Kansas City’s first marijuana dispensary sells out in two days. When will more open?
On Monday, patients celebrated the first legal sales of marijuana in the Kansas City area. But by the end of the day Tuesday, the dispensary was sold out.
The Fresh Green dispensary in Lee’s Summit opened with long lines but limited supply on Monday afternoon. With only a handful of patients allowed inside at one time, the wait to get inside sometimes lasted hours. It was a similar story on Tuesday, when the shop sold out after serving a total of about 500 patients, said Bianca Sullivan, who owns the dispensary with her husband.
“It was consistent,” she said. “It was about an hour-and-a-half to two-hour wait.”
Sullivan hopes the dispensary will get another delivery of marijuana within the next five to 10 days from its St. Louis-area grower. Other local dispensaries appear to still be several weeks away from opening.
As patients made their way into Fresh Green, located in a former Blockbuster video rental store off Missouri 291, Sullivan quickly noticed a common trend: most of the customers were not young. Her software system calculated the average patient age at 51. Of those patients served, 18 were above age 70 and only eight were between 18 and 21, she said.
To receive a medical marijuana card, patients must have a doctor sign off. But the list of qualifying conditions includes everything from a terminal disease to psychiatric conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder to medical conditions that cause persistent pain.
At dispensaries, patients only need to show their marijuana card and identification. But Sullivan said many openly talked about the conditions that brought them there, whether it was multiple personality disorder or late-stage cancer.
“You feel bad,” she said. “It’s this odd thing where they’re smiling. They’re so glad to finally have this.”
Aside from limited product, the state’s burgeoning marijuana industry hit another snag on Wednesday, as state officials announced they were investigating a consumer complaint of moldy marijuana sold in the St. Louis area. On Thursday, the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services said it had concluded that inquiry, finding “no evidence that the product batch presents a health and safety concern.”
That strain of marijuana was never sold at Fresh Green, Sullivan said.
Less than three miles away and a few blocks from downtown Lee’s Summit, Third Street Dispensary is hoping to open its doors by the end of November.
It is waiting on final state approval of its operation as well as state inspections of harvests at two different cultivation facilities, said co-founder Cheryl Annen. She and her husband have operated the Country Kitchen restaurant in Warrensburg for decades.
Third Street Dispensary will use Carroll County Cannabis Co. as one of its suppliers. Founder Ty Klein, who aims to reinvent his hometown of Carrollton into the “cannabis capital of Missouri,” said he hopes to receive state approval this week of his first harvest. That would allow the company to start delivering some product as early as next week.
Annen said she expected her dispensary would have its final state inspection “any day now.” In the meantime, she’s fielding phone calls from anxious patients looking for relief, she said.
“We’ve heard some really sad stories about conditions and how people have had to find it elsewhere,” she said. “It just makes you eager to open and help these folks.”
Some patients were surprised by the high prices charged in the first days of marijuana sales in Missouri. Fresh Green in Lee’s Summit and N’Bliss in the St. Louis area were both charging about $60 per one-eight ounce of marijuana. Those prices are well above the going rate in other states, but are expected to drop.
“We know that in the beginning we are paying more than we would pay in a stable market. But that’s normal from our research,” Annen said. “And we expect the market to stabilize pretty quickly as other places get opened. It’s higher than we want, but it’s still fair and it’s still better than driving and risking time and criminal activity going to another state or the black market.”
In total, Missouri regulators approved about 40 medical marijuana dispensaries in the Kansas City area.
A spokesman for the Kansas City Cannabis Company said the firm is “optimistic” that it will open its first dispensary in Blue Springs this winter. That will be followed by the opening of stores in Lake Lotawana, Kearney and Excelsior Springs.
But the company’s site cautions that only a handful of the state’s 60 licensed cultivators are in operation so far.
“And demand for that limited amount of product is incredibly high,” it says, “so stores may be delayed until enough products are readily available.”
Missouri Health & Wellness has received state approval to open its dispensaries in Sedalia and Washington, but is waiting on supply.
“We’ve had a lot of support from the community and people have been calling and stopping by asking when we’re going to open. We’re happy to say that we’re ready to serve patients in Sedalia and surrounding communities as soon as product is available,” Randy Stambaugh, the company’s statewide manager, said in a news release this month.
COCO Dispensaries plans to open its first store in Moberly, a small town about 35 miles north of Columbia, during the first week of November. It also plans to eventually open dispensaries in Chillicothe and Hannibal as well as a manufacturing facility in Clarence that will make infused products like gummies.
Ethan Foster, COCO’s co-founder, said he hopes the first store will have a variety of marijuana strains when it opens. But he still doesn’t know exactly what he’ll get from cultivators. He said manufactured products like edibles probably won’t be available until sometime in December.
COCO is still contemplating whether to limit customer purchases when it first opens. Foster said he expects to receive the second shipment of marijuana flower about a month after the first delivery.
Foster said COCO’s opening timeline is largely what he expected. But he knows patients are growing antsy: It’s been nearly two years since Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment sanctioning medical marijuana.
“I don’t have an exact answer as to why it’s taken so long,” he said. “But everything kind of depends upon cultivation and that’s the largest facility that takes a long time to get up and running.”
This story was originally published October 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
