Legal recreational marijuana sales OK'd a few days early in Missouri

Feb. 3—CARTHAGE, Mo. — Adam Murphy got a surprise on Thursday.

The director of retail for Show Me Organics, owners of the Blue Sage Cannabis dispensaries in Carthage and Lebanon, had been preparing his shop to sell marijuana and related products to adults for recreational uses starting Monday, but he got a call from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, saying their licenses would be ready on Friday, three days ahead of the deadline.

"The state surprised us yesterday afternoon, telling us our licenses were going to be approved today," Murphy said on Friday. "Our licenses at this location, and we have another Blue Sage in Lebanon, were both officially approved at about 6:10 a.m. this morning. It's a big change today, we are selling adult use cannabis to anyone 21 years or older who have a valid photo ID. and it's been busy."

Murphy said things started out slow in the morning, but as people started finding out that recreational marijuana sales were starting, business picked up.

"The phone has been ringing very two seconds," he said. "We opened the door with nobody here, but all day things have been picking up. Anything that's available for medical use is now available for recreational use, so flour is a large chunk of our sales, ground up flour that they can use for baking. After that we sell probably more edibles. Gummies are really big, oil cartridges, concentrates, tongue tinctures, transdermal patches, olive oil, there's all kinds of stuff."

John Payne, one of the leaders of the effort to pass constitutional Amendment 3 in the November 2022 election, said he's been hearing from people across the state that the approval of licenses for sales of recreational marijuana to adults on Friday caught a lot of people by surprise.

"That was pretty much everyone's expectation that they weren't going to be able to sell until Monday," Payne said. "That was until yesterday around 1 o'clock or so. I wouldn't say it was a huge surprise given the fact that it had to be done by Monday under the state constitution. It was always possible they could have gotten it done earlier, but our expectation was that it was going to be on the day that was mandated by the constitution. So it did take us by surprise a fair bit."

Payne said he heard from a dispensary owner in St. Louis who said he had lines out the door at his two locations starting around noon on Friday.

Murphy said he was gearing his two shops up for additional sales and a rush of customers.

He said estimates he had heard were that sales would jump to three to five times their current levels once the recreational sale of marijuana to adults started.

"We did add four more registers here," Murphy said. "We only had three up until today, now we have seven. Three of them are the express lanes that will help kind of keep people moving through.

"We're also recommending people do their orders online because those show up here and we can make it for you, then hopefully by the time you get here, it's ready and you can check out in the express lane and get in and out really quickly," Murphy said. "The wait time is what I'm most concerned about, just because we're going to have so many people here, so we're trying to help speed things up a little bit."

Justin Pace and his wife, Kali Bowman, both of Lamar, came to Blue Sage to make their purchase shortly after 12:30 p.m. on Friday.

Pace said they were both excited to finally see legal marijuana sales for recreational use in Missouri.

"I've been waiting 13 years just to be able to walk in and legally purchase without having to worry about anything," Pace said. "It's nice because we've actually driven to a different state to be able to access there, and it's nice to be able to keep it local and pay taxes here. We took a road trip up to Detroit recently to see my uncle, and we stopped at a few dispensaries in Illinois on the way there. Then on the way home, just on the other side of St. Louis, there was recreational use there so we stopped there on the way back. It's nice to be able to go to a neighboring town now instead of another state."

Murphy said he's excited to see marijuana sales for recreational use, but he wanted to reassure the people who have been buying it for medical uses as well.

"I know a lot of medical patients are worried about adult use customers coming in and taking all their medicine and that's why I said we're really lucky that we have a direct line to basically all the product we need," Murphy said. "Our medical patients are who got us here, they have kept us open for two years and I want to let them know that we have not forgotten about them."