The following is the text of a post made by Will Humble, Director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, on his blog on June 21, 2012:

“Overall, we ended up receiving 486 medical marijuana dispensary applications among our 126 Community Health Analysis Areas (CHAAs).  Twenty-seven of the CHAAs had no applicant at all- leaving 99 Community Health Analysis Areas with at least 1 applicant.  Seventy-five of the 99 had more than 1 applicant.  Assuming that each of these end up being complete, we’ll need to randomly select successful applicants in 75 of the CHAAs (we’ll be posting an updated summary of how many complete applications there are by CHAA in a few weeks).  Here’s how it’ll work for the competitive CHAAs on Selection Tuesday (August 7):

We’ll be using a device that blows balls inside of a clear cage to randomly select the successful applicant in each CHAA.  Applicants will be assigned a random code in advance…  and the person with the code that matches the ball that blows into the chamber will be allocated a Registration Certificate.  We’ll repeat this process for each of the competitive CHAAs.  The process will be webcast live on a URL that we identify a few days before August 7.  The Act doesn’t allow us to identify the successful applicants by name or even business name publicly- so the live announcement will be made using the code that only the applicants will have.  Each applicant will receive their unique identifier electronically so they’ll know whether they won their CHAA drawing via the webcast.  The Certificates will be mailed later that day.

Everybody that’s allocated a Dispensary Registration Certificate will have a little less than a year to build out and get an “Approval to Operate”.  Keep in mind that an application for Approval to Operate a dispensary is not complete until we get a written notice that the dispensary is ready for an inspection and they meet our criteria.  Our team recently put together some tools to help Registration Certificate holders meet our Approval to Operate criteria, including an Approval to Operate Application Checklist, Approval to Operate Application Instructions, and the Dispensary Inspection Checklist.”