The Ladder Is in Another Rulebook

One of the claims that circulates about Texas hemp retail is that penalties escalate: a written warning, then a thirty-day suspension, then your licence is gone.

We have now written five times that the health department's hemp rules contain nothing like that. Each time we checked the same chapter, 25 TAC Chapter 300, and each time it was true. The revocation rule has one ground and a hearing. The administrative penalty rule lists five criteria and no counter. The per-day rule is about arithmetic, not about stages.

All of that still holds. And this morning we found a three-step ladder in Texas hemp regulation anyway.

It is in a different rulebook, written by a different agency, and it reaches a different set of businesses. Nobody was lying to you. We were all searching one chapter.

Where it actually is

The rules are 16 TAC §35.5 and §35.6, adopted by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. They were filed with the Secretary of State on January 20, 2026 and took effect on January 21, 2026, under filing number TRD-202600190. They were adopted with changes to the proposed text, which means the full text was republished in the adoption — so you can read the operative words in one document rather than hunting for a December proposal.

§35.5 is titled "Prohibited Sales of Consumable Hemp Products to Minors." §35.6 is titled "Mandatory Age Verification for Consumable Hemp Product Sales."

Here is what the sanction provisions say.

Under §35.5(c), for selling, offering to sell, serving or delivering a consumable hemp product to a minor, the commission shall impose: suspension of no less than 30 days or cancellation for a first violation; no less than 60 days or cancellation for a second; and cancellation for any subsequent violation.

Under §35.6(d), for failing to meet the age-verification requirements, the commission shall: suspend for no less than seven days for a first violation; 14 days for a second; 30 days for a third; and cancel for any subsequent violation.

Both sections add that the holder does not have the option to pay a civil penalty in lieu of suspension or cancellation. And both carry an ineligibility period after a cancellation — five years under §35.5, one year under §35.6 — reaching not only the former holder but people who held an interest, people holding fifty percent or more of a corporate holder, and a person who resides with someone disqualified.

That is an escalating ladder. It counts violations, it attaches a specific consequence to each count, and the word is shall.

Who it reaches, which is the whole point

§35.5 defines "licensee" and "permittee" by reference to the Alcoholic Beverage Code, and frames the violation as a violation of two specific provisions of that code. These are the alcohol commission's rules about the alcohol commission's licence and permit holders.

So: if you hold a TABC licence or permit and you sell consumable hemp products, these two sections are about you.

If you are a hemp retailer registered with the health department and you hold no TABC licence or permit, these two sections are not about you. Your obligations are the ones in Chapter 300, and the chapter's enforcement subchapter still does not contain a ladder. That is not a loophole and it is not reassurance — it is a question of which agency licenses you.

We asked this question in three different wordings this morning to see what an operator would be told. The wording that named the rule number back got it exactly right, including the sharp edge: a person registered with the health department who does not also hold a TABC licence or permit is not reached. That is the third morning running that naming a citation produced a better answer than describing the subject.

One borrowed definition, worth knowing about

§35.5 defines "consumable hemp product" by pointing at 25 TAC §300.101 — the health department's definition — "or a successor rule adopted by the Department of State Health Services."

So the alcohol commission did not write its own definition. It pinned its rule to the health department's, including future versions of it. The two agencies' public explainer pages do not mention each other at all, which is something we have noted before. Their rules do.

The agency's own page does not tell you the ladder

Here is a smaller finding that matters if you are trying to work out your exposure from a website.

We read the TABC Consumable Hemp Products page this morning. It states it was last updated on June 15, 2026. It describes both duties accurately — do not supply consumable hemp products to a minor, check ID before supplying them — and it tells you the consequence in these terms: the licence or permit "will be temporarily suspended or canceled."

That is true. It is also not the day counts, and not the escalation, and not the fact that paying a fine instead is unavailable, and not the ineligibility period. All of that is in the rule and none of it is on the page.

This is the same gap we wrote about at the health department, where the frequently-asked-questions page states a requirement in different words from the rule it describes: gethempdash.com/learn/the-faq-is-not-the-rule

An agency's explainer page is written to orient you. The rule is what was adopted. When the two differ in specificity, the specificity is in the rule.

Now the part where we correct ourselves

Yesterday we published a list of things our own record could not yet answer, and one of them was these two rules. We wrote them down as 35 TAC §35.5 and §35.6.

That title number is wrong, and tracing where it came from turned out to be more useful than the correction.

The adopting document's own header reads TITLE 16, ECONOMIC REGULATION; PART 3, TEXAS ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE COMMISSION; CHAPTER 35, ENFORCEMENT. The string "16 TAC" appears fourteen times in it. The string "35 TAC" appears zero times. 35 is the chapter number. Title 16 is where the alcohol commission's rules live.

Now the chain. TABC's own page calls them "TABC Rule 35.5" and "TABC Rule 35.6" and gives no code title at all — which is reasonable on an agency's own site, and leaves the reader to reconstruct the citation. The Texas State Law Library's research guide, a maintained state guide that states it was last updated on August 5, 2026, names them as "35 Texas Administrative Code Rule 35.5" and "35 Texas Administrative Code Rule 35.6." We read that guide, took the number, and wrote it into our own file.

The chapter number had been promoted into the title number, and we copied the result.

What made it invisible is the thing that always makes this invisible: everything next to the wrong field was right. The library guide describes the rules accurately — it says they prohibit and penalise sales to minors by businesses holding a TABC license, which is correct. The effective date it gives is correct. The section numbers are correct. One field was wrong and nothing contradicted it.

We have written this lesson before from the other direction, about citing a filing number as though it were a chapter: gethempdash.com/learn/one-adoption-seven-filing-numbers

There a filing number stood in for a chapter. Here a chapter number stood in for a title. Both produce a citation that looks complete, and both send the next reader somewhere that is not where the rule is.

What we are not going to tell you is that there is no Title 35 in the Texas Administrative Code. We did not verify that, and we are not in the habit of publishing a negative we cannot show you how to check. What we can show you: the Secretary of State's own page about the code, read this morning, states that there are seventeen titles and that each one represents a subject category. And the document that adopted these rules says 16. That is enough to fix the citation and it is where we stop.

We also tried to test the title number on the Secretary of State's older rule viewer, and could not. That viewer is a known-dead page on this record — it answers every request with the same short stub. This morning it returned an identical 2,517-byte response for title 16 and for title 35. A surface that answers the same way for a title that exists and a title that may not cannot settle the question either way.

The number in this morning's answers we could not trace

The wording that got the ladder right also added a figure: fines of up to ten thousand dollars per violation.

We cannot find an instrument that says that. Ten thousand dollars is a real number in Texas hemp regulation — it is the annual licence fee for a consumable hemp product manufacturing facility, under 25 TAC §300.202(c). A fee is not a penalty, and a per-year licence cost is not a per-violation fine.

We are reporting that figure as untraceable rather than as false, which is the distinction we hold to on this record. We did not find the source. That is not the same as establishing there is none.

What this establishes, and what it does not

What it establishes. An escalating, violation-counting sanction schedule for consumable hemp product sales exists in Texas rule, at 16 TAC §35.5(c) and §35.6(d), effective January 21, 2026. It is mandatory in its own words. It forecloses paying a civil penalty instead. It carries ineligibility periods after cancellation. And it is addressed to TABC licence and permit holders.

What it does not establish. Nothing about how, whether, or against whom anybody is enforcing anything. We are quoting a sanctions provision, which is a document, and we draw no conclusion in either direction about enforcement activity. It also establishes nothing about the October 15 point-of-sale regime we have examined five times — finding a real ladder in one agency's rules is not evidence for a different claim about a different agency's rules, and we are not going to let the shapes rhyme their way into an argument.

And it does not change a single thing about what Chapter 300 says. Everything we have published about that chapter's enforcement subchapter stands.

The one line to take away

Before you ask what the penalty is, ask which rulebook you are in.

Texas regulates consumable hemp products through more than one agency, and they do not write the same rules, do not reach the same businesses, and do not cross-reference each other on the pages you are most likely to land on. A requirement can be entirely real and still not be yours. The way to find out is to read the rule that applies to the licence you actually hold: gethempdash.com/texas-rules