![]() ![]() And that’s why medical marijuana is not working.” “It becomes a ridiculous business model that the State of Colorado put together that makes absolutely no sense from a business standpoint or from a patient standpoint. “Then you’re forever chasing patients, and then you’re worried about having too many plants should the patients drop off,” said Wanda James, owner of Simply Pure in Denver. The decline in medical patients, especially in the Denver metro, poses a challenge for dispensaries, in part because they need a certain number of patients to be allowed to grow a certain number of plants. There are now 88,143 patients in Colorado, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment data. ![]() And since recreational stores opened in 2014, the registry has fallen more than 20 percent. Since the peak of summer 2011, more than 40,000 patients have fallen off the medical marijuana registry. Recreational cannabis is taxed at a higher rate, but given how prices have fallen, someone would have to be a heavy user to notice a big difference in cost. ![]() “Or you can get the same or similar product on the recreational side, you pay a little more tax for it, but at the end of the day there’s a lot less planning and work that goes into it,” Cullen pointed out. Then they have to find a store and designate a caregiver. A patient has to visit and pay for a physician, get a recommendation, file paperwork with the state and pay a small fee. Getting a medical card is also relatively onerous. There are about 200 recreational stores in Denver alone, helping to increase access and lower prices. David Zalubowski/AP A marijuana plant is shown under grow lights at the Colorado Harvest Company in Denver, Oct. Ninety percent of Cullen’s sales are recreational, something he calls “a dramatic shift.” But it’s a shift Cullen and others were expecting. “It’s hard to watch it just morph into a recreational market, but that is what’s happening.” “It’s near and dear to my heart, because it’s how we started, and it’s what we feel passionate about, and still do,” Cullen said. Tim Cullen, who runs Colorado Harvest in Denver, got into medical cannabis because he believed in its medicinal properties. ![]()
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