Dr. Kyle Kingsley
The news that Minnesota's health commissioner has authorized expansion of medical marijuana to chronic pain and some eye conditions, sure can't hurt Vireo Health, the multistate cannabis grower, processor, retailer and owner of Minnesota Medical Solutions.
In late November, publicly traded Vireo said it lost $13.7 million on revenue of $19.9 million during the first nine months of 2019, as it scales up operations in 11 states.
Its stock price has fallen from a "high" of $6.85 per share last spring to $1.30 per share recently, a market value of about $110 million.
Most public marijuana companies, including Vireo, have seen their valuations cut by up to 75 percent from their 52-week highs, as investors get over their initial giddiness and operators incur high startup and expansion costs in what may prove an early sorting of survivors.
Dr. Kyle Kingsley, a former Minnesota National Guard medic and emergency room physician, walked away from a $400,000-a-year job in 2014 and took a big pay cut to research and start Vireo in 2015 as an alternative to addictive opioids, alcohol and other substances to combat pain.
"We joked that if cannabis ever replaced alcohol, emergency doctors would be out of business," recalled Kingsley last spring. "And alcohol often was involved in domestic and sexual assaults, other violence, car accidents ... cancer, cirrhosis of the liver. It's laughable that alcohol and tobacco are legal, but it was a crime to use cannabis."
Kingsley, 42, said recently that Minneapolis-based Vireo is slowing the pace of development and will finish this year with 13 dispensaries instead of 16 to 20, as originally envisioned.
