The state says human error led to a Hilliard company's inadvertent exclusion from the proposed list of the dozen large-scale growers for Ohio's medical marijuana program.
The Department of Commerce says it uncovered the mistake this week and has notified PharmaCann Ohio it was improperly bumped from the list of successful applicants. The state has since awarded a total of 24 provisional licenses, the maximum allowed. The agency is researching how to proceed with 25 licensees including PharmaCann, which previously sued the state alleging it was unconstitutionally removed from the rankings by a racial quota. There is now a question of how to fix the problem. Ohio Public Radio's Jo Ingles has more.
The Commerce Department, which oversees Ohio’s medical marijuana program, now says, in a letter to Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, there were scoring errors in the process for determining which companies were awarded medical marijuana cultivator’s licenses. It says financial plans were downloaded twice, affecting 10 of the 110 applicants. And that prevented one company that should have been given a license from getting it. Some of the other businesses that were also denied licenses think there were errors in the scoring of their applications too and are hoping to win appeals. Yost says he’s in the process of formulating a response to this latest letter from the commerce department. But in the past, he’s called for a halt on issuing licenses until an audit can be completed.
