From 65 applicants, the Pennsylvania Department of Health has selected two to receive the initial permits to grow and process medical marijuana in the eight-county southeast region including Lancaster.
They are Franklin Labs LLC and Prime Wellness of Pennsylvania LLC. Information released by the department indicated that both companies will be based in Berks County, Prime at 2 Corporate Boulevard in South Heidelberg Industrial Park and Franklin at 1800 Centre Ave. in the city of Reading.
Winners in the other regions are Pennsylvania Medical Solutions LLC and Standard Farms LLC in the northeast; Ilera Healthcare LLC and AES Compassionate Care LLC in the southcentral; Terrapin Investment Fund 1 LLC and GTI Pennsylvania LLC in the northcentral; Agrimed Industries of PA LLC and PurePenn LLC in the southwest; and Holistic Farms LLC and Cresco Yeltrah LLC in the northeast.The department said it would release the scorecards for all of the evaluated applications on its website later today.
This map from the Pennsylvania Department of Health shows the planned locations of the 12 grower-processor applicants given permits on June 20, 2017.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health is about to award medical marijuana business permits, and it has had an array of interestingly named applications to choose from.
They include Organic Farmacy Management, Mary Jane’s Closet, Pure Releaf, Herbalishous Corp., Hippocratic Growth and Good Times.
There are also plenty that sound a bit more straightlaced, like Bucks Research and Growth Group, AgroPharm, PA Health and Wellness and Compassionate Healthcare Partners.
And then there’s one that appears to be in its own category: Classic Nails & Spa.
The department said Monday that it would announce winners of the grower-processor permits on Tuesday. It did not say when it would award the dispensary permits, but confirmed numerous times recently that it planned to do so by the end of June.
The department released the full list of applicants at the end of last week, about a month and a half after the partial list.
It shows only the proposed business names under which applicants filed and the region in which they applied.
More than 500 applicants paid nonrefundable fees of $5,000 or $10,000 in hopes of snagging one of 27 dispensary or 12 grower-processor permits.
The permitting process is expected to attract legal scrutiny here, as it has in other states.
The Pew Charitable Trusts says states legalizing medical marijuana have faced lawsuits for permits awarded under lottery systems as well as those distributed under a merit-based system.
Pennsylvania said it is using a 1,000-point scale to assess applicants, with categories like diversity plan and community impact worth 100 points each and other categories like operational timetable, capital requirements and security and surveillance worth less.
The final tally for the region comes to 65 dispensary applicants, up from 61 initially, and 46 grower-processor applications, up from 31 initially.
One of the grower-processor applicants, Leola Group M3C Agriculture, wants to locate in Lancaster County, and LNP has previously reported that its plans center in Eagle Industrial Park in Upper Leacock Township.
By LNP’s count, a handful of applicants on the initial lists were not included in the final lists.
Spokeswoman April Hutcheson said that could have represented misspellings or similar issues in the original list that were cleaned up for the final one.
She did not definitively answer LNP’s question on whether some applicants had removed themselves from consideration or been eliminated.
credit:lancasteronline.com
