By DOUG GRAVES

Ohio Correspondent

MONROE, Ohio — Ohio regulators received 370 applications to sell medical marijuana, but will initially award up to 60 licenses, at most.

According to Ohio Board of Pharmacy spokesman Cameron McNamee, two greater Cincinnati companies have been approved to cultivate medical marijuana under the state’s new program.

Ancient Roots LLC was approved for a grow location in Clinton County, while Hemma LLC received permission for its operation in Butler County. The approved cultivators were given 10 days to notify the state of the planned location for their facilities.

These two cultivators are Level II cultivator status, meaning the sites must be limited to 3,000 square feet. Level I sites can be as big as 25,000 square feet. Level I licenses will be announced at a later date, likely by mid-2018.

Ancient Roots is headquartered in West Chester, Ohio, listing President David Haley as its primary contact on its applications, and listed its proposed cultivation facility in Wilmington.

Hemma LLC is headquartered in Monroe, where it plans to operate its cultivation facility. Its listed owners are Elizabeth Van Dulman and Meghan Arata. Hemma and Ancient Roots were among 19 Greater Cincinnati-related companies to apply for cultivation licenses under the state’s new rules.

Another group calling itself Ohio Clean Leaf will have operations in either Dayton or Carroll. Ohio Clean Leaf includes seven owners with backgrounds in farming, rental property, trucking, investments and legal marijuana. The ownership includes multiple members of the Landis family of Carroll, who have run a hog and crop farm as well as a trucking company.

Other Level II-approved operations include Fire Rock Ltd. (Fairfield County), FN Group Holdings (Portage County), Mother Grows Best, LLC (Stark County), OhiGrow, LLC (Lucas County), Ascension BioMedical, LLC (Lorain County), Agri-Med Ohio, LLC (Meigs County), Galenas, LLC (Summit County) and Paragon Development Group, LLC (Montgomery County).

Applicants were scored based on their business, operations, quality assurance, security and financial plans.

“These were clearly many strong applicants and these selections for the Level II licenses reflect the best of the rest,” said Brian Wright of the Ohio Cannabis Assoc. “We are looking forward to working with them, our state leadership and the hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who will be able to have safe access to the medical treatments they need.”

McNamee said the Ohio Board of Pharmacy will decide at a later date (likely after sales begin next year) whether to accept additional applications for those areas and whether to add more dispensaries to meet patient demand.

The board decided to initially award up to 60 licenses based on estimates that between 0.04 and 0.44 percent of Ohio’s population (or between 4,600-51,000 patients) will sign up for the program in the first two years. Industry projections estimate between 1-2 percent of the population will qualify.

Ohioans with one of 21 medical conditions can legally buy and use medical marijuana if recommended to them by a physician. The state has until September 2018 to get the program up and running.