ST. LOUIS – The doors opened in the Central West End early Friday, in what was once the old Tom’s Bar and Grill off Euclid but is now home to Good Day Farm Dispensary.
“We grow everything out of our Columbia facility, which is about two hours away,” said Laurie Gregory, chief marketing officer of Good Day Farm. “It’s an impressive facility, from the flower to the mother plants to the babies. It’s all the way up, and these rooms are gorgeous are filled with, we grow everything from 50 to 75 strains that we’re growing constantly.”
A steady stream of customers is greeted by budtenders, who describe everything from edible gummies to grams of marijuana flower now sold over the counter to people 21 and up.
“I came in today because I use CBD gummies to help me sleep,” said Deborah Hauck, a customer. “It’s very good because I’m no longer on my sleeping pills.”
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services was expected to issue the licenses required to sell recreational cannabis on Monday. However, by late Thursday, some 170 dispensaries across the Show Me State were informed they met the requirements to begin sales as early as Friday.
Meanwhile, in the Delmar Loop, a former church is now a Swade Dispensary, where first-time customers and longtime users of cannabis can buy the product legally in Missouri.
“Our production licenses, we have two of them in the St. Louis area and one out in Earth City, and the other down in South Benton Park,” said Jason Nelson, CEO of BeLeaf Medical. “What we’re able to do with our retail assets, which is, you can find a vacant building and retrofit it to produce high-quality cannabis. We’ve brought 60 jobs to Benton Park through that exercise alone on the production side.”
One customer said that the recreational marijuana sales will be a benefit to the state.
“Oh, it’s a great thing,” said Keith Hunter, a customer. “I think it brings a lot of tax dollars to the city and the state and is only going to benefit us moving forward.”