It’s about time the town that was the inspiration for the Woodstock Festival got its own weed dispensary. HERbal Woodstock had its grand opening at 17 Tinker Street on April 17 to much fanfare.
Occupying the space that was formerly Jarita’s Florist, HERbal Woodstock is co-owned and operated by Melissa Gibson, who ran Hemp & Humanity, specializing in hemp and CBD products. A snowboarding champion, Gibson was drawn toward the cannabis plant as a way for her to gain relief from a number of autoimmune disorders.
When the state opened a pathway for dispensaries, she joined up with partner Courtney Beaupre, owner of Honey’s Cannabis in Gardiner. Beaupre closed the Gardiner store to help run HERbal Woodstock full-time.
To the uninitiated, walking into a dispensary for the first time may be intimidating and overwhelming. Not so at HERbal Woodstock, a warm and welcoming environment.
“If you want to feel sleepy, relaxed, we can help you with that, and then we have our CBD and other non-THC cannabinoid section — because we are all about wellness as well,” Gibson said. “We’re set up by how you want to feel and then what method you want to use, from pre-rolls to flower to vapes to concentrates to edibles. We find people have a very good reaction to it, and they feel very comfortable, especially for some folks that haven’t been to dispensaries before.”
Upstairs, what used to be the space used by Jarita’s to prepare floral arrangements now houses offices and a secure vault for inventory. The staff has a comfortable room there.
“We wanted our staff to feel if they closed their eyes and they were brought to sit down here and they opened them, they’d be like, oh, yeah, I must be in a Woodstock dispensary. It kind of feels mid-century modern,” Gibson said.
Gibson is devoted to her trade.
“I would go to conferences and farmers’ markets,” she said. “I was one of the first to bring CBD to a farmer’s market on Long Island. And then when the pandemic hit and people didn’t gather, I still recognized the value and even more of a need for people to have access to the plant. And so an opportunity came up in this building.”
Through her Hemp & Humanity storefront, Gibson was able to educate people about the plant’s benefits, particularly hemp. There were two main reasons why she made the shift to adult use.
“I just didn’t know if a CBD-only or a non-THC retail practice would be able to continue when dispensaries would be opening up around me” Gibson explained. “And then the next thing was I just wanted to have the plant all together. I wanted to represent the whole plant. I applied for a license in November of 2023, which was the first opportunity that most of us had to apply for a license.”
The state Cannabis Control Board granted Gibson a dispensary license in June 2024.
Confusion and compliance
It was a rocky start.
“There was some confusion and misunderstanding around my location and its proximity to the church or in Woodstock,” Gibson said. “And from a legal standpoint, from a compliance standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, I knew that I was in compliance.”
A dispensary cannot be within 200 feet of a church or 500 feet of a school if they are on the same street. Though the Woodstock Reformed Church has a 16 Tinker Street mailing address, it is technically not on Tinker Street. It is across the street and on the other side of the village green from HERbal Woodstock, which is on a road owned by the church. On town maps, the church is on a road called Tinker Street II.
Town supervisor Bill McKenna had proposed barring dispensaries from close proximity to a church or school, as consistent with state law. The town planning board had disagreed with the church restriction in the law.
“We were trying to work with the town, potentially,” Gibson said. If they would prefer us to be in a different location, we looked around for that. It took a long time for the state to say, no, you can’t do that. So by the time all of that got shifted through we didn’t get our final approval and we weren’t able to open until March 31.”
People were asking why Woodstock didn’t have a dispensary yet.
“You would have thought it would have been one of the first ones,” Gibson said. “And it always made me chuckle because that would presume that the state was making decisions on who should have a dispensary based on the culture of the town.”
Catering to the customer
The emphasis has been on knowing the local customer base while catering in a tourist area.
“We are really hypervigilant, both because we want to be and because we need to be about making sure that young people don’t get into the dispensary, but living in Woodstock, we skew a little bit older,” Gibson said. “So we have a different set of care that we provide, because if you’re older and let’s just say you’re in your eighties and you haven’t used THC before and you don’t know what to expect, we kind of walk you through that.”
She is confident.
“We feel we have a handle on what the locals and the tourists are looking for,” Gibson said. “And we also are representing so many of the incredible growers that have put their heart, their soul, their blood, sweat, and tears, all of their capital into growing something that’s really special. And that really helps to bolster the New York economy.”
Dispensaries give people the power to take health into their own hands.
“We’re not medical experts,” she emphasized. “This isn’t medicinal cannabis. We’re not prescribing anything. But I like to say that it’s very similar to caffeine. Caffeine is a drug, and yet you don’t need a prescription for it. There’s something for everyone. If you just want to walk around town or you’re coming here just to visit and grab one pre-roll, you can.”
There’s something in it for Woodstock, too. It gets a three percent tax on sales.
“And that’s unusual because usually taxes go to the state or the county,” Gibson said.
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