Qualified patients now have limited access to medical cannabis products, after the state’s first licensed dispensaries began making sales this week. Voters initially approved medical cannabis access by passing a statewide initiative in November 2016.

As Arkansas dispensaries continue to sell the first harvest of medical marijuana, cultivators and patients are looking toward edibles as the next stage of production.

Advocates say edibles are a more controlled way to consume the drug and that they think demand is high. It’s not clear when edibles might become available, what types will be produced or how much they will cost, but cultivators and dispensaries are limited in what kinds they can manufacture and how they can package them, said Department of Finance and Administration spokesman Scott Hardin.

Voters approved a medical marijuana amendment in 2016. Only two dispensaries, both in Hot Springs, are licensed and only one cultivator has harvested a crop, though two others expect to harvest their own this summer.

With the harvest of the state’s first legal cannabis crop just days away, sales of medical marijuana in Arkansas should begin in mid-May, according to government regulators. Department of Finance and Administration spokesman Scott Hardin said on Friday that a dispensary in Hot Springs should receive final approval for its license to sell medical marijuana within the next two weeks and a second retailer in the city should be inspected in about a week. Eventually, there will be 32 licensed dispensaries to serve the state.

As the state’s first medical marijuana dispensaries gear up to open their doors, Arkansas legislators have been pondering just how they’ll be able to advertise their wares. On Tuesday, Governor Asa Hutchinson will be passing a bill that would curtail the places and people to which medical marijuana businesses are allowed to market.

From the outside, the $6 million BOLD Team medical marijuana cultivation facility looks a bit like a prison and smells like a skunk. A sniffing, and naive, reporter thought the smell was coming from its mammalian source just outside the concertina-wired fence that surrounds the nursery in a fallow field in the middle of Cotton Plant (Woodruff County), but a savvy photographer set her straight.

Things are brighter on the inside, with long rooms of healthy, green plants nurtured and tended scientifically, with special grow lights, thermostats and air measuring devices, and vats of varying mixes of liquid fertilizer. Fans to blow air over the plants, fans to remove exhaust. A laboratory and a Brandeis University-trained chemist. A computer monitor tracking humidity fluctuations.

Arkansas regulators have announced that they have formally awarded all 32 licenses for cannabis dispensaries that will operate under the state’s medical marijuana program. Officials at the Department of Finance and Administration said on Tuesday that all 32 licensees approved last month paid the required $15,000 licensing fee and have posted a $100,000 performance bond. Scott Hardin, a spokesman for the department, said the dispensaries are now authorized to begin serving patients.

Though Arkansas voters passed Amendment 98 in 2016, which legalized medical cannabis in the state, Arkansas’s health department still hasn’t issued any official medical cannabis cards to struggling residents. Due to various legislative and regulatory delays, the state offered qualifying patients the option to attain a temporary medical cannabis license to use in Oklahoma.

More than half of states have legalized marijuana either recreationally or medicinally, but there is still a stigma that cannabis is a gateway drug. That's what one professor at UA Little Rock believed, so he dug deeper into research and was surprised by his results.

“The whole topic itself is motivated by marijuana itself being a gateway drug," said Dr. Rhet Smith, Assistant Professor of Economics at UA Little Rock.

Growing up with a father in law enforcement and an ER nurse as a mother, Smith is familiar with the opioid crisis and the growing acceptance of marijuana.

"Topics of drug abuse weren't exactly foreign topics at our dinner table," Smith said.

In 2015, he began researching how local access to medical cannabis impacts opioid-related deaths.

An Arkansas panel on Wednesday named 32 companies it intends to license to sell medical marijuana, two years after voters approved its legalization and following a series of delays that have frustrated patients and advocates.

The state Medical Marijuana Commission approved the scores from an outside consultant it had hired to evaluate about 200 applications for dispensaries. The companies must pay a $15,000 licensing fee and post a $100,000 performance bond before the licenses to sell the drug are formally issued. The commission last year awarded five cultivation licenses to grow medical marijuana.