The Lynn City Council voted Tuesday night to allow Mass Patient Foundation Inc. to open up both a medicinal and recreational marijuana shop 487-491 Lynnway.
The area along the city’s waterfront was previously selected and rezoned by the Council as an overlay district that allows for medical marijuana dispensary use, as well as recreational sales.
Back in July 2017 the Council voted unanimously to grant a special permit to Mass Patient Foundation Inc. (MPF) to site a medical marijuana dispensary on the Lynnway.
The Newton-based MPF, who also operates marijuana dispensaries in Oregon and Colorado, was one of two medical marijuana dispensaries approved by the City Council last year. However, That vote came with a proviso that MPF Inc. must ink a Host Community Agreement before it was officially granted the special permit to open shop.
MPF recently did so and agreed to hand over 6 percent of its annual gross revenues from medicinal and recreational sales to the city, as well as pay the city $100,000 to execute the Host Community Agreement.
There will be a seperate entrance for medicinal sales and recreational sales. Those holding a state license to purchase medicinal marijuana will not be charged the 20-percent state tax that the legislature recently imposed on recreational marijuana.
According to MPF’s filings with the city, they have satisfied the requirements put forth by Council members before medicinal and recreational sales take place in the city.
MPF will have tightly controlled security and surveillance, and is taking the empty Cooper-Lewis Building that didn’t blend with the surrounding area and giving it purpose.
All cultivation for the dispensary will be done in Fitchburg and any home deliveries to Lynn patients would also generate from the Fitchburg grow facility and not the Lynnway dispensary.
In May the Council voted unanimously to grant the other marijuana facility, Alan Rothenberg’s Olde World Remedies Inc., a special permit to open shop.
Again the approval came with the proviso that a Host Community Agreement is signed by Mayor Thomas McGee before the permit is issued. Olde World Remedies has already obtained all its Department of Public Health approvals, but there was a slight delay finding a marijuana cultivation site for the dispensary. Rothenberg recently secured a site in Grafton, Mass. and will begin the process of cultivating medical marijuana very soon.
Olde World Remedies differs from MPF in that Rothenberg’s has agreed to do give all of the profits to local charity. As a great believer in medicinal marijuana Rothernberg has said he has no desire to make money at the Lynn location. Because a family member is benefiting from the use of medicinal marijuana he wants to be able to share it with the community.
He has also offered to give away medicinal marijuana to those who can’t afford it free of charge.