Kentucky Now Has a Dispensary in All 11 Regions. 28 of Its 79 Licenses Have Changed Hands

On Monday, Oct. 12, a medical cannabis dispensary opened its doors at 81 Glynview Plaza, Suite 147, in Prestonsburg, the Floyd County seat in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Team Kentucky's Office of Medical Cannabis had signed off the Friday before. The store, a Sunnyside run by Cresco Labs, was the first dispensary to open anywhere in the state program's Mountain region, 18 mostly rural Appalachian counties that until that morning had none. (S1, S2, S3)

Lourie Moyer, Sunnyside's regional director for Kentucky and Florida, says she kept hearing the same story from people in the area. "So many people shared with me how they hadn't got their med card because there wasn't anywhere for them to go that wasn't a drive to Lexington," Moyer told WEKU. The region had fewer than 1,000 cardholders as of Oct. 2, according to a Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance newsletter cited by the station. (S3)

By the formal ribbon-cutting on Friday, Oct. 23, Moyer was describing those patients as the market. "There's nearly a thousand patients here in eastern Kentucky and they have access to a dispensary that is within a decent travel time for them," she told WOWK. Cresco announced the same day that Prestonsburg was its 83rd dispensary nationwide. (S4, S5)

Gov. Andy Beshear had already claimed the milestone. In an Oct. 16 release, his office said the Prestonsburg opening meant medical cannabis was now available in all 11 of Kentucky's dispensary licensing regions, with 26 dispensaries operating and 46 medical cannabis businesses up and running in all. More than 28,000 Kentuckians had been approved for cards, the release said, and more than 500 practitioners had registered. Speaking to the industry alliance's fall conference at the Lexington Marriott City Center on Oct. 21, where the group gave him an award, Beshear went further. "We've hit milestone after milestone, and access continues to expand," he said. "I think this can be a standard for how you do this and how you do this right." He also called the framework lawmakers eventually passed imperfect, while saying Kentuckians in need would use it. (S1, S6)

The state's own license roll tells a more complicated story about how Kentucky got here, and how far it still has to go. The Office of Medical Cannabis list, updated Oct. 14, names 79 licensees: 48 dispensaries, 16 cultivators across three tiers, 10 processors and five safety compliance labs. Twenty-eight of those entries record that the original licensee asked the office for approval to sell or transfer the license to someone else, and that the transfer went through. Of the 48 dispensary licenses, the list marks 27 as approved to operate, one more than the 26 stores the governor counted as open two days later. In the Mountain region itself, Sunnyside is the only one of four licensed dispensaries the list marks as approved to operate; the other three are in Powell, Pike and Perry counties. (S1, S7)

The momentum is real. When Beshear signed an executive order on June 11, Kentucky had 11 cultivators, four processors, two testing labs and 17 dispensaries operating, by the order's own count. Four months later the totals were 13 cultivators, five processors, two labs and 26 dispensaries, according to figures Beshear gave the alliance and reported by Louisville Public Media. Nine dispensaries opened in a little over four months. (S6, S8)

That June order did something else that shaped the market Sunnyside walked into. It rescinded Beshear's 2022 executive order, the one that offered a conditional pardon to Kentuckians with qualifying conditions who bought medical cannabis in other states and brought it home. The rescission took effect July 1. The order's reasoning was that the in-state program was now up and running and patients no longer needed to travel. From that date, a Kentucky cardholder in Prestonsburg or Paducah had to buy in Kentucky, at Kentucky prices, from a supply chain that state law requires to be grown and processed in-state. (S8, S9)

Those prices became the complaint. In July, Ricky Hunt, a 60-year-old from Hopkinsville who has lived with the effects of a spinal-cord cancer since childhood, testified by video to the legislature's Interim Joint Committee on Agriculture. "In Metropolis, Illinois, they have a one gram vape cartridge of THC on sale for $24 and I went to our place here to pick something up and it was $130," Hunt said. Sam Flynn, chief deputy counsel to Beshear and former executive director of the Office of Medical Cannabis, told the same committee that five of Kentucky's seven neighbors had medical programs first and that their more mature markets produce more and charge less. Prices would fall, Flynn said, as more cultivators and processors opened. (S10)

Flynn defended the decision in terms of control rather than price. "It's only about getting medical cannabis in the hands of those people who are allowed to have it and need to have it, and not into the hands of anyone else," he told WEKU when the change took effect. Kentucky-made products carry a symbol on the packaging, he said, and police have been trained to recognize it, so an officer can tell an in-state product from one bought across a border. (S9)

The committee's co-chair, Rep. Myron Dossett, a Pembroke Republican, put the risk in plain terms. Rolling back the out-of-state order, he said, risked "leaning to guide them toward the streets and purchasing something illegal because of the costs." (S10)

Rachel Roberts, executive director of the Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance, wants the program bigger. At the Oct. 21 conference she called the 11-region milestone huge. "Effectively, every Kentuckian is within an hour of a dispensary," she said, adding that there were outliers. She also said cardholder numbers, which Louisville Public Media put at more than 29,000 as of Oct. 15, need to approach 90,000 for the market to be considered healthy, and that her members cannot advertise to reach the patients who qualify. (S6)

“Without expanding access, the high price floor will continue.”

— Rachel Roberts, Executive Director, Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance

Roberts's list of fixes, laid out to legislators in July, runs through the statute rather than the governor's office: telehealth visits instead of the required face-to-face appointment for a card, physician discretion instead of a fixed list of qualifying conditions, an end to the notary requirement and looser advertising rules. Beshear has used his own tools at the edges. His June 2 executive order directed the Office of Medical Cannabis to clarify the qualifying-condition definition, which the governor's office says adds 15 conditions, including sickle cell anemia, ALS, Crohn's disease and Parkinson's. (S1, S10)

The transfers on the license roll are the part of the story the ribbon-cuttings skip. Kentucky awarded its first business licenses by lottery in 2024, and the program allows a licensee to sell or transfer with the office's approval under KRS 218B.080(6) and its licensing regulation. The roll shows that happening at every level. ZenLeaf, Inc., an original Fayette County dispensary licensee, transferred its license to KYLX Acquisition Company, which now operates Speakeasy Dispensary in Lexington. Chung Woo Kim LLC transferred a Jefferson County license to Picasso Cannabis, doing business as Kentucky Alternative Care. Robert Hoogendyk, an individual original licensee, transferred his to CB Slugger, LLC, which does business as Blue Sage Cannabis Company; a second license, originally held by Pinnacle Path LLC, went to WPBD Target LLC, doing business as Blue Sage Cannabis Dispensary. Four of the 10 processor licenses and seven of the 16 cultivator licenses record transfers too. (S7, S8)

None of that is improper. A transfer is how a lottery winner without capital, real estate or an operating partner becomes a store that actually opens. By the roll's own marks, 20 of the 47 licenses approved to operate are ones that changed hands, compared with eight of the 32 that are not yet cleared to open. It also means the businesses that survived the opening years are not always the ones the lottery picked. The roll records names and dates, not prices paid or the ownership behind each new licensee. (S7)

For Cresco, a company that operates in many states, Prestonsburg is a beachhead in a closed market. "Access is the foundation of any successful medical cannabis program," Charlie Bachtell, Cresco's chief executive, said in the company's announcement. "Kentucky continues to make meaningful progress, and we're excited to help build on that momentum." The store sells flower for vaporization, tinctures, topicals and edibles; smoking remains illegal under the state program, as does adult-use cannabis. (S5, S6)

1. Watch the Mountain region roll: three more licensees, in Powell, Pike and Perry counties, are not yet marked approved to operate.
2. Watch the cardholder count against the alliance's 90,000 benchmark, now that every region has a store.
3. Watch the 2027 legislative session for the alliance's asks: telehealth certifications, physician discretion, no notary requirement and advertising relief.
4. Watch prices as 13 cultivators and five processors scale up, the condition Flynn told lawmakers would bring them down.

Beshear told the conference that this was an industry that almost wasn't, and recalled legislative leaders who said they would never authorize it while he was governor. In Prestonsburg the argument is narrower. The store exists, the drive to Lexington is no longer the only option, and the patients Moyer counted are fewer than a thousand. (S3, S4, S6)

Whether that store becomes a business depends on how many of the people who once drove to Lexington, or across the river to Illinois, now get a card. Moyer said that was the message she heard most: people starting the paperwork because there was finally somewhere close to go. (S3)

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