Understanding Cultivating Caregiver and Caregivers in Missouri

In Missouri every legal MMJ patient may have a cultivating caregiver and a caregiver.

What does this mean? Let’s dive in to score some answers.

A caregiver means someone who gives medical assistance or care to a person or patient. In the medical marijuana realm of things. A caregiver may go on behalf of the patient to purchase medicine at any dispensary in Missouri and it also legally allows the caregiver to also assist the patient in administration of said medicine.

A cultivating caregiver is a caregiver who grows medicine for the patient and who is also legally allowed to construct forms of cannabis medicine to use in the healing process for the individual; such as tinctures, creams, RSO/FECO, cartridges, wax, batter, crumble, you name it and your cultivating caregiver can make it from the biomass that said cultivating caregiver grows for you specifically.

You do not have to have your medical marijuana license to have your caregiver license or your cultivating caregiver license.

To apply for your medical marijuana license in order to consume is a personal choice.

If you do choose to consume and therefore apply for your MMJ license it will give you the opportunity to try your recipes and adjust ratios appropriately to assist your patient in the trial and error stages of finding what is best suited for the individual. These are not only great options for people who are physically unable to make the trek to the dispensary or those who do not have the space or health to grow their own medicine but it is also imperative for pediatric patients.

A pediatric patient must have a parent or legal guardian as their caregiver or cultivating caregiver.

Hopefully in the future we can change the criteria, so it does not have to be a parent or legal guardian due to the convenience factor for a parent who may be burning the candle at both ends already. It is our mission to not only assist patients as individuals and their individual unique needs, but also the family unit themselves. You are legally allowed to grow for three patients. If you are a legal medical marijuana patient you may grow for yourself and three patients. The amount of plants that you can grow for a patient are the same as if you were growing for your personal medical needs, so 6, 6, and 6. Six seedlings, six non-flowering, and six flowering.

Each plant must be labeled as to which patient this plant belongs to.

If you’re interested in becoming a cultivating caregiver here’s a quick checklist of things that you should process before you make your decision.

• We suggest that you form a contract of some sort, that way you know what’s expected of you to provide every week, biweekly, and month for your patient. You need to negotiate costs, working with your patient's budget and your own. On top of that, communicating with your patient on who will be paying the State fees for the cultivating caregiver application needs to be settled early on.
• Revisit your contract and agreements frequently to discuss anything different or new that your patient would like to try.
• Be in the mindset of healing not dealing. Some of you may take offense at the audacity of that statement “Of course we’re here for healing!” But it needs to be at the forefront of your mind with each patient that you care give for. Dive into the Scientific aspects of it all, terpene profiles for specific strains, method of consumption that would work best for your patient, setting a specific plan for the patient to medicate at certain times of the day that will coincide with their endocrine system best, or specific methods of treatment that will aid most appropriate for the ailments that they have.

Below you will see some of the many ways a cultivating caregiver can raise the bar for their patients' experience.