Opuntia Dispensaries Ready to Bloom in South Denver

Starting a cannabis business may seem like a prickly proposition as Colorado dispensary sales decline, but Emily Drost still thinks the time is ripe. That's why she and her father, Thomas Laue, named their two new dispensaries Opuntia.

A 500-year-old word that later became the scientific label for the prickly pear cactus, opuntia is a plant native to Colorado and known for its vivid purple flowers and sweet fruits. A few months after opening the Denver dispensaries, Drost hopes her Opuntias are starting to bloom, too.

Her first store, a former Solace Meds dispensary at 2262 South Broadway, opened under the name Purple Med late last year. Drost has since rebranded it as Opuntia, the name of her other new pot shop at 2268 South Delaware Street, in a former Mighty Tree dispensary.

"For us, Opuntia is sort of a nod to my dad and him having lived in Arizona, and to me because I'm a master gardener in Colorado," Drost explains.

The family operation has two more stores in the pipeline as it prepares to also launch an in-house cultivation, extraction lab and edibles line. Having a vertically integrated business excites Drost, who says she "jumped on it" when approached by her father, a notable cannabis attorney in Arizona who is "very active in the industry."

Those father-daughter cannabis chats weren't always so smooth, though.

"The last time my dad and I had a conversation about cannabis, it was in high school. I might've been trying some things that he was telling me not to, and here we are," she says. "Now we're working on setting up a vertically integrated business."

Drost moved to Colorado from Chicago over twenty years ago to attend college at Colorado State University, and then didn't want to leave. She's mostly worked in the tech and business operation sectors, but the Highlands Ranch resident says she's all about plants now.

A few years before founding Opuntia, Drost reenrolled at CSU to take part in a botany certification program as she fell in love with gardening. Although she won't be leading Opuntia's growing operations, Drost says she "loves to experiment" and sees a lot of similarities between gardening at home and running a cannabis cultivation.

"There's a lot to learn specific to cannabis growing, which I'm still doing, but a lot of the scientific background is consistent with plants," she says. "Still, growing on a mass scale is very different than growing in your basement at home. I noticed this while looking at my 2024 garden of tomatoes and peppers in my kitchen. That part of sharing knowledge is very exciting to go through right now."

Knowledge about the cannabis business has never been more important in Colorado, where dispensary sales recently hit their lowest annual total since 2017. Wholesale cannabis prices have dropped at a similar rate, with business closures and layoffs hitting the industry hard in 2023 and into this year. Drost is confident Opuntia will weather the storm, however.

"My hope is to never start any business venture with a negative mindset, especially this one," she says. "I think that this industry is so fascinating to be in. It's really still in its infancy, but Colorado is a little further ahead than most. Navigating that is challenging, but exciting. It's fun to identify how to navigate within this structure while also bringing along some great outside resources that aren't really cannabis-specific."

Opuntia's internal grow will specialize in OG Kush genetics, according to Drost. The extraction lab is scheduled to be up and running before the end of the year, while the ideas for Opuntia's first edibles are somewhat obvious.

"The opuntia is native to Colorado, even up here in Denver," she points out. "I think Opuntia cannabis will need to have some prickly pear gummies in the future."