Utah Delays Awarding Medical Marijuana Grower Licenses

TORONTO, July 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) –PRESS RELEASE — Aleafia Health Inc. has announced that on July 12, 2019, Aleafia Health’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Aleafia Farms Inc., secured a License Amendment under Health Canada’s Cannabis Regulations authorizing cannabis cultivation for the entirety of the company’s Port Perry Outdoor Grow facility. The license immediately increases the company’s licensed and operational outdoor cultivation area from 292,000 square feet to over 1.1 million square feet.

As previously announced on June 10, 2019, Aleafia Farms received approval for cultivation in Zone 1 of the outdoor grow facility, and days later completed the planting of Canada’s first legal, large-scale outdoor crop. The license now adds Zones 2, 3 and 4 which encompasses the full 1.1-million-square-foot cultivation area. The license is effective as of July 12, 2019 and expires on Oct. 13, 2020.

The company expects to commence planting the newly licensed area on July 15, 2019, using approximately 7,000 cannabis plants currently growing in pots in Zone 1. The outdoor grow operation will be overseen by Aleafia Health’s proven, experienced cultivation team, which together have led the build-out and operations of seven cannabis cultivation facilities.

“The immediate four-fold increase in Aleafia Health’s licensed and operational cultivation area is our most significant milestone to date,” said Aleafia Health Chairman Julian Fantino. “We will continue to lead the way in low-cost production. This exponentially increases our total cultivation footprint while securing and increasing product supply for medical cannabis patients.”

It is intended that the cannabis grown at the company’s outdoor grow facility will be processed at the company’s Paris facility, for the extraction and production of high-margin products within a closed loop ecosystem.

“Our team is again relentlessly focused on execution, with plants in the ground within one business day of receiving our new Health Canada licence,” said Aleafia Health CEO Geoffrey Benic. “We plan to benefit from the increasing scale of our production operations across three facilities. Low-cost cannabis grown at Port Perry will accelerate and scale our mission of growing, producing and selling high-margin value-added cannabis health and wellness products globally.”