Joe Redner died in his sleep on October 16, 2026, at 86. The headlines led with Mons Venus, the Tampa strip club he ran for decades and sold in May 2025. For anyone who has held a Florida medical marijuana card, the more relevant piece of his record is a lawsuit he filed against the state Department of Health.
Redner was in remission from lung cancer when that started. His doctor had recommended hemp juice as part of his treatment. Florida voters had approved medical marijuana in 2016 with Amendment 2, but juicing was not one of the approved routes, and smoking was banned outright at the time. So Redner sued for the right to grow and juice his own cannabis.
The case, and how far it actually got
On April 17, 2018, a circuit judge lifted a stay in the case, which let Redner begin growing while the litigation continued. The Department of Health said it would appeal, and it did.
In April 2019 the First District Court of Appeal ruled against him. The reasoning was narrow and, for patients, blunt: "use" does not mean "grow" or "process." Redner took the fight to the Florida Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.
That is the whole of the legal outcome. He won a few months of permission and lost the principle.
What his lawsuit did not do
Redner's case did not legalize smokable flower in Florida. That came from a different lawsuit and a different branch of government: after the courts struck down the state's smoking ban, the Legislature passed SB 182 in 2019 and made flower legal for qualified patients.
He also did not create Amendment 2. Voters passed it in November 2016 with about 71% support, well before his home-grow suit was filed.
What the case did settle, for now, is the boundary the program still runs on. A card is permission to buy from a licensed dispensary, not permission to cultivate. Home grow remains illegal in Florida in 2026, and the Legislature has shown no appetite for changing that.
What patients actually have
As of October 16, the same day Redner died, the state's Office of Medical Marijuana Use counted 942,952 active qualified patients. Every one of them buys through a dispensary rather than a garden.
- State card fee: $75, renewed annually
- Physician visit: typically $150 to $400 depending on the practice
- Possession limit: 2.5 ounces of flower in a rolling 35-day period, plus separate allotments for concentrates and edibles
- Home grow: not permitted
Because the buy-only rule never moved, price competition at the counter does all the work for patients. That is the practical legacy of the fight he lost: your savings come down to which store you walk into and which discount stacks with what.
Weekly price comparisons live on our deals page, and the discount maximizer shows where a first-time, veteran, or birthday offer lands against the regular menu price.
The fight he did not see finish
The larger argument over what counts as legal cannabis is still running. A federal ban on intoxicating hemp products was pushed to December 11, which leaves Florida THCA and delta-8 shoppers a short window and a lot of open questions. We laid out the details in our breakdown of that delay.
What he left behind
Redner spent his life filing suits most people expected him to lose, and on this one he did. But the question he raised is still open in Florida: whether a constitutional right to use a medicine implies a right to produce it. Nobody has answered it since, and the patients who arrived after him inherited a program that depends entirely on the dispensary shelf.