First lawsuit filed over medical marijuana licenses

The first lawsuit over the Alabama Cannabis Commission’s bungled awarding of licenses was filed Thursday afternoon in Montgomery Circuit Court, asking a judge to impose a court-ordered stay on the awarding of licenses and to require the Commission to perform its own evaluations of applicants. 

Alabama Always LLC., one of the many applicants that didn’t receive a license at the Commission’s June 12 meeting, filed the lawsuit, in which it claims the Commission abdicated its duties to various third parties and then relied blindly on the information returned by the third parties. That information, the lawsuit states and the Commission has all but admitted publicly, was flawed. 

The Commission made that admission at a June 16 meeting, where it put a stay on the issued licenses due to “inconsistencies” it found in the scoring process. 

The lawsuit claims those inconsistencies are the result of the Commission abdicating its duties to a group of “graders” that were…