Medical marijuana could be used in SC as treatment in future pandemics under new bill
Marijuana could be used as an alternative to federally-approved medicine should a future health pandemic occur in South Carolina under a new proposal that a House panel amended Wednesday.
The House Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs subcommittee attached an amendment to H. 4567 that would allow doctors to prescribe marijuana as an alternative treatment. Lawmakers, however, ran out of time before they could advance the bill to the full committee, expected to return to the legislation next week.
House Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs is the chamber’s only committee chaired by a Democrat, and the only committee where Democrats hold the majority.
The bill would allow patients and doctors to seek out drugs outside of the Food and Drug Administration’s approved list to treat a disease declared a pandemic or endemic. For example, if the bill would have become law ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors and patients would have been authorized to treat the coronavirus with unproven treatments if they so chose, such as anti-parasitic medications ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
“I think its a good bill,” said Rep. Joe Bustos, R-Charleston, a bill co-sponsor. “I think it allows doctors to do more than only what the government prescribes.”
Bustos, the sole Republican, did not comment on the marijuana amendment, but ultimately voted to support it.
The amendment, proposed by S.C. Rep. Krystle Matthews, D-Berkeley, specifically adds medical marijuana as an alternative treatment doctors and patients could use. Matthews introduced the amendment after she expressed frustration that the committee has yet to take up a bipartisan medical marijuana bill passed by the Senate last month.
Committee Chairman Leon Howard, D-Richland, said recently he plans to take the legislation up after the House gets through the budget, sometime in April. But, unlike Matthews’ amendment, the Senate legislation is much more restrictive.
“What I think is hilarious is the fact that we use the FDA when we want to and we don’t when we don’t want to,” Matthews said, in response to opponents of legalizing medical marijuana without FDA approval but in support of trying alternative medicines for COVID-19.
The Senate passed a strict medical marijuana bill, sponsored by Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, in February after roughly seven years without debate.
Davis, who kept his bill very narrow to garner enough support for it to pass, said Wednesday that he supported “anything that gives latitude to physicians,” including Matthews’ initiative.
Davis said his medical marijuana bill and H. 4567 work to strengthen and give power to the doctor-patient relationship, which he called the “bedrock of public health.”
This story was originally published March 9, 2022 at 12:00 PM.
