Caroline Pettigrew has made the small town of Williamsport, Maryland, her home since moving across state lines from Pennsylvania in 2017. Located just a short drive outside of Hagerstown, the town boasts a lot of the same scenic landscapes found in the western part of the state that travelers stop to gaze upon from the highway or discover along the backroads. Caroline doesn’t take her surroundings for granted, spending as much time as she can outside during the day.
“I’m a gardener as it is. I grow a lot of wildflowers; that’s my thing,” she says. “I feel like I spend a large portion of my life now in the gardens.”
But living in a small town such as Williamsport comes with unique challenges, such as limited access to certain resources — including buying medical Cannabis. Caroline says the town shares a single dispensary with the rest of the county to serve all medical and recreational patients, with the next closest dispensaries being in or around Hagerstown.
“I make my visits count. It’s very inconvenient from where I’m located,” the 39-year-old says. “I feel like Western Maryland gets forgotten about.”
Caroline was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania, and started smoking when she was 13. She says she’s always had what felt to her like excessive worrying, but looking back, she knew it was severe anxiety and realized that Cannabis would help to calm her down.
“It was like my brain naturally knew that weed would help,” she says. She recalls one time in particular when her parents were away in Lancaster for the day, and she was anxious they would get into a car accident on the way home. But after she smoked, she says her worries about an accident disappeared.
She was prescribed numerous medications to help combat her anxiety, but they affected other parts of her body, such as her liver and kidneys.
“I’ve been on them for over 20 years. My brain stopped making dopamine and serotonin — stopped making all of that good stuff because it got so used to the pills I was taking,” she says.
While at college, she decided to stop smoking to focus on her education and says it was the worst six years of her life. When she started smoking again, however, she was able to replace three of her medications with Cannabis. Her preference, she says, is any kind of sativa-dominant strain rolled up into a blunt.
“It takes away the edge, and there’s always an edge, and Cannabis has always softened it,” she says. “There are a few medications I’ll always have, but if I had my way, I’d be off all of them and just use Cannabis.”
After moving to Maryland, she applied for her medical card and was accepted into the medical program in 2018, calling it a “dream come true” upon being accepted.
“Finally, we’re not going to get in trouble for having a plant that helps us,” she says. “I thought I’d never see that in my day.”
In addition to growing flowers, she put her green thumb to further use this year by growing Cannabis plants. Even though she’s only grown one so far this year, she intends to grow more when she has time.
“I took to this plant immediately. It was just super easy for me to care for, and it was a great experience,” she says, adding that she oiled some of the plant’s leaves with honey and made a medicated simple syrup.
While she dedicates most of her time tending to her flowers, she also utilizes the surrounding area for hiking with her dogs and regularly walks to a neighboring property to visit Mr. Rogers, a horse she describes as “a big bundle of equine love.”
“Cannabis helped me discover that authentic version of myself; it makes you reflect, and it brings people together,” she says. “I got to move to a beautiful area with mountains around it; I have a really cool husband, and I have a really beautiful life.”
When asked about the lack of accessible dispensaries nearby, Caroline says a possible solution could be to turn some of the empty shops and vacant buildings throughout the town into dispensaries; the catch would be to design them with the retro feel of a “mom-and-pop” store that complements the small-town atmosphere of a place like Williamsport.
“That would be so cute!” she ecstatically yells out as she finishes describing the idea. “A general store, but with Cannabis. That’s a money maker right there.”
