The DeWine administration doesn’t have to wait until late 2024 to issue adult use marijuana dispensary licenses to dispensaries currently operating under the Ohio Medical Marijuana Control Program, Issue 2 spokesperson Tom Haren told Hannah News on Friday.

“One thing that I think has been lost over the last couple of weeks is that the administration -- as is the case with basically all of its rulemaking powers -- has emergency rulemaking authority. Nothing would stop the Ohio Department of Commerce (DOC) from moving forward to allow existing operators to sell to all adults sooner than six months or nine months,” Haren said.

“If the DOC wanted to have a pathway to start adult use sales in January or February, there is a pathway for them to do that,” Haren added.

During a press event at the governor’s residence on Friday, Gov. Mike DeWine said DOC attorneys have told him the administration doesn’t have the authority to allow medical marijuana operators to begin selling adult use marijuana that early without legislation like HB86 (LaRe).

“If we had the authority, obviously, we would do it. I keep asking our team, ‘What else can we do?’” DeWine said.

DeWine spokesperson Dan Tierney told Hannah News that administration attorneys are advising the governor against using emergency rules on this issue.

“The fatal flaw here is that Issue 2 required the department to adopt rules to establish the licensure process. Our immediate indication from our legal folks is, regardless of what they intended with the language that they put out for voters to approve, there is not a mechanism to adopt emergency rules circumventing the normal rulemaking process to establish the rules for granting the licenses,” Tierney said. “Medical dispensaries will be eligible for a license, but you still have to do the licensing process before we grant them the license.”

Tierney said issuing an emergency rule to only allow current medical marijuana dispensaries to sell adult use marijuana would be “at best … a gray area.”

“We have a lot of interested parties out there that might be prone to litigation to preserve their market share or perceived market share, and the best way to deal with this is through what’s in statute,” Tierney said. “I understand what [proponents] are saying, but it’s not a situation where there is clear legal authority to do what they said. … People can be aspirational with what you can do when there’s a gray area or lack of clarity, but ultimately it’s ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda.’ Issue 2 could have been written a lot clearer in a lot of different areas, but it wasn’t. So we’re left dealing with what was there.”

DOC spokesperson Mikaela Hunt told Hannah News, “Due to the short duration for which emergency rules are in effect, adopting them would still not allow for legal sales of non-medical cannabis to begin faster than by the General Assembly passing the legislative provisions endorsed by the DeWine administration.”