Haleigh’s Hope Act (HB 1, 2015) — Georgia’s First Medical Cannabis Statute

Last verified: May 2026

The Vote

On March 24, 2015, the Georgia Senate passed Haleigh’s Hope Act 48-6; on March 25, the House passed it 160-1; on April 16, 2015, Gov. Nathan Deal signed it into law. State Sen. Renee Unterman (R-Buford), then-chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, carried the bill in the Senate — though she removed fibromyalgia from the qualifying-conditions list in committee in a controversial decision at the time.

What HB 1 Actually Did

Haleigh’s Hope Act is codified at O.C.G.A. § 16-12-190 et seq. The statute does not legalize marijuana. It creates a narrow legal-immunity regime:

• A registered patient (or caregiver) may possess up to 20 fluid ounces of "low THC oil" — defined as oil containing no more than 5% THC by weight, with cannabidiol equal to or greater than the THC content.
• The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) administers a confidential Low THC Oil Patient Registry under O.C.G.A. § 31-2A-18.
• A registered patient is immune from state prosecution for possession of qualifying oil.

The Catch-22 That Lasted 8 Years

What HB 1 conspicuously did not do was authorize cultivation, manufacture, or distribution within Georgia. To get the law signed, Peake had been forced to strip in-state production at Gov. Deal’s insistence. The result was a famous Catch-22: patients could legally possess the oil, but obtaining it required either traveling to Colorado (a federal felony for transporting cannabis across state lines) or buying on the illicit market.

For nearly a decade, this is exactly what families did. Janea Cox, Haleigh’s mother, became a Georgia voice for medical cannabis even as she repeatedly broke federal law to bring oil home from Colorado. Rep. Peake later told NBC News he ran what he called an "underground" cannabis-oil network from his Macon office, accepting boxes of oil from anonymous donors and distributing them to registered families: "Quite frankly, I don’t know how the product gets here."

Iterative Expansion 2017–2018

The original list of eight qualifying conditions was expanded twice before HB 324:

• SB 16 (2017) added six conditions: autism, Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS (terminal stage), Tourette’s, peripheral neuropathy, and epidermolysis bullosa.
• HB 65 (2018) added intractable pain and PTSD — the two conditions that, by 2025, would account for more than 75% of registry citations.

By the time Peake decided not to seek re-election in February 2018, the registry had grown from a few hundred to several thousand patients, but the access problem he had warned about in 2015 remained unresolved.

The Original Eight Qualifying Conditions

HB 1’s 2015 list (later expanded to 17 by SB 16 and HB 65):

1. Cancer (end-stage; or treatment causes wasting/recalcitrant N&V).
2. ALS (severe or end-stage).
3. Seizure disorders (epilepsy or trauma-related).
4. Multiple sclerosis (severe or end-stage).
5. Crohn’s disease.
6. Mitochondrial disease.
7. Parkinson’s disease (severe or end-stage).
8. Sickle cell disease (severe or end-stage).

For the full current list, see qualifying-conditions page.

Why HB 1’s Architecture Mattered

The Haleigh’s Hope architecture — legal-immunity for narrowly defined possession, combined with no in-state production — established Georgia’s template for restrictive medical-cannabis policy. Three architectural features persist:

• The 5% THC cap with CBD≥THC requirement — lower than any other state medical-cannabis program. SB 220 (2026) would remove this if signed.
• The 20 fl oz possession ceiling — a volume-based rather than mass-based limit, calibrated to multi-month dosing for the original epilepsy/cancer/MS use cases.
• The strict product-form restriction — oils, tinctures, capsules, lozenges, topicals, transdermal patches. No flower, no vapes, no conventional edibles. SB 220 would authorize vaporization for 21+ in private settings.

Allen Peake’s Legacy

Rep. Allen Peake (R-Macon) was a CPA, restaurant-franchise CEO, and conservative Republican who would become, in his own words, the "very unlikely" legislative champion of medical cannabis in Georgia. After his 2014 bill (HB 885) collapsed on the final day of session, he refiled in November 2014 as House Bill 1 — symbolically the first bill of the new session. Peake retired from the General Assembly in 2018; his seat is now held by other Macon-area Republicans. His "underground" cannabis-oil network from 2015–2019, distributing imported Colorado product to registered Georgia families, is one of the more remarkable pieces of recent state-legislator activism in U.S. cannabis policy.

The political fix to the access gap finally came in 2019 with HB 324 / Georgia’s Hope Act. See HB 324 page.

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