FILE – Marijuana plants display buds as they are in the flowering stage at the indoor growing facility of Mockingbird Cannabis in Raymond, Miss., Jan. 20, 2023. Supporters of legalizing medical marijuana in Kentucky achieved a breakthrough Tuesday, March 14, when their bill cleared a Senate committee with support from a key Republican leader after years of running into a roadblock. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)
Kentucky received nearly 5,000 medical cannabis licensing requests — a number far larger than expected. And it’s raising some red flags.
The first window to apply to open a cannabis-related business in Kentucky — that includes things like dispensaries, cultivators and testers — closed last weekend. The state had been reviewing the requests as they arrived in the hopes of staying on top of the application process.
But Governor Andy Beshear said a whopping 88% of the applications arrived in just the final four days, “meaning our attempts to review them as they come in and thus to decrease the volume at the end” were interrupted.
“That puts us up against deadlines. We wanted it to be lower. Turns out it’s going to be higher than anticipated,” he explained Thursday during his weekly press briefing.
The big rush of applications has some medical marijuana advocates worrying that bigger cannabis companies are trying to game the system, but officials hope background checks will weed out attempts to gain multiple licenses for operations that fall under larger parent companies.
“It’s hard to to identify yet whether it’s happened, how much it’s happened, because so many applications came in right at the end of a big flood of them,” Beshear said. “But I do believe that the system is set up to to prevent that from from happening.”
The governor said plans were already underway to more than double staff, but the massive influx has the state looking to tack put an additional 20 workers on the job.
The expectation is that the applications will be ready to undergo the lottery process for selection before they’re awarded this year — ahead of the program start date in January 2025.
H/T: www.wuky.org
