A dispensary’s first customer reflects on the first year of legal recreational weed in Mass.
"The sun still rises every morning."
Related Links
Stephen Mandile was invited to be Cultivate’s first customer when the shop opened its doors last November. A veteran who was injured in Iraq, he began spreading the word about medical marijuana after he says it changed his life in 2015 by helping him get off several prescription drugs.
Now a selectman in the town of Uxbridge, Mandile has continued to advocate for legal marijuana and the ways it can help improve vets’ quality of life.
We caught up with Mandile a year after Massachusetts legalized recreational weed to see what his year was like, and what he’s expecting for the future.
On being the first customer
Mandile was invited to be Cultivate’s first customer last year after the store took notice of his activism.
On opening day, the Leicester police chief honored Mandile’s service by presenting him with an American flag that had been flown over the police station for more than 100 days. Then Mandile bought some legal weed.
“I felt so odd for doing something that was, you know, a few years ago, I would’ve been locked up for,” he recalled.
But he also said the day was inspiring.
“It felt very surreal like, ‘Wow, we’ve finally convinced people that this can be possible,’ and here’s the day of reckoning where it’s happening,” he said. “It was pretty amazing.”
After making his purchase, Mandile said he went and smoked it with Lester Grinspoon, a 91-year-old Harvard professor whose 1971 book, “Marihuana Reconsidered,” earned him the ire of Richard Nixon and kicked off his legacy as, in Mandile’s words, the “godfather of medical cannabis.”
On legalization
After sustaining a severe spinal cord injury in 2005 while deployed in Iraq, Mandile said he spent the next 10 years trying various coctails of 57 different medications to control his pain. He said those drugs, from Percocet to Xanax, destroyed his quality of life.
When his wife first suggested he try medical marijuana, he wasn’t convinced. But after a suicide attempt, he decided to give it a shot.
“I was like, ‘I’m not going to sit around smoking weed all day, I’m not a druggie,’” he said. “But then I looked into what I was taking and I’m like, ‘Well, I’m taking medical heroin all day, so basically I’m sitting around doing what I say I don’t want to do.’”
Five months after starting to use medical cannabis, he said he was off all but one of his medications.
Now an advocate for legal marijuana being used to help veterans, Mandile is working on getting more discounts for vets’ medical cannabis and trying to move legislation through the State House that would give veterans better access to medical weed.
He’s still not sold on differentiating between medical and recreational marijuana, though.
“You don’t put it in medical dirt and it grows medical cannabis,” he laughed.
On the future
Mandile said he’s hoping to see prices drop across the state as more cultivators begin to pop up. He also has plans to open up his own shop.
He wants to use the store to raise money for veterans’ organizations, but he’s having trouble deciding where to open up.
“Knowing how much revenue this produces, I want to be in a town that I really care about,” he said.
Mandile said he’s also hoping the “pockets of resistance” around the state start to see that opening dispensaries hasn’t had some of the negative effects they anticipated. But on the whole, he said the stigma against cannabis and its users is fading.
“Overall, across the state, [in] most communities, the stigma is wearing off,” he said. “They’re seeing that, guess what, you’ve had a dispensary open for a year now and things aren’t catching on fire just because ‘God doesn’t like weed’ and stuff like that. The sun still rises every morning.”
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com