More than 2,600 applications for medical marijuana business licenses in Kentucky were filed before Saturday’s deadline.
That’s according to data from the Kentucky Office of Medical Cannabis, Louisville TV station WLKY reported.
Of those applications, more than 2,200 were for 48 MMJ dispensary licenses.
The application window in Kentucky was open from July 1 to Aug. 31.
The next step in the licensing process will be an October lottery to decide which operators will be licensed when the program launches in 2025.
MMJ license applicants have been tasked by the Kentucky Medical Cannabis Program with creating extensive business plans.
Pperhaps a bigger concern for MMJ license applicants, according to the Kentucky chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), is that big cannabis companies are trying to game the state’s lottery system by filing multiple applications under different names.
But Sam Flynn, executive director of Kentucky’s Medical Cannabis Program, tried to alleviate applicants’ fears.
“We require in these regulations them to provide us their ownership, their corporate structure, and they have to explicitly disclose whether they have a parent of any kind,” Flynn told Louisville TV station WHAS.
“Through these mechanisms, we’re able to determine whether there is a parent company, and because we define the parent as the applicant, in that case, the parent company can’t, in a sense, you know, load the lottery with multiple applications.”
