Ron Strider
Well-Known Member
Light like an autumn sunrise spilled into the dim hallway, chased by a smell of earthy pine.
Inside a flowering room, hundreds of marijuana plants soaked up their last hour of orange and red artificial sunlight before the room would go completely dark, simulating night for 12 hours to advance the budding process at Vireo Health’s upstate New York facility.
At a similar location in Scranton’s Green Ridge section, officials with the Minnesota-based company plan to report to the Pennsylvania Department of Health that they are ready to begin growing by the Dec. 20 deadline.
The company’s subsidiary, Pennsylvania Medical Solutions LLC, is one of only 12 applicants out of hundreds to receive a growing and processing permit under the state’s new medical marijuana law.
The drug will be cleared to treat 17 ailments in Pennsylvania under strict new rules. Companies that grow and process the plant into medicine, and others that operate dedicated dispensaries, are racing to meet fast-approaching deadlines, including Pennsylvania Medical Solutions, or PAMS, officials who say they’ll be ready by the target date.
New ground
The New York growing facility operates in many of the same ways Scranton’s will. Horticulturist Chuck Schmitt, cultivation director for the New York and Scranton facilities, said that’s in part because New York’s regulations, also fairly new, are similar to Pennsylvania’s.
Tucked away in the hills of Fulton County, surrounded by sprawling farmland, Vireo’s facility is the first business to set up at the Tryon Technology Park, a former state-owned juvenile detention center that shut down in 2011 with a dozen or so buildings left on 515 acres.
On the same hilly compound where teenagers once were likely jailed for selling marijuana, Vireo grows it by the bushel with government blessing. Some buildings have been demolished, some are doomed for demolition and some will stay.
Vireo likes to repurpose old buildings, said its New York subsidiary’s Chief Executive Officer Ari Hoffnung. It cuts down on construction costs and fits the company’s good-steward values.
A chain-link fence, about 10 feet tall and topped with barbed wire, surrounds a plain one-story building. Except for a small sign on the door and four peaks of a greenhouse in the back, a passerby might never guess marijuana grows there.
Inside, a door divides two main hallways. Rooms in one wing house hundreds of plants at different growth stages with different types of light to simulate parts of the growing season.
In one room, harvested full-grown plants hang upside down to dry.
On the other side of the door, scientists use high-tech equipment to grind down buds and convert them to oil.
Lab workers in the far end of the building mix in additives, including coconut extract, before packaging the medicine for distribution.
The New York plant employs about 30 people. The Scranton plant, on Rosanna Avenue off East Market Street, will need about the same number. Sixteen employees in New York, more than half of workers there, staff a security team for round-the-clock surveillance.
From inside the security room, they guard the entrance and study an array of monitors linked to cameras throughout the complex.
Regulations in New York, mirrored here in Pennsylvania, mandate meticulous record-keeping. Growers document weights at every stage, including when they discard stalks and leaves after plucking the buds.
“Every part of it has to be accounted for,” Schmitt said.
If projected waste conflicts with actual records, it could trigger an inquiry by regulators.
The New York health department, which governs the state’s medical marijuana industry, can demand records or video footage at any time.
Careful process
Inside the extraction room, operations manager Kait Nedo holds up a blue bucket half-filled with decarboxylate — buds ground into powder that have been heated to activate medicinal qualities.
The bucket’s contents comprised 30 to 40 plants, she said, and the volume would be reduced to even less than that during oil extraction.
While anything containing valuable amounts of cannabis oil gets stripped for processing, the growers still grind up waste to render it “unusable and unrecognizable” and mix it with soil, Schmitt said.
From the moment clone cuttings get planted, each has a unique barcode that it keeps until harvest time.
A barcode chain follows the production process to the dispensary to ensure Vireo can trace any problems back to the source. Pennsylvania law calls for a similar “seed-to-sale” tracking system.
Unlike in New York, Scranton will have no greenhouses.
Everything will grow inside the 60-year-old building PAMS bought for $2 million. Renovations and construction are underway.
The company has yet to grow a single plant in Pennsylvania, but some already challenged its claim on one of an initial 12, highly coveted grower/processor permits awarded by the health department in June following a competitive application period.
Rival BrightStar Biomedics LLC sued the health department in September to force the department to revoke PAMS’ permit.
BrightStar said PAMS failed to include in its application details on two former executives who were accused of smuggling $500,000 worth of cannabis oil from a Minnesota growing facility to a New York dispensary in 2015 in a scheme to prop up inventory. Their cases remain open.
BrightStar dropped its suit in October. It’s not clear why.
Sticky stigma
The company will have to overcome another challenge — generating interest in a new drug long saddled with a sticky stigma.
Nearly two years after beginning operations, the New York facility still operates at a loss, Hoffnung said.
“We see it as our responsibility to create the industry. So it’s not about hanging out until the industry matures,” he said. “We want to expedite the maturity of the industry and we work hard to do just that.”
Five physicians have state approval to prescribe medical marijuana in Luzerne County. They are Dr. Richard Blum, Dr. John Brady, Dr. Matthew Kozicki, Dr. Paul Tayoun and Dr. Robert Dompkosky.
Only one Lackawanna County doctor, Dr. Vithalbhai Dhaduk in Dickson City, has approval.
More are expected to apply for prescribing power, but that hasn’t slowed Vireo doctors from an evangelism tour selling physicians on marijuana’s symptom-relieving qualities.
They’re probably hearing a pitch similar to the one that James Mraz, Fulton County’s planning director, heard when Vireo first set sights on his county’s tech park.
The state had just deeded over the former detention center for the county to develop, and a consultant had recommended soliciting bio-science firms to locate there given its security and seclusion.
After several cryptic calls with a Vireo representative, he reeled when he finally learned that Vireo grew marijuana, he said. He was skeptical, but agreed to hear a presentation.
“My whole perspective changed,” he said, explaining that it quickly became clear that Vireo is a pharmaceutical company in the truest sense. “It was a perfect fit for what we were trying to accomplish.”
He helped the company get buy-in from other local leaders and wrote letters of support for Vireo’s license application. Vireo scored second highest in a competition among 43 applicants for only five licenses.
Federally illegal
Hoffnung said Nedo and her team have made the process more efficient, but there’s a floor to how much a small company — and most marijuana growers are small — can streamline, he said.
Even if doctors and patients alike embrace medical marijuana across the board, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency still considers it a Schedule I drug, which means, in the government’s eyes, it has no known medicinal benefit and a high potential for abuse.
“This is federally illegal. There’s no way anybody’s health insurance will pick this up,” Hoffnung said.
Pennsylvania dispensaries will have some control over pricing, and it’s unclear how much it will cost to buy the drug. In New York, high prices obstruct access for many patients who could benefit from it.
“Patients need to spend $200 to $300 a month on average to buy this medication. $2,400 a year, post tax, is a very high entry price for most New Yorkers,” Hoffnung said.
News Moderator: Ron Strider 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Tour of N.Y. medical marijuana facility provides glimpse of what’s coming to Scranton - Business - The Times-Tribune
Author: JON O'CONNELL
Contact: Scranton and Lackawanna County | Contact - The Times-Tribune
Photo Credit: TheTimes-Tribune
Website: Scranton news, sports, obituaries, and shopping | thetimes-tribune.com | The Times-Tribune
Inside a flowering room, hundreds of marijuana plants soaked up their last hour of orange and red artificial sunlight before the room would go completely dark, simulating night for 12 hours to advance the budding process at Vireo Health’s upstate New York facility.
At a similar location in Scranton’s Green Ridge section, officials with the Minnesota-based company plan to report to the Pennsylvania Department of Health that they are ready to begin growing by the Dec. 20 deadline.
The company’s subsidiary, Pennsylvania Medical Solutions LLC, is one of only 12 applicants out of hundreds to receive a growing and processing permit under the state’s new medical marijuana law.
The drug will be cleared to treat 17 ailments in Pennsylvania under strict new rules. Companies that grow and process the plant into medicine, and others that operate dedicated dispensaries, are racing to meet fast-approaching deadlines, including Pennsylvania Medical Solutions, or PAMS, officials who say they’ll be ready by the target date.
New ground
The New York growing facility operates in many of the same ways Scranton’s will. Horticulturist Chuck Schmitt, cultivation director for the New York and Scranton facilities, said that’s in part because New York’s regulations, also fairly new, are similar to Pennsylvania’s.
Tucked away in the hills of Fulton County, surrounded by sprawling farmland, Vireo’s facility is the first business to set up at the Tryon Technology Park, a former state-owned juvenile detention center that shut down in 2011 with a dozen or so buildings left on 515 acres.
On the same hilly compound where teenagers once were likely jailed for selling marijuana, Vireo grows it by the bushel with government blessing. Some buildings have been demolished, some are doomed for demolition and some will stay.
Vireo likes to repurpose old buildings, said its New York subsidiary’s Chief Executive Officer Ari Hoffnung. It cuts down on construction costs and fits the company’s good-steward values.
A chain-link fence, about 10 feet tall and topped with barbed wire, surrounds a plain one-story building. Except for a small sign on the door and four peaks of a greenhouse in the back, a passerby might never guess marijuana grows there.
Inside, a door divides two main hallways. Rooms in one wing house hundreds of plants at different growth stages with different types of light to simulate parts of the growing season.
In one room, harvested full-grown plants hang upside down to dry.
On the other side of the door, scientists use high-tech equipment to grind down buds and convert them to oil.
Lab workers in the far end of the building mix in additives, including coconut extract, before packaging the medicine for distribution.
The New York plant employs about 30 people. The Scranton plant, on Rosanna Avenue off East Market Street, will need about the same number. Sixteen employees in New York, more than half of workers there, staff a security team for round-the-clock surveillance.
From inside the security room, they guard the entrance and study an array of monitors linked to cameras throughout the complex.
Regulations in New York, mirrored here in Pennsylvania, mandate meticulous record-keeping. Growers document weights at every stage, including when they discard stalks and leaves after plucking the buds.
“Every part of it has to be accounted for,” Schmitt said.
If projected waste conflicts with actual records, it could trigger an inquiry by regulators.
The New York health department, which governs the state’s medical marijuana industry, can demand records or video footage at any time.
Careful process
Inside the extraction room, operations manager Kait Nedo holds up a blue bucket half-filled with decarboxylate — buds ground into powder that have been heated to activate medicinal qualities.
The bucket’s contents comprised 30 to 40 plants, she said, and the volume would be reduced to even less than that during oil extraction.
While anything containing valuable amounts of cannabis oil gets stripped for processing, the growers still grind up waste to render it “unusable and unrecognizable” and mix it with soil, Schmitt said.
From the moment clone cuttings get planted, each has a unique barcode that it keeps until harvest time.
A barcode chain follows the production process to the dispensary to ensure Vireo can trace any problems back to the source. Pennsylvania law calls for a similar “seed-to-sale” tracking system.
Unlike in New York, Scranton will have no greenhouses.
Everything will grow inside the 60-year-old building PAMS bought for $2 million. Renovations and construction are underway.
The company has yet to grow a single plant in Pennsylvania, but some already challenged its claim on one of an initial 12, highly coveted grower/processor permits awarded by the health department in June following a competitive application period.
Rival BrightStar Biomedics LLC sued the health department in September to force the department to revoke PAMS’ permit.
BrightStar said PAMS failed to include in its application details on two former executives who were accused of smuggling $500,000 worth of cannabis oil from a Minnesota growing facility to a New York dispensary in 2015 in a scheme to prop up inventory. Their cases remain open.
BrightStar dropped its suit in October. It’s not clear why.
Sticky stigma
The company will have to overcome another challenge — generating interest in a new drug long saddled with a sticky stigma.
Nearly two years after beginning operations, the New York facility still operates at a loss, Hoffnung said.
“We see it as our responsibility to create the industry. So it’s not about hanging out until the industry matures,” he said. “We want to expedite the maturity of the industry and we work hard to do just that.”
Five physicians have state approval to prescribe medical marijuana in Luzerne County. They are Dr. Richard Blum, Dr. John Brady, Dr. Matthew Kozicki, Dr. Paul Tayoun and Dr. Robert Dompkosky.
Only one Lackawanna County doctor, Dr. Vithalbhai Dhaduk in Dickson City, has approval.
More are expected to apply for prescribing power, but that hasn’t slowed Vireo doctors from an evangelism tour selling physicians on marijuana’s symptom-relieving qualities.
They’re probably hearing a pitch similar to the one that James Mraz, Fulton County’s planning director, heard when Vireo first set sights on his county’s tech park.
The state had just deeded over the former detention center for the county to develop, and a consultant had recommended soliciting bio-science firms to locate there given its security and seclusion.
After several cryptic calls with a Vireo representative, he reeled when he finally learned that Vireo grew marijuana, he said. He was skeptical, but agreed to hear a presentation.
“My whole perspective changed,” he said, explaining that it quickly became clear that Vireo is a pharmaceutical company in the truest sense. “It was a perfect fit for what we were trying to accomplish.”
He helped the company get buy-in from other local leaders and wrote letters of support for Vireo’s license application. Vireo scored second highest in a competition among 43 applicants for only five licenses.
Federally illegal
Hoffnung said Nedo and her team have made the process more efficient, but there’s a floor to how much a small company — and most marijuana growers are small — can streamline, he said.
Even if doctors and patients alike embrace medical marijuana across the board, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency still considers it a Schedule I drug, which means, in the government’s eyes, it has no known medicinal benefit and a high potential for abuse.
“This is federally illegal. There’s no way anybody’s health insurance will pick this up,” Hoffnung said.
Pennsylvania dispensaries will have some control over pricing, and it’s unclear how much it will cost to buy the drug. In New York, high prices obstruct access for many patients who could benefit from it.
“Patients need to spend $200 to $300 a month on average to buy this medication. $2,400 a year, post tax, is a very high entry price for most New Yorkers,” Hoffnung said.
News Moderator: Ron Strider 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Tour of N.Y. medical marijuana facility provides glimpse of what’s coming to Scranton - Business - The Times-Tribune
Author: JON O'CONNELL
Contact: Scranton and Lackawanna County | Contact - The Times-Tribune
Photo Credit: TheTimes-Tribune
Website: Scranton news, sports, obituaries, and shopping | thetimes-tribune.com | The Times-Tribune
