An idea was planted when Arnold city official Jason Fulbright and his brother, Justin, watched their father battle cancer.
The concept took root when one brother became part of the medical marijuana business in Oregon and the other made connections in Jefferson County that could help with a similar venture here.
Now that Missourians have voted to legalize medical marijuana, the brothers hope their advance planning leads to a bountiful harvest.
“We have wanted to pursue this since before Missouri passed the law,” said Jason Fulbright, 45, an Arnold Ward 1 councilman and a real estate agent.
He and his brother, Justin Fulbright, 40, who recently moved to Arnold from Portland, along with Terry Long, 45, of Imperial and Wayne Ziegelmeyer, 68, of Imperial own Bright Green Missouri, a company that aims to grow, manufacture and sell medical marijuana and related products.
If the group receives its required state licenses, the owners plan to set up cultivation and manufacturing sites in Imperial and run dispensaries in Imperial and Herculaneum.
Nate Tevlin, 31, of Denver and Lindsay Nooter, 38, of Arnold will help the four owners run the company.
As of July 30, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services had collected 592 pre-application forms and fees totaling $4,208,000, the agency reported.
The DHSS began accepting final applications for those wanting to open a state-approved medical marijuana business on Aug. 3 and stopped taking those applications Monday.
The agency had not reported how many applications it received as of Monday afternoon.
The DHSS plans to approve licenses for 60 cultivation facilities, 86 marijuana-infused manufacturing facilities and 192 dispensaries, along with 10 testing laboratories.
The agency has approved more than 5,000 applications from those seeking to use legal medical marijuana since it began accepting those applications on June 28, according to a written statement.
The Fulbrights and other owners of Bright Green Missouri must now wait to see how the third-party, blind scorer rates their company to find out if it receives a license to grow, make and sell marijuana and marijuana-related products.
“The skill level we have, I would put on par with anybody,” Jason Fulbright said. “From horticulture, science and facilities to building maintenance, I have confidence our company can and will be one of the top-quality companies in Missouri, assuming we receive our license.”
The idea
The Fulbrights said they became interested in the marijuana industry because of their father, the late Doyle Fulbright, who was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a type of cancer that starts from white blood cells in the bone marrow, in 1999.
Doyle Fulbright died Dec. 16, 2017, and the brothers said medical marijuana could have helped him manage the pain and lack of appetite from the disease and the chemotherapy treatments.
“He never pursued (medical marijuana) because his doctors didn’t have the option,” said Justin Fulbright, who was a licensed medical marijuana caregiver in Oregon. “His doctors gave him all the options they had available.”
Jason Fulbright said after watching his father go through 142 chemotherapy treatments, he wanted to be able to provide a legal, medical marijuana option for others, which his dad never had.
“Justin was always like, ‘Dad, we have medical marijuana in Oregon. It is great for cancer patients. It helps with chemo and the side effects,’ but it was illegal in Missouri,” Jason Fulbright said. “We would say as brothers, if this ever becomes legal in Missouri, Justin would come home and do this for Dad.”
Jason Fulbright said he found an important asset for his potential marijuana business at the Arnold Farmers Market – Long, a horticulturist who helped set up the market.
“Through the course of that first season of the market, I told him my brother and I have talked about it and if it ever becomes legal in Missouri, we are going to open a business,” Jason Fulbright said. “Terry said, ‘I would love to work with you.’”
Jason Fulbright said Ziegelmeyer also plays an important part in the proposed business, providing space to grow and manufacture marijuana.
Jason Fulbright said he manages properties for Ziegelmeyer and met with him and his wife, Debbie Ziegelmeyer, the day after the November 2018 vote in Missouri to legalize medical marijuana to see if they would allow their land in Imperial to be used for the cultivation and manufacturing part of the planned business.
“I told them, this will throw you for a loop, but there is something I want to talk to you about,” Jason Fulbright said. “I’d like to talk to you about leasing or working with you to open a medical marijuana business where we grow and sell medical marijuana. It took Wayne all of a half a second to say, ‘Let’s do this.’”
Doing it
Jason Fulbright said the company has raised just more than $2 million through investors and has up to $3 million in credit available to create its growing and manufacturing facilities along with potentially three dispensaries.
If Bright Green Missouri receives the state licenses it needs, Justin Fulbright said the company would start by getting its indoor growing facility functioning in Imperial.
Then the company would get its manufacturing site up and running, and the last step would be to open the dispensaries, where the products would be sold.
“We want to provide top-quality, pure and safe medical marijuana,” Justin Fulbright said. “We want to be the leader in Missouri of medical cannabis and produce a product that can work for all age groups and any type of ingestion.”
Shedding the stigma
Nooter, who is a chemist, said there’s a stigma attached to marijuana because on the federal level, it is an illegal drug.
However, she said, marijuana does have qualities that can help those who are sick and in pain.
“I see a lot of patients in pain everyday who could benefit from using medical marijuana,” Nooter said. “But they have no options but to take high-dosage prescriptions of opioids.”
Nooter also said marijuana is not physically addictive like opioids and when patients stop using marijuana, they do not suffer physical withdrawal.
Bright Green Missouri owners say they understand that some people view marijuana negatively, but they believe that is changing, as evidenced by Missourians voting to legalize medical marijuana, with 65.54 percent voting yes. In Jefferson County, the measure passed with 67.25 percent of the vote.
“I think voters overwhelmingly showed that stigma is going away,” said Tevlin, a plant physiologist. “And when they see how (medical marijuana) changes people’s quality of life when they are very sick, it will change their minds quickly.”
Jason Fulbright said the electoral support for medical marijuana is a reason why he isn’t afraid to enter the business as an elected official.
“It might be a thing, that my councilman is now this medical marijuana guy, but 70 percent of the people (in Ward 1) voted for it, so I think I’m in good standing,” he said.