South Carolina patients could get legal access to medical marijuana under a little-known state law that could be triggered by the Trump administration’s federal cannabis rescheduling move.
State Sen. Tom Davis (R), who has sponsored bills to legalize medical cannabis over a number of sessions, told The Post and Courier that the federal action kicks off “a chain of legal consequences in South Carolina that the General Assembly can no longer ignore.”
Specifically, an existing South Carolina law says that “if a substance is added, deleted, or rescheduled as a controlled substance pursuant to federal law or regulation,” officials then have 30 days to reschedule the drug in the “appropriate schedule” under state law.
A separate law, the South Carolina Controlled Substances Therapeutic Research Act, passed in 1980, sets up a program through with cancer and glaucoma patients could obtain medical cannabis “through whatever means” the state health commissioner “deems most appropriate consistent with federal law.”
Under the legislation, a Review Advisory Board could “include other disease groups for participation in the controlled substances therapeutic research program after pertinent medical data have been presented by a practitioner to both the Commissioner and the board and after necessary approval is received
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