Illinois Supply & Provisions (IS&P) has received approval from the city of Springfield to open the state’s first legal cannabis consumption space, which Chris McCloud, a spokesman for the company, said will not only allow Illinois residents and visitors to legally consume cannabis in the state’s nascent adult-use market, but will also serve as a model for other businesses looking to open similar spaces.
“This is the first of its kind in Illinois, at least right now,” McCloud told Cannabis Dispensary. “For us, it was important to get an approval from a municipality that we were working in before we put in a lot of time and effort into concept and legal work and all kinds of stuff that comes with it.”
Illinois’ adult-use cannabis law gives municipalities the option to allow and regulate public consumption areas within their borders. IS&P currently operates a dispensary in Springfield, as well as one in Collinsville, and the Springfield storefront, located in a former state office building, has room for a separate consumption area in the same building.
Springfield’s city council gave IS&P’s consumption space the official green light at a Jan. 21 meeting. IS&P’s parent company, Ascend Wellness Holdings, is now evaluating the space and creating design plans for the consumption area.
“It’s a big, huge atrium,” McCloud said. “There are multiple levels to it. There are all kinds of possibilities, so that’s what they’re thinking through now. What do we want the concept to be? What do we want this experience to be? … The idea behind it would be to potentially be a model for other cannabis consumption areas in the state.”
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Public consumption areas are still largely a legal gray area in Illinois, McCloud added. Springfield is, to his knowledge, the first municipality in the state to grant approval to such a space, and Illinois has not yet issued any laws that would regulate consumption areas that ultimately gain municipal approval.
“You can use [cannabis] in the privacy of your own residence, but even that can be a gray area with municipalities because what is your own space?” McCloud said. “Is it physically inside your home with all the doors and windows closed? Is it on your back deck? Is it in your front yard, on your front porch? Is that your own personal property, or is that considered public consumption? There are all kinds of gray areas. I guess that’s a long way of saying there is no roadmap for public consumption, and the laws are really, really stringent, so having a legal space to consume cannabis … makes a lot of sense because you’re going to eventually solve those problems by designating a place where people can come to legally, responsibly and safely consume cannabis.”
McCloud hopes Springfield’s approval of IS&P’s consumption space will start a larger conversation in the state’s nascent adult-use cannabis market, and that the state will start to answer some of these important questions.
IS&P is holding off on setting a target opening date for the consumption area until it gets more guidance from the state and municipality, McCloud added.
“It’s really going to be based on how long it takes us to get all of the questions answered that we need answered, and also to develop a concept and understand how long construction might take,” he said. “There’s no real timeframe at this point as to when it might open, but again, the approval from the city of Springfield … gives us now the ability to take that next step and start exploring what something like this would look like and how it would operate.”
Springfield’s approval of a cannabis consumption space also signifies a broader evolution of Illinois’ market, he added.
“[It shows] that these things are being thought about,” McCloud said. “Certainly, the public is thinking about them. We get questions all the time—where is it safe to use it? Where can I go?”
In time, IS&P hopes to answer these questions with its consumption space, but until then, the company is evaluating the best path forward and focusing on transitioning into the state’s new adult-use market.
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IS&P recently launched “Medical Mondays,” for example, where the dispensary closes to adult-use customers every Monday and instead focuses on its medical patients.
“It worked so well, not only to help us replenish supply on the recreational side, but for our staff, too,” McCloud said. “[It let] our staff be a little bit more intimate with our medical patients who may need more consultation. … We’ve found that our medical patients really responded well to it. They didn’t have to deal with crowds. They didn’t have to deal with lack of parking as much. It just became a better experience for them."
