The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday overturned lower court rulings that Florida’s medical cannabis regulatory scheme is unconstitutional, essentially delivering a blow to small companies hoping to enter the state’s marijuana industry.
At the heart of the Supreme Court’s ruling is a challenge to the state’s “vertical integration” model, which requires cannabis companies to be responsible for all aspects of the business, from growing and cultivating to transporting and selling.
The ruling will have wide-ranging implications for the state’s $1 billion-plus medical cannabis industry, which has been highly anticipating the ruling for eight months. The long wait was driven in part by pandemic-related disruptions.
The basis of Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling is a 2018 lawsuit filed by Florigrown, a Tampa company that applied to become a medical cannabis treatment center after voters overwhelmingly approved a medical cannabis ballot measure that year.
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