The
Meadowlands — already set to be the home of the state's largest
shopping and entertainment complex — will also be the site of the
state's largest dispensary of medical marijuana.
Once it opens for business, the dispensary plans to serve up to 4,000 patients a month with a variety of strains of cannabis.
The Christie administration this week issued a permit to grow medical marijuana to Harmony Foundation and will consider issuing a permit to dispense marijuana after the crop is tested later this year.
The nonprofit foundation will operate the 10,000-square-foot facility on Meadowlands Parkway in Secaucus.
"After
two years of designing and constructing this state-of-the-art facility,
we are excited to finally put it into action," said Shaya Brodchandel,
Harmony's president and CEO. The strains selected "are well suited for
New Jersey medical patients' conditions and to our unique growing
system," he said.
New Jersey currently has 13,200 patients
registered to purchase medical marijuana, which can prescribed for
certain medical conditions only by physicians who have registered with
the program.
Medical marijuana in New Jersey is the
most expensive in the country, according to Ken Wolski, the head of the
Coalition for Medical Marijuana-New Jersey. It sells for about $500 an
ounce, he said.
The state Legislature has begun considering a measure
to legalize recreational marijuana, which is projected to generate as
much as $300 million in tax revenue. Phil Murphy, the Democratic
candidate for governor, has said he favors legalization. That would make
it easier to purchase marijuana and would change the environment in
which dispensers of medical marijuana operate.
Once
the Secaucus center opens, New Jersey will have six marijuana
dispensaries, which state officials call alternative treatment centers.
The others are in Montclair, Egg Harbor, Woodbridge, Cranbury
and Bellmawr in Camden County.
Former
Gov. Jon Corzine signed New Jersey's law allowing compassionate use of
marijuana to treat certain medical conditions in 2010, leaving it for
Gov. Chris Christie to implement.
Christie, who
vehemently opposes legalization of recreational marijuana, enacted some
of the strictest regulations in the nation for medicinal marijuana.
Wolski
said he welcomed the new dispensary, but added: "We're very
disappointed with the pace of the process." Approval of the sixth
center, he said, "is long overdue." The law had anticipated that
additional centers would be approved by the state after the first six.
The Health Department says its permitting process for new growers is modeled after the background checks for casino operators.
The
examination of Harmony Foundation's executives and funding sources
began in December 2014. The leaders and financing have changed since
then, said Donna Leusner, a spokeswoman for the Health Department,
prolonging the vetting process.
"The permit was
issued after a comprehensive review, including several site inspections,
background checks of its corporate officers and a review of its
security operations and cultivation facility," she said.
Brodchandel,
who is 30, has no previous experience in the marijuana industry, but
led a company that produced products used in nuclear medicine, a highly
regulated industry that prepared him for this role, said Leslie
Hoffmann, a spokeswoman for Harmony. He joined the foundation in 2015.
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