For years, Nina Hanson, 68, had been seeing doctors to treat her fibromyalgia, which causes severe nerve pain that “jumps” around her body, when her doctor recommended she obtain a medical-cannabis patient card in early 2024, her husband, Donny Hanson, told the Mississippi Free Press.
Her pain made her desperate to try anything to manage her discomfort, often downing four to five prescribed hydrocodone pills daily, her husband said.
Nina Hanson went into a Mississippi medical-cannabis dispensary in Starkville, Mississippi, for the first time after she got her card. She brought in a list of cannabis strains and products that her doctor had recommended to her, and dispensary workers asked her questions about herself and her pain.
But the dispensary workers gave her a strain of cannabis that was for energy, not pain relief, Donny Hanson said.
“We spent quite a bit of money trying products that didn’t help her pain,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 7.
Donny Hanson, 72, smoked cannabis recreationally in the 1970s and has monitored medical use of the plant for quite some time. Frustrated with the dispensary workers’ inadequate product recommendations for his wife, he did some research and discovered he could get a medical-cannabis caregiver card to assist his wife with buying and providing her plant medicine. After going through the extensive background check process, he finally got his caregiver card later in 2024.
He said his wife is mostly housebound, as traveling in a car irritates her fibromyalgia, and she struggles cognitively, so he went to the dispensary without her to pick up her medical cannabis for the first time. But at that same dispensary Nina Hanson had first visited, a dispensary worker would not let Donny Hanson into the store without his wife, incorrectly quoting state law, the husband told the Mississippi Free Press.
Donny Hanson was confused. What was the point of him obtaining a caregiver card if he could only go inside a dispensary accompanied by his wife?
He decided to try another dispensary in town to see if he would be able to purchase his wife’s medical cannabis. That dispensary let him in, and he said he was able to buy pain-relief products that ended up helping Nina Hanson so much that she stopped taking hydrocodone.
“And it worked. It helped her,” Donny Hanson said.
The husband has spent much of his time crafting the perfect recipes for brownie and brookie edibles for his wife using decarbonized cannabis flower as well as creating cannabis-infused honey that the Hansons take each night before bed. Each serving is the perfect dose of medicine for his wife, he said. He knows this because he said he samples each batch to ensure it will work for his wife. The husband even brought samples to a local dispensary for workers to try and give opinions.
Donny Hanson got his own medical-cannabis patient card in 2025.
Soon, access to medical-cannabis programs could become easier. The Mississippi Legislature has passed bills to increase the caregiver card validation period, remove the concentrate potency cap on medical-cannabis products and give patients a right-to-try pathway. All bills have been sent to Gov. Tate Reeves’ desk for his consideration.
Extending Card Validation Timeframe
Under current law, Donny Hanson must validate both his medical-cannabis patient card and his caregiver card each year. One bill the Legislature has passed could change the law so that he would only have to renew his caregiver card every two years.
Extending the validation period for caregiver cards would help out the Hansons, he said, because Nina Hanson cannot be at home alone without Donny Hanson and she also has difficulty riding in a car.
“I don’t let her get out and drive anywhere by herself, so it’s very inconvenient for me to have to run and get all this stuff done,” Donny Hanson said. “Then, when she gets ready to sign the paper for me to be her caregiver, I have to take her to the bank, get the paper notarized, then bring her back home.”
To be a medical-cannabis caregiver, applicants must pass an FBI background check, even if they have already completed a background check to be a regular caregiver. Mississippi medical cannabis patient caregivers must reapply for their caregiver cards every year under current law.
House Bill 895 originally proposed requiring renewals to take place every five years, aligning the caregiver card timeline with that of medical-cannabis industry workers, who must renew their work permits every five years.
“They’ve had a background check, they’ve been fingerprinted—it should last more than a year,” Mississippi House Rep. Lee Yancey, R-Brandon, told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 5.
Yancey sponsored H.B. 895 and said that the patient’s doctor should have the ultimate authority over how often the patient must schedule follow-up visits with the doctor after joining the medical cannabis program.
“There was a mandatory six-month follow-up—we just took the ‘mandatory’ out,” he said. “The doctor still has discretion to have them come back after one month or three months or six months or 12 months or 24 months.”
But when the bill came over to the Senate, Sen. Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, amended the legislation to change the extension of caregiver cards from five years to two years. He also removed a provision that would have made patient cards valid for two years instead of one year and another that removed the mandatory requirement for medical-cannabis patients to have a follow-up visit with their doctors six months after first receiving their patient cards.
At a March 3 Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee meeting, Blackwell said he amended the bill to remove the patient-card language because practitioners called him with “concerns.”
“After this bill came out of the House, I had a number of calls from practitioners who had some concerns with it,” he told committee members. “Since that time, I’ve met with a number of physicians and practitioners, and my amendment basically reverts back to our original language (in the 2022 Mississippi Medical Cannabis Act).”
H.B. 895 also removes 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.
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, 43-year-old medical-cannabis patient Elizabeth Feder-Hosey said. Diluting concentrates often leads to medical-cannabis patients having to use more of a product to obtain pain relief, whereas they could use less of a concentrate if state law did not cap the potency levels, she added.
“(I’m using) more product to get the same effects, so I’m spending more money and I’m adding other things to my lungs that aren’t necessary for my body … just because you want to cut it,” Feder-Hosey told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 6. “And for me personally, there’s no difference in impairment. And even sometimes with the uncut medicine it’s even a better, cleaner, less intoxicating feeling.”
She founded Mississippi Patient Voices, a political-action committee, to help people obtain medical cards and to advocate to lawmakers, lobbyists and influential people in the cannabis scene on behalf of medical-cannabis patients.
In a 2025 Mississippi Patient Voices survey in which 975 Mississippi medical-cannabis patients participated, 69.8% of participants said the Legislature should eliminate the concentrate potency cap.
The House passed H.B. 895 by a 98-11 vote on Feb. 4 and the Senate approved an amended version of the legislation by a 33-19 vote on March 3. The House concurred with the Senate’s changes on March 18, so the legislation is headed to Gov. Tate Reeves’ desk.
‘Right to Try’ Medical Cannabis
Jennifer Kephart, 49, has postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, PTSD, anxiety and mast cell activation syndrome, and she has been a medical-cannabis patient for about a year. Her mast cell activation syndrome affects every single part of her body and symptoms change in length and severity from day to day, with “no warning at all,” she said. She often suffers with severe, debilitating pain which prevents her from eating.
Medical cannabis helps ease her flare-ups and boosts her appetite so that she can force a couple of bites of food down her throat.
“Medical cannabis is actually keeping me alive to where I can eat just two, three or four bites a day just to stay alive,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 9. “I drop anywhere from three to four pounds a week and then I’ll gain two pounds and drop four or five more the next week. So, like, literally at this point, you can see my hipbones, my arm (bones), everything.”
Mississippians who do not have a qualifying condition under the Mississippi Medical Cannabis Act of 2022 may be able to try the program under the sole approval of the Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney through House Bill 1152.
If a person has a non-qualifying medical condition and has tried a variety of conventional treatment methods unsuccessfully, the person’s treating doctor may decide that they are a good candidate to try medical cannabis. The doctor would then refer the patient’s case to Edney, who would personally approve or deny the person’s application under the legislation.
“This bill provides a procedure for people who do not have a qualifying debilitating medical condition under the Mississippi Medical Cannabis Act but do have an illness that is chronic, progressive, severely disabling, or terminal in nature to be considered for inclusion in the Mississippi medical cannabis program,” Mississippi Sen. Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, told senators at a Mississippi Senate Public Health Committee meeting on Feb. 24.
People with debilitating conditions who live out of state but see a health-care practitioner in Mississippi could receive a medical-cannabis card if the practitioner gives a written recommendation to the health department under a Senate amendment the Legislature approved.
During the committee’s discussion, Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney came up to the podium to clarify that the Right to Try Medical Cannabis Act was not going to make the medical cannabis program “wide open,” but instead provide a way for patients who need it to access.
“The original medical-cannabis statute will guide us and will trump anything else. The right to try is really for a narrow group of patients working with a treating physician to use the cannabis program for access for things that traditional FDA-approved medications have not worked,” he told the committee. “I do hope that if this is successful, that it will bring more of our hospice providers in the cannabis program in an appropriate fashion for end-of-life care.”
The state health officer added that the right-to-try provision also applies to people who have chronic or terminal conditions that are typically treated using opioids because it gives patients who do not want to take opioids another option for pain relief. The person’s treating doctor, who does not have to be a medical-cannabis practitioner, would refer the patient to Edney to see if medical cannabis could work for the person.
Elizabeth Feder-Hosey told the Mississippi Free Press that she supported the right-to-try bill because “a lot of patients fall through the cracks” and it could give people with chronic conditions “hope” that they could find relief by using medical cannabis.
“We have a very specific narrow list of qualifying conditions, but there are a lot of health conditions where you have the same symptoms but it’s under a different name,” she said.
Kephart got her medical card because of her PTSD diagnosis; she did not receive a mast cell activation syndrome diagnosis until a couple of months ago. But if that was her only condition, she would not qualify for a medical card under current law. The right-to-try provision could open up the possibility of letting a patient with that syndrome or another debilitating condition not on the qualifying conditions list get a medical card with Edney’s approval.
Kephart said she strongly supported H.B. 1152 because it could help break down the stigma and educate more people that cannabis has many medical uses.
“It would give people the opportunity to actually see if it would help and maybe that would open more people’s minds,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 9
The House passed H.B. 1152 by a 104-7 vote on Feb. 5, and the Senate approved it by a 34-17 vote on March 10. The legislation heads to Gov. Tate Reeves for him to decide whether to sign it into law.