More than a year after voters approved legalizing marijuana for recreational use in Montana, anyone older than 21 can now walk into a dispensary and buy cannabis. That has medical marijuana user Joylynn Mane Wright worried.
Wright lives in Prairie County, the state’s fifth-least-populated county, with nearly 1,100 people. She already drives about 35 minutes to get to the marijuana dispensary nearest her home, which is 2½ hours northeast of Billings. And now she wonders how much more difficult it will be to get the cannabis she uses to relieve the chronic pain she developed after a 2017 spinal surgery.
“I’m really worried about supplies and what it’s going to cost,” she said.
Other states have had shortages soon after their recreational marijuana markets opened. In January 2020, when recreational marijuana became legal in Illinois, some dispensaries had to close their doors or impose limits on purchases. The same thing happened in Colorado and Washington when the recreational market opened in those states.
Pepper Petersen president and CEO of the Montana Cannabis Guild and a medical marijuana provider in Helena, said he’s been telling his patients to stock up because he thinks the state’s dispensaries will run out of pot in the short term.
That leaves medical marijuana customers to compete with recreational users for a limited supply of cannabis.
Montana has not instituted such a rule. But Gomez said the 80 dispensaries that will serve only medical marijuana users will protect patients. “We believe the medical-only establishments are the safeguard for ensuring medical marijuana is available to registered cardholders,” Gomez said.
Some dispensary owners said they will reserve some of their supplies to ensure medical customers don’t run out. But others said they don’t plan on holding back, arguing that would be bad for business.
Barbie Turner, a co-owner of Alternative ReLeaf, a dispensary with locations in Polson and Libby, said she is worried about where medical users will get their cannabis. She said that if serving medical customers requires her to stop selling cannabis to recreational users, she will.
Petersen and others said more people might become recreational users once cannabis products that can be smoked or eaten become easier to buy.
Turner said that she and her employees have been working for months to make sure they have enough marijuana but that she’s still worried about the supply. There are limits, both legally and financially, on how much a provider can grow, she said.
Shops will get some help, she said, when the state’s wholesale market opens in January, meaning that dispensaries will be able to sell to one another in bulk.
Although many dispensaries — especially in college towns such as Missoula and Bozeman — are bracing for shortages this month, Erin Bolster said she thinks the real test of marijuana supplies will come in the summer, when millions of tourists visit Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.
Come summer, she thinks, the number of customers will skyrocket. That could mean even more competition for Montana’s medical marijuana there and in other popular destinations.
“We’ve been able to expand production,” Bolster said. “But the question is ‘Did we expand enough?’”
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