Shannon Cloud’s daughter has been having seizures her whole life. She’s twenty years old, registered in Georgia’s medical cannabis program, and according to her mother, Senate Bill 220 — the “Putting Georgia’s Patients First Act” — represents the kind of flexibility that could finally let her doctors find a THC:CBD combination that actually works.
It’s been years in the making. And on May 12, 2026, Governor Brian Kemp signed it into law anyway — despite a group of physicians sending him a letter asking him to kill it. The claims in that letter deserve a much closer look than they’ve gotten.
“It allows more flexibility for patients and doctors to access what’s really going to work for them,” Cloud told WABE, “taking away the really tight restrictions.”
Before Kemp signed SB220, a group of physicians had sent him a letter asking him to kill it — and the claims in that letter deserve a much closer look than they’ve gotten.
The Letter, and What It Actually Says
The letter, authored by psychiatrist Dr. Karen Drexler and signed by fellow physician Dr. Elizabeth McCord, among others, makes some incredibly bold claims.
It states that SB 220 would “authorize high-risk cannabis products, such as vapes and concentrates, that have no demonstrated safety or benefit for any medical condition” and warns of increased risks of “psychosis, addiction, seizures, heart attacks, cognitive impairment, and other serious health harms.”
It also frames the bill’s possession limit—12,000 milligrams of THC—as “the equivalent of more than 1,700 marijuana joints,” a number designed to strike worry and/or fear into anyone who is on the fence about medical marijuana.
But let’s take a look at these one at a time.
“No Demonstrated Safety or Benefit” — Says Who?
The claim that vaporized cannabis has no demonstrated safety or benefit for any medical condition is not supported by peer-reviewed literature, despite being stated in a letter to a sitting governor.
A 2024 peer-reviewed paper published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research—a clinical review developed by physicians at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto—specifically examined cannabis vaporization as a medical delivery method.
Their study found that it is appropriate for patients requiring fast-acting administration, with dried cannabis vaporizers and metered-dose inhalers presenting the lowest safety risk profile.
Nobody writing this paper was side-eyeing vaporization as a delivery method. It treats it as a clinical tool that requires proper patient guidance, which is exactly what a functioning medical program with licensed dispensaries and physician oversight is designed to provide.
A meta-analysis of 15 randomized controlled trials found that patients using cannabinoids were significantly more likely to achieve meaningful pain reduction than those who didn’t.
The American College of Physicians has published best practice guidance for clinicians on cannabis use for chronic pain management. Plus, the FDA has approved inhaled medications as a delivery method for decades.
The letter’s claim that cannabis poses a heart attack risk is also worth examining directly.
A University of Colorado study analyzing nearly 1.3 million hospital records found that cannabis consumers were less likely to go into shock after a cardiac event and less likely to die from complications.
That contrasts with the risks described in the letter. . The research is far from settled, but ‘increased risk of heart attacks’ is not what the existing literature consistently shows.
News coverage of the letter did not reference any data, studies, or citations to support its claims.
1,700 Joints: A Number That Tells You More About the Argument Than the Bill
The “1,700 joints” figure is where the framing of the letter becomes clearer.
Twelve thousand milligrams sounds alarming until you understand what it represents: a possession limit, not a dose. It’s the maximum amount a registered patient can have on hand at one time, not what they’re expected to consume in a sitting, a day, or even a week or month.
The math behind “1,700 joints” assumes an average joint contains roughly seven milligrams of THC, and then presents the total as if patients are expected to smoke all of it immediately.
By that logic, a standard Costco bottle of extra-strength acetaminophen (roughly 400 tablets at 500mg each) could be framed as containing “enough Tylenol for 200,000 milligrams of acetaminophen.”
The number is technically derived from real math. It’s also incompletely measured as a safety argument.
Georgia’s program requires physician authorization. Patients are registered. Dispensaries are licensed and regulated.
The possession limit exists so patients with serious chronic conditions like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, PTSD, and intractable pain can maintain an adequate supply without making repeated trips to a dispensary.
That’s not a loophole. That’s how medical programs work.
The Playbook Is Familiar
Dr. Drexler’s primary evidence, as shared with WSB-TV, is personal: her husband’s uncle was a long-term cannabis user who developed delusions in his fifties, eventually attempting to set his house on fire. She says she’s “convinced, as a psychiatrist, that schizophrenia doesn’t start in one’s 50s, that this was cannabis-induced.”
That’s a tragedy. It’s also an anecdote being used to support broader claims about medical cannabis policy.
There is legitimate scientific literature on cannabis and psychosis risk, particularly around high-potency use in adolescents and individuals with genetic predispositions to psychotic disorders.
That research is real and worth discussing, but it’s not being ignored by any means. And the picture is considerably more nuanced than the letter suggests.
Research out of Germany suggests CBD may have therapeutic potential for schizophrenia, with some studies comparing its effects to antipsychotic medications with fewer side effects, which is relevant context, considering the letter conflates THC and CBD under a single “cannabis causes psychosis” umbrella.
The distinction matters in a clinical setting, and a well-regulated medical program is precisely where it is made.
What the letter offers instead of this nuance is sweeping declarative language— “no demonstrated safety or benefit,” “high-risk,” “serious health harms” —again, with no citations and no acknowledgment of the extensive literature pointing in the other direction.
This is not a new playbook. It’s the same one that the opposition has been using to block cannabis access for decades: alarming language, a focus on worst-case scenarios without broader context, and the rhetorical cover of “patient safety.”
Invoke psychosis. Deploy a large scary number. Avoid the peer-reviewed literature that complicates the picture. Repeat.
What Patients Are Actually Living With
Yolanda Bennett, a registered Georgia medical cannabis patient and member of the Georgia Medical Cannabis Society, testified before the Georgia House Judiciary Committee earlier this year with words that cut through all of it: “We are already sick and we’re tired.”
She was speaking to the daily reality of navigating a program so restrictive that patients routinely get stopped and questioned by law enforcement.
It’s not their fault that their legal medicine is indistinguishable by smell from illegal marijuana. Just existing as a patient in Georgia — legally, doing everything right — creates a burden that medical marijuana patients in the other 40 states with functioning medical programs never have to think about.
The Georgia Medical Cannabis Commission’s own 2026 annual report documented what patients told them about the current program: they didn’t even understand what they were being offered.
Patients said that when they heard “low THC oil” they assumed it was a lower-quality product, a hemp product, or something that wouldn’t actually help them — and they went without.
Not because the medicine didn’t exist. Because the program was built in a way that made it invisible and inaccessible to the people it was supposed to serve.
Mississippi and Louisiana — both smaller, both with their own complicated histories on cannabis — each serve approximately 50,000 registered medical patients. Georgia, with a population of 11.3 million, has 34,500.
That’s the lowest adoption rate of any medical cannabis program in the country, in a state where two-thirds of residents support legalization.
Senate sponsor Matt Brass — who is also a physician — said it plainly: “For the patients that this program is designed to serve, it’s not always worked well enough.”
That’s not an activist talking — that’s the doctor who wrote the bill.
When Kemp signed the bill, he seemed to agree — stating in his signing remarks, “I also recognize that for some patients, medical cannabis provides significant relief to symptoms that would otherwise go untreated or would be treated with even more harmful opioids.”
Protecting patients — in a state where families have faced criminal charges for treating a child’s seizures with the only thing that worked, a registered patient can’t carry her medicine without bracing for a police stop, and the state’s own commission reports patients walking away from the program because they didn’t know “low THC oil” was the real thing — that doesn’t look like a veto.
It looks like finally giving this program the tools to function like one for the first time in the almost 10 years it’s been around.
One small but important note for patients eager to access new high-potency products: the Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission has until January 1, 2027, to finalize testing and labeling regulations for the new formats.
Kemp signed SB 220 quietly on May 12th — no fanfare, no press conference, just a signature and a statement. Exactly how anyone paying attention might have predicted it would end.
The doctors’ letter didn’t stop it. The “1,700 joints” math didn’t stop it. The anecdotes dressed up as evidence didn’t stop it.
Georgia’s patients finally have a medical cannabis program that functions like one — and the clock the opposition was counting on ran out.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
