Liz Merritt got goosebumps every time she looked at the test results for her CBD oil.
“I knew this was going to change people’s lives,” she says.
Merritt had already been involved in cannabis for 12 years when many people in the industry began to transition toward hemp production. After researching, growing and doing her own extractions with hemp, she quit her job as a lead grower for a marijuana company and started Healthy Roots in 2018.
“If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself,” she says.
Healthy Roots takes a different approach to CBD formulations. The company has a provisional patent on its own variation of a Rick Simpson Oil and CBD isolate mixture. The research, development and testing that go into every product are an added stress to the process, but nothing compared to the anxiety of launching her own business as a woman in the cannabis industry, she says.
“It’s really hard to be a normal person in a normal world when you grow cannabis, have kids and you’re a woman,” Merritt says. “My story is that I’m an ordinary person and I can do extraordinary things.”
But Healthy Roots wasn’t just an impulse. Merritt lost her mother to liver disease associated with the harmful opiates prescribed by her doctor. Although Merritt advocated for cannabis, the doctors wouldn’t allow it and even tested her for cannabinoids to make sure they weren’t in her system, Merritt says.
“If it was, they would remove her from the (pain management) program,” Merrit says. “She wouldn’t have had a doctor, she wouldn’t have had prescriptions. They put that fear inside of her and it wasn’t an option. So she’s a part of this company every day.”