Alabama’s Top Medical Marijuana Official Is ‘Very Hopeful’ Patients Could Finally Get Legal Access By The End Of 2025

*“I think the commission and the staff are more encouraged than we have
been any time in the past to date.”*

*By Alander Rocha, Alabama Reflector*

From the outside, it appears to be another one of over 1,500 farms in
Cullman County, with a couple of facilities and a structure that will
eventually serve as a greenhouse. The front office looks—and smells—like
any other office space, with their current hemp-derived products on display
and a couple of private offices behind a conference table.

But when Joey Robertson, CEO and president of Wagon Trail Med-Serv and a
managing partner at Wagon Trail Hemp Farms, opens a door behind the front
office, an herbal and skunky smell blows out, strong enough to leave one’s
senses feeling overwhelmed.

That’s where Robertson produces hemp-derived products like gummies, which
he has been doing since 2019.

“It’s been essentially the exact fall-in-line with what we’re going to be
doing on medical, minus some infrastructure improvements and a bigger
fence, so we’re already ready to roll,” Robertson said during a tour of his
facility last month.

The Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission awarded Robertson an integrated
facility license in 2023, meaning he can grow, process and sell products
under one license. But Alabama’s medical cannabis program, approved by the
Legislature in 2021, remains stalled, meaning Robertson has
multimillion-dollar machinery sitting idly.

“We’ve been able to carry or offset most of our losses, though, with hemp,”
he said. “So it’s made it to where hemp was hard to thrive, I guess you
would say, because we’re turning so much back into keeping that [medical
cannabis] license opportunity open.”.

After over two years of legal wrangling over the licensing process—and over
four years after the Alabama Legislature first approved the medical
cannabis program—state officials and cannabis producers like Robertson
think they’re moving closer to making cannabis available for patients
throughout the state, thanks in part to recent state appellate court
rulings.

“I think the commission and the staff are more encouraged than we have been
any time in the past to date,” said Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission
(AMCC) Director John McMillan, saying he is “kind of coming around to being
very hopeful” that medical cannabis could be available to Alabamians by the
end of 2025, though he stressed that is a best case scenario.

But there are still many obstacles ahead, including ongoing legal battles
and strong opinions regarding the program’s structure and fairness.

Marty Schelper, founder and president of the Alabama Cannabis Coalition and
Alabama Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition, said she was skeptical
about the entire program, saying potential patients may turn to a
potentially cheaper black market even when the program has been rolled out.

Schelper, who called the medical cannabis framework a “legal medical
cannabis cartel,” said she believes that the current system is designed to
control and regulate the industry by limiting competition, allowing license
holders to “set their price on whatever your product is, because you have
none of the competition.”

“They created the Alabama medical cannabis cartel, and they’re not allowed
free markets, and that’s why they can’t implement medical cannabis in the
state of Alabama,” Schelper said.

But others are sounding optimistic. Ray French, CEO for Specialty Medical
Products of Alabama, a company that won a license in each of the attempted
rounds, said that integrated operators who can grow, process and sell the
final product, like his own business, will be able to start operating
within “a few weeks, once the commission completes their process,” as they
are already operational and possess the necessary equipment and
certifications.

*A stalled program*

The Alabama medical cannabis law, enacted in 2021, allows registered
physicians to recommend cannabis for specific qualifying conditions. The
approved product forms are restricted to tablets, tinctures, patches, oils,
and gummies (only peach flavor), with raw plant material and smokable forms
remaining prohibited.

When the program is fully operational, there will be up to 37 dispensaries
across the state. After the licensees have operated dispensaries for at
least a year, the commission may allow licensees to open additional
dispensaries.

Robertson said they plan to operate dispensaries in Cullman, Decatur,
Florence, Athens and Montgomery, though he said that dispensary locations
are subject to change. He said that some cities have a higher concentration
of planned dispensaries compared to more rural parts of the state.

“So working with the commission, if they allow for us change and really
cover more of the state, which I feel like they will, people get more
coverage in medicine,” Robertson said.

But the licensing process, which began in 2023, has been contentious. The
commission’s first round of license awards in June of that year was
withdrawn amid controversy over the scoring of applications. A second round
of awards later that year was put on hold because of allegations that the
AMCC violated the Open Meetings Act. The commission awarded licenses at the
end of 2023, but those have been caught up in litigation.

The AMCC has already issued licenses in several categories, but integrated
facility and dispensary licenses, which are required before doctors can be
certified and allowed to recommend products to patients, have been on hold
due to the ongoing litigation.

But the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals in May overturned a permanent
injunction imposed by Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge James Anderson
in April that blocked the last round of licensing because it was awarded
under emergency rules.

The month prior, the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals overturned a temporary
restraining order that prevented the commission from issuing licenses due
to allegedly not complying with the Administrative Procedure Act, saying
that Anderson lacked jurisdiction when it issued a stay in favor of Alabama
Always, a company seeking a medical cannabis license, and dismissed the
case.

A more recent lawsuit was brought by five parents who want the court to
order the AMCC to establish a patient registry for medical cannabis patients.
A scheduled hearing on the case was postponed late last month; as of
Thursday morning, it had not been rescheduled.

All that remains for the commission to do before finalizing awards, said
McMillan, is to conduct investigative hearings, which can be called by any
applicant in the license category.

“We have notified the applicants that are eligible to participate as they
want to, and then we’ve turned it over to the administrative law judge,”
McMillan said, “We’re totally out of it, no communication, no nothing. It’s
between him and the applicants now.”

But McMillan was vague about a timeline for the hearings, saying that
several factors could influence it.

“It’ll depend on how many of the applicants want to participate in the
hearing, and then how long it takes the administrative law judge to do the
preparatory work for having the hearings and then to actually have the
hearing,” McMillan said.

Robertson said at an interview he feels that is a reasonable prediction. He
said his integrated facility, which includes an outdoor greenhouse and
indoor growing facility, as well as processing and production facilities,
is ready to begin operations as soon as he receives final approval.

Because cannabis plants can take months to grow, he plans to first procure
raw plant material from cultivators, whose licenses have been approved and
have been growing cannabis since the first half of 2024, to make the first
few rounds of products.

“We want to be that option for people to be able to bring their biomass to
us. We can convert it to oil products—either purchase it from them to
resell or to produce their products for them to sell in the independent
dispensaries,” Robertson said.

He said that with cannabis plants having been growing in the state since
cultivators received their final licenses, the remaining steps can be
completed within a month.

Because he is also a managing partner of Wagon Trail Hemp Farms, where they
have been making seed-to-sale hemp-derived products since 2019, he also
believes he won’t have much of a learning curve. The facility, he said, can
process 1,000 pounds of raw plant material per day, which translates to
about 80 kilos of oil daily.

“That’s enough oil for the entire state of Alabama. That’s enough to
produce 3.5 million doses in one day’s worth of oil,” Robertson said.

Once they have the oil processed and tested, the production process is
quite quick. They can produce 30,000 to 40,000 gummies in one shift.

*Ongoing litigation*

But lawsuits have continued. Will Somerville, an attorney representing
Alabama Always, one of the firms that sued AMCC after not receiving a
license, said in an interview in May the hearings should be conducted on a
“level playing field,” saying that applicants initially chosen in December
2023 should not receive an unfair advantage.

There is a strong belief that some licenses were awarded to those who did
not “raise as much of a stink about the process” as others, Somerville
said, a practice he believes to be illegal and discriminatory.

“I think that’s why they rewarded the people who sucked up to them,”
Somerville said. “I don’t think there’s any other basis for awarding those
licenses.”

French, of Specialty Medical Products of Alabama, called those claims
“unbelievable.” He said that his company is well qualified, with extensive
experience in the hemp industry in Alabama. He currently also owns Oscity
Labs, which produces CBD edibles and tinctures in an integrated facility.

The facilities, he said, have been certified as having Current Good
Manufacturing Practices (CGMP), a set of regulations enforced by the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure products are consistently
manufactured under controlled and healthy conditions.

“We feel like we are not only a qualified applicant in all ways, but we are
one of the handful of operators that are actually already CGMPed. I mean,
that’s a huge lift,” French said.

Alabama Always has also filed a federal lawsuit alleging the AMCC
commissioners showed bias and acted against those who challenged the
process. Somerville said the lawsuit seeks to determine the extent of the
commission’s misconduct and its impact on its clients, with monetary
damages potentially on the table, but he doesn’t foresee it stalling the
process further.

“We don’t think a lot of these commissioners have the ability to be
impartial,” Somerville said, saying the lawsuit is intended to ensure the
process moves along according to the law. A hearing has not been set on the
lawsuit.

McMillan said that the timeline for making medical cannabis available also
depends on how many applicants participate in the investigative hearings
process and how long the administrative law judge takes to prepare and
conduct them.

French said the appeals court’s decision to overturn the restraining order
was “very encouraging news.”

But the delays can be financially straining for applicants as they wait to
begin production. French said “keeping employees operational, keeping
operations going” has been a challenge, as well as maintaining expensive
facilities without being able to sell products.

Robertson predicted that he would come out even in about two years after
investing $4 million into the facilities. Because of the delays, he said
that it could be four years before he is able to break even.

“Between the legal fees and operational fees, and holding all of the
facilities and everything else, it’s been a multimillion-dollar venture at
this point. We have $4 million of infrastructure sitting here, and we can’t
do anything with it, and then we’ve got all the other operations and legal
fees,” Robertson said.

*This story was first published by Alabama Reflector.*

*Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.*

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Patients Could Finally Get Legal Access By The End Of 2025 appeared first
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