Portsmouth's Greenleaf starts legal marijuana sales on Dec. 1. What you need to know.

PORTSMOUTH – Aquidneck Island residents will no longer have to cross the Massachusetts border to legally purchase marijuana once Greenleaf Compassionate Care Center, and other sites in Rhode Island, start recreational sales on Dec. 1.

Pursuant to the Rhode Island Cannabis Act, the dispensary submitted a successful application for a “hybrid retail license” which allows a licensed compassion center to sell both medical marijuana and recreational-use marijuana to Rhode Island adults over the age of 21.

Jess, a retail employee at Greenleaf, spoke to The Daily News over the phone and said, “Not too much (is going to change),” before adding, “There is going to be a division in the way the building is set up” to separate medical sales from recreational sales.

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Here's a look a what to know ahead of the first day of recreational sales.

When is Greenleaf Compassion Center open? Will online purchases be allowed?

She said the dispensary is open from 10 a.m.– 6 p.m., seven days a week, and recreational sales are currently only available in person at the shop. While the dispensary would eventually like to offer online shopping and home delivery for its recreational customers, those options are currently available only to Greenleaf’s medical patients.

“At the moment, we want to focus on our patients and make sure they have the same experience they’re used to, but we do hope to have recreational (sales) online too,” she said.

She indicated Greenleaf eventually hopes to offer delivery service to recreational customers as well, although Matt Santacroce of the Rhode Island Department of Business Regulation told the Providence Journal’s Tom Mooney that while home delivery of recreational pot is allowed under the state’s new legalization law, “we have not had any requests from dispensaries to do so.”

Portsmouth police will provide a traffic detail outside Greenleaf on the first day of recreational sales

Portsmouth Police Department spokesperson Detective Khatu Khubchandani confirmed to The Daily News that Greenleaf, which sits on the corner of West Main Road and John Street just past the Stringham Road intersection, had requested a traffic detail in anticipation of its first day of sales. He said the detail would be on duty in order to help manage any congestion from 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Greenleaf, which has a small parking lot, also owns the plaza next door on the other side of John Street. The plaza used to house Smaller State Smoke Shop, but now sits vacant and adorned with signs reading “Adult Recreational Cannabis Use Coming December.”

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This plaza has a parking lot in the front, a few diagonal parking spaces on its southern side down John Street, and a second, larger parking lot in the back; all of these additional parking spaces will be available to Greenleaf’s medical and recreational marijuana patients, and the dispensary employs parking attendants to help customers navigate its lots.

Recreational marijuana industry could boost Rhode Island’s economy

Greenleaf, which has cultivated and sold medical marijuana out of its West Main Road location since 2012, will join four other medical dispensaries in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Warwick as the first five recreational weed shops in Rhode Island.

“We were pleased with the quality and comprehensiveness of the applications we received from the state’s compassion centers, and we are proud to launch adult use sales in Rhode Island just six months after the Cannabis Act was signed into law, marking the Northeast’s fastest implementation period,” said Santacroce in a Nov. 22 press release.

In the same press release, Gov. Dan McKee called the beginning of recreational marijuana sales “a win for our statewide economy and our strong, locally based cannabis supply chain, which consists of nearly 70 licensed cultivators, processors and manufacturers in addition to our licensed compassion centers.”

Rhode Island’s Office of Cannabis Regulation, under the state’s Division of Business Regulation, keeps aggregated data showing $4,622,075 in retail sales to 15,714 active medical marijuana patients in October 2022. However, if the numbers in neighboring Massachusetts are anything to go by, those numbers could go way up as more recreational licenses are awarded – in the same month, Massachusetts’ 165 retailers and three delivery businesses did $127.1 million in sales.

Newport, Middletown and Tiverton all voted to approve legalizing weed sales in the recent referendum and could stand to gain some revenue if a license gets awarded in their municipality. The Massachusetts marijuana industry generated $393.7 million with 33 retailers over the first year of adult-use sales from 2018 – 2019. So far this year, Massachusetts’ 168 recreational marijuana companies have done S1.34 billion in sales, and cannabis has surpassed cranberries as the state’s most lucrative cash crop.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Greenleaf dispensary, Portsmouth, legalized cannabis sales on Dec. 1