The network behind the Texas campaign
The push to ban and restrict cannabis in Texas is not a standalone local effort. It runs through a chain of connected organizations that traces back to a national group in Virginia. Here is how they fit together, and where their own transparency standard runs into trouble.
When “Citizens for a Safe and Healthy Texas” testifies at the Capitol, it reads as a group of concerned Texans. The structure behind it is national. The same handful of people and organizations recur across the campaign, and the lineage runs from a Texas storefront back to a Virginia-based national organization.
Where it starts
Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) was founded in January 2013 by former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, drug-policy advisor Kevin Sabet, and writer David Frum, in response to the 2012 legalization votes in Colorado and Washington. It has become the best-organized national opponent of legalization, running state coalitions across the country. Sabet is its president and CEO.
The Texas campaign sits downstream of that national operation. Every Brain Matters, directed by Aubree Adams, grew out of the Parents Opposed to Pot advocacy world and produces much of the graphic material that circulates under both its name and the Texas group’s. Citizens for a Safe and Healthy Texas, also directed by Adams, is the entity that appears in Texas legislative testimony. The “citizens” at the front of the Texas branding are a node in a national structure, not a spontaneous local movement.
Each organization has its own profile on this site, linked from the reports page.
The transparency problem
The most documented issue is not the structure itself, which is legal and unremarkable for a national campaign. It is a specific double standard about disclosure.
SAM has long run a campaign, branded “#FollowTheMoney,” demanding that the cannabis industry reveal who funds it. Yet in 2019, when New York law required lobbying social-welfare organizations to disclose their donors, SAM’s New York chapter asked the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics to keep its own funders confidential, citing fear of donor harassment. On September 10, 2019, the commission denied the request. Reporting at the time also documented government and law-enforcement-linked money flowing to the SAM ecosystem, funding the organization publicly minimized while it complained about industry money on the other side.
The pattern is worth stating precisely, because it is the fair version of the criticism: an organization that built a public campaign demanding its opponents disclose their backers fought to keep its own backers secret, and a state ethics body told it no.
Why it matters here
When Texas lawmakers hear from “concerned citizens,” it is reasonable for them to know whether they are hearing from neighbors or from the Texas outpost of a national campaign that will not apply to itself the transparency it demands of others. That is the entire point of putting the structure on the record.
Sources
- Smart Approaches to Marijuana, founding and leadership: Ballotpedia; Wikipedia; SAM (learnaboutsam.org).
- New York donor-disclosure denial (2019): Times Union; Filter; Marijuana Moment.
- SAM “#FollowTheMoney” campaign; SAM public statements.
- Every Brain Matters and Citizens for a Safe and Healthy Texas published materials; Texas Legislature witness records.