‘OBVIOUSLY CONCERNED’
Pot co. plans expansion despite fed threats
A Somerville medical marijuana company plans to more than double its number of employees over the next year, open two new dispensaries and eventually expand its clientele to include recreational users, despite the possibility of a federal crackdown.
On a tour Revolutionary Clinics gave yesterday to state Sen. Patricia Jehlen, Rep. Michael Connolly and reporters, CEO Keith Cooper said that after only two months in operation, the company has already hired more than 40 people and expects that number to reach 100 a year from now.
It also plans to open a pair of dispensaries in Cambridge by June and expand its clientele now that Bay State voters have approved recreational marijuana, Managing Director Meg Sanders said.
“We’re not abandoning medical marijuana,” Sanders told the Herald, “but we definitely want to participate in the adult-use market.”
This might seem like an overly ambitious plan, given the Trump administration’s decision to lift an Obama-era policy that kept federal authorities from cracking down on the pot trade in states where the drug is legal.
After U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced last week that he will now leave it up to federal prosecutors to decide what to do when state rules collide with federal drug law, Trump’s new U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, Andrew Lelling, called marijuana “a dangerous drug.” But Lelling also said his office will focus on “bulk cultivation and trafficking cases, and those who use the federal banking system illegally” while considering its available resources.
Jehlen said she was worried about the “chilling effect” Sessions’ announcement might have on an industry for which the state has spent nearly five years crafting regulations. But while Cooper said he was “obviously disturbed and concerned,” he didn’t sound it.
“I’d love to be able to sit across from Attorney Lelling,” Cooper said. “Every time we get a new patient here, it takes them away from an illegal supplier.”
Set in a renovated, twostory house on a section of Broadway that’s dotted with private homes and small businesses, Revolutionary Clinics’ Somerville dispensary looks less like a marijuana dispensary than an upscale jewelry store, with a lounge area and locked display cabinets.
Products offered range from tastefully packaged and arranged containers of cannabis flowers to lotions that claim to treat arthritis and inflammation, and edibles like cheddar crackers, almond cookies and caramels.
A first-time customer who asked to be identified by only her first name, Pat, picked out a range of items to treat her depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, conditions she had been previously treating with pharmaceutical drugs, which made her drowsy.
“I was using marijuana illegally and thought, gee, this works just as well for me,” she said. “So I got a medical marijuana card. I wanted to do it on the upand-up.”