When Omari Anderson’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, cannabis extract became a source of relief.

Mixed with her homemade juice recipes, it helped restore her appetite and sleep habits. Though she died in 2019 at 59 — five years post-diagnosis — the infused lemonade struck a chord with Anderson’s friends and prompted him to start a business.

Now he has brought Best Dirty Lemonade to market in Massachusetts. The product is also available in Atlanta, where Anderson is from.

“Our journey really started from a place of love and desire to help my mother,” Anderson told MassLive. “She wasn’t really sleeping or eating. And as a casual cannabis user at the time, I knew how cannabis made me feel.”

Anderson’s mother had an aversion to smoking. Born in London to Jamaican parents, Anderson said his mom made it clear she wouldn’t smoke, even as she developed aphasia and had difficulty communicating.

So, Anderson developed a homemade cannabis sugar, used it to make his mother’s lemonade, according to MassLive.

Best Dirty Lemonade partnered with Massachusetts cannabis company New England Treatment Access (NETA) to roll out cannabis-infused lemonade.

In addition to the three NETA dispensaries in Brookline, Northampton, and Franklin, Mass., the products will be offered at a few other dispensaries around the state, including The Heritage Club in Boston, The Boston Garden in Athol, Mello in Haverhill, and Northeast Alternatives in Fall River. They can also be purchased through Rolling Releaf, a cannabis delivery service in the Greater Boston Area.

The non-carbonated drinks will be available at recreational dispensaries as 12-ounce bottles with five milligrams of THC (the primary active compound in cannabis) and as a medical product in a more potent 25 milligram dose, according to MassLive.

Anderson said he plans to add new flavours, including strawberry and blue raspberry juices.

“The taste is not “overly weed-y,” Anderson told MassLive. “It’s sweet and refreshing and doesn’t leave a heavy, syrupy taste on your tongue or that coating in your mouth.”

And he wants to change the industry as well as the conversation surrounding cannabis.

He and NETA decided to support Let’s Talk Weed, a neighbourhood conversation platform for informing the public about cannabis and the industry, before placing their lemonade on the market.

He first got to know the company’s CEO and creator, Derrell Black, through the Black CannaBusiness initiative, which aids Black cannabis entrepreneurs in product development.

“For so long, cannabis has been this dark cloud over the Black community, and once it became legal it was as if Black and brown people were excluded from cannabis,” Anderson told MassLive. “(Derrell Black’s) main mission is to make sure we have knowledge about the industry.”