Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission (GMCC) members voted unanimously during their Aug. 23 public meeting to approve three more dispensary locations to serve patients in the state’s low-THC oil program.
Florida-based Trulieve, one of the largest publicly traded cannabis companies in the world, received its fifth Georgia retail license for a store in Evans, just outside of Augusta. Trulieve also has dispensaries currently open in Macon, Marietta, Newnan and Pooler.
And Botanical Sciences, Georgia’s first physician-owned medical cannabis provider, received its third and fourth retail licenses for stores in Chamblee and Stockbridge—both in Metro Atlanta. Botanical Sciences also has dispensary licenses in Marietta and Pooler, but only the Pooler facility is currently open.
The Trulieve and Botanical Sciences locations in Pooler, right outside of Savannah, are competing within half a mile of each other.
All nine approved dispensaries in Georgia are owned by these two companies, which are vertically integrated through Class I production licenses the GMCC issued in September 2022. The only other license holder in the state is SJ Labs and Analytics LLC, which has an independent testing laboratory permit.
“Thousands of registered patients have now found relief from the low-THC oil and products that are made by the commission’s production licensees,” GMCC Executive Director Andrew Turnage said during the Aug. 23 meeting.
“Additional dispensaries will be opening soon—you’d expect those to be sometime next month,” he said. “As a very important reminder for registered patients, their caregivers, and for physicians that are certifying or for physicians who are considering becoming a certifier of patients, these dispensaries are the retail locations for safely manufactured and laboratory tested products.”
This slow but steady rollout of five dispensary openings in 2023 (with four more openings coming soon) has arrived more than eight years since legalization under the state’s 2015 Haleigh’s Hope Act. The legislation is named after Haleigh Cox, a then-5-year-old girl diagnosed with intractable epilepsy and cerebral palsy who was having hundreds of seizures a day.
Haleigh, who was on pharmaceuticals for her seizures, began experiencing episodes where she would stop breathing, and her family decided to move her from Georgia to Colorado in March 2014 to begin a regimen of cannabis oil.
“She was maxed out,” her mother, Janea Cox, told CNN in 2015. “She’d quit breathing several times a day, and the doctors blamed it on the seizure medications.”
After switching from pharmaceuticals to cannabis oil, Haleigh's seizers subsided, and she began smiling for the first time in three years. She quickly became the face of Georgia’s medical cannabis bill, which then-Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law in April 2015.
Under current Georgia law, patients with one or more of 18 medical conditions can now legally purchase up to 20 fluid ounces of cannabis oils containing no more than 5% THC for use in oral or topical forms. It does not authorize the production, sale or ingestion of food products infused with low-THC oil, or the inhalation of oil through smoking, electronic vaping or vapor.
This access, while restrictive, took years to unfold, notably with the 2019 passage of the Georgia’s Hope Act. While the 2015 law allowed Georgia patients to possess low-THC oil, they had no means to access it until the 2019 legislation, which authorized the GMCC to oversee a limited license market.
Specifically, the GMCC can initially issue up to five dispensary licenses per production licensee, of which Trulieve and Botanical Sciences are the only two so far. The commission can then issue a sixth retail license per production licensee when the state’s registry reaches 25,000 patients and an additional retail license per production company for every 10,000 patients added after that.
Trulieve has a sixth dispensary listed as "coming soon" in Columbus, Ga., indicating the state's medical patient registry has crossed that first threshold.
Botanical and Trulieve became Georgia’s first production licensees in September 2022 when the commission approved them to operate up to 100,000 square feet of indoor growing space.
State law authorizes the commission to issue up to six production licenses. And GMCC regulators tentatively named the six winners at their July 2021 meeting, but more than a dozen of the 60-plus unsuccessful applicants filed protests later that year, and the licensing contracts were never finalized.
As a result, litigation and court orders regarding the state’s licensing process had halted the state’s commercial sales launch until April 2023, when the GMCC issued Trulieve its first three retail licenses and Botanical Sciences its first two.
The other four production licenses for vertically integrated operators have yet to be approved/issued.
