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Laws don’t matter anymore.
The crooks have figured out the game. If you put on a suit and get elected to office, pretty much anything is fair game. You can ignore procedure and process – and even have an unelected billionaire holding billions in government contracts upend all of government – and just change any law you don’t like.
It’s happening at the federal level as we speak.
On Tuesday, a bill was filed in the Alabama Legislature that would make it happen here too.
SB72, sponsored by Sens. Tim Melson, Greg Albritton and David Sessions, all Republicans, would make a number of alterations to the process by which licenses for integrated medical cannabis facilities are awarded. Most notably, it would remove the requirement for an investigatory hearing for any challenges made by an applicant denied a license.
That’s probably a bit obscure, particularly if you haven’t been pushing aside the weeds in the long running dispute over Alabama’s medical cannabis licensing process. So, let me briefly explain.
What’s holding up that process is the fact that the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission failed to follow Alabama law when awarding licenses. Specifically, the AMCC did not follow the regulations of the Alabama Administrative Procedures Act, which requires an investigatory hearing whenever a qualified applicant challenges the denial of a state-issued license.
Put in layman’s terms, that means that when the state of Alabama offers up a limited number of licenses to do something, and there are more qualified applicants than available licenses issued, any qualified applicant that doesn’t receive a license can challenge the decision, forcing the state agency that awarded the license and the applicant receiving the license to prove why it was more deserving.
This process is important for a couple of reasons. First, it creates a record to support the agency’s decision; and second, it guards against corruption, self-dealing and nepotism. If you have to prove why you handed out that license, you probably aren’t going to give it out to an entity your brother-in-law owns.
Well, the AMCC didn’t follow that requirement when handing out medical cannabis licenses.
On three separate occasions, the Commission attempted to award licenses without following this procedure. All three times companies that didn’t receive a license challenged the decisions made by the AMCC, and contested the fact that there is no reasonable process to challenge the AMCC’s decisions. (There were also other problems, such as fairly clear violations of the state’s Open Meetings Act. But those issues likely would have been solved had there been an investigatory hearing process.)
There is no question that the AMCC failed to do this. And that it is still refusing to do it – probably because it can’t possibly justify some of the decisions it made, which clearly ignore the plain language requirements of the medical cannabis act.
This is why we’re still in court. It’s why there is still no medical cannabis available to patients.
Now, in a sane, rational world, the solution to this problem appears to be rather simple: Follow the law.
Go back, work the process as required under the Alabama Administrative Procedures Act, award the licenses, hold the hearings, be done with it.
But this is Alabama. And in Alabama, as our Republican leadership likes to remind us, we come up with Alabama solutions to Alabama problems.
The Alabama solution: We’ll just change the law.
That’s literally what SB72 does – it removes the requirement for the hearing.
So don’t worry about explaining why you awarded that license. Don’t worry about explaining why you didn’t really follow the requirements of the medical cannabis act. Don’t worry about having to prove – using laws, facts, regulations and data – why a decision was made.
Oh, but this is not for all agencies. Just this one specific agency doesn’t have to follow the law.
And don’t go running to court, either. Because that’ll be a waste of time, since SB72 also states that no state court will have the power to intervene in the process.
The bill literally states: “… the courts of this state shall be powerless and without jurisdiction to issue to an unsuccessful license applicant an injunction, writ, order, or any other form of relief that would have the effect of preventing the commission from issuing a license or invalidating a license previously awarded by the commission.”
Startling language, no?
Fellas, this is not the way. I get we’re all frustrated over the long delay in awarding licenses and getting medical marijuana to patients, but this ain’t the way to solve it. This is rewarding bad actors. This is ignoring processes and regulations put in place to instill public confidence and root out corruption.
And it’s even crazier when you consider that there’s a perfectly reasonable and obvious solution just sitting right in front of everyone.
Follow. The. Law.
