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The medical cannabis licensing process in Alabama has been reset once again.
Montgomery Circuit Court Judge James Anderson on Monday afternoon ruled invalid the use of an emergency rule which the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission utilized in order to award licenses in December 2023. With that ruling, the court also tossed out the integrated and dispensary licenses that the Commission had awarded but not yet issued, effectively starting the process over from the beginning.
It is yet another setback for the beleaguered AMCC, which has bungled its way through four years of failing to implement a process that could stand up to legal scrutiny. Monday’s ruling is the third time the licensing process – or some major portion of it – will be restarted due to the Commission’s refusal to simply award licenses in a manner consistent with Alabama’s Administrative Procedures Act, which governs such processes.
Instead, the AMCC has repeatedly sought to shape its own process, utilizing an odd and confusing array of measurements – such as subjective applicant scoring that produced incredibly inconsistent scores and over-simplified rankings that allowed a minority of commissioners to eliminate applicants – and then remolding the entire process when required by courts.
Monday’s decision was in direct response to one of those remolding efforts – the use of an “emergency rule” by the AMCC that allowed it to correct a number of deficiencies with the original scoring process while still keeping some elements in place and not starting entirely over. Several unsuccessful applicants filed complaints about that approach, claiming, among other things, that the AMCC had no right to invoke the emergency rule because there was no emergency.
Anderson agreed.
“The grounds relied on by the Commission … do not rise to the statutory standard of “an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare,” Anderson wrote in his order. “An agency’s being embroiled in ongoing litigation is simply not a legal emergency, and no authority suggests so.”
Anderson also pointed out in his order that the AMCC abandoned its emergency declaration in the middle of the meeting at which it was enacted – in order to conduct other business – and then reimplemented it. It also later imposed its own administrative stay and then failed to create rules for post-award challenges that also followed emergency standards.
The ruling follows one last month from the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals – where Monday’s ruling is almost certain to wind up – that forced the AMCC to AAPA guidelines in terms of post-award challenges for applicants that didn’t receive a license.
Given those requirements, which forces the AMCC to establish hearings at which applicants can present evidence and offer expert witnesses, and Monday’s ruling resetting the entire process, Alabama is looking at another year, at least, before the first licenses for medical marijuana are issued. That would be nearly five years since the legislature passed the bill allowing medical cannabis.
The only potential hope for reducing that time would be new legislation that cuts away many of the legal problems and opens a pathway that would be less prone to lawsuits, likely by expanding the number of licenses.
