On Monday, the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC) voted to ratify an agreement with plaintiffs’ attorneys to allow the AMCC to move forward with presentations from cannabis applicants as part of its new timeline to make license awards in December.
Attorney Mark Wilkerson is representing the AMCC.
Wilkerson said that after a day of court-ordered mediation, he and AMCC staff have reached a settlement with most of the plaintiffs to allow the AMCC to proceed with new license awards if the commission votes to ratify the agreement.
Two major sticking points were addressed in the recent closed-door negotiations between all the attorneys.
The first issue was the ten-megabyte limit on marijuana application size. The AMCC provided flexibility to help applicants work around the limit – but that information was not distributed, so some applicants submitted applications that were far smaller than what they would have preferred – or did not apply at all because they could not figure out how to downsize their application to ten megabytes without leaving out vital information. In the agreement, there is no limit on the application sizes, and applicants were allowed to submit material initially left out of their applications.
The second sticking point was the scoring. The independent application evaluators hired by the University of South Alabama graded the applications, assigning them a numerical score and ranking them from first to worst based on that scoring. In the settlement, commissioners cannot consider any South Alabama scores when they make their awards.
Any of the lawsuits over the scoring or the file size limit were dismissed with prejudice by the court in exchange for agreeing to those two final points.
The Commission voted unanimously to ratify the agreement, meaning that the restraining order was lifted by the court.
The Commission then began hearing presentations from applicants seeking cultivator licenses and the applicants seeking the marijuana testing laboratory license.
Chey Garrigan is the founder and President of the Alabama Cannabis Industry Association (ACIA).
“We are happy that the Commission ratified the settlement,” said Garrigan. “This was the only way that we could move forward with issuing the licenses.”
“We were pleased with all of the presentations and look forward to working with all of the licensees in the future,” Garrigan added.
The Commission willreturnk Tuesday to hear presentations from the secure transporter and processor applicants. On Wednesday, the Commission will listen to presentations from the dispensary Applicants.
The Commission is expected to meet on December 1 to make those awards.
Next week, the Commission will meet to consider applications from the thirty applicants vying for the integrated facility license. The integrator license allows a business entity to grow, process, transport, and dispense medical cannabis. The Commission can give a maximum of five integrated licenses – thirty applications for vertically integrated licenses were turned in.
The Commission will meet on December 12 to award licenses to the integrators.
AMCC Executive Director John McMillan has said he hopes that Alabamians will be able to purchase Alabama-grown medical cannabis products as early as March.
All of the awards made by the AMCC in the June and August meetings have already been rescinded as part of the negotiations to end the litigation.
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