• 11
  • August
    2010

When the Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division of the Colorado Department of Revenue closed its offices at 11pm on July 29, it marked the official end of the last day to file an application for a state dispensary license.

At the end of the application period, 2,059 license applications were submitted and the state earned more than $7 million in application fees.

These 2,059 applications were broken down into the following categories:

• 717 applications to operate medical marijuana centers/dispensaries
• 271 applications to operate medical marijuana-products businesses
• 1071 applications to operate medical marijuana-growing facilities

It is worth noting that these figures do not include license applications that were postmarked Sunday but arrived later.

Residency Requirement Meeting

On July 30, an emergency hearing was held by the Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division to discuss one of the more controversial provisions for obtaining a license to operate a dispensary/center: the two-year residency requirement.

(See "Proposed Medical Marijuana Bills Already Creating Controversy" for more information)

While the meeting was originally intended to clarify these residency requirements, it quickly turned into a different type of discussion when senior director of enforcement Matt Cook indicated that he believed the two-year residency requirement applied equally to both owners/operators and their employees.

This interpretation was met with great outrage by many audience members. In fact, several attorneys who were present at the meeting claimed that this interpretation could be the target of a subsequent lawsuit.

Cook later attempted to remedy the situation by suggesting that since the Department of Revenue more than likely won't begin evaluating employee information until 2011, the legislature has more than enough time to rectify any potential interpretation problems regarding the residency requirements.   

It is worth noting that Sen. Chris Romer, one of the architects of the licensing law, drafted a letter to Cook in which he indicated that the two-year residency requirement was not meant to apply to employees. He went on to write that the legislature was prevented from fixing all the potential problems with the rule due to an end-of-session deadline, but that hoped he hoped Cook would apply the residency requirement only to owners/operators.

Stay tuned for further developments ... 

Related Resources: 
 
• More than 2,000 Apply for Various Pot Licenses (The Denver Post)