James Talarico

Hundreds of businesses across the state lay off thousands of people.

Let's go back.

Follow the money.

Okay.

What industry do you think was most invested in taking this new product off the market?

No.

Big alcohol.

Big beer.

And I guess I love beer.

That's not a critique of them.

My point is they use their influence to take a competitor out of the market.

By the way, a competitor that is...

Research suggests it is safer and less addictive than alcohol.

Again, I'm not disparaging alcohol, but it has a lot of negative side effects and is very addictive.

I have members of my family who struggle with addiction and struggle with alcoholism.

THC can be, under the right circumstances, an alternative.

I mean, there are seniors who use it for chronic pain.

There are veterans who use it for PTSD.

They're just Texans with anxiety who use it to chill out at the end of a long, stressful day.

And so the fact that the Lieutenant Governor, one, would do the bidding of one industry over the other, two, would hold up literally a life-saving bill that could have possibly saved lives over the weekend in those floods just to cater to wealthy special interests, to me is just an encapsulation of everything that's wrong with politics, right?