All of the 2019 medical #cannabis license applicants, who spent upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars on preparing and submitting their applications, must continue to wait for their applications to be processed.... with no end in sight.
I can think of several ways this situation could/should have been expeditiously resolved along the way, but it seems that NJ has decided to pursue a long clunky litigation strategy. Very odd.
The DOH is in a delicate situation here. If they agree to accept the rejected applications, then they would likely face lawsuits from non-applicants who could argue that they would have also submitted an application after the deadline period had passed.
Additionally, since the documents which these applicants failed to successfully attach was a pass/fail criteria of the application, if the DOH waives that failure, then other applicants who are rejected for other pass/fail criteria could similarly argue for a waiver of their respective criteria.
To end the stalemate the DOH can just agree to evaluate the rejected applications, and then simply penalize their scores for submitting applications with missing/corrupted files. This way they can award the licenses and increase patient access, and then deal with the inevitable lawsuits after.
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