The Advocate Series: Mitch Meyers

Mitch Meyers is a former maven of marketing – when she was at Anheuser-Busch, she was responsible for making Bud Light happen. She opened her own agency and sold it years later, seemingly retiring.

Meyers found herself vacationing in Colorado upon retirement, engaging with a friend who had become a medical marijuana caregiver. With no medical background, Meyers’ contact was treating patients with “this plant,” and Meyers was inspired.

“I was blown away – she would bring the PET scan and show me,” Meyers said.

Her inspiration led to her own research, which led her to join a group that entered the Illinois legal market after winning a single dispensary license.

“I am happy that my first training was in a state that was very regulated and difficult to manage,” Meyers said. “In the beginning, it was also difficult to get patients.”

Not too long after, Meyers’ attention was drawn to then-state Sen. Eric Schmitt’s CBD bill that authorized the state Department of Agriculture to license limited facilities to grow, process, and package CBD oil for intractable epilepsy.

“Four months later, there’s a little thing on the Department of Agriculture website,” Meyers said. Her group applied for one of the licenses and was one of two groups to be awarded a license by the department to be a one-stop-shop for CBD production in Missouri.

One could think that the limited licenses would allow Meyers’ group and the other to dominate, but a strange legislative climate federally left Beleaf, where Meyers’ is CEO, with 50 patients for their medical-grade cannabidiol oil.

Meyers credits the boom in popularity and the profound effectiveness for patients of CBD as a gateway for a state to explore and develop a medical marijuana program.

Beleaf has been held back from the initial CBD rush caused by the federal farm bill changes and their state license. “We’re behind, but I like our product.” Just in the past several months has Beleaf been readily available across Missouri and not just to patients with intractable epilepsy.

   

“Beleaf is still not profitable because we had fifty patients under the epilepsy bill,” Meyers said, toting the support of investors keeping the company afloat during regulatory shifts. “We didn’t care if it was only one patient that we helped – it is worth it.”

Meyers laughs, saying the Missouri application process has been reminding her of her last state application process for a facility in Illinois – another highly regulated, competitive market.

“If a state has chronic pain as a qualifying condition, you tend to have more patients initially,” Meyers said, observing that Missouri may have a wider initial breadth of patients compared to other states. It seems her luck with low patients numbers may change, should her group win facility licenses in Missouri. Beleaf may be behind, but Meyers notes that 6 months is like 7 years for the cannabis industry. Everything is developing and changing at lightning speeds.

Meyers is currently going from personally knowing the accounts of her company’s 50 patients, taking calls at any hour from parents or patients to having a mainstream CBD product created in Missouri – all while waiting for news about her group’s facility license applications. Being one of few professionals in the state with legal market experience exclusive to Missouri, Meyers is taking from both her Illinois and Missouri – and marketing experience – to see the state’s path ahead.

“We are going to try to stay the course and try to keep a very high quality product,” Meyers said. Beleaf grows their plants indoors hydroponically, controlling each part of the environment that effects the growth and development of the plants. “There’s always going to be a craft upper end, and there’s always going to be a Natty Light.”

Meyers believes once patients are educated beyond the initial intrigue of THC levels in medical marijuana, terpenes are what is going to shine – and terpene profiles will be able to be developed for different effects for different conditions.

“Those terpenes are so important,” Meyers says.

It seems Meyers’ trailblazer paths in marketing and medical cannabis may merge soon when she sees clearly the Missouri patient demand.