RAVENNA — The road to medical marijuana legally in the hands of patients is shorter now.
On Friday, the state of Ohio gave its first green light to a medical marijuana cultivator located in Ravenna.
In her first interview, 24-year-old Claire Hobson, COO of FN Group Holdings LLC, tells Channel 3 News, "It's very personal for us. For us it's about patients but it's also about our family."
Hobson spoke to us while standing in front of the meticulously designed building on Lake Rockwell Rd. in Ravenna.
She and her family from Chagrin Falls saw the value of medical marijuana. So Claire left a good finance job in Boston to be part of the process of getting it to patients.
"My grandma has rheumatoid arthritis. I came back because she was very ill at the time. We knew she lives with chronic pain, we see it every day, and thought, 'Isn’t there something better?' Something other than an opioid that we could give her when she doesn't even like taking Advil," said Hobson.
That's when the Hobson family decided to apply to be a cultivator and get in on the ground floor of the medical marijuana movement.
"I've had strong role models in my life, especially my mom, so to go forward it was easy to say I'm going to into this field and be good at it," Hobson said.
The family started building in Ravenna in December. Now they are the first of the 25 provisional licensees to pass a thorough state inspection.
They’ll be doing business as Wellspring Fields, growing up to 3,000 cannabis plants.
But Hobson says don’t hold your breath that plants will be grown and ready for the state’s September 8th fully-operational program deadline.
"There is a series of things we have to go through. The testing lab, for example, so patients get what they think they’re getting and know what’s in their product which is very important. It's not as cut and dry as people think. But we're committed. It really is about family for us. That's what drove Wellspring Fields and that’s how we continue to go on," said Hobson.
The Commerce Department also on Friday awarded testing lab licenses to the two colleges that applied to test medical marijuana products: Central State University in Wilberforce and Hocking Technical College in Nelsonville.
Licenses for privately-run labs will be awarded soon, a department spokeswoman said Friday.