LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Kentucky Alternative Care is one of only two winning applications in Jefferson County to sell medical marijuana.
They told WHAS11 in an exclusive interview Wednesday that they will open their doors on Bardstown Road this fall.
“Willy Wonka, we got the golden ticket,” said Tuesday Couglin, retail director for Kentucky Alternative Care.
The dispensary will sit at 2401 Bardstown Rd., across the street from the Highlands Kroger.
“It’s actually such a wonderful experience to see something that you thought of in your brain to have it come out into fruition, into real life,” Couglin said.
Couglin, a Pennsylvania native, is a specialist in opening dispensaries across the nation. She said the dispensary doors can’t open until they get cannabis on the shelves.
“Nothing’s available,” she said. “In Kentucky, nothing has had a chance to be produced here in Kentucky.”
Qualifying patient’s won’t have to travel out of state for cannabis products, but they might pay the price of convenience.
“We are definitely focused on high quality,” Couglin said. “Price point is definitely going to be not out of this world, but we want to make sure you’re getting the best quality for the best price.”
She said with only two dispensaries in the county, the market isn’t saturated.
“I hope to be the leader of our market,” Couglin said. “I hope that we can set those prices to make sure that it is affordable to everybody.”
She said the road to getting licensed wasn’t easy.
“One of the regulations is the no-stacking law,” she said. “So we couldn’t apply for multiple applications under the same name. We had to create business – 20 different businesses under 20 different names – to get our applications out there.”
She said it was a potential loophole to get past the app-stacking regulation. It means a group of people files businesses under different LLCs and with different leases to raise their chances in the lottery.
“It paid off,” Couglin said. “We got one out of the 48 tickets.”
She said she thinks this was a common practice for applicants – though state officials assured WHAS11 time and time again that app stacking is illegal.
Now Kentucky Alternative Care is charging forward, hoping to break the stigma for cannabis, and planning to open doors around October.
