With medical hashish now formally dwell in Mississippi, an area newspaper is spotlighting a household that introduced the newly authorized crop to their county––and their farm.
The Daily Leader of Brookhaven, Mississippi has the story out of Lincoln County, the place native officers initially opted out of the state’s newly enshrined medical marijuana legislation.
Mississippi lastly legalized medical hashish remedy final 12 months after prolonged legislative debate, however native governments got the choice to choose out of this system.
The choice in Lincoln County spurred a pair, Jason McDonald and Timothy Gibson, to take motion. Per the Daily Leader, the 2 “spearheaded efforts to legalize medical marijuana in Lincoln County after the Board of Supervisors voted to initially choose out of medical marijuana,” finally bringing the matter to a vote in August, when voters within the county reversed the choice by native officers.
Following that vote, McDonald and Gibson “began work on opening their very own Medical Marijuana Cultivation facility,” according to the Daily Leader, founding a enterprise “referred to as SADUJA [that] is separate from their tea farm however on the identical property in East Lincoln.”
That enterprise, per the Daily Leader, “was first licensed to develop Hemp in 2021 and as of December 22, was licensed to develop medical marijuana in Lincoln County.”
“Crime charges haven’t gone up, property values haven’t gone down like folks thought,” McDonald told the Every day Chief. “We have now been rising hemp since 2021. We offered hemp to native retailers round Mississippi. I don’t suppose folks have realized the hashish plant was rising right here legally properly earlier than medical marijuana handed right here. It was right here and it was rising on the farm.”
“I believe with something new persons are typically afraid of it,’ McDonald added. “It’s extra of what we’ve got completed simply doing it on an even bigger scale and we converted to medical hashish as a substitute of hemp. It’s the identical plant. Rising any plant is identical actually.”
Medical hashish gross sales launched on January 25, rather less than a 12 months after Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed a measure into legislation.
The medical hashish invoice was a supply of intense disagreement throughout the Mississippi legislature, and between lawmakers and Reeves, who was adamant about imposing tight restrictions on any legislation that emerged.
“The ‘medical marijuana invoice’ has consumed an unlimited quantity of area on the entrance pages of the legacy media retailers throughout Mississippi during the last three-plus years,” Reeves stated final 12 months after signing the compromise invoice.
“There isn’t any doubt that there are people in our state who may do considerably higher if that they had entry to medically prescribed doses of hashish. There are additionally those that actually desire a leisure marijuana program that might result in extra folks smoking and fewer folks working, with the entire societal and household ills that that brings,” the governor added.
Certainly one of Reeves’ chief issues was with the quantity of hashish a affected person may acquire. The governor most popular a restrict of two.7 grams per day; the invoice that landed on his desk, which was accepted with a veto-proof majority, permits sufferers to buy as much as 3.5 grams as many as six occasions per week.
“I’ve made it clear that the invoice on my desk will not be the one which I might have written,” Reeves stated after he signed the measure. “However it’s a proven fact that the legislators who wrote the ultimate model of the invoice (the forty fifth or forty sixth draft) made vital enhancements to get us in direction of undertaking the last word purpose.”