Everything’s bigger in Texas – including its legislators’ plans for marijuana legalization.

A bill that would make Texas the fifth state to legalize the drug doesn’t propose strict regulations or a state bureaucracy to enforce them. Instead, it would simply repeal state-level prohibition and open the door for an unbridled free market.

The idea – a significant divergence from states where legalization has been accompanied by frameworks to tightly regulate sales of the drug – appears surprisingly popular in the conservative state.

The Texas House of Representatives' Criminal Jurisprudence Committee passed the bill in a 5-2 vote on Wednesday night and it may be debated on the floor next week.

“The debate has changed and people aren’t afraid to vote for it,” says state Rep. David Simpson, the Republican sponsoring the bill.

The East Texas legislator introduced the bill earlier this year with repeated references to the Bible, turning heads as he used the language of social conservatism to sell pot legalization. “All that God created is good, including marijuana," he said. "God did not make a mistake."

Simpson says constituents hoping to use the drug as medicine spurred him to action, and he sees no reason to jail people for possessing the plant or to block farmers from growing industrial hemp. He says ending prohibition would have the added benefit of undercutting criminal drug cartels.

“A lot of Republicans don’t want government interfering with how much you can eat or drink or which doctor they can see – they want freedom,” he says. "And mine is a medical freedom bill and they do like it.”

Heather Fazio, Texas political director for the Marijuana Policy Project, one of the most prominent national advocacy groups pushing for legalization, says she was pleasantly surprised by the committee vote.

Fazio says the bill “basically strikes all marijuana offenses from Texas statutes, so marijuana would be akin to the jalapeño plant,” with regulations for produce applying to pot entrepreneurs.

“People could just start businesses and start selling their products,” she says. “The free market would naturally work out testing mechanisms and verification for consumer protection and things like that, so that we can make sure we know the products are contaminate free and we know the different levels of potency. All of that would happen naturally.”

MPP and other reform groups generally push to treat marijuana like alcohol. MPP opened up shop in Texas after a survey it commissioned with Public Policy Polling found 58 percent of Texans supported doing so.

Voter-approved reforms have established tightly regulated markets for recreational marijuana in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Local law in the District of Columbia allows legal possession and noncommercial gifting, as well as limited home cultivation of plants.

Simpson’s bill established neither a plant limit nor any alcohol-type rules.

“None of those things should be involved in just a plant,” he says.

Texans generally favor free-market policies, Fazio says, and the bill may inspire a new debate among reformers: “Do we regulate it like alcohol, or do we regulate it like jalapenos?”

MPP hopes to legalize medical marijuana by 2017 and recreational use by 2019 in Texas. In the current legislative session, reformers have focused on lowering criminal penalties.

So far, no state has legalized marijuana with legislation. The New Hampshire House of Representatives voted to legalize marijuana last year, becoming the first legislative body to do so, before reversing itself. That measure's Republican sponsor lost re-election, and reformers currently expect lawmakers in either Rhode Island or Vermont to be the first to take the plunge. A half dozen 2016 ballot initiatives are planned in other states.

Possession of marijuana for any reason outside limited research remains a federal crime. Federal prosecutors and anti-drug agents, however, generally respect state laws that tightly regulate sales for medical or recreational use.

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None of the Department of Justice's eight enforcement priorities would necessarily be triggered by a free-wheeling free-market approach to legalization, though the department's 2013 memo allowing states to move forward with legalization said it expected "strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems" that address public safety and health concerns.