25-Mile Rule and Other Arizona MMJ Laws Will be Changing

Last month a Superior Court judge ruled that some of the Arizona medical marijuana regulations are unreasonable, such as the lacking of a formal appeal process for dispensary registration certificate holders who don’t earn their approval to operate within one year.

The ruling has forced the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) to modify some medical marijuana laws and to approve the renewal requests for all the current dispensaries (open or not). This gives dispensary owners more time to open their dispensary.

Recently on the ADHS’s medical marijuana blog, they stated that they’re “also planning to make some modifications to the ’25-mile rule’ (measuring by road rather than ‘as the crow flies’), eliminating the former ‘year 2’ selection criteria for dispensaries by focusing on vacant CHAAs rather than patient density, and removing the lifetime disqualification for those applicants that receive a dispensary registration certificate but don’t execute.”

Oral proceedings with public comment will follow the drafting of these new rules. The ADHS expects the modified rules to be available by late 2014.