The small town of Talent, Oregon is blessed with two medical cannabis dispensaries, and a third will open soon. At the same time, neighboring Phoenix, Oregon has shuttered the doors of its single (thriving) dispensary and nearby Medford tries to discourage all things marijuana. The old saying is “all politics is local.” It does look like, at some point at least, that “all marijuana politics is local” too.
Michael Monarch, CEO of Green Valley Wellness in Talent, Oregon discusses some of the details, political and otherwise, in establishing a first class medical marijuana dispensary in Oregon’s new wild, wild west. Actually, things are not that wild here, more like mellow, at least inside (and outside) Green Valley Wellness. To get underway, Michael and partner Peter Gross effectively lobbied Talent mayor and city council, and helped this chic little city become a dispensary oasis in a desert of cactus-like city councils and county commissioners.
Please check out my interview with Michael Monarch at the Oregon Medical Marijuana Business Conference (OMMBC) on his challenges, successes, and responses to new legal threats.
Don Fitch
Interest in cannabis liberation extends back to the 1960s for Don Fitch. Most of his career has been in high tech and preventive health care, endeavors he continues with Well-Being Skills, focused now on ebook publishing. Don has always followed and contributed to efforts for ending marijuana prohibition. An Oregonian whose vision is endangered by glaucoma, Don has benefited from his state’s 1998 medical cannabis law, and his eyesight is fully preserved. Don has been writing about cannabis and well-being since 2008 in his blog, www.YourBrainOnBliss.com. This site explores the bountiful health benefits stemming from the discovery of the endocannabinoid system and increasingly legal medical cannabis. The impact of these discoveries, and the use of marijuana in prevention and treatment, may be as important to health care as were the microelectronic discoveries Don wrote about in the early ’80s were to our on-going technological revolution. His major goal, still frustrated after decades, is to see cannabis down-scheduled from Schedule I at the federal level. For fun, Don flies paragliders and travels.
