State Auditor Dave Yost says he’s found dozens of problems with Ohio’s Medical Marijuana Program, and he’s questioning the legality of one of the actions it took.
Yost says he found many issues with the process for scoring applications for licenses to grow marijuana.
“If you wrote a book about how not to roll out a government program, this would exhibit A.," Yost says.
Yost says the biggest problem is the Ohio Department of Commerce, which oversees the program, didn’t have legal authority to add to the list of growers when it discovered mistakes in scoring.
But Commerce director Jacqueline Williams says the agency had the legal right to add those growers. And she says some of the other problems identified in the report have been fixed.
The program was supposed to be fully operational earlier this month but wasn’t due to a long list of snafus and legal challenges. There is no specific timetable for when patients will actually be able to get medical marijuana in Ohio.