Today.

In his weekly presser, the governor talked about Kentucky's new medical cannabis program.

Thousands of businesses submitted applications for licenses to grow, process and sell medical marijuana to qualifying patients starting next January.

But the law only allows 48 dispensaries is divided between 11 regions of the state.

The governor says the number of applicants exceeded expectations and he says the state will work overtime to process those applications before the plan license lottery in October.

We are increasing our staff, almost doubling them for reviewing the applications.

We had already taking the step to move from about nine people to about 29 people, and we're adding another 20 on top of that to do our best to get through this as quickly, but also as accurately as we can.

The most important thing is that we do it right and we do it safely and we create a program that addresses any concerns and then provides this important health care service to our people.

We will announce the lottery dates for each license category in the coming weeks yourself to be prepared for processor and cultivate.

That lottery will be earlier than dispensaries.

This the program is going to help a lot of people.

I remember the better.

And with PTSD, who was brave enough to come up here to this podium with the service dog and to talk about how this helped him get from a 20 plus medications down to one or two.

Talked about how he had been contemplating suicide and had difficulty working and and how it helped him get to a really good and positive place where he's enjoying life and he could come up here and even do this.

So we're really excited as this rolls out.

And I just remind people that it is still a limited program that that you have to have one of a certain number of conditions.

While I think there need to be more conditions, it is limited to that.

And so we are making sure that as we set up the industry, that it's appropriately scaled, that we don't go through what we went through.

And hemp that left a lot of farmers with a whole crop that couldn't sell threatened bankruptcy, had a lot of processors.

But whether they had the right intentions are not in the beginning go out of business.

We want to make sure we do this right.

Patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder will be eligible to use a medical marijuana.