In 2019 Brooke Foster learned her son was changing his undergraduate major and abandoning his pre-medicine track.

His new plan: cannabis.

Foster, who owned and operated her family’s chain of local grocery stores in rural, northern Missouri, was shocked.

She knew little about medical marijuana and, as many do, thought it was just a way for people to get high.

Fast forward three years and Foster, who recently sold the grocery business, and her son have three dispensaries, a manufacturing and lab facility and are developing a cultivation site. The company, COCO, serves and employs northern Missourians, who have been surprisingly supportive of the introduction of legal weed.

Rural Missourians voted heavily in support of medical marijuana legalization in 2018 and seem to have welcomed it readily into their communities.

Some folks still have reservations about recreational legalization – they want a program that will be safe for their communities. But come November,  Missourians will have to vote yea or nay on an adult-use marijuana legalization amendment.

According to a recent poll by SurveyUSA, 62% of 1,782 registered voters in Missouri responded that recreational marijuana should be legalized. Among other respondents, 25% were against legalization and 13% were not sure.