After applying for and failing to receive a license to operate a marijuana dispensary, a Loudon man is suing the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services over failing to follow its own rules.
Paul Morrissette, who owns Regal Auction Services in Franklin, filed a complaint Thursday in Merrimack County Superior Court. Morrissette claims DHHS improperly dismissed his application to open Regal Compassion Center in Franklin and failed to follow the law regulating medical marijuana dispensaries.
Spokesman Jake Leon said Friday that DHHS hadn’t received a copy of the complaint, and couldn’t comment on it. “When it has been received, the department will review it thoroughly and will work with the Attorney General’s Office to respond to it,” he said.
In the complaint filed Thursday, Morrissette claims that DHHS was unfair, fraudulent and failed to follow through on its promises when evaluating dispensary applications.
Morrissette began working on his application after state Legislature approved medical marijuana use in 2013, and by the time he submitted it in January 2015, he spent $100,000 on the process, he told the Monitor at the time.
Thirteen others submitted applications, too.
Regal Compassion Center was not among the dispensaries that received a license in 2016 (only four are allowed at a time). Those that did are: Sanctuary ATC in Plymouth, Temescal Wellness in Dover and Lebanon, and Prime Alternative Treatment Center in Merrimack.
Prior to those licenses being issued, DHHS officials toured the host towns that had applications accepted and chosen for potential certification. At the first such meeting in Plymouth during the summer of 2015, Morrissette, along with others, shared his displeasure at the dispensary approval process.
Morrissette said that the law required DHHS to hold public hearings before selecting applicants. A DHHS official at the meeting disagreed – she said public input was being gathered in the post-selection, pre-registration phase of licensing a dispensary.
The applications were confidential before the selection point, the official said, making it “not appropriate” to gather input.
But Morrissette still feels DHHS violated this particular line in the medical marijuana statute: “Any time one or more alternative treatment center registration applications are being considered, the department shall, in partnership with the local governing body of the town or city where the alternative treatment center would be located, solicit input from qualifying patients, designated caregivers, and the residents of the towns or cities in which the alternative treatment center would be located. ”
He also claims DHHS did not abide by the 18-month deadline to issue marijuana dispensary registration certificates (they were issued in spring and summer of 2016, about three years after the law went into effect).
And Morrissette claims it was unfair and ultimately unlawful to equally weigh applications naming a specific proposed location for a dispensary – like his – with applications that didn’t have a specific location.
Morrissette continues in his suit that applicants who were approved didn’t follow all the rules of the statute, while he did.
When he filed an appeal to combat DHHS’ final decision on applicants, Morrissette said DHHS claimed it couldn’t hear the appeal due to a conflict of interest with an attorney.
Specifically, Morissette, through Concord attorney Bruce Marshall, asks for a judge to rule in favor of his case, for DHHS to pay his legal costs, and “other and further relief.”
His lawyer, Marshall, said the goal is for Morrissette to eventually be able to open up Regal Compassion Center someday.
“That would be the ideal resolution for my client,” Marshall said.
This is not the first lawsuit to be filed related to New Hampshire’s medical marijuana law. Prior to the state’s four dispensaries opening in 2016, Alstead resident and terminally ill cancer patient Linda Horan sued the state in order to use her therapeutic cannabis card in Maine.
Horan, who won the case in late 2015, died last February.
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)