After months of controversy around its selection of the state’s first marijuana growers, the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Commission will explore hiring an “independent consultant” to grade the nearly 230 applications for the dispensaries to sell the finished product.
The five-member panel unanimously approved a motion by a commissioner, Dr. Stephen Carroll, to consider outsourcing the evaluations, and it scheduled a July 12 meeting to hear from several state officials about the next steps and to make a final decision.
The commission had planned to rank the applications for 32 dispensary licenses the same way it scored the more than 80 cannabis growing permit bids earlier this year.
But the cultivation licensing process — in which each commissioner individually scored every application — came under fire after unsuccessful applicants and media outlets uncovered a variety of inconsistencies and irregularities.
Top photo courtesy of Adobe Stock
