Jim Rosica
Three Florida nurseries on Friday filed the first protests over the state’s licensing of growers of medical marijuana, according to the state Department of Health.
The department confirmed receiving filings from TropiFlora of Sarasota, San Felasco Nurseries of Gainesville and Perkins Nursery of LaBelle by the close of business.
Rejected nurseries have until Monday to file protests over the state’s award of five licenses to grow medicinal pot.
The businesses that received licenses, as revealed late last month, are Hackney Nursery Co. (northwest region), Chestnut Hill Tree Farm (northeast), Knox Nursery (central), Alpha Foliage (southwest), and Costa Nursery Farms (southeast).
“The department remains committed to getting this product to children with intractable epilepsy and people with advanced cancer as safely and quickly as possible,” DOH spokeswoman Mara Gambineri said. On Monday “we’ll review any petitions filed and evaluate the path we need to take to keep this process moving forward.”
The rationales behind each protest vary. TropiFlora, for instance, is objecting to the fact that four of the five licenses went to nurseries that also sat on the department’s “negotiated rulemaking” committee.
Perkins’ filing says it should have received a “default license” because its application wasn’t approved or denied in a timely fashion and instead was seemingly hung up in Health Department bureaucracy.
San Felasco, on the other hand, argues it was the highest-ranked applicant to grow and process medicinal pot in its region, but that another bureaucratic bungle caused it to be wrongly knocked out of contention.
The purported reason was that a low-level employee at the nursery flunked a background check, the document says. That person’s name and background history was redacted for “confidentiality purposes.”
The nursery now counters that the worker “has no record that would justify disqualification” and isn’t an owner or manager of the nursery.
The department also did not immediately flag San Felasco when the results of the screening came back to tweak the application, which is a rules violation, the nursery said.
In 2014, lawmakers passed and Gov. Rick Scott signed into law a measure legalizing low-THC, or “non-euphoric,” marijuana to help children with severe seizures and muscle spasms. THC is the chemical that causes the high from pot.
A three-member panel of state officials in DOH was tasked with selecting five approved pot providers out of 28 nurseries that turned in applications by July 8.
A medical marijuana lobbyist had told FloridaPolitics.com earlier this week a half-dozen Florida nurseries that had applied but failed to become growers “are thinking seriously about protesting.”
