For Bijan Sakaki, founding partner of Beehives Own, a medical cannabis dispensary licensee in Utah, the state’s nascent market seems like an afterthought to many in the industry, but he’s determined to launch a successful business to help the state’s patients base and combat Utah’s opioid epidemic.
Sakaki has been treating his ulcerative colitis with medical cannabis for the last six years, and once owned a dispensary in California that has since been sold. He and his Beehives Own team first applied for a cultivation license in Utah, and while their application ranked in ninth place, the state ultimately decided to issue eight cultivation licenses instead of the 10 that were permitted under state law.
“It was bittersweet when they said they were going to release eight instead of 10,” Sakaki tells Cannabis Business Times. “After that, we focused on the retail side. We’re fortunate enough to be able to get two of the 14 licenses—one in Salt Lake City, … which is in Salt Lake County, … the main population center of Utah and Salt Lake City. Then our second location is Brigham City, which is in Box Elder County, and that’s probably an hour north of the city.”
The company’s Salt Lake City location will be its flagship store, he adds, and that is where the team is currently focusing most of its time and resources in an effort to open the dispensary in late April or early May.
“Right now, we’re in the middle of the buildout for our Salt Lake location,” Sakaki says. “We’re hoping to be open for 4/20, but it looks like it’ll be the beginning of May. For our Brigham City location, it’s going to be August [or] September.”
The online application process for patients to obtain medical cannabis cards launched March 1, and medical cannabis sales began the next day, on March 2, when Dragonfly Wellness officially opened its dispensary in Salt Lake City.
“They chose to open despite the low number of patient counts right now,” Sakaki says. “It’s only a matter of time before people get their cards and are able to go to the store.”
In the meantime, the Beehives Own team is balancing the buildout of its facility with hiring.
“We’ve been pretty fortunate that everything has worked out, from building to finding new talent to bringing on like-minded individuals,” Sakaki says.
Under Utah’s medical cannabis law, dispensaries must have a pharmacist on site at all times, and Sakaki plans to recruit staff from nearby pharmacy schools.
“The biggest thing for us is finding the pharmacists who actually care about attending to the patients’ needs rather than just having a job,” he says. “They’re the intermediary between the medicine and the patients, so … we want to be able to have people who, for example, have a high level of emotional intelligence or a high level of empathy to understand where these patients are coming from. There’s a lot of stigma associated with cannabis, especially in our state here. We try to look at it in the most inviting way, [employing] people who care about patients.”
Utah’s law places certain restrictions on the types of medical cannabis products available to patients (for example, flower can be vaporized, but not smoked), but Beehives Own will still carry a wide variety of products, Sakaki says. The company plans to stock vape cartridges, sublinguals, topical creams and salves, and both high-end flower and flower for customers looking for a value buy.
“We also plan on having a couple proprietary formulations, whether they’re sprays or inhalation devices, so the delivery mechanism of your inhalation will be different than just the standard cartridge,” Sakaki says. “We’re working with some exclusive manufacturers for hardware for that.”
It has been quite the journey to launch the state’s medical cannabis program, Sakaki says, with lawmakers rewriting the law several times before Gov. Gary Herbert signed the last rewrite into law in late February, just days before sales opened. Now that the dust has settled a bit, the Beehives Own team is most excited about finally serving the state’s patients and helping to destigmatize cannabis.
“It’s been such an uphill battle, from a social standpoint and from a legislative standpoint,” Sakaki says. “Now that we will be operational, I’m excited to see the impact that medical cannabis has on the state. … We have the fourth-worst opioid epidemic right now in Utah, so I want to be able to have an impact on those things. … And I’m excited to show everyone that this medicine does help people. The results are real. … There are no meteors flying out of the sky. It’s not an end-of-the-world scenario. It’s just a plant.”
As the market unfolds, Sakaki expects patients to gravitate toward health- and wellness-based products, as well as flower for vaping.
“More total wellness products I think [will be] a substitute to the opioid epidemic—that replacement of taking a prescription medication versus taking a cannabis medication,” he says. “I still think we’re going to see a lot of flower sales. Flower is technically illegal to smoke, but you’re allowed to vape it. I think generationally, you have a large group of patients who are only used to smoking. You have a new generation of patients who are used to vaporizing. I think you’re going to start to see more flower in use because when you look at the data in all the other states, flower [is] a pretty substantial percentage of the products sold. I’d be curious to see how that plays out around regulations that flower isn’t able to be smoked.”
Looking ahead, Sakaki’s shorter-term goals consist of unveiling a cannabis retail experience that makes patients comfortable with purchasing their medicine.
“We want to make this a very disruptive experience so it’s not taboo,” he says. “You’re not going to this place to buy drugs—you’re going to this place to get your medicine. We’ll be educating and creating that experience for patients to show this is a medicine you can use safely, and you can trust the pharmacy.”
Education is one of the company’s longer-term goals, he adds, because the more the company can educate the state’s patients on the benefits of cannabis, the more they can decide whether to incorporate it into their health and wellness plans. And the more education the medical community receives, the more comfortable they will feel recommending cannabis to their patients.
Sakaki also hopes to unite with the broader cannabis industry to take a collaborative approach against what he sees as the industry’s two biggest competitors—the illicit market and the adult-use markets in neighboring states.
“I would say that while Utah is an afterthought for a lot of people in the industry, if you look at the demographic here [and] the surrounding states that have gone medical [and] adult-use, people have been consuming cannabis for years,” he says. “I really do think that it’s going to be an anomaly market, just given how largely the population has been affected with the opioid epidemic."
