Alabama's medical marijuana program just opened store number three

BamaBloom opened its doors in Athens, Alabama on September 14 — the third dispensary to go live under Alabama's medical marijuana program, run by GP6 Wellness LLC out of a storefront on U.S. Highway 72 West.

It joins two Callie's Apothecary locations — Montgomery, which opened in June, and Talladega, which opened in late August — as the entire retail footprint of a program state lawmakers created back in 2021 and that only started actually selling product this past June, after years of licensing fights and legal delays.

Nine cities are slated to eventually get a dispensary, with Birmingham, Bessemer and Etowah County named as next in line. At three stores roughly four years after legalization, Alabama's rollout remains the slowest-moving medical market the newsroom tracks — worth watching for any operator sizing up how long a "sure thing" license can take to actually turn into a working store.

For patients in north Alabama, BamaBloom is also just a shorter drive than the two existing options further south — the kind of incremental access improvement that matters more on the ground than it does in a headcount of total dispensaries statewide.