Three companies seeking licenses from the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission filed separate lawsuits against the agency last month, alleging problems with its online portal led to their documents being rejected.
A Montgomery County circuit judge last week agreed with Med Shop Dispensary and TheraTrue Alabama, ordering the commission to consider their applications.
A similar complaint from RedBud Remedies was denied Friday afternoon by Judge James Anderson, according to online court documents.
Companies had until Dec. 30, 2022 to submit their applications for various licenses under the 2021 medical cannabis law. In their suits, all three companies said they were not told about file-size limitations in the portal the commission used to accept would-be-licensees’ applications.
Dealing with complications from the 10 megabyte upload limit caused Med Shop to nearly miss the Dec. 30 deadline.
“…Med Shop asserts that the AMCC allowed some applicants to use a placeholder workaround to avoid the 10 MB size restriction and, for those exhibits, circumvent the portal process altogether. Such an alternative process was not announced to all applicants or contained in any public notice from the AMCC.”
And TheraTrue had to significantly modify its application to meet the limit.
“As a result of the file-size limitations and new procedures, TheraTrue was required to degrade the quality of some of its application exhibits, to TheraTrue’s competitive disadvantage,” its lawsuit says.
It submitted its application within minutes of the 4 p.m. Dec. 30 deadline, but when trying to pay the application fee, the site “crashed” and the company received multiple error messages. Similarly, Med Shop in its lawsuit also said that it was not told in advance AMCC would not accept American Express for its $2,500 application fee.
Both Med Shop and TheraTrue say after the deadline they tried to rectify their applications with the commission. TheraTrue’s lawsuit said the company spent months and hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing its application.
At the end of 2022, the commission said 94 companies had applied for medical marijuana business licenses.
Late last week, the commission told Alabama Daily News it couldn’t comment on the cases because the RedBud order was still pending. Commission Director John McMillan offered that he didn’t think the Med Shop and TheraTrue decisions would impact the commission’s licensing timeline. It’s expected to award licenses in July.
“The only change at this point (is) the commission will evaluate 96 applications instead of 94,” McMillan said in a text to Alabama Daily News.
There are several different types of licenses the commission will award and regulate. The commission may award up to 12 cultivator licenses, four processor licenses, four dispensary licenses and five integrated facility licenses. The law did not specify how many secure transport and state testing laboratory licenses can be awarded.
Annual licensing fees range from $30,000 to $50,000.
By late this year, people with qualifying medical conditions should be able to purchase medical marijuana with the recommendation of a doctor. Conditions include cancer, a terminal illness, depression, epilepsy, panic disorder and chronic pain. Allowable forms of marijuana include pills, skin patches and creams but not smoking, vaping or edible products.