Tallahassee’s first CBD dispensary opens

 

According to the Welief Organic Pain Relief Medicine website this peppermint tincture is a 10 mililiter bottle and is being sold by Natural Life Wellness Dispensary for $54.99.

 

Tallahassee welcomed a new business this Saturday: Natural Life, a dispensary that sells, among other things, $54.95 cans of liquid CBD along with other items containing CBD. 

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, CBD, or cannabidiol, contains over 100 cannabinoids and is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid that may also be useful in reducing pain and inflammation, controlling epileptic seizures, and possibly even treating psychosis and addictions.

In June 2014, Florida GOV. Rick Scott signed SB 1030 into law which allows the use of cannabis oil provided it is non-smoked.

Natural Life owner,Gabriel Suarez says that his brother been a major influence in his life and is one of the main reasons why he created the dispensary located on West Pensacola Street.

“I have a little brother with juvenile arthritis and a very severe case. He's had it since he was born and we’ve tried all types of medication. I've watched my parents travel to different states to get him different treatment and anywhere that someone claimed to be better than somebody else and he never really had a true relief,” he said.

Suarez is originally from Uruguay, South America, where his parents and brother recently moved back to due to family issues. Suarez says that his family found a cure for his brother’s arthritis –  cannabidiol.

“Around the same time they fully legalized marijuana and my brother started finding CBD products down there and taking them.” said Suarez. “Just THC, very similar to the hand products that we are selling here and found the most relief that he ever had and today he has zero symptoms of his arthritis. When he was told by doctors that it would be incurable.”

Suarez said that before the debut of Natural Life there wasn't an option for people, and most were forced to purchase CBD from dispensaries that require you to follow a process. But now there are more options.

At other dispensaries in Tallahassee there are certain requirements for customers but at Natural Life customers are not required to have a medical card or a prescription to purchase CBD products.

Tallahassee resident Rebecca Watson, 37, was the second customer to purchase from Natural Life. She said that Natural life is great because it helps with anxiety, sleeping, depression and it's better than taking pills. She also talks about the difference in costs for prescriptions versus CBD products.

“I was going to the dispensaries but you have to pay a $70 card and then you have to pay all this money to go through the dispensaries but now that Natural life the CBD store is open, you don't have to go through all of that,” said Watson. “You can just come in here and pick out what you want and you don't have to pay all these extra cost that these dispensaries have.”

Natural Life sales representative Alex Petrick, helps out in the CBD store. Petrick believes that the current problem with CBD is that there isn’t a lot of accessibility to it and a lot of people are buying it through online dealers and outside sources.

“What we do is provide education about what CBD is and the therapeutic properties that it can help you with in your health,” said Petrick. “We get sources such as the national institute on cancer, United States library of medicine and we use their scientific studies that they’ve wrote about CBD to just educate people on what it is.”

CBD contains properties that can be used to turn people off of an addiction of something. For example, someone who may be addicted to opioids could supplement with a CBD product and the product would turn off the inhibitors that usually lead to addiction.

Petrick explained that there are a couple of different forms to turn to within the Natural Life wellness dispensary they include:

For patients with anxiety, the best way to go is the vaporizer and e-liquid which replaces nicotine and the action of smoking. For athletes that may have a bruise they can use a CBD oil that is absorbed through skin contact.

The 7-day a week, Natural life wellness dispensary plans to continue to help one customer and patient at a time by helping people become more aware of CBD and the education that most are not aware of.