Updated Wednesday, Aug. 26, with a response from the Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance, which says the Lexington store is now scheduled to open in early October. Kentucky’s medical cannabis program reaches a milestone Friday, when Blue Sage opens a dispensary at 617 West Main Street in Lebanon — the 24th store to open out of the 48 the Commonwealth authorized, and the halfway point of a retail network the state began drawing names for in late 2024. Lexington will not be part of that milestone. The state singled out Fayette County for special treatment when it designed the program, handing it two dispensary licenses instead of the one nearly every other county was allowed. Twenty months after both names were drawn, one of those two stores is open. The other has not opened, and the company holding the license lists its principal office at the Ann Arbor, Michigan, headquarters of a multistate operator that has managed to open two other Kentucky stores this year — in London and in Wilder — but nothing in Lexington. Asked about it Wednesday, the executive director of the state’s cannabis trade association identified the coming Lexington store by brand name and gave a date. “High Profile Lexington, it is scheduled to open this fall, (early October tentatively),” Rachel Roberts of the Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance wrote in response to questions from The Lexington Times. High Profile is the retail brand of C3 Industries, the Ann Arbor company. If that holds, Lexington’s second dispensary will open about 21 and a half months after the state drew its name. What the state says the program looks like The Office of Medical Cannabis sent cardholders its August newsletter Wednesday afternoon. Its snapshot, dated Aug. 25, counts 25,209 active cardholders, 11 cultivators, five processors, two safety compliance facilities and 23 open dispensaries. Five of those dispensaries were new since the last newsletter: NatureMed in Murray (Calloway County), Speakeasy in Stanford (Lincoln County), Green Releaf in Richmond (Madison County), a High Profile Cannabis Shop in Campbell County, and Blue Sage in Lebanon (Marion County), which the state lists as opening Aug. 28. The gap between the state’s count of 23 and the industry’s count of 24 is Lebanon itself — the state’s Find a Dispensary page lists only stores already approved to operate, while the Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance counted Friday’s ribbon-cutting in advance in a release it sent Monday. The Lexington exception, and the license that hasn’t opened When the state built the dispensary map, it divided Kentucky into 11 regions, guaranteed each region at least four licenses, and capped every county at one — with two exceptions. Fayette and Jefferson counties, the state’s two largest, each got their own separate lottery for two licenses apiece. Fayette’s drawing was held Dec. 16, 2024. According to the selectee list the governor’s office published that day, under the heading “Region 1 – Bluegrass (Fayette ONLY),” the two winners were DHK KY LLC and ZenLeaf, Inc. ZenLeaf’s license did not stay with ZenLeaf. The Office of Medical Cannabis notes on its licensee list that ZenLeaf asked to sell or transfer the license to KYLX Acquisition Company, LLC; the office approved the request April 3, 2025, and the transfer was completed May 6, 2025. KYLX opened as Speakeasy Dispensary – Lexington at 1849 Alysheba Way on Jan. 15, 2026 — the first dispensary to open anywhere in Kentucky, a day ahead of The Post in Beaver Dam. DHK KY LLC has not opened. It is still on the state’s licensee list under Region 1 Bluegrass, Fayette County. It is not marked as approved to operate, and it does not appear on the Find a Dispensary page at all. Three Kentucky companies, one Michigan address DHK KY LLC is not a dormant shell. Kentucky Secretary of State records show the company was organized Aug. 13, 2024, is active and in good standing, and filed its most recent annual report on June 11, 2026. Its registered agent is Capitol Corporate Services at 828 Lane Allen Road in Lexington. Its principal office is listed as 4420 Varsity Drive, Ann Arbor, Michigan. That is the address C3 Industries gives as its own headquarters. C3 is a vertically integrated cannabis company founded in 2018 that operates the High Profile Cannabis Shop retail chain. Two other Kentucky companies list the identical principal office. ERH KY LLC, organized the same day as DHK — Aug. 13, 2024 — and registered in Laurel County, filed its annual report on the same day as DHK, June 11, 2026. Laurel County is where the High Profile store in London opened May 5. C3 Kentucky LLC, organized July 16, 2024 and registered in Campbell County, is where the High Profile store in Wilder opened Aug. 17 — the Campbell County opening the state’s newsletter announced this week. So the same Ann Arbor address sits behind three Kentucky dispensary licenses. Two of them are open and selling. The third is the one the state carved out of its own one-per-county rule to give Lexington. C3’s public pages are inconsistent about Kentucky. The company’s About page says High Profile retails “in Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Massachusetts, and New Jersey,” and does not mention Kentucky. Its retail page does: “For High Profile retail locations in Michigan, Missouri, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and Kentucky visit highprofilecannabis.com/locations.” The chain’s Kentucky page lists the London and Wilder stores. None of them mentions Lexington. The public records establish that DHK KY LLC gives C3’s headquarters as its principal office and that two sibling Kentucky licensees give the same address. Update, Aug. 26: After this story was published, The Lexington Times retrieved two further Secretary of State records that settle the question. DHK KY LLC’s current officers are listed as managers Ankur Rungta and Vishal Rungta, C3 Industries’ co-founders. And on July 15, 2026, DHK KY LLC registered an active assumed name: “HIGH PROFILE CANNABIS SHOP – LEXINGTON.” The Fayette County license is C3’s, by the company’s own filings. C3 Industries has not responded to questions. Why a license can sit for two years Roberts, who did not dispute the timeline, pointed to obstacles she said outsiders tend to miss. “It’s important to note the challenges medical cannabis businesses still face in finding landlords willing to rent to them and the challenges our industry faces without access to traditional financing for construction etc.,” she wrote. “I believe the perception is that this operates like other retail operations, when in fact it is very different because of stigma and federal overlay that affects everything from banking, to insurance, to buildout.” Because cannabis remains federally illegal, operators generally cannot get conventional bank loans, ordinary commercial insurance, or in many cases a landlord willing to sign — constraints that fall hardest on the buildout phase, which is exactly where Lexington’s second license has been stuck. Roberts offered to discuss the subject further by phone. She raised a second constraint that cuts at the program’s reach rather than its footprint: under the statute, licensees are “severely restricted in the ways they can advertise, so many eligible Kentuckians simply do not know that this is an option for them.” What the rules actually require Kentucky does not set a hard deadline for opening. Under 915 KAR 1:020, a license is valid for one year from the date of issuance. Section 6 of that regulation says a licensee that has not met “the timeline estimates provided in its initial license application to begin cannabis business activities in the Commonwealth” must notify the cabinet and submit a corrective action plan. If the licensee then fails to comply with its own corrective action plan, the cabinet “may impose penalties or sanctions.” Nothing in the regulation revokes a license simply because a store has not opened. But the regulation does create a paper trail — a notification, a corrective action plan — that would show what DHK told the state about when Lexington’s second dispensary is coming. Whether that paperwork exists is a question for the Office of Medical Cannabis. The Lexington Times put these questions in writing to C3 Industries, the Office of Medical Cannabis and the Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance on Wednesday, Aug. 26. The Alliance responded within an hour and its answers appear throughout this story. C3 Industries and the Office of Medical Cannabis had not responded as of publication. This story will be updated if they do. The industry’s numbers The Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance, a trade association for licensed cannabis businesses, used Friday’s Lebanon opening to make a broader case about the program’s health. In its Aug. 25 release, executive director Rachel Roberts said the rollout has been “exemplary” and that “pricing has begun falling as more dispensaries and brands enter the market.” The Alliance said the industry has created 407 jobs across cultivators, processors, dispensaries and testing facilities as of July, that 487 registered practitioners are certifying patients, that patients can buy from 14 Kentucky-grown brands, and that July sales totaled $1.87 million with August tracking toward $2 million. Asked where those numbers come from, Roberts said the Alliance obtains them itself. “We get data via regular Open Records Requests the alliance files to help track industry metrics,” she wrote. “The OMC also shares certain metrics monthly with licensees. The sales and jobs numbers come from those sources.” In other words, the state collects sales and employment data and distributes it monthly to license holders, but does not publish it on the program’s public website — which leaves a trade association as the main public conduit for how much medical cannabis Kentucky is actually selling. One set of the Alliance’s numbers does not add up. The release says Kentucky had 24,332 active cardholders as of Aug. 14, “a 12,032-patient increase from July 2025, representing 109.9% year-over-year growth.” Subtracting the stated increase from the stated total implies a July 2025 baseline of 12,300, which works out to about 98% growth, not 109.9%. Asked for the underlying figures, Roberts supplied two: 10,953 active patients on July 1, 2025, and 12,745 on Aug. 22, 2025. “I believe the calculation was based between those two data points since there was no August 14 number to directly compare to for YOY,” she wrote. Neither comparison produces the published percentage. Measured against the July 1 figure, the Aug. 14 count is up about 122%. Measured against the Aug. 22 figure, it is up about 91%. The state’s own count of 25,209, taken Aug. 25, is up about 98% from Roberts’ Aug. 22, 2025 number. The direction is not in dispute — by any of these comparisons, Kentucky’s cardholder rolls roughly doubled in a year. The specific figure in the release does not match the data behind it. The Alliance also said Sunnyside is scheduled to open in Prestonsburg in October, which would put at least one operating dispensary in each of the state’s 11 regions. That would complete the map by region. Whether it completes it in Fayette County depends on October. The state deliberately authorized two stores here, and one company has held the second license, in good standing, without opening a door, since the week before Christmas 2024. Roberts says that changes this fall. The company that would have to open it has not said so itself. Correction, Aug. 26, 2026: An earlier version of this story said C3 Industries’ website lists six states and that Kentucky is not among them. That is accurate for the company’s About page, but not for its retail page, which does name Kentucky. The passage has been rewritten. The Lexington Times regrets the error. Sources Kentucky Office of Medical Cannabis, Cardholder August Newsletter (emailed Aug. 26, 2026) Kentucky Office of Medical Cannabis, "Licensees" Kentucky Office of Medical Cannabis, "Find a Dispensary" Office of the Governor, "Medical Cannabis Dispensary Lottery Selectees, December 16, 2024" (PDF) Kentucky Secretary of State, Business Entity Search (DHK KY LLC, ERH KY LLC, C3 Kentucky LLC, KYLX Acquisition Company LLC) 915 KAR 1:020, Cannabis business licenses C3 Industries, "About" High Profile Cannabis Shop, Kentucky locations Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance news release, Aug. 25, 2026 Cover photo: "Cannabis sativa plant (4)" by Chmee2, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance (Claude Opus 5) for The Lexington Times and finalized by the editor. All records cited — the state licensee list, the governor's lottery selectee list, Kentucky Secretary of State corporate filings and 915 KAR 1:020 — were retrieved and reviewed directly. Republishing: This is original Lexington Times reporting, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. You may republish this article, in full and unaltered, for free — including commercially — with credit to The Lexington Times and a link to the original.The post Lexington’s second cannabis dispensary license has sat unopened for 20 months. The industry’s trade group says a High Profile store is coming in October. appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less