Kansas City cultivation and dispensary applicant hopes to help patients become opioid-free

Dank Medic is a facility applicant based out of Kansas City applying for a dispensary and cultivation facility license. Led by Mark Anthony Jones, the dispensary will sell their own flower and work with manufacturers and facilities to provide further inventory. 

Jones said Dank Medic applied “to provide a healthy alternative to the modern pharmaceutical medical establishment that has a long track record of its products killing people. The use of their products almost killed me. I couldn’t stay on the sidelines when the opportunity to help people with an amazing set of alternative options.”

Their dispensary facility plans to offer flower, edibles, concentrates, vapes, tinctures, topicals, suppositories, and capsules with THC and/or CBD. 

All four partners of Dank Medic are based out of Kansas City, Missouri. Their facilities applied for are both in Jackson County. 

“Our partners’ experience is varied,” Jones said. “My experience comes from being a patient for several years in another state. I became a patient in another state because of an old neck injury that flared up and I was put on opioids by orthopedic and pain doctors and I stayed on them for over six years. It was physically devastating. I wondered many times if I would end up being a statistic just trying to keep the chronic pain under control, much less the acute episodes. After many trial and error attempts, I was able to find the right combination of products that allowed me to lower my opioid usage over a period of a year, and as of Jan 17, 2018, I have remained opioid-free. Because I own family property in Oklahoma, my life partner, Clark Cordova, and I went in with my sisters and opened a dispensary and cultivation center in eastern Oklahoma last January. We are in a town of 4,050 population and there are more dispensaries in the state now than Starbucks. But we were the second to be open in the area and are doing pretty well. We have been traveling down and working from there two weeks out of the month since the first part of 2019.”

Jones said their facility priorities are “plain and simple – to help people alleviate their pain and other maladies and work towards full freedom and delivery from pharmaceutical poisons.”

• What do you see as the outlook of the medical cannabis industry in Missouri? 

“I think the outlook is good. But I hope we do not have $500-ounce prices to the patient. That happens in states when there are free market limitations like only 60 growers in the state! Arkansas has $500 ounces with their 24 growers. They cannot keep up and inevitably the price stays up there.”

• What are your biggest concerns and hopes for the industry? 

“Concerns: federal takeover upon descheduling to schedule 3. My main concern is that the federal government will go the direction of allowing big Pharma to manage it. Hopes: That upon descheduling, the states can retain compliance control from the feds and keep big Pharma OUT!”

• What do you consider the most challenging part of entering the industry? (Funding, application, etc.) 

“The most challenging part of getting into the industry is banking and the 280E taxes. Not that the Missouri application was a piece of cake!”