DAPHNE, Ala. (WALA) – Ray French has been on both sides of Alabama’s tortured efforts to launch a medical marijuana industry.
His companies, Specialty Medical Products of Alabama and Oscity Labs, initially lost out on one of the limited number of licenses to grow, ship and sell the drugs.
A judge found fault with how the Alabama Cannabis Commission awarded those licenses. When the commission tried again in December – it’s third attempt to get it right – Specialty Medical Products came out a winner. But the legal process that benefited French now is preventing him from processing marijuana grown in Atmore and processed at Oscity Labs’ facility in Foley.
French said if he could just get the go-ahead, he would be delivering product within weeks.
“We’ve got infrastructure ready,” he said. “We’re sitting here, absolutely ready to make these products right away, right now and can’t get them to the patients.”
Cultivators have been growing the plant, but the medicine cannot be processed and delivered until the latest litigation is resolved. Some doctors who would like patients to have medical marijuana say they are frustrated. Dr. Marshall Walker, a Mobile physician, noted that the medical marijuana industry is operating without controversy in states to the east and west of Alabama.
“It’s unfair to people in this state that there’s a different level of medicine being practiced on a different side of an imaginary line,” he said Thursday at an event sponsored by a patient advocacy group at the Southern Cancer Center in Daphne.
Walker said his own mother used marijuana illegally when she was battling cancer.
“I can’t certify a patient to use cannabis until there’s a dispensary open,” he told FOX10 News. “That’s the verbiage in the law. So, opening these things is the only way to implement the law that the people, quite frankly, wanted and they deserve.”
Amanda Taylor, head of the Patients Coalition for Medical Cannabis in Alabama, said she suffers from seven different debilitating medical conditions. She said she became a “medical refugee,” forced to move to another state to get treatment she needed because marijuana was illegal. She said it is disappointing that litigation has kept the industry on ice even after the Legislature legalized it in 2021.
Now back in Alabama, she estimates more than 54,000 people in the state would benefit from medical marijuana in the first year.
“This obstructionary lawsuits has literally crushed me,” said Taylor, who now lives in Cullman in north Alabama. “It’s – there’s so much needless suffering, and it’s all due to greed. … They need to stop and consider the people who are suffering. At least 54,000 people in Alabama is what I project and other people project in the first year.”
Taylor on Thursday asked the judge in Montgomery County to allow her to intervene in the pending lawsuit. That comes days after Specialty Medical Products of Alabama made a similar request. Both would like to see an end to the blockade against the licenses that the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission awarded last year.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Alabama Always, is a Montgomery company that failed to win one of the so-called integrated licenses that allows for cultivation, production, transportation and sale of medical cannabis.
Will Somerville, a lawyer who represents the company, said he agrees the industry should move forward.
“We do think that the commission ought to follow the law, which they haven’t done,” he told FOX10 News on Thursday.
Somerville said the commission awarded licenses to companies that didn’t even have facilities.
“Fact is that my client invested a lot of money in a state-of-the-art facility, and the commission has never explained why my client didn’t get a license,” he said. “My client satisfies all the requirements. My client may be the only one that satisfies all the requirements of the cannabis act.”
State Sen. David Sessions (R-Grand Bay) attempted to break the logjam in the past legislative session. He sponsored a bill that would have, among other things, increased the number of licenses. But that bill didn’t pass.
Mike Ball, a former state representative who sponsored the cannabis legislation, said he does not have a great explanation for why the Legislature capped the number integrated licenses at five.
“That’s an arbitrary number,” he told FOX10 News. “There was nothing magic about five. There was nothing magic – you know, just because people win an election don’t mean that they know everything.”
Ball, a former state trooper, recalled that he once was adamantly opposed to marijuana in any form. But he added he reconsidered his position after receiving an email from a woman whose grandchild was suffering from debilitating seizures. He said he investigated and found out that cannabidiol – an active ingredient cannabis – could help.
“I began to realize that … in our zeal to protect some people from themselves, we have caused additional suffering by not allowing science and medicine to develop this plant and use it in the way that I believe God intended,” he said.
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Cultivators have been growing marijuana, but the medicine cannot be processed and delivered until the latest litigation is resolved. Some doctors who would like patients to have medical marijuana say they are frustrated. Read More