If the governor of Mississippi moves to veto a medical marijuana bill over his concerns about the proposed purchase limit for patients, the legislature may well move to override that decision, a key state senator said on Wednesday. Gov. Tate Reeves (R) said on Tuesday that he wants lawmakers to slash the daily purchase limit for patients in half. The bill that lawmakers spent the summer negotiating calls for 3.5 gram of marijuana per day, and the governor signaled he’d veto the entire reform proposal if they don’t significantly reduce that amount. But Sen. Brice Wiggins (R), chairman of the Judiciary Committee Division A who is also running for a seat in Congress this year, says the people of Mississippi spoke loud and clear when they voted to approve a medical cannabis legalization initiative last year, and lawmakers have a duty to deliver on the reform after the state Supreme Court invalidated it for procedural reasons. He told Y’all Politics that “it wouldn’t surprise me” if the legislature voted to override the governor if he chooses to veto the bill that they’ve been working on for months. “I would hate for Governor Reeves to have any veto overridden because, like I said, I’ve worked with him on many different things,” Wiggins said. “But the reality is is that Initiative 65 passed with close to 70 percent of the vote. And the legislature spent all summer working on this and have listened to the people.” “I understand where he’s coming from, but in the hearings that we had in the Public Health Committee, we heard from legislators from Oklahoma, Michigan, Colorado—and now I have not been a drafter on this bill, obviously, but I trust the committee chairmen that are doing this,” he said. “It would not surprise me that that would be the case if that was to happen,” he said, referring to the possibility of a veto override. Lawmakers have already made several concessions to the governor as they’ve continued negotiations on legislation to replace the voter-approved ballot measure, and advocates hoped everything would be resolved in time for Reeves to convene a special session to pass it this year, as he suggested he’d do. But as the goal post continued to be pushed back, it became clear that legislators would need to tackle the reform in the 2022 session.
Kyle Jaeger, Marijuana Moment, 12/29/2021 13:11:00