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HOUMA, La. (AP) — A Louisiana man has avoided a driving while intoxicated charge by operating an electric-powered shopping cart to get from one bar to another.

A news release from the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office says 32-year-old Brice Kendell Williams is accused of taking the cart Sunday from a Walmart in Houma to a bar about half a mile (0.8 kilometers) away. Col. Terry Daigre says a deputy found the cart parked between two cars in the bar’s parking lot.

The sheriff’s office says Williams told the deputy he thought he might get charged with DWI if he drove his own vehicle from bar to bar.

Williams was arrested nevertheless, and charged with felony “unauthorized use of a movable.” It’s unclear whether he had an attorney to speak for him.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Three months after medical marijuana became available in Louisiana, doctors and clinics say some patients are finding the cost for therapeutic cannabis too high for treatment, pricing them out of a medication they waited years to obtain.

Nine pharmacies dispense medicinal-grade pot and set their individual prices. Dispensary owners say their charges reflect an industry with startup charges, small patient numbers and lengthy regulatory hurdles to meet.

In August, Louisiana became the first Deep South state — and one of more than 30 states nationwide — to dispense medical marijuana, four years after state lawmakers agreed to give patients access. Now, the state is grappling with the growing pains of a new medical market and a patient group that can’t use health insurance to cover costs.

Kathryn Thomas, CEO of The Healing Clinics, said a third of the medical marijuana patients across its five clinics in Shreveport, Monroe, Baton Rouge, Houma and Lafayette can’t foot the bill for the product.

“They can’t afford ongoing treatment,” Thomas said. “It’s becoming the program for the elite.”

The only cannabis currently available comes in a flavored liquid tincture, a bottle containing a dropper to use. One bottle can range from about $90 to $220, depending on concentration and pharmacy, according to medical marijuana advocates.

Dr. Victor Chou, who has a medical marijuana clinic in Baton Rouge with more than 600 patients, said many of his patients take a dosage of about one bottle per month and are finding relief from chronic conditions. But one-quarter of his patients, Chou said, can’t afford the medication.

“The average chronic pain patients would be spending maybe $1,000 a month at current prices for what they need,” he said.

About 3,500 people have received medical marijuana since the program began, according to the Louisiana Board of Pharmacy. Under state law, Louisiana is allowing cannabis to treat a long list of diseases and disorders, such as cancer, seizure disorders, epilepsy, glaucoma, post-traumatic stress disorder and Parkinson’s disease.

“We’re now working through the real kinks of a startup business and industry,” said Jesse McCormick, with the Louisiana Association for Therapeutic Alternatives representing the nine dispensaries. “They’re just like everybody else out here, trying to stay open and keep the lights on.”

Only the agricultural centers at Louisiana State University and Southern University are authorized to grow medical marijuana.

GB Sciences, LSU’s grower, is the only one currently providing product. John Davis, president of GB Sciences Louisiana, wouldn’t disclose its wholesale prices, but said pharmacies determine their own markups.

McCormick said the pharmacies have higher tax liabilities and banking costs than other businesses, and he said some Louisiana dispensaries built facilities and carried costs for months with no income waiting for cannabis products.

“I finally came up with our prices the night before we opened. It really was based on our expenses and what we had spent and lost, and what we needed to recover in five years,” said Doug Boudreaux, a pharmacist and co-owner of the Shreveport medical marijuana dispensary Hope Pharmacy.

Pharmacies say if they get more patients, prices will go down. They say any addition of new products also will help, such as plans to offer dissolving strips taken by mouth and topical creams.

Doctors and patients hope the addition of a second grower would drive down costs.

Southern’s grower, Ilera Holistic Healthcare, is setting up operations, with plans to have medical marijuana on pharmacy shelves next year. Ilera CEO Chanda Macias said the company will have a manufactured-suggested retail price for products and will stress customer affordability to pharmacies.

Chou’s hopeful the cost difficulties some patients are having will be addressed.

“I want to be clear: there are a lot of people who are getting a really, really good benefit out of this. I have many people who tell me they’ve been totally pain free for the first time in years,” he said.

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Follow Melinda Deslatte on Twitter at http://twitter.com/melindadeslatte

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Against the modern backdrop of oil refineries, strip malls and gated communities, hundreds of reenactors will gather Friday in southeastern Louisiana to remember a time when slavery flourished as a blight on America and some enslaved people fought back.

They plan to reenact the largest slave rebellion in American history.

Dressed in period costumes and holding machetes or rifles they will march 26 miles (42 kilometers) over two days from the sugar plantation country along the Mississippi River to the New Orleans suburbs.

“I think it will be an amazing experience,” said artist Dread Scott , who conceived of the project, and whose works address racial injustice and oppression.

“Seeing hundreds of black folk with machetes and muskets and sickles and sabers, flags flying, chanting to traditional African drumming, is going be an amazing moment. And people would be like, ‘What am I looking at? This doesn’t make sense,’” he said. “It will be an area where people can learn a lot and think a lot.”

Reenactments have long been a staple of Civil War heritage in the South, where people don Confederate and Union uniforms and stage mock battles. But this effort seeks to illustrate the struggle over slavery that came to be the heart of that war.

Scott first envisioned it about eight years ago. He’d wanted to stage a slave rebellion reenactment — maybe Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising in Virginia — but then a colleague told him about the uprising in Louisiana.

Slaves across a stretch of plantations organized for months before launching their rebellion on Jan. 8, 1811. Over two days the group grew to an estimated 200 to 500 people, according to Daniel Rasmussen’s book “American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt.”

Their goal was to march on New Orleans and establish a free republic. The rebellion was inspired in part by the Haitian revolution but conceived by people born in Louisiana and Africa, said Dr. Ibrahima Seck, the director of research at the Whitney Plantation and a historical advisor to the reenactment.

Most were field hands who toiled in hot, wet and humid conditions that contributed to their 13% yearly death rate, he said. Rasmussen writes that slaves in Louisiana’s sugar plantations faced “more brutal punishments and lives shorter lives” than elsewhere in North America.

Scott said the project sprung from his interest in how people liberate themselves and in slavery’s continuing effects on America today. He was also intrigued to learn about the little-known rebellion’s goals and how close it came to success.

“You can’t actually understand American society if you don’t understand slavery, and you can’t understand slavery if you don’t understand slave revolts,” he said.

The reenactment comes at a time of heightened racial tension in the United States, following the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. One of the most contentious episodes came in August 2017 when hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the planned removal of a Confederate statue. One person was killed when a white nationalist plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.

Bob Snead, who heads the arts group Antenna that’s producing the rebellion reenactment with Scott, said that was a key turning point. Some questioned whether the reenactment should even go on, but Snead said there was also a strong feeling that the project was more important than ever.

Organizers have taken precautions. They’ll have law enforcement and private security, and reenactors are advised not to engage with anyone along the route who might harass them.

The very public nature of the project should help, Scott said. They’ve reached out to area residents and will have lots of community involvement.

Scott emphasizes that the reenactment is a community effort, where months and years of preparation that brought people together are as much a part of the art as the event itself. They’ve held outreach events in the parishes the marchers will traverse. They’ve filed for permits, staged rehearsals and held sewing circles where people have come together to create costumes.

Part of the challenge was that there were few paintings of slaves to refer to, said Allison L. Parker who’s responsible for the costumes. She combed through pictures of runaway slaves and paintings and images of enslaved people in South America and the Caribbean for research.

For many of the African American participants, it’s important to highlight the fact that enslaved people did not accept their fate. They fought back. Julie Joseph has been coming to the sewing circles and will take part in the reenactment. She said black history in America is often overlooked or ignored.

“With this project, it’s highlighting the tenacity and the resilience that the people who were enslaved had to want to break free, to want to create their own republic,” she said. “I think that’s something that’s been really encouraging to me and something that’ll be really encouraging to a lot of other black people to know that I come from fighters.”

Karen Kaia Livers, the community outreach organizer for Antenna, said there’s a popular misconception that slaves in southern Louisiana and New Orleans were happy and that their enslavers were “good people.”

“That’s not the truth. Slavery is still slavery. And owning people and belonging to someone else is not freedom, not what America is all about,” she said.

After a climactic battle between the slaves and planters, the rebellion was crushed. Rasmussen describes how the planters chopped the heads off the slaves’ corpses — about 100 altogether — and displayed them along the road going from New Orleans into the plantation country.

But the reenactment will end with the reenactors gathering in New Orleans’ Congo Square where slaves used to gather on Sundays. Scott said he did not want to end by focusing on the brutality of white people but on the concept of black people trying to create their own republic.

“I’m choosing to focus on a vision of freedom and emancipation,” he said.

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Follow Santana on Twitter @ruskygal.