Opinion | Where does the buck stop at AMCC?

“The buck stops here” is an expression popularized by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who kept a sign with that saying on his desk in the Oval Office. The phrase serves as a potent reminder that the ultimate responsibility for failure—or success—lands squarely on the shoulders of an organization’s leader.

So, where does the buck stop at the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission?

The Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC) is tasked with the critical responsibility of ensuring that medical cannabis, cultivated in Alabama, reaches the patients who need it most. Their duties encompass the licensing of all operations—from growing and processing medical cannabis to transporting, testing, and dispensing the products. The AMCC also has the authority to enforce the laws and regulations governing the entire medical cannabis industry.

At the helm of day-to-day operations is the Executive Director, who serves as the Chief Administrative Officer of the Commission. Every employee within the Commission answers to the Director, and he bears the ultimate responsibility for both carrying out the Commission’s directives and ensuring the smooth enforcement of its rules.

Medical cannabis was legalized in Alabama in 2021, as a compassionate measure to alleviate suffering, yet it is now 2024, and not a single dose of the medication has been administered to those in need.

By all measures of the AMCC’s mission and responsibilities, the Commission and its Executive Director have fallen short of their mandates.

The AMCC has faced significant issues related to its licensing process, leading to multiple lawsuits and delays. The AMCC has admitted to serious errors in how applications were scored, which has been a central issue in the ongoing legal challenges.

There have been accusations and lawsuits over the AMCC’s violation of the state’s Open Meetings Act, further complicating the licensing process. They have been accused of violating the Alabama Administrative Procedures Act (AAPA) —another serious allegation. The Commission has also been accused of favoring certain applicants over others, leading to restraining orders that have halted the issuance of licenses.

In fact, the current quagmire can be directly traced to a handful of problematic actions taken by AMCC staff and directives given by AMCC attorneys at the very beginning of the licensing process, and then their subsequent refusals to accept responsibility or take appropriate actions to clean up those glaring — and in some cases, admitted — mistakes. Those fateful decisions, which ignored the guidance of the AAPA, violated Alabama laws, and opened the Commission up to ongoing lawsuits, were all sanctioned with the full knowledge of AMCC’s Executive Director. And to date, no one has accepted responsibility for those acts or moved to make substantial corrections. 

None of these are frivolous matters, as AMCC leadership and lawyers have implied, but serious issues that should have been answered with swift action. Instead, they were met with delays, denial, and cover-ups.

Outside attorneys hired by the AMCC have racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees with no end in sight. Recently, the Alabama Department of Finance has called into question these escalating payments, according to several sources. More troubling is that certain outside legal counsel has gloated that the AMCC’s troubles will carry on for years and make them a fortune.

Did the legislature and Gov. Kay Ivey pass the medical cannabis law so lawyers could get rich? Of course not. They did it to help people. But it is foolish to believe that greed and corruption wouldn’t lead some opportunists to see the benefits of continued legal entanglements for self-enrichment.

The phrase “The buck stops here” is believed to have originated from poker. According to A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, in the American Frontier era, players used a marker or counter, often a knife with a buckhorn handle, to indicate whose turn it was to deal. If a player didn’t want to deal, they could pass the responsibility to the next player by passing the “buck,” which became the term for the marker.

So, where does the buck stop at the AMCC?