_Pam Griner never planned to move back from Los Angeles to rural South Georgia, but when her older brother became disabled in 2018, home called her back. Then in her fifties, she definitely didn’t think her California career in the marijuana industry would continue in Georgia or imagine that her tiny hometown of Glennville could become a hub for the state’s legal medical cannabis production. But five years later, on a cool day at the end of November, Griner and seven other growers, men and women, could be found in the greenhouses of Botanical Sciences, the first state-licensed cannabis production company founded in Georgia, tending to the leafy young plants of the latest crop. She and her colleagues were among the first people in the state to legally cultivate marijuana—after years of controversy, Botanical Sciences finally planted their first crops in Georgia in early 2023. Outside, past multiple layers of security, the sun shone mildly on the fields surrounding the growing and extraction facilities and glinted on a large pond. During her lunch break each day, Griner drove home to check on her brother.

Growing anything has its risks and challenges—a plant, a business, a family, a community. Georgia’s legal cannabis industry is perhaps in its seedling stage and has already faced substantial threats, from an acrimonious licensing process to the building-supply shortages of the pandemic to the revelation last fall that the Georgia Department of Public Health had dramatically overcounted the number of registered medical marijuana patients and caregivers (rather than about 50,000, the number was closer to 14,000). Among the last states, even in the Southeast, to legalize medical marijuana production, Georgia has some of the most restrictive laws around the drug. Medical cannabis is only approved in the state to treat a narrow list of severe conditions, including seizure disorders, multiple sclerosis, late-stage cancer, and PTSD. As of this writing, only cannabis oil with no more than five percent THC may be used, and only oil—in capsules, creams, lozenges, or tinctures. Smokable and edible products are prohibited. In compliance with Georgia law, security around Botanical Sciences’ facilities is “like Fort Knox,” said founder Robin Fowler when I visited last July.

Georgia has two Democratic senators, but its state legislature is firmly controlled by Republicans, who are joining several other states in providing something that might once have seemed a contradiction in terms—a politically conservative approach to legal cannabis. Mark Niesse, a government reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who has been covering Georgia’s changing cannabis laws for nearly a decade, said, “Since 2015, because Republicans are in the majority, by necessity it’s been Republicans who have had to take the lead on this legalization effort, even though they are the political party that is less comfortable with expanded marijuana or cannabis use.” Niesse notes that several Republican legislators advocated strongly for constituents with medical conditions benefiting from therapeutic use of cannabis oil, especially children with seizure disorders. While many representatives and their constituents vocally opposed recreational use and expressed fears about a “slippery slope,” a strict focus on medical use came to unite much of the statehouse in supporting legal cannabis. Caution continued to be abundant; after low-THC medical cannabis oil was approved, Georgia lawmakers then took a few more years to agree on regulations for sales and distribution, creating frustration among patients who were now authorized to use the drug but not to buy it.

Outside of this context, Glennville, Georgia, population 5,049, might seem like an unlikely home for marijuana production, especially when compared to longer-established growing regions in California and Colorado, where recreational or “adult” use has now been legal for several years and cannabis tourism draws visitors from all over the country, or even when compared with the numerous Georgia cities that have decriminalized marijuana possession, including Savannah, which is sixty-some miles to Glennville’s east. Many Glennville residents belong to churches that discourage alcohol use, and Tattnall County remained officially dry until 2022. In fact, in another first, around the time Botanical Sciences began production in 2023, Glennville got its first liquor store in more than half a century, Liquor Depot (closed on Sundays). The town still does not have a single bar.

But marijuana legalization is becoming a bipartisan issue nationally, as more people understand the relief cannabis can provide to patients and see benefits of the industry in their own communities. The drug’s meaning is changing even in areas where it was once taboo. Some form of cannabis is now legal for medical use in most of the U.S.; twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have approved adult use. In turn, towns like Glennville are changing the face of cannabis production as it expands even into the Bible Belt.

_When Robin Fowler, an Atlanta-based pain-management doctor, began searching for a location for his newly founded company in 2020, community leaders enthusiastically advocated for Tattnall County, Glennville’s home. After low-THC cannabis oil was legalized for patients in 2015, Georgia’s legislature did not form a commission to award production licenses until 2019. Fowler purchased vacant land in Glennville that had been designated for an industrial park that never materialized. He also bought the town’s former elementary school, pleasing many. Municipal buildings in small cities are not always easy to sell.

For a town that some residents find resistant to change, there was surprisingly little outcry from citizens. “Hey, if we were giving away pecan pies out there, someone would have a problem with it,” said Wayne Dasher, chair of the Tattnall County Development Authority, gesturing toward the downtown street beyond his office. But he said that people seemed largely receptive, respecting the medical focus of the company and recognizing the economic opportunity it represented. Tattnall, like many South Georgia counties, has a comparatively low per capita income and a comparatively high number of residents living below the poverty line.

Despite its economic challenges, Glennville still has much to offer. During the same week that I spoke with Griner, Dasher, and others, workers gave downtown’s crape myrtles their winter haircuts and set up a huge Christmas tree in front of the outdoor stage across from the newspaper’s office in preparation for a holiday fair that would culminate in a parade of glitzed-out golf carts and lawn tractors. The town is graced with a surprising number of beautiful murals depicting its history, created by a local artist known as Johnny Paintbrush. In the summer, visitors pour in to attend the annual Glennville Sweet Onion Festival, honoring the county’s biggest crop. Agriculture is the region’s lifeblood, with pecans, peanuts, tobacco, sweet potatoes, and watermelons among its many other staples.

“It’s a quaint little town,” said Griner. “Everyone is so sweet here. Everyone knows everyone else. Sometimes they get in each other’s business, but that’s their way of showing that they care.”

The town’s first cannabis company did generate curiosity, and perhaps a bit of initial wariness as newcomers began arriving. When Reid Stone first moved to Glennville from Atlanta in 2021 to help Fowler launch the company, people christened him “the Weed Guy.” “Hey, you’re the Weed Guy,” they’d greet him when he walked down the street. Fowler, a practicing MD who completed an anesthesiology residency and a fellowship in pain medicine at Emory University and founded a group of pain management clinics and surgery centers, was “the Weed Doctor.” No one was overtly hostile, but Botanical Sciences was rather more exotic than the town’s lawn mower blade factory or the poultry plant. Part of Stone’s mission was to educate the community about the company’s purpose and reassure them that he wasn’t there “handing out gummies to the thirteen-year-old kid on the corner.” He says that he went into at least forty businesses on foot to introduce himself and the company.

Stone and Fowler did not fit any stoner stereotypes anyone might have held. Favoring business casual attire and short hair rather than ponytails or tie-dye and talking at length about multiple sclerosis patients helped by cannabis and the drug’s success in reducing opioid dependence, they became regular fixtures at the Rotary Club’s Wednesday lunches at the Garden Club. Botanical Sciences sponsored a charity golf tournament and became Platinum Level sponsors of the onion fest, where Stone endeared himself by entering a turtle in the annual turtle race, usually dominated by children. (He wants to clarify that his turtle came in dead last.) “Naturally, you always have some people concerned,” local reporter Pam Waters told me, “but the owners dispelled that right here in the community.” Now a staff reporter for the Tattnall Journal-Sentinel, Waters has been covering Glennville for more than forty years.

Building Botanical Sciences’ facilities meant millions of dollars spent in the area, says Development Authority chair Wayne Dasher, one of the first advocates of bringing the company to Glennville. Before a single plant could be grown, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, and other tradespeople set to work on the site. Building materials were purchased through a company in a nearby town. Between these immediate opportunities and the prospect of up to one hundred fifty well-paying jobs when production ramped up, townspeople were ready to root for the new company.

_In the first years after Glennville’s new cannabis-growing denizens arrived, some things worked out according to plan and others did not. A frenzy of litigation began soon after Georgia’s Access to Medical Marijuana Commission announced the first awards in 2021, with Class I licenses for larger producers going to Botanical Sciences and a company called Trulieve and four Class II licenses for companies that were allowed a smaller growing capacity. (Trulieve, a multistate company founded in Florida, located its Georgia facilities in the South Georgia town of Adel.) Unsuccessful bidders argued that the commission’s decision to let applicants redact so many details from public view made it impossible to assess the awards’ fairness. The controversy dragged on for more than a year before the state finalized its regulations for production and distribution in January 2023, clearing the way for sales, though the Class II licenses remained in limbo until they were finally approved in November.

By autumn, Botanical Sciences had opened four dispensaries in Georgia. Construction held up by pandemic shortages was finally complete. Registered patients could finally legally obtain their low-THC oil. Botanical Sciences CEO Gary Long told me that with the adoption curve of a new industry, growth may initially be slow but that the company had seen month-over-month improvement.

When Fowler bought Glennville’s old elementary school, he’d envisioned a site for offices and for temporary living quarters for contract workers or newly relocated employees. But when completed, the company’s new facilities offered plenty of workspace in proximity to all the physical processes of cultivating cannabis and processing it for the market and the living areas were only occasionally needed, so the old school again stood mostly empty. Apart from an older Glennville man working as a part-time security guard and handyman, Reid Stone worked alone in the school, headquartered in the principal’s office. If he needed to get to another part of the sprawling building, he zipped down the cavernous, echoing hallways on a scooter, his ever-present canine companion, Bo, trotting alongside.

Bo—named for Botanical Sciences—is a handsome, all-black German shepherd, just under two years old when I met him, with an eager grin and a passion for people. Originally acquired as a guard dog for the production facilities, Bo was among the things that didn’t work out. He was afflicted with terrible separation anxiety. This didn’t let up, so he was allowed to go home to live with Stone.

Bo became part of a sizable menagerie accumulating on the land adjoining the production facility, as Botanical Sciences’ personnel began to settle in Glennville. Out there, Fowler has been building a cabin and cleaning up the land to create a working farm. (Fowler splits his time between Glennville and Atlanta.) During the pandemic, while they shared a rental house next to Fowler’s land, he and Stone marked off and began hand-clearing trails. Fowler acquired honeybees, horses, goats, chickens, and pigs. The fields have been planted with corn, wheat, sunflowers, peanuts, and oats. Three alligators also moved in uninvited, Stone recounted, showing me around the farm. One gator was picked up by the Department of Natural Resources after it waddled up to a nearby home whose residents feared for their young grandchildren. The goats multiplied at an almost alarming pace. Two donkeys were added, to protect the other animals from coyotes. Since the other two gators mysteriously left, turtles have been proliferating.

Walking on the quiet trails and offering treats to the goats and donkeys brought Reid Stone joy, but even more important have been the human connections developing in the place he now calls home. Stone had not specifically planned to trade his life in Atlanta for one in a rural town of five thousand people, but as a divorced father of two children who attend out-of-state colleges, the timing worked out. He has made new friends through Glennville’s civic groups, and on Wednesday nights, he began opening the school gym for anyone in town to play basketball. At six P.M. on this last Wednesday in November, young men started trickling in after work and changing into workout clothes. Bo eagerly bounded up and down the sidelines, occasionally pausing to give sloppy kisses to people seated along the walls texting or stretching. Although many of the players were closer to his kids’ age, Stone joined in too. Between Wednesday games, he and the others would exchange joking trash talk on a group text.

“I love those guys,” he said. At first he had been apprehensive, but “these have been two of the happiest years of my life.”

_During my autumn visit, the precious plants that mobilized all these changes were residing in greenhouses, though the vast facility has both indoor and outdoor growing spaces. Cultivators carefully monitor their growth, light levels, and hydration, vigilant for any signs of under- or overfeeding, leaf burn, or disease. Because they are growing a medical-grade crop, they are strictly limited in the use of fertilizers or pesticides. Seeds are planted cyclically to generate a perpetual harvest. If Georgia’s medical cannabis industry expands as many hope, Botanical Sciences stands ready—they currently use only a fraction of their 100,000 square feet of growing space, which would be enough to serve 350,000 patients.

In some cultures and contexts, marijuana has long been considered a sacred plant. Here in this Glennville greenhouse, the people growing it also spoke reverently of the delicate jade-green plants that surrounded them. Experienced growers and extractors from Colorado got the operation started, but once it was underway the company began hiring cultivators who had not previously grown marijuana. One woman worked for several years in plant nurseries that grew trees and shrubs for landscapes; another had long experience with onions, tobacco, and other more traditional South Georgia crops.

Pam Griner discovered her calling for growing cannabis later in life, when her son graduated from Florida State University and announced that he and his friends were moving to California to get into the business. Wanting to see him safe, Griner joined them. After a few years, her son moved on to other work, but Griner had fallen in love.

For five years, her life revolved around the marijuana crops she grew in her rental home south of Bakersfield. The plants (“the girls,” she calls them in California parlance) took pride of place in the three bedrooms, while she and her two dogs slept in the living room. After a full day of work as an administrative or accounting assistant, she would come home and the grow lights would turn on. She woke up a few times a night with alarms to water the plants on schedule. She learned everything she could; she spoke and sang to her girls and they thrived. She sold her harvests in sacks to medical dispensaries.

Though her activities were lawful under California statute, Griner knew that a single woman living alone with ten thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana plants faced risks. “I told people I was working for an older gentleman,” she said. She made sure to buy supplies and sell her product in other towns. Since banking remains difficult for people in the cannabis industry, she secreted cash throughout the house—behind paintings, inside stuffed animals, and throughout the collection of hats she displayed on one wall. If her landlord, who had a key, were to help himself to her money or plants, she knew she would have little recourse.

By 2016, Griner’s business had dried up, as the California market largely shifted from medical to recreational with legalized adult use. She saw that she would have to branch out into packaging and marketing and spend large sums to try to compete with others. So she gave up her grow rooms and became a live-in maid and cook for a wealthy family in Malibu, where she would be closer to her son. When she moved back to Glennville, her cannabis dreams seemed to recede even farther into the past.

When Botanical Sciences began hiring locally, Griner was thrilled at the chance to once again do her dream job, since she lives on family land that she will not jeopardize by illegally growing cannabis on her own. Among the things she appreciated about Botanical Sciences was that half the cultivators on her team were female. After observing how male-dominated the cannabis industry is, Griner takes every opportunity to encourage women to get involved. She even notices that some of the plants that tend to do best are female. “Maybe it’s a girl-girl thing, that we connect with each other,” she joked. More seriously, she said, “Women are natural nurturers. We are born to do things like this. We take care of children, plants, and animals, with love.” She hopes to one day see more women leading cannabis companies. Griner is sixty now, but she would like to continue in the marijuana industry for the rest of her working life.

While showing me around the greenhouse, Chase Bradshaw, senior vice president of manufacturing and operations, said that he estimated that about half of Botanical Sciences’ workforce was over fifty. “You don’t have to have a horticulture or botany degree” to work with cannabis, he explained. After Bradshaw and his wife moved from Denver to Glennville, his parents and adult sister joined them there.

In addition to offering opportunities to older workers, Botanical Sciences also gave Glennville hope of retaining more of its younger residents, a struggle for most small towns. Greg Griffin, a twenty-year-old Glennville native who had recently been promoted to lead cultivator, represents one such success story. Griffin took college prep classes in high school but didn’t know what career he wanted to pursue, so after graduation he got a job installing water pumps and sprinklers for a local business. When Botanical Sciences hired him in December 2022, he immediately became fascinated by the cultivation process. Outside of work, Griffin read articles and forums and watched videos to learn more, impressing Bradshaw with his hard work and dedication. Griffin told me he loves his job and hopes to continue working for the company. “Everyone seems to have good morals and a good head on their shoulders,” Griffin said of his coworkers. It was hard for him to name a favorite task, because he enjoys everything, but he does find it especially satisfying to repot plants as they outgrow their containers. Harvesting, in contrast, can be bittersweet, since “you’re seeing all your hard work cut down.”

“This has been nothing but a blessing,” Griffin said.

_No story about drugs in America can be uniformly uplifting. In addition to agriculture and the Rotary Corporation, one of Glennville’s biggest employers has been Smith State Prison, among the most troubled correctional facilities in Georgia. Smith’s inmates make up almost a quarter of Glennville’s official population. Chronically understaffed and rife with violence and corruption, the close-security prison has been the site of numerous murders, of both inmates and guards—most recently last fall, when an inmate killed a correctional officer who was escorting two others from the dining hall. The county’s three ambulances are at times tied up there simultaneously, with emergency medical flights regularly needed. Inmates have even arranged for murders beyond the walls, as in the case of a hit job gone bad, in which the assassin went to the wrong house in Glennville and executed an eighty-eight-year-old man named Bobby Kicklighter who had no connection to the prison. The investigation of Kicklighter’s murder eventually implicated the prison’s warden in a massive contraband and drug-smuggling scheme. Minimum-security Rogers State Prison in nearby Reidsville has also experienced increased violence. Contraband remains an issue at both facilities, with people throwing packages over the walls surrounding the prison and even attempting deliveries with drones. Tattnall County Development Authority chair Wayne Dasher recently resigned after almost twenty years on the Georgia Corrections Board and calls the state’s prison system “a nightmare.”

Every year, thousands of people are committed to Georgia’s prisons for drug crimes, including marijuana offenses. The travails of Smith State Prison are representative of problems present throughout Georgia’s carceral facilities, as numerous investigations have uncovered. Criminal justice reform has been a major goal of marijuana legalization advocates in the state and elsewhere, especially as pervasive racial disparities have been documented in enforcing drug laws. In 2022, Democrats in the U.S. Senate introduced the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, which would not only decriminalize marijuana but also include “the expungement of certain federal cannabis offenses.” “By failing to act,” its sponsors argued, “the federal government is empowering the illicit cannabis market, it’s ruining lives and propping up deeply rooted racism in our criminal justice system, it’s holding back small cannabis businesses from growing and creating jobs in their communities. Cannabis legalization is here, and Congress needs to get with the program.” The bill did not receive a vote, leaving states to continue approving and carefully regulating businesses that remain illegal under federal law, even when serving registered patients and caregivers.

Unless or until federal cannabis policy changes, even producers who scrupulously follow their states’ laws encounter steep obstacles. Georgia had been set to become the first state to allow medical cannabis to be dispensed by independent pharmacies, which would provide access for patients living far from dispensaries, an innovation that made national headlines. The state’s licensing board currently limits producers to opening only five dispensaries each. Botanical Sciences representatives had been traveling all over the state to meet with doctors and pharmacies and by late November had agreements with more than one hundred and forty pharmacies. Reid Stone says that he put thirty-two thousand miles on his car in only ten months while pursuing that initiative. Then, days after Thanksgiving, the DEA sent letters to Georgia pharmacies warning, “Neither marijuana nor THC can lawfully be possessed, handled, or dispensed by any DEA-registered pharmacy.”

In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had recommended that marijuana be reclassified as a Schedule III substance, which would legalize its medical use. MJBizDaily, an industry publication, wrote on November 7 that the DEA was evaluating the HHS recommendation but that legal experts they interviewed saw a rule change as inevitable. In this context, the DEA warning to Georgia pharmacies was especially surprising. Reluctant to jeopardize their practices before more guidance becomes available, most pharmacies chose to delay moving forward with the program, a setback for Botanical Sciences and patients.

By March, several of the employees I’d met in July and November no longer worked for the company. A fifth Botanical Sciences dispensary, planned for Augusta, has been delayed. Reid Stone, who also departed the company, says that multiple staff members had been let go. Pam Griner was dismissed in late December. CEO Gary Long declined to answer my questions about layoffs or firings, but he says that Botanical Sciences continues to work with pharmacy operators as the market continues to evolve, and SVP Chase Bradshaw told me that production remains on track. The company has promoted medical card drives at its dispensaries and other locations.

_Meanwhile, cannabis continues to be widely used in Georgia and elsewhere, whether purchased at a dispensary or through illicit transaction. In rural Pierce County, south of Tattnall, the Georgia Department of Agriculture recently investigated what they believed to be a fish farm and instead discovered an indoor marijuana growing operation with an estimated $22.3 million worth of plants. The drug raid in late February was one of the largest in Georgia history. Kevin Caldwell, Southeast legislative manager for the Marijuana Policy Project advocacy organization, estimates that Georgia’s underground cannabis market could be as much as a $2 billion annual industry. The drug has been decriminalized in most of the state’s major cities and can be regularly seen and smelled at concerts, on beaches, and in other public venues. Caldwell believes that the limited number of legal places to obtain medical cannabis likely also pushes even eligible patients to the illicit market. Due to Georgia’s strict limitations on delivery method and THC count, the Marijuana Policy Project does not recognize the state as having an “effective comprehensive medical cannabis program” (a status shared by Texas and Iowa).

Legally growing marijuana in Georgia, with the open support of mayors, sheriffs, legislators, and faith communities, is a very new development. But it might be hard to find many locales in America, urban or rural, where the drug has not long been present. This is true even in Glennville. Though Tattnall County was officially dry, Pam Griner, as a girl in the seventies and early eighties, remembers seeing stills in the woods and adults having gallon jugs of moonshine around that looked like water. On Sundays, a man would sell beer out of his truck to people he knew. Marijuana circulated freely among teenagers in Glennville as it did elsewhere, she says, but “it was very secretive. Very hush-hush. No one talked about it. You cleaned up; you never smelled it.”

Although Botanical Sciences was ultimately embraced by the town, she still felt self-conscious running errands after work and made sure to keep her employee badge on. “I apologize, I brought work smells with me,” she told people.

As it turned out, most of them found her apology unnecessary. Since her employer came to Glennville, cannabis growing had come to connote many more things than vice—compassion for medical patients, investment in the town’s future, and valued new neighbors.

Whatever Botanical Sciences’ future may hold, Glennville has additional reasons to feel hopeful, as multiple new industries developing in Georgia find fertile ground in the area, with its comparatively low costs and eager potential workers. A Hyundai electric vehicle plant is under construction in nearby Bryan County, which is expected to employ around eight thousand people. In 2018, Georgia’s film industry even brought Will Smith, Ang Lee, and other Hollywood luminaries to Glennville to film several scenes for the action thriller Gemini Man. The historic downtown received a few more murals from the film’s production crew, including one that appeared to give Glennville a pool and billiards lounge. Only one building was constructed from scratch for the set—a liquor store.

Zuber Malek, a local entrepreneur who includes the Dairy Queen, Captain D’s Seafood, Marco’s Pizza, and Anytime Fitness franchises in Glennville among his many businesses, said in November that he was glad that Botanical Sciences saw the same promise he did when his family moved to Glennville in 2006. “They took a chance. They took a big risk and spent millions of dollars,” he told me, “and they are already creating higher-paying jobs.” He believes this kind of initiative is what will keep Glennville vital for the next hundred years. CHASE YOUR DREAMS, reads the mural on the side of his gym in commemoration of his emigration from India.

In April, Pam Griner will return to California for a few weeks to chase her own dream, helping a friend cultivate, harvest, and bring to market their cannabis crop. She will stock the house in Glennville with food for her brother, and friends and family members will look in on him. She says that in some ways it’s more enjoyable to grow in California, where people will be able to smoke the plants she so lovingly tends, rather than “squeezing the life out of them” to extract oil. She has maintained a side job as a virtual personal assistant for several years, so she was able to weather losing her cultivating job without undue hardship.

Whether or not cannabis has the mystical properties some attribute to it, Georgia’s early experiments with legalizing it have already changed lives. One of those is Reid Stone’s. Now the CEO of a telemedicine company that helps patients learn if they qualify for a medical cannabis card in Georgia, Stone has decided to stay in Glennville and put down roots. He says that he hopes Botanical Sciences will be a big success yet. And if they are, many caring hands in the town will have contributed to their flourishing.