Restaurant Row Cannabis Guide: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

The Grand Strand pulls in roughly 20 million visitors a year across sixty miles of coastline, and a large share of them come from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Maryland - every one of those states with a functioning legal cannabis market at home. They arrive expecting some version of that here. What exists instead is South Carolina law, unchanged, with no dispensary anywhere and no medical card to apply for.

Horry County is one of the busiest enforcement jurisdictions in the state during high season, and Myrtle Beach Police work Ocean Boulevard with heavy summer staffing. Possession cases here overwhelmingly involve visitors: a rental-house call, a boardwalk contact, a stop on Kings Highway with an out-of-state plate. The receipt from a Pennsylvania dispensary is not a defense, and more than an ounce turns simple possession into a presumption of intent to distribute. Bond court in Conway on a Monday morning is not how anyone plans to end a beach week.

The legal product is hemp, and the Strand sells a lot of it. Ocean Boulevard and the Kings Highway corridor carry smoke shops, beach shops and convenience stores stocking gummies, disposables and THC seltzers, with more in Broadway at the Beach and Market Common retail and across the grocery coolers from Surfside up to North Myrtle Beach. This is one of the highest-volume hemp retail concentrations in South Carolina. All of it runs into the federal container cap landing in December 2026, and for a shop on the boulevard, being findable in a search made from a hotel room is how it reaches a customer who has never walked past the door.

South Carolina sits in a small group of states with no medical cannabis law of any kind. There is no patient registry, no qualifying-conditions list, no license category for a dispensary, and no agency assigned to regulate marijuana, because the plant is still a Schedule I controlled substance under Title 44, Chapter 53 of the state code. Carrying an ounce or less is a misdemeanor: up to 30 days in jail or a fine of $100 to $200 on a first conviction, and up to a year on a second. Anything over an ounce triggers a statutory presumption of intent to distribute, which is where the felony exposure starts.

The Compassionate Care Act, S.53, filed by Sen. Tom Davis of Beaufort in December 2024, would have created a pharmacist-dispensed medical program with no smokable flower and no home cultivation. It cleared the Senate, as earlier versions did in 2022 and 2025, and then sat in the House until the General Assembly adjourned on May 7, 2026 without a floor vote. Gov. Henry McMaster has publicly called the case for medical cannabis compelling. It is still not law.

What South Carolinians actually buy is hemp. The 2019 Hemp Farming Act put cultivation and processing under the Department of Agriculture and adopted the federal 0.3 percent delta-9 threshold, and the consumable side grew into a roughly $60 million retail category with no state rules attached to it. Lawmakers spent all of 2026 trying to fix that. A Senate compromise in March would have capped gummies and drinks at 10mg per serving and restricted sales to adults 21 and older; a House version, H.4759, proposed 5mg per 12-ounce can under an alcohol-style permit. The conference report on H.3924 died on a 28-69 House vote on June 25, 2026. Nothing passed, so nothing changed.

Two enforcement realities sit on top of that. Attorney General Alan Wilson has held since an October 2021 advisory opinion that delta-8 and other converted isomers are not protected by the Hemp Farming Act, and SLED operates on that reading; Operation Ganjapreneur seized about 15 tons of product in December 2025. And federally, Section 781 of the 2026 appropriations law redefines hemp by total THC and caps finished consumable products at 0.4mg per container. A stopgap signed September 2, 2026 pushed most of that to December 11, 2026.

No marijuana brand operates legally in South Carolina, so the honest list is hemp only. Palmetto Harmony, based in Conway, grows, extracts and bottles in state and was the first vertically integrated hemp CBD company to get USDA organic certification on flower and viable seed - the closest thing South Carolina has to a homegrown label. In beverages, Crescent Canna's Crescent 9 seltzer is stocked at The Fresh Market locations across the state, and Wynk ships its low-dose delta-9 cans direct to South Carolina addresses. Beyond those two, judge a can by its label rather than its reputation. Beyond those, judge by paperwork rather than logo: a current certificate of analysis from an independent lab, batch number matching the package, and total THC listed rather than delta-9 only.

Two clocks are running. The first is legislative: S.53 died at adjournment on May 7, 2026, and the 2027 session restarts the process from scratch, with Sen. Davis expected to refile. The second is federal: Section 781 of H.R. 5371 redefines hemp by total THC and caps finished consumables at 0.4mg per container, and after the September 2, 2026 stopgap most of it lands December 11, 2026, with lab-made cannabinoids losing hemp status a month earlier. South Carolina never passed its own hemp rules, so it will absorb the federal version by default. Retailers should expect shelf-clearing, not a grace period.