Highlighting how and why the Deep South is warming up to marijuana reform

This lengthy new article, headlined "Medical marijuana laws taking root across the South," provides an effective review of marijuana reform developments in a number of southern US states. The piece merits a full read, and here are a few excerpts:

She lives in the wooden house her grandfather built more than a century ago in Chester, South Carolina, a rural community about a two-hour drive southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The cluttered home is dimly lit and not air-conditioned, with the low hum of floor fans filling in rare lulls in conversation. Two Chihuahuas, Cricket and Joe, scuttle around Ada Jones' feet as she peers down through her eyeglasses at the iPad in her hands....

If someone needs medical marijuana, they contact her over the Internet. Jones encourages those who reach out to her to purchase marijuana illegally and make their own cannabis oil. If they're unsuccessful, she puts them in contact with a supplier who can sell them a more refined product.

"It's almost like playing God," Jones said. "If somebody contacts me, I have to look at them and wonder. I wonder if that's police first, not if I can help their kid. I try not to do that, but you have to because you're scared."

Jones helps everyone she can, whether they be young mothers of epileptic children or older patients suffering from chronic pain. Her specific brand of civil disobedience, like so many other facets of Southern life, is captained by her faith. "They talk about the South being the Bible belt, and praise the Lord we are," Jones said. "I cannot not help somebody. I have to. As a Christian, that's what I'm here for."

Many Southern states have a long and failed history with medical marijuana, mired deep in forgotten statutes. Only recently, as the marijuana movement sweeps through statehouses, have those laws become political tinder for a new debate in the South....

South Carolina state Sen. Tom Davis first heard the name Mary Louise Swing in late January of last year. The opening month of the 2014 legislative session was just wrapping up, and the legislator was back from the capital city of Columbia to do some work at his law office in Beaufort, a scenic coastal city located on Port Royal Island.

Davis chatted briefly that Monday afternoon with a law partner who had just met a woman named Harriet Hilton at a local Rotary club lunch. Her granddaughter suffered from a severe form of epilepsy and was seeking a type of treatment not currently legal or particularly popular in the Palmetto State – medical marijuana. "Quite frankly, it wasn't even on my radar screen," Davis said. "It wasn't anything in terms of public policy that I thought about doing until I heard about that story."

About a week later, Hilton was sitting across from Davis in his Beaufort office, discussing her granddaughter, Mary Louise, now 7. With the help of senate staffers, Davis rifled through old statutes to clarify the current legality of marijuana in the historically conservative state. What they unearthed was an obscure, obsolete law that would come to play a greater role in 2014 than it ever did following its passage 35 years ago....

Republican Gov. Nikki Haley signed Davis' bill into law in June 2014, legalizing CBD oil for epilepsy patients in South Carolina. CBD oil is an extract with concentrated amounts of cannabidiol - the part of the cannabis plant anecdotally shown to treat seizures - and low amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC - marijuana's psychoactive component.

Though the final law allowed physicians to authorize, and patients to consume, CBD oil, it did not provide for its cultivation or dispensation. Parents, patients and advocates have grown increasingly frustrated with the current state of medical marijuana in South Carolina. A law was passed in Alabama last year to allow for limited use of CBD oil, although Alabama patients are running into the same inability to access the medicine and are also facing similar decisions about moving west....

Even today in states such as Alabama and South Carolina - where CBD oil is legal but there's no provision to grow or distribute the drug - patients are left to obtain medical marijuana on their own, often across state lines and in violation of federal law. "There is an underground network of parents who had been treating their children for a while in states where they had limited-access bills like we had," said Janel Ralph, a mother in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, whose daughter suffers from a severe seizure disorder. "It was really an underground railroad."

You could call Ada Jones one of its many conductors. "The Jesus Christ that I know wouldn't want me to let anybody suffer," Jones said. "If it's in my ability to help them, then I'm going to help them."

Perhaps her favorite patient is her best friend, Beverly Love. A 55-year-old Chester native, Love was diagnosed with lupus at 31, and soon after, multiple sclerosis. Her doctor told her she probably had a maximum of two years to live. She needed to get her affairs in order and figure out who would be raising her 8-year-old son after she was gone.

"That was a scary thing. Not mainly for me – I worried about my son, my child," Love said. "But I'm still here, surprisingly. Even my doctors are surprised that I'm still living." Before Love met Jones, she didn't know what the word cannabis meant and had never smoked marijuana. She considered those who did drug addicts. "She could run for president and you couldn't find nothing on her. The girl is squeaky clean," Jones said. "She didn't want to do this. But she didn't want to die."

Jones inundated Love with countless articles on marijuana's medical benefits and personal testimonies to its effectiveness. "She just kept on," Love remembers. "And I'm thankful that she did. I'm really thankful that she did." Love first experimented with medical cannabis about a year and a half ago, spreading some medicated jam Jones had acquired for her on a piece of bread just before bedtime. Within two hours, Love said she experienced a relief she hadn't known in years.

She does not suffer from epilepsy, the only qualifying condition eligible to possess CBD oil in South Carolina. Even if she did, the oil she takes now is whole-plant – meaning it contains naturally high levels of THC in relation to CBD. She knows she could be arrested, but for her, the risk is worth it.

"If I started getting locked up now, I would move to a state where it was legal, because it's made such a difference in my day-to-day living," Love said. "I actually have quality of life now. And I didn't."