WeedVoter

Oziel "Ozzie" Ochoa, Jr. Democrat

Texas House, District 37

About this race: A district in the Rio Grande Valley or Laredo area. The sitting member's recorded votes on the 2025 hemp-THC ban and the Compassionate Use Program expansion are listed on the race page in date order, with their record-vote numbers, as the official journals print them.

Whose record this page shows. The paragraph above is about the race, and part of it describes a different person. Everything after this line on this page is Oziel "Ozzie" Ochoa, Jr.’s own record and nothing else — including, where it says so, the finding that no record was located. No cannabis record is listed on this page for Oziel "Ozzie" Ochoa, Jr., so where the paragraph above points at records, it is pointed at the race page and not at this one. Every record the paragraph above describes is set out candidate by candidate on the Texas House, District 37 race page.

Oziel "Ozzie" Ochoa, Jr.Democrat

No record compiled yet. Nothing on cannabis — no vote, bill, statement or endorsement — was found in any source we could read. One limit on that search is recorded with it.

What was checked for Oziel "Ozzie" Ochoa, Jr., and the limits on it

Checked on 2026-09-18: the member-level rolls of every 2025 cannabis and hemp record vote in the official Texas House and Senate Journals — SB 3 and HB 46 in the regular session, SB 5 in the first called session and SB 6 in the second — including every Yea, Nay, present-not-voting, absent and statement-of-vote list, where this name does not appear because they hold no Texas legislative office; the author, joint-author, coauthor and sponsor tables of every cannabis, hemp, THC and Compassionate Use bill filed in the 87th, 88th and 89th Legislatures and the 2025 called sessions, at the Legislature's own bill-lookup service; and a press sweep including the Spectrum News report on the March 2026 Austin candidate forum on THC policy, which quotes six candidates by name and does not include them.

⚠️This card does not tell you whether this candidate held a seat in an earlier Legislature, but the question is now narrower. Read on 2026-10-15, from each chamber’s own journal: the roll of members-elect that the Texas House Journal prints, district by district, on the first day of every regular session from the 75th Legislature (1997) through the 89th (2025), and every senator the Texas Senate Journal names with a district on the first day of every regular session from the 76th (1999) through the 89th.

For the 89th those are journals.house.texas.gov/hjrnl/89r/pdf/89RDAY01FINAL.PDF and journals.senate.texas.gov/SJRNL/89R/HTML/89RSJ01-14-F.HTM and every journal read is listed on this site’s corrections page. No one by this candidate’s name appears in any of them. That is narrower than a negative answer. Those rolls name the members seated as each session opened, and in most years the Senate’s names the senators who were not up for election by surname alone, so a member who sat only in earlier sessions, who arrived at a special election and was never named in full on a later first day, or who served under another name would not be found this way.

If this candidate is one of those, there may be a cannabis voting record this site is missing.

Also checked on 2026-10-05: the Texas Hemp Business Council’s published 2026 candidate questionnaire roster at texashempbusinesscouncil.com/wp-json/thbc/v1/candidate-responses and texashempbusinesscouncil.com/candidate-responses. The council is a hemp industry trade association; it put twenty questions about hemp and THC policy to 221 named candidates for the Texas Legislature and statewide office, this candidate among them, and publishes the answers it receives.

On the date checked the council’s own roster recorded this candidate’s status as "awaiting" and carried no answers from them; 30 of the 221 had answered by that date and this candidate was not one of them. The council states that answers are added as they are completed, so this records only what the roster showed on 2026-10-05.

Also checked, and read in full on 2026-10-05: this candidate’s Ballotpedia profile at ballotpedia.org/Oziel_Ochoa, which contains no mention of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8 or Compassionate Use.

Also checked, and read in full on 2026-10-06: this candidate’s own campaign site at www.ochoafortx37.com — 21 pages, reached from the home page’s own links and from the site’s sitemap.xml, each fetched only after its host’s robots.txt had been checked and found to permit it, 45,615 characters of text in all. The site identifies itself as the campaign of Oziel Ochoa Jr. for State Representative, District 37. The extracted text of those pages contains no occurrence, on a word boundary, of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, Compassionate Use, delta-8, delta-9, dispensary, decriminalize, cannabinoid or psilocybin.

This card has been corrected. What earlier versions of it said, and what was wrong with them, is published in the corrections log.

No score: this candidate has no recorded vote or bill authorship on a cannabis measure. Silence is not a position, so nothing is inferred from it.

Campaign sites and voter guides checked for Oziel "Ozzie" Ochoa, Jr.

Pages read in full:

  • onyourballot.vote411.org/m/race-detail.do?id=69005971 — sections on the page: Qualifications; Elections; Healthcare; Economy; Data Centers; Energy; Education; Affordable Housing — the question set the local League of Women Voters chapter wrote for this race, read in full by us on 2026-10-06. Not one of its questions asks about cannabis, hemp or drug policy. ⚠️Against every question this Candidate's entry reads "Candidate has not yet responded", so this records an unanswered questionnaire and not a silence of their own choosing. Their entry carries no occurrence of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, hemp-derived, THC, thc-a, CBD, delta-8, delta-9, cannabinoid, dispensary, decriminalisation, psilocybin, Compassionate Use, consumable hemp, SB 3, Senate Bill 3, HB 1325 or HB 46.
  • www.ochoafortx37.com their own site — sections on the page: the whole of this candidate's own campaign site as this guide read it — 21 pages, reached from the home page’s own links and from the site’s sitemap.xml, each fetched only after its host’s robots.txt had been checked and found to permit it, 45,615 characters of text in all. This row was built on 2026-10-12 out of the sentence above it in this card's own search log, which named the address and said it had been read while the list beside it did not. It records no reading that the log had not already published.
  • riograndeguardian.com/stories/around-600-parishioners-attend-valley-interfaiths-2026-candidate-accountability-session,87074 — sections on the page: Read 2026-10-17, HTTP 200. The Rio Grande Guardian’s report of Valley Interfaith’s 2026 Candidate Accountability Session in Mercedes, published 2026-10-12, which names this candidate (as Oziel Ochoa, the Democrat running for Texas House District 37) among those who attended. It prints the four questions put to the Texas House candidates (SNAP funding, tax breaks for data centers and water and electricity costs, Adult Career Education funding, and meeting the organisation after taking office). None concerns cannabis, and the report contains no occurrence of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8 or Compassionate Use.

See the whole Texas House, District 37 race, including every opponent →

Who is paying for this campaign

Campaign finance — Texas Ethics Commission

Texas Ethics Commission filer 89998, filed as “Ochoa , Oziel”, treasurer appointment for State Representative, District 37, dated 2025-08-29. The name on the filing is not word-for-word the name on the ballot — both are printed above so you can check the pairing yourself before you rely on it.

Why there are no figures and no industry breakdown here. Texas does not require a candidate to report a contributor’s employer or occupation — the Commission’s own 2026 guide asks for the amount, the contributor’s name and address, and the date, and that is all. So there is nothing in these filings to group into industries, and we have built no such grouping rather than imply one. Separately, the Commission’s bulk filing archive tells automated readers to stay out of it, and we honour that, so we have read no individual Texas contribution record. Treat the itemised question as unchecked by us, not as checked and found empty.

Read this filer’s own reports at the Texas Ethics Commission (ethics.state.tx.us) → — choose Transaction Type “Contributions”, then Search By “Filer ID” and enter 89998. The Commission’s search posts its results, so there is no direct link to one filer’s page; the number above is what makes it one step instead of a hunt.

Any grouping of contributors into an industry is weedvoter’s own classification, applied to employer and committee names exactly as filed. The Commission publishes employers and committees; it never publishes industries. OpenSecrets discontinued its public interface in April 2025, so nothing here is an OpenSecrets classification.

Money received is not a position. Everything on this card is money that changed hands. It is not evidence that any contribution influenced any decision, nothing on it is placed beside a roll call, and we make no claim about anyone’s motive. For what Oziel "Ozzie" Ochoa, Jr. has actually done about cannabis, read the record above on this page — the roll calls, the bills that carry their name, and the date of each one, every entry linked to the document it came from. That is the part of this page built to be judged, and it is the part the score is calculated from. No contribution on this card moves that score by a cent.