If you’ve ever watched a bracket-style competition — March Madness, a baking show, take your pick — you know the format: a lot of contestants, a panel that has seen it all, and weeks that feel a lot longer to the people waiting on a decision than to the people watching from home. Substitute “medical cannabis license” for “trophy,” and you’ve got a pretty fair picture of what recently wrapped up in Tuscaloosa.

For those catching up: The Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission originally awarded five integrated facility licenses back in December 2023. Several of the applicants who didn’t make the cut challenged that outcome, the dispute eventually made its way to the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals, and the court sent everyone back to do this the administrative way — a full contested-case hearing under the Alabama Administrative Procedure Act, with a neutral hearing officer taking evidence and making a recommendation to the commission.

That hearing officer is retired Alabama Supreme Court Justice Bernard Harwood, and calling his job over the past few weeks “thankless” undersells it. Fourteen applicants, one license category, five spots — Harwood sat through testimony from nearly every one of them, day after day, in a proceeding that had to be fair to all 14 at once. That is a genuinely hard needle to thread, requiring a special kind of patience and evenhandedness.

Testimony ran from July 27 through August 14, with each applicant getting an opportunity for its day in the spotlight. Across those sessions, the recurring themes were the ones the statute actually asks about: whether an applicant meets Alabama’s threshold eligibility requirements — 15 years of state residency and 15 years of commercial horticulture experience, attributable to a majority of the ownership group — and how each applicant stacks up on the broader suitability factors the commission has to weigh, things like integrity, capitalization, operational experience, and how close a facility is to actually being ready to operate. The hearing also touched on the statutory set-aside requiring at least one license go to a qualifying minority-owned or minority-controlled applicant, and the ownership and governance structures several applicants use to meet it.

We’re not going to referee any of that here, and not just because it would make for a bad blog post. In the interest of full disclosure, our firm represents one of the 14 applicants in this proceeding. That’s exactly why we’re sticking to the procedural play-by-play rather than grading anyone’s performance — you’ll get no predictions out of us.

So, what’s next? No one gives a closing argument in this kind of proceeding; the written post-hearing briefs do that job instead, and they’re due 30 days after the final transcript is certified. Once those are in, Harwood will issue a recommendation to the full commission, which then votes on how to award the five licenses. Neither a date for that recommendation nor a date for the commission’s vote has been set yet, so — as with most things in this saga — patience remains a job requirement for everyone involved, applicants and blog authors alike.

Given how much litigation this docket has already generated, we wouldn’t be shocked if this isn’t the last chapter, whatever the commission ultimately decides. We’ll keep watching the inbox for that recommendation and let you know as soon as there’s news to report.

Thanks for stopping by.