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MEDICAL-MARIJUANA CHALLENGE INVOLVES LICENSES FOR GROWERS

TALLAHASSEE - A new law that protects five nurseries may have given more ammunition to "ganjapreneurs" seeking an entry into what could be one of the nation's largest medical-marijuana markets come this fall.

The law was intended to inoculate from pending legal challenges the five growers, and their teams of consultants and investors, selected by Florida health officials in November to serve as medical marijuana dispensing organizations, responsible for growing, processing and distributing cannabis products to a limited population of patients.  While the law did just that, it also gave at least one losing applicant new grounds for its existing complaint.

Under the 2016 law, the five growers selected last fall by a three-member panel - who ranked the applications within different regions and awarded licenses to the top scorers - are allowed to keep their licenses.  The law also requires health officials to grant licenses to organizations whose administrative or legal challenges are successful.

And the law requires that any nursery that was the top scorer in a region must receive a license, even if health officials deemed it ineligible.  McCrory's Sunny Hill Nursery is claiming that it also must receive a license because of that provision.

McCrory's contends that it should have received the highest score in its region, where health officials granted a license to Knox Nursery.  McCrory's and Redland Nursery were already challenging Knox's license when the new law went into effect this spring.

In an amended complaint filed May 2, McCrory's argues that it should receive a license without having to go through the process of being re-evaluated.  Of the seven applicants in the Central region, the panel gave McCrory's an aggregate score of 5.5417, just below Knox, whose score of 5.5458 earned the Lake Mary-based grower a license.  "The scoring error resulted in the department erroneously awarding the highest score to Knox," McCrory's lawyers David Ashburn and Lorence Jon Bielby wrote.