“No.”
That’s the answer Marc Rosenfeld gives when he is asked if he knew what he was getting into when he decided to enter the medical marijuana business.
The attorney, involved heavily in real estate development, says that slowly, his other work and clients have fallen away as his time is consumed with his new business, the Commonwealth Cannabis Company, or CommCan, Inc., which he hopes will be dispensing its medical marijuana products before the end of this year.
CommCan’s Medway cultivation facility, in the Medway Industrial Park near the Medway/Millis town line, is a building near completion.
“We have three provisional registrations to operate registered marijuana dispensaries in the communities Millis (on Route 109 near the Medway town line), Mansfield and Southboro, with a centralized cultivation, processing lab and kitchen facility in Medway,” says Rosenfeld.
Since, in Massachusetts, all of these groups are vertically integrated, and there’s no such thing as wholesale market, he says, CommCan will grow the plants, harvest them, process the plants, extract the oil, create concentrates, infuse the edibles and even package any products it will sell at its dispensaries.
That will definitely mean jobs for the community, and Rosenfeld he is committed to hiring locally where he can, he says. His Medway cultivation facility will, then, employ a master grower, a grow and harvest team, a production team to take the marijuana flowers to the next step.
“What people used to call marijuana or weed or pot is actually the flower,” says Rosenfeld. Half of his actual sales will be the sale of those flowers, but the other half will go to a lab, with a chemist who can extract oil from the plant. Then, he says, the he will need a culinary team to come up with products to make and people to package, label and track all the products. Every bit of the product must be accounted for and will be monitored by camera, he says, and that’s where security comes in.
Patrons of the CommCan’s RMDs will be registered medical marijuana patients, suffering from one of the listed debilitating conditions as defined by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, referred by a physician who has taken training to determine that cannabis is an appropriate option for them.
Personally, the choice to move into this field made sense to Rosenthal, with his background in real estate development and law and his network of knowledgeable advisors, as well as a “personal history with family members who could have benefitted from something like this that was pretty unavailable.” Rosenfeld says he is excited to be part of a new industry legitimizing something that’s been around for 1,000 years.
“Activists have been making progress on this issue for years. In terms of the community’s education level and the media attention in general, it’s touching more lives,” says Rosenfeld. “First it was decriminalized, then it was medically allowable, and it’s now allowable.” Rosenfeld hopes someday that every primary care physician will be “part of this conversation,” he says. He’s personally seen the stigma associated with marijuana fading.
“You would walk into a town hall in 2015, and nobody would talk to you. The look you would get when you said why you were there to initiate a conversation. Now, everybody will talk to you,” he says.
As to the passage of Question 4 this past November, Rosenfeld says that doesn’t affect him.
“Nothing with the implementation of the ballot affects our model or our business,” says Rosenthal. “We operate under the Compassionate Care Act (105 CMR 725: Implementation of an Act for the Humanitarian Medical Use of Marijuana).
“Personally, I am open to nonmedical sales, but Commcan will always be a medical RMD. A lot of people interpret (Question 4 passing) as poof, they’re going to just turn into a nonmedical dispensary, but that’s not how it’s designed to work. I will have to have gone through a special permit process. I’ll have a special permit to say I am operating as a medical dispensary, but to have the ability to sell nonmedical, I’d need to approach the towns again, and it would be a town by town decision.”
Issue Date:
March, 2017
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