On the morning of Aug. 28, 2019, Todd Smith was running late for a meeting. It would be a busy few days for Smith, a lobbyist and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller’s top political adviser.
He had to go to Houston later in the day, but this breakfast meeting was too important to skip. Before he left Austin, he stopped in at an I-HOP right off I-35, just a few miles from his home. He had a meeting with Nathaniel Czerwinski, a musician and activist who working at an Austin CBD shop at the time.
The Texas Agriculture Department was in the middle of crafting its regulations for hemp cultivation. After 88 years of prohibition, the non-psychoactive cousin of marijuana had become legal to grow once again in Texas earlier in 2019.