Marijuana dispensary owners: It’s a ‘calling’
November 15, 2009 by Mark Collins
Filed under Business, News
It’s 2:30 on a weekday afternoon and a man walks out of the back room at an office in Meadow View Village in Longmont.
“I’ll see you next week,” he says to the two clerks behind the desk.
The office is nondescript. Color photographs of Colorado mountain vistas hang on freshly painted walls. Two contemporary chairs provide a place for visitors to sit. A plastic tub of bubble gum sits on the counter at the front desk. It’s pretty much like any other business, except the front door to the office is always locked.
Scott Reach, owner of Stone Mountain Wellness in Longmont, says he benefited from medical marijuana after a mountain-biking accident. He calls his business a "mission." Photo by Kira Horvath.
Stone Mountain Wellness, which opened Sept. 1, is one of five licensed medical-marijuana dispensaries currently operating in Longmont.
“I wanted to open my store in a place that was a little more upscale, clean, made my patients feel safe, where they could park in a parking lot and not feel all worried about coming into a store that might not be in a good part of town,” says owner Scott Reach.
Reach became a caregiver — the term the state uses for people licensed to sell medical marijuana — after being a patient himself. The former downhill mountain biker suffered a broken scapula, clavicle and several broken ribs in a bicycle accident in 1996.
Because Reach is allergic to prescription painkillers Vicodin and Percocet, his doctor recommended medical marijuana when it became legal in 2001.
“It really changed my life,” Reach says. “It got me off a bunch of painkillers, it got me off of anti-depressants.”
Business has been brisk at Stone Mountain. Reach says the company, which sits next door to an EdwardJones Investments outlet and a Vic’s coffee shop, did $15,000 its first month. That means he paid nearly $1,300 in sales tax to state and local coffers, Reach quickly adds.
And “every week it gets busier and busier,” he says.
Stone Mountain Wellness offers several varieties of medical marijuana. Photo by Kira Horvath, Longmont Ledger.
But Reach sees the business as more than a an opportunity to make money. He says it’s a calling.
“This is something I feel very strongly about,” he says. “I know it helps people. Most of my patients are cancer people, (or suffer from) fibromyalgia. I have a guy who survived three brain aneurysms. I have very sick people. I try not to cater to the college kids.”
As of July 31, the movement in Colorado included 13,102 people who had applied to be patients since the state’s registry began in 2001 after voters approved a 2000 measure legalizing medical marijuana. According to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, 73 percent of approved applicants are men and the average age is 41.
With 1,166 registrants as of July, Boulder County ranks third among the state’s counties with number of patients. Their diagnoses, according to the CDPHE, range from cancer, glaucoma and HIV/AIDS-related symptoms, to the most common, severe pain.
Ironically, the business that occupied the office space where Stone Mountain serves medical-marijuana cardholders was a company that helped people quit smoking tobacco. But anyone familiar with medical marijuana knows the medical pot industry offers an array of non-smoking delivery systems.
Reach hired a local commercial baker to cook up an assortment of cannabis-infused baked goods. He says his outfit sells 60 medicinal baked goods a week. Cookies cost $5, brownies are $7 and banana bread costs $10 a loaf. The amount of doses varies in each.
The Blueberry Twist was the last medical-marijuana dispensary to open before the city of Longmont voted to placed a 90-day moratorium on new medical-marijuana businesses. (The council voted for the moratorium so the city could consider new zoning regulations about dispensaries; Reach has been asked to sit on a study panel formed by the city).
Tony Woods opened The Blueberry Twist just days before the Oct. 2 moratorium took affect. The store, named after a popular medicinal herb and located at 725 Main Street, has a different vibe than Stone Mountain. Its front door is unlocked, which allows customers into a spacious lobby, decorated in hip industrial style. Corrugated metal is fashioned to one wall. A large black table with bar stools sits in the middle of the room.
Though the front door is unlocked, security is tight at The Blueberry Twist. Woods installed a wire-mesh doorway that locks most of the rest of the roughly 1,200-square-foot office from the front lobby. Someone sits behind a secured window and takes patients’ state-issued cards, runs them through a database to insure they’re legit, Woods says.
When the paperwork clears, customers are allowed into the back where transactions take place.
Woods, who owns the storefront space where his dispensary is located, decided to open The Blueberry Twist after he had difficulty leasing the space to other businesses due to the economy.
Though Blueberry held an official grand opening last week, Woods said he’s been doing business since the beginning of October.
“We’ve seen all types — husbands and wives, some people from the mountains, some hippies, a few men in suits,” Woods says about his growing customer base. “It seems like we’re getting all types of people that are all united by this movement.”
Contact Mark Collins at BDCTheater@comcast.net.
