FROM 'NOT A POT PERSON' TO MAINE DISPENSARY BUSINESS MOGUL

AUGUSTA -- Rebecca DeKeuster doesn't act like a woman who has just
cornered much of Maine's medical marijuana market.

The former high school English teacher is criss-crossing the state
behind the wheel of a 1997 Chevy Cavalier. Her husband towed it from
California behind a U-Haul moving truck, she said.

And when she finally pauses for a face-to-face newspaper interview,
DeKeuster suggests the Augusta House of Pancakes, a favorite breakfast
spot in her newly adopted hometown.

DeKeuster, 40, is the most powerful figure in Maine's emerging
dispensary business. She is the chief executive officer of Northeast
Patients Group, which has been awarded state licenses to operate four
of the Maine's first eight medical marijuana dispensaries. Its
licenses give Northeast exclusive dispensary rights, at least for now,
to the state's biggest markets -- including Portland, Augusta and Bangor.

Just eight years ago, DeKeuster was teaching in a northern California
high school and knew little about medical marijuana, she said.

"I was not a pot person."

Then she got a call to come home to Missouri because her father was
dying from lung cancer.

Friends suggested she take her father some marijuana to help with
pain, nausea and depression, but she didn't want to risk getting
caught by airport security, DeKeuster said.

"I watched him die ... knowing that if I just had the guts to do it, I
could have helped him so much," DeKeuster said, wiping tears from her
eyes. "It shouldn't be something that I'm afraid to tell you about. It
shouldn't be something that I'm afraid to fly with."

Soon after that, she left teaching and took a $14-an-hour job as a
salesperson at Berkeley Patients Group, a medical marijuana
dispensary, and got to help other people, some with serious and
terminal illnesses, she said. "It was an affirmation for me."

DeKeuster eventually became general manager, a position that brought
her to Maine last winter to meet with policy makers writing rules for
the state's new network of dispensaries.

"We've been very open about sharing our model," she
said.

She gave advice to the state's task force, as well as other groups,
and began to feel invested in the state's new rules, she said. "It
became harder and harder to leave."

DeKeuster and her husband officially moved to Augusta in March and she
became the sole officer of a new group, Northeast Patients Group. The
group applied for five licenses, hoping to win one or two, she said.

DeKeuster has since been racking up the miles in her Cavalier, working
to set up the new businesses and a central marijuana growing facility
in Hermon.

DeKeuster would not say how much she was paid as Berkeley's general
manager, and said she does not yet know what Northeast's salaries will
be.

But she said she did not get rich in the medical marijuana business in
California and won't in Maine, either.

"There has always been an underlying plan to share our mission," she
said.