<p><em>TAMPA</em> – In what had once been a bank building, nine agriculture students on a recent weekday watched a video explaining how to recycle discarded plant leaves for use in an extract.</p><p>But the leaves weren’t leftovers from tomato plants or corn stalks. They were were from the cannabis sativa plant — marijuana.</p><p>Like the leaves themselves, the students’ school is considerably unorthodox.</p><p>Medical Marijuana Tampa has been open since February, and has plans to eventually offer courses in advanced growing techniques, grow-room build-outs and breeding and genetics.</p><p>To bring the curriculum to fruition and to finance an even more ambitious goal, founder Jeremy Bufford is trying to raise $10 million. With it, he hopes to establish a chain of up to 15 pot dispensaries and grow rooms — including in Bradenton — that would be poised to capitalize on a November state referendum that could make medical marijuana legal in Florida.</p><p>While raising $10 million sounds lofty, medical marijuana supporters contend that the figure is entirely realistic.</p><p>“You’ve got a lot of people with money in Florida,” said Kris Krane, founder of 4Front Advisors in Phoenix, which has helped entrepreneurs navigate federal, state and local laws in 20 states.</p><p>Cannabis consultant Michael Mayes, chief executive of Chicago-based Quantum Nine Inc., believes Bufford’s goal may be “a little on the light side.”</p><p>“This is not your closet grow room anymore,” Mayes said. “Think of pharmaceutical-grade clean rooms.”</p><p>He maintains it’s not unusual to spend up to $4 million just to get a full-size grow-room operation going.</p><p>Despite the hurdles, the 33-year-old Bufford is optimistic.</p><p>“I think, honestly, we will be done in 30 to 60 days,” he said.</p><p><B>Lining up</b></p><p>Bufford is among a growing number of investors and entrepreneurs lining up now to take advantage of a favorable vote on medical marijuana following a court-approved constitutional amendment.</p><p>Polls currently predict the amendment will pass. If it does, Florida’s medical marijuana market within a few years could approach California’s, which last year had $980 million in sales.</p><p>But with passage of the medical marijuana amendment looking likely, the Republican-led Florida Legislature is working to pass a bill that would allow just four dispensaries statewide to dole out a type of cannabis that has no psychoactive effect but can stop seizures.</p><p>While that would likely not be enough to induce him to set up his business on a wide scale, Bufford said, he sees the potential law as a plus, because it could convince investors to weigh in sooner — and also allow him to produce at least one plant variety prior to the summer of 2015.</p><p>Robert Platshorn, a West Palm Beach cannabis activist who lectures seniors on the potential benefits of pot, invited Bufford to speak at a seminar held March 29.</p><p>“What I liked about him is he is opening a real bricks-and-mortar school,” said Platshorn, who served a 32-year prison sentence for smuggling marijuana into Florida and authored a book about his experiences called “Black Tune Diaries.”</p><p>“He has very ambitious plans,” Platshorn said.</p><p>Bufford’s ambitious plans have also drawn critics.</p><p>“It is pie in the sky,” said Robert Jordan, a Parrish resident who grows marijuana as medicine for his wife, ALS sufferer Cathy Jordan. </p><p>For his part, Bufford is fixed primarily on establishing a brand name, and providing input into the 100-plus pages of regulations that will likely be issued from Tallahassee if the two-page amendment passes.</p><p>“When people think about innovative research and ground-breaking technology related to medical marijuana, I want them to think about Tampa, Fla., and specifically about Medical Marijuana Tampa,” said Bufford, adding that MMT would like to build its own state-of-the-art labs to test crops.</p><p>Using advanced chromatography, the company would measure the actual content of active cannabinoids, such as THC and CBD, as well as any harmful additives such as heavy metals.</p><p>Quantum Nine’s CEO agrees that a lab is a solid idea, but points out that the state is likely to demand a ream of paperwork.</p><p>“The state is going to want visibility into your operations,” Mayes said. “They are going to want to know your sanitation protocol, your transportation protocol, your quality assurance protocol. Everything has to be done tactfully.”</p><p>Since 1971, marijuana has been classified as a Schedule 1 drug — one with no medical value, in the same class as heroin and LSD.</p><p>For cancer patients like Parrish’s Ryan Roman, however, marijuana should have a place in the canon of medical treatments.</p><p>He remains wary, though, about expectations that medical marijuana might be available by June 2015, the date the state has established to write rules and operating procedures for issuing identification cards for users.</p><p>“It is going to take, I would say, three to five years for everything to be written out and structured,” he said.</p><p>Now a paraplegic, Roman uses a vaporizer to breathe in cannabis fumes, which he started taking to improve his appetite and to help control spasms brought on by metastasized spinal cancer.</p><p><B>Banking on pot</b></p><p>MMT’s former bank building, at 715 E. Bird St. just off Interstate 275, had everything Bufford was looking for.</p><p>He says he is so pleased that he intends to scope out former banks for future locations, he said.</p><p>“When you think about it makes sense,” Bufford said. “You typically have a large lobby, that would be our grow room. You have a couple of offices that would make sense for cutting, trimming, curing, and you have a vault for storage and security.”</p><p>Even old teller windows and drive-throughs could serve a role. </p><p>“The cameras and microphones are already in place,” he said. </p><p>“We don’t have to do a lot of build-out.”</p><p>Bufford’s four classrooms take up only a fraction of the 10,000-square-foot building. The balance would be used as a vegetative grow room; a specialized lighting room for flowering plants; a curing room; and a room for preparing medicines from buds.</p><p>With the concept in place, Bufford hopes to launch a series of outlets. “Then we can create a franchise development corporation that takes that concept and goes to every other market in the United States.”</p><p>He envisions all the medicines pre-packaged and dispensed according to doctors’ recommendations. Once registered, patients would order their medication in advance, present identification upon arrival at a MMT dispensary and pay for their products.</p><p>He plans for delivery to be an important component, too, because many patients might be bedridden.</p><p>Bufford said has no plans to emulate the designs of marijuana dispensaries in California, which look like coffee houses with jars of marijuana adorning the walls.</p><p>“That is completely not what we are going to do.”</p>
Ahead of cannabis vote, preparations for an industry
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