New England Public Radio

The first medical marijuana dispensary in western Massachusetts may be open for business as soon as next week in Northampton. The operators have been busy, signing up new patients, training new employees, and of course, producing a lot of marijuana.

The marijuana is grown at a facility in Franklin, Massachusetts, and it’s nothing like your crazy uncle’s backyard pot patch.

Pharmaceutical-grade cannabis

Before entering the facility, visitors have to take what’s called an air shower, which removes pollen and other contaminants. After a person steps inside, 34 silver nozzles blast air all over him or her. In addition, a visitor must wear a white lab suit and booties.

The reason for the procedures are simple, according to Norton Arbelaez. He works for New England Treatment Access and also co-owns a Colorado company that sells both medical and recreational marijuana.

“The whole point of this facility that we have invested so dearly in is to be able to control the environment, to be able to control the temperature, the relative humidity, the light cycles,” Arbelaez says. “You need that in order to grow what is in effect pharmaceutical-grade cannabis.”

The building where the growing takes place is 60,000 square feet. No signs out front give any indication that roughly 10,000 marijuana plants are inside. Instead, the first tip-off is the smell when you enter. Arbelaez points out that what can be smelled is the finished product.

“We are currently harvesting. We’ve been harvesting for a month now,” he says.

Getting to the finished product takes about four and a half months.

The marijuana life cycle

Life begins for the medical marijuana plants in the nursery, a room filled with plants about six inches high and where nothing is left to chance. For example, the light spectrum of the light provided changes over the course of their life cycle.

In the nursery, Arbelaez says, “In effect, we’re in a room now where we’re telling the plants, if you will, that it’s early spring.”

Once the plants have grown bigger and stronger, they’re ready for the final stage in one of the flower rooms. One has 200 plants, which are three feet high and covered in huge buds, some two or three inches long. The smell in the room is pungent and the light is incredibly bright. The plants think it’s late summer. Arbelaez says the plants are about a week out from being harvested.

“You can see with the naked eye the trichome themselves,” Arbelaez says. “They look like a kind of a fuzzy white covering on the plant material. It is secreting as much oil as it possibly can to attract pollen, all right but because we only have female plants and there isn’t any pollen to be found, then in effect the plant is overproducing oil and that’s good for us and that’s good for the patients.

Cabernet Sauvignon and Gorilla Glue #4

The names of some of the strains they’re growing here don’t exactly sound like serious medicine. There’s Grape Ox, Afgooey, Rug Burn OG, and Gorilla Glue #4.

“Those particular names are names that identify the vintage if you will,” Arbelaez says. “I mean, if you were talking about a Cabernet Sauvignon or any type of particular grape or plant, they have a name. as so this is a name that identifies a particular cannabinoid profile, it is a name that identifies a smell, a look.”

After the marijuana is harvested, it gets trimmed and sent to a room to be cured. In that room, row upon row of huge buds hang upside down on giant metal racks.

In a kitchen on site, Willy Wonka meets Cheech and Chong; a confectioner has started making edible marijuana candies, brownies and chocolates.

There is one room that is off-limits to visitors: the vault, which Arbelaez describes as “a massive steel room, quarter-inch steel on all sides. There there is a biometric lock on the vault door itself that will only open up to specific fingerprints.”

He adds that what’s in the vault is the final tested product, the marijuana that’s ready to go to Northampton.

From medical marijuana to recreational? 

The marijuana will eventually go to Brookline as well, where the company plans to open a second dispensary.

Of course, medical marijuana may be just the beginning. A question will likely be on the 2016 ballot in Massachusetts, legalizing recreational use. If it passes, will the Northampton dispensary and the people behind it enter the larger, more lucrative market? Arbelaez wouldn’t give a yes or no answer.

“There’s so much speculation on that right now,” he says. “Really, we’re so focused internally on you know, staffing, on training, on getting our stores open, on serving patients, that you know we’re really completely out of that discussion and we’re really just focusing on execution and doing this the right way and so we’ll let the voters speak and I’m sure a year from now, we’ll take this issue up again.”