Shangri-La Dispensaries will hold a grand opening at 1 p.m. Thursday, July 11, for its new Springfield dispensary. The event will include area vendors, food trucks and live music. Shangri-La, 3128 S. Dirksen Parkway, represents the company’s first entrance into Illinois’ adult-use cannabis market.
The parent company, founded in 2019, is a multistate cannabis operator with retail, manufacturing and cultivation operations in Missouri, Oho, Illinois and Connecticut. Shangri-La becomes the seventh dispensary in Springfield, although one person, Chris Stone, is involved in five of the dispensaries through various business entities.
Stone is affiliated with both Ascend Cannabis and Maribis, which have two locations each, plus Share, which opened in the former Magnolia Lane store on South Sixth Street in 2023. A Chicago-area investment group recently opened High Profile in the former Steak n’ Shake location in Prairie Crossing.
While the other dispensaries are all located in existing buildings that were remodeled, Shangri-La was new construction. The Springfield City Council approved the permit for the new dispensary in February 2023 with virtually no discussion. Joe McMenamin, then the Ward 7 alderman, was the only no vote.
He told Illinois Times at the time, “I’ve consistently been against every dispensary, whether it be downtown, east side or west side. I think we’re normalizing something, recreational marijuana, that we should not normalize.”
The City Council has levied a 3% sales tax on cannabis, with half for police and fire department pension funds and the other half earmarked for projects intended to help businesses and neighborhoods on the east side.
