ABINGTON, Pa. (WLVT) - Along a stretch of Old York Rd. in Abington, one new business is bustling with customers. Since it opened in April, TerraVida Holistic Center, Montgomery County’s first medical marijuana dispensary, has been inundated.
“We thought we would see two patients in our first month,” said TerraVida president Chris Visco. “On our first day, we saw 115.”
TerraVida is one of seven medical marijuana dispensaries that have opened Montco. since February. Less than a year after it became available in Pennsylvania, medical marijuana has seen a surge in popularity. As of May, more than 37,000 patients had registered for the program, according to Gov. Tom Wolf’s office.
“We were not expecting this amount of volume,” Visco said.
TerraVida’s Abington location now sees an average of 200 patients a day, Visco said. Demand is so high that producers have struggled to supply enough product, a problem compounded by the requirement that all marijuana products sold in Pennsylvania be grown in Pennsylvania.
“In the beginning, there were shortages at the dispensaries, but now it seems that the grower-processors are producing enough that they are able to meet the demand of the patient population,” said Kobi Waldfogel, marketing and sales manager for Terrapin Pennsylvania, a medical marijuana grower/processor.
Dispensaries usually offer vaporizer cartridges, capsules or tinctures. In August, they began to also sell dry leaf, or flower, though only for vaporization.
Many are hailing the legalization of medical marijuana a success. Proponents said it was a long-overdue way to manage many health issues, especially chronic pain.
“Pain doctors are not prescribing opioids anymore,” Visco said. “They’re telling them to get their medical marijuana card and sending them to the dispensaries.”
Given the current opioid crisis, some medical professionals say medical marijuana is actually safer for some patients.
“That’s the thing that everybody’s been so worried about, is overdosing and premature death,” said family medicine Dr. Avrom Brown. “They’re not wrong. But there are ways of evaluating patients in the pain world.”
The transition to legalization hasn’t been completely frictionless; some patients have complained about what they see as an arduous process to get the medical marijuana.
First, the patient has to register themselves in the state’s Medical Marijuana Registry. There are 84 approved physicians who can certify they suffer from one of 21 qualifying conditions, like autism, cancer and PTSD. Then they can get their state-issued Medical Marijuana ID Card, and then they can go to a dispensary.
But that’s to be expected with a brand-new regulated system, said Waldfogel of Terrapin Pennsylvania, whose parent company Terrapin Care Station operates in several states.
“Pennsylvania has done a really good job of making this a real medical market and getting patients registered that need this medicine,” Waldfogel said.
And the process may simply with time.
“It’s a gray area now for a lot of people. And that’s making it tougher for the patients,” Dr. Brown said.
So far, it hasn’t stopped the nearly 30 new patients who Visco said come into the Abington TerraVida every day, or the planned opening of several more dispensaries in the state, adding to the current 32 open.
That number is only expected to grow, as the state Health Department will issue its next round of permits to grow and dispense sometime in September.
