In July, Mississippi will begin accepting applications for those wanting to open a medical marijuana dispensary. Before that, aspiring dispensary owners must receive permits from their city, approving the location of the dispensary.
As of Thursday, there have been three permit requests for dispensaries and another for a grow facility filed with the city of Columbus, according to building administrator Kenneth Wiegel.
The city’s planning commission will consider the requests on June 13 and make its recommendation whether to approve or deny the permits to the city at the June 21 city council meeting.
Starkville Mayor Lynn Spruill said that while there have been a lot of inquiries about obtaining permits in Starkville, no one has applied for a permit so far.
“I’d be very surprised if that doesn’t happen, though,” Spruill said.
Among those who have filed for a permit are Corey Herring and Sophia Kibe, who are partnering on a planned dispensary at a Highway 45 site Kibe has been renting for two years.
Herring is the owner of Corey Herring Automotive and Kibe is a massage therapist at Mississippi State who also has a private practice as well as a metaphysical shop, which offers an array of crystals and minerals to help people in improving their health holistically.
“We’ve been working on this for about a year,” Herring said. “Sophia and I have been buddies for years and years. I work on her vehicles and she works on my sore muscles.”
Getting a site permit is just one step in the application process, a process Herring called “a train wreck.”
“It’s not cheap ($25,000 for a license and a $15,000 application fee) and you had better have a lot of patience,” he said. “There are a lot of things that have to be done. There are 36 pages of stuff the dispensaries have to do — background checks, a signed lease, getting approval from the planning commission and city. You have to have a huge security system and a huge camera system. You have to have a survey of the property line, a business plan and a financial plan. It’s very expensive to do this.”
“It’s very rigorous,” Kibe said. “It’s not like opening a liquor store, This is really, really regulated.”
Before she could pursue her plans to sell medical marijuana, Kibe had another sale to make: convincing Herring of the benefits of medical marijuana.
“I have wanted to do this for a really long time,” Kibe said. “I have friends out west who have been on the forefront. It isn’t something that’s taboo out there, but here we’ve been conditioned to believe it’s a bad thing.”
Herring fit that description.
“To be honest with you, as somebody who has never used marijuana, I was against it,” Herring said. “But I have a family member who has really bad arthritis and the only thing that seemed to relieve the pain was the CBD you get in medical marijuana.”
The more Kibe explained the benefits of medical marijuana for pain management, the more convinced Herring became.
“With the right dosage, if you do it correctly, it’s almost miraculous how well it works,” Kibe said. “There are other things that are legal that are far less effective.”
Herring said he began to realize the importance of providing medical marijuana in the Columbus area.
“I’m big with veterans and medical marijuana can really help with PTSD,” Herring said. “That was the big thing for me. We have (Columbus Air Force Base) and a lot of veterans who live here. We probably have as much PTSD as any place in the country. I feel like this is something those veterans and people suffering from nonreversible pain really need.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
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