Nature’s Medicines celebrates first weeks of business

Apr 19, 2022

Wareham’s third retail cannabis shop opened earlier this month, and Dispensary Manager Jacqueline Robillard said business has been steady since opening day on April 6.

“We try to create a mature shopping experience,” Robillard said, sitting on a cozy chair in one of the dispensary’s consulting areas.

Nature’s Medicines operates several dispensaries across the nation, from New Mexico to Michigan to Missouri. The Wareham location is the company’s third recreational dispensary to open in Massachusetts, with two already in business in Uxbridge and Fall River.

The dispensary marks Wareham’s third, and final, retail cannabis business under the town’s self-imposed cap of three retail licenses.

The Wareham shop differs from Nature’s other Massachusetts dispensaries, Robillard said, as the newest dispensary offers an open shopping experience for customers.

In Fall River and Uxbridge, customers are in line as soon as they enter the dispensary, and they can speak with an employee and pick out products when they reach the front.

In the new Nature’s Medicines in Jordan Plaza, the experience is more open. Customers can roam the main room, peer into display cases of — empty — packaging, advertising products like “Mr. Moxey’s Mints” and cannabis-infused “sea salt caramel bites,” before buying something.

If they’re looking for help, Robillard said, customers can talk with employees at the shop’s “education hub” about different products and their possible effects.

“Consultation can really range and vary,” Robillard said. “Our menu is quite extensive.”

Cannabis is part of what the manager calls “modern herbalism” — a product that may be able to assist people with certain maladies, like anxiety, stress or a host of other problems.

Robillard, who said she’s worked in the cannabis industry for a decade, emphasized that the effects of cannabis products aren’t quite pharmaceutical and guaranteed for every customer. The drug, which can come in a smattering of different forms, isn’t a substitute for a good diet, healthy sleep schedule or other habits.

Using cannabis is about more than just finding a product with a high tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, content, Robillard explained.

As Robillard describes the effects of cannabis products, she opens a thick binder she put together about terpenes — chemical compounds found in cannabis and elsewhere. Each page details one of the terpenes — of which there are more than 100, though there’s 11 “main” ones, she says — and its chemical properties.

The binder indicates which terpenes are found in products at Nature’s Medicines, and which terpenes may help with customers’ problems.

So when customers come in, they can find a product — whether it be an edible, vape, concentrate or something else — that works for them specifically.

“We’re really happy to be here,” she said. “We’re here to help.”