Medical marijuana became legal to grow and sell in Kentucky Jan. 1, 2025, but more than a year later, there aren't any places open for patients to buy products.
Kentucky's first medical cannabis dispensary, The Post in Beaver Dam, opened its doors in December. But only a few days after its grand opening, the dispensary announced it would need to temporarily close after running out of products. The business posted online that it plans to restock and reopen in January.
The slow rollout of medical marijuana products is being felt in Northern Kentucky as well. Bluegrass Cannacare, a dispensary in Florence, was originally eyeing a Nov. 2025 opening date, but as of January, an official opening date has not yet been set.
Last year, Bluegrass Cannacare's general manager told WVXU supplies are limited due to Kentucky's small number of cannabis cultivators and processors, making it difficult to determine when the dispensary can be stocked and open to patients. The dispensary says it anticipates product supply to remain an issue for the first few months of 2026.
Out-of-state struggles
Elsewhere in the region, other dispensaries are beginning to take shape, but appear even further from opening.
NatureMed, a cannabis company with several dispensaries located in Arizona and Missouri, has added four new locations in the Commonwealth to its roster of stores, with two of them landing in the Northern Kentucky region: one in Erlanger and another in Carrollton. According to Kentucky's Office of Medical Cannabis website, the company secured two dispensary licenses using two different LLCs: Yellow Flowers LLC and Green Grass Cannabis LLC. NatureMed's website does not have operating hours posted for any of its Kentucky dispensaries yet.
The fourth dispensary with a license to operate in the region is owned by C3 Kentucky LLC, a part of C3 Industries based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The company operates just over 30 High Profile-branded cannabis shops in several states, and plans to open another in Wilder. C3 Industries secured its license to operate by obtaining it from the original holder, Nicole Tirella.
C3 Industries told Wilder's planning and zoning commission in late Nov. 2025 that it plans to begin construction on its new dispensary location along Country Drive in early 2026.
Bluegrass Cannacare manager Chad Johns, who also manages a vape shop in Fort Wright, told WVXU last year that being a Kentucky resident gave his dispensary an edge over many of the companies that won licenses in the state's 2024 lottery. Many of the winners are based outside of Kentucky, making it harder for them to identify physical locations that meet the state's zoning standards due to their unfamiliarity with the region.
The license lottery itself remains a point of controversy. Before the 2024 lottery application deadline, one Northern Kentucky business owner told WVXU that the state's $5,000 fee for a single dispensary application made the process too risky for some local business owners. And, even if they were selected, they'd have to pay an additional $30,000 nonrefundable licensing fee. This opened the door for already established marijuana companies to create multiple LLCs and flood Kentucky's license pool with applications to increase their chances of winning.
Similar complaints prompted Kentucky's Auditor Allison Ball to open an investigation into the Office of Medical Cannabis' lottery process in April 2025.
“Kentuckians should have confidence that state offices operate with transparency and integrity, and my office is committed to ensuring those standards," Ball said at the time.
The auditor has not publicly shared an update on the investigation in recent months.
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