Yesterday Will Humble, Director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, wrote the following on his blog:

“It’s been a busy week for our medical marijuana team.  Our 2-week dispensary application period ended a couple of hours ago…  as did the hearing regarding adding new debilitating medical conditions.

We received 484 dispensary applications over the last 2 weeks.  As you know, we have 126 Community Health Analysis Areas (CHAAs) and a maximum of 126 possible dispensaries (one per CHAA).   Some of our CHAA’s received multiple applications- for example, the Estrella CHAA had 16 applicants and the Flagstaff E  CHAA 13 had applicants.  Many other CHAAs had only 1 applicant. 27 areas didn’t receive any applications.  You can see the number of applications by CHAA on our website.

Our team just finished logging all of the applications that we received and has already started reviewing some of the applications for “Administrative Completeness”.  Any applications that are “Administratively Incomplete” (in other words, if they’re missing something) will be returned to the applicants so they can correct whatever is wrong.  In June, we’ll be checking for “Substantive Completeness” (which is a more thorough, quality review), and the applicants will have another chance to make corrections.  We expect to award all of the Registration Certificates on August 7.

Registration Certificates will be awarded to applicants in CHAAs with only 1 applicant on August 7 as long as their application is Administratively and Substantively complete.  We’ll be holding a random drawing on August 7 to award Certificates in the CHAAs with more than 1 qualified applicant.   Of course, some CHAAs will not have a dispensary this year because we didn’t have an applicant.

We also had our hearing regarding adding debilitating medical conditions this afternoon at our Laboratory.  We heard from dozens of folks – some urged us to add the conditions and some that urged us not to.  We have also received hundreds of comments on-line.  We have several more weeks before we need to make a decision.  If you’d like to view the public comment session, we have a link on our website.”