© 2024 KASU
Your Connection to Music, News, Arts and Views for 65 Years
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Marijuana Cultivation Licenses A Big Surprise For Winners, Commissioners Alike

Arkansas's Alcoholic Beverage Control Division chief Mary Robin Casteel (at bottom) will join Arkansas Medical Marijuana Commissioners Dr. Carlos Roman, James Miller, Dr. Ronda Henry-Tillman, Stephen Carroll and Travis Story tomorrow.
Bobby Ampezzan
/
ARKANSAS PUBLIC MEDIA
Arkansas's Alcoholic Beverage Control Division chief Mary Robin Casteel (at bottom) will join Arkansas Medical Marijuana Commissioners Dr. Carlos Roman, James Miller, Dr. Ronda Henry-Tillman, Stephen Carroll and Travis Story tomorrow.

When the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division of the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration announces its five highest scoring applicants to own and operate a marijuana cultivation facility for the state's germinating medical marijuana industry, it will be a surprise to the Medical Marijuana Commission who scored the 95 applicants.

"These 95 applications were scored individually by each commissioner. They were then brought back to the Alcoholic Beverage Control office [and] turned in individually; so at this point the commissioners are also going to learn along with everyone else those top five scores," Scott Hardin, spokesman for the department, said Monday.

The announcement will be made at the commission's regular meeting at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday. The division is overseeing administration of the drug rollout much as it does alcohol sales licensing; the Arkansas Department of Health is overseeing patient registration and, ultimately, some drug quality aspects.

The state has has the 95 applications, some totaling over a thousand pages after appendices, since a September deadline. Each commissioner took all 95 applications and scored them according to a rubric they voted on over many meetings.

 

Hardin said the state is already the subject of a couple of lawsuits over the selection process, and he "absolutely" predicts more after Tuesday's announcement.

Regardless, beginning tomorrow the division and the commission will turn its attention to the 227 who applied to retail medical marijuana (some of which also applied to grow it). 

"I think you’re probably looking at, just from the sheer amount of applications, 200-plus that are obviously large applications — it’s going to take a couple months. This is just speculating, but I think you’ll probably see the commission discussing probably a late-April/May announcement of dispensary licenses. Somewhere in that timeframe, and barring anything slowing us down legally or otherwise, we’re on track to have hopefully everything up and running by summer 2018," Hardin said.

Each application to grow was accompanied by a check for $15,000. Those that don’t get picked get half of that back, but those that do have to subsequently submit another $100,000 to cover the licensing fee, and post a $500,000 performance bond, within seven days of official notification.

To date, the state has approved over 4,000 medical marijuana identification cards for patients. Hardin says the state anticipates a total ten-times greater — 40,000 registered patients — when the program’s fully up and running.

This story is produced by Arkansas Public Media. What's that? APM is a nonprofit journalism project for all of Arkansas and a collaboration among public media in the state. We're funded in part through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with the support of partner stations KUAR,  KUAF,  KASU and KTXK. And, we hope, from you! You can learn more and support Arkansas Public Media's reporting at  arkansaspublicmedia.org . Arkansas Public Media is Natural State news with context.

 

Copyright 2020 Arkansas Public Media. To see more, visit Arkansas Public Media.

Bobby Ampezzan is a native of Detroit who holds degrees from Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA) and the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville). He's written for The Guardian newspaper and Oxford American magazine and was a longtime staff writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The best dimestore nugget he's lately discovered comes from James Altucher's Choose Yourself (actually, the Times' profile on Altucher, which quotes the book): "I lose at least 20 percent of my intelligence when I am resentful." Meanwhile, his faith in public radio and television stems from the unifying philosophy that not everything be serious, but curiosity should follow every thing, and that we be serious about curiosity.