And so it begins. Somewhere out in growland, the clone of a cannabis
mother plant — coddled like a Renoir under dialed-in light — is pushing
out roots. Before winter is up, it will produce flowers to be sold at a
Berkshire retail outlet this July.
More than a year after state
voters approved adult recreational marijuana use, 107 pages of draft
regulations are in hand. After having those tentative rules batted
around at public hearings over the next two months, starting in
Pittsfield Feb. 5, the Cannabis Control Commission must firm up state
law "935 CMR 500.000: Adult Use of Marijuana," by March 15.
The
commission then dives into the business of receiving and approving
applications in what its chairman admits is a "challenging" process.
But you can't hurry a plant.
Even
before rules are in place, the commission is counting on an initial
supply of cannabis from existing sources to feed the recreational
market.
Thanks to the state's medical marijuana program, those
supplies are out there. They include operations like Theory Wellness of
Bridgewater and Great Barrington and the soon-to-open Berkshire Roots
cultivation facility and dispensary on Dalton Avenue in Pittsfield.
Nick
Friedman, president of Theory Wellness, expects his firm to be in the
vanguard of recreational sales, both at its two current dispensaries and
as a wholesale supplier to other retailers.
It's go time, he says.
"A facility should be preparing to start growing right now," Friedman said.
Meantime,
entrepreneurs who still haven't broken in await their chance, hoping
Massachusetts' rules provide opportunities for smaller growers, such as
Berkshires farmers.
"This is estimated to be a billion
dollar industry and we need to make sure western Mass. is not left
behind," said State Sen. Adam Hinds, D-Pittfield.
Hinds said he
and others are working with the Cannabis Control Commission and with
prospective local cultivators to "ensure a level playing field."
"I
am glad we appear to be on track for regulations to be completed March
15 as we move towards applications by April 1 and having stores open by
July 1," Hinds said.
When recreational sales begin this summer,
they will be the first to be regulated east of the Mississippi River.
Local shoppers are expected to propel a business that grew to $6.7
billion in 2016 in North America and is likely to top $20 billion in
revenue by 2021, as decades of resistance fall away.
Legal sales
in California begin today, Jan. 1. While states including Washington
and Nevada allow use, marijuana remains a controlled substance
elsewhere, prohibited by the federal government.
New landscape
As producers lock in, communities across the state, and in Berkshire County, remain befuddled by recreational weed sales.
Many are hedging their bets on the new cannabis landscape by opting to delay the start of retail sales.
Others
cities and towns, though, are laying out welcome mats. Residents of
Clarksburg voted last week to allow recreational marijuana sales in a
small industrial zone on River Road (Route 8), near the town hall.
You still can't buy gas in Clarksburg, but in time shoppers may be able to grass up.
With
its new bylaws, Clarksburg stands to secure something it sorely needs:
new tax revenue. The state law allows communities to place a 3 percent
tax on sales of recreational marijuana.
"Most of our towns are
interested in diversifying their revenue sources, and this would be one
way to do it," said Thomas Matuszko, assistant director of the Berkshire
Regional Planning Commission.
Public health advocates, meantime, are expected to press for greater protections for minors than the draft rules provide.
"Marijuana
is the No. 1 substance for which youth receive residential addiction
treatment in Massachusetts," said Wendy Penner, director of prevention
and wellness for the Northern Berkshire Community Coalition.
With
full legalization, she is concerned that remaining brakes will be
removed from use of a substance young people already view as normal and
acceptable.
"They're perceiving this as not harmful," Penner said.
Hurry-up governing
Steven
J. Hoffman, chairman of the Cannabis Control Commission, is vowing to
meet the July 1 start of recreational sales. That's already six months
later than voters wanted, under the November 2016 referendum question.
In
draft regulations published online late last month, Hoffman's panel
goes where cannabis regulators in other states, like Colorado, initially
feared to tread. The draft rules provide for "social use" of marijuana
—- in short, allowing the drug to be consumed in public with other
people.
That provision is expected to be controversial, as is
how new marijuana businesses will be able to advertise their presence.
Those issues consume pages in the draft regulations and get specific, as
laws must.
Cities and towns will retain a great deal of local
authority to regulate any such "social use" businesses, according to the
draft rules.
While this is the first time the state has written
rules for recreational marijuana sales, Massachusetts can take guidance
from experiences in other states, such as Colorado, where a medical-only
program evolved into adult recreational use.
When it comes to
protecting young people, the state is considering policies shaped to
deal with concerns about youth access to alcohol and tobacco. The
commission's proposed rules, for instance, bar marijuana businesses from
using cartoon images to entice interest from those under 21 — just as
Joe Camel came in for a thrashing from anti-smoking advocates years ago.
Edible products cannot take the form of animals or fruits. And
in fashioning logos, new cannabis businesses cannot use images of
marijuana or play off the plant's many names and nicknames.
Penner, of the Northern Berkshire Community Coalition, suggests such rules only go so far in protecting young people.
"It ends up inevitably targeted to youth, because they're the next market," she said of cannabis marketing.
The adolescent brain, Penner and others in the health field note, remains a work in progress and is vulnerable to addiction.
The
point now, she holds, isn't to undermine the ballot result but to
understand the risk full legalization poses, at a time when cannabis use
by Berkshires teenagers has been ticking up. Use among eighth-graders
increased from 7 percent in 2013 to 11 percent in 2017, according to the
coalition.
"It is really hard to have a nuanced conversation
about this," Penner said, stressing that her goal isn't to roll back the
law. "That is not what this is about."
New arrival
One of 2018's expected cannabis leaders in the Berkshires hasn't even made its official arrival.
The
people behind Berkshire Roots have been overhauling a building at 501
Dalton Ave. in Pittsfield to create 15,000 square feet of cultivation
space plus offices and a dispensary for medical marijuana customers.
John
E. Mullen IV, the outfit's CEO, says he expects to open as a medical
dispensary by March, then apply for a license to sell to the
recreational market as well.
Even before that, Berkshire Roots
will expand to more than 35 employees. Some of those recruited worked in
Colorado and have experience moving from medical to adult-use markets.
"We're
pretty excited about being the first growing facility in Berkshire
County," Mullen said. "It's a huge undertaking and a big investment
financially and in time."
The company began gutting the space,
the former home to a Salvation Army store, almost a year ago. An auto
shop moved out of the back and a pool hall lost its lease this fall.
Now, the full space, nearly 26,000 square feet, will be devoted to the cannabis business.
On
Friday, an inspector from the state Department of Public Health spent
half the day checking the company's adherence to rules governing the
latter stages of cannabis production, including flower processing and
extraction of psychoactive ingredients.
"To make sure we have
all of those things dialed in. It's highly regulated and you have to be
on the top of your game," Mullen said.
As the market widens this year to include recreational, others will get a taste of that level of oversight.
"It's not going to be any less regulated," he said.
Guiding
the growing operation is Dennis DePaolo, chief cultivation officer,
backed up by Joe Baillargeon, Berkshire Roots' production manager.
Investors in the company include Matthew C. Feeney, Andrea F. Nuciforo
Jr. and Albert S. Wojtkowski, according to DPH documents.
Berkshire
Roots and Theory Wellness are the only two dispensaries in Berkshire
County. Another with a prospective address beside Berkshire Roots on
Dalton Avenue, Heka Health, won early DPH approvals but has not moved
forward. An attorney for the firm said earlier it planned to open last
fall but the site at 531 Dalton Ave. is quiet.
And a fourth,
Temescal Wellness, expects to open in Pittsfield in 2018 but has been
focusing for now on its production facility in Worcester, said Julia
Germaine, its chief operating officer.
Building a brand
Friedman,
the Berkshires native who helped create Theory Wellness, said the year
ahead offers his company a chance to reach more customers and expand its
brand.
Having been open for months, both in Bridgewater and in
Great Barrington, Friedman feels he and his colleagues, including CEO
Brandon Pollock, are poised to make an "easy transition" into the
recreational side. Theory Wellness will be applying to sell to the
wholesale recreational market from its growing facility in southeastern
Massachusetts.
"There's a lot of opportunity to be a leader in
the field — and a lot of issues to work through as the new regulations
are formalized," Friedman said. "The next milestone will be the final
draft."
Looking ahead, Berkshire Roots will be seeking permission
to open a second dispensary, likely outside of Berkshire County. And
Theory Wellness may look for a third outlet.
Even as it
considers growth, the company sees itself as a "craft" producer, given
the 12,000-square-foot size of its cultivation plant. Its motto is
"small-batch cannabis."
Friedman says he hopes the industry, still young in Massachusetts, keeps a place for smaller producers.
"I think the small-scale craft producers can be a value in the larger market," he said.
Nathaniel
Karns, executive director of the Berkshire Regional Planning
Commission, said it could be difficult for small operations to find
their way. Those that do get into the cannabis trade early are likely to
prosper, even if they sell out later to larger outfits.
"You
have to sort of wonder with any kind of business if that isn't the
natural flow of things," he said, citing the example of cable television
in its early years, when small companies served communities.
"It will be interesting to watch it unfold," Karns said.
The
website fivethirtyeight.com reported last week that in the last several
years, the biggest cannabis companies nationally have been shouldering
out small firms. The site notes that retail prices for cannabis
typically fall after legalized sales begin, squeezing margins for small
operators.
As the Boston Globe's Dan Adams notes in his latest
"This Week in Weed" recap, the draft rules in Massachusetts seek to
create opportunities for small business.
"Whether that's enough to make little outfits here viable remains to be seen," Adams writes.
The commission holds a mandate from the Legislature to provide opportunities to existing farmers.
Lawrence
Davis-Hollander, an ethnobotanist interested in outdoor cultivation in
Berkshire County, is concerned about wording in one draft regulation
that says the growing area cannot be visible from a public place, such
as a road.
"That is patently absurd. It's legal — hello?" said Davis-Hollander. "Either they are legalizing it or not."
At the Pittsfield hearing in October, he had asked commissioners not to set "overly onerous" rules for local farmers.
Woman's dream
One of the many people watching the rule-making process, and looking for a way into the field, is Donna Norman of Otis.
She
hopes to secure a license to sell cannabis as what she's calling the
Calyx Berkshire Dispensary, somewhere in southern Berkshire County.
Her business name says a lot about her motivations. Calyx is the female part of the cannabis plant.
"I
would love to be one of the first woman-owned cannabis stores in the
Berkshires," she said. "It's giving us a voice in an industry that's
always been a man's world. I don't think enough women are supported in
business. This is our time."
She adds, "I am female. Hear me roar."
Norman
was among several dozen people who offered comments at the October
public hearing Hoffman's commission convened at Berkshire Community
College. She pointed out at the hearing that cannabis use remains
stigmatized.
One of her goals is to help overcome that, she said
in an interview Saturday. That's in part why she applauds the
commission's embrace of "social use," in which establishments could be
licensed to allow people to consume cannabis together in public, under
strict rules.
"You can't regulate an industry and not expect
consumption anywhere," Norman said. "Massachusetts is looking far ahead
and thinking out of the box. It's a very social thing, like alcohol."
Norman,
who has worked in the finance field for three decades, said she
continues to scout for possible retail locations in the county.
"The
communities really need to support this industry," she said. "We need
jobs. A lot of the communities are shooting themselves in the foot by
putting in these moratoriums."
"I'm trying to tiptoe through the landmines and figure it all out," Norman said.
Though
the rules for growing, transporting and selling weed to adults are not
yet fully defined, one thing is clear, people in the business say.
Expect no shortage of customers.
"I think there will be a robust market to serve," Friedman said.
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