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A lawsuit that already has a Montgomery courtroom filled to the brim with attorneys added yet more parties Tuesday, but the presiding judge blocked an advocate for patients from joining.
Amanda Taylor, executive director of the Patients Coalition for Medical Cannabis Alabama, attempted to join the suit in order to give patients a “seat at the table.”
Montgomery Circuit Judge James Anderson said he sympathizes with the patients who need access to medical cannabis, but said that doesn’t establish standing for this lawsuit between license applicants and the AMCC. He also questioned whether Taylor had attempted to join the lawsuit for “attention and to raise money” after seeing an interview she gave on WSFA.
“We have all these lawyers that are keeping everything held back and it’s not fair to the patients because they are sick, they are suffering, and they are dying,” Taylor said after the hearing.
Denying Taylor’s motion was the only substantial action taken during the course of the hearing, but Anderson is considering revising his temporary restraining orders stalling the process after hearing two hours of argument from attorneys.
Several applicants and the AMCC want the court to allow the AMCC to proceed with “investigative hearings” for the licensees.
But not all parties want Anderson to lift that portion of the order. Will Somerville, counsel for Alabama Always, said he expects to file for summary judgment and that allowing the investigative hearings to proceed would allow a flawed process to continue.
“The process is clearly flawed,” Somerville said. “And there has to be a way to move the whole process forward to make sure that the licenses that are issued, when they are issued, are legal and enforceable and that there can’t be any challenge to them. Because right now we’ve got a situation where they keep issuing licenses and keep doing so in violation of the law and it’s just got the whole process mired in mud.”
The lawsuit is preventing the awarding of licenses to integrated facilities, which can oversee the production and distribution of medical cannabis from seed to sale, as well as dispensary-only applicants.
There was some discussion once again of resolving the dispensary licenses so that treatment could get to patients. Dispensaries are currently the only missing chain in the pipeline—attorneys representing cultivators said they are stuck spending hundreds of thousands of dollars cultivating the cannabis to comply with their license, but have no way to dispense the issue.
Anderson did not decide Tuesday whether those cultivators could be part of the case, noting that they are less interested in a particular outcome and are more interested in simply reaching some outcome.
Alabama Always’ latest filing calls for a special master to take over the licensing process, although Anderson previously indicated he does not believe a special master is not the right solution in this suit.
Numerous attorneys left the courtroom Tuesday with murmurs that they thought at points that Anderson was going to modify the TRO. But despite no action being taken yet on that, Somerville said he thought the hearing represented a shift from months of jurisdictional arguments to a focus on the procedures themselves.
