Ohio County is best known as the home of Bluegrass music legend Bill Monroe. It’s also a former coal community, and its largest city, Beaver Dam, has a population of 3,500. The town anchor is the Baptist church.

“You hear the joke about what came first, the chicken or the egg. Here, we talk about the city or the Beaver Dam Baptist Church. Actually, it was the church,” said Mayor Paul Sandefur. “The church was started in 1798 and the city formed around it.”

Today, Beaver Dam is home to a large timber industry, a chicken processing plant, and a distillery. It will also be the first place Kentuckians can legally buy medical marijuana.

‘Cannabis is the only thing that’s helped me’

When you enter the city limits of Beaver Dam, the welcome sign reads “Life is Good Here.” For chronic pain sufferers like Misty Taylor, it’s about to get better.

“I had a bad horseback riding accident in 2015 and broke several vertebrae. My back is totally wired together,” Taylor told WKU Public Radio. “I also have a hard time keeping weight on, with my appetite, and so far cannabis is the only thing that’s helped me get to a decent weight.”

Most importantly, Taylor says medical cannabis eases her back pain so she can work as a restaurant server. She’s tried other forms of treatment that haven’t worked.

“I was going and getting shots in my back and it would give me relief, basically, until I got home,” said Taylor. “Pain pills seem to give me a mental fog and that hung-over feeling.”

More: Tennessee lawmakers vote to ban most cannabis products, despite protest from local businesses

Since Gov. Andy Beshear issued an executive order in 2022, Taylor has been traveling to Illinois to purchase cannabis products.

“It helps with my anxiety,” she explained. “It definitely helps with my appetite and being able to keep weight on. I sleep better not tossing and turning with pain.”

The executive order protects patients who possess medical cannabis purchased at out-of-state licensed retailers. But driving two hours to Metropolis, Illinois, isn’t convenient. Taylor is now excited at the prospect of buying medical cannabis in her hometown.

This fall, The Post Dispensary will open in Beaver Dam, the first in the state since medical cannabis became legal in Kentucky in January. Its owner and general manager is Trip Hoffman of Denver, Colorado, who has opened dispensaries in other states.

“I’ve been here every other week for six or seven months now. We stop and eat, buy things, and everywhere we go, we talk about our business,” Hoffman said. “I’ve done this a lot and I’ve never had such a warm reception as I have here in Ohio County.”

The dispensary will serve patients seeking alternative treatments for a range of qualifying conditions, including chronic pain, cancer, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and PTSD.

‘Marijuana is a medicine the Lord Himself put here’

Many remain unaware of how to access medical cannabis or are hesitant due to stigma. Earlier this month, The Post Dispensary held a public event, a one-stop shop of sorts to provide education, medical evaluations, and help applying for a medical cannabis card through the Kentucky Office of Medical Cannabis.

Amber Christison, an employee with Kentucky Marijuana Card, was on hand to help Ohio County resident Nisa Voyles apply for the card, much like a prescription that patients take to dispensaries. Voyles was wearing a shoulder sling from a recent surgery. She, too, has been going out of state to buy marijuana under the governor’s executive order.

“I am a professional businesswoman. I work in HR, and not one person has frowned upon me,” Voyles said. “Not one person has thought anything less of me or my skill set because of it. Marijuana is a medicine the Lord Himself put here for us for many different reasons.”

At one point, Voyles was on 14 daily medications to treat her migraines, arthritis, and chronic pain. But her support for medical cannabis is about more than just her ailments. She said she lost her mother to years of prescription drug abuse.

“I grew up without a mama because she was always in bed. Multiple times, I had to go in there with a mirror to see if she was breathing or not because I didn’t want to touch her,” Voyles recalled. “There is so many people that could have been saved had they had medical marijuana then.”

The Post Dispensary in Beaver Dam will offer Voyles and other chronic sufferers a range of medical cannabis products, including tinctures, edibles, topicals, and flower.

Earlier this month, owner and GM Trip Hoffman offered an early look inside of the dispensary, which is still under construction. It’s located in the former Beaver Dam post office, commissioned in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy.

“So when you come in, you’re gonna walk down this way, and we’ll have one employee, the receptionist in this area, and the first thing they’re gonna do is check your ID and make sure you’re over 18,” explained Hoffman.

The receptionist will then ask for a medical card issued by Kentucky’s Office of Medical Cannabis. If the patient doesn’t have one, they’ll be instructed on how to apply for one and be sent home. For those with a card, it’s time to shop.

“So on this kiosk, you’ll see the menu. Right now, we just have a couple of test things in there, there’s nothing real,” Hoffman demonstrated. “You can say, ‘I want one of those,’ so you hit it and it goes into your cart for checkout.”

Ordering medical marijuana is much like ordering on a kiosk at McDonald’s, but there’s no super-sizing. For a majority of cardholders, the allowable limit is four ounces of cannabis flower every 25 days.

Unlike McDonald’s, the product here is under heavy security. Behind the building is a receiving area where delivery trucks will park inside a chain link pen and the gates will lock behind them. Once unloaded, the cannabis is taken to the vault where access is tightly controlled.

“There’s three security systems,” Hoffman said. “You have your access, which is your door control. You have your burglar system, which is motion detectors and door sensors that call police. Then you have your video surveillance which records everything and we have 40 cameras inside and out.”

Neither the Beaver Dam Police Department nor the Ohio County Sheriff’s Department responded to a request for comment, but Mayor Paul Sandefur said local law enforcement is on board with the city’s cannabis business.

While Hoffman acknowledged skeptics have concerns about the impact a dispensary will have on Beaver Dam’s small-town charm, he said those critics should give it some time.

“Let us prove ourselves. The customers come and go every five minutes. They don’t hang out, we’re not loitering, we’re not consuming,” Hoffman said. “We’re just another hardware store, another CVS, another pharmacy. I think people see that over time and warm up to us.”

Questions remain about Kentucky’s licensing operation

While the dispensary is expected to have a local workforce of around 20, Hoffman, as its owner and GM, lives in Colorado. He’s built a career opening both medical and recreational dispensaries in other states.

Hoffman’s company is called Tree Soft, LLC, and according to business filings, The Post Dispensary in Beaver Dam is the company’s only dispensary. The state auditor’s office is investigating how Kentucky’s Office of Medical Cannabis administered the lottery process for awarding business licenses, with many going to out-of-state companies.

“When you do that, you’re going to open up to the idea that you might have people who own these licenses that are not residents,” Hoffman acknowledged. “This industry is so complicated. It’s much different than opening a hardware store or convenience store. Having people come in that have experience to operate it, is a good thing for a community because we’re going to provide a safe and compliant business.”

A group of companies that applied for a medical marijuana license in Kentucky has filed a lawsuit claiming the rollout of the state’s medical marijuana program is unconstitutional.

Several applicants allege out-of-state marijuana companies were able to game the lottery system by creating many new LLCs in Kentucky, which flooded the state with expensive applications. Some applicants tied to individual companies have now won or acquired licenses across all three licensing categories, a practice known as “vertical integration” that state regulations were intended to prevent.

But Hoffman, the owner and GM of the The Post Dispensary, says thinks Kentucky’s system for awarding licenses was fair.

“Having experienced the licensing process in a dozen states or more, what each state is learning to avoid litigation, is that they have to open it up to a lottery system,” Hoffman said. “The merit-based system, while it seems plausible, it’s always ripe with corruption because I know firsthand from some of the recipients who won, I would speak to them and they would say, ‘I donated to this politician or did something else,’ so we’re a big fan of the lottery.”

As of July, more than 11,000 Kentuckians had received a medical cannabis card and are waiting to purchase the product. The Post Dispensary in Beaver Dam hopes to be stocked by October, but that could get delayed because of supply chain constraints. Kentucky’s program requires all cannabis products to be grown in-state, and cultivators such as Armory Kentucky LLC in Mayfield only began operations in July. It takes about four months for plants to grow from seed to flower.

“The market, they don’t allow us to be vertical, so I can’t own a cultivation and and a dispensary, so they’re all kind of independent. They need us and we need them. It’s a symbiotic relationship,” Hoffman explained. “Right now, there’s only two cultivators in operation, and they’ll both be at different timelines as far as when their product is available, but we’re talking to both of them.”

Armory Kentucky LLC is starting its inventory with adult plants that they say should be ready to harvest in October, as opposed to the long process of growing from seeds. Hoffman acknowledges he’s concerned about there being enough product to sell, at least initially.

“We might have to ration what we can sell to an individual in the very beginning because we may not have enough to sell to everyone,” Hoffman said. “That’s a happy problem to have. Patients may not be all that happy, but we’ll do our best.”

Gov. Beshear has acknowledged it’s taken longer than he would have liked to form the medical cannabis industry in Kentucky. Because of that, he signed an executive order to waive renewal fees for patients who get their cards so that they don’t get charged again before retailers actually open. The governor is also leaving in place his 2022 executive order in place protecting patients who possess medical cannabis purchased at out-of-state licensed retailers.

Kentucky Public Radio’s Joe Sonka contributed reporting for this story.

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