San Antonio Drug Crimes Attorney

The people we defend on drug charges are rarely dealers. They are drivers pulled over for a taillight, passengers in someone else's car, roommates whose house got searched, students with a pill they were not prescribed, and people carrying a small amount for themselves. What separates a manageable outcome from a felony record is usually how early someone starts pushing back.

Texas does not have one drug law. It has a system, and where your substance lands in that system matters as much as how much of it there was.

The Controlled Substances Act divides everything into a total of six penalty groups (PG1, PG1-A, PG2, PG2-A, PG3, and PG4). PG 1 carries the harshest treatment and covers cocaine and many prescription opioids, and as of July 31, 2026, synthetic cannabinoids were added to Group 1, including THCA, Delta-8, Delta-10, THC-O, and others. PG 2 includes MDMA and naturally derived THC concentrates. PG 3 holds most common prescriptions, including Xanax, Valium, Adderall, and Ritalin. PG 4 covers certain compounds with small amounts of narcotics. Marijuana sits outside the groups under its own statute.

Penalty group 2 includes mostly hallucinogenic substances, like Ecstasy, PCP, and mescaline.

The penalties for manufacture or delivery of drugs in PG2 are as follows:

Texas law treats marijuana separately from the other penalty groups. Apart from its narrow medical program and its rules for hemp, possessing, selling, or growing marijuana is still a crime in Texas. The table below lists the penalties for possession and for manufacture or delivery, based on the amount involved.

Two features of this system catch people off guard. Group 1 has no misdemeanor tier at all, so even residue in a baggie is a felony. And Texas weighs adulterants and dilutants along with the drug itself, meaning the cutting agent counts toward your total. That rule reshapes cases involving concentrates in particular, which we cover on our THC vape and concentrate defense page.

The same drugs produce wildly different exposure depending on a word the State chooses: possession, or possession with intent to deliver.

Intent is rarely proven directly. It gets inferred from circumstances an officer describes after the fact: how the substance was packaged, whether a scale was present, how much cash was in the car, what your phone contained. Each of those can have an innocent explanation that the report does not include. People divide their own supply into smaller containers. Scales can be used for measuring a substance for personal use. Cash exists for reasons unrelated to drugs.

Defeating the intent element does not just improve a case. It drops the charge by one or more felony levels, which is often the single largest swing available.

Prosecutors have to prove you knew the substance was there and that you exercised care, custody, and control over it. Texas courts call this evidence affirmative links, and the requirement exists precisely because proximity alone proves nothing.

This is where a large share of our cases live. Drugs found in a car with four people in it. A shared apartment where the search turned up something in a common area. A borrowed vehicle. A jacket that was not yours. The State's position is that whoever was closest is responsible, and the law does not actually work that way.

What makes the links strong or weak is specific: whether the substance was in plain view, whether it was within your reach, whether you had exclusive access to the space, whether you made incriminating statements, whether your belongings were mixed in with it. We work through each of those, because a case built on presence rather than proof is a case that can be attacked.

Nothing shapes a drug case more than how the evidence was found, and this is where cases end early when they end well.

Officers need a lawful basis for the stop before anything that follows counts. A traffic violation that did not happen, a stop extended past its purpose while waiting on a dog, a consent that was requested in a way that made refusal feel impossible, a warrant supported by an affidavit that does not hold up. Each of those can take the evidence out of the case, and without the evidence there is usually no case left.

We request the dashcam and body cam footage in every drug case, because the video and the written report frequently show two different encounters.

San Antonio is dense with schools, parks, and daycares, which makes one enhancement more common here than most people expect.

An offense within 1,000 feet of a school, youth center, playground, daycare, or public pool can be enhanced under the drug-free zone statute in Texas. The effect is significant: it adds years to the minimum sentence, doubles the maximum fine, and can make probation eligibility much more difficult.

Distance is a measurement, and measurements are checkable. We verify how the State calculated it and whether the facility was actually operating as claimed at the time, because these allegations are added routinely and confirmed rarely.

Here is the part that changes how most clients feel about their case.

Texas requires judges to place a defendant on community supervision, rather than send them to state jail, after a conviction for a first state jail felony possession offense with no prior felony record. This is written into the Code of Criminal Procedure, and it is not discretionary in those circumstances.

Beyond that, a judge can reduce state jail felony punishment to a Class A misdemeanor range, and first-time offenders can often reach pretrial diversion that ultimately ends in dismissal. Also, Bexar County operates treatment-based court programs for people whose underlying issue is addiction rather than dealing. Deferred adjudication remains available in many drug cases as well, and unlike some other charges, a successful outcome here can leave a path to sealing or even expunging the record.

None of these apply automatically. Eligibility is narrow, the windows of opportunity are early, and the way a file looks when a prosecutor first reviews it affects which doors stay open.

For more detail, see our guide on first-time drug possession charges in Texas.