Your ice cream right off I-95 is safe. At least for now.
If you were anywhere near the embattled cannabis social media sphere early this month, then you probably encountered buzz regarding a certain Connecticut Dairy Queen being demolished and replaced by a cannabis dispensary.
In fact, if you’re a Blizzard fan, you may have actually grown angry over rumors that the DQ off I-95 on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard in New Haven was slated to be replaced by a shop owned by the Florida-based Trulieve Holding Inc.
You may have also been upset if you’re a cannabis fan, since Trulieve has faced widespread scrutiny since news broke last year that one of their Massachusetts manufacturing employees, Lorna McMurrey, “died of cardiac arrest due to an apparent asthma attack—a condition that [her mother] said she never had until she started working at the large-scale grow facility, which is owned by the multistate cannabis giant,” as this month’s cover story in the Nation magazine put it.
But while the setup for the Dairy Queen takeover story was sexy enough to cover and cause consternation, the followup—that the deal is not happening—received far less coverage and anti-fanfare. From the New Haven Register:
Robert Pursell, property owner of the parcel at 254 Kimberly Ave., also confirmed that information to the Register, and said he was notified by Trulieve earlier this week that it “would no longer be pursuing the proposed development of a retail cannabis shop.”
“I believe, as a corporation, they are going to concentrate their expansion efforts in the South,” said Pursell, who also owns the Dairy Queen, confirming the franchise will remain at the site. “They had approached me with a nice offer and we pursued it a little bit.”
Contacted by the Register, the only response that a Trulieve spokesperson had was, “I don’t have anything for you on this.”
So there you have it. While no ice cream is safe around stoners, this Dairy Queen is safe from Trulieve.
