Is medical marijuana now legal in S.C.?

What GOP Sen. Tom Davis said on the Senate floor Wednesday sounded almost surreal in the Republican-supermajority chamber.

“In South Carolina, right now, as we stand, we have just become the 41st state that has a legally authorized medical marijuana program.”

What Beaufort’s Davis, the legislature’s foremost medical marijuana proponent, said was probably news to most South Carolinians.

After all, no new medical marijuana legislation has passed the S.C. House and Senate. There has been no signing ceremony at the governor’s mansion. Supporters and opponents weren’t holding press conferences to celebrate or decry the move.

But as Davis explained to his colleagues, none of that was apparently necessary. He said the state already has a law mandating the creation of a medical marijuana program in the state Department of Public Health (DPH) that was passed by the legislature and signed into law in 1980.

On its face, the plain language of the act appears to support Davis’s contention.

“There is established in the Department of Health and Environmental Control [the DPH precursor agency] a controlled substances therapeutic research program,” the law says. “The program shall distribute to cancer chemotherapy and radiology patients and to glaucoma patients who are certified pursuant to this act marijuana under the terms and conditions of this act for the purpose of alleviating the patient’s discomfort, nausea and other painful side effects of their disease or chemotherapy treatments.”

And when Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an April 23 order “immediately” reclassifying medical marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III substance — essentially ending the federal prohibition by formally declaring medical marijuana a drug with legitimate medical uses — he triggered the 46-year-old S.C. law, Davis said.

“Medical marijuana is now legal in South Carolina,” Davis continued. “And Dr. [Edward] Simmer, as the DPH director, is in charge — he ‘shall’ provide that marijuana to those patients [under the law].”

State agencies quiet about impact

State agencies were mostly mum in response to Davis’s argument.

In an April 30 statement, DPH acknowledged the federal action, but didn’t comment directly on its Palmetto State implications.

“We are assessing the impacts to DPH and the state of South Carolina,” spokesperson Casey White said.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED), whose chief, Mark Keel, has been a leading opponent of medical marijuana, declined comment.

“SLED does not have anything to provide on this matter at this time,” the agency said in an unsigned statement.

Gov. Henry McMaster’s office also did not reply to a request for comment, but confirmed through a spokesperson that the federal rescheduling would trigger a state reclassification in an April 25 news report.

Still, as Davis told Statehouse Report Thursday, he’s not happy about the apparent win.

In fact, he sees the current situation — an apparently binding mandate on DPH, with none of the guardrails and regulations that he’s tried to put in place through a carefully crafted medical marijuana law over the past 12 years — as a failure by state leaders to recognize that an eventual federal rescheduling was inevitable.

“The legislature, quite frankly, has been derelict in its duty,” Davis said.

‘The most conservative medical marijuana bill in the country’

S.C. has seen at least three serious attempts to legislate on medical marijuana since the 1980 bill, and Davis has been at the center of each effort.

In 2014, he sponsored and passed Julian’s Law, which allows patients with severe, treatment-resistant epilepsy to possess cannabinoid oil containing up to 0.9% THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

That legislation, he said, grew out of a conversation he had with a constituent who pointed him to the medical research supporting medical marijuana in epilepsy treatment. And it was in the course of working on that bill that Davis said he discovered the larger body of scientific studies on marijuana’s medical uses for other serious medical problems — cancer, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, chronic pain and more.

“That’s when I realized we needed to put some safeguards in place to allow doctors to provide their patients with this product,” Davis said.

What followed was a comprehensive bill that sought to strictly regulate medical marijuana, from sourcing to prescribing to dispensing — legislation that Davis has called “the most conservative medical marijuana bill in the country.” Since then, he’s shepherded the legislation through the Senate twice, in 2022 and 2024, only to see it die without a vote in the House.

And now, without comprehensive legislation, Davis fears that lawmakers’ inaction has left the state with an irresponsible legal mandate to provide patients with an unregulated drug.

“My position has always been that this is a potentially dangerous substance,” Davis said. “We need to regulate it. We need to have physicians authorizing it. We need to have pharmacists dispensing it with proper labeling. And all that’s missing now.”

The consequences of inaction

With state agencies still mostly silent on the 1980 law and only six days left in the 2026 legislative session, Davis said the most likely short-term outcome is a finding by DPH that, without direct funding from the legislature, it can’t create the legally required program. But that’s unlikely to settle the issue until lawmakers return next January, he noted.

“I’m not encouraging this, but I expect there will be some legal actions filed by individuals who want to access marijuana for medicinal purposes,” Davis said. “And they’re going to compel, or attempt to compel, DPH to discharge the duty it has been statutorily directed to do.”

Asked about his own next steps, Davis said he plans to reintroduce his regulatory bill next session when he believes the legal situation will force the legislature to act.

But that’s not the solution to the challenges facing S.C., he said, likening the medical marijuana bill to two other bills he’s sponsored, and expects to soon see die, this session — comprehensive data-center regulation and new authority for local governments to pair new development with the roads and infrastructure needed to support it.

“A lot of times as legislators, we tend to think if something’s complicated or uncomfortable, we can just do nothing and avoid the problem,” Davis said. “But that’s just not the case.”

He added, “Doing nothing is a choice. And doing nothing has consequences.”

Jack O’Toole is Statehouse bureau chief for Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper.
Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com