The Record We Will Not Summarize

We keep a record on smokable hemp provisions in the Texas rules. It is four sentences long and it stops early, on purpose. It says the provisions exist, it says they are in effect, and then it says this:

> it does not summarize their scope, because that summary has not been verified against the rule text.

That record has been sitting in that state since August. This morning it became the most uncomfortable page we publish, because the question it declines to answer turned out to be the question everybody is asking.

Three phrasings, three answers, one morning

We ask the questions an operator would actually type, in more than one wording, and we write down what the answer says rather than which pages it lists. Today all three wordings were versions of the same question — what can a Texas shop have on the shelf.

The first came back saying flower, pre-rolls, vapes and concentrates are currently legal to sell and ship in Texas again, resting on a court order from April.

The second came back with a tidy three-phase timeline ending in a ban that is, it said, "enforced since June 5."

The third did not mention litigation at all. It opened a compliance checklist with a flat instruction: as of March 31, 2026, smokable products including flower and pre-rolls are prohibited in Texas retail. No court, no qualifier, no as-of date.

Same morning. Same question. Three answers, and they cannot all be right.

The one that came apart when we fetched its source

The first answer named its authority: a temporary restraining order issued by a named Travis County judge on April 8.

We pulled the contemporaneous report. What the Texas Tribune recorded on April 8, 2026 was a temporary injunction, from a different judge, and the article says the appeals court allowed sales "for another week" — a bounded window, not the open-ended present tense the summary put it in.

Wrong instrument. Wrong judge. Wrong tense. And an order from five months ago described as the current state of things.

None of that is visible from the outside. The summary was specific, internally consistent, and named a real court in the right county. The check that works is fetching the page and reading it against the summary — the same control that has caught every one of these, and the only one that would have caught this.

The second one did something worse than get a fact wrong

"Enforced since June 5" is not a fact that was reported incorrectly. It is a fact that was manufactured out of a different kind of fact.

Something did happen in early June: an appellate court lifted an injunction. That is a procedural event. It tells you the legal posture of an order. It tells you nothing whatsoever about whether any agency is inspecting anyone, issuing anything, or acting at all.

Texas newsrooms covering that exact decision headlined it "back in effect, but enforcement is unclear" and noted the two-sentence decision did not decide whether the rules were lawful. Between those newsrooms and the summary, a court's silence about enforcement became a claim about enforcement.

We hold enforcement posture open in both directions on every record where we have not verified it, and this is why. An injunction lifting is not an enforcement campaign starting. It is also not evidence that one is not.

Why our own record stops where it does

Here is the part that looks like evasion until you sit with it.

The scope of the Texas smokable hemp provisions turns on how those provisions interact with a litigation history that runs back years and is still moving. Our review has not verified that scope against the rule text, and it has not verified how the older history bears on it. So the record says the provisions exist and are in effect, and it declines to tell you what they cover.

We are not going to close that gap this morning by picking whichever answer sounds most confident. "Pending" is a state, not a missing value. A source that has an answer for every question has stopped distinguishing between what it checked and what it assumed, and you cannot tell from the outside which sentence is which.

There is a second, sharper version of this. We published a record-by-record status map of [which Texas hemp rules are unsettled](https://gethempdash.com/learn/which-texas-hemp-rules-are-unsettled) in August. It walks five families of record. It does not include this one. The record missing from our own map is the record the market is asking about — and it is missing because it is the one we cannot yet stand behind.

What did not move

Now the useful part, and it is the reason this is not just a piece about uncertainty.

The Texas rules were in and out of court repeatedly this spring. An injunction issued, was reinstated, was lifted. Through all of it, a specific set of requirements did not move, was not stayed, and is not what anyone is arguing about. They took effect March 31, 2026 under TRD-202601066, and they carry section numbers you can check a product against this afternoon.

On the certificate. 25 TAC §300.301(d) names twelve fields as a condition of sale — among them laboratory identification and contact information, sample and lot identification, analytical methods and instrumentation with limits of detection and quantitation, an expiration date, measurement-of-uncertainty analysis parameters, and a QR code verifying the authenticity of testing at an accredited laboratory. At paragraph (12) it requires results reporting delta-9 THC, total delta-9 THC, and total THC per container — all three. A certificate missing any one of them is not a passing certificate.

On the arithmetic. The threshold binds total delta-9 THC, not delta-9 alone and not total THC. Total delta-9 THC is delta-9 plus 0.877 times THCA, at 0.3% or less on a dry weight basis, inclusive, with an allowance where the accredited laboratory's measurement of uncertainty produces a range including 0.3% or less. That text is verified. Its enforcement posture is under review and we assert nothing about it in either direction — a distinction we set out in [effective is not enforced](https://gethempdash.com/learn/evidence-gap-effective-is-not-enforced).

On the label. 25 TAC §300.402(a) requires batch number, batch date, product name, the manufacturer or processor's name with telephone number and email address, recommended serving size in milligrams and servings per container, and a URL providing or linking to a certificate of analysis — conspicuously marked, and reaching the certificate in three or fewer steps. The URL is mandatory and a QR code does not substitute for it; DSHS declined a comment proposing exactly that swap, citing HB 1325. Section 300.402(b) requires five warnings, and §300.402(c) puts the label on the outer packaging of each product intended for individual retail sale.

On registration. 25 TAC §300.502(g) sets $5,000 per retail location for registration and for renewal, and §300.202(c) sets $10,000 per facility for a consumable hemp product licence. Fees are not prorated. DSHS separately publishes the amount payable as $5,150 per location for a one-year retail registration, stated to include the Texas Online fee. Those are two different quantities and both are real.

The contested question is scope — what a provision covers. The document questions were never in that fight.

What we are not telling you

We are not telling you what you may put on your shelf. That is the question our record holds open, and answering it from a search result would make us the fourth confident voice in a morning that already had three.

We are not telling you how any of this is being enforced. Under review, both directions, no exceptions.

And we are not reading anything into silence. The DSHS Consumable Hemp Program page, read this morning, carries no notice dated September 2026 and still has no last-updated stamp. That is a statement about what is in the record. It is not a statement about what the agency thinks or intends, and turning it into one would be the same move we just spent four sections objecting to.

What is worth doing this morning

Take the answer you have been given about your shelf and find the instrument behind it. Not the article — the order, the section, the rule. If whoever told you cannot produce it, you have a summary, and this morning summaries of this particular question disagreed with each other three ways before nine o'clock.

Then go and do the part that is settled. Pull a certificate and check it against §300.301(d), field by field, including all three THC values at paragraph (12). Check a label against §300.402(a) and count the steps from the URL to the certificate. Those requirements did not move while the docket did, and they are the ones that are numbered, verified, and checkable today.

Source: Smokable hemp provisions: 25 TAC Chapter 300; Texas Health & Safety Code ch. 443. Our record states the provisions exist and are in effect and does not summarize their scope; scope and the bearing of earlier smokable-hemp litigation are pending counsel verification, and the record is published in that state. April 2026 order: Texas Tribune report of April 8, 2026, recording a temporary injunction from Travis County and an appellate ruling permitting sales for a bounded period. June 2026 appellate decision: reported June 9, 2026 by Texas public newsrooms as leaving enforcement unclear and not deciding the lawfulness of the rules; our records carry the interlocutory appeal as continuing. Texas provisions, all TRD-202601066 and effective March 31, 2026: COA field set 25 TAC §300.301(d) and (d)(12), verified August 16-17, 2026, dual-source; total delta-9 THC threshold 25 TAC §300.301(a)(4), (b)(4) and §300.302(b)(1), (c)(3), verified August 16, 2026 against the DSHS adopted-rule text and the Texas Register adoption notice, computation method resolved August 17, 2026; label content 25 TAC §300.402(a), (a)(6)(A)-(B), (b), (c), verified September 8, 2026, dual-source across authorities; fees 25 TAC §300.502(g) and §300.202(c), verified August 16, 2026, triple-source, with the amount payable verified September 2026 dual-source within the regulator. DSHS Consumable Hemp Program page read September 12, 2026. Enforcement posture: under review, asserted in neither direction, on every record named here.

The full record set is at [the Texas Rule Center](https://gethempdash.com/texas-rules).