Medical cannabis businesses to be allowed in Covington

The Covington City Commission voted to allow medical cannabis businesses in the city on Tuesday.

City Manager Ken Smith recommended in July folding the different medical cannabis business types into the city’s existing business categories as established by ordinance rather than making new categories.

Under this suggestion, the city would categorize a dispensary as a pharmacy, meaning one could open wherever a pharmacy could also open. The commission affirmed this recommendation Tuesday night.

The legalization of medical cannabis in Kentucky came about on March 31, 2023 , when Gov. Andy Beshear signed Senate Bill 47 into law. The law, which takes effect on Jan. 1, 2025, enabled the regulation of medical marijuana statewide and established the administration of such regulation under the Cabinet for Health and Family Services and the newly-established Kentucky Medical Cannabis Program.

The law established five kinds of allowable facilities: cultivating centers where the cannabis would be grown, processing facilities where the plants are refined for medical use, hybrid facilities where both cultivation and processing would take place, dispensaries and safety facilities where products are tested to ensure they’re safe to use. Dispensaries can only sell the cannabis itself. They cannot sell any other items.

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Under Tuesday’s ordinance, cultivating centers are categorized as light industrial facilities, processing facilities are categorized as micro-manufacturing centers, safety compliance facilities are categorized as research, testing and development labs and production facilities are categorized as warehousing centers. Dispensaries, as mentioned before, would be categorized as pharmacies.

Smith argued this will make it easier for city staff to enforce zoning for the businesses as they will have clear categories to reference, Smith said on Tuesday, rather than leaving them to figure it out on their own.

The first round of licensing will see the issuance of 11 processing licenses and 48 dispensary licenses across Kentucky, numbers that will increase in the coming years as the state gets more used to regulating the businesses. Those licenses will be distributed throughout the commonwealth’s 11 area development districts. No more than one dispensary license per county will be issued in this first round.

Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties have already banned the establishment of medical cannabis businesses county-wide, but regulations at the city level can override the prohibition.

Dispensaries cannot open within 1,000 feet of a school or a daycare. This limited the number of spaces where one could conceivably appear in Covington.

“It’s pretty evident that the areas in Covington where a dispensary could be open just due to that one restriction is pretty limited, at least up here, closer to the river,” said Interim City Solicitor Frank Schultz.

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