Mississippi Today
‘The state threw them to the wolves’: Health department struggles to manage massive medical marijuana program
‘The state threw them to the wolves’: Health department struggles to manage massive medical marijuana program
Behind closed doors, Mississippi’s eight-person medical cannabis office is struggling against its workload.
The Health Department office charged by the Legislature with running Mississippi’s new medical marijuana program is steeped in disorganization: agents rarely visit cultivation sites, application backlogs reach hundreds deep, and lags in communication with licensees often stretch on for weeks, a Mississippi Today investigation found.
Business owners feel frustrated, unheard and worried that the millions of dollars they invested — and the tens of thousands they paid in fees to the state — could go up in smoke.
“The state threw them to the wolves,” cultivator Joel Harper said of the fledgling marijuana office. “They should have paid the money to bring in professionals, even a third-party consultant. Instead, they’re sending people out into the cannabis world who have no idea about anything cannabis.”
At the center is a handful of workers, tasked with unrolling a massive program without enough staffing to operate efficiently. Cultivators say when they do hear back from the office, the messages are incomplete or inconsistent – especially when it comes to how they construct their farming facilities.
And that’s if they hear back at all. The office already has mountains of unprocessed paperwork.
As of the second week of January, 277 work permit applications sat in a queue waiting to be processed, according to copies of the office’s records obtained by Mississippi Today. Could-be cannabis workers can’t start their jobs without permits. Another 995 patients had yet to to be told whether or not they’ve been approved for their dispensary cards.
Three dozen businesses had their own applications stuck, along with almost 40 other medical practitioners, the records show.
In a statement to Mississippi Today, department of health spokesperson Liz Sharlot acknowledged the backlogs.
“We are working with the MMCP (Mississippi Medical Cannabis Program) Licensing Director and the team on how to put more efficient processes in place,” she said.
Even when the office hired new workers – growing from four to eight in recent months – little was done to train them on the law and the industry, an employee of the health department told Mississippi Today. The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions.
The health department said in October, when Mississippi Today first reported the backlogs, it was working to fill 25 more positions. That has yet to happen.
The health department worker said much of the disorganization stems from the office’s former director Kris Jones Adcock.
The Department of Health did not answer questions related to plans to increase staffing levels or what medical marijuana-related training their current staffers received.
“The people of Mississippi deserve better,” the worker said.

During one five-week period, Adcock held three jobs simultaneously within the health department: the cannabis role, the head of a domestic violence office, and a promotion to a department-wide role as assistant senior deputy.
The health department didn’t respond to questions about the effects managing three positions may have had on her ability to run the cannabis office. Adcock now holds only one department-wide role: Assistant Senior Deputy to the Senior Deputy.
Adcock announced two weeks ago that the office’s attorney, Laura Goodson, would be the acting director.
The health department employee also said Adcock set a tone of rushed processes and absentee leadership that has left the marijuana office in clean-up mode.
“There was no due diligence on some of the applications,” the worker said. “Some of it was her knee-jerk reaction to get stuff out the door after it (the backlog) built up. Instead of an orderly process, it was just rushed.”
Emails obtained by Mississippi Today show that it wasn’t just cultivators struggling to hear back. The head of a lab testing facility also expressed frustration.
“The complete lack of communication is just not feasible any longer,” Rapid Analytics director Jeff Keller wrote to Adcock on Dec. 16. “I am begging you to please just name the time on Monday and I will make it work.”
A month later, one of Keller’s employees sent his own desperate plea to the office.
“I’m trying to find out when I’ll be able to start working there,” he wrote about his job at the lab. “My background check was cleared on December 15th … I’ve left multiple messages but have not received a response.”
The CEO of test facility Steep Hill, Cliff Osbon, sent his own email on Jan. 13 on behalf of four employees who still needed their work permits so they could begin work and the lab could start testing marijuana.
Neither testing lab responded to Mississippi Today’s request for a comment.
Zack Wilson, a micro-grower in Potts Camp, said he had a worker waiting more than two weeks on a work permit.
“You send an email. Wait two weeks. Email again,” Wilson said. “You just sit and wait. I know they’re short staffed, but come on guys.”

Cultivators say unanswered questions have led to a murky-at-best understanding of how some of the regulations are being interpreted and enforced.
That’s bubbled up with the use of so-called “adapted greenhouses,” putting already competitive cultivators more at odds. The regulations call for no outdoor growing, a solid roof, permanent walls and slab foundations.
In the early days after the law was passed, Harper, the head of Como-based Pharm Grown Canna Company, said officials made it clear to industry hopefuls that greenhouses would not be approved as growing facilities. So he, like many others, invested money in renovating a large warehouse that would rely on artificial lights.
In the last few months, he’s noticed much cheaper greenhouse-style structures popping up with the health department’s approval.
Harper and others who followed the bill’s creation closely say greenhouses go against the spirit of what legislators intended.
The debate comes down to word definitions that aren’t spelled out in the law itself. If the bill doesn’t allow any “outdoor” growing, that should mean the structure can’t utilize the sun, some argue. The greenhouses have clear-plastic roofs to use a mix of sun and artificial light. If the facility needs to have a solid and secure roof, clear plastic shouldn’t be permitted, according to some interpretations.
Cultivators like Wilson don’t see it that way.
“The roof certainly isn’t made of liquid or gas,” he said. “Plastic is a solid.”
Wilson said his site plan, including the materials he was using, were all approved by the health department when he handed in his application. He was given his cultivation license in August, according to public records.
Another cultivator, Jason McDonald, is building his own greenhouse under the company name SADUJA. He received his license on Dec. 22. He said his roof is two layers of clear plastic. He has screened-in shutter windows, a cement foundation and plumbing. McDonald runs a tea farm. He’s used to meeting regulations and dealing with bureaucracy and hopes to start growing marijuana by the end of the month.
Mississippi Today also obtained documents Adcock signed off on the site plan, including a hand-drawing where the facility was labeled “greenhouse.”
“I emailed them and asked: ‘Will this greenhouse we’re planning to build meet regs?” McDonald recalled. “They came back and said: ‘you need to read the regulations’ so, I quoted the regulations and said ‘what’s the ruling on this?’ and they said ‘you need to read the regulations.’ I added the specific subsection, and then never got an answer back.”
The word greenhouse, he said, can summon something different depending on the cultivator. He, like others, agrees Mockingbird Cannabis should have been cited for its greenhouse that was under scrutiny in the fall because it had roll-up sides, not permanent walls.
Mockingbird also built a massive state-of-the-art warehouse as its main cultivation site.
“I will tell you we haven’t done anything we didn’t disclose to the Department of Health and in our application,” Mockingbird CEO Clint Patterson told Mississippi Today in October.
Harper and other warehouse operators don’t blame the small businesses for building greenhouses — they’re cheaper to construct and run, leading to significantly higher profit margins. They blame the state for approving them.
“We want them to succeed,” Harper said of greenhouse growers. “We just want them to do it in the way everybody else had to.”
The leading authors behind the bill that created the medical marijuana program could not be reached by Mississippi Today after repeated requests for comment. Rep. Lee Yancey said in the fall that it was the health department’s job to interpret the rules, and if the statutes were not clear enough, it would be addressed in the Legislature.
Sharlot, the health department spokesperson, said it did not approve a model for greenhouses and pointed to the “regulations that specify the physical requirements for a cultivation facility.”
“The MSDH met and continues to meet its statutory requirements as it did with the aggressive timelines in creating the MMCP,” she said.

On Jan. 11, Adcock brought her recommended changes to cannabis regulations before the board of health hoping for the members’ swift approval.
Public commenting regarding updates to the regulations were open for less than a week, ending the day before Christmas Eve. It got about 150 comments, Adcock told the board.
The end result was a thick stack of paper delivered to each board member fewer than two days before the meeting.
“To get 1,000 pages, less than 48 hours before our meeting, it’s almost impossible to review to know what we’re really doing,” said Jim Perry, the head of the board’s cannabis committee.
Adcock’s proposed changes covered everything from batch sizes for testing to whether a cultivation license could cover more than one growing space under a single license.
During the meeting, Perry said he wasn’t comfortable with passing changes without time to review them and ask questions. State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney apologized to the board for the ream of paper and the lack of notice. He promised it wouldn’t happen again.
“Cannabis is special and unique and needs to be heavily vetted,” Edney said at the meeting.
Adcock went over some of the regulation changes she said were the most “emergent,” but ultimately the board chose not to act.
Following the meeting, Perry told a Mississippi Today reporter the committee process was created so “we can hear from people and be able to make well-informed and not rushed decisions.”
A committee meeting about the regulations has been scheduled for Jan. 26 at 3 p.m.

With the constant flood of applicants, strapped-for-time staffers aren’t making regular site visits, according to cultivators and those with inside knowledge of the office. That means growers can get their provisional four-month licenses extended, begin growing, finish batches and have them tested and sent to market without having ever met an agent in person.
Onsite visits are required for a renewal of a license, but not for moving a provisional license to a permanent one, according to the health department. When asked about the frequency of agent visits, Sharlot emphasized that the office is remotely monitoring all cultivators with the seed-to-sale tracking program.
Meanwhile, the 163 licensed dispensaries are eying the number of patients – Sharlot said 1,732 as of Monday – who have licenses to purchase medical cannabis. They’re worried it won’t be enough to sustain a business after months paying rent without revenue.
The department of health worker who spoke to Mississippi Today said whenever they make a dent in the patient queue, it doesn’t take long to climb back over 1,000.
The health department says it has licensed a total of 73 cultivators; 12 processors; four waste disposal companies; nine transportation companies; three testing labs; 151 medical practitioners; and 975 workers with permits.
It’s a constant battle to keep up.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Pharmacy benefit manager reform likely dead
Hotly contested legislation that aimed to increase the transparency and regulation of pharmacy benefit managers appeared dead in the water Tuesday after a lawmaker challenged the bill for a rule violation.
The bill was sent back to conference after Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, raised a point of order challenging the addition of code sections to the bill, which will likely kill it.
House members in the past have chosen to turn a blind eye to the rule, which would require the added code sections to be removed when the bill is returned to conference. This fatal flaw will make it difficult to revive the legislation.
“It will almost certainly die,” said House Speaker Jason White, who authored the legislation. “And you can celebrate that with your pharmacist when you see them.”
“…This wasn’t ‘gotcha.’ Everybody in this chamber knew that code sections were added, because the attempt was to make 1123 more suitable to all the parties.”
The bill sought to protect patients and independent pharmacists, who have warned that if legislators do not pass a law this year to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, which serve as middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry, some pharmacies may be forced to close. They say that the companies’ low payments and unfair business practices have left them struggling to break even.
The bill underwent several revisions in the House and Senate before reaching its most recent form, which independent pharmacists say has watered the bill down and will not offer them adequate protection.
House Bill 1123, authored by White, originally focused on the transparency of pharmacy benefit managers. The Senate then beefed up the bill by adding provisions barring the companies from steering patients to affiliate pharmacies and prohibiting spread pricing – the practice of paying insurers more for drugs than pharmacists in order to inflate pharmacy benefit managers’ profits.
Independent pharmacists, who have flocked to the Capitol to advocate for reform this session, widely supported the Senate’s version of the bill.
The Senate incorporated several recommendations from the House into its bill, saying that they believed that the legislation would have the House’s support.
Instead, the House sent the bill to conference and requested additional changes, including new language that would eliminate self-funded insurance plans, or health plans in which employers assume the financial risk of covering employees’ health care costs themselves, from a section of the bill that prohibits pharmacy benefit managers from steering patients to specific pharmacies.
This language seeks to satisfy employers, who argue that regulating pharmacy benefit managers’ business practices will lead to higher health insurance costs.
Sen. Rita Parks, R-Corinth, who has spearheaded pharmacy benefit manager reform efforts in the Senate, previously said that adding the language to the bill would “remove any protection out of the law.” But she signed the conference report that included the language Monday after a heated conference meeting between lawmakers.
Rep. Hank Zuber, R-Ocean Springs and co-author of the bill, said the bill has something for everybody, gesturing to its concessions for employers and independent pharmacists. He said the bill gives independent pharmacists 85% of what they wanted.
Mississippi Independent Pharmacies Association director Robert Dozier was not available for comment by the time the story published.
Zuber told House members Tuesday to “blame the Senate” for the slow progress of pharmacy benefit manager reform in Mississippi, citing the body’s failure to take up a drug pricing transparency bill half a decade ago, for three years in a row.
“If the Senate had followed the leadership and the legislation that we drafted those many years ago, we would not be here,” Zuber said. “We would have the information on drug pricing, we would have the information and transparency on (pharmacy benefit managers) and we would have the ultimate reason as to why drug costs continue to rise.”
Members of the House expressed dissatisfaction with the legislation Tuesday, arguing it did not do enough to ensure lower prescription drug costs for consumers.
“I’m going to try to do something next year that goes even further,” Zuber responded.
For the past several years, lawmakers have proposed bills to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, but none have made it as far as this session.
“We’ll go another year,” said White.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Feuding GOP lawmakers prepare to leave Jackson without a budget, let governor force them back
After months of bitter Republican political infighting, the Legislature appears likely to end its session Wednesday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown if they don’t come back and adopt one by June 30.
After the House adjourned Tuesday night, Speaker Jason White said he had presented the Senate with a final offer to extend the session, which would give the two chambers more time to negotiate a budget. As for now, the 100 or so bills that make up the state budget are dead.
The Senate leadership was expected to meet and consider the offer Tuesday evening, White said. But numerous senators both Republican and Democrat said they would oppose such a parliamentary resolution, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has also said it’s unlikely and that the governor will have to force lawmakers back into special session.
White said he believes, if the Senate would agree to extend the session and restart negotiations, lawmakers could pass a budget and end the 2025 session by Sunday, only a few days later than planned.
But if the Senate chooses not to pass a resolution extending the session, White said the House would end the session on Wednesday.
It would take a two-thirds vote of support in both chambers to suspend the rules and extend the session. The Senate opposition appears to be enough to prevent that.
Still, the speaker said he believes Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Senate leaders are considering the proposal. But he said if he doesn’t hear a positive response by Wednesday, the House will adjourn and wait for Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session at a later date.
“We are open to (extending the session), but we will not stay here until Sunday waiting around to see if they might do it,” White said.
White said leaving the Capitol without a budget and punting the issue to a special session might not cool tensions between the chambers, as some lawmakers hope.
“I think when you leave here and you end up in a special session, some folks say, ‘Well everybody that’s upset will cool down by then.’ They may, or it may get worse. It may shine a different and specific light on some of the things in this budget and the differences in the House and Senate,” White said. “Whereas, I think everybody now is in the legislative mode, and we might get there.”
The Mississippi Constitution does not grant the governor much power, but if Gov. Tate Reeves calls lawmakers into a special session, he gets to set the specific legislative agenda — not lawmakers.
White said the governor could potentially use his executive authority to direct lawmakers to take up other bills, such as those related to education, before getting to the budget.
“When we leave here without a budget, it is entirely the governor’s prerogative to when he (sets a special session) and how he does that.”
While the future of the state’s budget hangs in the balance, lawmakers have spent the remaining days of their regular session trying to pass the few remaining bills that remained alive on their calendars.
House approves DEI ban, Senate could follow suit on Wednesday
The House on Tuesday passed a proposal to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs from public schools, and both chambers approved a measure to establish a form of early voting.
The House approved a conference report compromise to ban DEI programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from K-12 schools, community colleges and universities. If the Senate follows suit, Mississippi would join a number of other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump, who has made rooting DEI out of the federal government one of his top priorities.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers follows hours of heated debate in which Democrats, all almost of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. Legislative Republicans argued the legislation will elevate merit in education and remove from school settings “divisive concepts” that exacerbate divisions among different identity groups.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the act, but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law, but only after they go through an internal campus review process that would give schools time to make changes. The legislation could also withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply.
Legislature sends ‘early voting lite’ bill to governor
The Legislature also overwhelmingly passed a proposal to establish a watered down version of early voting, though the legislation is titled “in-person excused voting,” and not early voting.
The proposal establishes 22 days of in-person voting before Election Day that requires voters to go to the circuit clerk’s office or another location county officials have designated as a secure early voting facility, such as a courtroom or a board of supervisors meeting room.
To cast an early vote, someone must present a valid form of photo ID and list one of about 15 legal excuses to vote before Election Day. The excuses, however, are broad and would, in theory, allow many people to cast early ballots.
Examples of valid excuses are voters expecting to work on Election Day, being at least 65 years old, being currently enrolled in college or potentially travelling outside of their county on Election Day.
Since most eligible voters either work, go to college or are older than 65 years of age, these excuses would apply to almost everyone.
“Even though this isn’t early voting as we saw originally, it makes this more convenient for hard working Mississippians to go by their clerks’ office and vote in person after showing an ID 22 days prior to an election,” Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England said.
Republican Gov. Tate Reeves opposes early voting, so it’s unclear if he would sign the measure into law or veto it.
Both chambers are expected to gavel at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to debate the final items on their agenda.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
‘A lot of us are confused’: Lacking info, some Jacksonians go to wrong polling place
Johnny Byrd knew that when his south Jackson neighborhood Carriage Hills changed wards during redistricting last year, his neighbors would have trouble finding their correct polling place on Election Day.
So he bought a poster board and inscribed it with their new voting location – Christ Tabernacle Church.
“I made a sign and placed it in front of the entrance to our neighborhood that told them exactly where to go so there would be no confusion,” said Byrd, vice president of the Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods.
Still, on April 1, a car full of voters from a senior living facility who should have gone to Christ Tabernacle were driven to their old polling place.
“I thought it was unfortunate they had to get there and find out rather than knowing in advance that their polling location was different,” said Sen. Sollie Norwood, a Democrat from Jackson who was on the ground Tuesday helping constituents with voting.
One of those elderly women became frustrated and said she no longer wanted to vote, Norwood said, though her companions tried to convince her otherwise. By midday Tuesday, 300 people had voted at Christ Tabernacle, one of the city’s largest precincts currently in terms of registered voters, but among the lowest in turnout historically.
Voting rights advocates and candidates vying for municipal office in Jackson are keeping an eye on issues facing voters at the polls, though without official results, it remains to be seen if that will dampen turnout this election with the hotly contested Democratic primary.
“I still believed it was gonna be low,” Monica McInnis, a program manager for the nonprofit OneVoice, said of turnout. “I was expecting it would be a little higher because of what is on the ballot and how many people are running in all of the wards as well as the mayor’s race.”
The situation is evolving as the day goes on, but the main issues are twofold. One, thousands of Jackson voters have new precinct locations after redistricting last year put them into a new city council ward.
Two, some voters didn’t realize their polling place for the municipal elections may differ from where they voted in last year’s national elections, which are run by the counties.
In Mississippi, voters are assigned two precincts that are often but not always the same: A municipal location for city elections and a county location for senate, gubernatorial and presidential elections
“People in Mississippi, we go to the same polling location for three years, and that fourth year, it changes,” said Jada Barnes, an organizer with the Jackson-based nonprofit MS Votes. “A lot of us are confused. When people are going to the polling place today, they’re seeing it is closed, so they’re just going back home which is making turnout go even lower.”
Barnes said she’s hearing this primarily from a few Jackson voters who called a hotline that MS Votes is manning. Lack of awareness around polling locations is a big deterrent, she said, because most people are trying to squeeze their vote in between work, school or family responsibilities.
“Maybe you’re on your lunch break, you only got 30 minutes to go vote, you learn that your polling location has changed and now you have to go back to work,” she said.
Norwood said he heard from a group of students assigned to vote at Christ Tabernacle who had attempted to vote at the wrong precinct and were told their names weren’t on the rolls. They didn’t know they had been moved from Ward 4 to Ward 6, Norwood said, meaning they expected to vote in a different council race until reaching the polls Tuesday.
Though voters have a duty to be informed of their polling location, Barnes said city and circuit clerks and local election commissioners are ultimately responsible for making sure voters know where to go on Election Day.
Angela Harris, the Jackson municipal clerk, said her office worked to inform voters by mailing out thousands of letters to Jacksonians whose precincts changed, including the roughly 6,000 whose wards changed during the 2024 redistricting.
“I am over-swamped,” she said yesterday.
Despite her efforts, at least one voter said he never got a letter. Stephen Brown learned through Facebook, not an official notice, that he was moved from Ward 1 to Ward 2.

A resident of the Briarwood Heights neighborhood in northeast Jackson, Brown’s efforts to vote Tuesday have been complicated by mixed messages and a lack of communication. He has yet to vote, even though he showed up at the polls at 7:10 this morning.
His odyssey took him to two wrong locations, where the poll managers instructed Brown to call his ward’s election commissioner, who did not answer multiple calls, Brown said. Brown finally learned through a Facebook comment that he could look up his new precinct on the Mississippi Secretary of State’s website — if he scrolled down the page past his county precinct information.
This afternoon, Brown has a series of meetings planned, so now he’s hoping for a 30-minute window to try voting one more time, even though he’s skeptical it will make a difference.
“I’m a very disenchanted voter, because I’ve been let down so much,” he said. “I vote because it’s the thing that I’m supposed to do and because of the sacrifices of my ancestors, but not because I truly believe in it, you know?”
Brown’s not alone in facing turbulence. Back at Christ Tabernacle, one Jackson voter, who declined to give her name, said she’s frustrated from having to drive to three polling locations in one day.
“I’m dissatisfied with the fact that I had to drive from one end of this street and all of the back to come over here when I usually vote over here on Highway 18,” she said. “This was a great inconvenience, gas wise and time wise.”
The same thing happened to Rodney Miller. He called the confusion some voters are facing in this election “unnecessary.”
“That ain’t the way we should be handling business,” he said. “We should be looking out for one another better than that, you know? It’s already enough getting people out to vote, and when you confuse them when they try? Come on now. That’s discouraging.”
Christ Tabernacle is the second largest precinct in the city in terms of registered voters, with 3,330 assigned to vote there as of 2024, according to documents retrieved from the municipal election committee. But it had one of the lowest voter turnout rates – 10% in the 2021 primary election before redistricting and before it became so large.
Byrd mentioned the much higher turnout in places like Ward 1 in northeast Jackson, compared to where he lives in south Jackson. Why does Byrd think this is?
“Civics,” Byrd said. “They took civics out of school. If you ask the average person what is the role and responsibility of any elected official, they can’t tell you.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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