JACKSON, Miss.—Mike Watkins, a Mississippi medical-cannabis patient and consultant, hugged and high-fived people as he organized protesters waving pro-medical cannabis signs near the side of the Mississippi Capitol Building on Monday morning.
About 100 medical cannabis patients, practitioners, industry workers, caregivers and advocates gathered that morning in protest after Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed two medical-cannabis bills on March 26, House Bill 1152 and House Bill 895. Advocates argued the bills would open up the state’s medical-cannabis program and make it more easily accessible, but Reeves said in his veto messages that the bills went beyond the program’s scope.
Watkins immediately took action and posted a call-to-action on Facebook the morning of March 27, urging medical-cannabis patients, caregivers, industry workers and advocates to join him at the Mississippi Capitol Building for a peaceful protest to compel the Mississippi Legislature to recommit the bills and pass them by a veto-proof two-thirds majority.
Medical-cannabis advocates in the Legislature, Rep. Lee Yancey, R-Brandon, and Sen. Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, briefly made appearances during the protest. Watkins celebrated their advocacy and encouraged protesters to call and email legislators who voted against the medical cannabis bills because Yancey and Blackwell “are on our side.”
“We’ve got to sell it to everyone else,” Watkins said, encouraging protesters “This is a worthy cause, an easy win, and I believe we can get the votes, but you got to put in the work.”
Watkins, who is an U.S. Army veteran, was heading the protest with his service dog, a grey and black speckled Great Dane-Bull Mastiff mix named Brooklyn Rza, and Mississippi Patient Voices Founder Elizabeth Feder-Hosey.
“This has been the ultimate team effort, and I think this year we can see what legislative session can be when we’re all together and we’re all united and there’s more of us,” Feder-Hosey told protesters.
While Mississippi has 68,000 medical cannabis patients, about one-third of Mississippians—or 984,000 people—could qualify for a patient card, Feder-Hosey said at Monday’s protest.
“We just haven’t reached them yet,” she said.
At Monday’s protest, Gulf War veteran Devereaux Galloway emphasized that 74% of Mississippians voted in 2020 to enact a medical-cannabis program through Initiative 65. Over a million people voted in favor of legalizing medical cannabis through Initiative 65 and the alternative Initiative 65A, a stricter version of the program. (The Mississippi Supreme Court invalidated the ballot-initiative process in 2021, which as a result, nullified the medical-cannabis program. The Legislature enacted the Mississippi Medical Cannabis Act in 2022.)
“Your power is in November,” Galloway said, encouraging protesters to vote. “It’s bipartisan—we’ve talked about that. It’s not about race, gender, ethnicity—it’s about the 74%.”
‘House Bill 895 Seeks to Erode Three Important Safeguards’
Medical-cannabis caregivers would renew their caregiver cards after two years instead of one year under the version of House Bill 895 that the Legislature sent to Gov. Tate Reeves. The bill discontinued mandating doctors to have their medical-cannabis patients come in for six-month follow-up after receiving their patient card. Without the mandatory six-month follow-up, the Legislature would leave it up to the doctor’s discretion to decide when and how often patients must return for a follow-up visit.
H.B. 895 also removed the 60% potency cap for medical-cannabis concentrates, like Rick Simpson Oil, which means medical-cannabis patients could buy the full-strength version of these products without the Legislature limiting their potency.
Reeves said he vetoed H.B. 895 because the Mississippi Medical Cannabis Act of 2022 has already been “largely successful” in achieving its goal of providing treatment to Mississippi patients.
“House Bill 895 seeks to erode three important safeguards contained in the Act to minimize the potential diversion of medical marijuana for recreational purposes,” Reeves wrote in his March 26 veto message. “The requirement of a mandatory six-month follow-up visit to ensure the patient is receiving a therapeutic benefit from utilizing medical marijuana; requiring caregivers to pass an annual criminal background check; and capping the THC potency at 60% for oils and concentrates are reasonable and necessary checks and balances on the medical marijuana program and do not create unnecessary barriers.”
Concentrates are the purest form of the cannabis plant. After concentrates are extracted from the cannabis plant, they typically have around 90-100% potency. This means that Mississippi cultivators currently must dilute the strength of the concentrates to comply with state law by adding CBD, terpenes and other additives, Elizabeth Feder-Hosey told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 6. Diluting concentrates often leads to medical-cannabis patients using more of a product for pain relief, whereas they could use less of a concentrate if state law did not cap the potency levels, she added.
Rep. Lee Yancey said on Monday that Mississippi is the only state with medical or recreational cannabis that has THC caps on concentrates.
Yancey, who’s the author of H.B. 895, referred the bill back to the House Business and Commerce Committee, of which he is the chairman. Legislators can override Reeves’ veto, but it will require a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and the Senate.
At Monday’s protest, he extended gratitude to the demonstrators who gathered at the Capitol.
“We are trying to decide what our next steps are,” the chairman said. “We’ve got less than a week left of this legislative session and so whatever happens is going to happen pretty soon if something happens. If it doesn’t happen, it’s not for lack of some us trying. But we thought these were practical things that could make the program better.”
‘A Continuing Challenge to Strike the Appropriate Balance’
Mississippians who do not have a qualifying condition under the Mississippi Medical Cannabis Act of 2022 would have been able to try the program under the sole approval of the Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney through H.B. 1152.
The Senate added an amendment to the bill that would have given out-of-state residents the right-to-try medical cannabis as long as they were under the primary care of a doctor in Mississippi. In a March 26 message, Reeves said he vetoed the bill because of the Senate’s amendment, saying it pushed the bill “beyond its original intent” and extended right-to-try “to every person on the planet.”
“Since the adoption of the (Mississippi Medical Cannabis) Act in 2022, it has been a continuing challenge to strike the appropriate balance between the utilization of marijuana for medical purposes versus the utilization of marijuana for recreational purposes,” the governor wrote in his veto message for both H.B. 1152 and H.B. 895.
Reeves said Edney had expressed concerns about allowing out-of-state residents the right to try medical cannabis, quoting the state health officer in his veto message.
“The amendment making out of state residents eligible for the program, in our opinion, shifts the intent of the bill away from giving Mississippians the ability to work with their treating physicians in dire situation when all other options have failed,” a quote from Edney says in Reeves’ veto message. “This policy position of MSDH was clearly communicated to leadership and in committee that we could only support this narrowly drafted and strict language and would not support anything to make the program more recreational in nature. Unfortunately, the amended language distorts the purpose of the bill’s original intent.”
The Mississippi Free Press verified the quote with Edney, who confirmed he said it.
Reeves noted in his veto message that he was not opposed to allowing Mississippians with chronic or debilitating conditions to have the right to try medical cannabis under the sole permission of Edney.
“I share the State Health Officer’s concerns that the amendment of HB 1152 beyond its original intent has the potential to upset the tenuous balance struck by the Act and poses an unreasonable risk of pushing the medical marijuana program in the direction of facilitating recreational use,” the governor said in his message. “In the future, if the Legislature returns this legislation to my desk as originally proposed and passed the House, limiting its application to Mississippi residents that are suffering from a debilitating and terminal illness, accompanied by a reasonable repealer date to allow for an evaluation of the “right to try” program a couple of years after its implementation, I will sign such legislation into law. However, I am compelled to veto House Bill 1152 at this time.”
The House referred the bill back to the House Public Health and Human Services Committee. For the bill to become law, it now must pass through the House and Senate with a two-thirds majority in both chambers.
