"Profile: Citizens for a Safe and Healthy Texas"

Citizens for a Safe and Healthy Texas is the Texas-facing organization that appears in state legislative testimony supporting bans and restrictions on cannabis and hemp-derived THC products.

Background

The group is directed by Aubree Adams, who also directs the national project Every Brain Matters. Adams relocated to the Houston area from Colorado in 2018, and Texas Capitol witness records have listed her accordingly. The organization’s graphics and claims are largely shared with Every Brain Matters, reflecting the common leadership.

What it does

The group registers to testify for restriction and ban legislation and circulates the study-based graphics examined in our fact-check. Its branding emphasizes local, grassroots concern; its lineage, shared leadership, and materials place it inside the national campaign structure described in our network investigation.

What their Facts page says, checked

The group maintains a “Facts” page, and the first thing worth noting is where those facts come from: the page embeds and links to Every Brain Matters’ “Dispensing Truth” project and its “Know the Science” section. The Texas group’s evidence base is largely the material Every Brain Matters produces, which is consistent with the shared leadership.

The sourcing on the page is uneven. Several headline claims, including that legalization is “an epic failure” and assertions about homelessness, school drug violations, and teen use, trace to a single Colorado Springs Gazette editorial, an opinion piece rather than research. The driving section leans on a 1988 federal report and states that 28% of fatally injured drivers tested positive for marijuana. Presence is not impairment: THC metabolites can linger for weeks after use, so a positive test does not show the driver was impaired at the wheel. A dramatic “Cuban organized crime” item rests on one local television news segment quoting a single sheriff.

The most revealing section is titled “Additional Research is Not Needed to Determine if Marijuana Use is Harmful.” It then lists how many results a PubMed search returns for phrases like “cannabis violence” (887) or “cannabis murder” (70), as if the number of papers mentioning two words proves a link. It does not. A keyword search returns everything containing both terms, including studies that find no association, review articles, and unrelated case reports. Counting search results is not evidence, and “additional research is not needed” is the opposite of a scientific stance.

In fairness, the page also cites at least one strong study, the 2019 Lancet EU-GEI analysis linking daily high-potency cannabis to higher odds of psychotic disorder, and it accurately quotes NIDA director Nora Volkow on opioids. The issue is not that every item is wrong. It is that a few real findings sit alongside editorials, anecdotes, decades-old reports, and a search-result-counting argument, all presented as settled “facts,” with much of the sourcing dating to 2016 through 2019.

Sources

• Citizens for a Safe and Healthy Texas, “Facts” page (safehealthytexas.org/resources/facts).
• Colorado Springs Gazette editorial (cited by the group); NHTSA 1988 report (cited by the group).
• Di Forti M, et al. High-potency cannabis and first-episode psychosis. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2019 (cited by the group).
• Volkow interview, USA Today, 2019 (cited by the group).
• Texas Legislature witness lists; Every Brain Matters materials.