Texas has always been the turtle in this country’s long-distance race to achieve sanity in its marijuana laws.

Consider that in the early 1970s, the maximum sentence in Nebraska for your first pot-possession conviction was a week in jail. In Texas, it was life in prison. During that same period, it was a less serious offense in Texas to castrate a man than to give him a marijuana joint.

It’s this ignoble history — and the narrow-minded thinking that accompanied it — that state Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, is fighting with SB 269, the bill he filed Tuesday. It’s the senator’s second attempt in the past two years at comprehensive legislation that would allow doctors to recommend cannabis for patients suffering from a wide range of medical conditions.

Menendez’s first attempt, during the 2015 legislative session, didn’t make it past the Senate’s Health & Human Services Committee. Instead of that potential home run, lawmakers opted for a bunt single, with the Texas Compassionate Use Act, a law (signed in June 2015 by Gov. Greg Abbott) that offered only the slightest crack in the state’s impenetrable wall of resistance to medical marijuana.

Under the Compassionate Use Act, cannabis must come with a prescription (rather than a mere recommendation) from a doctor, must have low quantities (less than .5 percent) of THC, and can be provided only to patients with intractable epilepsy.

Legalization advocates rightly complained that the law was so narrow as to be nearly pointless, but we have to be thankful for small favors when it comes to Texas marijuana laws. Conceptually at least, the law recognized that marijuana could have medicinal value, and that amounted to a step forward. That conceptual step makes Menéndez hopeful that his colleagues will be amenable to letting Texas join the 28 states that have meaningful medical-marijuana laws.

It will be a tough battle, and Menéndez is encouraging supporters of his bill to make their voices heard by contacting Abbott’s office.

Marijuana advocates in this state have long bemoaned the unique political factors that make Texas so loathe to expand its collective mind on weed. The greatest progress on marijuana legalization around the country has been achieved by a coalition of progressive criminal-justice reformers and libertarian-leaning conservatives.

But this state’s conservative wing has never subscribed to the live-and-let-live libertarian ethos, and progressive Texas Democrats have been reluctant to take a stand, aware that with Mexico on our southern border, they could be branded as soft on drug cartels.

Jamie Balagia, a local attorney and legalization advocate, said this to me in 2014: “We get no respect from either party. The Democrats claim to support it, but they never do anything. And the Republicans, when they were in college they all smoked weed, but now they sit there and wave the flag and the Bible.”

Menéndez, to his credit, has taken action. He attributes his epiphany on the issue to watching his father-in-law battle cancer three years ago.

“As he was going through the treatment, he was having all kind of issues, from nausea to lack of appetite,” Menéndez said. “My oldest son did a ton of research and he was talking about how my father-in-law might get some relief from medicinal marijuana.

“My father-in-law was in a tremendous amount of pain, but he didn’t want to be in the stupor that the opioids put him in. But he also didn’t want to break the law (by using marijuana).”

The more Menéndez studied the issue, the more he realized that Texas was forcing seriously ill people to leave the state so they could find relief from their pain. One man moved to New Mexico and called himself a “medical refugee.” A Texan with multiple sclerosis told Menéndez he is thinking about moving his family to Colorado.

At his Tuesday press conference, Menéndez said, “I filed this bill because doctors, not politicians, should determine the best treatment for severely ill patients.”

That’s what it comes down to. For too long, our marijuana laws have been at the mercy of uninformed elected officials, who are guided by old-school “just say no” ideology, rather than medical science or human compassion.

As Menéndez likes to point out, what we’re really debating about is nothing more than a set of molecules. Along those lines, he quoted a doctor who decried the “personification and prejudice of this particular set of molecules.”

During the 2017 Legislative session, the most problematic molecules for Menéndez will be the ones floating around in the stubborn brains of his colleagues.

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470