Becky Henderson sat in her motorized wheelchair beside her mother, Sherry Henderson, at a long wooden table full of lawmakers and doctors in a meeting room at the Mississippi Capitol building in Jackson, Mississippi. She had come to a Mississippi Medical Cannabis Advisory Board meeting on Dec. 20, 2023 to advocate on behalf of medical-cannabis patients and share her story as doctors and lawmakers grilled her on various aspects of the program.
By that point, Becky had fought for years for Mississippi to have a medical-cannabis program. She was paralyzed due to a spinal cord injury after a car wreck in 2003 at age 21, and another wreck in 2018 further debilitated her condition.
“I’ve become mostly bedridden. I’m still struggling with being shut up in my room—bedridden and in excruciating pain both physically and emotionally. And I almost gave up completely. It’s no lie when I tell you all that it’s a Christmas miracle that I’m in this room today,” Becky said at the Dec. 20, 2023, meeting.
The Gulfport, Mississippi, resident often spoke with lawmakers and advocated for people with disabilities who sought cannabis to soothe aches and pains, but that meeting was her first and only time speaking to the Mississippi Medical Cannabis Advisory Board.
Becky joined the state’s medical-cannabis program when it became law in 2022. Her health started declining, and she was homebound and living with her mother, Sherry Henderson, by then. Becky had lived with her mother on and off throughout the years and had also lived with her son and her former boyfriend, Sherry said.
Years after she got paralyzed, in 2018, Becky got into a second car accident because the hand controls in her car that allowed her to drive stopped working. She broke her leg, but Sherry said the doctors did not mend her leg through surgery because she was already paralyzed.
“She went downhill real fast after that as far as her ability to care for herself,” Sherry told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 25, 2025.
On April 25, 2024, Sherry went to the Gulf Coast Veterans’ Affairs office to get treatment for a kidney infection. She hired a palliative-care nurse to sit with Becky while she was gone. When Sherry was driving back home, the nurse called and said she was putting Becky on hospice. A day or so later, Sherry said Becky took extra morphine and overdosed; she found her daughter “foaming at the mouth,” she said.
“She didn’t deserve to go through what she went through, but she stayed fighting and continuing to try to live until we got the answers,” Sherry said. “And then when we got the diagnosis and the answers that we needed, she was just too weak to continue fighting, and they told her they couldn’t give her liver (medicine).”
Becky spent the last nine months of her life in hospitals and nursing homes that refused to let her use medical cannabis despite her having a medical-cannabis patient card, her mother said. On Feb. 18, the 41-year-old woman died of drug-induced liver failure from years of taking prescribed morphine and fentanyl to ease her pain, Sherry said.
“I wish the whole world would wake up to what’s going on,” Becky’s mother said. “Pharmaceuticals were made with good intentions, but the effects on the different individuals is devastating, especially when they use them in large quantities without any regard to the patient’s health.”
The day Becky died, Sherry had to get her own medical-cannabis card renewed at a local clinic. She told Becky she would be going to an appointment and would be back soon.
“She didn’t pass until I was on the grounds at the hospital right before I got in her room. She wanted me to go. She didn’t want me to not get my license renewed because she fought so hard,” Sherry said.
‘I Didn’t Want to Live My Life as a Criminal’
Becky Henderson was a brightly spirited person who “loved everyone,” Sherry Henderson told the Mississippi Free Press.
Becky entered the world 14 days past her due date and was walking and talking by the time she was 6 months old, her mother said. She was born in Panama City, Florida, and her family moved around frequently when she was growing up because her parents were in the Coast Guard, Sherry said.
Before she became paralyzed in a car accident in 2003 at age 21, her mother said Becky worked in factories, as a maid and as a nurse’s aide. She obtained three health-care degrees from the Ultimate Medical Academy, and Sherry said her daughter planned to use her education to teach staff at doctors’ offices and hospitals to treat patients with dignity and compassion.
Becky started smoking cannabis when she was about 15, and she began to do research by reading various studies, watching documentaries and talking to people who had been using cannabis for years, Sherry said.
“I didn’t want to live my life as a criminal, being criminalized for using what I saw as medicine. So, I found that it was important to fight so that we all could use that medicine and not be criminalized for it,” Becky Henderson told the Mississippi Free Press on June 8, 2023.
She said she became an advocate for Mississippi’s medical-cannabis program when the Mississippi Supreme Court decided to overturn a voter-approved medical marijuana program in 2021 and nullified the entire citizen-led ballot initiative system. The ballot-initiative system allowed citizens to put issues on the ballot after gathering a requisite number of signatures from each congressional district.
Becky started emailing lawmakers with her recommendations, and she said some responded and others ignored her messages. But she continued her work even as her physical condition dwindled over the next few years.
Becky particularly advocated for patients to be able to grow their own cannabis at home as a more affordable and accessible way to get cannabis because she said medical-cannabis products in Mississippi’s dispensaries are expensive. The patient also explained that home- and bed-bound patients can benefit from home-grown cannabis because they don’t have to leave their residence to get their medicine.
“I want to make sure that the patients do have their voices heard, too, because I know so many of them, like me, fought for this,” Becky told the Mississippi Free Press on June 8, 2023. “And I know so many of them lined up to vote, like me, and voted for this. And we … felt a little robbed. And we’ve got to make this right. Home grow’s the way to make it right.”
‘Fight For What’s Right’
Former Mississippi Independent Cannabis Association Executive Director Mike Watkins wanted to bring in a patient to talk to lawmakers to share her testimony and advocate for policy updates to the medical-cannabis program during a December 2023 Medical Cannabis Advisory Council meeting.
“We wanted to get somebody there that knew the law, that understood this, was eloquent enough to speak and strong enough to be able to be grilled by some of these people who, frankly, have more letters past their names than any of us,” Watkins told the Mississippi Free Press on March 4, 2025.
Becky told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 3, 2024, that a Gulfport dispensary worker called her and said that Watkins was looking for a patient to speak to the Legislature.
Watkins called Becky a “big ball of sunshine” who was eager to advocate for patients’ access to medical cannabis. When he told lawmakers Becky would be speaking at the council meeting, he said they were “very aware” of who Becky was because she had been writing letters and speaking to lawmakers for years about medical cannabis.
“You got an advocate who took all the strength she had in the world to get out of her bed and go to the damn Capitol and fight for what’s right, not just for her, but for people like her. And for the next two years, three years, she couldn’t even use (medical cannabis) because the facilities she was in wouldn’t let her,” Watkins said.
At the meeting, Becky shared her testimony of being a house-bound, bedridden person struggling to access parts of the medical-cannabis program, like visiting dispensaries and attending mandatory in-person doctor’s appointments. She inspired lawmakers and health officials to consider legislation to potentially allow for medical-cannabis delivery to care facilities and delivery to homes for paraplegic, quadriplegic or otherwise immobile patients.
Becky told the Mississippi Free Press in 2024 that she was “humbled” and “thankful for the opportunity” to travel to Jackson to speak with lawmakers about cannabis.
“If we don’t make them aware, they don’t know. They’re just guessing. I don’t want it to be a guessing game,” Becky told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 3, 2024. “They need to know the truth and the facts on the ground because it’s different for us. It looks good on paper whenever they write a bill out, but then, once it’s put into practice, you got to work the kinks out. And I’m happy to work the kinks out.”
Rigid Requirements to be Medical-Cannabis Caregiver
To be a medical-cannabis caregiver, people must pass an FBI background check, even if they have already gotten a background check to be a regular caregiver. Although Sherry Henderson is also a medical-cannabis patient, she had to pass an FBI background check to become a medical-cannabis caregiver for Becky Henderson.
As a non-caregiver, Mike Watkins could pick up Becky’s fentanyl from the pharmacy but could not pick up her medical cannabis. He said he did not understand why someone could pick up a patient’s opioids without a background check but not cannabis.
Watkins said medical cannabis is not accessible to homebound patients and patients under 21 because under the law, dispensaries are not allowed to offer delivery or allow nonpatients and noncaregivers to pick up a patient’s medical cannabis.
“How are those people going to get their medicine?” he pondered.
He said there needs to be a pathway under the law to have medical-cannabis access in treatment facilities, noting that medical-cannabis patients are allowed to use cannabis at businesses and facilities that permit it.
Sherry said the hospice facility in which Becky spent her final months of life would not let her daughter use her medical cannabis.
“They wouldn’t let her use medical cannabis, even though she had her medical license,” Sherry said. “They would not let her use that in any of the hospitals, nursing homes that she went to throughout this whole ordeal while she’s been sick. Not one of them let her use her medical cannabis. They refused. They said, ‘If I gave it to her, I could be prosecuted,’ even though it was hers and she had a license for it, so I wasn’t able to give her any comfort in the last nine-and-a-half months.”
‘Becky’s Bill’
Mike Watkins started a nonprofit to help Mississippians gain access to medical care, including medical cannabis. He called it the Devack Henderson Foundation, named after both Becky Henderson and one of Watkins’ friends from the U.S. Army, George M. Devack. Sherry Henderson serves as the cofounder and assistant director of the organization.
The foundation has paid for more than 1,000 patients’ medical-cannabis cards, Watkins noted. He said he also wants to be able to give patients medical supplies, like wheelchairs, or assist veterans with household bills.
Watkins said he and other medical-cannabis advocates have called the patient-centered language in the medical-cannabis legislation “Becky’s Bill.” He mentioned that he had been working with lawmakers to add a patients’ right-to-access clause to the bill for the 2026 legislative session.
A major flaw in the medical-cannabis program is that any changes, even minor adjustments, to the program can only come through the legislative process, Watkins said. This means that every aspect of the program must be written in a bill that the Legislature passes and the governor signs into law.
But Watkins said other agencies in Mississippi, like the Mississippi State Department of Health, that get funding and major changes through the Legislature, are able to make day-to-day operational changes without legislative oversight.
“Just because we have a program doesn’t mean it’s a program that works well. It doesn’t mean it’s a program free of issues and headaches and roads to nowhere. We absolutely have that,” Watkins said. “So, why would anybody think that we would pass a law that wouldn’t need to be revamped year in and year out to fix the unintended consequences of government regulation?”
He said his solution would be to mimic cannabis programs in Oregon, Colorado and Oklahoma that have separate commissions that can work on cannabis regulation year-round and accomplish work outside of the legislative session.
Additionally, Watkins advocated for adult-use recreational cannabis, saying the state could make millions in profit monthly if it legalized cannabis. Adult-use recreational cannabis is not legal in any of Mississippi’s surrounding states, which Watkins said could drive business to the Magnolia state if it legalized the program.
“All the things that we’ve been complaining about, you know, that we don’t have the money for, or we don’t have the infrastructure for, or that we can’t get done—well, (recreational) cannabis can provide those funds to accomplish the things we need in the state of Mississippi,” he said.
Becky told the Mississippi Free Press in 2023 that she also wanted the state to expand cannabis to be a recreational program because of the challenges Mississippians must undergo to obtain a medical-cannabis patient card.
“Every adult over 18 should have the right to make their own decision, whether or not they want to smoke weed or not,” Becky told the Mississippi Free Press on June 8, 2023. “If it helps them, it helps them. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
