Marijuana dispenser contemplates regulation

FORT COLLINS – On a recent weekday afternoon, Shawna Stamm, owner of Green Acres Medicinal marijuana dispensary in Fort Collins, pauses to talk about her business that opened Jan. 23.

During the next 45 minutes, several walk-in clients enter seeking marijuana. All the while, her unanswered cell phone rings almost continuously.

“The demand is huge,” says Stamm, 39, who signed up about 50 new clients during a recent Saturday and has acquired about 150 clients in just a few weeks.

Stamm, a former dental assistant and cosmetic esthetician specializing in facials and chemical peels, said she decided to open a medical marijuana dispensary because of a desire to help those in need.

“I truly want to help people,” she said. “I take the term caregiver extremely seriously. This is not a free ride to smoke weed. I try to treat people like a doctor would.”

Stamm, a tall, energetic woman with an open and friendly personality, said she wants to play by the rules and do everything on the up-and-up. She spent time researching the best place to have her dispensary – a commercial zone at 3509 S. Mason St. far away from schools and where kids might congregate – and has advertised her services in local publications.

Stamm said she worries that some less careful dispensaries in the area may harm the progress that’s been made so slowly since Colorado voters approved medicinal marijuana use in 2000.

“There are places in town that are scary,” she said. “They are truly doing things wrong and need to be shut down.”

Stamm said she knows of some dispensaries and physicians that are providing licenses to healthy college students “and that’s not where this is supposed to be going.”

“This is not Amsterdam,” she said. “A lot of people might want it to be, but it’s not.”

Stamm said she’s happy to see the Colorado Legislature finally taking up medical marijuana regulation. “Nothing’s really set in stone, so everybody’s winging it right now,” she said.

Colorado lawmakers were zeroing in on possible new regulations for dispensaries at the time of this writing, including requiring doctors to review a person’s medical history and give them a full exam before issuing a license to buy or grow marijuana.

Stamm said one thing she does not want to see the legislature do is try to limit how many patients one dispensary can serve. “I want them to set some rules in place, but I don’t want them to come in and run my business.”

Stamm said she understands that gaining respectability for a substance that’s been illegal in the United States for so long is going to take time and the best efforts of those who want to overcome society’s prejudice against its use.

“There are still people who really frown upon medical marijuana,” she said. “They can’t get over the fact that the government’s been against it for so many years. I will be the first to say it’s not for everybody. But people have been smoking it for thousands of years, and there’s so much scientific evidence that it really is beneficial for some people.”

Steve Porter covers health care for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-221-5400, ext. 225, or at sporter@ncbr.com.

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