Sustainable Alabama asked Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge James Anderson on Thursday to modify a temporary restraining order that had been placed on the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission for months.
Sustainable Alabama filed a lawsuit on Thursday asking the court to allow the commission to issue their company a license since it continues to have to “pour money into operations” after over a year of delays due to litigation from other companies competing for a finite number of licenses.
The commission awarded the company one of five integrated facility licenses to cultivate, dispense, process, transport, and sell medical cannabis three times in 2023. However, the program has been held up in litigation since last summer.
“To sustain its status, Sustainable must continue to pour money into operations. The only other option is to quit, and the continued imposition of the Court’s sweeping injunction now puts that on the table,” Joel Connally, an attorney representing Sustainable Alabama, said in a filing on Thursday.
Connally said the company “now faces a mounting decision of whether maintaining the effort to obtain the license is worth it.”
“At some point the potential of profits will never overcome the mounting losses this legal quagmire has created,” Connally said.
A couple of changes to the stalled medical cannabis program were proposed in the previous session, but none garnered enough support to become law.
“Without some modification of the restraining order, the Legislature too will likely only assume there is no point in moving forward with the effort. By application of a restraining order, the Plaintiff (and others) had an entire legislative session to propose new bills, lobby legislators, utilize public relations, and generally try to obtain some legislative fix to the problems it created and now bemoans. All to no avail. The net effect, as of the close of the session, was discussion of repealing the law. Like Sustainable, the Legislature, having authorized the expense of millions of dollars thus far to establish a program that now only grows lawsuits, may decide the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. There is undoubtedly a fast-approaching breaking point that is created by the current injunction,” Connally said. “The temporary restraining order gives unbalanced weight to the interests of the Plaintiff. It halts the process entirely while the Plaintiff pursues ever-expanding arguments. First, it was application size limits, then scoring methods, then open-meetings law questions, then futility, then lack of scoring, and now the argument that an administrative appeal process must have been in place and available preceding any award of a license by the Commission (which first occurred in June 2023). Wash, rinse, repeat. And there is the fundamental problem of immunity that merely naming the Commissioners does not resolve, which is one of several issues before the Court of Civil Appeals in countless appeals and writs. “If it’s not a mess, it’ll do ‘til a mess gets here,” to quote a Cormac McCarthy novel. Litigation will always exist. That has been made clear in so many states previously. It is the sweeping injunctive relief that enables the Plaintiff to continually poison the well publicly in its crusade against the Commission, its members and its staff. In doing so, the net effect is to erode both the public and Legislature’s confidence in the Commission and, by extension, any applicant such as Sustainable that was awarded a license. The Court can immediately remedy these problems and provide some stability to the program itself by allowing the Commission the ability to issue a license to Sustainable.”
Sustainable by Caleb Taylor on Scribd
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