned 403. Both returned 403 to a fabricated section number as well, at almost exactly the same size, so neither 403 tells us anything about whether the section is there.
• A third site returned a genuine 404, which is a real answer: not at that path.
• The Legislature's own site answered three different endpoints with three different byte counts, which looked like progress until each one turned out to be the same application shell with no statute inside it.
• An archived copy of the same page from August decompresses to that shell as well, byte for byte, so the document tree has not been serving for at least two months.

That is a statement about seven surfaces on one morning. It is not a statement that these sections cannot be read, and we still owe them another attempt somewhere else.

What we are not telling you

Because the ladder stayed shut, we are not saying which Penalty Group holds any compound, what quantity crosses which line, or what any particular product on any particular shelf carries. Underneath all of this our record has an open question we have never closed: the July action amended the schedules of controlled substances, and the penalty groups are a separate list in a separate place. Whether an entry on one is an entry on the other is something we have not established, and we decline it in both directions.

We are also not saying the inverse of any of it. That a circulating figure is assembled wrongly is not evidence that the real exposure is smaller, and it is not evidence that it is larger. It is evidence about the figure.

And the three ten-thousands are worth pulling apart before anyone budgets against them. The ten thousand in the Penal Code is a ceiling on a criminal fine attached to a conviction. The ten thousand in the Texas rules is an annual facility license fee. And a ten-thousand-a-day penalty for unlicensed operation was put forward by commenters during the Chapter 300 rulemaking and declined in writing, with the department saying it relies on an administrative penalty matrix instead. The enforcement provision actually adopted assesses a penalty against five named criteria rather than counting days. One number, three unrelated instruments, and two of our four phrasings reproduced the one that was refused. We took a figure apart the same way three days ago at gethempdash.com/learn/the-multiplier-lost-its-container, where a correct division had come loose from the thing it was dividing.

What to do with this

If you are carrying a number in your head about what a mistake costs, start by asking which end of a range it is. Ten to twenty is a pair of ceilings. Two years is the floor of both degrees. And the question of which degree reaches what you are actually holding is, on every surface we could reach this morning, not answered at all.