PIERRE, S.D. — Dr. Kevin Sabet, president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), will testify today before the South Dakota Legislature’s Medical Marijuana Oversight Committee with a straightforward message: keep medical marijuana medical and prevent the program from expanding into a de facto recreational market.
Sabet will also address what federal marijuana rescheduling means for South Dakota and argue that the change puts even more responsibility on state lawmakers and regulators to set clear standards on potency, products, advertising, qualifying conditions, and enforcement.
From Dr. Sabet’s prepared remarks:
On federal rescheduling:
“I know you heard in August that it’s still under review. For the broad question, that’s right. But for medical marijuana in South Dakota, the change has already happened.”
“[R]escheduling brings no federal potency limit, no product restriction, and no advertising rule. If South Dakota doesn’t set a standard, nobody does.”
“It is not FDA approval. Nothing on a dispensary shelf in South Dakota has been reviewed by the FDA for safety, effectiveness, or dose.”
On keeping medical marijuana from becoming recreational:
“Oklahoma is the cautionary tale. Its program has no list of qualifying conditions at all; a physician’s recommendation for any reason will do. It grew into thousands of dispensaries, and the state eventually had to freeze new business licenses. South Dakota is nowhere near that. But the same forces are at work in every program, and the design choices are what hold them back.”
“Look at your own data. In August, seventy percent of South Dakota patients qualified under severe, debilitating pain, and almost fourteen percent under PTSD. That’s about eighty-four percent of the program. Cancer is about four percent. MS is about one percent. And the program grew by about a third in a single year, to nearly twenty thousand patients.”
On what South Dakota can do:
“Whatever happens in court, the federal government has now put South Dakota’s own rules in the driver’s seat. If you have to keep a medical marijuana program, patients with serious illness are best served by a program that looks like medicine: specific diagnoses, real relationships with clinicians, known doses, and honest labels.”
Sabet will recommend that South Dakota strengthen documentation for qualifying conditions, establish potency and product limits, make certifications more clinical, tighten purchase and home-grow limits, restrict advertising, and require greater public reporting from the program.
Event Information
What: South Dakota Medical Marijuana Oversight Committee
When: Tuesday, October 13, 2026, 12:00 p.m. CT
Where: South Dakota State Capitol, Pierre; Sabet will appear remotely
Live stream: South Dakota Public Broadcasting
