Business is budding for a new local medical marijuana access centre. With more than 100 visitors in its first few days, the centre is keeping busy.
Business is budding for a new local medical marijuana access centre. With more than 100 visitors in its first few days, the centre is keeping busy.
Cole Pethybridge, co-owner and manager of Starbuds, says he wanted to open the centre to provide better care for St. Albertans and tackle stigmas attached to using medical marijuana.
“There's probably more people than anyone knows who use medical marijuana,” he says. “But people don't want others to know that they're using it.”
Starbuds is a franchise based out of B.C. Since the store is focused on the medicinal side of cannabis, so you won't see any bongs or pipes on display when you walk into the office.
Instead you'll see a waiting room with a leather couch and a few chairs, a table hosting marijuana-related literature and patient fill-out forms attached to clipboards on the front counter. In the back is a small doctor's office.
The only items that are for sale in-store are hemp products, such as coffee or seeds, that don't contain either THC or CBD (the active ingredients in cannabis).
The access centre has one part-time doctor on site to assess patients and determine if medical marijuana is the right avenue for treatment. If so, the doctor will determine what strain or type of marijuana is appropriate for the patient's needs.
Pethybridge has been using medical marijuana for the last four years, although he started smoking pot recreationally 10 years ago.
“I've always known that it helped me,” he says. “It's plants, not pills. You have one plant that can help with a hundred different things.”
His prescription provides him a strain of marijuana that treats his anxiety and chronic back pain, which he developed from years of playing contact sports.
Pethybridge says it's a popular belief that the majority of medical marijuana patients are in their early to mid-twenties. However, in other Starbuds locations the majority of members are between the ages of 50 and 80.
“These are people that smoked a joint once or twice when they were young, never used it, and now have problems that it can help and don't want to be on a prescription for a bunch of pills.”
People use medical marijuana for a variety of reasons such as anxiety, PTSD, depression, loss of appetite, inability to sleep and chronic pain caused by cancer or glaucoma.
Bryce Hooper lives in Edmonton but controls all the social media uploads for St. Albert's Starbuds. Two of his younger brothers are part owners of the new access centre and residents in St. Albert.
Hooper is a veteran who uses medical marijuana to treat his PTSD. He served in the Canadian Forces as a mobile support equipment operator. His job was to drive troops around and collect blown up vehicles from war zones.
He was deployed to Bosnia in 2004, Dubai in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2008 to 2009.
Through his military career, Hooper was a pallbearer for 33 of his comrades in Dubai.
At the end of his tour in Afghanistan, Hooper soon experienced the toll of serving in the military.
Instead of driving down a dangerous road called Ambush Alley in fear, he says he started to crave the adrenaline he would experience from being in constant danger.
“I was hunting for that adrenaline rush that was never there. For a lot of veterans it's really hard to dial back in civilian life.”
Soon he had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with PTSD. He spent the next four years travelling between different psychiatric wards in Canada.
“You're doped up on all these pills that are trying to control your symptoms, but it just masks PTSD.”
Through the constant use of prescription drugs to treat his disorder, Hooper developed a deadly addiction to opioids.
In 2013 Hooper attended a Veterans Affairs' rehabilitation program in B.C. to help counsel him through his PTSD. It was that same year a friend suggested he switch from taking prescription pills to ingesting medical marijuana.
“12 months later I had my first prescription from a doctor in Calgary and life just got better from there.”
He says he went from taking numerous pills to just two: one in the morning and one at night.
He currently ingests around 10 grams of prescribed marijuana a day.
Pethybridge says even though marijuana isn't on site currently, once legalization happens in 2018 they plan to start carrying it on site.
For now patients will have to order through their website and have it shipped to their homes.
Starbuds is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday and is located at 161 Liberton Drive. Patients must be 19 or older.
For more information about the clinic visit their website www.starbudsnation.ca.
