Education is one of the primary goals of the Utah in the Weeds podcast. Tim and Chris seek to learn something new with every guest they interview. They sure had plenty of opportunities to do just that while recording episode 46. They spoke with Boojum founder and CEO Dashiel Kulander about a number of fascinating topics in the hemp and CBD space. [02:18]
Kulander came to the cannabis industry from Southern California, where he worked in entertainment before launching his own marketing firm focused squarely on the cannabis industry. He eventually returned to Utah where he started Boojum, [05:35] a company that processes hemp and CBD. Boojum was one of the first hemp processors to be licensed in the state.
Much of the discussion in episode 46 centers around how Boojum and its staff transform raw ingredients into usable products. [18:22] The company doesn’t deal in any flower products. They concentrate on things like tinctures, oral sprays, gummies, and so forth. White label products are also on the table.
Kulander explained that Boojum puts a heavy emphasis on education and research. [26:27] Education is all about making sure patients understand how their medications work as well as which products will work the best for them. In terms of research, Kulander is passionate about making Medical Cannabis products as specific and exacting as other pharmaceuticals. His company is constantly researching ways to make that happen. [40:48]
While the conversation between Tim, Chris, and Dashiel gets a little technical at times, they make the topic easy to understand. This is a fascinating episode from the perspective of an industry expert who has a passion for hemp and CBD as medicines. Both Kulander and Boojum are determined to make the Utah market stronger as time goes by.
Tim Pickett: Welcome to episode 46 of Utah in the Weeds.
Chris Holifield: I’m Chris Holifield.
Tim Pickett: And I’m your host, Tim Pickett, medical cannabis expert in Utah. This week we have Dashiel, the CEO of Boojum, who we talked to — and it was a pretty interesting conversation — about the market in Utah, his background.
Chris Holifield: Terpenes. I mean, we got into we got into all the different cannabinoids.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, we got into some pretty technical aspects of cannabis and Boojum’s products, how they pick products, their most-
Chris Holifield: It was fascinating. It was really fascinating, because like you said, how do people decide which products are going to hit the shelves? And that’s why you got to listen to this episode to find out how they do their products, how they get their products, where they’re going-
Tim Pickett: He revealed his most common, or his-
Chris Holifield: The popular-
Tim Pickett: … which product is most popular. And I think it’s a good… It’s great in Utah because we don’t have a huge market, and there’s not a ton of players in the market, so we’re able to interview these guys. And you can really get a handle or a sense of who these companies are-
Chris Holifield: You get an intimate relationship with them almost, you know?
Tim Pickett: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Holifield: So you’re going to enjoy this conversation. Go to utahmarijuana.org/podcast to listen to all the podcast episodes. You can listen right there on the website, you could subscribe in whatever podcast player you listen to this in, and-
Tim Pickett: Absolutely. As far as maybe a little bit of housekeeping, just so patients are aware, Utah Therapeutic, utahmarijuana.org is opening up in Bountiful and soon to be back in Provo in the next little while. So if you are a patient and you need help, reach out to us there.
Chris Holifield: Utahmarijuana.org is the website for that. And you can go to iamsaltlake.com to listen to my other podcast, I am Salt Lake podcast, go check that out. If you love interviews with people in Utah go give that one a listen. But otherwise, let’s get into this conversation, Tim.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, I’m excited.
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Chris Holifield: Anyways, here we go, guys. Let’s start with you, what got you involved in Boojum? Is that a good place to start?
Tim Pickett: That’s a great place to start. We were talking a little bit before we even started recording, the story, it’s pretty interesting.
Dashiel: Yeah. So I’ll back it up just a little bit in terms of how I came to founding Boojum with my partner. So grew up down in Moab, Utah, after that I bailed I was like, “All right, I got to go to another state.” My parents wanted me to go to a good university, ended up going to San Diego, ended up coming back to finish at the University of Utah, and I studied film, with a focus in European art cinema, actually, surprisingly enough.
Tim Pickett: This is, wait, your parents… I mean, to just jump right in here, your parents are like, “You need to go get a great education.” You go and you study film. Did they feel fine about that?
Dashiel: They felt fine about that, as long as there was a direction to it, that I was passionate about, I don’t think they really cared what it was. And I think also it was kind of the end goal of just having a degree. My dad’s obviously from that baby boomer generation, and that’s just what was done, right? So after finishing college, I went out to Los Angeles and worked as a producer editor, which in the industry, you would call a predator, for better or worse. So I would go out and I would produce segments and come back and edit them with the producers in-house and we would go out and we would sell sizzle reels. So we would do reality shows, Intervention was one of the ones that was under our roof. We did Trisha Yearwood Southern Cooking. We’re not out there making anything super fun, like Pirates of the Caribbean, but that’s where I really kind of cut my teeth, so to speak, in media and in marketing.
Dashiel: After that, I jumped over and started working for a marketing agency out in Los Angeles called Cybrid Media, and we worked with a bunch of different big publications, and we would just move eyeballs online, right? So worked with a lot of ad dollars. So I was doing that for quite a while, got a little bit burnt out on it because at the end of the day you can be a film student and wide eyed and bushy tailed and you go out there and while you’re able to work yourself into somewhat of a creative position, maybe filming a reality show on a Malibu beauty pageant is not necessarily where you wanted to end up, right?
Dashiel: So after that, I jumped over more into marketing and worked with a company called Cybrid Media, we worked with a bunch of very large publications online. I don’t know if you guys have heard of The Chive and BroBible and stuff like that, they were some clients of ours.
Chris Holifield: Name sounds familiar, yeah.
Dashiel: And then Bleacher Report, who ended up getting acquired by Turner, I think a couple years after for like 150 million or something. And then after I moved down town, I started my own marketing agency out there, and we focused exclusively on cannabis. So we started doing marketing, calm strategy, calm planning for some big cannabis companies out there such as Eureka Vapor, Fly Vape, companies that have mostly gotten their start out of Colorado and then expanded into California, Oregon, Washington afterwards. Marketing is something I like to do, it helps kind of feed the creative side, I guess. However, I always wanted to be in the supply chain. And I always wanted to be making a commodity and a good that we could actually sell.
Dashiel: So when the laws back here in my home state and Utah changed in 2018 to allow and regulate the production of hemp and CBD, I moved back out here. And we were, if not the first, one of the first two or three hemp processors that were licensed here in the state. So we’ve been out here really from the very beginning. I’m not going out on a limb by saying our intention was always to want to get into medical as well. We built out our initial facility according to all the rules and regulations so that when that time did come, we’d be able to switch over very quickly, which is what we’ve been able to do.
Tim Pickett: And the marketing with the cannabis in California gives you a pretty good idea of what the restrictions are. And we haven’t talked too much about this aspect of cannabis, Chris, on the podcast but the marketing anything with the word cannabis, the word marijuana in it, it’s just not allowed, no Google AdWords, no… It’s hard to do anything, Facebook shuts you down, you can’t boost any posts. Do you feel like that’s a that’s been a huge benefit or kind of a benefit?
Dashiel: Well, I don’t know if I’d call that a benefit, maybe to me personally, and learning how to navigate proper marketing channels, because like you said, you can’t run ads, right, on Instagram, or Facebook or Google or anything like that. Not even for CBD unless you really know what you’re doing and working with a good agency. So what that forced us to do was to find other ways that we can market, right? So a lot of what that is, is either micro-influencer, social influencer campaigns…
Chris Holifield: Or coming on a podcast.
Dashiel: Or coming on a podcast.
Tim Pickett: Or coming on a podcast and talking about it.
Dashiel: Yeah, and just trying to… The best way to market right now and what the industry needs is really just education. So that’s what we’ve really leaned into in 2020, and going into this year 2021.
Chris Holifield: Did you ever think Utah was going to get to where it is? I mean, because you mentioned you got your processing license? How many processing licenses do they give out? Remind me. Did they give out six?
Dashiel: So the processing license is not limited by cultivation and at the pharmacy and retail level. And I think their reasoning for that is that if you cap and you create limited licenses on the cultivation side, ideally a free market, that’s going to find its own equilibrium, because there’s only so much supply.
Chris Holifield: So anybody can get a processing license? Well, not anybody, if they apply for it.
Dashiel: Yeah, you have to apply for it. And one thing to keep in mind here in Utah is that they did a really good job looking at other more mature markets and seeing how they developed, right, by allowing things like outside capital to allow the Trykes or the Columbia Cares or whatnot to come in, which was really important for a nascent industry because at the end of the day, what these MSOs did is they came in and they were the ones with the supply and they were the ones cutting the checks, right? So they really did help support the industry. I’m sure you guys are familiar with Randy over at Tryke and I don’t think there’s a single group or person in this industry right now that cannot attribute some sort of their growth to Randy and Tryke and these other large MSOs.
Tim Pickett: Sure, I mean Tryke’s putting out the most product right now. I don’t think they will for forever, but it’s definitely companies like that. Even I think companies like Curaleaf who come in and help, not only just have a retail license, but they’re good at what they do, they’re multistate, they can help shape the growth of the industry just by being here, and just by being at the table evolved in the conversation. Do you feel like Boojum, because they were early, is that something Boojum sees themselves as a leader in this space now, because you’ve been here around? I mean, your name is known all over the medical market now.
Dashiel: I think that being an early mover and a first mover is pretty crucial, right? Not only in a state like Utah, which to kind of go back and answer your question, did you see it happening here? Maybe not as soon as it did, right? It happened very, very, very quickly, and I think the CBD and hemp markets kind of helped that happen. But in terms of getting in early being a first mover, if you look at other companies in other states, when you go in and you can acquire that early market share, eventually when these adult use and these recreational markets do dovetail with medical markets, historically, it’s those early movers who are going to have… really be able to dominate the market.
Tim Pickett: Do you think that hemp, being involved in the hemp and the medical marijuana market is something that’s… is it unique to Boojum in Utah? It seems more unique, like Zion isn’t doing a lot of hemp processing, or Tryke’s not doing any hemp processing.
Dashiel: So both, I know that Tryke, they do have their hemp cultivation license as well, Zion, I believe they do as well. I think that having one foot in each market is very important. In Utah, they were actually the first state to allow that interplay between the two markets, allowing the hemp byproduct, right, or those remediation fractions, or even just hemp itself to be transferred into the medical market. Now, the way that they initially wrote that law was that cannabis processors would be able to purchase hemp as well. Now that got rolled back for a number of reasons so that now only medical cannabis cultivators can bring that hemp into the market, right?
Dashiel: But it’s a strategic play by a lot of the groups and I think it’s an important one. For us, that’s really where we learned how to do what we do, right? That’s where we developed our applications, and our extraction methods and our processes. And that’s what allowed us to really hit the ground running being the first medical cannabis processor here in the state. Also, there are other strategic benefits of having both licenses primarily dealing with taxes and IRS tax code Section 280E.
Tim Pickett: Oh, yeah, 80E, this has come up in a couple of our interviews.
Chris Holifield: Remind me what 280E is?
Dashiel: So Section 280E says that if you are trafficking a controlled one scheduled substance, you cannot write off anything outside of your cost of goods. So all of your business expenses, your SGNA, you’re going to get taxed on all that.
Chris Holifield: Any mileage? Anything? Nothing?
Dashiel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Holifield: Yeah.
Tim Pickett: Nothing except for the cost of goods that you produce.
Dashiel: Which is obviously the ingredients —
Tim Pickett: Or to improve those goods, right?
Dashiel: Yep.
Chris Holifield: That’s just-
Dashiel: And the labor that goes in to directly plant touching personnel.
Tim Pickett: This cannot be understated in the argument to legalize or decriminalize the cannabis market, the high THC market, because the government gets a pretty significant benefit by the way it is run now in the tax code.
Dashiel: Very true. Yeah, I think that’s one reason when people are like, “Oh, are we going to legalize now that the Dems have the tie breaking vote in the Senate and control the house?” And it’s not that simple of an issue to really unpack, first off. Second off, the federal government makes more money with cannabis being illegal due to Section 280E and civil forfeiture laws.
Chris Holifield: And they probably know that.
Dashiel: Yes, sure they do. When they do the budget, and they come up with a bill, and they say this is the benefit or the decrease in tax revenue by doing this bill, yeah, I mean, who knows? It’s a complicated process.
Chris Holifield: Didn’t dispensaries, like in California run into stuff like that with this last year, with COVID? Not getting any COVID relief and stuff like that, because of a lot of that, too? Didn’t that have something to do with it, too?
Dashiel: Yeah, well, so PPE loans, the small business loans, I would be surprised if they were even many uniquely hemp companies that even got those loans, right? Because at the end of the day, you have the FDA and you have the USDA and you have the DEA, who potentially misled some of these government agencies with an oversimplification of the process. A lot of the issues that we see that have created dysfunction in the supply chains, that is caused by a simple misunderstanding of the complexities of extraction process, right? And at any point, if I take material grown for CBD, or CBG, or whatever it is, and I bring it into the lab, and I distill that down, that’s going over point… now even over 1%, right? That’s going to be at least 2% to 3% in THC.
Tim Pickett: Oh, yeah, and this is like every time, right?
Dashiel: Every single time.
Tim Pickett: This is every single time. We talked to Kyle Egbert about this. There’s nothing really you can do until the next step when you can take it out, right?
Dashiel: Correct. So what a lot of companies will do and one thing that we had to do as a pivot after that crash in July of 2019, is to regain our margins, we had to go back to the drawing board, right, and we had to take it all the way to the finished product, right?
Tim Pickett: This is the crash you’re talking about where the hemp price… the price of like raw materials just went through the floor?
Dashiel: Yeah, completely. When we first started, the first batch of hemp that we bought got shipped in out of Oregon and we paid $55 a pound on that. It showed up, it was touted as maybe 11%, 12% CBD, we ran it through our extraction system, we got nowhere near the yield we thought we were going to get. We got to tested and it was really around 4%. So we were paying $55 a pound for 4% material. If you were to go out now and pay fair market value for hemp or CBD material, you’re looking at $1 to $3 per pound. So the fall was drastic, and it completely-
Chris Holifield: Wow. That’s just…
Dashiel: … obliterated the wholesale market, right? So if I now am buying this hemp, taking it down to distillate, we started to see the cost of distillate go from 45 to 35 to 25. Now, I believe it’s somewhere sub $500. So it’s almost become cost prohibitive to be working as a wholesaler with raw ingredients. So if you take that and you tack on top of it, the potential liabilities of having to transfer that oil now out of a state to where maybe that’s where your only buyer is, maybe you don’t have those local supply chains, because of rules and regulations like we see in Utah that have really throttled distribution.
Tim Pickett: These are the rules of selling hemp in state?
Dashiel: Yes, selling hemp in state. Primarily, one, we can’t market, we can’t advertise it, right? We can’t say-
Tim Pickett: Is this is the medical market or do you just, because Boojum’s in the medical market, now you can’t advertise at all, period?
Dashiel: We don’t like to advertise, obvious… I mean, even sponsored content we wouldn’t do. Things like this we love to do because it’s just a collaboration.
Tim Pickett: This is just a… Yeah-
Dashiel: It’s a conversation.
Tim Pickett: … it’s conversation, right? This we do because people are interested in what’s going on? And there’s no other route to get the information, right?
Dashiel: Exactly.
Tim Pickett: So I think it’s super important to have these conversations. And when you talk about the hemp, like distributing hemp and distilling it, and then the interplay between the medical market and the hemp market, it always comes up in these conversations that there’s this… it’s just a weird place to be. Anything over 3%, but under, I would say 15%, right? Because the market seems to be like this 15% flower, is this gray area it seems like. And there’s a huge benefit if we switch and pivot and talk about medicine, there’s a massive benefit between 3.3% THC and 15%, or 0.3% and 3%, right?
Dashiel: Yeah, no, absolutely. That’s one reason why we wanted to jump into medical is because we wanted to focus on making medicine. Much like a million other people that you’ll talk to in this industry, local, or nationally, our belief in cannabis is all stemmed from anecdotal experience, or we have a loved one or a relative or somebody that cannabis was the only thing providing, say, end of life care, or something like that. So to be able to fully tap into the potential of this plant on the cannabinoid production side, you really want to be able to play with all of those compounds. Absolutely.
Tim Pickett: If we talk about Boojum and what products they’re making now, do you feel like you got into medical and you have favorite products, does Boojum have favorite products?
Dashiel: Sure. So even on the CBD side, we always took a pretty firm strategic position, and that was really to focus on value add type products. And what I mean by that is infused products. We do not sell flower, we do not co-pack flower or put it on the market. We also have not even branched into any sort of smokeable or inhalation type of device just yet, primarily because we don’t think that smoking flower is really the best medicine, you’re maybe getting 5% to 7% of what’s actually in there versus when we have something like an oral spray or tincture, and we’re dosing it based off of the active molecule, meaning that if we’re putting in 1,000 milligrams of, let’s say THC, we’re not just going to weigh that out and put it in there. You’re going to say, “Okay, there’s THC oil tested at 80%, so I need to account for that, when I’m formulating this. And I know that every single spray or every gummy or every 2.25 ml of a tincture is exactly the dose that I’m looking for.”
Dashiel: So by focusing not only on one specific area in the supply chain, which is the processing, and not trying to overextend into cultivation and retail, and then also focusing on acquiring market share in the infused, edible category just gave us a very clear direction and has really allowed us to focus on what we’re good at. And it’s kind of a short-term play, but it’s really more of a long-term play when you look at the trajectory of these infused products and how much market share they’re eating into from flower, even the numbers that the Utah Department of Health released recently, we’re seeing flower lose market share month over month, I think right now it sits around 35%.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, I would say that the… I would agree with that, and I would agree that, like in Utah’s market specifically, you have a lot of the early adopters, right? A lot of the early patients are going to be those who use flower, they’re going to be what we call legacy users, those people who are experienced with cannabis. In the beginning, we were seeing maybe 8 out of 10, 9 out of 10 patients that they were using cannabis and only 1 in 10 were not using, or cannabis was new. Now, I mean, it’s 35%, 40% of our patients are new to cannabis altogether. And that’s a huge number for only this far into the program. But those patients are not using flower, they want concentrates. Not concentrates in the smokeable concentrates realm. They want tinctures, and edibles, oral sprays, things that are easily dosed that are more conspicuous, because I mean, this is a Mormon culture, right?
Tim Pickett: So I mean, I think Boojum really fits in there. We talk a lot about Boojum with our patients, because of the dosing. Specifically you came out with a product cheek spray, that people really liked, because it’s a metered dose and metered dose… Frankly, metered dose inhalers are needed, if anybody who wants to produce one. I mean, I think it’s an important piece. But their metered dose, they’re a good effect, and they were low dose. There’s two kind of things I want to talk about, talk about the team at Boojum. How to products like that… Who’s involved in development of that?
Dashiel: So with a lot of the initial product development, a lot of that was… So my role in it, I’ll start with, is market data, coming from marketing and advertising, we clean data and we look at it, we look at reports from MJ business, we look at reports from New Frontier data, we compile as much data as we possibly can, and we clean it, and we try to make actionable strategies off of it. And we also want to know who we’re selling to, and we want to serve a very specific patient even.
Dashiel: The reason for the oral spray, and that was a conversation between Brittany and myself and Olivia Kulander, our chief science officer was to really bring down the onset time of infused edible product. And because you’re spraying and the part… it’s kind of breaking up the particle size and going under your tongue, as opposed to going through your first pass metabolism and digestion and everything, that’s why the onset time is, for a lot of people, and this varies a lot between individuals, under 20 minutes even, right? So now we have an alternative to inhalation devices, or flower for patients with crippling anxiety, or PTSD, or something like that.
Tim Pickett: Where they can have a trigger event, they can use the product, and they can get effect without inhaling.
Dashiel: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Pickett: Right? With that product.
Dashiel: Yeah. So I would say typically, when we’re going and we’re looking at, “Okay, what products do we want to do?” One, the market data has to be there, right? And if you look at market data, and you look at these other states with these more mature markets, if you’re trying to be profitable in this industry, I mean, it’s not… I mean, it is a green rush in some sense, but it’s not that easy to come in, and be profitable and be successful in cannabis. And we saw that play out in Canada, we’ve seen a play out here, we’ve seen the rise and fall of groups like Canopy Growth and MedMen.
Dashiel: Yeah, so if you look at the data, if you only have two to three SKUs, maybe only 10% of those companies are going to be profitable. If you start releasing more products and casting a wider net, if you have 7 to 10 SKUs, now, 80% of those companies are profitable, right? And so there’s a lot of really simple data like this that you can look at to make better business decisions. But that’s not where the buck stops, that’s only one part of it. The other part of it is the research that we do into, “Okay, well, what is the best delivery method? What are the best cannabinoids and ratios?” And for us, the one thing that we’ve been pushing very hard is what is the best terpene profile to add to supplement to this medicine?
Dashiel: So typically, Brittany and I will go back and forth about a product, Olivia will go and she’ll do a bunch of research, we’ll write internal lit reviews on different scientific studies, which we will, if we ever published those online, obviously, they’re all cited, to find, “Okay, well, what does the research say? What kind of a medicine do we want to put out there?” And then so we’ll join the market data and we’ll join the research, and then we’ll put a product out there. And I think over the last, what is it, eight months or so of this program, everybody’s really just kind of been A, B-ing a bunch of stuff, right? Like, “Okay, well, what works? What do we want to put out there?” I think that we’ve launched maybe six or seven, maybe even eight different tincture varieties with different terpenes on them to see, “Okay, well, do patients, are they educated on terpenes? Do they know what they want?” And we’ve seen incredibly positive market signals on terpenes.
Dashiel: Terpenes is something that is going to be huge, because at the end of the day, if somebody is trying to classify a plant as an indica or sativa, it’s not the cannabinoid profile that determines that, it’s the terpene profile.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, it’s the steering wheel of the product, really. The citrusy terpenes being the sativas, the more earthy terpene smells, if you were to just paint with a broad brush, it seems like that’s the more indica style. And then that translates really into what types of patients will experience what effects. Of course, everybody’s a little bit different. So when you’re building these tinctures, and you have a lot of different… What do you recommend the patients do when there’s so much variety?
Dashiel: Yeah, and I mean, that’s why it’s really important to have educated pharmacies, bud tenders, and then even groups like yourself that can kind of give them this advice. But what it really is going to come down to is… And I just want to say one thing, we’ve been shocked at how many people do know what their favorite terpene is, it’s surprising. But aside from that, for somebody to be able to learn, “Okay, well, I like limonene versus a myrcene or something.” It’s education, education, education, and then eventually they’ll try it, right? And so the three terpenes that we’ve seen that have been the most successful and we’ve gotten the most feedback on are your limonene, like you were mentioning, it’s kind of your citrusy morning terpene. And then your beta caryophyllene has been hugely popular, and then myrcene.
Dashiel: Those are the ones that we’re really seeing, which is interesting, because if you were to kind of draw out a little schematic in terms of, “Okay, maybe this is an indica, or this is a sativa.” Or another way to think about it, “Here’s your morning, here’s your all day hybrid,” right, in the middle, “And then here is your evening gummy,” which is going to be more like your indica or something, because it has myrcene in it.
Tim Pickett: So let’s back up here a little bit. Because I think when people listen to this episode, there’s going to be a lot of people who understand the terpenes, the cannabinoids, but I think we could spend just a minute, and correct me if I’m wrong here, so when we talk about cannabinoids, those are the compounds within the plant that are expressed as the plant grows, they’re part of the plant. Typically, those can be manipulated through the processing and building of a product like a tincture, you can add or subtract cannabinoids, depending on the processing. But that’s more difficult-
Dashiel: Yeah, so that’s not necessarily… you don’t really subtract or add different cannabinoids, right?
Tim Pickett: Cannabinoids. Right? Okay, so yes, and I agree with that there. However, then you go into the terpenes, and cannabinoids, we know some about, but that’s what we’re learning more and more and more about, CBG, CBN, the different cannabinoids and what they do. We know a lot more about terpenes, and terpenes give the odor of the plant, and, like you were saying, they give the sativa effect versus the indica effect. Beta caryophyllene is known for kind of an anti-inflammatory as well, they can have medicinal properties. Beta caryophyllene is very high in some of these Hazes and Kushes that are good for pain. So pain patients tend to lean to strains like that even. So when you build a product like Boojum builds, then you can create a recipe that takes the plant material in the concentration, and then adds terpenes to it, to, like I was saying, a steering wheel effect, you have to adjust the results for the patient.
Dashiel: Yep, exactly.
Tim Pickett: In a way.
Dashiel: Exactly. So yeah, and there’s a couple different ways you can do this throughout the extraction process, right? So the way that we extract at our facility, we do use ethanol, we use a cryoethanol and we run it incredibly, incredibly chilled. We’ve done a lot of A/B testing, surprisingly enough, do you know a difference in 10 degrees temperature from maybe negative 70 to negative 60, or even negative 55, is going to affect the yield of various cannabinoids, right? So they all have a proclivity to come out at kind of a different temperature, which is very interesting. So we pull it out, and then we do what you would call a full spectrum oil or as other industries would call a FECO oil, a full extract cannabis oil.
Dashiel: And what that means is that you’re only doing an ethanol extraction, you may filter it with membranes, or diatomaceous earth or something along those lines, and then you’re going to pull the solvent out of it. However, all of those natural terpenes that did manage to survive and last through the curing process, are still retained in that full spectrum extract. So our oil is an FSO full spectrum oil, meaning we do not further distill it. Now if you wanted to go further and make a product such as something that would be used for vaping, you’re going to want to distill that further, right? There’s other plant compounds that are in there that are going to make that experience much less enjoyable. That’s why a FECO oil or an FSO oil or an RSO oil is typically ingested orally, with food.
Dashiel: So if you go down to the distillation, then you’re stripping those terpenes out. So now you just have a distillate. And the reason that you would do that is to increase the potency of those cannabinoids. So if you want to take that, and then now put it into a cart, or any other kind of product that you would really taste, you’re going to have to re add those terpenes back in now, you’re not going to have those original terpenes anymore.
Tim Pickett: We’re going to become experts, Chris.
Chris Holifield: Yeah, no. Well, you mentioned that limonene, my wife uses that. She uses the Boojum limonene.
Tim Pickett: Oh, really?
Chris Holifield: She loves it. She’s gotten into… I don’t know a whole lot about it, helps her with her ADD, I guess. Keep her focused.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely a daytime use.
Chris Holifield: So it’s great.
Dashiel: Yeah. And so one reason why I think our products have really resonated with the patients here in Utah, is that we don’t go through that distillation process. So we keep as much of the original compounds intact as possible, which makes it a little bit more difficult when it comes to the patient or user experience and the flavor profiles, right? Because CBD oil or THC oil does not taste good.
Tim Pickett: No, it tastes terrible.
Dashiel: And so that’s where our product development chief and confectionery guy Julian Hensarling comes in. He comes in and we look at-
Tim Pickett: Oh, he’s going to get featured, right?
Dashiel: Yeah.
Tim Pickett: Coming up in Salt Baked City, right?
Chris Holifield: Yep.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, should to Cole there.
Dashiel: Yeah, he will be. But he’s incredibly talented, and he’s able to take that original oil and put it into a tincture and then supplement it with some other terpenes that do not come from that plant originally, to be clear, different terpenes to actually make that a product that you can wash down, right?
Tim Pickett: Or that tastes decent or yeah.
Dashiel: So he works with the original terpenes that are in that full spectrum oil, supplements them with some others and then in the case of a gummy, or something like that, with other flavors to make the most enjoyable product when it comes to flavor. And then also, that’s what really makes our products so effective is that we are using that full spectrum because you can go in and you can deconstruct these oils, you can run it through distillation, you can take the terps out, you can do whatever, and then you can go back and be like, “Okay, well now I’m going to put them back all together.” But that is not a full spectrum product, right? They just don’t go back together the same way that they are grown in nature, in that synergistic effect.
Tim Pickett: And he’s a pretty cool guy. What’s his title? Confection stylist?
Dashiel: He likes to call himself… Yeah, he’s a confectionery director, right?
Chris Holifield: What a title.
Tim Pickett: I want that title. I make food look and taste good. Yeah, whatever you bring me, I’m going to make it look better, I’m going to give it a haircut, add some of this, add some of that.
Chris Holifield: Well, look at fast food commercials, they always make it looks so good.
Dashiel: It looks so good.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, you need a guy like that. Especially in cannabis, because unless you like raw grass sprayed with skunk, that’s been dug up out of the dirt.
Chris Holifield: See, I think cannabis is just beautiful.
Tim Pickett: Well see like, I mean-
Dashiel: It is.
Tim Pickett: … I think we get used to it, right? I’m sure that when you go to your processing plant, and then you spend all day there and you come home, I mean, your clothes smell like-
Chris Holifield: Stinky.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, you get stinky. And I’ve gotten to where I don’t mind it. I’m used to it.
Chris Holifield: I don’t really smell it anymore, yeah.
Tim Pickett: Right.
Dashiel: I will say that it was a nice mix up and change having Julian come in because typically, the lab just smells like cannabis, right? Or sometimes… And now you walk in there, and everybody that we have given a tour to leaves and says, “Wow, that is like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.” Now we have these all these other fantastic smells in the mix.
Tim Pickett: Okay, now I’m down. This is good. I got to come up there.
Chris Holifield: Do you give tours, can we come get a tour?
Dashiel: Yeah, absolutely, we’d be happy.
Chris Holifield: I’m sure it’s hard for the public to get to your-
Dashiel: It has been hard, but everybody is creating these post… I wouldn’t say post COVID, but after a COVID kind of hit, everybody has created their protocols, and what their tolerance levels are for stuff like that.
Tim Pickett: How does your family now… Because you’re from Utah, and you came back here, you worked a little bit in the cannabis industry or a lot in LA. And now you’re coming back here, you’re neck deep in this industry, what does your family think? How has that culture shift been, personally?
Dashiel: Sure. So I will say that we ended up in Utah in the back of a Volkswagen van in 1991, down in a small Valley outside of Moab called Castle Valley.
Chris Holifield: What year of Volkswagen?
Dashiel: Oh, I think it was a ’71.
Chris Holifield: Yes.
Tim Pickett: Nice.
Dashiel: It was nice. My dad’s had multiple of those. So my parents were originally from California, my mom from Manhattan Beach area, my dad from San Francisco, Oakland up north. And they were down in Mexico. My dad’s a travel writer, he writes for National Geographic and Conde Nast and stuff like that. He’s actually doing insurance stuff now. But they came back after 10 years in Mexico, and the prices on property in California had just skyrocketed, right? And they were just a couple bohemian hippies. And they were like, “All right, what do we do? Let’s hop in the van and drive to the first place that scratches our soul or whatever.” And it ended up being Castle Valley, Utah.
Dashiel: So we are, I will say, more liberal probably than most families here in Utah. More recently seeing me jump into the industry, unfortunately, that’s not something my mother was able to see, she did pass away from cancer in 2017, which was just another motivator for me because towards the end of her life, instead of using benzos, or other opioids to help manage pain, or Ativan and Xanax and stuff like that, which, in those final few months of your life, if you’re battling something like cancer, they take you out of reality, and you’re not there for those final moments. So my mom leaned on cannabis pretty heavily. And that really, really motivated me to try and get it into more patients hands out here.
Dashiel: So yeah, we started doing the CBD stuff, like a year after that, the following year we were ready to get into medical, finally jumped in. And so I would say my family, they love it, even my extended family. I have a bunch of family out here in Utah, aunts and uncles and cousins and whatnot, and they’ve always been supporters, I believe, and I’m pretty sure of medical cannabis, and-
Chris Holifield: Well, that’s good. I mean, it sounds like they’re a pretty —
Tim Pickett: It’s really good.
Chris Holifield: … supportive family.
Tim Pickett: And I think that, although you hate to lose family members, and I’m sorry that your mom isn’t here to see the success of Boojum, and what you’ve been doing in the industry. On the other hand, it’s nice to start to hear the stories of people who were able to utilize cannabis, instead of just the barrage of stories that we hear constantly of patients who weren’t able to use it, or aren’t educated that it’s out there and another tool, so it’s nice to start hearing those.
Dashiel: Yeah, I think accessibility is huge, it’s important. The education and the accessibility for patients to be able to get it because, like you said, there’s some people in Utah that don’t even know, at this point that we have a medical program.
Tim Pickett: There’s so many patients, we see patients every single day who come in, and they’re like, “I didn’t even know, my friend just told me yesterday, or my friend told me last week-”
Chris Holifield: It was not popular.
Tim Pickett: “… and I’ve had this pain. It’s not there.” Or they’ll see a billboard and they’ll be like, “It’s legal?”
Dashiel: Yeah.
Tim Pickett: Yeah. Well, yeah, there’s plenty of pharmacies around and there’s… Seems to be growing.
Chris Holifield: It goes back to the advertising thing, though. You know what I mean? It’s because you can’t advertise about it, so where —
Tim Pickett: That’s right, how do you get the word out?
Chris Holifield: How do you tell people about it?
Tim Pickett: Yeah. But I do think now it seems to be a growing grassroots. You can see it this growing grassroots exposure, this word of mouth thing that we’re doing here, that is just… People want to talk about it, right?
Dashiel: Yeah, I got to commend your guys’ work on that part of things on that behalf because people just need to hear conversations, people need to hear regular people talking about the potential of this plant, which cannabinoid production is just one aspect of it, right? I mean, there’s untapped potential in this plant. I mean, you look at the grain and fiber options, right? I mean, you look Levis switching over and Wranglers and Legos going to all-hemp plastic and Porsche are making hemp cars. And that’s probably going to be the next wave that we’re going to see. I would say 2021 is probably going to be the year of outsize supply of fiber this time, as opposed to cannabinoid production. I mean, the plant intersects with more industries than any other plant on this planet.
Chris Holifield: It’s amazing.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, I mean, even the center of the Global Hemp Association for hemp associations is right here in Utah.
Chris Holifield: Right here in Utah.
Dashiel: Yeah, that’s right.
Chris Holifield: Where do you see this going? I mean, would you eventually like to grow? Would you eventually like to go bigger in the industry? Or where do you see this going in the next five years for Boojum?
Dashiel: Yeah. Well, for Boojum, we really want to push the research, right? And also out of a need for survival, people need to diversify, right? So you need to look at every single potential, either distribution channel or revenue path, which… And also like, “Okay, well, how are the rules and regulations going to end up?” Right? Now that we have dam in the… or a dam in the executive branch and the administration, obviously, and then now controlling the House and the Senate as well. So I think groups have to prepare for these things, and that means exploring these pharmaceutical swim lanes, exploring what do we do if adult-use and recreational flips? Where do we place our bets? If you look at medical markets, they have been just as, if not more, resilient to the recession and COVID-19 to even adult-use and rec markets, especially ones that lean heavily on tourism.
Dashiel: So where we would like to grow is we would like to either be working with other groups, with cultivators to create the most consistent products possible. And what I mean by that is products that are consistent enough to be used for research, for these pharmaceutical companies. And that, in addition to it being federally illegal, one of the reasons why research has been so sparse, is that it’s very hard to grow this plant exactly the same every single time, which means that now if you’re going to go and you’re trying to do clinical trials, but you have one batch of oil that has say 5% CBC, and it’s same flower, and somebody else extracts it, and now you have 10% CBC. So all of these fluctuations in these differences that come primarily from the genetic of the plant, but then also how they were grown, and then how they were processed, it can even come down to how they were stored, right?
Dashiel: If you store plant material improperly, or if it’s too hot, or something like that, it’s going to isomerize, some of it’s going to turn into a CBN or something like that, right? Or it’s going to go hot in the field, as I’m sure you guys know-
Tim Pickett: Oh, yeah.
Dashiel: … these hemp issues that people have had. So we need to fit standard models, right? And this is the same, even on the grain and fiber side. This is why Levis and Wrangler are going into this, that end-use market, it exists. But the production of the plant, whether for medicine, or for fiber needs to fit existing standardized models, right? You need consistency, it needs an existing infrastructure, primarily for production and distribution.
Tim Pickett: Sure, I mean, the markets are too big to be inconsistent. Imagine Levis going in with just a run of what we got out of the garden over here. And then we grew some in the US south, and that was a mess. Yeah, that consistency, I think makes it harder to transition over too. But to your point, I can really see a huge need, it’s one of the things in medicine that I can’t get my peers to accept cannabis as a medicine because it’s so inconsistent. And when you talk about the products being consistent, I can prescribe amoxicillin and I know the patient is getting the same thing every single time. That’s what Western medicine is all about. You have a symptom, you have an allopathic approach, and you prescribe a medication. That’s how we study medicine. But no one is focused on building those medications to study. Hopefully Boojum can get into that and do some research on products that are very consistent. That’s very needed.
Dashiel: Yeah. And we are actively working towards that and we are realizing more and more, while we will continue to focus on our category in the supply chain, we’re realizing more and more that really comes down to the genetic, it comes down to the plant because you don’t want to be going in and paying these outsize sums to be processing, distilling, running through chromatography, isolating, and then recombining to create a medicine that’s less effective as it is when it just comes off the plant, right? So looking for those kinds of partners that can tackle these issues with us is going to be a big priority for us over the next couple of years.
Tim Pickett: Exciting.
Chris Holifield: I’ve learned a lot.
Tim Pickett: I have too.
Chris Holifield: And now I want to walk across the street to Beehive and get some more of your products.
Tim Pickett: I know, we’re recording right now. I’m looking right across the street out there.
Chris Holifield: What’s your most popular item?
Dashiel: So the most popular item is the oral spray. Yeah, the oral spray is by far our number one seller right now, I think because it’s novel, we don’t have a direct competitor, obviously, there in a local market. And the onset time is quick. And like you were mentioning, it’s a low dose, and it allows patients to slowly titrate it up and find their specific dose.
Tim Pickett: Yep. Exciting. It’s a product. It’s a cool idea. And that just one more exciting thing about cannabis, you can design, whatever it is, whatever you imagine. It’s like Disneyland.
Chris Holifield: I remember the first time I ever went into a dispensary in California like 10 years ago, and I remember seeing some of the stuff and I’m like, “Wow, it’s more than just-”
Tim Pickett: I know, it’s more than just a pot of weed.
Chris Holifield: “… a flower that you can smoke.” It’s like creams and topicals and lotions and this and that.
Dashiel: And it’s incredible how well it all works too, right? Like the topicals, they work incredibly well. And yeah, what’s great about going to markets like Colorado or something, it is nice to see some of these products like the chocolates, right? And also they don’t have a lot of the same product limitations that we have here. Even in terms of how we explain what this product is to the patients and what ingredients we can use, right? We can’t go out and make a huckleberry, pomegranate gummy, and say that on the gummy right now, even though that would not appeal —
Chris Holifield: Why can’t you say that?
Dashiel: Because you can only use a list of the state’s approved artificial flavors, which is maybe there’s eight of them.
Chris Holifield: See, and I didn’t even realize that. I learned something new.
Tim Pickett: Right. And there’s a besides… They’re gelatinous cubes that are edible. Do you feel like that’s over restrictive? Or do you feel like it was placed in the right spot, and we can modify that legislation as we go?
Dashiel: I think the legislation can be modified to more accurately reflect the initial intention of that piece of legislature. For instance, what they are concerned about is that we don’t put something on the front of that bottle that’s attractive to kids, right?
Tim Pickett: Right. I mean, that’s the bottom line.
Dashiel: That’s the bottom line.
Tim Pickett: We don’t want kids taking all the cannabis, all the THC.
Chris Holifield: I wouldn’t want my kids taking all my cannabis anyway.
Tim Pickett: I mean, of course, right? And there are in states with medical and rec programs, there is an increase in ER visits for overdose for children.
Chris Holifield: There really is?
Tim Pickett: That’s just a fact. Okay, more access equals more overdose and more ER visits. There are ways to compensate for that. But that’s just a fact.
Dashiel: Yeah, I think that’s a fact. But I think it’s also important to stack it up to other medications like opioids, right? If you look at the therapeutic index of cannabis versus an opioid made from a opioid plant, Poppy plant, the chance of overdose with that opioid is 70 to 1, meaning you would need to take X amount more to overdose on it. With cannabis that is 40,000 to 1. So in terms of the safety of the product, yes, we don’t need to be putting product out there that is attractive to kids or easily accessible for kids or is not in childproof packaging. But let’s say that that does… whatever, your dog gets ahold of a bottle of gummies versus a bottle of OxyContins and breaks it open and your kid accidentally puts one of those in their mouth, I could tell you which one I would want.
Tim Pickett: Exactly. Very, very good point, because you have-
Chris Holifield: I have an idea.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, I mean, although the cases of cannabis overdose go up when you have more access, you’ve got to look at the opioid overdose. The opioid epidemics all go down in every state that has access to legal cannabis. The opioid use rates go way down.
Dashiel: And to be clear, when you say cannabis overdose-
Tim Pickett: I’m talking about THC overdose.
Dashiel: Just in terms of them calling a hospital?
Chris Holifield: Yeah, what would be considered a THC overdose?
Tim Pickett: Yeah, so a THC overdose would be something that, in my opinion, right, it would be something that either A, leads to a call to poison control, for THC ingestion that was not anticipated.
Dashiel: But not a fatality.
Tim Pickett: Never a fatality, right.
Dashiel: Okay, gotcha.
Chris Holifield: Do people really call that for THC?
Tim Pickett: Oh, absolutely. Yes, all the time.
Chris Holifield: I was going to say, I just sit it out.
Dashiel: Absolutely.
Tim Pickett: Well, and that’s education. And when they come to the ER, and I still work some shifts in the ER and people will come in, and, of course, when I’m working with the physicians there, they’re always like, “Oh, yeah, somebody’s overdosed on THC, Tim, you’re it. This is your field, go take care of them.” And in every case it’s just rest, relaxation, a little bit of IV fluids, you know…
Chris Holifield: Kind of talk them down, just “hello!”
Tim Pickett: … just bring in a friend, and it’s going to be okay. And it doesn’t last forever. And is it dangerous? I guess, depending on what your view of danger is, right? But would I rather have them… I’d so much rather take care of them for that, than watch them die of an opioid overdose.
Dashiel: We have so many parents that reach out to us who are trying to put their kids through the compassionate use board, right, for things like MS or debilitating seizures. And they say, look at this point a lot of these parents are… they’re saying, “This is palliative care. This is end of life treatment at this point. And I’m not going to give my kids opioids.” To your point about opioid overdoses, I’m sure you guys saw the study that came out. I think it was fairly recent, maybe two weeks ago, but states that have enacted some sort of cannabis legalization, whether medical or adult use have seen a 20% reduction in opioid overdoses.
Chris Holifield: I can see that.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, it’s a huge number. I mean, it just shows that this does work, cannabis does work. If any listeners or if you have patients that need help with the compassionate use board, we get a significant amount of referrals for that type of patient, and we work with the patient’s primary care provider or their neurologist or whoever, because a lot of those specialties don’t have time to learn a lot about cannabis. And the compassionate use board has become… I don’t know, it’s modifying. We talked Katie Barber about it a little bit in a podcast episode before.
Dashiel: Yeah. Well, that’s what you guys are here for, and that’s phenomenal, because people do need to know how to navigate these waters and the bureaucracy and the red tape and everything. It’s hard for us because as an operator, and as a producer, and as an establishment here that makes cannabis products, we can’t go out and be advising these parents about what to take or… We’ll put them in contact with the right people and say, “Okay, this is the proper way to do things.” But it’s hard because a lot of people do reach out to us for that kind of advice, and it’s not something we can give.
Chris Holifield: It’s probably hard because you sometimes want to give advice, but you have to be careful about what advice you give-
Tim Pickett: Well, yeah, they know…
Chris Holifield: … because you’re not a doctor.
Dashiel: Yeah.
Tim Pickett: We have a couple of really young patients that don’t use THC, but use fairly high dose CBD. And we contact the manufacturer directly of the product, because sometimes we need to tweak the products a little bit. And these producers in Utah, I’m sure Boojum is the same, it’s important to get all of these kids in these special cases what they need. So it seems like everybody’s willing to go the extra mile for that type of patient.
Dashiel: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Holifield: Anything else you want to ask him, Tim, before we wrap-
Tim Pickett: No.
Chris Holifield: I mean, anything else you want to talk about? While the mics are hot here? Let’s open it up man.
Dashiel: Yeah, sure. I guess maybe I could go back to your initial point, or a question about, “Okay, well, where does Boojum go? Where do we want to grow?” I think that what we really want to help create is driving infrastructure development here in the state. And that means not only working on local infrastructure and exploring other diverse applications for this plant, but also working with legislators to help create a profitable business model in the state, right? And a lot of that’s going to happen on the hemp and CBD side. So while medical cannabis is fantastic, and the market is new, but it’s robust, and it’s growing, and legislators are working with everybody in the industry to make sure that it is a success. At the end of the day, if you look at hemp and CBD, either for cannabinoid production or grain and fiber, those are huge markets, huge, untapped markets at this point. I mean, we’re serving, I think you said 22,000 patients-
Tim Pickett: Yeah, something like 22,000 legal users in Utah now.
Dashiel: Yeah, but as soon as we can kind of clean up the legislation locally on the hemp and CBD side and create viable distribution models per rules and regulations, that’s going to explode and it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen soon and it’s going to help out a lot of these local farmers, for sure. My job as the CEO of the company is really to focus on macro level strategy and direction of growth. So we are looking for a lot of these kind of strategic hemp and CBD partners currently, but it’s going to be… it’s different and people who are interested in getting into the market, you got to start small, you got to make a consistent product, and you got to have something that’s going to help you kind of rise above and you also have to think of CBD a little bit differently.
Dashiel: CBD is not going to be the main… it might may be the main active ingredient, right? But what we need to see is we need to see it start going to beverages, we need to see rules and regulations that are going to allow for it to use as a food additive, such as New York and Colorado have recently done. So I mean, there’s a multitude of legislative changes, the least of which is certainly not any sort of social equity and reparation laws that I think certainly need to be written into legislature here.
Dashiel: And then on the medical side, I think there’s some clear, glaring issues, right, that that affect social equity and access to cannabis here in the state. For instance, the flower laws, right? Flower is the cheapest thing when you walk into the to the dispensary for the most part. It’s what a lot of people are very familiar with. But at the end of the day, we have this flame law that says you can’t even light it up. So you got to go home and you have to purchase at least $100 $150 maybe even $200 device-
Tim Pickett: Yep. Because if you buy the $20 one, you’re just going to buy it every month.
Chris Holifield: A halfway decent one is going to be $200, $300, $400.
Tim Pickett: Exactly. It’s 200 bucks to buy a decent for sure.
Dashiel: Yeah, so who is going to end up potentially getting in trouble for using this medicine? It’s going to be lower income individuals.
Chris Holifield: I didn’t even think about that, wow.
Dashiel: I mean, really what it is, it’s a dead man’s trigger for conservative opposition in the state to cannabis. So it’s something that needs…
Chris Holifield: So you think Utah should allow smokeable flower?
Dashiel: I mean, they do and they don’t right now, right? They’re selling it in the pharmacy, but they’re saying you can’t smoke it. So I think there needs to be some clarity on those sorts of issues, 100%.
Chris Holifield: Makes sense to me. I think they should allow it.
Tim Pickett: We always bring this up. We always ask…
Chris Holifield: I know, we do.
Tim Pickett: … about this, because I’m the provider, and I’m like, “Don’t smoke.”
Chris Holifield: Well, the big picture, here’s the thing you’re the provider-
Dashiel: It’s not the best medicine, but through time-
Tim Pickett: I know it’s not, and I get it.
Dashiel: … you shouldn’t get in trouble for it now.
Chris Holifield: Exactly. There we go.
Tim Pickett: No, you’re right, you shouldn’t get in trouble.
Chris Holifield: Maybe don’t push it, but you shouldn’t… It’s like, “Hey, if you’re a patient, if you have a card…” Maybe educate them, maybe say, “Hey, you know what, that’s not the best way to consume it.” But don’t slap them on the wrist with a fine.
Dashiel: And the market is moving there naturally too, I mean, we’ve seen it across the board in other markets, not only during COVID, but pre COVID as well, as that flower market share is getting eaten into year after year.
Chris Holifield: How can people get a hold of you… Or how can they see your products? I guess Instagram, right?
Dashiel: Yeah. So according to the marketing and advertising laws right now, there’s too much of a gray area, we can’t go out, we can’t advertise, right? But what we are allowed to do is maintain a digital platform where we can show our products or talk about the products. I would say, depending maybe on the pharmacy and who you talk to, you the best place to learn about the products is in the pharmacies, because they’re going to be able to really sit down, they’re going to be able to tell you a lot of things that we probably can’t print and put on flyers and get out there.
Tim Pickett: No, for sure, but like we were saying, I mean, your educational posters are up in some of these pharmacies, and they teach people. So I think that that’s important. It’s a great place to learn about your products.
Dashiel: Yeah. And that’s the one thing that we are allowed to do is create educational materials, right? So we can’t make a flyer and make it all sexy and just shove a product down your throat, but what we can do is make educational materials and that is what the industry needs. And despite saying, “Okay, well, these are the flaws in the local legislation.” For the most part, I would have to say the Department of Ag and Food as well as the Department of Health has done a phenomenal job with trying to structure this program in the best way possible, both economically and on the healthcare side for the patients.
Chris Holifield: And are your products in all the pharmacies, dispensaries here in Utah? That you know of at least.
Dashiel: Yeah, we are in all of the pharmacies, yep. I wish we had more access to more flower and more supply and whatnot. But that’s kind of a natural growing pain that I think everybody’s dealing with. So we try to keep them stocked and in every pharmacy as much as possible.
Chris Holifield: And I’m sure as 2021 goes into 2022 I mean, it’s just going to get better and better, I would imagine, with supply.
Dashiel: Well, yeah, I mean, I think 2020… The real supply issues kind of died with 2020.
Chris Holifield: Because of COVID.
Dashiel: Well, also it just took them that long to get up and running. Even when Tryke and Randy came in, they were the only cultivator and are still one of only two, maybe three cultivators that are selling to third party processors. And they didn’t even maximize the full cap of their license, because a lot of people just did not expect the patient population to kind of explode the way that it did.
Chris Holifield:22,000.
Dashiel: Yeah, so all these other groups are now getting it together, building out the remaining allotted square footage of their license, and dialing in what genetics they want to use. And so I know that there’s multiple groups now that are going to be doing at least 500 pounds a month. So hopefully, what that translates into is lower costs for patients, right? Because one thing that that everybody knows is an issue here and the state is the price of products. If you go on Reddit, if you go on Instagram, you go talk to anybody-
Chris Holifield: Oh, yeah, everywhere, the price of products is outrageous.
Dashiel: … it’s about the price of the product. And what people need to realize is that, that all starts with the cost of the flower, right? If we’re here and we’re paying, just to make the math easy, let’s say $700 a pound, right? If you look at other mature markets, they’re more down around $300 to kind of $400 a pound or something like that. Now, because that cost has not come down, and there are some factors that are creating that, one of those are these people co-packing flower, right? If everybody’s going in, and everybody’s buying everything that’s in there, nobody needs to come down in price, at least from their perspective. And for us, when we don’t control the grow or the cultivation, we don’t control the cost of a flower. So if we want to find margins to make this profitable, while also dealing with things like Section 280E, that’s why the price kind of… it stays high. However, this year we’ve developed some strategic partnerships, and I believe other groups are also developing these strategic partnerships that are going to allow us to get medicine to patients at a lower cost.
Chris Holifield: Very good.
Tim Pickett: Well, that’s good.
Chris Holifield: Can’t wait.
Tim Pickett: No one can wait.
Chris Holifield: Yes.
Tim Pickett: Everybody is waiting for things to equalize, all the pharmacies to open. I mean, it’s exciting because if you need the products, you can probably get them, but the barriers will come down.
Dashiel: And it’s also important to bring people over from that illicit illegal market, right?
Tim Pickett: Oh, for sure.
Dashiel: For public safety, if you have patients that are going in, and they’re getting asked to pay three times maybe what they pay in the black market, and the product is not even on the shelf, they’re just going to keep buying it from their buddy, right? So that’s a cause for concern.
Chris Holifield: Absolutely.
Tim Pickett: Absolutely. Well, this has been a good conversation.
Chris Holifield: Yeah, absolutely.
Tim Pickett: I’m glad we could have you on.
Chris Holifield: Let’s wrap this episode up —
Tim Pickett: Absolutely.
Chris Holifield: … bring him back through and catch up, and —
Tim Pickett: Yeah, we’re excited to see Boojum grow and what products you have coming out and all the research.
Dashiel: Awesome.
Tim Pickett: Yeah, this will be fun.
Dashiel: Well, yeah, we’d love to maybe have you guys up, and you guys can check out the facility.
Tim Pickett: Oh, yeah, we’ll come. We’ll bring the mics.
Chris Holifield: Yeah, I’m down.
Dashiel: Yeah, bring the mics and we’ll do one up there.
Chris Holifield: Yeah, I’d love to. Maybe do a little video if that’s allowed-
Tim Pickett: Yeah, that’d be great.
Chris Holifield: … and get some visual.
Dashiel: Yeah.
Chris Holifield: Well, cool. Really quickly, Tim, anything you want to mention, utahmarijuana.org is how they can get a hold of you, right?
Tim Pickett: Yep, utahmarijuana.org and utahmarijuana.org/podcast is where all of the podcasts are available. And we’re caught up, Chris.
Chris Holifield: We are caught up.
Tim Pickett: We’re caught up, they’re all there.
Chris Holifield: And leave us some reviews in iTunes if you haven’t yet. We want to see some reviews in there. Share your podcast episodes with your family and friends because that’s how we get the word out, right?
Tim Pickett: That’s right.
Chris Holifield: We are advertising, but it isn’t either, so-
Tim Pickett: No, it isn’t. And look for us in Salt Baked City.
Chris Holifield: Oh, yeah.
Tim Pickett: We’ve got an ad coming out in Salt Baked City, Utah in the Weeds.
Chris Holifield: Go, Cole.
Tim Pickett: It’s going to be really cool.
Dashiel: First publication, right, first print?
Tim Pickett: Yep, first print, he’ll be a guest coming up. So yeah.
Chris Holifield: He was on episode 11, I think it was. Go back and listen to that one. Thank you again. It’s Dashiel, right? Dashiel?
Dashiel: Dashiel or Dash.
Chris Holifield: Dashiel.
Dashiel: Dashiel.
Tim Pickett: Dash, perfect.
Chris Holifield: Dash. Uh, thank you so much, and like Tim likes to say…
Tim Pickett: Stay safe out there.
Chris Holifield: All right guys, have a good week.
