By Stephen Appezzato
RED BANK – The borough’s first retail cannabis dispensary will celebrate its grand opening later this month. The owners anticipate their budding business, Monteverde Modern Dispensary, open since December for medical marijuana sales, will soon be blooming.
Across the street and a few doors down from Strollo’s Lighthouse, Monteverde is located in a one-story building that formerly housed a dry cleaning business at 45 North Bridge Ave. According to co-owner and chief operating officer Devin Liles, business has been slow thus far. But with the green light to sell cannabis to all customers age 21 or older, Monteverde will unlock a much broader clientele.
“Recreation is really where the industry is right now,” said Monteverde co-founder Elizabeth Egan. “A lot of the medicinal patients I’ve been hearing are not refilling their (medical use) cards because of the fees that they still have to pay. So it’s just more convenient” to buy recreationally, she explained.
“We’ve had many patients or many clients stop by, either walking by or calling on the phone, wanting to know when recreation is going to be” available, Egan said.
Who’s Behind Monteverde?
Liles has worked in the cannabis industry for 20 years. The Colorado native started in 2003 in California working as a cultivator; that state legalized medical marijuana in 1996. In 2010 he joined up with two entrepreneurs in Colorado and created The Farm, one of Boulder’s most successful cannabis businesses. Liles became the CEO in 2015 and left in 2018.
“When I left, I went into consulting and helping others get set up,” he said.
Liles co-founded Monteverde with Egan in 2018. Egan, a physical therapist assistant, was inspired to open the business after being in the medical industry for over 24 years.
“I just watched patients really suffer with pain, things that we couldn’t help with. And then I watched patients get addicted to pain medications,” she said.
“I had watched family and friends kind of self-treat with cannabis and they had seen good results. So, I knew that there had to be another way,” Egan explained. With New Jersey legalizing medical marijuana, Egan said she was proud to be a woman owner of a dispensary.
Since they began offering medicinal cannabis in December, Egan said she has served patients from all walks of life with different conditions, ranging from anxiety to sleep issues, chronic pain and cancer.
The partners originally applied for licenses to sell medical marijuana in Hoboken and Asbury Park, “which were in two of the three regions that the state divided into in order to spread out dispensaries to best serve patients,” Liles said. While the Hoboken license was awarded to another company, Monteverde was awarded a license by the state for Asbury Park. Then a roadblock: During the application process, Asbury Park “inexplicably put a ban on all cannabis in their town,” Liles said.
The business owners had 20 days to find a new location for their dispensary or they would lose their valuable state license.
After browsing boroughs that had ordinances allowing both medical and recreational on the books, the partners settled on Red Bank.
“If you’ve been in the industry at any time at all you know that once a state goes dual use, even though it’s great to continue to serve patients, the patient numbers dwindle as adult use comes online. And that’s been the case in Jersey. So, we needed to find a town that had both,” Liles explained.
He said they “really lucked out” finding Red Bank, calling it a “great town to be in.”
Finding real estate that complied with the borough’s planning and zoning codes was a longshot, but they ultimately succeeded.
Being the first dispensary in the borough, Egan said the process was complicated to navigate, but they persevered. “We’re a team. Between the state and the (local) government, we’re considering them our partners,” she said, offering help where they can and asking for direction from the borough when needed.
Talking Shop
Liles said the products available to recreational customers are “essentially the same” as those offered to medical customers, including “flower, pre-rolls, concentrate,” as well as vaporizers and gummy and lozenges, the two types of edibles allowed in New Jersey.
At this time, Monteverde sources its products from companies with manufacturing and cultivating licenses. Currently, in New Jersey, it is difficult for cannabis retailers to be vertically integrated – to produce and sell their own products – due to regulations.
“In the new recreational market, they (the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission) bifurcated the industry into retailers and producers,” said Liles.
New Jersey has six types of cannabis business licenses – cultivators, manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, retailers and delivery. According to Liles, currently, most cannabis producers in the state operate under the original cultivator, manufacturer and distribution licenses that were awarded for medical applications. Many of these licenses have since been purchased by large, multistate “operators,” who are “vertically integrated players.”
Much of the product Monteverde offers comes from these companies. But, “with the advent of recreational (sales) in New Jersey, we’re finally starting to see some standalone cultivator and product manufacturers,” Liles said, which will expand the variety of marijuana products available to recreational customers.
How Did We Get Here?
New Jersey first legalized cannabis for certain medical applications in 2010. Over the following decade, the list of illnesses and conditions allowed for medical use expanded. In 2019 Gov. Phil Murphy created the Cannabis Regulatory Commission, the state’s governing body over the marijuana business. In a 2020 referendum, New Jersey residents voted in a two-thirds majority to legalize recreational cannabis and in 2021 the Garden State became the 14th in the nation to legalize marijuana use for anyone 21 or older. That same year, Murphy signed legislation that expunged the records of thousands charged with marijuana possession and small-scale distribution. On April 21, 2022, recreational sales were officially legalized, raking in approximately $2 million on the opening day.
According to state law, dispensaries are allowed to sell up to 1 ounce of usable cannabis product to customers in each transaction – 28.35 grams of dried flower, 4 grams of solid cannabis concentrate/resin, or 1,000 mg of multiple ingestible cannabis-infused products.
Although the state legalized recreational cannabis, the law allowed each municipality to ban, approve and regulate cannabis businesses within their borders. Red Bank “opted in” to the cannabis business in 2021; many towns in the Two River area did not.
“There aren’t many (dispensaries) in the region; a lot of towns nearby have banned it. So, we do anticipate a robust business,” Liles said.
Monteverde received its license from the borough in October, alongside two other cannabis businesses – Canopy Crossroads and The Frosted Nug. A fourth, The Garden at Red Bank, received planning board approval in December.
Dissolving Stigma
With more states legalizing cannabis usage and businesses, Liles said he’s noticed a lot of the stigma around marijuana, and the industry as a whole, dissolve in recent years.
Liles said there was a time when “folks were really reticent to come over from mainstream occupations because they were afraid to have cannabis on their résumés. “That’s one indicator that things are really changing” around the opinion of cannabis.
“Over the last five to six years, we’ve seen a lot more willingness of people to come over from mainstream jobs into the industry,” Liles said.
Egan echoed this, but would like to see more progress in the medical industry, where it can still be considered taboo.
“I’ve had people say they’ve asked their doctors and their doctor is like, ‘Well, no. I don’t know much about it so this is the prescription I want you to take,’ ” she said, noting many doctors have not researched medical cannabis treatments and default to traditional medications.
“I think we need to still get to the doctors, to at least open those conversations for the patients to give them an option,” she said.
Monteverde is selling CBD-only and even vegan products alongside THC offerings and Egan is excited to offer all adults access to regulated marijuana, a much safer alternative to black market products, as well as an opportunity for customers to “personalize their goal of what they want out of cannabis.”
The article originally appeared in the February 15 –21, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
