Medical Pot on Agenda 2023 for South Carolina

Medicinal cannabis advocates in South Carolina are ready to go again in hopes that 2023 will finally be the year they legalize the treatment in the state.

Local news station WPDE reports that two bills “for the 2023 legislative session have been pre-billed in the South Carolina House [that] would legalize medical marijuana despite the ongoing federal cannabis ban.”

One measure, according to the station, is known as the Put Patients First Act and would “authorize patients with exceptions to use medical marijuana” while “allowing dispensaries to open statewide.”

The other, known as the South Carolina Compassionate Care Act, would authorize and at the same time “permit” the use of medicinal cannabis [the state department of health] control most of the process, issuing licenses to sell products, setting rules for using the products, and making changes to enable cannabis research,” according to WPDE.

The latter bill has the same title as a separate measure introduced last year by Republican Senator Tom Davis, who has advocated for medical cannabis in the Palmetto State for years.

Under Senator Davis’ bill, patients suffering from a variety of conditions could have received medicinal cannabis treatment: cancer, multiple sclerosis, a neurological disease or disorder (including epilepsy), sickle cell disease, glaucoma, PTSD, autism, Crohn’s disease, ulcers colitis, cachexia, a condition that causes a person to be housebound including severe or persistent nausea, a terminal illness with a life expectancy of less than one year, a chronic condition causing severe and persistent muscle spasms, or a chronic condition for which an opioid is or could be prescribed based on accepted standards of care.

“If you bang on the door long enough. When you make your case. When the public asks for something, the state Senate owes a debate,” Davis told local media last January. “The people of South Carolina deserve to know where their elected officials stand on this issue.”

After the bill passed the Senate in February, Davis applauded his peers.

“Even those who were against the law, I mean, they could have just been against it. They could have railed against it, they could have tried to delay things. They didn’t. They voiced their concerns, but what they then did was dig in and try to better the bill. So what you’ve seen in the last three weeks is what should be happening in a representative democracy,” Davis said at the time.

But after the law was approved in the state Senate, members of the state House of Representatives voted in May not to continue debating the law, shattering the hopes of Davis and other medical cannabis advocates.

“We suffered a procedural setback today in the House of Representatives,” Davis said after last year’s House of Representatives vote. “I can’t cry about it. I can’t pout about it. I can’t come back and lash out and try to hurt other people’s bills. That’s not productive. I just need to find a way to get this thing up or down the house and I’ll work on that.”

Davis isn’t the only one who will be clamoring for another attempt to get the proposal over the line in this upcoming legislative session.

A group of military veterans living in South Carolina have been vocal in support of legalizing the treatment in the state.

“No one has ever died from a cannabis overdose,” Cody Callarman, a former Marine Corps member, told WACH in November. “For me, I can say that it definitely helps me fall asleep and stay put [a]sleep and relieve many nightmares.”