MASSACHUSETTS: John Greene wants to open a medical marijuana dispensary to help people with serious illness avoid the suffering he watched his father endure in the weeks before he died from cancer.

The 32-year-old Plymouth resident who runs a wholesale herbal extract company there, said his father was diagnosed last October with liver, lung and stomach cancer. He starved to death just weeks after his first chemotherapy treatment, Greene said.

“(My family) knew we could stimulate his appetite if he had medical marijuana available to him,” Greene said. “That ultimately would have extended his life.”

Instead his father was given high doses of morphine, Greene said, which made him completely uncommunicative for the last weeks of his life.

Greene has submitted applications to open dispensaries in Plymouth and Bristol counties and hopes to locate his Plymouth County dispensary in Brockton.

As the only city in the county, Brockton is the logical choice, Greene said, and its hospitals and transportation will help ensure patient access.

He said the cultivation and manufacturing operation to supply his two potential dispensaries would likely be located in Plymouth.

Greene’s company, Adaptonic, makes herbal tinctures and extracts that promote good health. The company sells products like Liver Forever, which treats congested livers and gets rid of toxins. It is made from milk thistle, schizandra berry and olive leaf.

He said his experience as an herbalist would inform his approach to operating a dispensary.

“We’re not opening up a business to get people high. We’re opening up a business to heal people,” he said.

Greene said the focus would be to provide strains of marijuana with high medicinal value and less THC, the chemical compound responsible for marijuana’s psychoactive effects.

The clinic he envisions would also provide nutritional consulting, other therapies and other herbal medicines, he said.

“These won’t look like head shops,” he said. “We want our facility to have the look and feel of a wellness center.”