FALL RIVER — A company that at one point looked poised to open the city’s first cannabis dispensary until its plans seemed to stall will hold a public outreach meeting next month for its Hartwell Street facility.
In 2016, Cannatech Medicinals was the first cannabis company to receive the required local approval needed to apply for a marijuana retail license with the state. The company began construction of a roughly 50,000-square-foot cultivation facility on 12 acres in the city’s industrial park, as well as a dispensary on Hartwell Street. However, despite early progress, the dispensary has yet to open while three competing applicants have opened dispensaries in the city.
Little activity on Cannatech Medicinals' plans had been reported over the last year until this week, when the city clerk’s office received notice of a planned public outreach meeting the company has set for March 10 at Fall River Public Library. Such public outreach meetings are a requirement of the state Cannabis Control Commission’s license approval process.
According to the CCC’s most recent list of cannabis businesses trying to open in Massachusetts, Cannatech Medicinals had yet to submit a license application as of Feb. 14.
Depending on how the company fares before the CCC, it has a lot of ground to cover if it plans to catch up with businesses that have already opened in Fall River or are nearing license approval.
Northeast Alternatives and Nature’s Medicines opened their Fall River medical marijuana dispensaries in 2018, and Northeast Alternatives became the city’s first recreational dispensary when it expanded into adult-use sales last year. Earlier this month, Hope Heal Health, which opened for medical sales last year, also expanded into the recreational market.
Nature’s Medicines' application for a recreational sales license is still moving through the CCC’s approval process, but so are five other proposed dispensaries that have already submitted their applications with the state.
One detail of note in Cannatech’s road to being operational is that it has been sold several times in the last few years.
Dr. Henry Crowley and Steven Pimental, who founded the company in 2015, sold their interest in the company to the Toronto-based MPX Bioceuticals in 2017. At the time, MPX announced the company’s Fall River operations would be called Health For Life Massachusetts.
Then, in early 2019, the company was sold to the New York-based iAnthus Capital Holdings, which had been among the first few companies approved to conduct cannabis sales in New York City.
Next month’s public outreach meeting will cover Cannatech’s cultivation and product manufacturing facility at 1100 Innovation Way and the 160 Hartwell St. dispensary. Members of the public will be allowed to ask the company’s representatives questions. According to the notice submitted with the clerk’s office, Cannatech maintains provisional certificates of registration from the state’s medical-use-of-marijuana program to operate at both locations and is seeking approvals for recreational cannabis sales.
The meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. March 10 at Fall River Public Library.