Chinese buffet to become marijuana dispensary

The new tenant of the former Chinese Chef Restaurant will serve a much different clientele in the near future. 

With a slew of medical marijuana dispensaries planned along I-35, Besame Wellness will soon call Cameron home and provide a number of medical-marijuana products to residents.

“We have five dispensaries in the region, north of Kansas City … Cameron is kind of a regional service center for that north central area along I-35,” said Jack Mitchell, CEO of Besame Wellness. “We’re very focussed on the community, although we haven’t engaged them yet we will. It is important for us to be very visible, a place we can hopefully be a part of that business community along Walnut.”

Besame is the first medical marijuana dispensary to officially announce its intention to open in Cameron.  Earlier this year the Missouri Department of Health announced the approval of licenses for BMD Cameron, LLC at 714 N. Walnut and Shanri-La Cameron, LLC at 1 Baldwin Road while rejecting applications filed by MiSkye, LLC at 2301 N. Walnut and Therapy Harvest Corporation at 700 E. Bryan. The latter generated a bit of controversy thanks in part to former Missouri National Guard adjutant general Stephen L. Danner, the primary financier of the project, who at the time was under investigation by the state of Missouri for pressuring state officials into giving a $7.5 million housing project slated for construction in Cameron. Mitchell said Besame is just getting started on applying for its license to sell medical marijuana and should receive a response sometime this summer.

“We just closed on the building last week. It’s now time for us to start doing the hard work of building permits and dealing with the city and all of those things you have to do,” Mitchell said. “There is a major regulatory process with the state and the health department. Now that you have Coronavirus, everything is in an uproar.”

Another challenge for Besame will be getting flower product on store shelves. Mitchell said medical marijuana must be grown in Missouri and the group Besame contracted to grow their marijuana must also obtain its permit before beginning operation. 

“It takes time. The best case, if everything went really, really well, it will not be until July when you’ll see anything on the market,” Mitchell said. “It will be limited for a while until more people can get up and running on the growth side. We will have a pretty broad range of products. We will have flower and all kinds of different edibles, vape cartridges and all of the things you see in dispensaries in a state like Colorado.”

Last summer, the city council approved its zoning regulations with the most dividing policy setting a required distance of 750 feet from a school, church or childcare provider. Mitchell said Besame hopes to quickly ingratiate itself in the Cameron community, but first must get the old Chinese restaurant location up to par to service the city’s medical marijuana needs.

“This is stuff our people have all dealt with in the past. We pretty much have to gut [the building] and rebuild the entire interior,” Mitchell said. “The is a lot of security, a lot of camera. We will remodel and build a really nice presence interior and exterior … We have to begin a really robust patient education program with a lot of events.  We obviously can’t do that now because of the Coronavirus. We have to have an ongoing engagement with the patient community so we can educate people as to what these products do. We just have to get rid of a lot of misconceptions that have been out there about marijuana.”