The 100th episode of Utah in the Weeds features a candid conversation with TV host Big Budah. Budah talked about his use of Medical Cannabis to treat chronic pain and sleep issues.
Transcript coming soon.
We have been fairly vocal about our desire to see the list of qualifying conditions in Utah expanded. We’ve been particularly interested in Medical Cannabis as a treatment for acute pain. Well, we have good news to report – lawmakers approved a bill during this past session that now qualifies some forms of acute pain for Cannabis treatment.
The bill in question is SB195 Medical Cannabis Access Amendments sponsored by Sen. Luz Escamilla and Rep. Raymond Ward. Thanks to their hard work and an affirmative vote in both legislative houses, the bill is now law. Patients expecting to experience some types of acute pain can apply for a temporary Medical Cannabis card allowing them to treat their pain with Medical Cannabis.
The specific section of the bill outlining the qualifying conditions expansion is 26–61a–104 Qualifying condition. It states the following, in relation to pain expected to last more than two weeks:
“Pain that is expected to last for two weeks or longer for an acute condition, including a surgical procedure, for which a medical professional may generally prescribe opioids for a limited duration, subject to Subsection 26-61a-201(5)(c).”
Other types of acute pain might also be eligible, though additional language in the law suggests they would need to be approved by the Compassionate Use Board. Chronic pain is already a qualifying condition.
The law is still new enough that it will take some time to figure everything out. The important thing is that state lawmakers have recognized that certain situations involving acute pain are better handled with Medical Cannabis than opioid painkillers. We consider this a big deal.
The change is a big deal for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are the many stories we have heard from patients. Our very own Tim Pickett has heard plenty of stories (on the Utah in the Weeds podcast) of patients who switched to Medical Cannabis after deciding opioids were bad news for them.
Opioids have their place in modern medicine. But we already know they are highly addictive. We also know that not everyone tolerates them well. Medical Cannabis is another option for managing acute pain. Our state lawmakers have acknowledged as much in expanding the qualifying conditions list to include acute pain.
So what does all of this mean to you? It means you might have another choice. However, you and your medical provider have to figure out whether your acute pain qualifies for Medical Cannabis. The best advice we can offer is that you talk things over with your medical provider as soon as possible.
If you are planning to have surgery, it is important to have the discussion sooner rather than later. Your primary care physician or surgeon may not be registered as a Qualified Medical Provider (QMP) in Utah. If either one is willing, they could still recommend Medical Cannabis as a Limited Medical Provider (LMP).
There are restrictions to the LMP program. Your medical provider can learn what these are by visiting the state’s Medical Cannabis website. In the meantime, take heart in knowing that some types of acute pain will soon qualify for Medical Cannabis treatment.
Utah’s program keeps getting better. Thanks to attentive lawmakers who earnestly want to improve access to Medical Cannabis, they are crafting rules designed to do just that. We think adding acute pain to the qualifying conditions was the right move for lawmakers.
Episode 99 of Utah in the Weeds is the second in a two-part discussion with canna-therapist Clifton Uckerman. Clif has quite an interesting life story, and his background has helped to enrich his occupation as a cannabis-affirming therapist.
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everyone out to episode 99 of Utah in the Weeds. My name is Tim Pickett and I’m so excited. We’re coming up on episode 100 next week. I’m going to do it. Today is the second half of the interview and discussion that I had with Clifton Uckerman. He is a licensed clinical therapist and if you are not subscribed, go ahead and subscribe so you can go back and find last week’s episode and start it from the beginning, understand Cliff’s story. Where he comes from, where he’s headed, what he has lived through with really surrounding drug use and his family and his personal experiences and how he is developing that into a treatment for the shame molecule, as he calls it. And today, we get into that a little bit and prime that discussion for future episodes and future discussions. Very great conversation with Cliff today.
Tim Pickett:
From a housekeeping perspective, join me at Utah Cann, the third annual business conference and consumer expo utahcann.com, that’s U-T-A-H-C-A-N-N.com. It is May 13th and 14th, next Friday and Saturday, at the Utah State Fair Park. You can get your tickets today. You can search our social media at utahmarijuana.org. We’ll have info about those tickets. And I’m really excited to go down there. There’s a lot of panels. We have our own staff. Melissa Reid will be on the panel. We have, I believe Amber Stachitus is speaking about women and cannabis. And Cliff, of course, will be there. And I will be there. We’ll try to record down there as well like we did on 4/20 if you haven’t listened to that episode, that’s fun. That was a couple of weeks ago. Just exciting things as we’re getting out into the open again and the world is opening back up.
Tim Pickett:
So enjoy this episode and looking forward to coming to you next week with episode 100. Stay tuned. Enjoy.
Tim Pickett:
When did you start practicing? Right after you got your masters and licensing?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. 2011. I worked at Odyssey House.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. Why wouldn’t you? You grew up here?
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. My dad was in Odyssey House for a little bit.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
Just for a little bit before he got kicked out.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So I mean, yeah, you’re really just literally giving back to the community that you were raised in.
Clifton Uckerman:
Mm-hmm. And then from there, I just love … It’s not like I love being in charge or love to lead. It’s just that those tend to be the positions that I gravitate towards or that call for me. So from there, I just have been in leadership administrative management positions. Still doing direct service but helping with organizational growth, helping organizational culture change, with improving and enhancing service delivery systems with increasing the volume. And aiding in the retention of clients and building communities. Any organization that I’ve ever been at or helped to either start or improve, it seems to be that my energy and passion and the teams that I get to work with and build and create, bring things to life a little bit.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Okay. So question now is, and partly because this is a cannabis podcast, is you left cannabis behind because it was bad.
Clifton Uckerman:
Hated it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And it was-
Clifton Uckerman:
[inaudible 00:04:30].
Tim Pickett:
… part of the story of all the negative things that were happening to you as a child.
Clifton Uckerman:
Well plus I ended up with cannabis-induced psychosis when I was about 18. So I remember calling the cops on myself and hearing lots of voices thinking people were trying to kill me and hearing a lot of different things inside of my brain. And the cops came one night and they said, “Oh, we’re dealing with a 51-50.” And I turned my back on them and went into my home, literally. And they just left.
Tim Pickett:
They were like, “Oh, he’ll be fine.”
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. But I did smoke. I smoked a lot of weed from 12 to 18 until I had the psychotic episode. And I got scared. And then I really hated it because I associated it with all of the turmoil and destruction that was happening in my world, in my life, and with my family but-
Tim Pickett:
So you were anti-cannabis with the people you were around as well?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. Or I just avoided it all together. And still, a lot of my friends and family still use. I mean my brother, before he died, he had diabetes and glaucoma because of the diabetes and he went blind for a good year. And when he really took up using marijuana, his vision came back. Not all the way but partially. And so for up until he died, he could still drive and get himself around and go shopping and watch TV. But before that, he could not see anything at all. He was completely blind.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. When did it come back to you or … So you’re 18. You have this event. You associate cannabis with a lot of these negative things that have happened. You hate it.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
And you become … Did you get all the way through your masters program-
Clifton Uckerman:
Without.
Tim Pickett:
… without cannabis? You’re hating it clear through then?
Clifton Uckerman:
No. I think in my mid-20s and early 30s, I started to come back to it a little bit more. I was really afraid of it because I didn’t want the paranoia, I didn’t want the voices, I didn’t want the psychosis.
Tim Pickett:
Well that makes it both negative. So not only is the stigma and the association negative, but the experience was negative too. So it really … I mean I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d never come back to it.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right, yeah. I think for me, it’s more of a social justice matter. Because still, if all my friends and all my family are going to use it then there’s got to be benefit and value to it. And I really am not happy with the existing and the historical criminalization that happens. Not happy with people that get arrested and charged.
Clifton Uckerman:
Here’s where I think that now that I’m thinking about it. The turning point was when I was running the CATS program, the addiction treatment program in the Old County Jail. One of the earlier jobs that I had out of my masters program. And I was working with two pods, 67 guys on one side, 56 guys on the other side, running addiction treatment services in each of those little communities. Community-based, community model, community therapeutic model. And so many of them were being violated. They would leave the jail, they completed their addiction treatment program, they got their certificate. Two weeks later, they were right back. And my question was, “What the hell? What are you …” “Because I got violated.” “Violated for what?” “A dirty drug test.”
Tim Pickett:
A dirty drug test.
Clifton Uckerman:
“For what?”
Tim Pickett:
I peed dirty.
Clifton Uckerman:
“For bud, for smoking bud. And it was a violation.” So I would say, when I worked there, 80 percent of the guys in there were actually only back in there because of a violation.
Tim Pickett:
So they would come in, they knew the whole program, they were stellar residents.
Clifton Uckerman:
Residents, yeah.
Tim Pickett:
They were stellar residents, they knew all the rules. They did their thing. They got out. And then …
Clifton Uckerman:
The other problem there is a lot of them would come in with opiate addictions, heroin addictions. And this is the height of the opioid epidemic, 2015, 2016. So they would come in, their tolerance would go down because now they’re locked up and they’re not using anymore. And a lot of times, if they can get out and just use marijuana, that helps-
Tim Pickett:
Deal [inaudible 00:09:18]-
Clifton Uckerman:
… delay the urges, cravings, and impulses. That can extend their sobriety. That can help them manage their urges, cravings to use. And so … But what happens is because they can’t use marijuana, then they’re right back to heroin. And because their tolerance is low, they die and overdose.
Clifton Uckerman:
And so although a lot of them are coming back for violations, a lot that were on heroin coming in, ended up dying when they got out because they went back to using and didn’t have any buffer, didn’t have any [inaudible 00:09:49], didn’t have anything else as a medicine or a medication that they could use to extend their lives and delay return to use of more iris drugs.
Tim Pickett:
Do you think there’s something to being able to self-dose cannabis compared to other medications? You talk about people getting out of an institutional treatment setting and not really having access to self-dose medications. They’re on a few medications probably that are prescribed. And if they run out, they’ve got to get a visit, they’ve got to go in, they’ve got to go through some hoops to get that back. And on the other hand, you also have this … You can’t dose an anti-depressant or another drug. You just get what you get. You can’t take more on a bad day, less on a good day. Less if you got to go to work. I think there’s something to having a sense of control.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. Well that … So there’s another angle to this too which is there’s an over representation of minorities in the criminal justice system, people of color, right? So if people from communities of color, if they have better and greater access to marijuana but less and more restrictive access to traditional, mainstream psychiatry and other things like that, then what’s going to happen is they’re going to get out, they don’t have the access. A lot of times, they get disqualified. Like I get really angry when people of color go into the doctor, go in for a visit, and they get turned away. Or they don’t get the help. Or they get forced on something that really isn’t what they’re asking for or needing. And that happens a lot.
Tim Pickett:
It still happens. For people who don’t believe in it, we study it in med school that it still happens. It’s embedded. There’s no other way to describe why it happens. It’s just embedded.
Clifton Uckerman:
I think there is an implicit bias though with historical, in a white society, an implicit bias, people of color come in and we tend to look at them as crazy, impoverished, poverty-mindset, entitled, and med-seeking and an addict. And they just want what they want and we’re not going to let them have their way.
Tim Pickett:
Right, we know better.
Clifton Uckerman:
So I think for somebody, especially people coming from communities of color, I think it’s important that whatever they have access to already, let’s build on the strength of that.
Clifton Uckerman:
And then my deal was, in the last couple of years, especially with the legalization of medical marijuana, was if they are already accessing that and subscribing to it and there is some key benefit or value to it, let’s legitimize it and then help them get off the streets and away from synthetics and into a medical program where they can be educated on dosing and not getting in trouble for it or get violated or go back to jail because they have a history of charges with that medicine, with that substance.
Tim Pickett:
Going to turn it on their head. Basically, use the anti-system to fix the system.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. And now, if they have choice and freedom over what they’re dosing and how they’re dosing, a lot of times … So it’s kind of a manipulation that I use in therapy. But if I can help them divert their attention from alcohol and other drugs that carry greater risks and are more lethal, especially when combined and interacting with each other, and I can use little therapeutic strategies to divert their attention away from that. And divert their attention to medical cannabis and going through the process and getting a card and in the dispensary, now, they’re distracted by something that they actually feel like they have a little bit of choice and control and that they get to trial and error with and experiment and they’re not going to die. They might get a little high. They might have a little bit of anxiety. But guess what? They can always come back in and talk to me, or you, about it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
And we just integrate the experience and then we help them learn how to continually improve.
Tim Pickett:
Shit. You might have cracked the code. Let me distract you. Here’s something that’s really cool, right?
Clifton Uckerman:
No. But it’s bringing something that, to me, is kind of a logical algorithmic approach to a certain set of behavioral issues that you got to work through. Because primarily, to me, I always look at time. You need time. You need this person to get more time away from the substance they’re addicted to or using or the situation or the thought breakdown. You need time. Because time will heal the body and the brain itself. Different experiences are used as adjunct therapy and different thought process, you usually can teach people. But that all requires time and distraction gives you that time. That’s cool.
Tim Pickett:
If you get them distracted for a month or two on this little pathway that they’re trying to figure things out and trial and error and experiment with, there’s your time. Not only do you get the time and you distract them, but like you say, you’ve distracted them with something that is, they have some control over or they’re going to learn that they have control over it. And it might even be beneficial.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
Right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
Because of the way cannabis works on the brain, we definitely know it can open up new thought pathways. It can let people deal with things. Talk a little bit about that, how you’ve really in Utah, pioneered this, in my opinion. But utilizing cannabis in therapy.
Clifton Uckerman:
It’s different for everybody because every patient is in a different place in their relationship with the medicine. And at a different point in time in their life from one to the next. And so some examples are, so right now, with the way that the laws are, with the medical cannabis program, PTSD is the only qualifying condition. Now there’s a lot of people out there that are advocating for every other mental health issue to be a part of that qualifying condition. But if you think about it, every other mental health condition, you could probably attribute to some kind of trauma. And you could probably tie that trauma to a diagnosis of PTSD. So I’m happy that PTSD is the only qualifying condition right now. We can focus on that and learn how to work with it and around it. And when we don’t have to spend our time and energy on trying to lobby and advocate for every other mental health stuff.
Tim Pickett:
No. We just need to talk to people and get to the bottom of their issue.
Clifton Uckerman:
Trauma.
Tim Pickett:
And their trauma.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
Because what I say is, the next five or ten years, the DSN will really take a better look at generational trauma, gender trauma, religious trauma, racial trauma, and a lot of this mental health stuff, all these mental health conditions will be trauma-oriented or focused on the trauma.
Clifton Uckerman:
So in therapy, what we do is we treat the PTSD. So the easy explanation is, so the trauma, the negative life-impacting experience that contributes to the detrimental development … Detrimental development is all that cognitive errors and thinking cognitive flaws, the negative, self-defeating thoughts that I begin to have the intrusive voice as those negative faults, beliefs. The detrimental development is something happens in my life, especially when I’m young, like zero to 15-years-old. I’m a really selfish kid. I come out of the womb designed to be that way. Because if I’m not selfish, if the world doesn’t revolve around me and I’m not the center of everyone’s universe, I won’t get clothed, fed, bathed, sheltered. So a kid is really selfish and designed that way and appropriately so.
Clifton Uckerman:
So the earlier the traumas, whatever kind of trauma it is, the more detrimental development is going to occur. And that detrimental development, the way that that kid internalizes the trauma, is the way that they see that when the world revolves around them and they’re the center of the universe is, “Oh my gosh, I did something to cause this. It’s my fault. I’m to blame. I’m bad. I’m no good. I’m unlovable. Nobody loves me. I might as well just go kill myself.” That’s trauma.
Clifton Uckerman:
So what happens is that trauma gets imprinted into … It gets mind-stemmed into the earlier parts of the developing brain which later on become the mid or the hind part of the brain, the cerebellum, the amygdala. And in that little trauma stamp inside of the brain, the only way for it to become a memory and stay there is for it to embed, to be embedded in it, the shame molecule. And that shame molecule is what gets triggered as we get older in the rest of our lives which tells us, “Uh oh, avoid this. Stay away from it. It’s too painful. You don’t want to go through this again.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, but it’s stored and I see … So this is a good map-making explanation of it because it becomes the emotional part of the brain, the amygdala, where you don’t … You have a hard time articulating what that looks like. You have to learn how to articulate it from a feelings standpoint and what you feel like. But it is super effective and it is the only part of the brain that’s still alive in fight or flight situations, right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yes, yes.
Tim Pickett:
You don’t use your frontal lobe.
Clifton Uckerman:
No.
Tim Pickett:
And it creates callused connections to the frontal lobe where it knows it can get its signal across. And a lot of times, those are … They’re terrible connections because they just put you back into the negative spiral.
Clifton Uckerman:
That’s what we call the short-circuiting. It’s short-circuited, right?
Tim Pickett:
Yep.
Clifton Uckerman:
Which is why we react so instantly and react so heavy and react so negatively to some things that had those traumas not been there, we probably wouldn’t even be perceiving it in that kind of way.
Tim Pickett:
No. It’s not logical. If you were able to step back, and people with PTSD from specific traumatic events, once they’re able to step back and get that perspective on what happened at the time, that’s part of the process of healing, right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
And what’s interesting about cannabis, is it softens those short-circuit connections.
Clifton Uckerman:
It softens it. It uses your endocannabinoid system and those EC receptors to open things up. Think about it. You have all those endocannabinoid receptors in your central nervous system, in your immune system. So if my central nervous system is hijacked and my brain is short-circuited and I have this trauma with the shame molecule, then the cannabis is going to come in, open things up, decompress, and soften things out. Give me time to really think about things and talk about things. If I feel safe enough with the therapist that I’m with, I unwrap the trauma memory because it’s holding onto that shame molecule pretty tight. And once I unwrap or unpack the trauma memory, I can release and relinquish the shame molecule.
Clifton Uckerman:
And a lot of times, the shame molecule comes out in tears. A lot of emotional expression. It’s very painful. That’s why people avoid it and they don’t want to talk about it. But it has to come out in the tears because the tears are what carry the shame molecule out of the system, out of the brain and out of the body. And the cannabis helps people to get there. And once you do the education, then they can dose and go down that road, talk about the trauma, release the shame molecule, have a really good cry, and begin to feel better.
Clifton Uckerman:
There’s a chemical reaction that takes place. So when I cry, and I’ve just done some trauma-focused work, the oxytocin levels rise in my brain. And what the oxytocin wants to do is go in and prune all of those old neurons that was storing all of that old, negative psyche. Energy that shame molecule so it begins the pruning process and it helps with neurogenesis so I can begin to establish new neural pathways inside of my brain but the only thing that’s going to help me develop new neural pathways inside my brain is sitting there having a conversation with somebody that finally, in the first time in my life, shows me that they care enough to listen and understand and hear me and empathize with me so I can get this stuff out without judgment. And so now, I’m going through memory reconsolidation and my oxytocin levels are pruning. I’m going through neurogenesis, neural pathways are happening inside of my brain.
Clifton Uckerman:
This can cause a lot of anxiety for a person because it’s new and it’s fearful because it’s unknown. And so after a really good session, even with the relief of a really good cry and releasing all of that shame molecule, anxiety increases, anxiety disrupts sleep patterns. And so the patient will probably want to dose to manage the anxiety and to get good sleep and prepare coming back to the next session so they can continue that process of doing trauma-focused work.
Tim Pickett:
When did you figure this out?
Clifton Uckerman:
The years that I’ve been working with people, all the research and studying that I’ve been doing. But there’s an algorithm so I’ve worked with probably … Oh gosh, at least 8000 or more people by now. And when I listen intently and I’m trying to understand and I’m really thinking deeply about what they’re going through and what they’ve been through and I compare that from one patient to the next, there’s a pattern. There’s an algorithm. Right?
Tim Pickett:
Yep.
Clifton Uckerman:
And-
Tim Pickett:
We are animals. We’re all human.
Clifton Uckerman:
We’re all human.
Tim Pickett:
And we tend to repeat, the behaviors repeat, the stories repeat. Different details, same story.
Clifton Uckerman:
And with all the literature and all the research from a lot of different disciplines. Like I’m very eclectic and so I pull from the medical model. I pull from psychiatry. I pull from neuropsychotherapy. I pull from epigenetics. I pull from a lot of different theories of mind that exist in different disciplines. That’s what I like about social work is that’s, I think, the training of a social worker is we’re trained to pull from everything, lots of different things, and then we put it all together and make the connections and say, “Gosh. All of this body of knowledge from all these different disciplines. If we can bring that together and really understand how it’s all connected …” That’s what I’ve been able to do to help people more.
Tim Pickett:
Feels like we’re on the cusp of really accepting this locally, especially. And I don’t know of other programs that are like this, that are like yours. U’s really opening up to the idea, even, even really just opening up to the idea, that cannabis can be used as a therapeutic tool. I think there is some … We have these conversations. There’s discussions about cannabis and psilocybin use in spiritual, religious experiences. But I don’t … I’ve never, until I met you and this cannabis-affirming therapy, I didn’t really know anybody who was utilizing it specifically as a way to help people release, really. Right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Right, right.
Tim Pickett:
And I’m really excited about it.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
What I like about it is it fits a logical pattern for my medically-trained brain.
Clifton Uckerman:
There’s a formula.
Tim Pickett:
There is a formula. There’s an algorithm. There’s a formula. It makes sense to me. There’s not a lot of hocus pocus. And so I feel like it can be something that the medical community can actually get behind. Especially because it’s guided by a trained professional. We trust you in the traditional, synthetic medical society, we trust the therapist. Because you’re trained. You’re trained in our same system. And we, I mean it seems like, doctors need that trust. It’s just so important, the legitimacy. So I see this type of program really … I don’t know. I feel like it can find the legitimacy. And then you go back to your history and your story growing up and your credential now. And now you’re involved in teaching people at the University of Utah which offers a lot. And the credibility. You’ve had the credibility to get the position at the U. You have to have credibility. You have to have … You can’t just have one piece of the puzzle. You got to have the whole thing done.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. I did my Colloquium and in my presentation to the school, the College of Social Work, my last slide is, “And if you accept me, my current study, my current field of study is treating PTSD in conjunction with medical cannabis from the lens of a trauma-focused and of an approach in consideration of generational trauma, racial trauma, historical trauma.” All that kind of stuff. And so that was out there on the table.
Clifton Uckerman:
My first day, the other day, going in there to get some of my books for the summer semester, one of the first people that came to me and said congratulations said, “And I love that you affirm medical cannabis because I am a medical cannabis patient too.” And I think now the door’s opening and people are talking about it and we get to do more education. We get to maybe think about finding ways to get support to invite that into curriculum and bringing that back into the community. And do you know what I love about this industry is that it’s inclusive of everybody. And we all get to talk about it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I love this community. It’s been really fun. The people on all sides from the physicians and the PAs and MPs to the therapists and clear to the growers and the processors, the people who use it, patients. And it really is all about the people who utilize the plant. I mean what it all comes down to it, we all essentially work for the same thing.
Clifton Uckerman:
We’re all connected.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, we’re all connecting.
Clifton Uckerman:
To the same thing.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I’ve found it a really fun and rewarding place to work. It seems like there’s only good people, almost. I’m sure we’ll find a couple of bad eggs.
Clifton Uckerman:
Here and there.
Tim Pickett:
Here and there.
Clifton Uckerman:
Some are malleable. Some are changing.
Tim Pickett:
They just need a little session. They just need to have a good cry.
Clifton Uckerman:
A little bit of love.
Tim Pickett:
I’ve heard you say that to a few … Just need a good cry. Release that shame molecule. What have we missed for the first two episodes that we’re working on together?
Clifton Uckerman:
So you and I have … So first of all, I can’t let this opportunity go by without thanking you and appreciating you, Mr. Tim Pickett. I still have on my phone, I keep your first voicemail that you ever sent me.
Tim Pickett:
Really?
Clifton Uckerman:
[inaudible 00:31:06]. I just want to see if it will. I don’t know if it will here in the studio. But it was 4/18, oh my gosh, of 2020.
Tim Pickett:
4/18. So almost two years ago, day before my birthday. We’re about to come up on that … record.
Tim Pickett:
[inaudible 00:31:28] giving you a call. I thought to entertain how we could work together because PTSD is one of the very interesting qualifications for medical cannabis and I think anxiety is a reasonable option as well for patients who want to navigate the Compassionate Use Board. But I would need a little bit of help from somebody like yourself. And I think there’s ways we could work together. So go ahead and give me a call back any time. I think Monday might be best. [inaudible 00:32:04].
Tim Pickett:
I got a lot to say.
Clifton Uckerman:
But I keep that in my voicemail because I think that was the pivotal moment of being able to get to where we are right now.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, wow. That’s a while ago. It feels like a lifetime ago.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I mean April 18th, the first dispensary had opened, Dragonfly was opening. The phone was ringing off the hook. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. We were just trying to see as many people as we could and navigate the system. And I didn’t know anything about PTSD. I’m glad we connected, no question. It’s been fun because the programs that you worked on and everything that I’ve learned about you has always … You have a very impressive resume. Your history is just phenomenal. You cannot overstate the value of what you’ve been through, what you’ve learned. So for me, working with somebody like you is just a way to help a lot of people. Which like we said, in the very beginning, you help people and that’s what makes business do well. And then your business does well, you can help more people.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. Much appreciation too. I think one of the things that we got to talk about is get more into the shame molecule and neuroscience and that formula. I’d love to really share that formula and really help patients understand what they’re going to get when they sign up for trauma-focused therapy when we’re using medical cannabis in conjunction with that. And what the outcome is that we can achieve together. And usually, it’s life-changing.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And I’m sure I’ve got some, hopefully, some things I can add to that. We can really get into that. So let’s do another couple of sessions and talk all about the science and the approach and what it’s like for people, what that experience is like for people. I’m excited.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
So to wrap this piece up, I’m Tim Pickett, host of Utah in the Weeds. Clifton Uckerman, Medical Director of the Behavioral Health Program at Utah Therapeutic Health Center. If you have any questions, 801-851-5554 is our phone number. Utahmarijuana.org. You can find us both there. You can find access to Behavioral Health Therapy, therapists, that are really cannabis-affirming. Is that the-
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
That’s a good term for that?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And can help also. That program, from a therapy standpoint, Cliff, almost all insurances your paneled on for the behavioral and health therapy sessions?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yes, yes.
Tim Pickett:
So this is a great way for people to get access into the medical cannabis program and get help and for a copay, right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yep.
Tim Pickett:
Get the help they need.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yep.
Tim Pickett:
We can talk all about that, too.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
That’s like an entire episode, how we’re working within and outside the system in a really legal way. And to help people navigate this whole thing, I think that’s a whole nother conversation that I’m excited to have later.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
But anyway, utahmarijuana.org, Utah in the Weeds, subscribe and stay safe out there.
Clifton Uckerman:
Thanks, everybody.
Episode 98 of Utah in the Weeds is the first in a two-part discussion with canna-therapist Clifton Uckerman. Clif has quite an interesting life story, and his background has helped to enrich his occupation as a cannabis-affirming therapist.
Tim and Clif started with a discussion of the challenges of being both a cannabis user and a parent. [03:40]
Then they talked about some of Clif’s recent career developments before going back to the beginning of Clif’s history with cannabis. Clif says he’s been around cannabis for his entire life because his father was a “well-known” cannabis dealer in western Salt Lake County. Clif says his dad began to deal cocaine as that drug became popular. in the 70s and 80s. Clif’s father was shot to death in 1997. [07:30]
Clif told us about an experience in junior high in which he was caught with cannabis and his father’s handgun at Westlake Jr. High. He says he spent most of his teenage years “in the system” as a juvenile delinquent and eventually wound up as part of a gang. He says, at the time, he didn’t imagine his life would last beyond the age of 18. [18:30]
Around the time he turned 18, Clif became involved in a community program, “YouthWorks,” which helped him find mentors and turn his life around. He says he returned to the program in a paid position as a peer leader, and eventually became the program’s director. Meanwhile, he got his bachelor’s degree and received heavy encouragement to get a master’s degree. [29:00]
Clif briefly considered a career in law enforcement but decided to pursue social work as a way of giving back to his community. [36:26]
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everybody to episode 98, bearing down on 100 here, 98 of Utah in the Weeds. My name is Tim Pickett. I am the host. And today’s episode is a two part, the start of a two part discussion with Clifton Uckerman. Clif is an LCSW and now the first Latinx professor at the University of Utah. He recently accepted a position there. He is part of Utah Therapeutic Health Center and has brought his entire practice and his expertise in history into canna therapy and discussing some of this shame molecule.
Tim Pickett:
Today’s episode is the beginning, like I say, of a two part discussion. We go through some of Clif’s history. Clif is a local Utahn and you’re going to want to hear about Clif’s history, his upbringing, his experience with the cannabis plant, and his family. You’ll understand a little bit about his drive to make this something, to make this program something that works to make people … to help people be okay and really help them through their trauma. And if that includes canna therapy and cannabis based therapy or help with the cannabis plant and de-stigmatizing that, you’ll enjoy some of this conversation. Clif’s become a good friend of mine and somebody that I trust to take care of people. I think Utah is just lucky to have somebody like him around.
Tim Pickett:
From a housekeeping perspective, it’s May. And like I said, we’re bearing down on episode 100. We’ve got some special things planned for May. Stay subscribed to Utah in the Weeds. If you need updates for medical cannabis, go to utahmarijuana.org. We’ve got updates. We’ve got education at Discover Marijuana on YouTube. And we continue to drive people through the uplift program, our subsidy program. If you know somebody with Medicaid or terminally ill, encourage them to apply. We have ways for them to get their evaluation and discounts at the pharmacy through that subsidy program. Lots of partners, Beehive Pharmacy, Deseret Wellness, Zion Medicinal, Wholesome, Perfect Earth, and True North joined. We hope to be adding more partners through that program this month as well. Curaleaf is now going to be on board and Bloc Pharmacy with Justice Cannabis is on board as well.
Tim Pickett:
We’re helping people get through, and if you can’t get through immediately and you need behavioral health therapy, we talk a little bit about that in this episode, but utahmarijuana.org/uplift is the place to go to find out more about that great program. It’s something that Clif and I are working on together. We’re just trying to give back to the community there and help the people of Utah find access to cannabis when they need it.
Tim Pickett:
Enjoy this episode, everybody. I’m looking outside. It’s a beautiful day. Go outside, walk your dog, get out and enjoy this beautiful weather.
Tim Pickett:
Do you drink alcohol?
Clifton Uckerman:
Sometimes.
Tim Pickett:
I’ve been drinking a little more since COVID, but I’ve been having this kind of issue with my thought process around alcohol versus cannabis, and my kids. Remember when we were in the panel and Desiree got asked a question, and then she said, “I smoked weed.” And then, “Oh, my kid’s in the room.”
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I wanted so bad to stop everybody and say, “Okay, listen.” That goes to show you that even us in this room, the literal people who are trying to de-stigmatize cannabis, can’t even sit up here on a panel and not worry about our own kids seeing us or knowing that we’re smoking weed.
Clifton Uckerman:
That shame molecule. We still carry shame and it’s embedded.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. How the fuck are we going to get rid of that? My father-in-law goes to my sister-in-law’s house and is yelling downstairs and the junior high kid’s in the kitchen and he’s yelling downstairs, “Hey, Brandon. How much of this gummy should I be taking?” And his daughter just ripped him a new asshole. She was so pissed off because he’s talking about something that … And I talked to my wife about this this morning and I said, but she said, “That’s none of anybody’s business.” And I said… I’d go in and I’d say ibuprofen. And I would say, “Well, honey, how much of this ibuprofen should I take?”
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
And that’s okay.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
But cannabis isn’t like that.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
Why is that? Really, it’s the shame molecule that’s embedded when we’re young.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. I mean, think about it. I mean, the war on drugs started in the ’70s, maybe the ’60s. So we’re talking, I mean, it’s 2022. So we’re thinking 40 plus 20, that’s 60 years in the making of it being criminalized, penalized, punished, shamed, so generations.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
That is bad. And if you are associated with it, you are a bad person. Don’t talk about it.
Tim Pickett:
Don’t talk about it. Don’t do anything. Even when we’ve come so far that I literally do this for a living. And we still have this in the back. I mean, I’ll pour a drink. I’ve said it on the podcast. I’ll pour a drink in front of my kids, no problem. But won’t consume cannabis in front of my kids.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
I know it will change over time.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And I guess the answer is time is the only… Time, and then repeating. I mean, what do we do?
Clifton Uckerman:
Time and people that can make the change. I mean, time goes on, but it’s the people in that time or within that time, like you or me that can… Or anybody else that’s willing to take that risk, have that courage and be open and honest and transparent and forthcoming about it. If I have asthma and I have my children or my child in front of me in the same room and I’m having asthma attack, I’m going to take my inhaler and use my inhaler in front of them. I’m not going to keep it secret and go into the bathroom to use my inhaler.
Tim Pickett:
No, of course not. But we do still associate with cannabis with both the recreational side, the medicinal side. We’re using it for both, now. Hmm. Anyway. Okay. Well back to basics.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I kind of imagine this as… I mean, let me introduce Clifton Uckerman. You’ve never been on the podcast before.
Clifton Uckerman:
Never.
Tim Pickett:
That’s a tragedy in itself. And Clifton Uckerman is LCSW, licensed clinical social worker, and, congratulations, the newest professor at the University of Utah in the Latinx-
Clifton Uckerman:
Position.
Tim Pickett:
Position.
Clifton Uckerman:
First of its kind.
Tim Pickett:
I’m so excited. For listeners out there, I mean, this is the episode. If you are not subscribed, you should subscribe now and get the downloads every week, because Clif and I are going to have multiple conversations throughout the year. We’ll publish. We will definitely not get through all of this today.
Clifton Uckerman:
Hmm.
Tim Pickett:
Right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, you have a really fascinating story. We’ll just see where this takes us.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. Cool.
Tim Pickett:
When was the first time you were exposed to cannabis?
Clifton Uckerman:
Cannabis?
Tim Pickett:
Can you remember?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. Since I was born. My dad was a pretty well known marijuana dealer back in the ’60s and ’70s. I mean, he had pretty rich connections. I remember, as early as I can remember, I mean, there would be pounds and pounds in the closet. I mean, I think I asked him one time when I got older how much weed did you have in the… That must have been at least a couple hundred pounds sitting in the closet.
Tim Pickett:
Holy cow. Wow. And you’re just a little kid.
Clifton Uckerman:
I’m just a baby. Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Was this here in Utah?
Clifton Uckerman:
Here in Utah, on the west side of Salt Lake. My dad built and owned a house on property in a neighborhood called Chesterfield. Are you familiar with that neighborhood?
Tim Pickett:
Not really. I think I’ve heard of it.
Clifton Uckerman:
It’s the last to be incorporated. Even with curb and gutter, it was still dirt road, in West Valley City. The last neighborhood to be incorporated, Chesterfield.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, wow.
Clifton Uckerman:
They called it Teepee Town because everybody, 20 years before my dad built his home, a lot of people lived in Teepees. My play shed growing up was actually my grandparents’ old chicken coop. And before it was the chicken coop it was an actual little piece of housing for somebody to live in.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. !hat was it like growing up there? I mean, we can talk as much about this as you want, really. Look, you’re a therapist. You got into therapy. I know that this is a lot of, I don’t know. Tell us the story. Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
Well, have you seen the movie Blow with Johnny Depp?
Tim Pickett:
Yep.
Clifton Uckerman:
That’s kind of my dad’s story. And I grew up in that story. I mean, there’s this kind of cliche ’60s and ’70s of the big time drug dealer, marijuana, turning into cocaine, and then cocaine dismantling it all and ending in nothing good. My dad had pretty rich connections in the ’70s, sold a lot of marijuana, all of his brothers and all of his children. I was the youngest, so had I been 10 years older, I would’ve been selling for him. When I did become a teenager, I was selling at 12 or 13 years old. But all my older brothers in that time in the ’70s and all his brothers, they all had a pretty profitable distribution. And they were selling a lot up here-
Tim Pickett:
Here in the west.
Clifton Uckerman:
Here in Utah, yeah. I was born in ’81 and by the time I was born that’s when-
Tim Pickett:
Oh, you were moving into Coke.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah, he was into cocaine. And the problem there is he got pretty addicted to it. And everybody that was selling his weed also started selling his cocaine, and then everybody that started selling his cocaine, and him included, got hooked on it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. You went from a drug that was dangerous because it was illegal, to a drug that was just plain dangerous.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. That’s too bad. But you can see the progression, I guess, of the thought process in society, how everybody thinks, oh, weed’s a gateway drug. Look at this story.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
But really that kind of had nothing to do with it. It was just that it was illegal and profitable.
Clifton Uckerman:
Plus it was part of the trend. It was a societal trend. That’s what was just kind of coming in and moving and moving through people’s lives. I think it’s another form of medicine. Probably much more addictive than marijuana.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. It’s a lot more addictive from a medical standpoint. No question.
Clifton Uckerman:
And probably brings with it just a major onslaught of additional consequences. The criminalization and the incarceration and the legal involvement that can come with purchasing, selling, distributing, using is probably the most major consequence of them all.
Tim Pickett:
I believe you. I’m sure there’d be people out there who don’t think that. But I think that the criminalization of it just made everything… It just destroyed the whole thing.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And then you had addicts who couldn’t get any help.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
Period.
Clifton Uckerman:
Period.
Tim Pickett:
We just put them in prison. And then we blame them and shame them.
Clifton Uckerman:
We shame them and punished them. And with addiction, I mean, the way that I look at it, in the marijuana days, I mean, of course I wasn’t really alive in the ’70s, but when I look back at photos and heard stories of my family and all the outings and the crowds and community that they were involved in, I mean, that seemed it was a really fun time. Right?
Tim Pickett:
I mean, it had to be. Because nobody died.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. And it was just kind of use your medicine, come together, have fun, live life. And then the ’80s came and I think because of the societal trend, my dad, those rich connections that he had… my mom showed me pictures of all his connections and we’re talking big lawyers in Utah, big doctors in Utah, big real estate agents in Utah that are my dad’s connections. And my dad is really half Filipino, half German mixed race, biracial, general contractor that just lives on the west side.
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Clifton Uckerman:
So here comes the cocaine and he’s just kind of following suit. And these connections are just giving him more feed on what the supply and demand is and he’s distributing whatever the trend is at that point in time.
Tim Pickett:
Of course.
Clifton Uckerman:
But he did get busted in a really big way. I’m four years old, I was having a sleepover. And then all of a sudden, I see, just from the movies, all these agents, all in gear, black sunglasses, guns out and they come and bust in the house. And they seize everything. They go into his bedroom, they’re pulling out kilos of cocaine that he had duct taped under every drawer in his bedroom.
Tim Pickett:
Oh my gosh.
Clifton Uckerman:
And they take him to jail and they have all of his cash, wads of cash. And then my friends are like, “What the hell? Let’s go.” Their parents had to come pick them up.
Tim Pickett:
Oh yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
And then my sister came and got me from the house. But at that point in time, I think that’s when things really started to go downhill because he didn’t get adequate treatment, and he was already in an addictive process. So the most counterintuitive thing that you can do, having worked in addiction myself as a clinician and as a provider, the most counterintuitive thing that you can do to somebody that’s in or coming out of or wants to come out of an addictive process is shame them. Because, really the triangle of addiction, the recipe of disaster for the addictive process is unmourned loss and grief, unprocessed or hidden trauma. Hidden because it gets buried and nobody talks about it and it remains a secret. And then the internalized shame that’s packed into or embedded into that trauma memory. So if you’re shaming somebody that’s in an addictive process or coming out of an addictive process, so counterintuitive and counterproductive, it’s like throwing gas onto a fire.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Now you grow up and when did you start using cannabis?
Clifton Uckerman:
Let me do a little bridge-
Tim Pickett:
Okay. Fill the gap.
Clifton Uckerman:
a bridge to that. He went down, didn’t get adequate treatment, was shamed and criminalized and penalized. And I think a lot of people, if they have the support and the resources and tools, most people don’t know what they don’t know until they’re getting busted, they go to jail, some bad consequence occurs and then they realize, and then they wake up and they’re like, “Oh my gosh. I didn’t realize. Now I feel guilty and ashamed.” And then they just need help.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
So for my dad, because I don’t think he got adequate help, he just became more ashamed. Couldn’t share more of his traumas, wasn’t mourning any of the loss and grief that was coming from this major life consequence. And so just continued to spiral down. I think if I look back at it, reflecting and looking at how I witnessed everything, I mean, I think he got… I could see him… At the time I didn’t realize this, but looking back at it now I do, getting more and more depressed, feeling more and more ashamed. Having lost a lot-
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
because of the criminalization and really couldn’t recover. And so ended up back in an addictive process until I was about 14 or 15. Because he got so heavily addicted to cocaine and crack cocaine, injected for several years, but in his last days as a crack addict, he was inevitably, eventually shot and killed in a crack house. One of the most reputable ones in Salt Lake City in 1997.
Tim Pickett:
Wow.
Clifton Uckerman:
Probably a few years before that, I had found some weed, in his truck. I think he was still trying to do a little bit of side hustling, but he didn’t have the major connections that he had had before.
Tim Pickett:
No.
Clifton Uckerman:
But my brother did and my other brother did. And so both my brothers, while my dad was kind of going downhill and getting more entrenched in his addictive process, but my brothers were still selling a lot of weed and I had found some in my dad’s truck. And I also found a little .22 millimeter handgun as well. So I’m 12 years old, lacking parental guidance and supervision. Family is broken up and falling apart.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
So I go to school and I pack my locker with a couple ounces of weed and I’m carrying around a little .22 at 12, 13 years old in seventh grade.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, I didn’t know about the .22.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
God.
Clifton Uckerman:
Scary stuff.
Tim Pickett:
That’s scary stuff. I mean, the weed alone at that time…. Okay. You’re going to school in West Valley?
Clifton Uckerman:
West Lake Junior High.
Tim Pickett:
West Lake Junior High. It is 1992, ’94.
Clifton Uckerman:
About ’94, ’95.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. ’94, ’95. So we are in the midst of… I mean, we’re changing laws to make it harder on people so we can prosecute kids as adults. We’re building three strike rules. And you’re not white.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Let me, I mean, add that to the mix.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
And whoever says that’s not an issue doesn’t know anything from anything else.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
So what is this like for you in junior high? You making money?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. Well-
Tim Pickett:
You’re kind of making your own money.
Clifton Uckerman:
I’m kind of making my own life based on what I saw all my elders and my dad do.
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Clifton Uckerman:
So I’m just kind of following suit and I don’t know what I don’t know. What does a 12 year old know? I mean, I was so young and stupid.
Clifton Uckerman:
I’m just driven by anxiety, fearful of what the future holds because I have to survive and I don’t know any other way but to just do what everybody else does. So yeah, I’m making money, but I’m also a delinquent juvenile because I have no parental supervision and support. My family is broken. It’s just me and the world. And I’m finding family through other kids and peers my age that are coming from similar backgrounds and home lives, because that’s what I can relate to and identify. I don’t feel like I belong with the normal kid. I feel estranged from the mainstream kid.
Tim Pickett:
From the mainstream at that time. You’re finding comradery and friendship in the kids with similar situations, broken homes and drug use.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yep. And then it’s just fun. It’s like, oh, this is cool. We get freedom. We get to do whatever we want. This Peter Pan and the lost boys.
Tim Pickett:
Wow.
Clifton Uckerman:
So I get kicked out of West Lake Junior High because of all that. I went, got put in the system. I was in the system for most of my teenage years. Did a lot of alternative schooling at a lot of different youth in custody classes in the valley.
Tim Pickett:
Talk about that a little bit. There’s a few of these kind of schools. If you get kicked out of one school, you go to another. If you get kicked out of two schools, you end up going to the special… I don’t know what that’s… What is that like in the ’90s to be you in these schools?
Clifton Uckerman:
Well, I get suspended from West Lake.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
And then I have to go enroll at Central, the old Central High. Which is where all the bad kids went.
Tim Pickett:
That’s where the bad kids go.
Clifton Uckerman:
And I got kicked out of there, because they have strict attendance policies.
Tim Pickett:
And you’re just not showing up because you can’t get there or because you’re stoned at home. You don’t give a shit about school.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. All of it.
Tim Pickett:
All of it.
Clifton Uckerman:
All of it. Yeah. It just wasn’t even part of the normal life routine for me.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, do you feel like once you stepped outside of that mainstream going to school, you just feel like you abandoned care of it as a kid? I just don’t…. It’s not my story. I’m really fascinated with that sense of being a teenager and not knowing what you don’t know and really not knowing anything.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
Not only do you not know what you don’t know, essentially you don’t know anything.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. I think when you say abandoned care, I mean, I think the care was probably abandoned by the adults in my life that were dealing with mental health and addiction issues. And so really at that point in time it’s not necessarily that I’m-
Tim Pickett:
You’re trying to survive.
Clifton Uckerman:
I’m in survival mode. Yeah. Because care was abandoned with me.
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Clifton Uckerman:
And so then I had to do what I had to… Be the adult that I thought I had to be in order to get by in the world and survive.
Tim Pickett:
And school’s not part of that equation.
Clifton Uckerman:
And schools not part of that.
Tim Pickett:
That’s a lower priority.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. And the people that I were hanging out with, so the groups or the crowds that you tend to kind of fall into that I fell into, have their own hierarchy, call it gang life. And so part of that survival strategy is to prove yourself, to become one with the gang and then do what you can do to help sponsor and support all the activity that the gang life provides and the support and care that they bring to your life.
Clifton Uckerman:
So then I’m proving myself. I’m stealing cars. I’m stealing stuff from stores. I’m jacking purses. I’m selling drugs. I’m moving and shaking things. I’m doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And school’s just completely out of the picture at that point in time.
Tim Pickett:
You don’t seem this type of person now.
Clifton Uckerman:
Not now.
Tim Pickett:
I’m sitting here across from you trying, not really trying, but the mind starts to envision this situation. And I’m envisioning myself at that point in time. Because we’re not that far in age. I was born in ’78, so somewhat similar in age. I’m in junior high, high school at the time. My world is not at all like this, at all. Right. I’m watching you on the news.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. Oh yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I don’t quite know how to wrap my head around that, knowing you now.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Huh.
Clifton Uckerman:
It’s a huge change for me. I mean, I’ve completely changed my life and the trajectory that I was on. I didn’t think I would make it past 18. I thought I’d be dead or in prison.
Tim Pickett:
You just didn’t have a… Okay. Is it normal teenage development that you cannot see beyond a certain future? Or is it that your situation was such that you didn’t see past your 18th birthday?
Clifton Uckerman:
Well, I think it’s part of natural, normal human development, especially as a teen for the imagination station to start to take place. All this neuronal activity and all these new neural pathways that are developing inside of the brain, I think most teenagers are going to think far enough or as far as they can see and imagine something in their future.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Imagine getting married or having a house, or what it looks like to be the X, Y, Z person after high school or after college.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. And my imagination only just took me to death or prison, or a big time drug dealer with all the power and a big old crew.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. You would still have the imagination running. It would just run in a… Was it really that limited?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
It was prison, death or a mansion with a crew.
Clifton Uckerman:
Oh yeah. Well, and that’s all I seen.
Tim Pickett:
That really is the only… Because the imagination wouldn’t go on the street. Right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Well, you can’t-
Tim Pickett:
Wouldn’t go addict.
Clifton Uckerman:
You can’t think of an alternative world if you don’t come from that alternative world to begin with.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Clifton Uckerman:
So the only world I’m living in is death, destruction, drugs, gangs, crime.
Tim Pickett:
What happened? How did it-
Clifton Uckerman:
How did it all change?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. What was the catalyst?
Clifton Uckerman:
Well, I was locked up a lot in my teenage years. From 12 to 18 I was in and out, in and out of detention, juvenile settings. So I was on my way… I was this close, people can’t see my fingers right now, but I got half a millimeter between my thumb and my index.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. There’s no space. There’s no light there.
Clifton Uckerman:
This close from youth prison. Because I was involved in quite a bit of stuff. I was a fighter. I had lots of road rage. I carried lots of drugs. I carried weapons, all that kind of stuff. But my dad got shot and killed when I was 15, 14, 15. I probably would’ve went to prison had I… at that point in time, we went to try to look for the guy that killed him. And had we found him that night, I’m certain that I would’ve killed him and been in… still been sitting in prison. But he had a fleed and went to California and time had passed and I had grown and became more emotionally mature and learned how to later accept and forgive and all that kind of stuff.
Clifton Uckerman:
But through my teenage years, and being locked up all the time, I got to about 18 years old, 17, 18 years old. And with being locked up all that time, I actually was in places where there were people that did mentor me. Now, a lot of them, very few of them, were people of color. And so when I ended up in detention centers and I was in a day treatment program through Valley Behavioral Health called ARTEC. I was in there for a while.
Clifton Uckerman:
Then I got into a program in the community. It was a prevention program where we would just build homes. They would pay us, teach us all these life skills and whoop our butts when we got into trouble. They became the parents that we never had. So this group of friends that I had developed at this later point in time in my teenage years, we were all just roughneck kids with no family support, lack of parental guidance. And it was the people in the community that actually stepped into raise us. So along the way, I had probably a handful of mentors that just stepped in to my life, guide and direct and try what they could to help me change my life around.
Clifton Uckerman:
And so by the time I was 18, 19, I just ended up with some really good mentoring, getting involved in the community. I remember walking, knocking on doors with Senator Pete Suazo, other legislators like Duane Bordeaux. And I was angry though, because I felt a lot of police brutality. My dad before he got killed was beat up really badly by the police for stealing a pack of cigarettes at Smith’s. My brother had already gotten locked up and went to prison for carrying a firearm. And I was just angry and I got involved in the community.
Clifton Uckerman:
I just wanted to make a difference. I wanted to make a change. I wanted to make sure that people could actually have a chance to succeed and not have to suffer on top of the family problems and kind of the generational and racial kinds of traditions that tend to carry through because of systemic racism and injustices and oppression, I didn’t want people to have to also experience extra discrimination and oppression in their own community, in the villages that they were living in. So I was angry and I was knocking on doors, just trying to get people involved and get support and ended up on a pathway of education and really linking into the community and really relying on the people that were there to mentor and support me along the way.
Tim Pickett:
When did you decide to get into, start to get into clinical practice and realize… It seems, to me, this is somewhat of a calling for you. Or certainly would feel like that likely when you decided to do it.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. If I think back to those teenage years and all the programs that I was in, I was always a leader. I always took charge. I’d backtalk. I’d smart mouth. The other kids saw that courage and they kind of just followed me in that. And then this program that I was in, where we built homes, it’s called the YouthWorks program through NeighborWorks Salt Lake on the west side of Salt Lake, I ended up coming back to that program as a peer support, a peer leader. I was getting paid. I was one of the first peer… We have peer support specialists now. But back then, you just called it a peer leader and there was no certification.
Clifton Uckerman:
And I got involved in this program. I got really involved in the community. I kind of went through the ranks and I became a site supervisor, was wearing my own tool belt, carrying my own nail gun, teaching other kids like me how to build homes. And then I became the coordinator of the program doing a desk job and paperwork. And then I ended up becoming director of the program and I was writing multimillion dollar grants over the course of five years. Did a lot of grant work grant writing, did lots of projects in the community
Tim Pickett:
This is when you were a teenager, you were involved in that program and working and building houses and working your way up. Did that come with a lot of education, formal education? Or was it on the job?
Clifton Uckerman:
On the job.
Tim Pickett:
And they were like, “Here’s a grant. I need you to learn how to write one just like this.”
Clifton Uckerman:
On the job, the opportunity presented itself. I stepped in. A lot of it was just the social skills training from all of the programs I had been in and the people that had mentored me, but the opportunity came to write the grants. And one thing, one talent that I always had, even in junior high and high school as I was attempting to get an education, is writing. I’ve always had really great technical writing skills. Sometimes I write too much.
Clifton Uckerman:
It just kind of presented itself. And I spent about a week, when the opportunity came, to get this grant in, because it was due a week. And the old director in that position had left, so really it was me as the coordinator to step in and see what I could do. Did a week. Stayed up really late most nights and was just typing away, doing research, getting the information, collecting the data, running the budget so that I could submit this grant to Salt Lake County and have the county pay for more services for youth in the community.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. Did you parlay that into college?
Clifton Uckerman:
After that people kept telling me you need to get your master’s degree. Because I had, I actually had gotten my bachelor’s degree in that time. By the time I was 18 and going through all the programs and getting out of the system, I was able to get a GED in the alternative setting, which gave me my last five credits for a high school diploma. So my high school diploma allowed me to get into Salt Lake Community College. And I used FAFSA and government funding because of my family’s income-
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Clifton Uckerman:
to get me through college. And during this time as I was transitioning my life and my lifestyle and getting involved in the community, I actually ended up getting a really good opportunity to meet the president of the University of Utah, Bernie Machen, through a really great mentor of mine. Her name was Irene Fisher and she was doing a lot of work on the west side community and developed what’s now called University Neighborhood Partners, on the west side of Salt Lake. So she took me to his office. We were in his office and he asked me if I wanted a full ride scholarship. He would just give it to me, because of where I had come from and what I had been through and all the work that I was doing in the community and my leadership ability.
Clifton Uckerman:
So he said, “I will give you a scholarship. What do you want to do? Do you want to come up here?” I said, “Give me a week to think about it. I don’t want to say yes right now.” I actually wanted to be a cop. And I did a little bit of training in the police corps, the academy, and realized really quickly that it was so much of an us versus them mentality, and because of where I had come from, I couldn’t live with myself hitting the streets and arresting people that looked me, that came from families that I came from and putting people deeper into the system. I wanted to help in a different kind of way.
Clifton Uckerman:
So I got the scholarship, got my bachelor’s degree, became the director of that program, youth program. And then people kept telling me, “You need to get your master’s degree. You need to get your master’s degree.” And so I applied for some scholarships, sold everything that I had, really went nearly homeless and broke to get my master’s degree. And then finally got my master’s degree, 2009, 2010. Didn’t know a thing about diagnoses, didn’t know a thing about DSM, didn’t know a thing about mental health disorders. I just knew that I wanted to help people. And I thought social work was the way in and I submitted the application and got accepted to the program.
Tim Pickett:
Do you still feel that way, that social work is the way to help people?
Clifton Uckerman:
I think there’s a lot of different ways to help people. What I used to tell people is, because in the early days social work didn’t make enough money. I was making maybe 35,000 a year.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Everybody I know who went into social work said the same thing. It was just hard. I mean, I’ve got an uncle who went into social work and ended up back in construction, owning a construction company, because you just made a better living at it.
Clifton Uckerman:
I would tell people, because I used to chair the Chicano Scholarship Fund. We would give thousands of dollars in scholarships a year up at the U of U. And I would tell these social work students turn back now.
Tim Pickett:
Turn back, hurry. Hurry,
Clifton Uckerman:
Become an architect or a doctor and donate to charity.
Tim Pickett:
Accountant. Anything else. Anything else. But that has somewhat changed. We’ll talk a lot about this, I think, in maybe a whole future discussion. But it is different now from an income standpoint.
Clifton Uckerman:
Oh yeah.
Tim Pickett:
That’s for sure. And really because of COVID, there was a lot of changes with COVID, too.
Clifton Uckerman:
Well before that-
Tim Pickett:
Oh, and the ACA.
Clifton Uckerman:
with the parity law. With the commercial insurance having to cover mental health and addiction. Being a social worker, and especially doing clinical services and providing therapy, wasn’t just something you did with Medicaid or the nonprofit or government sector, you could jump into the private sector and really work with commercial insurance. I learned that you could, for me, the more people I helped, the more money I could make and the more money I make, the more people I can help. And that’s been my philosophy.
Tim Pickett:
I’m glad you’ve come to that because it is true. I don’t know that it’s… I think it’s universally true. And I think when you focus on helping people, you definitely have more opportunity to make money. And you’re right, money is fuel and businesses need fuel, which means you can help more people.
Tim Pickett:
Thanks everybody for listening to part one of a two part episode and discussion with Clifton Uckerman. Stay tuned for next week when we finish up our conversation of essentially phase one of what Clif is up to and his background and story. Really an inspiring story for us to pay attention to those around us and how drug policy is affecting our youth and how it affected Clif. We really need to reach out to people and lend a hand. Looking forward to episode two next week. Stay subscribed to Utah in the Weeds. Stay safe out there.
You are new to the whole Medical Cannabis thing. You have visited a Qualified Medical Provider (QMP) and obtained your Medical Cannabis Card. You are all set for your first visit to the pharmacy. But you’re nervous. You don’t know what to expect and wish there was a guide to Medical Cannabis. Well, take a step back and breathe. You are not alone.
Medical Cannabis, or Medical Marijuana if you prefer, is still fairly new in Utah. It’s pretty normal for new patients to go into it with more questions than answers. But the good news is that QMPs and Pharmacy Medical Providers (PMPs) are usually more than happy to help. Feel free to ask whatever questions you might have. In the meantime, we have put together this introductory guide to Medical Cannabis that we hope will answer at least some of those questions.
The debate over marijuana safety has been raging for decades. Political ideologies aside, historical and medical evidence does not suggest that marijuana poses any significant dangers to human beings. Better yet, a scientific research report published in 2019 cites evidence suggesting that human beings have been safely using marijuana for thousands of years. It has been utilized medicinally and for religious observances for a long, long time.
You should also know that, to date, there are no reported deaths that have been directly linked to marijuana over-consumption. In other words, Medical Cannabis patients are not harming themselves or dying as a result of overdosing.
Historically speaking, the most common way to use cannabis has been to smoke it. Utah regulations prohibit smoking it, so Medical Cannabis patients in the state have other options to choose from. Here is what we currently have to work with:
There is no one-size-fits-all delivery method for every patient. Your best bet is to talk things over with your QMP and PMP.
The first thing most people think of when the topic of cannabis comes up is getting high. That can be a scary proposition for new patients who have never used Medical Cannabis before. Here is what you need to know: your medicine might make you high, but it might not. It really depends on the cannabinoids you are using.
THC is the cannabinoid that causes the high effect. So if your medicine contains THC, you are likely to experience those feelings. However, some Medical Cannabis medications contain little or no THC. Instead, they offer CBD as the primary cannabinoid. CBD does not induce those high feelings.
Getting dosage right can be a tricky thing. First, accept the reality that you probably won’t get it right the first or second time. In fact, do not be surprised to find yourself adjusting delivery method and dosage throughout an entire lifetime of use. That is the nature of Medical Marijuana.
We recommend that you work with your PMP to determine how to best utilize your medicines. Also, track your usage. Write down how much medicine you use, how frequently you use it, and how it affects you. That is valuable information your PMP can look at to help you determine the best dosage.
Consult our “Find Your ‘Just Right’ Dose” guide to Medical Cannabis for more information on tailoring your cannabis dosing to your unique needs.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Medical Marijuana. You have a lot to learn, but there are plenty of people standing by ready to help. We trust you will find the Medical Marijuana community welcoming, friendly, and always willing to come alongside and assist you in your journey.
Cannabis pharmacies around the state held several 4/20 events this year. Tim stopped by three of those events and talked with industry professionals, patients, advocates, and others involved with Medical Cannabis.
This episode also includes Clifton Uckerman’s keynote speech at the Dragonfly Wellness 4/20 event in Salt Lake City.
Tim Pickett:
Welcome, everybody, out to Utah in the Weeds. This is Episode 97. We’re getting there, folks. Almost there. I’m Tim Pickett, the host. And today, we’re celebrating 4/20. A little bit late, but I wanted you to hear some of the clips that I recorded during the day. Lots of people’s thoughts and attitudes about the cannabis holiday, cannabis Christmas. And it was a fun, fun day here in Utah. Lot of enjoyment and excitement around the Utah Medical Cannabis Program. We were at Beehive Medical Cannabis Farmacy. We were at Dragonfly Medical Cannabis Pharmacy in Downtown Salt Lake. Also, I started out at Wholesome in Bountiful. There were events down in Deseret Wellness in Provo and Park City. There were sales all over so people could stock up on their medicine. And one of the things that I noticed is there’s so much love for the patients here in Utah and how this program is growing and really just expanding to help people.
Tim Pickett:
So enjoy this episode. We’re getting close. If you’re not subscribed, subscribe to Utah in the Weeds. You can find us anywhere, iTunes Podcast. We’ve got a lot more great content coming up. Make sure you’re tuned in for next week. Clifton Uckerman, part one of a two-part series of the beginning of his story, the Canna-Therapist here in Utah now. He was a panel speaker and the keynote speaker at the 4/20 Dragonfly event. A little bit about that in this episode as well. Enjoy. So basically what I was going to do is I’m just going to go around everywhere I go today and ask people how they feel about 4/20, the program, who they are, what the hell they’re doing, right?
Julian Miranda:
So my name is Julian Miranda. I’m the Community Engagement Manager for WholesomeCo. I’ve been with them for just over a year and I’ve been having an awesome time just getting to know the greater cannabis community here in Utah.
Tim Pickett:
So what does 4/20 mean to you, Julian?
Julian Miranda:
So 4/20 to me, obviously first and foremost, it’s a day to celebrate just this cannabis plant, the amazing properties it has not only as a medicine, but as an industrial product such as hemp. There’s so many applications for it. But today at WholesomeCo, we’re actually trying to make it a point to bring awareness to our patients about expungement, about the social inequity that’s going on with the war on drugs. We’re going to be joined by [inaudible 00:02:41]. They are a citizen-forward profit company that is going to be doing expungement through the Clean Slate Act, which is automatically expunging criminal records for people. And so [inaudible 00:02:58] going to be out here talking about the expungement process and just bringing awareness to that for our patients. So we’re really excited to have them out here and used to be serving all our patients all day long.
Tim Pickett:
Jared, tell us about the flower.
Jared Ulmer:
Yeah, super excited about it. My favorite is Tricross right now. We’ve got that in 3.5 gram units. There’s also Gorilla OG, Gummy Bears and Froot by the Foot. Some newer strands that we’ve released. We’ve had Gorilla OG before, but those other three are new this time around and Tricross is actually my favorite of this bunch, the most potent and good stuff. All of our flowers are greenhouse grown with the sun, supplemental LEDs as well. Yeah, got a nice brand new greenhouse up there and it’s looking good.
Tim Pickett:
Kylee.
Kylee Shumway:
I am not 100% sure how 4/20 came about.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, it was the Waldos. You know what you should do is you should watch this YouTube channel that I have, it’s called Discover Marijuana. He talks about the Waldos, they were in high school, right? They were in high school and they used to meet after something at… They got done at four o’clock so they’d meet over on this wall, and it was next to a statue of Louis Pasteur and they would smoke weed at 4/20. And then one of them, or their dad, was a base roadie for The Grateful Dead and that’s how the story got out was they were part of the Grateful Dead roadie crew. And so there you go, lesson learned. Do you have a lot of new patients here today?
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah. We have a ton of new patients here today. My pharmacists are almost full. I almost don’t have any appointments left. Why today?
Tim Pickett:
Adam. Adam Toller who was on our podcast, I don’t even know what episode it was. Do you remember the number? Who knows what number, it was last summer. But it was a good episode and you’re doing walk-in visits today. I’m interested what you think of 4/20 as a provider.
Adam Toller:
I think that 4/20 means good people, good weed, good fun. And as a provider, yeah, it’s all about helping people and this is a great time to come in and see us and get evaluated for your conditions and get the help you need.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I think from a provider, from my standpoint too, I think it’s just exposing the plant to more people no matter what way it is, because sometimes we’re going to expose it through parties like this and discounts and things. And then other times, you’re going to expose it through people being addicted to opioids and having to get off of them and that other traditional what we would be used to as providers. But I don’t feel like it matters how you get exposed as long as you get exposed and the experience wasn’t negative.
Adam Toller:
Correct. I absolutely agree with that. I think that having a good positive experience with cannabis in a good environment can really bring about healing and uplifting to the patients. So events like this could be a great way to be introduced to cannabis.
Lara Lucas:
I’m Lara Lucas. I’m a patient navigator over here at Utah Therapeutic. It’s a great day for 4/20, it’s beautiful, sun is shining. I love seeing everyone in their canna gear and it’s like Christmas over here.
Tim Pickett:
You’ve been with us for about a year and a half. How has your involvement in the cannabis space changed you?
Lara Lucas:
It’s changed me by seeing how much it helps people. We have all ages, all religions. I come in to work every day looking forward to hearing people’s stories on medications they’re not taking anymore and how happy this makes them. And it makes me happy to be able to help people and hear their stories.
Tim Pickett:
That’s cool. Thanks, Lara.
JD Lauritzen:
So my name’s JD Lauritzen and what 4/20 means to me is really activism. I know we celebrate it a lot as a more corporate holiday, a consumption holiday. I like to look at it more from activism and that’s really what we’re doing here at WholesomeCo today. 4.2% of all sales today will be going to Mission Green to help get cannabis prisoners out of prison. So for us, it’s a day of activism and a day giving back.
Tim Pickett:
Wow, that is cool. 4.2%?
JD Lauritzen:
Yes. 4.2% of all sales will go to Mission Green. And yeah, they’re an activism group that helps to get federal cannabis prisoners out of prison. So our money will help do that.
Tim Pickett:
One of the things I love about this whole industry is we do these fun little things about 4/20, right? We ask for $4.20 donations from patients. We donate 4.2% to Mission Green here at Wholesome today. It makes it fun. It makes us all a community, don’t you think?
JD Lauritzen:
That’s right. I mean today to me, I know I understand some people may have certain feelings about the word 4/20, but it’s more than that, right? This isn’t just about consumption and being a stoner and all that stuff. It truly started as a day of activism. So that’s what we see it as and that’s how we’ve positioned it and we’re having a great time out here today. We’re really excited, a company called [inaudible 00:08:02] will be out here today to talk about expungements with people and we’re excited to announce next month some stuff that we’re going to do with them. So yeah, this is the first step in a number of avenues that we’re going to take to give back and help people, try to do our best to help repair some of the harms of the war on drugs.
Dylan Rowe:
My name is Dylan Rowe and I did eight years in the Marines. I was an infantry squad leader, did a couple tours to Sangin, got hurt and came home and ran into the benzos and the opiates and everything that was being prescribed and was really unhealthy. My family life started to fall apart. I switched to medical cannabis in 2018 and got off of every single thing that I was on. Lost 75 pounds. Went to school for psychology, got my degree. And now, I’m a local beekeeper.
Tim Pickett:
You’re a beekeeper?
Dylan Rowe:
Yeah. Yeah. I just started this year. It’s something I really wanted to do towards the tail end of my degree. And I have four hives in Davis County and just been trying to promote positive vibes and live life.
Tim Pickett:
You switched to cannabis in 2018. I mean it sounds like from even the short story you’ve given me that that was part of a big change for you.
Dylan Rowe:
It was huge. Biggest thing, I wasn’t afraid of dying at night. I didn’t have to carry a Narcan anymore. My wife and I started to develop a whole new relationship. It was filled with love and trust and understanding, and she was really happy and really proud of me for making the decision to just turn in all my medications and cold turkey it. And I mean it hurt for a while, but medical cannabis literally saved my life. I probably would not be here if it wasn’t for it and the push in Utah.
Tim Pickett:
Why come out on 4/20?
Dylan Rowe:
Oh, why not come out on 4/20? The environment, everybody that is here. These are the type of people I want to be around. They’re the type of people that I have found have accepted me for who I am and the decisions that I’ve made. It’s not an educated thing to smoke weed for pain or for anxiety or anything, PTSD. And it’s a lot safer. It’s a lot healthier.
Tim Pickett:
Awesome, man. Thanks. I appreciate you.
Dylan Rowe:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for spearheading it, Tim. It hadn’t been for you making the push and doing everything that you have done, people like me would’ve been left through the cracks and probably been another victim of the opioid epidemic that’s going on in the state.
Jose Perez:
My name is Jose Perez and I’m owner of [inaudible 00:10:55] food truck. And for the most part, we’re happy to be out here celebrating 4/20. It’s a holiday that it goes under the radar, but it’s actually very popular throughout my culture. And it’s something that we really like and we’re happy to be a part of it.
Alex Bismuke:
My name’s Alex, I’m with WholesomeCo. So 4/20 is a celebration of the medicine and the culture, where it comes together where people get to experience culture, they get to experience the history of cannabis in our country and the world and they also get great relief from pain.
Tim Pickett:
This next section is going to be at Beehive Medical Cannabis Pharmacy. Hi, I’m Tim.
Melissa:
Melissa. I’m a caregiver of a patient. The journey’s been long and it’s been me resisting several parts of it along the way, but I’m warming up and I’m trying to learn and be supportive and know that it helps.
Billy Bitter:
So I’m Billy and 4/20 means to me, I feel like it’s just the day of destigmatizing cannabis use too where it’s just everyone’s celebrating, everyone knows 4/20 even before I smoked pot, oh wait, that’s the wrong way to say it, used cannabis. Even before I used cannabis, it was before I was medicating, it was still just like, “Ha ha, 4/20, blaze it.” There’s pictures of me on my mission holding a clock at exactly 4:20 on 4/20 because I thought it was funny. So it’s just this day of recognizing marijuana I guess as just part of a cultural moment.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, so you graduated from the Y.
Billy Bitter:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Here, we all know what that means. So did you do anything on 4/20 when you were in school?
Billy Bitter:
Yes. But according to them, no. It was very under the wraps because BYU is very anti any drug, alcohol, any use like that. So I had my little house in Provo that me and my friends just went into the backyard and lit up a little bit.
Tim Pickett:
You may have partaken.
Billy Bitter:
And may or may not have partaken allegedly. But it was a fun little time and it was just like the Waldos with the 4/20 story, right? 4:20, going to the statue, lighting up, having a good time.
Tim Pickett:
Sweet. Okay, who’s next? Courtney.
Courtney Lipscomb:
4/20 now because I work here with you is like the Christmas season in one day. So it means I’m busy. But when I was younger, it meant stuff that maybe wasn’t legal. Don’t put that in the podcast. Can I? Okay. I guess. I mean I was younger in high school, college. I had a group of friends that we would hang out on 4/20 and do the 4/20 things. And now, I get paid to do the 4/20 things.
Tim Pickett:
I think it’s even funny how people… Even now, we’re like, “Oh wait,” just the way we say it, just the way we still talk about it. We’re just not all the way there, right? We’re just not all the way.
Courtney Lipscomb:
Yeah. Immediately I was like, “Oh my God, my mom’s going to hear me say that.” So she fully knows now. I’ve been doing this for two years now, so she knows. But yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Your mom’s well aware of who you are and where you work.
Samantha Simmerly:
Hi, I’m Samantha Simmerly. 4/20 to me is just a great holiday. I love the community. I feel like it brings everyone together in the cannabis community and I love that. It just makes me feel a little closer to everyone in the community. And it’s nice to feel that support. Sometimes you can feel alone and so it’s nice to have that cannabis family come together.
Tim Pickett:
What got you involved?
Samantha Simmerly:
I’ve used it off and on since probably high school. But I’ve been a patient for about a year or so. And I’ve known for the past few years though that it really helps a lot with anxiety and sleep a lot definitely.
Tim Pickett:
What’s your favorite product?
Samantha Simmerly:
Ooh. For me, it’s flower. I usually like flower the most. Yeah. Well I really liked the I think it was called Push Pop Cake.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, yeah.
Samantha Simmerly:
That one I think is [inaudible 00:15:41] I think it was the brand. I really liked that one. That one was really good.
Amber Stachitus:
Oh, do you just hold it? Okay. I wouldn’t know when to do this.
Tim Pickett:
Why?
Amber Stachitus:
Because the singer would kick in and I’d be like… Yeah, total eclipse of the… See, I’m ready. I’m ready for karaoke.
Tim Pickett:
Once you have the microphone in your hand.
Amber Stachitus:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
It’s songs.
Amber Stachitus:
Yeah. It’s musical. You’ve got proper mic technique.
Tim Pickett:
I was taught.
Amber Stachitus:
Where’d you learn that?
Tim Pickett:
High school musicals.
Amber Stachitus:
You had a better high school musical director. If Ms. May is listening, you were fine.
Tim Pickett:
No. So Merrily Webb was our choir director. She’s from here. I think now she directs the… And Merrily Webb, if you’re listening, you gave great mic technique. And I know that I went into the cannabis space and I think she is still the women’s choir director at BYU.
Amber Stachitus:
Oh. So you had very good education is what you’re saying. I’m Amber Stachitus and 4/20 for me, it’s just being able to celebrate that we have this medicine in our state. I think it’s important for people to be honest and open about their cannabis use. And 4/20 is an opportunity to do that because a lot of people are showing that they’re open about their cannabis use. So it’s like if you’re going to embrace it, if you’re going to step out of the closet, the canna closet, maybe 4/20 is that day for you.
Bijan Sakaki:
Bijan Sakaki with Beehive Pharmacy and Beehive Gardens. 4/20, man, that means a lot. 4/20 is a day that a lot of the culture comes out. They put in the time, it’s about the culture, the people, it’s more than just the medicine. 4/20 was a code everybody used and now it’s evolved into a day and it’s evolved into a movement. So I think it’s really important to the culture. But it’s, again, necessary to also not digress from what the plant is. Plants are here to help so let’s not lose sight of that. So 4/20 is a good day to recognize that, bring everybody together. And I think industry wise, people love it because it brings the patients out. You get deals, you get vendors, you get food trucks. It’s crazy now to see the 4/20 being recognized as a cultural day. But yeah, I think it’s important. Don’t lose sight of it. Even patients out there, don’t lose sight on why this medicine helps you. Don’t get distracted by the fancy stuff. If it’s good medicine for you, stick with it.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. So say your name and then say what’s 4/20 all about for you. When you get asked at Christmas, what’s Christmas mean to you? Okay.
Jen Makuakane:
I’m Jen Makuakane, I’ve been a Q&P here since July. Christmas means to me helping patients, 4/20 Christmas. It’s a nice break to help patients in a way that’s maybe a little bit more light and airy.
Alex Bismuke:
Hey, this is Alex Bismuke. 4/20 means to me, it’s just a group holiday. You try to get together with all your best friends, family members, celebrate it like Christmas. You hang out, have fun, enjoy the day and just be in nature where it all came from and just enjoy what’s provided for you.
Tim Pickett:
You bring up this nature thing. So it’s springtime, 4/20, you’ve got Easter’s always close by. I feel like we’re more likely to be outside. Like you say, enjoy. And there’s no real gifts associated so there’s not a lot of pressure like there is with real Christmas. I feel like with real Christmas, there’s a lot of pressure, but 4/20, there’s no pressure.
Alex Bismuke:
Exactly. Sadly, we’re not in a state where we gift medical marijuana. If we could, then I’d be definitely giving some gifts out to my buddies. But no. Yeah, no pressure, it’s all on you. Whatever you buy, it’s all for yourself. I mean unless your buddies have also medical marijuana cards and then it’s okay to share. But for there, it’s all for you. And it’s a great holiday to just enjoy, to chill, be one with nature, go out in nature, just relax, soak it all up and enjoy.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, Victor. You’ve never been on the podcast. You’ve been working with us for two years so you’ve seen a lot of patients come through as many as anybody in the whole organization, probably as many as anybody in the state. Really, you’ve probably helped more people get through the EVS system than anybody in Utah.
Victor Caruso:
Me and Katie, probably Stu as well is in that bundle.
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Victor Caruso:
But yeah, the three of us.
Tim Pickett:
What do you like about the whole program, this whole thing, or about 4/20?
Victor Caruso:
Well I think 4/20 is the celebration of freedom. And what I like about the whole program is that it creates that freedom for people to speak about it, for people to be able to feel, able to just talk freely about this subject which is really important. It’s just medication and different ways to do it. There’s not only one way to do it now, there’s plenty which is pretty cool in my opinion.
Tim Pickett:
What makes you love your job or like your job?
Victor Caruso:
Well I was looking at all the memes they were sending today in the group chat and that was pretty cool. I was talking to my friends about it that pretty rarely you see that in a work environment where people are so happy and so festive that they share it with you basically and you feel free to share it as well.
Tim Pickett:
I like it too. I think we have a pretty good culture. This section of the recording is at Dragonfly. So we’ve moved from Beehive. I was at Wholesome earlier and went to Beehive, saw their festivities. And certainly, I will say, I mean I like everybody, but Dragonfly did the best job at getting the community together. This is better than last year. There’s food trucks out the back. There’s probably 20, 30 booths at least, a lot of people.
Beckie Meisenheimer:
I’m Beckie Meisenheimer with Pure Plan Medical. And 4/20 used to never mean anything to me until I started getting into the medical side of cannabis, which we’ve been involved in the medical side for about a year. And we’re very excited because it helps so many people. And it helps myself too because I’ve had some real bad back surgeries and hard time sleeping. And so it’s changed my life and so I wanted to get into this business to help other people in their life so they could have an alternative. Cannabis is medicine. We need to help other people understand how important it is because I’ve seen what opiates do to families.
Beckie Meisenheimer:
I see they start taking it because they’ve got pain and they can’t get off of it, and then their whole family falls apart. And when I had my back surgeries, I couldn’t take opiates. They made me sick and I would just lose them. And so it was so hard on me to have back surgery. And at that time, I discovered CBD and what it could do for people and investigated that for four years and then went from there and figured out that medical cannabis is really the key.
Tim Pickett:
What’s your favorite product that you make?
Beckie Meisenheimer:
Pure Plan Harmony. And it smells absolutely wonderful. And I wanted to create something so the people that don’t like the earthy flavor or the taste or the smell or the environment of it, I wanted to create a product with effects and be able to put them in there. So when you walk in, you can just pick this up and say, “Hey, I can use Pure Creative. I know what that would stand for. Pure Energy, Harmony, Focus, Rest and Recovery.” And they have really nice terpene profiles, but they also have effects which a lot of people don’t put effects in their cartridges, put effects back into it to give you those terpenes and an effect in a vape cartridge.
Tim Pickett:
This is your thing, right, is that you have the effects that you’re essentially just putting it right out there. This is what you would feel.
Beckie Meisenheimer:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Some of the effects that you are probably going to feel the harmony and the Harmony… Ooh, I’m excited to try that.
Beckie Meisenheimer:
I love Harmony, it’s my favorite. It really is. I mean for me, I can take just a small amount, one inhale at night and I can sleep all night and get up rested. And that’s huge for somebody with back problems that they don’t toss and turn and move, and you really get a good night’s sleep and it doesn’t cause anything strange. And I just love it. And that’s why we created it. It was a lot for myself.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Beckie Meisenheimer:
And then we wanted to help others to see that there’s an alternative and everybody’s, body’s different. So they really have to tune in to what works for them. My husband, when he tries Harmony, he doesn’t like the effect. It riles his brain and the receptors. And he doesn’t like that very much, but it puts me right to sleep. So that’s why we created the other line too. We also have some that is for people that do like the way dirt smells in cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
It’s the plant smell. We have a [inaudible 00:25:39] one too.
Beckie Meisenheimer:
Yeah. And I don’t like the smell of those, but a lot of people do. So we created something for them. It’s not my favorite.
Tim Pickett:
It’s refreshing to hear the truth, right? Because a lot of people are like, “Ah, do I have to eat skunks and dirt?”
Beckie Meisenheimer:
Yeah. It’s not that way at all. When I first went to Curaleaf, I walked in there and it smelled terrible and I was freaked out by all the names and I didn’t know what they did or why. So that’s when I started investigating and saying demographics in my age, which is middle-aged, if I could create something that people like me could walk in there and go, “Oh, this is a brand that has one for harmony. I know what harmony means,” instead of Dosi Doe or the skunk or all those things.
Tim Pickett:
This is why I like 4/20 because it brings us all together.
Beckie Meisenheimer:
Absolutely.
Bruce Meisenheimer:
Bruce Meisenheimer with Pure Plan Medical.
Tim Pickett:
So I see you got the sticker, “Cannabis is medicine.”
Bruce Meisenheimer:
Yes. Yes, and we believe in that since Beckie’s had a hard time with her back over the years and we needed to find something else for her other than opiates. And this has been helping her out a lot, being able to get restful sleep.
Narith Panh:
I’d love to invite Megan up onto the stage here, share a few words, talk to you guys a little bit about the UPC and really what they’re here to do for our community. So here’s Megan.
Megan Keller:
I’m so pleased to be here celebrating the medicine that has improved so many of our lives. Today, I want to tell you how our subsidy program changes lives and how Dragonfly has spearheaded the effort by taking on more patrons than all the other medical cannabis pharmacies combined.
Tim Pickett:
So now, we’re hearing from the Utah Patients Coalition representative because Desiree Hennessy, there was an announcement made that Desiree Hennessy has lost her son. So very sad to hear that. Des is just a hell of an activist for medical cannabis here in Utah, has done so much for the program and for access for so many people in Utah. Condolences definitely to her and her family. The Dragonfly subsidy has put a lot of people through for product, for free product every month. That’s run through the Utah Patients Coalition and multiple pharmacies are part of that. Dragonfly obviously here announced that they’ve supplied a little bit more than everybody else certainly and they’ve done a lot for the community for sure.
Narith Panh:
So we’re really proud to be able to invite our next keynote speaker up here, his name’s Cliff Uckerman from Utah Therapeutic Health Center. And he’s doing a lot of incredible work around mental health and really helping to destigmatize mental health and having real conversations with people and taking away the shame from that. So I’m really proud to bring Cliff up here and he’s going to talk to you guys a little bit about the work that he is doing.
Clifton Uckerman:
Thank you. Thank you. Narith, thank you so much. All right. So let me get everybody’s attention around here. When I say four, let me hear you say 20. Four.
Audience:
20.
Clifton Uckerman:
Four.
Audience:
20.
Clifton Uckerman:
So my name’s Clif Uckerman. I also want us to give a little bit more love and support to our young artists that were up here rapping, let’s give them a round of applause. You guys did a great job. I know I have to stop at 4:20 so that we can take a moment of silence. So will you just let me know, okay? I want to talk about the shame molecule. I want to coin that term right here on stage today. If you Google that term, you will not find it. It comes from me. And I want to make sure that you all can maybe see me in the future as a pioneer in the medical cannabis industry for bringing behavioral help to this community and to this industry in an affirmative, non-punitive, shame-free kind of way. I want to give a shout out to Tim Pickett with UTTHC for letting me do this work with him.
Clifton Uckerman:
So the shame molecule is a big part of PTSD. PTSD is the only qualifying condition for the Utah Medical Cannabis Program. And that shame molecule gets stuck and locked into the trauma memory. That trauma memory is that negative life event that we all have had in some form or another that gets imprinted into the hinder mid part of the brain. Now, one cool thing is that we’re all gathered around here, circling around, dancing around, singing around plant-based medicine, marijuana, cannabis to be exact. And also, I think all of us share something in common which is the traumatic impact of the drug war, the war on drugs that started way back in the sixties and seventies. So the shame molecule that’s trapped into that trauma memory, that negative life event not just in our lives, but probably your dad’s life, your grandma’s life, your great aunt’s life, where they told us that we were bad people, there was something wrong with this.
Clifton Uckerman:
We were doing something wrong. They locked us up. They criminalized us. And for generations, for a minute now, we’re still trying to recover from that. And we’ve been down on our luck, got really hard hit because we could never talk about it. We had to live in silence. We had to have a relationship with medical cannabis in a very criminal way. And then we were thought of as criminals for a long time and we’re recovering from that. So I want to talk to you a little bit about how we’re helping people treat PTSD with any other negative life event, with any other trauma memory that the shame molecule’s packed into, where they come in feeling like they’re to blame, they’re a bad person. They did something wrong, there’s something wrong with them. They get socially ridiculed, socially condemned, socially marginalized, really beaten up and bullied, made to believe that because they’re a bad person, they’re not going to go to heaven and they’re only going to go to hell.
Clifton Uckerman:
So we bring them in. We use medical cannabis in conjunction with the PTSD treatment. We know that CBD, high ratios of CBD with a little bit of THC is what our patients love. They don’t want to come in to get high, they want to come in to heal. So what they do is they dose before session, they dose after session and it helps reduce the inflammation, all that negative life experience, all that trauma, all that bullying, all that social condemnation, all that social ridicule, turns into mental stress, emotional psychological trauma, it inflames the brain. So we help them decompress. We get them out. Call to action is Dragonfly has a product that they just put out today on Facebook, it’s the sleep stuff. That’s going to be a really important after session dosing strategy. I want you to take a look at that, let us know what we can do to help. Thank you so much for letting me come up here and be on stage with you.
Tim Pickett:
Stay safe out there.
Voters approved Medical Marijuana in Utah back in 2018. Within 15 months, the state’s Medical Cannabis program was up and running. There’s always room for improvement in the program, but Utah has already made significant progress.
If you have any doubts about that, compare Utah’s Medical Cannabis scene with that of the UK. The Cannigma website has a great article discussing this very topic. It was published in February 2021, but little has changed in the UK since then. Author Mary Biles explains just how difficult it is to obtain Medical Cannabis and why millions of patients choose to go the illicit route. Reading the piece makes it easier to appreciate what we have in Utah and most other states.
The UK joined the Medical Cannabis community when the drug was approved for use in 2018. At the time, Medical Cannabis advocates were sure that patients would be given easy access to their medicines the same way other prescription drugs are obtained in the UK. That did not happen. In fact, it wasn’t even close.
A 2020 report from the UK’s Centre for Medical Cannabis revealed that only twelve patients had received legitimate Medical Cannabis prescriptions from NHS doctors. That is a total of twelve from the time Medical Cannabis was approved to the date the report was compiled. In addition, another four-dozen or so had gotten prescriptions from private physicians.
You have to understand that the UK’s medical system is a single-payer system. Medical providers do not have nearly as much freedom as providers here in the US. UK doctors have largely been hampered in their efforts to prescribe Medical Marijuana by an NHS that insists on continuing to wait for more evidence of its efficacy.
The unfortunate reality in the UK is that the vast majority of Medical Cannabis patients turn to the illicit market to buy what they need. In fact, the previously mentioned report indicated some 1.4 million illicit users in 2020. That hardly seems reasonable for a country that approved legal Medical Cannabis four years ago.
There is some good news on the horizon, though. Biles reported last year on the UK’s new Cancard program. Though it isn’t at all like Utah’s Medical Cannabis program, it still serves a valuable purpose.
Medical Cannabis patients with valid Cancards have something they can show to demonstrate they use cannabis for medical purposes. For example, the card could be presented to a police officer who happens to be investigating whether a person is in possession of cannabis legally. This gives the officer more information in helping to determine whether to take action against the person in question.
In order to get a Cancard, a patient must be suffering from one of more than two-dozen qualifying medical conditions approved by the British government. Biles notes that the card is intended for patients who either could not get approval from an NHS doctor or cannot afford the annual registration fee required to get a prescription.
It has been said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. In terms of Medical Cannabis, the grass is greener in Utah than in many other places. Sure, there are plenty of things about the Utah Medical Cannabis program we hope legislators will fix. But our program is still light years ahead of the UK’s program. We should appreciate the effort our lawmakers have put into making Medical Cannabis accessible here.
Episode 96 of Utah in the Weeds features High Times CEO Paul Henderson and Beehive Farmacy Founder Bijan Sakaki.
First, the pair told us about their acquisition of a license to cultivate Medical Cannabis in Utah, a process that took about a year and a half. [02:43]
Next, the discussion shifted toward the business philosophies in Utah’s Medical Cannabis market. [09:11]
Tim asked Paul about his role as the CEO of High Times, and how the company has grown to become much more than a magazine. [12:12]
The discussion then shifted to some of the challenges that cannabis companies can face, particularly with banking. [23:35]
Tim talked about his use of the cannabis strain Ice Cream Cake to treat an issue with his back. He said the strain helped him with muscle relaxation, pain relief, and keeping his mind free of stress. [34:22]
Next, Paul and Bijan talked about their expansion plans and the challenges that some cannabis companies face. They also talked about their biggest cannabis competitor, which they say is the black market. [36:30]
Paul and Bijan then talked about the importance of quality assurance in the cannabis industry. They also told us about some new products coming to Beehive Farmacy in the next few months. [41:54]
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everybody out to episode 96 of Utah in the Weeds, a discussion about cannabis and cannabis culture here in Utah, I’m your host, Tim Pickett.
Tim Pickett:
Today, our interview is with Bijan Sakaki and Paul Henderson. Bijan is the founder of Beehive Medical Cannabis Pharmacy here in Utah, and Paul, also is one of the partners. Paul is also the CEO of High Times, really the largest, essentially media group for cannabis in the cannabis space, and we talk a lot about his High Times’ opening of dispensaries in California, and how that, what started out as a magazine and writing articles has become a full fledged vertical offering in the cannabis space. We also talk a lot about Beehive Medical Cannabis Pharmacy here in Utah with Bijan, really great sess with those two, it was super fun and perfect intro into the week of 4/20. When I was growing up, I was going to rodeos around July 4th, and that was always called cowboy Christmas, and 4/20 seems to be cannabis Christmas or the hippie holidays, whichever you prefer. This is a great week for Utah Therapeutic Health Center, our spirit week as a healthcare company that is focused on bringing cannabis into legitimate medicine. It’s super fun this week for us as well.
Tim Pickett:
Beehive Medical Cannabis Pharmacy here in Utah is on 1991 South, 3600 West. It’s right off of the 21st South Freeway headed west, if you had thought about going up to Windover and getting your cannabis this week, just get off of 3200 West there on the 2100 South Freeway and just stop here in Utah, save yourself the trip and the legal problems with going out to Nevada, just stop here. We’ve got a clinic across the street that will be open all week right there across from Beehive, and it’s a great place. They’ve got drive through, they’ve got online ordering, they’ve got a huge parking lot there, and they’re going to have an event on 4/20 with special discounts, and we’ll be there as well, stop by and see us, stop by and see the other vendors. Just an exciting week all around and enjoy this episode, this discussion with Bijan and Paul.
Tim Pickett:
Your name first because then I’ve got to get that right.
Paul Henderson:
Paul Henderson.
Tim Pickett:
CEO of-
Paul Henderson:
CEO of High Times.
Tim Pickett:
High Times, just High Times?
Paul Henderson:
It was High Times Magazine, some people still refer to it as that name, but yeah, High Times, we’re branching off into a bunch of different directions now.
Tim Pickett:
And Bijan, we’ve had you on the podcast before.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
We even heard about all of your paintball-
Bijan Sakaki:
That was old world. Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Your old world stuff.
Bijan Sakaki:
Old world. I’m Bijan Sakaki, CEO of Beehive.
Tim Pickett:
Worlds best Utah Cannabis Pharmacy.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yes, you heard it from Tim, not me.
Tim Pickett:
That’s right.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah. So Beehive Farmacy we’ve got Buzz, we’ve got Beehive Gardens.
Tim Pickett:
Buzz and Beehive Gardens are the brand names, because you’re vertically integrated?
Bijan Sakaki:
Correct. We’re one of the four vertically integrated groups. So Beehive Gardens is-
Tim Pickett:
That’s not well known, I think.
Bijan Sakaki:
Okay.
Tim Pickett:
I think that it’s well known wholesome and Perfect Earth, with True North is Curaleaf now with Tryke. But I think there are a few-
Bijan Sakaki:
Dragonfly is also a vertical.
Tim Pickett:
We’ve got Dragonfly.
Paul Henderson:
But that’s because we did not start out that way, right? We were retailers and we had the chance to acquire the license from Harvest.
Tim Pickett:
And so Harvest was the grower-
Bijan Sakaki:
Was the initial, correct.
Tim Pickett:
… And then you acquired that.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yep.
Tim Pickett:
Paul, were you involved in the whole thing all along?
Paul Henderson:
Yep.
Tim Pickett:
Because we met, I think we met originally-
Paul Henderson:
Maybe around the opening of Beehive in Salt Lake.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Paul Henderson:
Yeah. Not as long as Bijan, but well before the laws had passed, Bijan and I had got together and started talking about what Utah would look like, and then I was going to be a small advisor, just to help out with what I had done in the California market, and then that just kept snowballing into a larger and larger role. And then Bijan and I actually wrote the applications ourselves, we didn’t hire law firms.
Paul Henderson:
And so yeah, I was there all along with the coming in ninth place on cultivation, first loser, all the way through to top application on the retail side.
Tim Pickett:
How does that, I remember that because I was lifting weights with Sean Hammond at the time all those applications were being processed. And then the losers and the winners.
Bijan Sakaki:
They all get their emails.
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Bijan Sakaki:
Like, “Hey, it wasn’t you.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, “Hey, it wasn’t you.” What does it look like to lose and then try to get Harvest’s license? How did that play out?
Bijan Sakaki:
I think it’s a longer journey than that. Helping stand some things up and then stepping away from it, and then really digging in with Beehive once retail came through. So, everything comes back full circle, and I wouldn’t say that this was an overnight thing, this is, we’ve been putting in 10 plus years into this thing. So it’s just like the re-evolution of it. We missed out on cultivation, we got retail, and we had a fortunate opportunity to help manage and operate one of them early on. And then given that multi-state operator situation, divestiture of assets, et cetera, we were able to then, while we were already managing it, we were consuming all the output from it anyway. It gave us the ability to now throw metaphorical gas on the fire, and then start increasing the quality and some of the output in the SOPs.
Paul Henderson:
The story is interesting too because I’m kind of a nerd in the cannabis space in the sense that I’ll listen to earnings releases, and I’ll read MDNA, what the companies put out as part of their quarterly earnings releases. And I actually saw in one of those that a Harvest had said that their board of directors and management had come together and decided to divest of a bunch of assets in non-core states. So states out of Arizona and California, and a couple of, where they wanted to double down. Because they only have limited funds and bandwidth, and they can’t be everywhere.
Paul Henderson:
And so when I saw that High Times had actually done a deal with Harvest to buy some retail stores in California, so I reached out to the M&A guys saying, “Hey, I see that you guys are going to divest of non-core assets, you didn’t get retail in Utah, any chance you want to sell your Utah cultivation?” And he’s like, “I don’t know, maybe.” And then that just started the conversation, and it took a good year or so.
Bijan Sakaki:
Year and a half.
Paul Henderson:
A year and a half to actually go through, mostly because it was kind of the first transfer of ownership license in the state of Utah, and nobody wanted to run afoul, didn’t know what to do. So they really took their time from a regulatory process to understand-
Tim Pickett:
That is the department or health over that, or the department of ag over that?
Bijan Sakaki:
That was department of ag.
Paul Henderson:
Department of ag.
Bijan Sakaki:
And they work hand in hand with the attorney general’s office, and it was, they really went through, and the first time you do anything is going to be the most challenging. And so it was a good experience for both people to know what kind of undertaking that requires.
Tim Pickett:
But since you, that transition of ownership with Harvest, and now you’re vertically integrated, you’re not the only ones who’ve done that, right? Then-
Bijan Sakaki:
That’s correct. Curaleaf-
Tim Pickett:
Curaleaf did that with Tryke.
Paul Henderson:
Correct.
Bijan Sakaki:
And then-
Tim Pickett:
Well, and then it did, we went the opposite way with Zion and Bloom.
Bijan Sakaki:
Correct. Zion worked in alignment with-
Tim Pickett:
With the retail operation. And now I guess if you drive down there, their sign even says Zion Medicinal, on the wall.
Bijan Sakaki:
Well, okay. So technically then, the number then would be six, six vertically integrated operators.
Paul Henderson:
I guess, yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Huh.
Paul Henderson:
Wow.
Bijan Sakaki:
While a lot of people think vertical integration is the solution to everybody’s problems, it pauses its benefits, absolutely, but it also has a lot of challenges because then people have a different market strategy. People are cultivating with different intent. Some cultivators here are cultivating strictly for extraction for gummies and distillates. Other people-
Tim Pickett:
I’ve been there.
Bijan Sakaki:
… And there is no right or wrong, it’s just a different strategy.
Tim Pickett:
That’s what’s been so fascinating for me to be on the medical side, but then to also start to get relationships with all these, both retail, the processors, the growers, the vertically integrated, the non-vertically integrated, and see the different personalities of their companies, and what their skillset is, right? What type of products they believe are going to benefit the market or the patient base, and that’s been as fascinating as anything.
Bijan Sakaki:
It’s hard, and it’s hard, and everyone is going to have an opinion. Like what we do-
Tim Pickett:
We do it right, we’re the only ones who do it right, we’re the only ones who make medicine. Oh, no, we’re the only ones [crosstalk 00:09:55].
Bijan Sakaki:
Or if you go this way, you’re going to have five people that say, “Great, they went left.” And half the people say, “Why didn’t they go right?” So no matter what you do, people will always have an opinion. So our strategy is different than other peoples, we want to have, our motto internally is, no buff. No mids, we don’t want any mid grade. If I’m not going to consume it, if our team is not going to consume it ourselves, we don’t want it coming out of our facility.
Tim Pickett:
Do you feel like that’s what somewhat sets you apart from some of the other license holders in Utah, is that history of being somewhat of an expert consumer or in this space, longer than other people?
Paul Henderson:
Yeah, I think so. Bijan, from a consumer perspective, but even, I’ve been in the California space for six years, so understanding just the market and what works, what doesn’t. If you’re everything to everybody, you’re nothing. And so you need to pick a lane, and you need to stick with it, and that’s what we picked. If Bijan won’t consume it, if I won’t consume it, then we’re not going to sell to our patients, even though that’s a low price point, maybe a much lower price point, it just, we don’t feel it’s the right thing to do.
Bijan Sakaki:
And so with that, we’ve got, in our garden we’ve got 60 lights right now, and we’re putting out a decent amount of flower, but over the last six or seven months like this Green Crack that I just cracked open, has definitely, this is our number one. That’s our number seller.
Tim Pickett:
Hand that to me Paul. We’re just sitting just far enough away, oh my God, in the conference room.
Bijan Sakaki:
And then the Ice Cream Cake too.
Tim Pickett:
I love-
Bijan Sakaki:
Like they’re very, very different, and they do very different things.
Tim Pickett:
They’re both so different in the smell.
Paul Henderson:
But it’s also a different, it’s a different growing style, right? So our patients are seeing the difference in what we took over, which was the Harvest brand, and then coming out with Buzz and seeing genetics just different process, right? Layering in some skills and growing from different operators, bringing in some of our friends to overlook things and give us advice and making tweaks, and all of a sudden, the output becomes that much better. And so it’s fun.
Tim Pickett:
How does your background in High Times, well when did you become CEO of High Times? Because we interviewed Stormy-
Paul Henderson:
Yeah, Stormy. Yeah [crosstalk 00:12:23].
Tim Pickett:
He was here in Utah, right?
Paul Henderson:
So I actually joined and consulted with High Times in October of 2019, until January of 2020. I then became president and COO at that time, and I held that position until January of 2022. So about two years, and I was just named CEO recently.
Paul Henderson:
So, fairly new in the CEO role, but I joined High Times to pivot them from just media and events, into plant touching. Retail stores, branded products, and we’re doing a bunch more licensing now. I’ve been there through the whole evolution, so taking on the CEO role was a pretty simple transition.
Tim Pickett:
What do you, we all know High Times is the magazine, originally.
Paul Henderson:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And the events that they put on, like the competition events. And I don’t know much about that. What’s that like?
Paul Henderson:
So we have basically, think about it as business verticals. So we have media, we have events, and then now we have the plant touching world and licensing. And so the media is also the magazine, is still is the magazine, we still produce 10 physical copies a year, we’ve talked about going all digital, but it’s like a staple on a coffee table, people love it. So we still produce that. And then we have hightimes.com, which is online, and then we have all the social media, which I believe we have about 12 million followers across our media channels, social media. And so that’s one business unit.
Paul Henderson:
And then the events, mostly we’re known for cannabis cup events, which basically crowns the best weed by market across the country, and sometimes globally. And so we would, I’ll tell you historically, we would go into a market, the brands would submit all of their entries, which sometimes they are collabs between companies to create the best flower or best concentrate. They submit it to the Cup. We would have 20, 25 well known judges which would consume all the product, and then we would announce the winners at a weekend festival, right? Music, and vendors, and food and all that.
Paul Henderson:
So COVID shuts that whole world down, we had a whole slate in 2020 of those events, so we canceled them, and then we actually pivoted very quickly and we productized the Cannabis Cup. And what I mean by that is we actually had, went to every market again, we had the brands contribute their products to be judged, but we built those into kits, which are actually a Cannabis Cup bag pack, and then we worked with retailers to sell those kits to the public for the first time ever. And then the public actually had the chance to submit their entries for judging. So the public became the judge, so we called it the Cannabis Cup Peoples Choice Edition, and we’ve been running those incredibly successfully over the last two years during COVID.
Tim Pickett:
Do you think the people choose better weed than the judges?
Paul Henderson:
I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. I’m not the one that’s going say, but at least now we give a voice to the people and it’s all aggregated, and it’s thousands of entries, versus 25. So maybe.
Tim Pickett:
It is the peoples plant, right? Maybe we get to choose.
Paul Henderson:
So we have the events business, and then we are now operating seven retail stores in California, and two delivery hubs which are non-storefronts. So we deliver in Sacramento area and the Los Angeles area. And then also-
Tim Pickett:
How’s that going?
Paul Henderson:
It’s going well. So California is in a bit of a flux right now, it’s in an interesting point in time, mostly around the competition with the illicit market. And I will say-
Tim Pickett:
There’s still a bunch of competition with the illicit market?
Paul Henderson:
Yeah. You’re looking at California’s probably a 10 billion dollar market, and there’s three billion of legal sales, so probably 70% is still in the illicit market there. So it’s pretty wild.
Paul Henderson:
I would say last year you saw stimulus checks being given to people. People were at home, so they were consuming weed even when they were working. The sales-
Tim Pickett:
We definitely had a bump in visits that week, and for the few weeks after. Like a noticeable, every time those checks would come, and-
Bijan Sakaki:
There’s an influx of people.
Tim Pickett:
You’d have an influx of people [crosstalk 00:16:29].
Paul Henderson:
We saw that in stores, people coming in. They had money to spend, they spent their disposable income with us or with the general industry. The problem now is that, that money is gone, and you see the overall market in the legal space down about 20% year over year in the retail sales.
Tim Pickett:
You’ve seen that with stock prices-
Paul Henderson:
Yeah, that too. Even more so, and the market caps are down 50 or 70% of cannabis companies.
Paul Henderson:
And so we feel fortunate because we’re not down that, we’re basically either even from last year or up in many stores. And so I prefix that to say California is in a tough spot, we’re actually doing quite well, and for example, we launched a line of High Times branded products. So flower pre-rolls, vape cartridges, and the brand was selling extremely well in our own store, but we didn’t know if that was because, oh, people are coming to a High Time store, and they buy High Times product. Okay, that makes sense. But we took over a store in downtown Oakland that we did not rebrand as High Times, but we are managing it today. We put the High Times branded products simply on the floor just to see what happens. No marketing push, not budtenders pushing it, and it became a top three selling brand against all the legacy California brands, overnight.
Paul Henderson:
And so we know that the name holds cache, you know people know about it, you just don’t know if it translates into actually buying products in a physical storefront, but it does.
Tim Pickett:
It does make sense, and you’re the only company that I’ve ever heard of that went that direction. Went from the marketing, the advertising, the content, into retail end product branding. And its got to be an advantage-
Paul Henderson:
Obviously it’s a massive advantage.
Tim Pickett:
… You just told the story. Is that coming here?
Paul Henderson:
Not yet. High Times is I think is too recreational for the Utah market, the name just simply-
Tim Pickett:
It probably was in the bill, I’ll have to ask.
Paul Henderson:
You can’t use high-
Bijan Sakaki:
That gives off a recreational disposition, but that also just because Paul works at High Times, we’re not going to try and backdoor a High Times deal out here just for regulators [crosstalk 00:18:42]-
Tim Pickett:
Just for the regulators, right. Okay, got it. That wasn’t the point of bringing Paul.
Bijan Sakaki:
No, no.
Paul Henderson:
I was not at High Times when we first started working on this, I was the CEO of another company.
Tim Pickett:
And I think… So that everybody hears this as a listener and the regulators, we try, we on the medical side, you on the production and the retail side, we do try to keep well within the guidelines of the regulations. We don’t necessarily, of course we want to push the access for more and more people, because we’re all believers and advocates that it’s a safe substance that we should all be able to safely use it in an educated way. But we’re not trying to break the rules, right? We’re trying to live within those rules, and we’re just trying to do what the democracy was designed to do, change the system from within.
Bijan Sakaki:
And on that too, when we have such red tape around what we can do, how do you differentiate yourself between other operators? Like we said before, there is no right or wrong, everybody, every retailer, every cultivator, every processor, [crosstalk 00:19:54] different.
Paul Henderson:
Well you’re trying to tell that story of what makes you different and when you can’t market that story, then how’s anybody supposed to find out, right? So it’s a little bit of a conundrum.
Tim Pickett:
And quickly, you get retailers with reputation without doing anything.
Bijan Sakaki:
For good or bad.
Tim Pickett:
For good or bad.
Bijan Sakaki:
For good or bad.
Tim Pickett:
I think Dragonfly had some good things and suffered in some ways in the beginning, everybody seems like they’ve had that.
Bijan Sakaki:
And to that point, they were the first. So there is, everything, there’s pros and cons to everything. Every operator, every group has their strong suits, I think every store has a different vibe, and so that attracts different patients for different reasons. And I think when you look at home delivery, and I think that is a different experience than what you’re used to right now in the stores. So when you talk differentiation, you lose that experience factor, so you have to go with either product or availability.
Tim Pickett:
We’re going to vape a little on that.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah, let me load up this volcano here.
Paul Henderson:
Going back to the differentiation though, what’s interesting, most people don’t realize, one, we took a lot of heat at High Times early on about being a media company and moving into retail, right? We were told, “Hey, stay in your lane, do what you do,” which is media.
Tim Pickett:
Who told you that?
Paul Henderson:
A lot of industry people, because I think they were worried about the competition [crosstalk 00:21:30]-
Tim Pickett:
Of course.
Paul Henderson:
… Crossing over.
Tim Pickett:
They don’t have, yeah. They don’t want, you’ve got 12 million followers, of course they don’t want you involved.
Paul Henderson:
And so it was funny, right? Because, and I always explain that we’re a media company-
Tim Pickett:
You learned how to advertise.
Paul Henderson:
Yeah, we’re a media company that’s becoming a cannabis company, and people like, and I use the example of the time of MedMen, they’re a cannabis company, but they were trying to become a media company, right? So every cannabis company tries to become a media company because it’s an acquisition, it’s a customer acquisition game in California and beyond, in the recreational market. So they, like MedMen launched Amber Magazine, and they’re pushing their social media. Those are all assets we already have, we’re just now slowly transitioning into the actual cannabis space.
Paul Henderson:
So anyway, its been a phenomenal change, and I talk a lot about going horizontal across our business verticals, so what I explain there. For example, we run a cannabis company in California, we crown the best winners of let’s say, the Southern California market, we then guarantee distribution of those winners in our stores and we actually create a separate section for the winners that year, their products in our retail stores. So we’re doing things we’ve never been able to do before, and we’re going across our cannabis vertical and our retail vertical.
Paul Henderson:
Now another perfect example too is Cannabis Cup, if anybody’s listening, has ever been to one in California or beyond, we historically made money through ticket sales, sponsorships and vendor booths, just like any other event company. But now because we’re a retailer in California, we can actually sell the weed directly to the people. So historically, other vendors would have their own retail license, they would sell and we would just say, “Hey, you can go ahead and sell, no problem,” with all the people. So if we bring 50,000 people to an event over a weekend, those vendors going forward, this year and beyond, are going to check their product into us as the retailer, and then we’re going to manage sales across the whole venue. So instead of generating a million in sales per Cannabis Cup, we’ll generate six million over a weekend in cannabis sales and tickets.
Paul Henderson:
So again, horizontal across verticals, we have the audience, now we’re monetizing the audience.
Tim Pickett:
Wow.
Bijan Sakaki:
It’s risky, plant touching honestly sucks from a regulatory perspective [crosstalk 00:23:42]-
Tim Pickett:
I know.
Bijan Sakaki:
… You’re a plant touching [crosstalk 00:23:45]-
Tim Pickett:
No, I’m not plant touching, but I cannot bank, they don’t believe me. They don’t believe me when they look me up online and they’re like, well, you’re a marijuana company. I’m like, I don’t touch the plant, I don’t process, I don’t do anything, just please…
Bijan Sakaki:
Do you need a bank?
Tim Pickett:
No, I bank with you, I bank at the same place you do because they’re the only bank in Utah that understands both sides of it because they understand the producer side, they know a lot-
Bijan Sakaki:
And that’s honestly a big silver lining of our market is you have operators like that in California, it was cash all day, and you imagine the risk you take.
Tim Pickett:
Even in the medical side of things, we’re down, we take a small, a much smaller percentage of cash now than we did before. But in the beginning of the program, people were coming to me for medical visits and expecting they had to pay cash, just right off the front. And I take their HSA card. And that was really wild for people.
Paul Henderson:
Wow. And even before plant touching, even as an advertiser, media and events company, we had bank accounts shut down all the time because you are affiliated, right?
Tim Pickett:
It’s the affiliation, you promote, you sell or tell people where to find it, or something like that and it’s like-
Bijan Sakaki:
But Tim, Paul and I, we’ve both been banned from major banks personally-
Paul Henderson:
Personally because of it.
Bijan Sakaki:
Which is weird.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, it is. It’s still, I think there’s a growing group of people who think this is normalizing, and they’re really caught off guard when they find out how redundant your businesses have to be, two merchant accounts, two bank accounts. Two of everything that just in case-
Paul Henderson:
Factor.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And I think, and High Times probably did that for [crosstalk 00:25:37]-
Paul Henderson:
For decades, yeah. People, they see a state legalize and expect that you can operate like a normal business.
Tim Pickett:
Like a normal business, right?
Paul Henderson:
Forget about the federal rules around 280E and tax deductions, like just simply, I used to have service providers like website development companies refuse to work with me at my previous cannabis company saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not willing to take your money.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. [Davie 00:26:04], by the way, Davie won’t take your money. Davie won’t take a normal person’s money if you find somebody online whose related to it. And just, I don’t know. Email, you’re right. Website providers.
Paul Henderson:
So there’s still a long way to go. A long way to go. We can’t advertise, even in California, forget about the Utah rules around advertising, but in California, I wish that I could put up a Google ad to drive people to my storefront. I can’t do it, Google won’t take my money. I can’t advertise [crosstalk 00:26:32], any interstate that crosses state lines, you can’t put up a billboard. So they made that more challenging. But every company has their own rules in what they want to do, and most of them don’t want to deal with cannabis, so they don’t.
Tim Pickett:
What’s High Times, so High Times is now vertically integrated in a way that no other cannabis company really is.
Paul Henderson:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
With the media company.
Paul Henderson:
Yeah, exactly. So vertically integrated, people generally think of growing, manufacturing, retail. We’re a different vertical, right?
Tim Pickett:
You’re also content.
Paul Henderson:
Yeah, exactly. It’s content and events, it’s customer acquisition really.
Tim Pickett:
How do you do, one of the things I was going to ask you with these events is, when you have them in-person, you can’t have product from multiple states?
Paul Henderson:
No.
Tim Pickett:
How does that work in the US? It’s just like all a regional, meaning a state-
Bijan Sakaki:
State by state.
Paul Henderson:
All state by state. So when we host an event in Detroit or around Detroit and Michigan, we can’t have a vendor come with product unless they show that they’re licensed by the state. We verify, everything has to be a state specific. Then you go to Nevada, California.
Paul Henderson:
So it makes for interesting things because it’s all demographics, right? It’s some weed in California, there’s just different products there than you might find in different states. And we’re crowning different categories of the best cannabis, and it will be all different brands. Some brands through licensing deals, [crosstalk 00:27:58]. So you see the same brand, but it will be different growers.
Tim Pickett:
Do you still see the same genetics?
Paul Henderson:
No, not generally.
Tim Pickett:
Almost-
Bijan Sakaki:
I would say almost never.
Paul Henderson:
Some companies that are working with groups like Seed Junky or others, are trying to create this base of having the same genetics in multiple states, starting from seed. And okay, this brand you know is always starting from the same genetic material, but that’s far and few between right now.
Bijan Sakaki:
But also even then, when you pop seeds, you find a pheno, there’s such a different, there’s a difference in this phenotype.
Paul Henderson:
Or even grower conditions, right? An indoor grower isn’t built the same.
Tim Pickett:
Altitude, or all kinds of things. It’s like coffee, right? Just-
Paul Henderson:
It’s very regionalized.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So with Beehive, what products, you’ve got Buzz, is this the only flower you’re growing?
Bijan Sakaki:
No, we’ve got Ice Cream Cake there, we have Green Crack, we’ve got some Mochi Gelato, we’ve got some Lavender Jones, some the of the older legacy strains that-
Tim Pickett:
Lavender Jones.
Bijan Sakaki:
Afghan Kush, Hindi Kush-
Paul Henderson:
But they’re all under the Buzz brand right now.
Tim Pickett:
All under the Buzz brand?
Bijan Sakaki:
All under the Buzz brand right now, and then we’re working through some regulatory speed bumps regarding the Cookies launch.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, right. Yes. How would you, because of the name, because there is some-
Bijan Sakaki:
Well, with this recent legislation, it’s defined as a recreational disposition. Well, that name was included in that piece that would prohibit-
Tim Pickett:
So, for those of you who didn’t hear, that was the episode with Rich [O’Born 00:29:38], where we discussed this in detail, so go back to that one, a couple of weeks here, and listen to that discussion.
Bijan Sakaki:
And so that then puts rule making authority, department of ag, to determine what is recreational or not. And so-
Tim Pickett:
Got it. But that is one of the most popular strains in the country.
Bijan Sakaki:
It is probably the biggest brand in cannabis right now.
Tim Pickett:
Cookies is one of the most well known pain control strains that exists because it’s full of beta-caryophyllene.
Bijan Sakaki:
Strain two. But the brand ultimately, the brand Cookies-
Paul Henderson:
High level brand, and then there’s multiple strains underneath the Cookies kind of parent, right? One of those strains will do something different, but your point well taken, Girl Scout Cookies initially created by that company, together with some of their other strains, are incredibly popular amongst certain patients. And I just heard the same [inaudible 00:30:38] and Maryland as well, as exactly that. Is there’s a certain demographic, or the state also has some regulatory issues, Maryland is very a medical state as well, but once the patients spoke out and they realized what those strains did for patients, they gave the approval and it’s like the top selling strain in Maryland.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I think that. But that again with High Times or something that the public or the department has decided sounds too recreational, then they’re really trying to put a… I don’t know. We can get into this-
Bijan Sakaki:
No, no. What it is, everyone’s trying their best. Regulators are moving quickly, laws passed, people have to have a position, it’s just, I think we’ll come to a solution. Because again, by all means, we do not… People have a really big misconception of a medical market of cannabis. Everyone thinks, medical pass, one is regular pass. Honestly, I hope reg never passes here, because things happen in that marketplace that you can’t undo in the medical market. Right now people are saying-
Tim Pickett:
From the medical side, it de-legitimizes it as medicine, when you move to recreational, especially when you move that way too fast.
Bijan Sakaki:
100%.
Tim Pickett:
Right? And that’s I think, what you saw in Oregon, their medical program goes down 20% or 70%, after the adult use passes. But there is, I keep telling people, there is a third of the users here who’ve never used before in their life, and they would not have found cannabis unless it was medical.
Bijan Sakaki:
Medical, right.
Tim Pickett:
Right? So there is an expansion of access with medical.
Bijan Sakaki:
But you also have to look at it from, put your patient hat on now and think, what does recreational tax and the additional burden pass through to a customer? Now these $60 [ates 00:32:37]-
Tim Pickett:
That’s right.
Bijan Sakaki:
Now become $85.
Paul Henderson:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
Because of regulation.
Paul Henderson:
We [crosstalk 00:32:43] this bill in Utah will have a tax, and excise tax or some type of extra-
Tim Pickett:
You’ve got a really good point. We did the calculation for [crosstalk 00:32:51].
Bijan Sakaki:
There is no adult use Utah bill, just for [crosstalk 00:32:54]-
Tim Pickett:
No, no, no. And there is no plan, there’s no-
Bijan Sakaki:
Correct. But any adult use bill typically, because that’s one of the things that move the needle for people is, okay we can have this additional income.
Tim Pickett:
Well, and you look at the cost, if you’re complaining about the cost of the Utah program, the cost of the medical visit you’ve got, and the cost of the product, you’re thinking is high. If you compare that to driving all the way, even Windover, with gas prices now especially-
Paul Henderson:
And time, and risk.
Tim Pickett:
… And all that time and risk, and then you’re crossing state lines, and then you’re buying it at 22% tax there, and bringing it all the way back, breaking state laws, federal laws. Even the numbers work out to be as inexpensive here already.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah, for sure.
Paul Henderson:
And I remember when Utah program, the medical program launched and there was kind this recoil of the pricing, and yet Missouri went live about the same time with $100 ates, that was the cheapest you could find. And so you’re looking at it like a 60 versus 100, it’s like I’d rather be in the Utah program. I feel like because we’re surrounded by recreational states, and states that have had programs for many, many years with prices coming down little by little, year over year, people get accustomed to that’s what you should pay, and so the price is a little bit of a shock. But if you compare it to a state that’s around dry states, if you will, then prices are sky high.
Tim Pickett:
Boy this, I’ll tell you I used Ice Cream Cake when I hurt my back two weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago, my back totally locked up and I couldn’t walk for a couple of days. It happens once every couple of years to me. I should get it looked at. But I had to, I’ll be honest, I had to really use a lot of cannabis to get the pain pretty bearable, which I was surprised about. It seems like we’ve talked to patients and we tell them to use as least amount as possible. But there’s a time and a place, and this is not medical advice folks, but there’s a time and a place where you just got to get basically as high as you can stand, to get through the pain.
Bijan Sakaki:
How’s your back now?
Tim Pickett:
Well, it’s way better. Three days of complete, like I can’t do anything, because the first day I couldn’t walk at all, second day I could make a cup of coffee, and third day I could watch Olympics and eat lunch. But both the muscle relaxation, the pain control, and then keeping my mind away from work, I couldn’t have done that without it. Totally.
Bijan Sakaki:
No, that has been… We were putting that in rotation a little more, so you will see more Ice Cream Cake. I’m excited for peoples reaction on the new menus because I think it’s also important to keep putting out different stuff. It’s challenging too when you have a small garden because you’re also limited, so until we get our expansion up and running, we’re going to be trying to maximize what we have, and [crosstalk 00:36:05]-
Tim Pickett:
Grow really good flower, and the Green Crack.
Bijan Sakaki:
And the Green Crack. The Green Crack is a great one, I think we’re going to maybe put that on ice for a little bit and then bring it back. But we’ll see.
Tim Pickett:
I’m such a lightweight.
Bijan Sakaki:
You’re good.
Tim Pickett:
I’m trying to work on my tolerance.
Bijan Sakaki:
This, I mean the volcano, is very, very effective.
Tim Pickett:
Absolutely. So, what else should we talk about? You guys, dealers choice.
Paul Henderson:
Well, Bijan just mentioned expansion, so for those that don’t know, if you have one cultivation license in the Utah, it allows you to grow in two different locations, so we had been searching high for an industrial warehouse, but with COVID, all the big companies snatched up every warehouse you could find. So that’s been made very difficult. So, we’re working on some options, we might be able to expand at our current spot, and so that will just increase canopy, allow us to bring out more varieties, more strains at the same time.
Bijan Sakaki:
To feed more stores, because right now it’s also a little bit harder where we sell so much at retail. So, if our output is X and our sales are Y, we also have to make sure that other people have enough to eat as well.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, because if you get… We have a lot of patients move a lot. We’ve been surprised at how people are moving around.
Bijan Sakaki:
What do you think is the driver there? Because a lot of stuff is priced differently at different stores, same stuff priced differently.
Tim Pickett:
Priced differently.
Bijan Sakaki:
Is it-
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I think people are learning that they can go, if they’re headed home to [Tooele 00:37:41], they’re going to find you. Whereas in the beginning, they were all-
Bijan Sakaki:
People are still finding us though.
Tim Pickett:
They are, but people were going to Dragonfly for a whole year because they didn’t know anybody else was open. Now, God bless him, I love you Kevin over there, but they really didn’t know anybody else was even open. And they would live by one, like [inaudible 00:38:09], they were driving all the way down to Salt Lake. So that’s the problem with the advertising, nobody can really-
Paul Henderson:
Get the word out.
Tim Pickett:
… Nobody can get the word out.
Paul Henderson:
[crosstalk 00:38:17] website, but I can count on one hand-
Bijan Sakaki:
Not to mention Paul, we just got our Instagram shut down.
Paul Henderson:
Oh, that’s [crosstalk 00:38:25]-
Tim Pickett:
That’s right.
Bijan Sakaki:
All you haters, thank you, because we’re just going to make another one, and we will just get that one shut down again.
Tim Pickett:
Every time your reach increases, kaboom, somebody flags you and then you’re suppressed. I’m surprised on Instagram, we’ve had okay success on Instagram, it’s Facebook that we cannot get any reach on Facebook at all.
Bijan Sakaki:
It’s hard, but-
Paul Henderson:
Same company though, just different internal policies, and no armor reason, you do everything right, you follow the rules, you don’t sell anything on Instagram, and you have your license numbers there, so they know you’re legit. And it doesn’t matter, shuts you down, and that is the one voice we had to kind of speak to our patient base, so this is what’s going on, come in. So we’ve just got to start over and do it again.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, that’s so crazy, how they can even do that.
Bijan Sakaki:
Technically, it’s federally illegal, so they report to bigger people than we do.
Paul Henderson:
Anybody wondering, it’s Beehive Farmacy, with an F, Backup, is our new. Beehive Farmacy Backup is our new Instagram handle, so go check it out.
Bijan Sakaki:
Hopefully we get Beehive Farmacy back up. No, but it is Backup.
Tim Pickett:
Are most people coming through the drive through now?
Bijan Sakaki:
People still do. People still do. People still come drive through.
Paul Henderson:
50% of orders or so, coming through [crosstalk 00:39:48]. Is it that high right now? I don’t remember the numbers.
Tim Pickett:
Do you have delivery yet?
Bijan Sakaki:
We’re about to do delivery.
Tim Pickett:
What’s the name of the delivery service, do you know?
Bijan Sakaki:
We’re going to do it internally.
Tim Pickett:
You’re going to do it yourself?
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah. It was a build versus buy decision, and-
Tim Pickett:
You decided to do it.
Bijan Sakaki:
We decided to do it.
Tim Pickett:
Can you sell space in your car for flyers for Red Hanger Dry Cleaners?
Bijan Sakaki:
Or for Utah Therapeutics?
Tim Pickett:
Not for me, I’m just thinking like Mo’ Bettahs Food.
Paul Henderson:
I don’t know.
Bijan Sakaki:
I think, well I don’t think, I know all the driver stuff needs to be discrete, non-marked. It’s not like this is a truck delivering weed, and you can get a menu at Mo’ Bettahs.
Tim Pickett:
Right, yeah. I’m always interested in what else can you do at the point of sale.
Bijan Sakaki:
I know originally the advertiser requirements were a little bit undefined for those third party couriers, so we’ve seen our friends, love the billboards, love them, they’re everywhere.
Tim Pickett:
They are.
Bijan Sakaki:
I think it helps raise awareness for everybody.
Paul Henderson:
That cannabis is legal in Utah. I still talk to people every day that have no idea there’s a medical bill in Utah.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, that’s my billboard, and it’s, no matter how much exposure any other Q&P group gets, it’s totally great for us, because it’s just exposure is that they talk to four or five people, they learn it’s legal here and where they can, if it’s an option for them.
Paul Henderson:
Yeah. We talk a lot about how we’re not really in competition with the other licensed groups, our main competition is the illicit market. It doesn’t matter what state you’re in, I talked about California, but Utah has a big underground market with IED coming through, I don’t think it’s any surprise. So it’s us really educating patients here that, or our potential patients that, hey, this is legal now, you can go through and get your card and come into a pharmacy.
Bijan Sakaki:
But for a lot of people too they’re like, “Why would I do that?” And if you truly are mindful of what you eat and what you put in your body, what you’re consuming, then you want to know that this has been tested. We want to talk about lessons in California, so a lot of things in California that never would pass testing, would allegedly get destroyed. And those things allegedly appear in other markets. So if you really don’t have a grip-
Tim Pickett:
Didn’t we have something like that here coming out of Tooele or something? A huge, huge bust.
Bijan Sakaki:
So Paul’s comment about the 80 and the 15, it is where the 80 and the 15 meet, and so there’s people always getting caught with, you agreed on KSL, 300 pounds of [inaudible 00:42:43] or whatever, and that guy’s going back to Auburn in New York, or wherever he’s from. So you get a lot of questionable product. You have these vape pens back during, “Vape Gate,” the vape gate stuff. So those are full of dillutants, vitamin E acetate, a lot of the actual oil itself had Myclobutanil, pesticides. If you have a dirty flower that doesn’t pass and then you extract it, now all those pesticides are concentrated in that distillate.
Tim Pickett:
In that distillate.
Bijan Sakaki:
And then that’s what’s being used to then make gummies and fill vape carts.
Paul Henderson:
And even before that, if you have a flower in California that pops for a pesticide that Bijan just mentioned, Myclobutanil, or it’s called Eagle 20 as well, and it’s sprayed on fruits and vegetables in California, so it’s not dangerous if you eat it. But if you put flame to the weed, it turns into cyanide and you’re inhaling that.
Paul Henderson:
Talking about being careful about what you’re putting in your body, there’s dangerous chemicals that you can be inhaling if you don’t know where the flower is coming from.
Bijan Sakaki:
And even on the edible side, because we get a lot of people that come into the store and they’re like, “Hey, I bought these gummies and,” they’ll pull a picture on their phone, and they’re like these gummy bears that are rolled around in distillate. And it’s like, you don’t really know what’s in that. With these, you know how much is in one serving and one product.
Tim Pickett:
Are these in your store?
Bijan Sakaki:
These ones are not, we’re actually going to start producing these here the next few weeks. These are going to be, I think a really good product for this market.
Tim Pickett:
You want to talk about them? They’re just empty packages right now, but they’re tablets, yeah?
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah. So these are pro-tabs by LEVEL. LEVEL was started by one of the smartest guys in cannabis that I know, Chris Emerson, he’s a PhD. Brilliant guy, brilliant team, he and his wife run the company, and they have really formulated a great product, it’s a small form factor, it doesn’t digest in your liver, so the effects are very similar to a flower high. It doesn’t convert into 11-Hydroxy, so it’s not like that meme when an edible kicks in and then you’re like riding that rocket ship. So it doesn’t give you that, it’s a very familiar experience to what you would get if you medicate with flower.
Bijan Sakaki:
So we’re going to drop these, we’re going to have 100 milligram tabs, 25 milligram tabs, single packs, four packs, 10 packs. So I think it will be a really good alternative for people who are familiar with the edible consumption, but are also new to cannabis and maybe don’t want to take something with sugar and gelatin and food coloring and all the other stuff in there, when this is simply just-
Tim Pickett:
Well the tolerance will be a little different because if it doesn’t convert to 11-Hydroxy, then the high, the level of high or that level of psycho-activity, is different.
Bijan Sakaki:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tim Pickett:
Right?
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
But consistent dosing, we do need more products in Utah with consistent dosing, so that you know exactly how many milligrams you’re taking, what it’s likely going to feel like from a medical standpoint. That’s just how medicine should be taken.
Bijan Sakaki:
Understood. And that’s the same approach. That’s why, I’ve known these guys for five plus years, and when this market opened up, we have what, the third or fourth opioid problem right now?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Bijan Sakaki:
And-
Tim Pickett:
It’s huge.
Bijan Sakaki:
And so for a lot of chronic pain people, this is not an unfamiliar method of consumption. Whereas, vape rising flower or vape rising cartridge-
Tim Pickett:
Or even taking a gummy, some people are like, it’s like I’m eating candy, like the gummy vitamins.
Bijan Sakaki:
True.
Tim Pickett:
They feel like it’s not real. Pills are just so much easier for people to understand when it comes to medicine.
Bijan Sakaki:
And part of it too is just watching a lot of these variable doses of edible sell really well and really poorly. And so we’re coming out with a smaller dose market, more of that micro-tier single digit milligrams.
Tim Pickett:
You can see, so as a retailer though, that’s a good point you bring up, you can see what patients want, where the demand is, and then even if you’re a little smaller with the production side now, you’re kind of coming into it in a better spot, where you can develop products that-
Paul Henderson:
It’s just market research, right? It’s like you know exactly what’s selling, you can go back, and you can build what people want to buy. So you don’t have to guess and check, you don’t have to come out with something and test it.
Tim Pickett:
Has that been something that you personally have been able to really influence in Beehive, because of your experience in the marketplace?
Paul Henderson:
A little bit, but I wouldn’t say to that extent. But I think I helped a lot early on, on what eCommerce business, to go with duchy on the front end, so we can take orders online. And like our big sign, instead of the brand name, just put a big green cross, and it’s like the bat signal, right?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, it is.
Paul Henderson:
Anyway, it was just a lot of those little things that-
Tim Pickett:
It is going down the 201, right? [crosstalk 00:48:13].
Bijan Sakaki:
That’s 201.
Paul Henderson:
And so it was more kind of business related stuff to like, I actually tried and failed and iterated and went through multiple versions of things, to kind of figure out what works. And then we just go the benefit on the Beehive side of like, hey let’s skip all that. And these guys built the best website for cannabis retail stores, so let’s go there.
Tim Pickett:
Sounds cool.
Bijan Sakaki:
And that, again, a lot of how we ran things are relationship based. We work together because we want to work together, it’s not because it was like, oh, this is the only opportunity at hand, and this is a forced relationship. So we’ve got a lot of trust there.
Bijan Sakaki:
But also too, to the earlier point, we can listen at the registers and be like, “Yo, people are asking for more concentrates.” So now we’re going to take all of our trim and we’re going to now make concentrates that everybody that’s going to Windover, doesn’t need to go to Windover anymore. It’s like, we’re going to now have some good cured live resin, we’re going to have some cured resin, we’re going to do some solventless. And again, it’s that comment Paul made earlier, you can’t be everything to everybody.
Bijan Sakaki:
We can’t sell mids and also pretend to sell top-shelf. And then also pretend to sell little [chinsy 00:49:30] like snake oil type items. And so it’s like picking what’s really important to us, like we’re super passionate about the brands we’re bringing, LEVEL is one of them, Cookies is another one. You’ve seen a couple of the other brands that we’ve launched at Beehive, like Proper, like Release Society.
Tim Pickett:
Those two are great brands too. And that Release Society is [crosstalk 00:49:55]-
Bijan Sakaki:
And they have great products too.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Bijan Sakaki:
And part of our strategy on the Release Society carts was, we see a lot of carts come through the store with returns. Bad hardware, bad inputs. So how can we make that tweak a little bit.
Paul Henderson:
And this is the stuff we saw in California, that one dollar Chinese cartridges, they have a failure rate, and you know what it is. So yeah, you can save a couple of bucks, but then your brand gets a bad reputation of your hardware failing all the time. So do you spend some more money? Do you upgrade the hardware? Do you just kind of work with people like Release Society to let them know, this is exactly what works, we’ve already tested it, I’ve already been through all these iterations in California, and use this manufacturer for your hardware, and no returns yet, I guess [crosstalk 00:50:36] today.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah, its been great. And so we have the luxury of also, again, put our patient hat on like, would we use this? What issues do we have because we’re using it? Does this hardware need better improvement, let’s try and do something. Is the flower testing well enough? A lot of people are either flavor chasers or potency chasers. So with flavor, you need more [inaudible 00:51:03], you need more resin production, which adds to the medicinal benefit of the actual plant itself. So how can we double down on our environmentals? Let’s change the way we feed, let’s change our schedule, let’s… I’m generalizing here, but the changes we’ve made in cultivating in the last six, seven months, look completely different. And so over the next couple of months, you’ll see the flower quality starting to increase, because once you make a change, you’re not going to see it until the end product, six, seven months later.
Bijan Sakaki:
So, things that we’re doing now, you’re not going to see in market until July-ish.
Tim Pickett:
You guys really are, now that I’ve been talking to you for the hour, you guys are the only owners who know the business top to bottom. You realize that don’t you? Like from clear out to the consumption side, nobody is doing it all the way, or nobody is really involved all the way in the vertical. They’re either involved heavily in the retail and not in the grow and the producing, the production. But you guys seem to be involved all the way.
Paul Henderson:
Yeah, I don’t know enough of the other operators to know that actually, so it’s interesting. But before I was running High Times, I was CEO of a company called Grupo Flor, which was one of the larger vertically integrated companies in California. So I have run 230,000 square feet of cultivation in dutch glass greenhouses myself. I actually worked with the greenhouse companies to convert them from cut flowers to cannabis, so I had to learn everything from lifecycles and we’re talking about environmentals with lights and humidity, and everything Bijan just mentioned.
Paul Henderson:
So, well I’m not doing it at High Times, bringing all those skills together with what Bijan knows and some of our other partners, we’ve been at every single level from-
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, from the first [crosstalk 00:52:59]-
Paul Henderson:
… I had the first ever hydrocarbon extraction license in the state of California, it was in Salinas California, it was me because when we brought the Colorado department, marijuana enforcement division med, spoke with them, brought their fire department consultants out to California, worked at the facilities. You didn’t have a choice but to actually build it, right? So we’re doing the same thing here but we can benefit, Bijan was in California for a while too, so he saw all that. So we’re now owners operators, we now have been involved in every single thing from genetics, through to retail delivery. And I think it shows in our product here in Utah, that we care a lot about what we do.
Bijan Sakaki:
And while we’re not in the garden every day, we’ve got a really solid team up there, and we’re getting better at figuring it out. But when we do make a change, we all know what we’re changing. So, it’s double edged sword though because while we are involved, that may inhibit our growth or our ability to scale to that degree. But I think right now when you’re juggling chainsaws, it’s better to be careful.
Tim Pickett:
You’re juggling some pretty good chainsaws though. You’ve got a very successful, in my opinion, you run a really great pharmacy. Your pharmacies in both locations are excellent.
Bijan Sakaki:
Thank you.
Tim Pickett:
Really involved. Mindy and I talk all the time-
Bijan Sakaki:
She’s great.
Tim Pickett:
… And are involved in a group from Brigham city. And yet your, it almost seems like the best is yet to come still, because you have all of this expansion of grow, the product side, the brands you want to bring on.
Bijan Sakaki:
Yeah, and on top of that it’s just, double down on customer service. Everyone’s trying, so we don’t want our spot to be a place people come because they feel like they have to, it’s because it’s a place they come because they want to, they trust the people that are there as the pharmacist, as the pharmacy agent, as us the owners, because there’s not a lot of people that… I’m very open about, know who you’re supporting. It’s like that whole, know where your food comes from campaign. So we have a pretty small team and I’d say we’re probably the mom and pop underdog.
Tim Pickett:
You will always be.
Paul Henderson:
And you mentioned Brigham city, we haven’t talked a lot about that. But that’s the second location of the retail store, for those that don’t know. We are in Salt Lake off of 201, Brigham city, right in between kind of what Logan and [Ogden 00:55:38], if you will.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, you’ve got to make the turn off of the freeway to go up the canyon.
Bijan Sakaki:
Take the 1100 South exit, we’re right in the same parking lot as Walmart, next to Subway and the Supercuts.
Tim Pickett:
Yep, right in between there in that strip, like this little strip mall. Your sign’s on the back of the store. I see it every time I drive up.
Bijan Sakaki:
You’ll see the green cross, and if you’re a patient in Salt Lake, all your information is in Brigham city, so you don’t have to see the pharmacist again, unless you want to.
Tim Pickett:
And there’s probably no line there most of the time.
Bijan Sakaki:
Honestly, its been getting a lot busier. Mindy’s been doing a really good job of, she-
Tim Pickett:
She comes by, and make sure our patients know that she’s up there.
Bijan Sakaki:
Well she took over her own ordering.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, does she?
Bijan Sakaki:
So we were trying to run thing central to Salt Lake, and this is an example of areas where we thought we knew, hey, this is the right strategy, we learned it’s not. And so centralizing ordering was great for vendors, but kind of a nightmare for us because the frequency of what was happening in Brigham city-
Tim Pickett:
Was different. Or it would be totally different.
Paul Henderson:
Different, different product selection and stuff.
Bijan Sakaki:
Different demographic. We look at the ratios of what sells flower, [crosstalk 00:56:55], vape carts is different in Salt Lake than it is in Brigham, and we have the same products on the menu. So yeah, Mindy and the crew said Zed, Landon, we had a couple of new hires up there as well. They’ve been holding it down, it’s a new pharmacist, and we’re hoping that we can be kind of that specialty location for, again, that high end top-shelf medicine that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get at other pharmacies.
Tim Pickett:
Hmm, yeah. Cool.
Paul Henderson:
Yeah. And its been growing month over month, so I think really just as patient count has gone up, we see the results at the end pharmacy.
Tim Pickett:
That’s cool. So tell me your Instagram again, the new one.
Bijan Sakaki:
Beehive Farmacy Backup.
Tim Pickett:
Beehive Farmacy Backup, with an F.
Bijan Sakaki:
Farmacy with an F.
Tim Pickett:
Farmacy with an F. How else can people get a hold of you? What’s the address of the locations?
Bijan Sakaki:
So, beehivefarmacy.com, from there you can either make a registration appointment as a new patient, you can view our menu for both stores and place an order there. Salt Lake’s location, 1991 South, 3600 West Salt Lake City, 84104. So that’s right off the 201, right near [inaudible 00:58:07] Highway. Brigham City is, 1150 South, 870 West Unit C.
Tim Pickett:
I’m testing you right there.
Bijan Sakaki:
I know. Unit C-
Tim Pickett:
I can tell [crosstalk 00:58:21]. Just follow your nose. When you go to Subway, just stop by the medicine store.
Bijan Sakaki:
But you can also call us if you have any questions.
Tim Pickett:
And you can find you at utahmarijuana.org/dispensaries, for anybody whose just looking up dispensaries in Utah, and not medical cannabis pharmacies, you tend to run into us. And we have all of your information, both locations too, and some really good reviews actually.
Bijan Sakaki:
Well great. And I know we’ve got some-
Tim Pickett:
And we’ve done some articles on some of the stuff on utahmarijuana.org.
Bijan Sakaki:
I know we also have some deals for some of your patients-
Tim Pickett:
Oh yeah, new patients if you see us in West Valley especially, you’re going to get a coupon to the pharmacy straightaway. So we did have some patients, we’ve had patients come in, in the morning, and by the time they leave our office, have their card, and be able to come across the street. We’ve actually had that happen.
Bijan Sakaki:
That’s great. So it’s almost the same [crosstalk 00:59:25]-
Tim Pickett:
Because the department of health has been so, almost everybody gets a same day turnaround now, but some people get a two hour turnaround, because the department of health has been really on top of-
Bijan Sakaki:
That location, your location was really popping during the Letters.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, the Letters is great, because you can walk over-
Bijan Sakaki:
You could walk over, yeah. It was…
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, there are some things with the system right now that are, I’m squinting my eyes right now people. Okay, Utah in the Weeds podcast. If you’re not subscribed, then subscribe to the podcast, utahmarijuana.org/dispensaries, Beehive Farmacy. Man, its been great talking to you Bijan and Paul. Congratulations with your store in California, [crosstalk 01:00:09] and your new role here. And-
Paul Henderson:
And for those who don’t know, I live in Utah, so I just never clarified that. This is my home base, I travel for High Times. So my office for High Times is in Venus Beach, but I’m on the road generally three to four weeks out of the month.
Bijan Sakaki:
Didn’t you go to BYU?
Paul Henderson:
I did go to BYU as well. [crosstalk 01:00:28], that’s what I’m saying, I’m not the outside guy coming in, I live here.
Tim Pickett:
And there’s the bells. There’s the church bells. That’s it, all right everybody.
Bijan Sakaki:
Thanks Tim.
Tim Pickett:
Be safe out there.
Episode 95 of Utah in the Weeds features Steve Urquhart, a former state senator who helped to shape Utah’s Medical Cannabis landscape. Steve was one of the co-sponsors of “Charlee’s Law,” the 2014 legislation which legalized CBD oil for people with intractable epilepsy. Steve founded The Divine Assembly, a church whose members use psilocybin mushrooms as a sacrament.
Steve shared a little bit about his current career and his thoughts on Utah’s Medical Cannabis climate. He points out that many Utahns still purchase their cannabis in Nevada. [03:03]
Steve has fought for Medical Cannabis in Utah as both a legislator and advocate. He also founded The Utah Bee, an online magazine focused on covering cannabis, psychedelics, and alcohol in Utah. [05:59]
Steve teaches two courses in the University of Utah’s School of Medicine: health policy & leadership, and health systems. He invites a variety of guests to speak at some of his courses, and he says this helps his students understand life “in the trenches” of public health. [11:15]
Tim and Steve touched on the risks versus the benefits of having a Medical Cannabis program in Utah, and they agree that the benefits far outweigh the risks. [16:27]
Tim asked Steve about the public health perspective during recent years as Medical Cannabis became available in Utah. Steve says public health should be based on good data, but the federal prohibition of cannabis has created a “Catch-22.” [19:45]
Steve believes the federal government will probably remove psilocybin and MDMA from the list of Schedule I drugs before removing cannabis. [26:02]
Steve’s church, The Divine Assembly, encourages members to connect with themselves, others, and “the Divine.” Members can optionally use psilocybin as a sacrament. He told us about his early “healing experiences” with psilocybin that ultimately led to the creation of The Divine Assembly. [28:21]
Steve expanded on the roles of spiritual experiences and psilocybin in healing, saying psilocybin helps the brain to form new neural pathways. [34:39]
Steve talked about having the right “set and setting” for a psilocybin experience. Most unpleasant experiences with psilocybin, he says, happen because the user was not in a good setting. [41:06]
Tim asked Steve about the role of cannabis in spiritual healing. Steve says, because of his experiences with psilocybin, he can use cannabis to reach the same mystical state of consciousness. [47:18]
Steve talked about “entheogens,” or substances that “bring us closer to God,” including cannabis and psilocybin. [50:25]
We wrapped up with a discussion of some local organizations working to incorporate cannabis into group settings like group therapy. [57:12]
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everybody out to episode 95, only five more to a hundred. Today on Utah in the Weeds, my name is Tim Pickett. I am the host of Utah in the Weeds, podcast about cannabis and cannabis culture and medical cannabis. And today, psilocybin, and religion, and God, and spirituality, and experience, with Steve Urquhart. Steve is the founder of The Divine Assembly, a church that is premised on magic mushrooms, and psilocybin, and interacting with the divine. We have a great conversation today. Steve also teaches public health at the University of Utah, School of Medicine, in their Public Health Department. He was a state senator here in Utah, represented Washington County down South, and is a phenomenal guy.
Tim Pickett:
Lots to say, got him fired up there at the end, if you get all the way to the end. Couple of guys just talking about cannabis program and really the opportunity that we have to move things forward with society, spirituality, heck, we could even bring back God into the community. For those of you who are not subscribed to Utah in the Weeds, it helps us out a ton. We’ve got more and more subscribers every week. We’re so happy with the response. And heck, we’re coming up on a hundred episodes, so stay tuned. Next week, Bijan and Paul. Bijan is the founder of Beehive Medical Cannabis Pharmacy here in Utah, and Paul Henderson, the CEO of Hightimes, and also one of the partners in Beehive Pharmacy in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Tim Pickett:
That is our 420-week, spirit week, cannabis Christmas coming up for all of you who are part of the cannabis program here in Utah. And for those of you, three of you who listen outside of Utah, thanks for being a part of this. Enjoy this episode and reach out to us on Discover Marijuana on YouTube, I know there’s a lot to remember. Discover Marijuana on YouTube, that’s the place to get a hold of us, all of these episodes are uploaded there. And there’s another place for you to subscribe and learn more about cannabis and medical cannabis, and all the sciencey stuff about cannabis. So enjoy this episode with Steve Urquhart. This is one of my favorite conversations. So Steve Urquhart, what are you up to?
Steve Urquhart:
So I’m a lawyer, and I still practice a little law. Mostly that’s just friends and family stuff. I have a few paying clients, and I teach up at the U of U Medical School. I teach in the Division of Public Health, teach health policy, and I’m busy running my mushroom church, The Divine Assembly.
Tim Pickett:
Were you involved in the legislation this spring, when they were trying to develop the, was an allocation to study whether or not they should let psilocybin into Utah?
Steve Urquhart:
I can’t really say I was involved in that at all. Very, very peripheral to… Probably not even saying I was involved at all. Just followed it, talked with some folks and gave a few suggestions here and there. But I’m happy with it. I like the composition of who’s on the task force, and I like the direction of the task force. Even before it starts, I like that it destigmatizes psychedelics to some degree by being worthy of study by the state. So yeah, I think this is a big step forward.
Tim Pickett:
What do you think about the cannabis law here in Utah?
Steve Urquhart:
That’s a very complex issue there, my feelings on that. At this point, I think it’s decent. The Utah legislature does a good job when moneyed interests are involved, and now that there’s money in it, I think that the law keeps improving. And I’m not a patient, so I sure don’t want to speak on any patient’s behalf. I’m not part of it. I go to Wendover to get what I need, and as I think, tons of Utahns do, and it’s amazing. The revenue we’re giving away, that parking lot is full of Utah plates, as I assume, the Mesquite Dispensary is too.
Tim Pickett:
Oh yeah. I mean, it was built… I know the owner, or know a little bit about the owners and the group. I mean, it’s built for us.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. No, it is. I mean, I usually talk with the people who are there at the cash register, the people grabbing it, and ask them about all the Utahns, and they say, “That’s all we get. That’s our business.”
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Steve Urquhart:
But, so obviously, it’s not working completely well if that’s the case, but I think that it’s doing okay by patients. It’s probably better than nothing.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. What makes you not want to be involved, or is that just out of convenience? Or?
Steve Urquhart:
Well, I was very involved in the legislature, I ran the CBD bill in the Senate, and then helped with attempts in the Senate, Mark Madsen’s bill. And then the initiative, when it started to go wonky there at the end, and the LDS Church started to play, and I think they were absolutely playing games. Just they wanted anything they could call a compromise, whether people agreed to sit at a square table or a round table, they were going to hold up something like Lion King, holding up Baby Simba saying, “Here it is, we have a compromise, you don’t need to vote for this.” And I think that was… I think that was dark and dirty.
Steve Urquhart:
I think it was a cheap attempt to get people to vote against the initiative. And then if it failed, despite all their promises, they would’ve said, “Oh yeah, people don’t want it.” And so I think it started out dishonestly, stupidly, and then the bit about the state was going to dispense a schedule one federally-illegal substance. That was-
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Still comes up-
Steve Urquhart:
It was that-
Tim Pickett:
Still comes up. They were trying to protect kids who had these conditions and keeping it in elementary schools and high schools where these kids are… This is in a locked case. And may I remind listeners that schools are like pharmacies, they have a ton of medications in them all the time. But they were saying the same thing. You’re going to dispense federally-illegal substance, you’re going to let us carry around, they compared it to heroin.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. Well, and if you remember, the state was going to be the pharmacies as they call them. And-
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Central fill.
Steve Urquhart:
And I just… Yeah, central fill. And so I really don’t think that the people involved are that dumb, I think that it was something that they knew could be locked up in the courts for years, and the state would ultimately lose, which they would have. So I worked with TRUCE and Christine Stenquist, to just try to get the truth out. And my wife and I started The Utah Bee. The point of that, we started it during that campaign, to try to get, I’m sure what you’re doing, to try to get truth out there. Utah journalists are overworked, I think that. You look at the trip, for example, a lot of great, young journalists, but I cannot believe their workload.
Steve Urquhart:
They need to get out so much work product, that it’s difficult for them to dig deep on many studies. And here, there’s just no time because it was on the ballot. So knowing how the church works, knowing how the legislature works, we wanted to get out some truth, get out some stories quickly, knowing that the media would at least read it and it would help give them a start on where they could look with their superior skills and resources. And so, yeah, The Utah Bee is out there, and we still run it. We call it altering the hive, and it’s about cannabis, psychedelics and alcohol, and I have a lot of fun with that.
Steve Urquhart:
But that was my involvement, was working with Christine and TRUCE to try to battle about a lot of the dishonesty that was coming from the legislature and the LDS Church. And we give ourselves right or wrong, we all need to be the heroes in our own stories. And the Utah Bee, we give ourselves a little credit for helping keep that above the 50% level in the vote.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And Christine’s been an activist clear through, even til through today, really involved with TRUCE, in trying to get their message out. And I don’t… Is it wild that I just about said what they consider truth, as if our political system has biased me so much that truth is relative to the position that you speak from?
Steve Urquhart:
Well, to some degree, that’s all of us. I mean, my version of how this passed, what it was about, that’s a truth to me, based on what I saw. Is that an objective truth? Probably not.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So, okay. Yeah. Fair point. What you teach at the University of Utah, I’m fascinated with education. I feel like if I was… I could retire tomorrow, and I’d be a lifetime student somewhere. You teach in the Medical School and the Public Health Department, they’re on Wakara. Yeah?
Steve Urquhart:
Right. Right.
Tim Pickett:
What-
Steve Urquhart:
You spent some time there. Right? That’s where the PA program is.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Yeah. Spent a significant amount of time right there. And I think we were underneath you guys, in the basement, for a while. What courses do you teach?
Steve Urquhart:
So I only teach two. I teach health policy and leadership to medical students and PhD, public health students. And then two years ago, I picked up a course on the Korean campus, just via Zoom, and that’s health systems. It’s great stuff. We go after the essential premises of public health, we go over social determinants of health in the PhD-MD course. We go over start, well, just the history of public health, what it is, and then we get into Medicare, Medicaid, move forward to the ACA. And it’s a pretty interesting course. We get to bring in a lot of public health practitioners. And when I inherited the course, it was kind of a who’s who? Who in Utah has done big things in public health? And I tried to keep those big prominent players, but I also am a big believer that I have friends in low places, borrowing that from Garth.
Steve Urquhart:
And I brought in some folks who really were down-and-out in life, and then have risen above, and went on to get some degrees, and done prominent things in the community. I mean, for example, I bring in Christine to talk about medical cannabis and the fight for that. She was a bedridden patient for 16 years, and then kind of a Mr. Smith goes to Washington, Erin Brockovich’s story. She came way up to the capital, and I think as patient zero, she had a huge part changing the state. I bring in Mindy Vincent, who was a 17-year IV drug user, in and out of jail, just really a litany of difficult things there. And she went into the court program and got some life skills, has got two master’s degrees, started the Utah Harm Reduction Coalition.
Steve Urquhart:
I bring in a former sex worker. And to me, that’s public health. Public health is in the trenches. Yes, we have the officials who run it out of nice offices, with big titles, but public health is a lot about the people who are down in the trenches. And community health workers, as a state, we just recognized community health workers as a discipline, as a certified group. And that’s where the rubber meets the road, public health. And so I’m really excited to introduce those people and those concepts to a lot of students who largely have been in academia. Right? And-
Tim Pickett:
Right. Their whole life.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. And some might not know any sex workers, might not know any IV drug users. And they really love those people. Mindy, it’s so funny. She’ll drop 10 F bombs on them, and that’s just who she is. She’s just seen so much of life, and she talks like who has seen it, wants others to understand it. And the students really just love her and love Christine, love people who’ve been out doing and experiencing and achieving.
Tim Pickett:
It’s one point of the medical cannabis program that I think is, it’s always important to showcase or to get these individual stories out because there’s so much still, a stigma, with the cannabis program, especially that there’s just a bunch of who want to get high and we’re just creating this gateway so they can do that. And there is a decent portion of the cardholders here in Utah that I would say might fit that mold. However, you might… Look, you’ve got to have, or else the 72-year-old who was addicted to opioids and changed their life around, or somebody with neuropathy… I’ve got an interview in May, somebody with neuropathy, so bad, they couldn’t walk, gets help. I’m okay if 10,000 people get access to something that’s relatively safe, if I can help those four or five people.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I feel like that’s where public health, the balance is, you constantly are fighting for funding and for programs to help the few, really help the few, and then there’s always this fight against the fraud and abuse argument, the fraud and abuse.
Steve Urquhart:
And we always have to weigh relative cost, relative risks. And what I tell them when I bring in Christine, is to talk about her fight and the fight for medical cannabis in Utah. I tell them, “Look, in big ways, you’re not going to get this, because you’re going to take for granted what she did, what she’s talking about, because things have changed so much.”
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Steve Urquhart:
It was only very few years ago that lawmakers thought the only people who used cannabis were stoners. And given how this state leans, they were degenerate stoners. I mean, these were not people we wanted to associate with. I mean, that really was, not only the predominant view, almost the universal view of the legislature, and just pure misinformation, pure stigmatization. We take so much for granted now, but when you really can look at it dispassionately without the stigma, it’s very low risk. I mean, cannabis is a low risk to society, when you legalize it. I mean, the big risk when it’s illegal is, well, then it is underground.
Steve Urquhart:
And you do have outlaws who are dealing with it. Your risk comes from the fact that it… I mean, I picked this up from Mindy, and I know she picked it up elsewhere, but this stuff isn’t because it’s dangerous, it’s dangerous because it’s illegal.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Steve Urquhart:
So-
Tim Pickett:
There’s a lot of truth to that. In fact, it’s more dangerous now because the potency… for that exact reason. It’s been illegal for so long that there’s been a monetary incentive to make it stronger and stronger and stronger, so you have to smuggle less of it to the US.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. And so now we’re bringing in the other cannabinoids that have really been breeded out, because people wanted to get stoned off, it was off THC. But so from a public health’s perspective, my biased perspective, the risk of cannabis in a good program is very, very low. And so, as you say, there are people who absolutely benefit from it, I would say, absolutely need it. I mean, for example, we are really concerned about the opioid epidemic in this state, well, chronic pain is a real thing, and you need something to help.
Steve Urquhart:
And cannabis, for a lot of people, is that help, and it is so benign compared to opioids, that the risk of this stuff is very low, and the benefit of it for some people is very high. And so, as you say, if part of it is that some people are going to go to paper factory, paper mills, and get the car that they might not really merit, if we’re going to have people using it recreationally, who cares? I mean, seriously, who cares? The risk is so low and the benefit is so high for some people, you need to air on that side of, “Well, let’s make sure we’re doing what we need to do to get it into the hands of people who need it.” Which course largely includes cost. And that’s where the Utah program is not doing a great job. Our costs are still much too high.
Tim Pickett:
From a public health standpoint and cannabis policy, do you feel like the velocity or the speed at which things are changing is increasing? Because it feels like that on my side. Like you said, five years ago, there was this almost universal feeling and thinking that it was terrible and you weren’t going to legalize it at all, you have the compromise and then you have the industry now involved. And is that… I don’t know. How does public health policy deal with this and change with this?
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. I think that things are moving rapidly. It’s just insane to me that it’s still federally-illegal when a huge majority of the states have de-criminalized. People want to say states have legalized it, well, they really can’t, it’s decriminalized states, that if you use it according to X, Y, Z, then yeah, we won’t consider a crime, but it always is a crime. And so first off, that creates a weird situation for public health. It’s still very difficult to get good data, good science, and public health should all be based on data. And we’re still struggling to experiment with cannabis because it is federally, a schedule one. And you need the research, you need the data to move it off schedule one, we’re just caught in a catch-22 there.
Steve Urquhart:
So public health likes to deal with data, it’s tough to do that with cannabis. So you have to look past that. Maybe you don’t have the best data, what data you have? And how can you work with that? And I think it comes down to what I just said. The risk of this is objectively low. The benefit seems to be quite significant for folks. And so from a public health perspective, what I’m concerned about is, okay, how do we get it to the right people, get the wrong people out of the business, and how do we get it to people in a cost-effective way? And that’s where I would like to see our system improve.
Steve Urquhart:
I don’t care, I really don’t care if it’s ever adult use, or as people say recreational in Utah, because it’s pretty easy to get. I mean, my perspective, thank you, Oregon for just flooding all of the West with black market cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. They have an abundance. It is spilling out by the hundreds of pounds.
Steve Urquhart:
So recreationally, anyone really can get it, public health perspective. What are you getting? Do you know what you’re getting? Do what’s really in it? It’s better if it is loosely regulated, if it’s monitored, but Oregon’s-
Tim Pickett:
Well, yeah, because then you could keep it. Wouldn’t you think that better public health policy, in that regard, better regulation, you could keep the wrong people from using it, if we want everybody under 21 not to use it?
Steve Urquhart:
Well, I mean, let’s go back to the opioid crisis. Let’s go back to H, let’s go back to the deadly one, heroin, injection centers, injection sites. God, I’m blanking on the term, but safe consumption sites, I think we properly call them. Not a single person has ever died at a safe consumption site. And heroin is absolutely deadly because there, they’re taking it at a place where the dangers can be mitigated in significant part. So yeah, if we can look at things objectively and deal with them on the basis of data and harm prevention, great things can happen. And cannabis, for the longest time, we weren’t using any harm reduction principles, it was just now, right then.
Steve Urquhart:
And now that that is becoming somewhat looser, by action of the states and largely by destigmatization, we’re having a lot of harm reduction principles come in. And that’s why I’m saying the risk of cannabis, it’s getting lessened by the day. That’s really a good thing. If the feds would come to their senses and move it off schedule one and we could have real science, then, oh my gosh, this could be… It is a miracle to so many people, but broadly to society, if we could loosely regulate, if we could conduct research, if we could bring costs of legal cannabis in line, it’d be great things, it wouldn’t do great things for big pharma. And I’m not really a conspiracy-minded person, but to what degree is that part of the hang-up on the federal level?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I think you’ve got to be onto something. It just doesn’t make sense, objectively, that it’s still on the federal, the schedule one list, unless there’s something behind it with a lot of money, I just don’t think.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. And-
Tim Pickett:
Doesn’t sense to me any other way.
Steve Urquhart:
Well, I mean our current president, last president, I think combined age is 2000. They come from a different age.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Fair.
Steve Urquhart:
So maybe [crosstalk 00:25:21]-
Tim Pickett:
And the Senate does.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. The whole Senate does. There’s no way… When the MORE-
Steve Urquhart:
Average age of the Senate I think is 132.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. It’s probably right up there. And I think the MORE Act, it’ll pass in the House again and again, but there’s no interest in the Senate, and-
Steve Urquhart:
Which is amazing. I mean, which is amazing. A majority of those senators come from states that have decided it’s okay, to some degree.
Tim Pickett:
Yep.
Steve Urquhart:
And it’s just so bizarre that they’re not even in line with their own states on cannabis policy.
Tim Pickett:
Do you feel like psilocybin… Switch gears with me here. Do you feel like psilocybin can leapfrog cannabis?
Steve Urquhart:
It already has. You look at the amount of research going on with psilocybin, it’s night and day. We know so much about psilocybin, just because we are allowing scientists to do their thing. Even though it’s on schedule one, the difference is, you can go out and you can psilocybin to do your studies. And cannabis, up until very recently, you couldn’t. I’m sure you know the name Dr. Sue Sisley. Dr. Sisley has been approved by the FDA forever to study cannabis on veterans with PTSD, but she couldn’t get the cannabis. And that’s changing a little, but you had to get it from the feds, your research cannabis. Well, they’re shit growers, they don’t know how to grow it.
Steve Urquhart:
They don’t really have incentive to grow good stuff. And whereas psilocybin? My gosh, you have universities that are dedicating so many resources to it. And what I say is, if you have a big project, you want to involve academia. Don’t ever leave them in charge, because it’ll never get done, but you want to involve academia because there’s expertise and genius there that you just don’t find in other sectors of society. And so the fact that we can allow these brilliant researchers to dig deep on psilocybin, oh man, the things we’re learning. So the barrier on the Oregon’s drugs, the barricades, was cannabis, that was the devil’s lettuce.
Steve Urquhart:
And it just still carries the stigma to Joe Biden, to Donald Trump, to people who are in charge of things. And psilocybin was overlooked. So yeah, psilocybin is going to come off schedule one before cannabis, MDMA, which known by a lot of people, the club drug Molly. That’s going to come off schedule one before cannabis. So yeah, cannabis research is lagging behind, and if research is lagging behind, then society’s lagged behind on that issue.
Tim Pickett:
Looking back at your arc with The Divine Assembly, it seems like you were ahead of the times-
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. Maybe, I don’t know.
Tim Pickett:
… with this.
Steve Urquhart:
So yeah, for your listeners, Divine Assembly is a church with mushroom sacrament, magic mushrooms. We have one tenant, which is, you can commune directly with the divine, and that being the one tenant. No one else has to tell you how to live. We don’t need doctrine, we don’t need dogma, we don’t need hierarchy, just commune with the divine, it doesn’t need to be through psilocybin, it can be through yoga, music, meditation. There are various ways to get there. And at the end of the day, for me, it’s really all about community, so I love the community that we are building.
Steve Urquhart:
And the way that started is, I started my psychedelic journey in January, 2017, right after I got out of the legislature, and was just having these incredible healing experiences. And so I figured, “Wow, if there’s anything on earth that I’ve seen, that I’d call religion, it’s this.” And having fought against the LDS Church to better secure LGBTQ rights in Utah, we were fighting against what they called their religious liberties. And so I gained some expertise on the First Amendment, and on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Steve Urquhart:
And figured, “Okay, if that protects other religions, this should protect what I consider to be my religion.” So we formally established… I do believe we were the first formally established, out in the open, public, psilocybin church. Not that I really care one way or the other, but yeah, it shocks me, but first, psilocybin, clearly, we were early on that.
Tim Pickett:
Originally, when you set up the church, of course, you had to make sure that you came out and said, “No, we don’t promote the use, sale, acquisition of a schedule one drug.” What’s that look like now?
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. Thank you for that question. We’re still learning. We’ve only been around not even two years, and a lot of that through the pandemic. Well, I guess all of it, if we consider we’re still in the pandemic. And our first in-person ceremony was a year ago, and that really scared me. What I want is a safe place for people to experience this. And we usually get people who are older, they live pretty quiet, reserved lives, they’ve read about this or heard about it from kids or grandkids, and they want a safe group to do it with, other people, younger people.
Steve Urquhart:
Well, they have friends and they’ll just go do it in a friend’s basement. And so I’m like, cool, we can do this, a safe environment. And our first ceremony, I didn’t know what I was doing, we didn’t know what we were doing, and so I really backed off. And now we’re to the point, we don’t in… A ceremony that “The Divine Assembly” runs, we don’t ever distribute. We do sound baths, we’ll do Hapé ceremonies, we’ll just get together, kind of a potluck. Because the conclusion that I reached, and those of us who are really involved in it, is people are safer when they’re participating in ceremonies with people who they really know and know well, because that just takes out a lot of the danger factor.
Steve Urquhart:
Let’s talk about sexual predation, start with that. It can largely remove that. Also, if someone has a bad experience, if they are working with a guide, or a shaman, or someone with a lot of training and more of a formal ceremony, there probably will be some immediate integration, but what will the contact be a week later, a month later? And what we’re finding is, if people meet each other, they become friends, they really have an organic relationship, well, if something comes up, they call their buddy, “Hey, I’m having these dreams, or I’m having… What do we do here?”
Steve Urquhart:
And then the guides, the ones I’m thinking of, who are operating on the TDA platform, they know what they know and know what they don’t know. And so they can send out a medical said, “Hey, head of ceremony, someone’s struggling with this. Who can we talk with?” So really becomes… We tried to pattern it after the mycelial network, the growth pattern of the mushroom.
Tim Pickett:
Of the mushroom?
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. You consider the roots of the flowering mushrooms, the fruiting mushrooms, but really that is the fungus, it’s the mycelium. And that’s how we view The Divine Assembly, where we have a lot of touch points. And so if someone’s struggling then, we’re probably going to know someone who they can talk with and get some help. And we’re really excited about the community aspect of it.
Tim Pickett:
It’s something that I haven’t heard about with cannabis, but man, if you were describing the same situation and you were talking about cannabis, I feel like it would be the same. A lot of young people, they just go into their friend’s basement and do it. But one of the things I think people struggle with, in the destigmatizing cannabis as medicine, probably the same thing with psilocybin to an extent, is this fear of not knowing what it’s going to feel like, and not being around somebody who can help or understand, not knowing that you could get paranoid, and what are you going to do?
Tim Pickett:
Is there a lot of that with psilocybin? As a medical provider, I am fascinated with psilocybin. And I have been secretly quoted as saying things about the psilocybin research, like you say, it’s leapfrogging cannabis, from a research standpoint. I’m fascinated with the idea of the brain and how it resets. Do you feel like spirituality is one of the key ways to… I guess I should ask a different question. What’s the goal of… Is the goal to destigmatize psilocybin and get it more accessible?
Steve Urquhart:
Yes. And I’m going to go back to the question you were about to ask, I think. What is the role of the experience, and I would even say the spiritual experience, in the healing process? Is that what you were-
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Yeah.
Steve Urquhart:
And I talk about that with my students. And remember, every single student in my class is far smarter than I am. I mean, these are brilliant students. And what I say to them, as I say, for the first time in human history, we actually can start to talk about a cure for depression. And the way that works, medically, is psilocybin, it shuts down the default mode network. The default mode network is the part of our brain that, it keeps us alive. I mean, thank God for this default mode network. I mean, we react to danger before we even realize it’s danger. I mean, these are our instincts, and that’s the stuff that keeps us alive. And it filters out, think of Buddy the Elf, when in… Oh my gosh. What’s it called?
Tim Pickett:
The Chris-
Steve Urquhart:
Elf. Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, Elf.
Steve Urquhart:
So Buddy the Elf, he goes to New York and he’s just freaked out by all of it, and just amazed by all of it. And that’s a brain where the default mode network, it’s not that formed. Right?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Steve Urquhart:
Buddy the Elf hadn’t seen a lot of trauma, hadn’t seen all this. So he’s just… It’s all new to him. Whereas a typical new Yorker just walks down the street and, man, they don’t notice anything, and the way that works is, our default mode network, it just filters it out. We hear an ambulance, we hear things that normally would freak out a baby or someone who hadn’t seen it, and our brain instantly tells us, “This is not dangerous.” And then other things is like, “This is dangerous.” And so a lot of that is great, and a lot of it is really bad, because it also factors in the messages we got from maybe an abusive father or from times we failed.
Steve Urquhart:
That part of our brain is saying, “Don’t try this. You’re just going to be sad, you’re going to be… You can’t do this.” And so it’s a blessing and a curse. And psilocybin, the way it works medically, is it shuts down that part of the brain, so other parts of our brain can get to know each other, they can develop true neuronal connections like, “Well, hello stranger, I remember you from when I was five years old.” And we really can rewire our brain. And that is an important part of it, but I don’t think that is all of it.
Steve Urquhart:
And this is what I ask my students. I say, where you are now in academia, you’re allergic to conversations about religion and spirituality in the classroom, academia, unless you’re in a theology class, we just don’t discuss it. But what do we do as public health professionals? When we see that it is curative of depression, and a lot of folks, and then 70% of those folks, when we, as researchers, as professionals, talk to them, they want to talk about God, they want to talk about the divine, they want to talk about spirituality. What do we do? And so public health, we’re going to have to entertain God concepts. And to me, that is such a fascinating thing, that God has worked his way back her way. Sorry. That’s how I visualize her. God has worked her way back into academia, through psychedelics, through magic mushrooms.
Tim Pickett:
And potentially to extend that thought, God could work their way back into society.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Right. In a big way.
Steve Urquhart:
And-
Tim Pickett:
And not just the society that’s already embraced an idea of God from the conservative side, but a way God can enter through the scientific side, through the objective side. This whole swath of the population, that basically discounts religion and discounts God, those are the people that psilocybin can introduce God back to.
Steve Urquhart:
Well, you just described-
Tim Pickett:
Or God, back through.
Steve Urquhart:
You just described The Divine Assembly’s reason for being. I was having these experiences that I think they compare to the religiosity, the wonder of anyone who’s ever walked the earth. But then what I quickly say is, anyone walking the earth can have similar experiences. And the language that we hang around those experiences, it is religious language. And so I was telling my wife, Sarah, “To protect this, to allow other people to experience the divine, I’m going to start a church.” And I’m telling my best friends and universally, they’re like, “No, you’re not. No.” I was-
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Knowing your background, where you lived, I mean, come on.
Steve Urquhart:
Because I grew up Mormon, and most of them did too, my wife did. And when people leave the Mormon faith, they don’t go to other churches. They largely are like, “I was defrauded, I’m done with God.” And then they take psychedelics, and they’re like, “Oh, maybe I just misunderstood the divine.” So it’s interesting to see people who were just jaded against religion, against God, find this incredible spirituality. It’s an awakening, and it is so much fun to be a part of.
Tim Pickett:
In your experience, is there percentages of people that have good versus bad experiences? Is it a learning process on how to experience these things?
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. I love your questions. Set and setting, that’s what is always talked about in psychedelia. Set is what do you bring to the experience. What is your situation? What is your state of mind? And then setting is where are you doing it? Who are you doing it with? Is it safe? Is it secure? And I had someone just last week, a couple, they wanted to meet with me, because she had a “bad experience” with mushrooms. And so I’m like, “Well, tell me about that.” And she’s saying, “Well, all the stuff from my childhood came up, I had forgotten, but it came up and it was just horrible.”
Steve Urquhart:
And that’s the way this stuff works, is parts of our brain that don’t know language, they show us images, they show us memories, saying, “Please heal me, deal with this.” And the way I see her situation is, oh my gosh, that shouldn’t have been a bad experience, that could have been a miraculous experience if she had been properly held, if she had been in a setting where people could help her process and deal with that, and she still can. I mean, that’s what I was talking about. I’m like, “Okay, let’s integrate that. Let’s find the right people.” And so I was just having coffee with someone this morning, who they’re getting together tonight, someone who I considered great in a integration.
Steve Urquhart:
I’m like, “Talk through this. What was your mind trying to tell you? What does your mind want to heal? And so most of these… If bad experiences, largely, I mean, you’re in the wrong place, you’re with the wrong people. And if you had been in a different place, with different people, it might have been extraordinary. Am some of my biggest leaps as a human being were with psychedelics, and the stuff that came up was sad, it was horrific. It was my mind saying, “Please deal with this, you’ve been cramming, please deal with this.” But I was in situations where, man, I’m just this gooey puddle on the floor, I’m just sobbing, remembering it, and thinking about it, just feeling so lonely.
Steve Urquhart:
I was just really held well and could come home with, Sarah, my wife, and just talk about it, just continue to integrate and process. And we cram a lot of this stuff down, we try to forget at it when we have the opportunity to see it, and work through it, and learn lessons and improve, and do things differently. So bad experiences, for the most part, are just bad settings.
Tim Pickett:
Do people typically with The Divine Assembly or with psilocybin experiences, are they using low doses, high doses? Is there a protocol, that you’re jumping in with five milligrams, or is it grams, milligrams?
Steve Urquhart:
Yes-
Tim Pickett:
Or do people micro-dose and then do big experiences?
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. Yes and no to everything you just asked. So Divine Assembly, where we typically end up is, we’re pretty low-dose, we’re a gram or two, maybe three of… Three, you’re starting to get heavy. So micro doses typically are half a gram or less, and then what they call heroic doses. I just call it a full send, that’s five grams. And I’ve done much higher than that. I haven’t recently. For like a year, I haven’t done a big dose, and I think it’s about time. So you can find magic and wonder in all of it. again, part of the reason, again, Divine Assembly, people are looking primarily for a community, they’re looking for a safe, initial journey.
Steve Urquhart:
I don’t feel any need for people that I personally work with, for first timers, I don’t feel a big need to do a full send. It’s just like, let’s dip your toes in the water and get you comfortable with it. And again, this is part of set. If you go in super nervous, then, man, who knows what’s going to end up? But if you figure, “Okay, I have a loose steering wheel here. I know where gas, pedal, and brakes sometimes work.” You’re just going to be more relaxed. And so I think it’s, we’re not in a rush on this. And so I like the idea of people going in with one or two grams, let’s see some pretty lights and some shapes, and maybe some cool things. And then next time, let’s go a little deeper and see how that goes. And so my wife and I, we were full sent. We started on ayahuasca, and-
Tim Pickett:
You went all the way.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. We jumped in the deep end, and I’m glad we did. My biggest best experiences were with really heavy doses, and I really went deep, but thank heavens, I was with people who could hold me, because it could have got messy, could have got sloppy were they not there. But like I said, I haven’t taken a huge dose for a long time, because, in part, there’s a laziness, because it’s a lot of work. But also maybe I’m just justifying avoiding the work, but I think a gram, gram-and-a-half, two grams, my brain knows where I want to be now, and it takes me there, and I can do considerable work with a pretty small dose.
Tim Pickett:
It’s literally like we’re talking about cannabis, in a lot of ways.
Steve Urquhart:
It is.
Tim Pickett:
Starting slow and set and setting and the hallucinogenic effects of cannabis, which are definitely different than psychedelic. But-
Steve Urquhart:
I’m going to debate you there.
Tim Pickett:
… you think. Well, see, and I’ve read a little bit, and again, fascinated with this idea of using these substances to assist in experiencing life and the spirituality. How does cannabis fit in then, for you?
Steve Urquhart:
So I talk about this with everyone. I talk about this with a lot of people, cannabis as a hallucinogen, now that I have had a number of psychedelic hallucinogenic experiences. And by that, I mean tons, over a hundred, easily. My mind knows where I want to be, it knows where I encounter the divine. And I call that… I mean, I steal it from Henry James. It’s the mystical state of consciousness, that’s where the divine dwells. Cannabis can fully get me there. And I was not having these experiences with cannabis before I experienced psychedelics. And now, with cannabis, if I’m in the right place with the right people, or by myself, just walking around downtown, I can have a full-on psychedelic experience with cannabis. My brain’s like, “Okay, I know what you’re trying to do. We’ll get you there.”
Tim Pickett:
It’ll take you the rest of the way.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. And I think that’s probably a huge part of the reason that I’m not doing big doses of psilocybin, is because cannabis is helping me get there.
Tim Pickett:
Awesome. I’ve experienced some pretty strong spiritual and hallucinogenic experiences with cannabis, and I think people can. Frankly, sometimes people will be in such acute pain that that’s where they need to go. And there’s a lot of metal providers who are a little scared to tell people that’s what you’ve got to do, because you don’t quite know what their set and settings are.
Steve Urquhart:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
And even though it is a community, it’s not a formal community, and there’s still lot of stigma. And I think the more people, maybe this is the case, that the psilocybin community almost has to be a little tighter, and it’s smaller, and it can be. I don’t know if that’s true at all. And the cannabis community is getting so big and dispersed. It’s hard to get people to communicate. But target against myself, most of the people I know, who are elderly, who want to try cannabis, it’s with their sons, daughters, it’s with somebody younger, who’s going to help them with that set and setting piece.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. I mean, I think so. I love the term entheogens, and an entheogen is something that brings us closer to God. I mean, maybe the original entheogen was alcohol. We sure know the Greeks used it heavily, and they believed that that was a way to interact with the gods. And cannabis, we see that all over the world. And I think part of it’s, you look at the pathway of those two substances, they did become more recreational. Man, I need a better word. I have no problem with recreational use. Fun is a way to worship, it’s an important way to worship. But I guess you look at all the alcohol ads, you look at the bars, you look at, let’s start there, you just see a lot of unhealthy use of alcohol to where, is it an entheogen?
Steve Urquhart:
Well, I think maybe naturally it is, but it’s abused in a lot of unhealthy ways. Cannabis being forced underground, there’s a lot of that too, but I think they can be very, very powerful entheogens, it’s just, again, set and setting. A lot of people use cannabis because they want to get stoned, they want to drink because they want to get drunk. Whereas yeah, grandma and grandma, when it’s time to use psilocybin, well, they want to heal. And so they approach it with a different set, a different mindset.
Steve Urquhart:
And so they end up having spiritual experiences that I think are fully there, can fully be there with cannabis as an entheogen and alcohol as an entheogen, is just the way we approach… We always do, even if we don’t realize it, we always do have some steering wheel, breaking gas, on these trips. What are we going to do with these entheogens? And with The Divine Assembly, people approach magic mushrooms as a sacrament. This is a way to encounter the divine and to heal in that mystical state of consciousness. So that tends to be the experience they have.
Tim Pickett:
It’s a pretty cool way to think about cannabis in that “medicinally” but in that experiential, that spiritual setting as if it were more like a psilocybin substance. I think people would get a lot more benefit out of it, medicinally, if they were just 10% more mindful.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. I mean, let’s go back to what we were talking about earlier. Cannabis can fully get us into that mystical state of consciousness. Okay. I guess, why does it get me there? Because that’s where I want it to get me, and that’s what I want from it. And so our minds are incredibly powerful. And I think these entheogens, we evolved with cannabis. We have the endocannabinoid system, for heavens sake. Our body knows what to do with this substance. And I think cannabis is an incredibly, wonderful, powerful spiritual entheogen, it is something that absolutely can bring us closer to God. And when I’m talking about people healing from depression, with psilocybin, they quickly, 70% of them want to talk about spirituality.
Steve Urquhart:
They want to talk about the divine, because that’s what they’re hoping to find. They’re hoping to find something beyond the mundane. And if cannabis users, like I do now, like many people do, I think if that were the set, they probably would find it. And if they’re properly held, if they’re with people in a place where that is the expected outcome, then I think we would find it more often. So yeah, even, yes, we’ve medicalized cannabis in other places, and heavens, we call it recreational use, let’s call it full-on spiritual use. And I think we’re going to get there as a society. We’re going to rediscover the magic of cannabis, the spirituality of it, see it more as an entheogen, and it’s going to become even more curative than it is now.
Tim Pickett:
I completely agree with you on that one. And I hope we can together make that happen, a little bit at a time. I think that’s a project we can work on together.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. I would love to do that. I’ll tell you an interesting thing. Again, let’s go back to, have mushrooms leapfrogged cannabis? Oh a hundred percent. The Divine Assembly, we are fully entitled to all the religious protections of the Baptist Church, of Muslim, of any religion. And I think the courts would see that, like they have with ayahuasca. There’s some very important, strong ayahuasca cases. If someone wanted to start a church with cannabis, that’d be a different issue, because, to the courts, it still is the devil’s lettuce. They don’t see the entheogenic, the God-breeding qualities of it. They think, “Ah, these are just stoners trying to pull something off.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Steve Urquhart:
And you look at the… Now, I don’t know anything about this church in Oakland. Maybe it’s the shadiest thing ever. I just can’t speak one way or another. Maybe it’s the best thing ever. But in Oakland, where they have decriminalized cannabis or sorry, decriminalized magic mushrooms, a church out there was rated, but it wasn’t really rated for the mushrooms. What I can tell, it was rated because it was giving out cannabis as a sacrament, and they’re saying, “We have a legal program for doing this in California, you’re outside the program.” So even though a mushroom church was rated, my understanding is, it was rated more for the cannabis aspect of it. So-
Tim Pickett:
Wow. That doesn’t surprise me though, because that’s where our society is. I couldn’t imagine a cannabis church, because I would think that, I mean, the neighbors, the cops, everybody’d be up in arms.
Steve Urquhart:
Well, I’ll tell you what would be fun, with Divine Assembly, I tell people, we’re entitled to religious protection, but don’t be stupid about it. This is schedule one substance. Let’s be smart, let’s not flaunt it, let’s make sure we’re not diverting it to kids and to outside of a spiritual setting, let’s be smart. And so how could you do a cannabis church in a smart way? I think it would be great for, in Utah, medical cardholders. So not me, but people who have their medical cards get together and worship with it. And don’t do in a way where you’re just messing around, do it in a way where you’re safe, where you’re sincere, and see what comes out of that. And I bet, absolute magic could come out of that. And the police, they can’t mess with that, if cardholders are getting together and enjoying it together.
Tim Pickett:
Enjoying it together. There’s been just this year here, Steve, a couple of groups to start working on that project together. There’s a yoga group out actually in Central Utah, That’s doing it next week for cannabis Christmas 420.
Steve Urquhart:
Perfect.
Tim Pickett:
Starting that off. And there’s some therapy groups that are thinking of doing it, and I’m involved in one, called an infusion group, that we’re trying to figure out just what you said. How can you create the set and setting? Maybe a therapist, to make sure that people are held as you’re… Very good way to put it.
Steve Urquhart:
Well, how can I help? I mean, get in touch with me. I have some legal skills and a lot of research in this area. I would love to help because, again, personally, I think that cannabis is a very powerful entheogen. I’m using it, illegally. I’m using it as an entheogen, and it shouldn’t be illegal, but it is. That’s just how it is for me right now. I don’t qualify for a card, I’m not going to go lie to get one, if people do whatever, I’m not trying to be judgy, but I don’t want to do that. I’m trying to walk through the front in life these days, and I haven’t always done that. And so I don’t have a card, I’m using cannabis illegally, but for people who can use it legally, to get together and worship with that. And to me, worship means connecting with ourself, others, the universe.
Steve Urquhart:
Oh, and that just makes me excited. I think that there’s so much magic that can be had there. And I want to reclaim religion. I’m sorry. I’m just going to… You got me fired up here, so I’m just going to-
Tim Pickett:
You got-
Steve Urquhart:
I view God as a rat-infested crack house with good bones. I think that people have co-opted the name God, the concept of God, and they’re doing it for control and for base reasons. And I think that some of us can… God is a reclamation product. I think that people create gods, it’s not the other way around, and we can create some very worthy gods and some very worthy religions. We can worship, we can achieve rapture. We can be part of the divine by things that we create by proper set and setting. And I think that that absolutely can happen with cannabis. And I’d be very excited to help friends out with that project.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. That’s awesome. We’ll definitely reach out to you. Is there a way that people can connect with you in general? Is your Facebook page, The Divine Assembly page, is that a good place to interact or find out more about this and the psilocybin aspect, learn a little bit about it. Do you want to do that?
Steve Urquhart:
Well, I do. I am a flawed human with some mental health issues. And so a lot of social media scares me. Part of my story, I don’t know if you know this. I really fell apart when I was in the Senate. And part of that was, not opening mail for eight months, and I still don’t open mail. I have people help me with that. And so emails, they scare me. And so I really do want to connect, but it becomes difficult to connect with me, even people I really love and want to connect with just part of, Steve, being Steve, as I hide from that. So you can see what we’re doing on The Divine Assembly dot org.
Steve Urquhart:
And if someone emails, The Divine Assembly dot org, people will look at it, and they will respond, and things that I should respond to, they will work with me to help me respond. That’s a roundabout way, but I just don’t want… Talking about holding people, it’s important to me. And if I don’t get back to people, know that it’s just something that I battle. But I do now have people at The Divine Assembly, they will get back, and they will work to get me in touch with them. That’s a shitty answer, but that’s-
Tim Pickett:
You know what, that’s okay. And for people at the Utah in the Weeds Podcast, if you watch us on Discover Marijuana on YouTube, or you listen to this podcast, that channel on YouTube, Discover Marijuana, all the podcast episodes are there. And you could go there and make a comment on the video, and my team would help find that too. So The Divine Assembly dot org, Utah Marijuana dot org, or Discover Marijuana on YouTube, comment on a video, and we’ll help as well.
Steve Urquhart:
Yeah. That would be great. I struggle to give my church, my people, the attention that they really deserve as wonderful human beings. And so, if I’m now flooded with a bunch of cannabis-
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Steve Urquhart:
… concerns, then oh, wow, this is even more out of control. And so yeah, if they want to go through you, your podcast, the magic you’re making, and then we interface, that would be wonderful.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. That would be great. Well, Steve, is there anything that we’ve missed?
Steve Urquhart:
How many universes have we missed? But we have covered some good things.
Tim Pickett:
Yes, we have. Well, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate this discussion. I think that it’s just so important for people and me to listen, learn a little more.
Steve Urquhart:
Well, what a great discussion. Thank you. And thank you for the work you’re doing, and let’s make some magic together.
Tim Pickett:
Absolutely. For those of you who aren’t subscribed to the podcast, this has been a great discussion with Steve Urquhart, and Utah in the Weeds, you can subscribe on any podcast player, you can also listen to all of our episodes on Discover Marijuana on YouTube. Stay safe out there.
