State health officials choose new pot czar

Director of Office of Medical Marijuana Use will oversee nearly 500 retail sites

TALLAHASSEE — An attorney with decades of military experience is taking over as the state’s new pot czar at a time when the state’s medical-marijuana industry is poised to double in size.

Florida Department of Health officials tapped Christopher Phillip Kimball to serve as director of the state Office of Medical Marijuana Use, the agency confirmed to The News Service of Florida this week.

As director of the medical-marijuana office, which was created in 2015, Kimball will oversee nearly 500 retail sites.

Kimball spent more than 20 years in the U.S. Navy and served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He received a bachelor’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and graduated from Albany Law School of Union University, according to Kimball’s LinkedIn profile.

Kimball, whose LinkedIn profile listed one of his “professional passions” as “helping clients solve their thorniest problems,” begins the job as the state’s marijuana industry, which has 22 licensed operators, is expected to grow exponentially.

After voters in 2016 passed a constitutional amendment that broadly legalized medical marijuana, a resulting 2017 law laid out a framework for the industry that required the state health department to grant new licenses as the number of patients increases.

With more than 760,000 patients now authorized for medical marijuana, the state should have issued at least another 22 licenses to keep up — doubling the number of current operators.

For years the DeSantis administration blamed a delay on granting more licenses on a challenge to the 2017 law filed by the Tampa-based company Florigrown. But the Florida Supreme Court upheld the law more than a year ago.

The delay in the rollout of new licenses sparked another lawsuit filed this month by Louis Del Favero Orchids Inc. The company has long sought a license, but its other administrative and legal challenges over the past four years have fizzled.

Kimball replaced Chris Ferguson, who ran the medical-marijuana office for the past three years. Ferguson remains at the Department of Health in a different role.