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Sitting in his home in New Orleans, Andrea Lane watched in alarm as his toes began turning a dark color. 

Fearful, he headed to the hospital. “My toes just busted open and started filling with pus,” Lane said.

Doctors amputated eight of his toes. 

That’s when Lane, who has since returned to his native Vicksburg, learned the cost of diabetes. 

One of nine children, he said his mother also had diabetes – a family history that would have put him on his doctors’ radar as being predisposed to the dangers it presented and possibly headed off the outcome.

But Lane, 52, never had a doctor. He never underwent an annual physical. He has no insurance.

Since his toes were amputated in 2019, Lane has waited to be approved for Medicaid coverage. He’s twice been turned down. Four hospitalizations ranging from five to 15 days have left him owing more than $100,000. 

And like so many other Mississippians lacking health insurance, he’s turned to a patchwork of resources to save him from further complications and an early death. He’s leaned on the Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center to get the insulin he can’t afford and the Diabetes Foundation of Mississippi to provide needles and glucose monitoring. 

The father of three, who prepared food when he worked in New Orleans and also washed cars, saw his work history cut short by a chronic condition that caught early might have prevented the loss of his toes. He lost his food preparation job when he had difficulty standing for long periods of time. 

He’s trying to save the remaining two toes on his right foot. He’s treating with betadine a sore that’s developed on the left foot where his toes were removed while dealing with the pain. “My foot like it is, I stay off of it. I use a four-legged cane,” Lane said.

He’s also now dealing with high blood pressure.

“I need wound care, but when I try to go in, the first they ask is do you have insurance,” he said.

“I need a primary care doctor,” he said.

“Diabetes can take a wrong turn. … I don’t want anybody to have to take care of me,” said Lane, who lives with a sister.

Those lacking insurance, like Lane, turn to organizations like the Diabetes Foundation of Mississippi and the Health Advocacy Center Program for help.

Both try to help those who could qualify for Medicaid to enroll or direct them to free or sliding-fee clinics if they don’t. 

The foundation serves as a conduit connecting diabetes patients to resources, like federal community health centers that can supply an older formulation of insulin at less than $25 a vial. 

“Insulin analogs are so expensive,” Irena McClain, associate director of the Diabetes Foundation, said, referring to synthetic-made insulins.

Insulin retails at $300 to $400 a vial, she said. “A lot of oral medications are running at $600 a month. That’s out of our (the foundation’s) price range” to provide, she said.

Pharmacy companies have patient assistance programs but require a doctor’s signature. 

Finding help requires knowing where to go, what to ask and education. 

“When kids with a chronic illness turn 19, they lose their Medicaid,” McClain said. “But their heart condition doesn’t go away. Their diabetes doesn’t go away.”

Roy Mitchell, executive director of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, said 64% of Mississippians suffer from chronic disease, such as diabetes, asthma and heart disease.

Those who fall into the coverage gap “don’t have a lot of options,” he said. 

And there are plenty of Mississippians who fall in that gap. More than one in five Mississippians don’t have health insurance.

“We screen people to see if they are eligible for Medicaid or if their children are eligible for Medicaid,” Mitchell said.

“There are little-known ways to gain Medicaid eligibility that we have found over the years to find people eligible for Medicaid,” he said. “We’ve had to do a lot of Medicaid outreach. We’ve done it not just with providers but also hospitals.”

If individuals don’t qualify for Medicaid, Tammy Bullock, Medicaid consumer advocate with Mississippi Health Advocacy, said she checks to see if they can sign up under the Affordable Care Act. “But a lot of these people work part-time jobs,” she said. “In rural areas, they don’t even make enough to afford the premiums.”

She said she’ll then refer them to the few free clinics in the state or sliding-fee clinics like the federal community health centers. The sliding fees are based on household size and income. But there is no consistency in how much uninsured patients have to pay out of pocket. It may be as low as $10 a visit or, in one case, as high as $65, she said.

For specialized treatment, Bullock said she’ll connect them to financial assistance programs at hospitals. If they are still working, Vocational Rehabilitation will pay for such things as cataract removal with laser surgery, hearing aids and rotator cuff surgery. But Vocational Rehabilitation rarely covers hip and knee replacement surgery because such expensive procedures drain the agency’s funds, Bullock said.

The Mississippi Health Advocacy Program’s consumer assistance program was originally funded under the Affordable Care Act to help people enroll in the Health Marketplace. When the funding expired, the Trump administration didn’t renew it. Through private funding, the consumer program continued with a different objective, Mitchell said.

“It came out of people ending up on our doorstep, people who don’t have health insurance or who are having trouble with their health insurance carrier or provider,” Mitchell said.

Like the Health Advocacy Program, the Diabetes Foundation helps people navigate the system, McClain said. “If they are on Medicaid, we get them a case worker. The durable medical equipment companies seem to change every year. We have mothers calling: ‘Who can I contact to get my child’s (insulin) pump supplies?’ ”

Even Mississippians on Medicaid are limited to what they can get, she said. “Mississippi is one of the only states that Medicaid doesn’t pay for prostheses to those who have lost a limb.”

Because there are so many Medicare providers, the foundation tries to hook patients up with the equivalent of a case manager, she said.

The foundation has helped people taken in by Medicare provider companies’ “slick commercials” that say you may not have to pay a premium or deductible, she said. “These patients may wind up in that ‘donut hole’ where they have to pay for their medical supplies.”

Under Medicare Part D, this coverage gap (donut hole) begins after the insured and his or her drug plan have spent a certain amount for covered drugs — $4,130 on covered drugs in 2021. 

There has been a revolution in diabetes management with new medications, protocols, insulin pumps and glucose monitoring devices, but none of that is available to those without insurance, McClain said.

“You can have the best technology in the world, but if you can’t get it into the hands of those who need it, what good is it?” he asked. “You’ve got to have a level playing field.”

Medicaid expansion would help do that, McClain and Mitchell said. 

McClain said Medicaid would decrease amputations, keeping people healthy and working.

“Medicaid expansion saves lives,” Mitchell said. “It just says how high the stakes are. Health insurance is life or death.”

This report was produced in partnership with the Community Foundation for Mississippi’s local news collaborative, which is independently funded in part by Microsoft Corp. The collaborative includes the Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Advocate, Jackson State University, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Mississippi Today.

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State senators plan to bundle up on Wednesday morning after they slip and slide into Jackson — Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann informed lawmakers that the heat, which was out at the Capitol on Tuesday, won’t be restored until Wednesday afternoon, “hopefully.”

“Take that into consideration when you dress for tomorrow morning,” Hosemann told senators, who gaveled in Tuesday, took up no real business, voted to relax the Senate’s dress code, then gaveled out a few minutes later with plans to return Wednesday at 10 a.m..

“We appreciate everyone’s patience while we work in the cold for the citizens, literally,” Hosemann said.

The House, meanwhile, met by Zoom online briefly Tuesday for what is certainly a first in the state’s history: Speaker of the House Philip Gunn presided over the lower chamber via video call. The House plans to reconvene Wednesday at 2 p.m.

The unprecedented winter storm that has impacted most of the state has ground work of the Mississippi Legislature to a near halt.

READ MORE: Ice reported on roads in 74 of 82 Mississippi counties as more winter weather approaches

But in terms of the legislative calendar, the winter storm came at a good time. The storm hit after legislators met the deadline of taking up bills that originated in their own chamber. If the storm had hit a week earlier, most likely multiple key pieces of legislation would have died because of the inability of many lawmakers to make it to the state Capitol to take up those bills.

Now legislators have a brief respite in their calendar.

Legislators have until March 2 to pass out of committee bills that had passed the other chamber. Before then, legislators face a key deadline of Feb. 24 to take up revenue and appropriations bills on the floor of the chamber where the bill originated.

READ MORE: Medical marijuana, transgender athletes, teacher pay: Bills to watch this legislative session

This deadline could impact several key pieces of legislation. For instance, Gov. Tate Reeves’ proposal to phase out the income tax must be taken up on the floor of one of the two chambers by Feb. 24 to remain alive.

But later this week, both the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee are expected to meet. Those are the two committees where tax bills, such as a phase out of the income tax, would originate. The Senate called a Finance Committee meeting for Wednesday.

In addition, the House and Senate Appropriations committees also are expected to meet in the coming days as work on developing a state budget intensifies to meet the Feb. 24 deadline.

But on Monday and Tuesday, there was little activity at the Capitol. The House met completely via Zoom on both Monday and Tuesday. The Senate came in both days, but disposed of motions on bills passed or killed last week on Monday and did little on Tuesday.

On Monday, Gunn, R-Clinton, presided over the House session from the House chamber. Rep. Bill Pigott, R-Tylertown, was the only other House member in the chamber making the trip from his home in southwest Mississippi in the midst of the winter storm. Other members were on Zoom. The Senate on Monday met at the Capitol, with some members having to hitch rides in or home afterward with those with four-wheel-drive vehicles.

On Tuesday, Gunn presided via Zoom, presumably from his Clinton home, in a very informal meeting. He said he would be back in the Capitol to preside when the House convenes Wednesday afternoon. Other members also are expected to be in the chamber, though participating via Zoom still will be an option.

House Ways and Means Chair Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, said he might preside over a meeting of his committee from his home in north Mississippi later this week, especially if another winter blast impacts north Mississippi as is currently forecast.

Gunn said during Monday’s session he had proposed pushing back legislative deadlines by a week to accommodate the winter storm, but Senate leadership had rejected the proposal. Earlier this session, Gunn rejected the proposal by Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, to postpone the session because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The Mississippi State Department of Health announced Monday it confirmed the first case of a COVID-19 variant in the state that is known to spread more easily and quickly than other strains. The United Kingdom first identified the strain, called B.1.1.7, last fall.

So far 40 states have also reported cases, including neighbors Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Florida has the most known cases in the United States with 379.

While U.K. experts reported last month that the variant may be associated with an increase risk of death, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said more studies are needed to confirm that finding.

“Current available vaccines are expected to be effective against variant strains, but further research continues,” MSDH said in a release, adding that the department will expand surveillance for variants. The department said it hasn’t found any spread or international travel associated with the case but is still investigating.

MSDH advised the public to continue taking the same precautions, including wearing masks, avoiding gatherings and washing hands.

The CDC is also monitoring two other variants — one traced to South Africa and one to Brazil — both of which have less than 20 known cases in the U.S. However studies over the weekend identified several other variants that apparently originated in the U.S, the New York Times reported.

The post Faster-spreading COVID-19 variant found in Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A smile can be seen behind Rep. Jim Beckett’s Ole Miss mask when he is asked if his colleagues are already coming to him to talk about the redrawing of their legislative districts.

After all, nothing is more important to most legislators than having a district in which they can be re-elected.

“A day doesn’t go by when somebody doesn’t want to share his or her opinion,” said Beckett, a Republican from Bruce. “My response is we don’t have the (Census) numbers yet. I tell them they will be given an opportunity…That is my intention to talk with the members about their districts.”

Beckett, though, stressed that he is making no promises that House members will get all they want in the process of redrawing the 122 House districts to match population shifts found by the 2020 Census.

Beckett, a small-town attorney who is in his fourth term in the House, was tabbed by Speaker Philip Gunn to head up the all-important-to-legislators task of redistricting.

On the Senate side, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann is playing his cards close to his vest. He has yet to name a chair of the Senate redistricting panel.

Hosemann said he does not want to make appointments to the redistricting committee until he sees the Census numbers to ascertain what areas of the state will be the most impacted by population changes.

The states were scheduled to receive the numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau by the end of 2020 to begin the process of redrawing the district, which must be done every 10 years to ensure the principles of “one person, one vote” or equal representation. The COVID-19 pandemic has delayed the receipt of those numbers. The Census data is now slated to be delivered to the states no earlier than July 30.

Fortunately for Mississippi, the Legislature has plenty of time to complete its redistricting process since state legislative elections will not be held until 2023. The Legislature most likely will redraw its districts in the 2022 session.

Ideally, Beckett said, the redrawing of the four U.S. congressional districts could be completed this fall during a one-day special session. For that to occur, though, the state would have to receive the population numbers and Hosemann would need to appoint a chair and members of the committee in a timely fashion.

Beckett said that would be ideal since the congressional elections will be held in 2022, and qualifying to run for those offices would begin in January.

The Census is not expected to result in Mississippi gaining or losing a member of the U.S. House. But, most likely, there will be some reconfiguring based on growth in certain areas of the state and population declines in other areas. But the end result most likely will be the maintaining of one African American majority district, concentrated on the Delta and including a large slice of the Jackson metro area.

READ MORE: How a college student exposed racial gerrymandering, prompted a lawsuit and forced Mississippi to redraw a voting district.

As far as the Mississippi Legislature, there are currently 15 majority African American districts in the 52-member Senate and 42 in the 122-member House. The state has a Black population of about 38% based on past Census data.

Rep. Ed Blackmon, D-Canton, who has been a member of the House since 1980 and played a key role in redistricting battles that led to increases in the number of African Americans in the Legislature, says under court precedent it would be difficult for the number of Black majority districts to be reduced in the redistricting effort.

But in reality, Blackmon said, the Republican majority has no intention of reducing the number of Black majority districts.

“Having Blacks packed into districts serves the purposes of the Republican majority,” he said. In Mississippi, most African Americans vote Democratic and most whites vote Republican. By “packing” African Americans in districts, it limits their influence in other districts, making it easier for Republican candidates to prevail.

In 2000, when Democrats controlled the House, there were 13 House districts drawn with significant but not dominant African American influence – a Black population of more than 35% but less than a majority. During the last redistricting, after Republicans had wrestled control, that number dropped to two districts with a Black population of more than 35% but less than a majority. In the Senate, the change was even more pronounced, going from 11 districts with a Black population of more than 35% but less than a majority in 2000 to three after the 2010 Census.

At one time, as the vestiges of Jim Crow laws designed to keep African Americans from voting were more pronounced, Blackmon said it was important to construct Black super majority districts. But with African Americans now more likely to exercise their right to vote, Blackmon said the pronounced “packing” can be used to limit the influence of Black voters.

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Although the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education declared public school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, schools in Yalobusha County’s two major towns clung to it for an additional 16 years. 

Water Valley and Coffeeville, nestled in the state’s northern hilly region on land that was once inhabited by the Choctaw and Chickasaw indigenous people, didn’t integrate until 1970.

Community activism and another U.S. Supreme Court case in 1969 forced schools in Yalobusha County and the South as a whole to finally desegregate.

The court ruled in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education that schools had to desegregate “immediately,” instead of the previous ruling of “with all deliberate speed” in Brown v. Board in 1954. By Feb. 1, 1970, schools across the state of Mississippi and in Yalobusha County finally integrated after over a decade of willful delay.

Today, 51 years since school desegregation, former teachers and students who witnessed and participated in the school integration movement still vividly remember the experience of attending all-Black schools for their entire lives until that changed in 1970.

Dorothy Kee, 75, was born and raised in Coffeeville and graduated from the then-segregated, all-Black Coffeeville High School in 1956. Kee’s father was president of the local NAACP chapter; she said she remembers seeing him lead school desegregation efforts in the community.

“My dad was a believer in civil rights to its fullest and to its fairest,” Kee said in a 2019 oral history interview. “So he became one of the leaders of the NAACP.”

Kee had already graduated from Alcorn State University in Lorman with a degree in social work and had begun her career as a teacher in Yalobusha County when she joined her father and other activists in the community who were pushing for school desegregation.

“I was secretary. I never participated in the marches because at the time I was pregnant with my daughter,” Kee said. “But I played (as) many roles within the community as possible, such as keeping records of what happened and things like that. I had already finished college when the most effective fight for rights was started. As a matter of fact, I almost lost my job because of my daddy’s participation.”

Kee taught school in Oakland and Coffeeville during the early years of school integration in Yalobusha County, but leading up to integration in 1970, she remembers a local boycott in the community to pressure the school board to desegregate the schools. She said the event was organized with guidance from Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, vanguard civil rights activist, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and mentor and friend to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“(They) became kind of worried about the situation of discrimination in Coffeeville, and one of the goals that they wanted to meet was to see (our) children or faculty members with the same treatment as white citizens. There was a lot of discrimination, and this lead to people that had the nerves and the mind to try to change things in Coffeeville,” Kee said.

But the transition to having white children and Black children in the same schools for the first time in history wasn’t an easy one — for Black children or for Black teachers in Yalobusha County.

“So when I went over to Oakland, the (white) students thought maybe I came from Africa or anywhere else. They didn’t know me,” Kee said.

Emma Gooch grew up in a big family in Water Valley. She was the third of 12 children born to their mother, a homemaker, and father, a World War II veteran. Gooch, now 68, attended the all-Black Davidson Elementary School and Davidson High School. She graduated in 1970 and was part of the final class of students to graduate from segregated schools in Water Valley.

As a child, Gooch’s family sharecropped, picking cotton, corn and sorghum for wealthy white plantation owners to survive and make ends meet. Like many other Black children who were raised in the South under Jim Crow segregation, Gooch’s primary education revolved around, and often came second to, sharecropping.

“I was a pretty good student. I had very strict teachers. I remember them all, how they trained us and kept us in check. And we had to go to school every day,” Gooch said in a 2019 oral history interview. “And then in the harvest season, we were released from school at noon so that we could go work in the fields…We worked in the field until the harvest was done, and then we would start going back to full day school times in late December up until school was out in May.”

Gooch began sharecropping with her family at about 5-years-old, and it wasn’t until her family moved on their own land in Water Valley when she was about 10-years-old when she and her siblings did not have to leave school to sharecrop during the harvest season.

Today, Gooch and her family live on the same property her family bought years ago.

Still, what stands out most to her when she thinks of her years in school is not the sharecropping, but the experience of attending school with a close-knit, caring community of teachers and students at Davidson High School.

“It was amazing. We had some of the strongest teachers. They were so involved in us…They knew our parents, and they could whip our butts if we did wrong,” Gooch said with a laugh.

She still has copies of all of her report cards from grade school, which she keeps in an album with a collection of family photos and documents for her memory and to share with her children and grandchildren.

When Gooch graduated high school in 1970, she moved to the Midwest to attend a clerical training school. When she came back home to Water Valley in hopes of getting an office job, the only available employment was at the denim factory. She worked there for a few months before enlisting in the United States Army, where she remained active duty for decades while raising two sons. Gooch retired in Water Valley where she still lives today and enjoys spending time with her two grandsons, who attend Water Valley schools.

Today, there are two primary public school districts in Yalobusha County — the Water Valley School District and the Coffeeville School District.

WVSD serves a student population of about 1,000. Today 52% of the student body is white and 43% is African American, according to 2020-2021 data from the Mississippi Department of Education. The Coffeeville School District serves a total of 460 students, 80% of them African American.

Gooch said these days she focuses on taking care of herself, her family and her grandchildren and that “life is different here than it was when I grew up here.”

“Not only were we segregated in school, we were segregated in life, in town and stuff. Now, Black people live all over this town in all of the different neighborhoods and everything, and that was a big change,” Gooch said “But when I was growing up, that didn’t happen.”

Editor’s note: A full archive of photos and additional oral history interviews, like the ones mentioned in this article, are available online in The Black Families of Yalobusha County Oral History Project Archive, which emerged after Dottie Chapman Reed, Water Valley native, and author of the column “Outstanding Black Women of Yalobusha County” in the North Mississippi Herald, and Jessica Wilkerson, a former history and Southern Studies professor at the University of Mississippi, collaborated. In the spring 2020, Dr. B. Brian Foster, a sociology and Southern Studies professor at the University of Mississippi, took over as director of the project and will collaborate with UM students and Reed on its expansion in the next phase of the project known as the Mississippi Hill Country Oral History Collective.

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This was just three games ago for Ole Miss basketball: The Rebels were 8-8 overall, a disappointing 3-6 in the Southeastern Conference. They were coming off double-digit losses to Arkansas and Georgia. They were playing decent defense, but the offense seemed terribly out of sync. Three-point shot attempts clanged away like so many unanswered prayers.

Actually, prayers get answered more often than Ole Miss shots went in the basket. In those losses to Arkansas and Georgia, the Rebels were a combined 3 for 29 from 3-point land. That’s right: 3 for 29. You have much better odds than that in carney games at the fair.

Kermit Davis Jr.’s team was dangerously close to the playing-out-the-season stage. Ole Miss’s NET ranking, a prime component of what it takes to qualify for the postseason, was No. 69 in the nation, far from what earns consideration for an NCAA Tournament bid.

Now then, let’s look at what has happened in those last three games over a span of just eight days: Ole Miss knocked off 10th ranked Tennessee 52-50 on a Tuesday night in Oxford. Then, the Rebels went on the road to defeat Auburn 86-84 in overtime. And then they returned home to crush 10th ranked Missouri 80-59 Wednesday night.

Who were these guys?

The gang that couldn’t shoot straight suddenly did. The same team that shot 3 for 29 from behind the arc in two games a couple weeks ago, hit 8 for 20 against Missouri. The team that had records of 8-8 and 3-6 is now 11-8 and 6-6. That NET ranking has risen from 69th to 56th.

The Rebels are far from in the tournament. Indeed, they are not yet even on the proverbial tournament bubble. But they are definitely in the conversation for being on the bubble if that makes sense. And they are playing by far their best basketball.

What has happened? As you might suspect, it’s far more than the basketball just started going in the basket. As often happens in this crazy sport, the outside shooting game started to click when the Rebels started looking inside first. Specifically, the Rebels looked inside to Romello White, the transfer from Arizona State, who scored 14 in the low-scoring win over Tennessee, and then 30 in the high-scoring win over Auburn.

“Romello is just playing better, posting better, and we’re doing a better job of throwing it to him,” Davis said.

As the opposition sags back to defend White, the Rebels get better looks from the outside. Better looks produce more makes.

But it’s not just White. The Rebels, across the board, are playing better, especially the guards. Off-guard Jarkel Joiner has found his range, which is more mid-range than from behind the arc. And Devontae Shuler, the point guard, is playing like an All-Conference first teamer. He scored 15 against Tennessee, 26 more against Auburn, and 15 more against Missouri. And, says Davis, Shuler is playing much better defensively and making plays without the ball in his hands.

Here’s what some fans may miss with all this offensive improvement. Better defensive play has been the catalyst. So much of the Rebels’ point production comes as a direct result of the defense, particularly the complicated 1-3-1 zone that has been Davis’s bread and butter as a coach. The trapping defense, which often evolves into a 2-3 but sometimes a man-to-man, produces turnovers in bunchs. Opponents have a difficult time preparing for it because they rarely see it, and it’s hard to duplicate in practice. It is almost like preparing for the wishbone in football in that you almost never see it and you can’t replicate it in preparing for a game.

But the Ole Miss resurgence is more than all that. As Davis puts it, “We were never that far away. We were up nine at Florida and didn’t close them out. We were up seven against Wichita State and didn’t get it done. We win those two games – which we should have – where would we be now? I think people would be talking about us probably being in the tournament.”

As it is, the Rebels are still dangerously close to being out. A winning record in the SEC is a must and the Rebels are at .500 now. They play at South Carolina Saturday. The Gamecocks, a team hammered by COVID-19 this season, have played only 13 games and are 5-8 overall and 3-6 in the league.

They are also dangerous, as evident in a 3-point loss to No. 11 Alabama Tuesday night.

After South Carolina, the Rebels have home games left with Mississippi State and Kentucky and road games with Vanderbilt and Missouri.

All are winnable if the Rebels play as well as they have in the last three games. All are lose-able if they revert.

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After failing to gain the needed three-fifths vote in a first try Thursday night, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann held the Senate over into Friday morning and it passed a legislative alternative to the medical marijuana program voters approved in November.

Senate Bill 2765, authored by Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, passed 30-19 on Friday morning at about 1:15 a.m. The bill had failed a Thursday night vote, 30-21, needing 31 to pass. The lesser number for passage was needed in the wee hours Friday because some senators were absent, lowering the three-fifths threshold.

Sens. Jennifer Branning, R-Philadelphia, and Tammy Witherspoon, D-Magnolia — both of whom voted against the measure the first time — were absent for the second vote. Sen. Lydia Chassaniol, R-Winona, who voted for the bill the first time, was absent the second vote. Sen. Benjamin Suber, R-Bruce, had been absent for the first vote but voted for the bill on the second vote.

The measure now heads to the House, where it faces an uncertain future. Senators included a “reverse repealer” in the measure, meaning the House could not pass it on to the governor without more debate in the Senate.

The measure would take effect only if the courts strike down the voter-passed Initiative 65 medical marijuana program, which is now in the state constitution but faces a challenge in the state Supreme Court. “Trigger language” was added to the Senate bill in an amendment on Thursday. Originally the measure, if passed, would have created its own program regardless of whether Initiative 65 was there or not.

READ MORE: Mississippi’s medical marijuana mess

The bill would tax medical marijuana, with a 4% excise at cultivation, and with a sales tax patients would pay. In an effort to gain more support, the original 10% sales tax was amended to 7% on Thursday night. Most of the taxes collected would go to education, including early learning and college scholarships.

The bill also would levy large licensing fees on growers and dispensary shop owners. Originally, those fees would have been $100,000 for growers and $20,000 for dispensaries. Those were reduced to $15,000 and $5,000, respectively, on Thursday night. Other changes were made in an effort to assuage those who believed such fees would keep small businesses and farms out of the game.

The measure faced bipartisan opposition, despite the numerous last-minute concessions to reduce its taxes on marijuana and to ensure it wouldn’t thwart the Initiative 65 medical marijuana program that voters passed into the state constitution in a landslide in November.

“The bill in front of you does not replace Initiative 65,” Blackwell told senators before the first vote. “It has trigger language, where in case Initiative 65 is struck down by the courts, it will be enacted. Seventy-four percent of our population approved Initiative 65, whether you like it or not … This bill only goes into effect if the courts strike down 65.”

But Senate Bill 2765 began as something of an end-run around Initiative 65, and until amended in a last ditch effort to gain enough votes, it would have “co-existed” with Initiative 65, or potentially replaced it depending on courts and the industry. Many supporters of the original grassroots voter marijuana initiative decried the legislative attempt to create a “parallel program” as dirty pool.

After years of inaction by the Legislature despite growing grassroots, bipartisan support, voters took the matter in hand in November and approved Initiative 65. It’s a constitutional amendment mandating and specifying a state medical marijuana program. It puts the state Health Department in charge, even though the department and its board say it is ill equipped for the task. It prevents standard taxation of the marijuana, and any fees collected by the Health Department can only be used to run and expand the marijuana program, not go into state taxpayer coffers. Initiative 65 allows little regulation or zoning by local governments and no limits on the number of dispensaries.

The Initiative 65 constitutional amendment also now faces litigation, set to be heard in April by the Mississippi Supreme Court. Madison Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler brought the challenge, arguing the state’s initiative process is flawed and the measure was improperly before voters. Other lawmakers and political observers have opined that Initiative 65 could face other legal challenges — and could be tied up in courts for years.

Some proponents of the Senate legislation passed Friday morning have pitched it as a backstop — a way to stand up a medical marijuana program in Mississippi, even if the state Supreme Court overturns the voter-approved constitutional amendment or it faces years of further legal challenges. Others said it could serve as a better program for taxpayers and local communities even if Initiative 65 is upheld.

The bill’s supporters reasoned that since many state leaders are opposed to Initiative 65, including the agency tasked with running it, and litigation is pending, the Legislature-passed program would provide more stability for the industry. They surmise growers and dispensaries would opt for the Legislature-approved plan.

The Senate plan would have the Department of Agriculture and Department of Revenue regulating the program, not the Health Department.

The Senate stayed in recess much of the deadline day on Thursday, in part because the leadership was trying to whip votes and come up with changes to the medical marijuana proposal to garner the three-fifths majority needed for passage.

Some key issues that led to the bill’s defeat in the first attempt on Thursday:

• Democrats, and in particular the Black Caucus, were angered over the Wednesday passage of a Senate bill to more easily purge voter rolls in Mississippi and were not feeling very amenable on the marijuana push.

• Some Republicans were concerned the marijuana proposal had anti-competitive measures that would favor large corporations and prevent small Mississippi growers and businesses from getting in the market.

• Other Republicans did not want to vote on a marijuana proposal, period — one reason the Legislature hadn’t been able to come up with a program before voters took things in hand in November with Initiative 65.

• With Initiative 65 passing by a landslide in November, and many advocates accusing the Legislature of trying an end-run around the voter approved constitutional amendment, some lawmakers didn’t want to be seen as usurping a grassroots initiative.

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