The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Commission is being sued by a group of industry applicants who claim that the regulators were incorrect in rejecting their applications during its initial assessment last month, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports. The names of the plaintiffs were left out of the complaints to protect the anonymity of the process.
The lawsuits seek a temporary restraining order in an effort to force the commission to include the plaintiff’s applications in the final scoring review, and an injunction to keep those applications in the final pool.
Scott Hardin, spokesperson for the AMMC, said that the commission had already met with those applicants to explain what disqualified them and that the thousands of dollars the firms paid in application fees would be returned. He said if the restraining order were granted, the commission would be forced to “shut down” its work.
According to the report, the commission disqualified the applicants for a variety of reasons, but primarily for incomplete applications, which could include minor infractions like failure to provide a second form of identification, which was the reason for at least one applicant’s denial by the commission. Department of Finance and Administration records show that Arkansas received a total of 322 cultivation and dispensary applications and 16 were considered inadequate.