Episode 102 of Utah in the Weeds features Thomas Swahn of Swahn Balanced Health, a clinic specializing in ketamine infusion therapy and Medical Cannabis evaluations.
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everybody out to episode 102 of Utah in the Weeds. My name is Tim Pickett, and I’m the host. Here, a podcast about Utah cannabis and cannabis culture, and medical cannabis. And today, another discussion about psychedelics and these psychotropic medications. Ketamine, is the topic, mostly, of our discussion today, with Tom Swahn, of Swahn Balanced Health. They have a clinic in northern Utah, and specialize in major depression treatment with Ketamine infusion therapy. This discussion goes right along the lines of our discussion with Steve Urquhart in a previous podcast, where we talked about psilocybin and The Divine Assembly, with Steve’s church, and those developing research and studies regarding all of this psychedelic medications that’s coming down the pipeline.
Tim Pickett:
In fact, additionally, my discussion with the president of The Libertas Institute, Connor Boyack, about the psilocybin bill here in Utah that was recently passed, which develops a task force to study the effects of psilocybin, and what the program would look like, if in fact, Utah was able to put a program for these psychedelics and this type of treatment therapy together.
Tim Pickett:
I’m excited to introduce you to Tom Swahn. He’s a great guy, and knows a lot about this therapy, has been doing this for quite a while. Just a really interesting new concept of treatment that you go to every couple of weeks. Or you could go to a retreat and find these experiences, and really get in touch with what’s happening deep inside the brain, changing perspectives, and associating a different perspective to certain events. It has the potential to be really powerful for people, and I’ve known a lot of people who have had great success with this.
Tim Pickett:
Make sure you’re subscribed on any podcast player that you have access to, Utah in the Weeds. You can also find us on YouTube at Discover Marijuana. We have a lot of videos there for cannabis and cannabis therapy. Keep doing this program with cannabis here in Utah, and just excited it’s a beautiful June day here. Welcome. The birds are singing outside. Enjoy the summer and this discussion with Tom Swahn.
Tim Pickett:
Where did this all start? Because it looks like you went to Westminster. Are you from here, Utah?
Thomas Swahn:
Yes, I’ve always lived in Utah, ranging from cities between Farmington, is the furthest south, and right on the line between Ogden and north Ogden is the furthest north, but always in the little bubble.
Tim Pickett:
You have slightly gauged ears. I don’t even think they would’ve let you live in Farmington.
Thomas Swahn:
It’s true, that I was not well received there. And I’ve always been a little eccentric with my appearance, and so that was one of my first [inaudible 00:03:26] when I was young, growing up in an LDS family, that kind of free-thinking and doing whatever you felt like, wasn’t well received. Made you a bad person, accordingly a lot of the church leaders and the neighborhood where I lived.
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Thomas Swahn:
So from a young age, I was raised in an LDS family, but around 10 years old, I was telling my mom, “I don’t think God is real. I don’t think these are good people here. I don’t know why would take our advice on how to be good people from people who are like this.” And she would tell me, “If you talk bad about God, you’re going to get hit by lightning.” And I’ve always just been super logical, and I was like, “Then why do I not get hit by lightning?” That seems … I just always needed evidence.
Thomas Swahn:
And that’s the thing about Ketamine and other psychedelics, is that the experience was a spiritual experience. For me, that was evident. I was from this staunch atheist too, now, I feel like a pretty spiritual person.
Tim Pickett:
How did you get into medicine?
Thomas Swahn:
Frankly, it was just, I didn’t really feel when I was younger like I had a sort of a calling. But I knew I really liked science, I wanted to do something where I can help people. So I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll go to medical school.” So I started to doing premed in college, and within a couple of years realized, “That’s not something you can do on a whim.” Sure, I felt like I could have the capability to do that, but without the drive to do it, that’s so much work. So I was like, “Well, what can I do with all the prereqs I’ve already done in premed?” So I applied to nursing school, and they were like, “Yeah, you got all this prereq coursework done. You got great grades. Come on in.”
Thomas Swahn:
So I did that, and I just practiced as a nurse for a while. I worked in variety of different areas, from long-term care in hospice, and physical therapy rehab, to, I went to the operating room after that, and I left that-
Tim Pickett:
Where? Where were you in the operating room?
Thomas Swahn:
At Davis Hospital.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, cool. That’s what I did for six and a half year, is GI surgery and trauma.
Thomas Swahn:
Oh, nice.
Tim Pickett:
Right, for the general surgeons in West Valley. And the OR nurses there, you’re way too young for that, right? That’s where they go to retire.
Thomas Swahn:
Yes, yeah. But, I mean, there wasn’t a whole ton of critical nursing skills you needed. And so the fact that I was smart and could move like the wind, I was perfect there. I excelled at it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Thomas Swahn:
Get everything prepped and good, and move fast. But that was one of the most fun areas to work, but it was not going anywhere from a [inaudible 00:06:22], kind of watching my bills slowly get lost.
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Thomas Swahn:
So moved to ICU, I wanted to do something else, but didn’t know what. And I went there to just get all the skills that I could. And while I was there and watching people pretty much go through this worst case scenario of almost dying, but then we pull them back from the brink, just enough to survive, but their quality of life is garbage. And then we just send them home like we did a good job, and everybody pats themselves on the back. That was-
Tim Pickett:
I know. It is true, right? They leave, they go home. They’ve just spent 10 days intubated, 27 days in the ICU, then they … couple of, five, six days on the floor. And then you just send them home.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And you’re like, “Oh, this is cool. Way to go.” We operated on a guy who he blew a hole in his small intestine, just by running into a pole. He was playing some football and ran into a pole. And it took him … I saw him later, six months later after he was discharged from the hospital, and he was skinny, still. Because he’d lost the weight in the hospital, and then he decompensated so much that he never … it’s just so long to recover.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And he was a normal healthy guy, before and after. You would’ve considered him, after, a really healthy guy. But it just, so long to recover. And there’s not a good support system, even still. You have to know how to navigate that after-care system, you feel like, to get the help you need. Home physical therapy, home health. Your insurance will pay for all this stuff, but I never ordered it. And I’m a PA, I discharge people from the hospital. It wasn’t my wheelhouse really, so I didn’t really manage it.
Thomas Swahn:
I feel like each of these patients needs a social worker just to manage their own case, because our system is so fragmented that there’s … Yeah, how do you keep track of all the things and work your way through it? And the insurance is the one that gets to call the shots at every turn.
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Thomas Swahn:
We have the people who stand to lose money if you actually get the care you need, deciding if you need the care.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, that’s true. So when did you decide to go into NP school? And you went to Westminster, yeah?
Thomas Swahn:
Yes. When I was in the ICU and seeing us just send all these people home, and not even just physically damaged, but mentally traumatized from the experience, we’d just send them home and say, “Good luck.” So I was considering doing CRNA, and that was based on my time in the OR, just because I thought it was a lot of fun. But I decided that a nurse …. that I wanted to help prevent these issues that land people there. So that’s why I decided to go to NP school. I also am a very ADD person, and so figured if I got bored, that would afford me the chance to switch specialty every time I felt like I needed to, keep it fresh.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Describe nurse practitioner school. Because the way we heard it in … Okay, this is not a slam to NPs, but I always think this is funny, that I was told this is NP school. Right? So I’m a PA, a physician assistant. In Utah, we are very, very similar. We used to be a little less similar until there was a bill passed two years ago that independentized PAs, allowed us to be independent, and actually bill people. And we’re one of the only states that does that.
Tim Pickett:
But in school, I was told that nurse practitioner school is nurses teaching nurses how to be doctors. That’s literally how it was described to me. Of course, this is a doctor who said it that way. But what was it like for you?
Thomas Swahn:
I really had a good experience at Westminster. Through the clinical rotations, I was able to choose pretty much all of my preceptors. The school would provide them, but I had so many connections to doctor who I knew personally. So I would just cast a line out for different specialties. It’s like, “Can I come follow you for a few months?” And so that, it was beneficial for me, and a lot of my preceptors were MDs or PAs.
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Thomas Swahn:
I guess all my instructors at the school were nurse practitioners as well, so that’s literally true. It was nurses-
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, nurses teaching nurses how to be doctors.
Thomas Swahn:
Uh-huh.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, it’s funny, because your model, the nursing model, the lamplight of learning … My best friend in the world is a ICU nurse at IMC. Great guy, very, very smart guy. And there’s some things about nursing that are really, really great. And then there’s these other things that are … they’re traditional nursing care model that is … I don’t know, we don’t talk about it a lot. Do they have that at Westminster? At UU, it was like, “The lamplight of learning,” or something. And in PA school, we have the same thing. We have these things that were dumb.
Tim Pickett:
Does that taint you? Do you look back and think, “Oh, yeah. That part, I could do without.” Or, “I wanted a little more clinical diagnostic skills compared to the nursing skills.” Or, alternatively, because you had all the ICU experience and all the nursing experience, it was a lot easier for you to move towards, “Oh, that’s the pathophysiology of why that was the way we cared for the patient in the ICU. Now I understand how to diagnose that.”
Thomas Swahn:
That was a lot more my experience, was just, “I’ve seen these things done for years,” and I knew already, basically, what we would do. But school was, then, taking it up the ladder to why, why are we doing these things. And so I do feel like that was a major benefit, to have had so much clinical experience. But a little bit of the problem was everybody in my cohort had different backgrounds. And so depending on what you had seen in your clinical practice so far, certain subject would be a breeze. And then for me, I hadn’t done anything with children, so I struggled with pediatrics a little bit.
Thomas Swahn:
Almost to an embarrassing level, because between me and my wife, she had five kids and I had three when we got married. So we’ve got eight kids, but I’m still looking at milestones I could never quite nail down, like, “What is age was that? Why are you looking at …”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. “When do you get hair there? You got to be way too early.”
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah, I thought it was a pretty good education overall. I do feel like we took a lot of the diagnostic information and a lot of the other stuff we learned from medical literature, than just nursing.
Tim Pickett:
Do you feel like there were things in that program that you, right off the bat … Okay, so you’re into Ketamine and alternative therapy, you do some cannabis stuff. But did you feel like even through the program, you were already a little skeptical, or did that come later?
Thomas Swahn:
Skeptical of Ketamine?
Tim Pickett:
No, skeptical of what we were taught. I don’t know. I remember our pharmacology and depression section, there were five medication types that we could give as first line. SSRIs, Wellbutrin. And really, it came down to, one of the things they told us in school, was just ask your patient if they know somebody who’s taken a medication, what that medication was, and did it work. Because if you diagnose depression in somebody, and they know a friend who took Zoloft, and they had success, they’re actually more likely to have success with Zoloft than a different medication. Just by the fact of knowing somebody who took it.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Which made my ears perk up like, “What the … are you talking about?” You’re leaning into the placebo effect.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And some of these, yeah, that power of subjection is real. And so I started getting a little skeptical right from the beginning in certain aspects of medicine.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah. In our covering of depression and stuff, there wasn’t really anything like that they told us. It was actually broken down pretty thoroughly. And like, “These ones are energizing anti-depressants. These ones are more calming. In these cases, you want to use this. In these cases, you want to do this.” But overall, we didn’t hammer on that really all that much. We did a basic amount of [inaudible 00:15:35] and stun testing. But mostly, it was just providing us tons of resources to reference, once we were in practice.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, nice.
Thomas Swahn:
So that was nice. But overall, we didn’t do any education on Ketamine. That was something that I became personally interested in. I got really interested in it, because it has this instant anti-suicidal effect, and I had a lot of suicide in my family growing up. I lost my dad to suicide when I was eight years old, I lost my aunt a few years later, and there were a variety of other family members who had attempted or succeeded in their suicide attempts. And this was something that could’ve changed my whole life.
Thomas Swahn:
So I just became really interested in it personally. And the more people I talked to about it, I was finding this … We all went through the D.A.R.E. program as kids, and thought, “If you use any of these illegal drugs, they’re all scary, and you’re going to trade a moment of fun for your brain. You’re literal … destroy your brain just to have fun times.” So that was when I was like, “Yeah, I would never be interested in that.” I value my intellect. But then, we find out from the evidence, actually, these things are really good for your brain. Psychedelics, Ketamine, they promote all this mental wellness, even in normal people without depression.
Thomas Swahn:
So I became really interested once I saw that safety and efficacy data. And I found that the people I was talking to were consistently like, “Oh, but it makes you hallucinate. I would never do that. I’m not that kind of person.” And that was wild to me. I’m like, “What does that even mean? What are you talking about? What kind of person?” The fact that it’s a pleasant experience and good for you, to me, that’s a win-win. But to them, there was something evil about a substance that makes you high, regardless of its effects.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So say a patient come into you, and they’ve … I would imagine, most, there’s a lot of patients who come into you now, and they have never experienced anything like this in the past. Even with cannabis, they may have smoked weed and gotten high and understand what that feeling is. but there are a lot of patients, I bet, that come in with nothing like that, especially in Utah.
Thomas Swahn:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
With no experience of being, “high”. How do you explain Ketamine to that person?
Thomas Swahn:
I’ve written a whole Ketamine preparation guide that I send out to them and tell them a little bit about what to experience, how to get … the treatment. But when they come in for their treatment, I tell them, “We could talk about this all day long, and you will still have 0% of an idea of what the experience you’re about to have is actually like. The only way to know is to go through it.” And that why, if you think about what language is, t’s based on shared understandings. You can I can use words, because we both understand what that means. But if one of us has an experience that is completely outside of anything the other person could’ve possibly experienced, then there’s no words for that.
Thomas Swahn:
And so I tell them, “It’s going to be very bizarre. It’s going to feel like an ineffable, strange journey that you’re about to go on. But 95% of people feel incredible during it just regardless. It strips away anxiety, it covers you in a blanket of serenity. And your body is totally safe and fine. We’ve got a good environment. I’m here for you if you need. I’ll be checking on you regularly. You got a [inaudible 00:19:28] thing. You’re going to do great. But it is strange.”
Tim Pickett:
“But just plain and simple, this is going to feel strange. Let it go. Try to enjoy it, or just see where it takes you.” The initial treatment, how long is the effect?
Thomas Swahn:
So the IV infusion itself is over 40 minutes that I do here. Usually about 10 to 15 minutes after that, the strongest effects are wearing off, but then there’s residual effects for a few hours to the rest of the day, at least as far as the physical effects. The mindset changes. People will usually experience a benefit right away. That first couple of days after, they suddenly are aware of joy again. It’s kind of brought awareness to things in their life they can change and it’s given them a diff perspective of their problems.
Thomas Swahn:
But for that first one, they usually only last a couple of days, maybe up to a week or two or most, and that’s where we start doing the repeat treatments and a series. For most people, especially in more treatment resistant cases, they’ll need a full series of six treatments done twice a week. And then after that, we usually are able to achieve a pretty robust and durable response. And I’ll see most patients about once a month when their symptoms start to come back, they’ll come in for a booster treatment.
Tim Pickett:
About once a month. What’s the duration, the lifespan of a typical patient? Are they coming in for kind of a blast of treatment and therapy, and then you do once a month for … I don’t know do people do this for years and years?
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah, a lot of people, it’s going to be … so basically, we know from depression, your brain wants to build itself a certain way, and we can modify that with drugs. But as soon as you don’t have the drugs, it’s going to build itself back the only way it knows how. So usually, it tends to be a long-term thing, but I have noticed, I’ve been doing this for a year, and I’ve noticed that my longer-term patients, I will start to see them less and less over time.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Thomas Swahn:
And at first, worried that was just they couldn’t afford it, or were just dealing with it. But when I came to see them again, they were, “I’ve just been doing great.”
Tim Pickett:
I don’t really know a lot of the research behind this, but is there a rebuilding of neuro connections in the brain? With psilocybin, just the fungus, that is affecting something in the brain, where you’re creating new neural connections, or you’re disassociating some, and then allowing others to, I don’t know, develop, or you’re finding new connections. Because in PTSD, you have this emotional part of your brain that’s connected to the logical part, and it builds these calluses where it’s just firing over the same thing, so people get in the thought loop. Every time they go to a certain experience, they experience that trauma again. Where psilocybin is starting to show that these things are changing these neural connections. Is that the same with Ketamine?
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah, it’s a lot of the same stuff. With the classical hallucinogens, like psilocybin, or LSD, or ayahuasca, those are all serotoninergic in nature, they’re [inaudible 00:23:04]. This one, is an MDMA receptor, which is works with glutamine, and that’s our brain’s main excitatory neurotransmitter. And so you get a different feeling with the experience. And psilocybin and other of the classical hallucinogens can be very emotional. They’re very mood augmenting. And so whatever you’re experiencing is just an amplified version of that.
Thomas Swahn:
But Ketamine works through, they call it a use-dependent blockade, so as soon as those neurons are trying to fire, the most active one for those thick neural tracts of those ruminating negative thoughts are, those neurons will start to get plugged up with Ketamine. And so a lot of patients will, during their experience, try to be telling me what their experiencing, and then suddenly be like, “Lost my thought.” And I’m like, “yeah. We know. That’s what’s supposed to happen.”
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Thomas Swahn:
But it interrupts them by blocking them with ketamine, the most used neurons. But at the same time, it has a blockade effect on inhibitory neurons. It keeps our subconscious quiet, so we can think. And so, it’s similar to psilocybin, we get widespread brain communication through these back channels, areas that don’t normally communicate. They’re been able to identify a cascade of effects that results in an increase of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, for, they call it BDNS. And that actually does increase dendritic branching and synaptogenesis, people will have new neural connections forming at an increased rate.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. From an illegal standpoint too, obviously, your clinic can’t do psilocybin treatments.
Thomas Swahn:
Not …
Tim Pickett:
Did you say not yet?
Thomas Swahn:
I said not yet, but one day, we … I mean, they did pass through the Utah legislation, it was totally done, signed by the governor, house bill 167. I think it’s called the psychotherapy mental illness task force, something along those lines.
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Thomas Swahn:
And so, they’ve put together this task force to make recommendations for currently illicit substances, like psilocybin or MDMA, and make recommendations on it, if and how, and how much, and who can use these for their therapeutic benefits. And I think that it’s good news that we’ve identified these things definitely are helpful. It’s to a point, we can’t really deny it anymore, so how do we use them?
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Thomas Swahn:
And their report is due by the end of this October. I’m hoping that we’ll get some progress, and at that point, maybe will change the clinical [inaudible 00:25:45] on psychedelics and offer more things.
Tim Pickett:
Nice. Is there a difference between … you mentioned psilocybin, MDMA, Ketamine, ayahuasca. Is Ketamine closer to MDMA than psilocybin, or is there known differences?
Thomas Swahn:
Well, MDMA is, itself, an interesting middle ground. People will argue whether it’s a psychedelic or an empathogenic, or an entheogenic. I mean, it depends on how you’re interpreting it. Psychedelic just means mind-manifesting, and so it’s these mind-expanding drugs, I think, that encompass all of those. Entheogens are like God-manifesting, or it’s a class of these drugs that just increase feelings of love and social connection. And MDMA technically is methylenedioxymethamphetamine. It’s a form of methamphetamine that’s tweaked in a way that makes it both less harmful, and slightly psychedelic.
Thomas Swahn:
And they’re using that, specifically, in people with PTSD, because it promotes self-love and forgiveness and connection to other people in a way that helps people stop feeling like they’re worthless, or these traumas were their fault, or that it needs to control their lives. As far as the classical hallucinogens and Ketamine, they work through a much different mechanism. Mostly, they’re considered psychedelics together, because of the experience Ketamine creates is a very intense psychedelic-type trip, just like the other ones. But whereas some of those, I think will be better ultimately for depression, because they bring that freshness and joy back to life.
Thomas Swahn:
I think, Ketamine, with its ability to ease anxiety and feeling of fear or shame or guilt, I think that that’s ultimately a better tool to face some of these traumatic memories. Although they are finding with psilocybin studies, the benefits in some cases have lasted up to six months, a year. So I think that that will be a better option in a lot of cases.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. It will be really nice, to that point, to have multiple options.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Because right now, we have … Well, I mean, it’s nice to have just the options we have, frankly. But it will certainly be better when there’s more options. And they’re already out there, MDMA, psilocybin, Ketamine, cannabis, even ayahuasca, peyote. They’re out there. They’ve been used for centuries, but we just don’t have them in traditional medicine, because we need pharmaceutical companies to sign off on these things. Unfortunately, the way our system works.
Thomas Swahn:
One of the [inaudible 00:28:42] I think will be beneficial going into the future as we get more data on all these things, on their safety and their effects, will be to be able to combine in ways that will amplify effects. I mean, if you read some of these … what do they call them? Trip reports. Online, people talk about mixing Ketamine and MDMA, or psilocybin and Ketamine, or whatever, cannabis and these other substances. And the synergistic effects could, I think, provide invaluable things that none of them could do alone, but we’ll have to wait until we have more safety data.
Tim Pickett:
Right. Yeah, how to blend them together. And then, boy, you’re going to have to be monitored. Speaking of monitoring and Ketamine, so you’ve got a twice a week therapy, you can come downtown and you can get this therapy or go to Clinton and get this therapy. But what about going to retreats? Is there a place where Ketamine therapy can be done in a retreat setting, where you go somewhere? Because for me, it seems like Memorial Day weekend would be a perfect time, to where I could show up Saturday morning, I could meet the provider, I could have a little lunch, I could get a little intro to the system. Then I could have my first Ketamine session that day, see how that feels, do another one Sunday, cleanse on Monday, come home. Or a six-day. Does that work? Or do these … you can’t do them day after day?
Thomas Swahn:
So, I mean, Ketamine, there are plenty of studies that have shown … have down consecutive day treatment. Or even, you could find some that were like, “Oh, it’s 72-hour continuous infusion done in the hospital.” And that sounds crazy, because it has a time dilation effect. It would feel like you were there for three infinities.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, wow. So when you’re in the K-hole … this is how we call it in the … I mean, I use Ketamine in the emergency department for … the kids cut his tongue open, and I’ve got to sew up his tongue, so we’re going to use Ketamine. We Ketamine for that. I guess off-topic here, what’s the dosage difference in what I’m using in the ER to put a person down so that I can do a procedure versus what you’re using in clinic?
Thomas Swahn:
So I think the IM dosing for sedation was six to 13 milligrams per kilogram, something like that. At the clinic here, I give it from 0.5 to 2 mg per kilogram. Because with the dosing of Ketamine, there’s actually an increase in neural activity up to a certain point, and then that Ketamine blockade of the neurons shifts from blocking certain channels while they’re open but just blocked, to totally shutting them down. And that’s when we get that total anesthesia sedation. But usually though, for OR sedation, they’ll mix it with Benzos or whatever else to promote amnesia of the experience, and to give a little more sedation.
Thomas Swahn:
The funny thing about kids, is they still have a layer of magical thinking. So whereas adults will get the emergence delirium when they have super heavy doses, and that’s why they stopped using it as much for anesthesia. Just fine with that. They go on these magical journeys, and they’re just cool with it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. We use it more in kids than we do in adults, for that exact reason. The adults tend to not have … those heavy doses can tend to have like little mini nightmares. And then not only are you dealing with the injury that you have to fix, but you’re dealing with a grownup human being who’s not having a good time at all. But these doses that you’re giving are much, much lower.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah, they’re much lower. And two milligrams per kilogram gives us a healthy buffer before we would reach any sort of sedation when given over 40 minutes. And even with that dose, the experience is quite intense. I don’t give most patients anywhere near that dose.
Tim Pickett:
I see. Do you build up a tolerance, like you do with cannabis and THC?
Thomas Swahn:
It’s not real clear, at this point, in the literature. What I’ve seen here at the clinic is that people will … are to build up more of a tolerance to the negative effect before they do the positive effect, similar to cannabis. I don’t really think that there is that much tolerance. Either that, or it must build quickly and maybe wear off quickly. By the time we get done with the induction series, we’ll get month out and do a dose of the same one, and people will report that it feels stronger. So that could be potentially a mild tolerance that was built. Or frankly, I kind of think it’s just, you had that gap between a series of these intense experiences, after you take them, a little more intense than you remember.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And you’re also, I could see, getting used to, not that you’re building up a tolerance, just getting used to the effects and getting used to that journey. Where the mind goes, and being okay with … we can do that just a little more intensely, because now I’m used to it.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Whereas, same thing with cannabis, right? You use your first time, maybe that causes some anxiety if you use too much. But after you get used to it, and you understand the sensation at that intensity level, then you seek that out in a lot of ways. Right? That’s your therapeutic dose.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah. I usually will describe to my patients … dog getting used to riding in a car. At first, that time, it might be this flying metal death box, because they have no idea what’s happening.
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Thomas Swahn:
[inaudible 00:35:03] stick your head out the window on the freeway on your little space cruise.
Tim Pickett:
Right, and now all of a sudden, you really want to get in the car, all the time.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
That’s a good way to put it, because you’re right, you wouldn’t understand. That’s a really good analogy. Have you worked in a place where you’re doing daily sessions, like a retreat setting?
Thomas Swahn:
I haven’t. I’ve done daily consecutive sessions for just a few patients, like if they came from out of state, or something like that, where it’s not practical for them to stay and do twice a week for three weeks in a row. So in those cases, I’ve done three treatments in a row. And the first time they do great. Second day, they’re like, “Oh, I still feel a little overwhelmed from my first.” And then by day three, they’re like, “Got a little bit of a hangover, and I don’t know if I can do this hero’s journey for three days in a row.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Thomas Swahn:
Because some of the experiences, especially if we’re going up in dose, can feel like you’ve literally spent a lifetime on this journey.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. Does Ketamine therapy work in conjunction with behavioral therapy really well?
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Is that part of the decompression of all of these things that are coming up from your patients?
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah. The optimal way to do it would be to have a therapist, discuss with them that you’re going to do Ketamine therapy, go over some grounding techniques, some intention setting to decide what you want to get out of the therapy. And then when you come in, that can kind of act as your GPS for where experience goes. But then, once they start the … like you said earlier, the best thing, and really the only thing you can do is let go and float downstream. Just go with the experience, fully surrender to it.
Thomas Swahn:
And I’ll coach my patients like you might have emotional content or even traumatic memories come up. But if you trust the Ketamine, trust yourself, trust the experience there, lean into it, then you will be able to get a different perspective and process these things in a way that might’ve been impossible for you. And so, after they go through those experiences, I usually recommend trying to get into your therapist again in the next couple of days, while we have that increased period of synaptogenesis so that new neural connections happening at an increased rate. And that way, they can really capitalize on the fact that they’ve been knocked out of their rut, their ruminated thoughts, as well as this opportunity to develop new skills, faster.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I can just see how that would be really helpful for people who go through this experience and then want to talk about what it means, and how it can affect them and what to do next. And that change in perspective, for PTSD, we know that being able to see the event from a different perspective, essential, it’s one of the key pieces to curing, if you could cure PTSD.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Death, do you have people that come in and do Ketamine treatments who are dealing with cancer diagnoses and facing their own death or the death of a loved one?
Thomas Swahn:
That’s something that is a really useful aspect of Ketamine therapy, or other psychedelics. I, personally, have many of those patients. Actually, [inaudible 00:38:53] know people in my personal life dealing with cancer and I’m unable to get them to come in. But it’s one of those things, that quite frankly, it makes you feel connected to the … way that it makes it seem like you won’t be gone if you die. You just will return to the ocean that is the universe we’re all swimming in.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. What are those barriers? How do we get past that? How do we get past people’s resistance to therapy like this? We’ve been trying. I’ve been trying with cannabis.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I almost think it’s easier with cannabis than it is with Ketamine.
Thomas Swahn:
It certainly is. And I’m a QNP as well, as you know. I can far more readily convince people to try cannabis than Ketamine. It still has a scary aspect to the journey, because you tell people it’s life-changing. But it’s very intense, strange. And especially the people I’ve known who are going through chemotherapy and cancer and the dying process, they seem to be kind of stuck in that fear. And they’re, I guess, just afraid of what they’ll experience. It seems like if you tell them, “This will make it not seem scary that you’re dying, or at least will help change your perspective on it,” I think that that just in the moment sounds extra terrifying. I’m not sure how to really go about that, but it is something I think about pretty frequently.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, it seems like society is moving it forward slowly. But I talked to Connor Boyack, he’s the president of The Libertas Institute, was really influential in getting the cannabis law passed. And he was influential in the psilocybin bill, the task force that was passed this session. And we talked about how generationally things will change, and we’ll probably get to a point where Ketamine is much more normalized, where cannabis is much more normalized throughout the population.
Tim Pickett:
But on the other hand, the person who needs it tomorrow, right? That 62-year-old with major depression, who needs a Ketamine treatment to save their life, to your point about your family, we can’t really afford to wait to let society catch up. We really have an obligation, I feel like, as providers, especially to educate people that there’s something else out there, in order to push that conversation. When that 62-year-old needs it tomorrow, or else they die on Friday, we need to figure out a way to get that conversation … speed it up.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah, and it’s something that, ultimately, I feel like we should even be doing when patients come, but the problem with giving it at that instance is that that’s a horrible environment to do it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Thomas Swahn:
You’re in there, everything’s sterile, people screaming up and down the hallway. That’s a recipe for a bad experience. I don’t know what the ultimate infrastructure would look like, but I do feel like we need to take this seriously and consider, how do we implement this? Even the … ultimately, for depression are kind of baffling to me. We’re still on this, sort of in this position that Ketamine’s new, that it should only be used as a last resort. Why do we reserve these therapies that I feel like could stand to improve almost anyone’s quality of life and experience like this. And we reserve it for people who already at rock bottom, and everybody else is just expected to deal with whatever they’re dealing with.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. That’s surprising to me too. Why is this last-line therapy, instead of first or second-line therapy? Why can’t we change the mentality of prescribing two or three pills, to, “Okay, maybe, which do you want? Here are the three options. We can do a prescription medication, and you can try that for a month, and that’s totally okay. We can give that a shot. Maybe you’ll feel more comfortable with that in the beginning. We also have this treatment protocol with Ketamine therapy. Both are in conjunction with behavioral therapy.” And you can kind of decide, that here’s the evidence on both sides. Let the patient be part of the conversation.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, I know the answer is probably just, “Well, I have 15 minutes with the patient. The easiest thing to do instead of explain this whole thing to them is just to write a prescription and see them in three weeks. Just be done.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, besides that Swahn, they don’t take insurance, right?
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Sorry.
Thomas Swahn:
Exactly.
Tim Pickett:
But the pill, totally covered, no problem.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah. And then that gets us to kind of, frankly, the bullshit around S-Ketamine, of like, “Oh, it’s this. We just filtered out the left-handed molecules from Ketamine, called it a new medication.” Now it’s $800 a dose, instead of $3. And you still need two hours of monitoring, but we’ve got a patent on it, so we can charge whatever we want.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. What is up with that?
Thomas Swahn:
It’s a case where we’ve let the pharmaceutical company decide, “This is how we make money, so this is how it needs to be done,” rather than using these tools we have and know are effective. It’s considered off-label and came off patent in 1990, so nobody’s interested in trying to push it for FDA approval, because they can’t make any money back.
Tim Pickett:
Do you use nasal Ketamine at all?
Thomas Swahn:
I don’t, [inaudible 00:44:57]. But you can get racemic Ketamine, which is just the 50/50 mixture, for people that know. You can get that just compounded in a nasal spray. I could easily prescribe that to a patient. And there’s no clear evidence whether S-Ketamine or the right-handed molecule, R-Ketamine are any more effective. I’m sure they have minor differences in psychoactive effects and duration and whatever. But when we already know one form is very useful just in its super cheap form, it seems strange to me that we would allow our insurance companies to only cover the super expensive form that’s not proven to be any better.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. So how do patients get in touch with you and get associated with this type of therapy, if they have major depression, or if they want to explore it and just come talk to you? What’s the process?
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah. So what I usually do is just have patient … there’s a self-scheduler on our website. Our website is SwahnBalancedHealth.com. Swahn is S-W-A-H-And, and then balanced with a D, health.com. They can schedule an appointment right on there. They can give us a call, 801 613 8842. And I’m happy to answer calls when I can, anytime. They can even text that number. And we can do a phone consultation. There’s very few contraindications to Ketamine therapy that would make it unsafe. Some of them are unstable hypertension, more sever cases of cardiac, kidney or liver disease, active psychosis, elevated pressure in the brain or eyes. We proceed with caution in cases where there’s substance abuse issues. But outside of that, there’s very few reasons that it’s contraindicated.
Thomas Swahn:
So people can even schedule online themselves. As soon as they do that, I will send out intake paperwork. Then they’ll fill that out. We’ll meet for first appointment and go over everything, make sure that they are an appropriate fit, and then we can get started right …
Tim Pickett:
And how long does it usually take to get in?
Thomas Swahn:
I mean, right now, the clinic’s still young. I’ve been doing this for a year total, but we moved into this location October 1st, 2021. And so we’ve only been here seven months.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, so still building up a patient base, still plenty of availability is essential what you’re saying.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah. Yeah, I should have openings pretty much every day that we’re open. It’s pretty rare that the entire day is fully booked out. People can get in, right away.
Tim Pickett:
And then you do this, you do cannabis. And what else does the clinic do? Those are the two things.
Thomas Swahn:
So right now, that’s all I do. Yeah. Basically, when I started offering Ketamine therapy, the improvement in people’s quality of life was phenomenal. I’d never seen that promising in medicine. And so I wanted to build a place that went away from the sterile, clinical feel. And so this clinic that we’ve opened here, I’ve got different themes for each patient room. Each room has a different nature-based theme. I’ve got a forest room with tapestries and different plant stuff. There’s an Echo Dot in every room to play music. There’s two recliners, so they can bring a guest. And I’ve got light projectors that actually will reduce a lot of the dizziness some people can feel from visual effects.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, cool.
Thomas Swahn:
So they can wear an eye mask if they want, but the projectors have done a really good job of changing it from these kaleidoscopic visuals to more of just a flow. It feels very incredible. I wanted it to feel more like the spiritual experience that I feel like it is. And like you said with these retreat settings, I think ultimately, that will be a beautiful option.
Thomas Swahn:
And Ketamine was known as the buddy drug when it was first being used. It made its debut in 1970 in the Vietnam war. And they called it the buddy drug, because anybody could grab a syringe and sedate your buddy. It was just that safe. It preserves cardiovascular function, it preserves respiratory function and protective reflexes, so there’s no life support needed. Even in here, in the clinic, honestly, I feel like checking vital signs at all is more of a medical formality than anything. There’s rare [inaudible 00:49:46] anybody with any issues. And usually, it’s if they’re stopped taking their blood pressure medication that we’ll even see a problem.
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Thomas Swahn:
They’ll have to postpone treatment until their blood pressure’s under control. But in general, yeah, if you were able to establish with a bunch of people at a retreat that they had a good health history, were good candidates, their vitals were stable, I don’t even think you would need to check them again for the rest of the weekend. Granted, that’s, I guess, sort of a-
Tim Pickett:
Talking from experience, right? You’re comfortable with it, you know what to expect, you know what to look for, which is awesome. This is awesome. Have we missed anything that you want to talk about?
Thomas Swahn:
In general, no. I think that that covers most of it. I mean, there’s a lot of specifics, and I spend all day talking about this. I’m very passionate. So people are welcome to ask me any personal questions about their case, or what to expect. But yeah, I mean, I think that’s a good overview.
Tim Pickett:
This is good. I want to hear … I think we should get back together down the road, and talk about how the clinic is going, and also, talk about the … especially with psychedelics, as we expand the access to other psychedelics and we talk more about more psychedelics than just Ketamine. I mean, I’m interested, because you’re in this field, you’re a subject matter expert, so I think this will be an interesting conversation to have again. I appreciate you coming on.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Tim Pickett:
SwahnBalancedHealth.com, right? You’re in Clinton.
Thomas Swahn:
In Clinton, yep. Clinton, Utah.
Tim Pickett:
SwahnBalancedHealth.com, Thomas Swahn. Thanks. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming on.
Thomas Swahn:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Tim. It was a pleasure.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. All right, everybody. Stay safe out there.
Episode 101 of Utah in the Weeds features Vanessa Kyrobie, who uses cannabis to treat the painful symptoms of a mysterious and debilitating disease.
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everybody out to episode 101, that is three digits, 101 to Utah in the Weeds. My name is Tim Pickett and today’s episode is an interview and really a deep understanding of how cannabis can change a person’s life. Vanessa Kyrobie is a patient here in Utah. She has a deep Mormon background, and this story will touch your heart. I rarely get a chance to hear stories that are like Vanessa’s and the impact that her change in attitude, I guess, or just understanding of the cannabis plant can have an outcome in a human life. And by extension the life of those around you, your family, your kids. If you know somebody who is hesitant about using cannabis, this is a good story to listen to. For those of you who are not subscribed, you can subscribe and you can be sure that we are headed towards another 100 episodes of Utah In The Weeds.
Tim Pickett:
Stay tuned for next week when we release an episode interview with Connor Boyack, who was integral in the writing of prop two, the passage, the negotiation that took place, he brings up some fans and some detractors, of course, with his involvement in what happened and the development of the Utah Medical Cannabis Program. For those of you, like I say, subscribe to Utah In The Weeds on any podcast player that you have access to. My name is Tim Pickett. We are found on discover marijuana on YouTube as well.
Tim Pickett:
You can subscribe there and download all of our episodes and see a lot of educational resource videos there that we do with Zion medicinal and Blake Smith. For those of you who are on our newsletter at utahmarijuana.org, that’s Utah marijuana.org, stay up to date with our webinar series. We do those I think monthly on Wednesday nights, you can also find those on YouTube at discover marijuana, lots of information, lots of resources, and have some fun out there this summer folks. Enjoy this episode with Vanessa Kyrobie. So take us all the way back, Vanessa, to when you first got introduced to cannabis.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
That’s a cool story. So in order to understand why I got introduced to cannabis, you got to understand how I became very sick. For 34 years, I was a perfectly healthy young woman, very ambitious. I was a senior engineer working for the LDS Church and I was living a wonderful life. In under 20 days in January 2018, my fingers and my feet, and my face started to go numb. And we thought that was some strange symptoms. And 20 days later, I had an MRI and that would be the last day I would walk for about 18 months. And the next two months after that, February, March 2018, I saw 14 doctors had over $150,000 worth of test. My body began to shut down. So the neuropathy spread across my entire body. My body felt like it was on fire. I could no longer stand.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I could no longer control the left side of my body. They thought that I was having strokes. They thought I was having seizures. They tested me for MS. I was having lumbar punctures, MRIs. It looked like Guillain-Barré. This condition where your autonomic central nervous system shuts down very aggressively. I had all the symptoms of Guillain-Barré, but none of the proteins that you would expect your body to create when that was happening. And so all they could understand was that something was shutting my body down. Something was shutting down my central nervous system, but we couldn’t tell what. And so the pain that I experienced from this was indescribable. My entire body felt like it was on fire, pins and needles filling above that. And the pain was driving me mad. So the doctor started prescribing me so many types of opioids, Gabapentin, heavy-hitters, not so heavy-hitters.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, it’s insane. You talk about this like it’s just a story now. Right. But what you’re describing and Guillain-Barré is not common. It’s rare.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
It’s very rare.
Tim Pickett:
It’s very rare. And in the ER and in emergency medicine, we’re trained that it typically starts at the feet and works its way up, not typically in the hands, but it’s like people are wearing numb socks and then they get weakness and it goes up to the knees and it’s both legs. And then all of a sudden they can’t walk. And at that point, you start to really worry that as it creeps up, they won’t be able to breathe.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
Like, and it’s coming and it’s devastating. Yeah.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And it was scary. And that’s the same thing because as the neuropathy spread across my chest, my heart rate was too high and then too low blood pressure, too high, too low. I started passing out.
Tim Pickett:
And this happens with people with spinal cord injuries where you can’t regulate your nervous system. And that’s what regulates your blood pressure. So there’re these chills people get and the blood pressure and the heart rate starts to go… I mean, it’s trying to regulate, but it’s not communicating with the whole half of your body.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Exactly.
Tim Pickett:
Which at times will expand the blood vessels so then your blood pressure just drops. So your heart rate got to jack up and people shake and shiver. I was a CNA. My very first job in medicine was a CNA working with spinal cord injury patients. And we would see this nervous system, just the response was crazy. But the pain you describe is the burning.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah. And we actually figured out what the burning was later. So I was keeping a medical journal and noticed I had four MRIs with contrast in under nine weeks and strangely enough my symptoms became considerably worse within 12 to 24 hours after each MRI. And the MRI comes with a contrast and the contrast is a gadolinium based, rare earth heavy metal that they claim is safe for your body and that your body will push it out in under three days. Well, we found out that my body composition does not push that gadolinium contrast out after an MRI. So what we had found out was that I’m going through all these symptoms and then I had gotten a manmade disease above this from my MRIs called gadolinium deposition disease. And that’s what made me lose my balance, lose my ability to walk, also aided in shutting down my central nervous system, because I essentially had heavy metal radiation poisoning from my MRIs that made my symptoms so much worse.
Tim Pickett:
Was this something that was underlying they thought or something that was caused by… What was happening to you? You weren’t excreting it, the body wasn’t getting rid of it. Is that something that you always have had do you know?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
So we found out later, so because I was healthy, these are things I’d never explored. So we later learned through genetics tests that I have a mutation, it’s called the MTFR mutation. So my body has lost about 80% of its natural detoxing abilities. So some of these medications that they put in my body I wasn’t able to detox the bad. We also learned that because of this genetic mutation and another one called ultra rapid metabolizer, that some of these opioids that they were giving me, my body was metabolizing them so fast that they became toxic to me. They were almost acting as neurotoxins rather than helping me with my pain and making things considerably worse for me. So it was a crazy combination. The neuropathy came first and then all these other symptoms showed up after the MRI. And it was just this perfect storm of being perfectly healthy.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And under 20 days watching my entire body collapse both from whatever my mystery disease was that caused the neuropathy and we have some theories. We actually now have evidence from later MRIs that I had encephalitis, a very rare form of encephalitis called mycoplasma pneumonia, autoimmune encephalitis. And they think that this bacteria got into my brain, collapsed my CNS and the neuropathy feeling. I lost two thirds of my nerve density. And under about six months, we proved that with biopsies because when it’s your small nerve fibers being destroyed, they have to do a biopsy. They can do an EMG to look at your large nerves. My large nerves were fine. So they ruled out any delete disease of my large nerves, but realized that my small nerves, which is my autonomic central nervous systems’ communication pathways were disappearing. And that was what was leading to a lot of the autonomic dysfunction that we saw then, and that I still deal with today. I have POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. So my heart rate and blood pressure still can’t regulate. It’s been four years.
Tim Pickett:
And this is because the loss of the nerve tissue.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
So there is some regrowing of nerves, but not in the way that you’re talking about or the way that you lost.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Very slow.
Tim Pickett:
You grow like a centimeter, an inch of one nerve. I mean, we’re never giving you back all of the nerves, unfortunately.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct. Correct.
Tim Pickett:
So 20 days, less than three weeks time, what’s happening for you? Oh my God. Just the emotional part of this.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Terrifying. I had two small children at the time. They were only four and six at the time. And so one thing that was really scary was my husband. I didn’t realize a few times was pulled out into the hallway and they said to him, your wife’s not going to make it. She’s most likely going to have a heart attack or her blood pressure will drop too low. She’ll go into levels of losing oxygen to her brain and she might just shut down in the middle of the night. They sent home a heart monitor at one point and said, you know what, this will beep if her heart goes too low, at least it might be able to wake you up and see what you can do. But they told him I was most likely going to die in my sleep. What was very frustrating was they could see my body shutting down.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I was starving. I wasn’t absorbing nutrients. They would see me have these seizures. I was in the ICU in and out. But as soon as none of their tests came back positive with any meaningful reason or clear indication of what was shutting down my body, each time they said, well, your tests are normal. You look fine to us on paper. We can see you are not fine, but because there’re no diagnoses to keep you here, they kicked me out of the hospital every single time. I was sent home with nothing, I was even surprised I was losing so much weight and they wouldn’t even keep me to give me TPN or any other methods of nutrition. Again, simply because they couldn’t find a diagnosis that would explain my symptoms. Some of them said I had conversion disorder that this was all made up in my head and it felt real to me.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And I’m like, no, I know me. I know my stress. My stress is what made me one of the most successful women in my career, I was one of the first females to graduate from UVU in a bachelor’s in computer science. I loved my stress. I loved my ability to use my stress to be an overachiever and a very productive young woman. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was enjoying very, very rich blessings from my talents. Right? And so for doctors to look at me and say, okay, you’ve lost the ability to walk, talk, eat, even swallow, my autonomic dysfunction for me to be able to swallow food even shut down. So I could get food to the back of my throat and my muscles couldn’t even contract to push food down.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
So I was choking on everything I was trying to eat. The other strange symptom as I started to spin in a clockwise circle. And that happened right after my MRIs. And we later found out that the MRI contrast embedded into my cerebellum, given me a form of cerebellar ataxia. I still can’t walk with balance. I had to learn how to walk visually. I did nine months of neuro rehab to walk visually because I had to walk with a cane or a wheelchair, because I couldn’t walk straight.
Tim Pickett:
So what happened? How did you get through it? Like did somebody decide, you know what, let’s do this one more test.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
So that’s exactly what happened. So we’re now at the end of March, I’ve seen, like I said, about 15 doctors and was in the out of the hospital about nine times. And one of my doctors finally said to me, here’s your choice-
Tim Pickett:
You’re in a wheelchair at this point?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I’m in a wheelchair at this point. I can no longer walk. I can no longer eat. I couldn’t even make words come out clear. Even my speech was slurred. My tongue stuck out to the left. I had a really hard time being able to communicate. And that was a lot of speech therapy as well. But what was going through my mind was a lot of praying because my husband lost his mother to cancer when he was five years old and the last thing I wanted to do was have my husband go through the same thing, having children almost the same age that he was when he lost his mother. And now to have to experience through the side of being a widow with two kids.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, and you were telling us about the test, the final test.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah. The final test. So I had prayed that I would find the right doctor to figure this out and sure enough, within 24 hours, three different people reached out to me and said, hey, he doesn’t take insurance, but there’s a doctor. His name is Dr. Andrew Peterson. He’s with a company called Forum Health here in Utah. And they said, look, he says that he’s a functional integrative medicine doctor, but he’s also a doctor who’s a diagnostic expert. He can figure things out when nobody else can. And so I called their office and obviously he’s a wait to get in. And they’re just like, oh yeah, he could probably see you in two or three months. And I’m like, here’s the deal, one of my doctors said that I have less than two to three weeks to live. Here’s the state that I’m in.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And my options were to die at home, die at Mayo Clinic. And maybe they might figure something out or choose a hospice. And they said, hold on, came back onto the phone five minutes later and said, he can see you tomorrow. He’s booked out three hours. So I sat down with this doctor for two hours and he went over every single test, every single result, every doctor’s note over the last three months, looked over a brief medical history and said, okay, there’s a lot that hasn’t been tested yet. Hold on. He wrote me a blood lab, it was 46 files of blood that I had to be drawn in three different locations, Lab Corp quest in the hospital. And it was a $22,000 blood test. This blood test results came back three days later and that’s how they found the mycoplasma pneumonia antibodies high enough for them to say, all right, we’re pretty sure that from this, you are dealing with a form of encephalitis and this bacteria is so small.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Mycoplasm lever later learned is a recognized bacteria in the medical community. But because it’s so small, it doesn’t have a cell wall and antibiotics don’t work against it. So most of my traditional doctors don’t think of testing for mycoplasma infections and there are sometimes considered co-infections of Lyme disease and other things. I was negative for Lyme disease, but my antibodies were 6,000 times higher than the threshold for mycoplasma pneumonia. So the best guess was that this infection got into my brain and then further my body became autoimmune to the presence of this bacteria. So my body started attacking my own central nervous system, as well as this bacteria festering in my brain. And we have MRIs that indicate with the lesions and holes and tumors that it’s left behind that this kind of damage would only be seen if there was an infection in the brain, but it took us to almost three years to figure that out from beginning to end for that damage to actually show because you can’t fight this type of infection with antibiotics, I began doing IVs.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And so the IVs that he chose to do, they’re natural high dose vitamin C ozone, and he did throw antibiotics in there just for good measure and slowly but surely doing these IVs over the next three months, improved some symptoms. But what we didn’t know was the heavy metal poisoning from the MRIs was causing the rest of the symptoms as we sat there. He’s like, okay, these central nervous system issues that you’re having and some of these neurological issues you’re having, we can track that back to this bacterial infection possibly, we can track that back to autoimmune possibly, but your skin being on fire, you spinning like a drunk, some of these things don’t make sense. And about the same time Chuck Norris, the Chuck Norris came forward and said to the world, hey, my wife was almost killed after having seven MRIs.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And they had done this huge interview and his wife had gotten on the news and she said, after my MRIs, one of the first symptoms was, I felt like I was on fire. And that was a huge light bulb in my head. I was just like, wait, Gina Norris just said she felt like she was on fire and that’s one symptom that none of my doctors could understand was me saying, literally I feel like I’m on fire. And so we started researching it and sure enough, very rare populations can’t expel MRI contrast so the rest of my symptoms happened to be heavy metal poisoning from a manmade injection from my MRI scans. And that took me about $60,000 and 18 months of chelation therapy that I had to go through with the PICC line and the chemo port in order to remove that heavy metal that the MRIs had left in my body.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Six months after my MRIs, we had measured it for the first time and my gadolinium and uranium levels, because gadolinium is actually mined with uranium was 600 times normal than a human body should have. And to equate this, it’s the exact same treatment I would have to do. If I decided to go to Chernobyl and dance in reactor four naked, it’s the same treatment you would do for radiation poisoning. So those combined, you can imagine I was in a lot of pain and none of the opioids were working. That’s how I got introduced to cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
Wow.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Little blown away. A crazy story.
Tim Pickett:
That’s crazy. I mean, I’m sorry. I’m chuckling, this is just crazy.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I know crazy. I have to too, because you look back, I mean, in the moment this was terrifying. Right?
Tim Pickett:
Oh, unbelievable. But you’re on somewhat on the other side of a lot of this right. Where you don’t fear death tomorrow.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
Right. I mean just that alone is just such a huge success. Okay. So wow. I mean, I got to take a breath for heaven’s sakes. That is awesome. Just an awesome case. Right? Okay. So now, opioids aren’t working and I mean, nothing would work.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah. Right.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, I can’t think of a drug that I would prescribe to you right now that would really help.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
You’d have to take so much Gabapentin, you’re taking Ambien to sleep. You’re taking opioids to take your pain out, but then your digestive system isn’t working, especially if you’ve got autonomic dysfunction, your GI system isn’t working anyway as well.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. There’s not a lot of really great… Well, there’s no good prescription medication out there for you.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
No. And that’s what was insane.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So who says, hey, I know what you should do?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah. So that happened to be, I have two uncles that are physicians in California. One of them is an OB, the other one’s a family practitioner and does both functional medicine and traditional medicine. So my doctors/uncles are very well aware of what I’m going through. So May 2018, they reach out and they say, hey, with all these symptoms that you’re having, you need to try cannabis. Now you got to understand, I grew up LDS. I’m working for the LDS church. My very first thought was, you remember going back to fourth grade saying no to drugs I took.
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
At the time I was so naive, I wouldn’t have known the difference between heroin and cannabis. Right?
Tim Pickett:
I mean, that’s what we were taught in the school.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
It’s what we were taught. Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
They were side by side.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah. All these drug classifications are all bulked into one, all horrible for your body. They’re all entryway drugs to something worse. And so my first thought was absolutely no way.
Tim Pickett:
Well, and plus you were working for the church.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Exactly. And it’s illegal in Utah.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, I grew up Mormon and I understand and it’s one thing to be active LDS in Utah. And it is kind of another level to be active LDS in Utah and work for the church full time. Right?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
It was my career. Yeah. And we reached a point where at that point there was, there was two things that shifted in my healing journey. The first thing was a realization that I couldn’t control what was happening to my body, but I could control how I was going to react to it. So even though I was dying, I said, I am going to let people see my positivity, see my hope, see my smile, see my strength. I wasn’t going to let what was happening to my body, determine my outcome. Now at the same time, I wasn’t going to roll over and die. As I said, I was a high achiever, an overachiever, one of the first in the field as a female and I just turned all of that into learning about the body, learning about natural medications. And so I had researched cannabis and I started learning about the endocannabinoid system.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And that was the first thing that made me realize, wait, if God gave us an endocannabinoid system that has the ability to help with your pain, reduce inflammation, stop disease, and this can only be activated by a natural plant that has the compounds that react go into these receptors. I’m like, okay, God gave us an endocannabinoid system for a reason and he has given us plants that nothing else can fit the receptors for that. There’s got to be more to the story here. So after doing a little bit of research, I called my uncles back and said, okay, I want to try this, but I absolutely have to be able to do this in a way that I’m not breaking any laws. And so they said, well, come down, come live with us and let’s try it in California where it’s legal.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And I said, all right, let’s do it. So I went to California and stayed with my uncle and started using medical cannabis and just simple things like tinctures and gummies. And it was incredible. And under three days of being on cannabis, I was able to walk without a cane. My spinning in my head reduced significantly. I wasn’t spinning as a drunk as much. I was amazed at how much it helped me be able to keep food down. I wasn’t throwing up all of my meals. The autonomic dysfunction didn’t go away, but it lessened. I mean, and that was only within three days. By the end of my two week stay, I wouldn’t say I was healed. I mean, obviously this isn’t a magical cure, but I was functional. That was the biggest thing that I realized was I could actually appear functional as long as I had this medication in my system.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And it almost seemed opposite when I don’t have cannabis in my system. My speech is lured. I still spin like a drunk. I fall over easy. That’s when somebody would look at me and be like, you look a little impaired or something’s not right in your head. When I’m on cannabis, especially the sativa side, sativa hybrids, I can speak clearly. I can think, I can respond. I can drive safely. I can walk without falling over. I can manage my pain, all of these things.
Tim Pickett:
This is still even true today?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
It is still true today. Since it’s become legal, every single day I have a form of cannabis, either through a patch, a tincture under my tongue, mince that I take. I vape very occasionally only if I need it to hit a little bit faster for, I have flares. Obviously, a lot of my diseases have left me with flares. But what I found was the magic combination for myself was very high dose CBD. So my CBD intake is between 50 to a hundred milligrams a day. And my THC is between 2.5 to five milligrams about once or twice a day. And that’s about it. And the high dose CBD is actually what helped me when I returned to Utah because obviously I said, you know what? I’m going to keep the laws, but I’m going to advocate for medical marijuana.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And I was really excited when I came back to Utah, started researching our laws to find that liver toss and the Utah patients of cannabis and natural choices had announced, hey, we’re going to propose a bill that people would be able to vote on for legalizing cannabis for medical use. And I was all in, I was passing out signs. I was at the governor’s office when they were discussing some of the proposals. I was at the press conferences. I was running booths. I was sharing with people my story about how medical cannabis was helping me with my own disease and including people that said no, I’m not voting for this. This is a drug it’s going to end up on the street. And I expressed to them, look, this saved my life. This helps me. And a lot of these people said, wow, well, you’re an amazing person. I’ve always been inspired by you and you’re telling me this medication helps you and you’re asking for the right to use a natural medication. How can I say no to that?
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And so a lot of people that said no to voting originally would talk to me and say, you know what, for you I will vote yes. And that was a really big deal. The night that it passed, I did a quick news interview with KUTV and stood there and said, I am so happy. Thank you. Thank you for giving me the right and it’s sad that we had to vote on this. But thank you for giving me the right to choose to use a natural plant for my own healing.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, absolutely.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
That was a big day. That was absolutely a big day for me. And I got my letter the next day. So I was definitely one of the first people to be able to have access to this medication. Use it legally, as well as having the opportunity because I worked for the LDS church to speak to higher up members to express to them, hey, this medication helps me and could someday be the key for me to return to work. Unfortunately, some of my conditions were not reversible and I was ruled permanently disabled in the beginning of 2020. So as soon as that happened, I was trying so hard to return back to work and get my career back. And I was crushed by that ruling. I wasn’t expecting it, but the brain damage is too extensive. The neuropathy has still not stopped. So I still struggle there. I have chronic migraines, chronic nausea, autonomic dysfunction continues. So I am now adjusting to a life that’s different from what I expected, but making the best I can of what this life’s given me. So that’s really where I am today.
Tim Pickett:
So talk about the event that made you choose cannabis. We had talked about this before we started recording.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
So I actually reached a point where I had determined I wasn’t going to break the word of wisdom or the rules of my church and I wasn’t going to take cannabis. And I reached a point where the opioids I was on were making me go crazy. All I could think about was self-harm. And that me dying would be the only way to get a release from this pain. So I actually did a lot of research to take the right pills and I set a date and a time where my kids would be at school and my husband would be at work and I’d be home alone to take these pills and end my life. And I did so, and whatever happened next is nearly unexplainable, but I found myself in a beautiful garden. And so I thought at first, all right, I did it. This must be heaven or some transitional phase into heaven, and I’m looking around and I see a man walking towards me in white robes and immediately realized this is Jesus Christ walking towards me.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And for a quick second, I had this sense of panic, sadness, depression dread, oh my gosh, I just took my life and here’s the moment that I have to face him. And just hoping that he’ll understand why I did it, that he would understand that I did this because I couldn’t handle the pain anymore. I couldn’t handle this disease and had lost hope. And what’s also strange is this opioid that I was on does have a side effect that makes you have disassociative suicidal tendencies. And a lot of people have lost their lives using some of these particular drugs. But I felt like when I took my life that I was watching myself in third person, I really didn’t want to do it. But I watched myself doing it with the other half of me saying, no, I don’t want to, but not feeling like I was in control, but coming back to the garden, he was approaching me.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And the first thing I noticed is that he was holding a plant in his hand and he comes up to me and I remember looking at his eyes so much love and understanding and compassion. And he simply looks at me and says just these things, Vanessa, I created this plant for the use of man, why are you rejecting my gift? And that’s all he said, that’s all he said. The next moment I was awake. I was laying on my bed. My phone was ringing off the hook. And as I had understood, it was my mother. She had called three times and she had picked up my kids from school. As I had planned, she was driving them home and she lives about five minutes from my home. And as I said, my kids were just four and six at the time. And all of a sudden, all three of them heard the words of someone say, pray for Vanessa.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Pray for Vanessa right now. And my mother immediately pulled over. Even my little four year old daughter says TT, who’s the name of her grandmother, TT, TT, we need to pray for mommy right now. And so they all started to pray for me. And my husband had the same inspiration as well. And when I woke up, she had gotten home and she called me and she said, we had this feeling to pray for you. What happened? And she’s just like are you okay? Are you okay? And I’m like, no, I don’t know. I tried to take my life, but I don’t think it worked. And I’m still trying to remember what happened after, but in the end there was no evidence that I had taken any medications whatsoever in my body. Nothing was found in my body. And from that point over, I realized that it was okay to use medical cannabis because this was indeed a gift man to help us with our diseases and our pain. And that’s what really made me choose to try medical cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
How’s your family adjusted to this new situation? The blessed part of this that they have you now?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
Right. Has there been other things because of your involvement in the cannabis advocacy world that have changed for you long-term? I mean just the news, the podcast, the advocacy, do you seem like you talk about this all the time now?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Anyone I can share my story with, I share it with them. And I wouldn’t even say a little tension. At the time I was a youth leader in my ward. And obviously when my news story came out the day after it was legalized, hey, this is Vanessa Kyrobie. She’s LDS. She waited until it was legal. Here’s her story. Right? And I just thought, okay, this is just a simple little news story. It got rewritten in a few other languages. And my family from Mexico even called me to say, you were on the news in Mexico. I’m like, are you serious? It made it all the way down there. And they’re like, yeah. And obviously, I’m one of those people that I respect other people’s choices. And this medication had so much bad rap behind it, that there were members of my ward that came forward and said we think you’re a bad influence on the youth.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
We don’t want you in any leadership positions. You shouldn’t be talking about this in our ward or to our kids. And that was a little bit hard for me at first. Now it’s more open because now that the church has rewritten the word of wisdom to say, hey, this is a medication that we actually approve of as long as it’s being used correctly. And that’s typically what I respond with when people say, okay, you’re using medical marijuana. You’re just this pothead and what if you abuse it? Well, what if I abuse it? People abuse sugar, people abuse caffeine, people abuse their own prescriptions of Xanax and Adderall.
Tim Pickett:
And we’re on prescriptions to feel better, right? To raise our mood to be a little bit more happy.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Exactly. So I’m just like any of these things can be abused. I mean, yes. Can cannabis be abused? Can it be used for a recreational? It can. Sure. But so can your Xanax, so can your Adderall, so can your Coca-Cola you drink 19 times a day. I mean, it’s really perspective. I’m using it for the right reason. I don’t overuse it, I don’t share my medication. This is simply what helps me be able to live a fulfilling life to be able to be a mother to my children, to teach them and to be there for them. A lot of activities that I used to love are limited. That makes me sad. I used to be an avid hiker. We’d hike miles. I was a pro snowboarder back in my teens. I haven’t tried snowboarding in four years because I still can’t maintain my balance.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
When we do go on hikes, my kids recognize that mommy needs to sit down and take a lot of breaks. If I’m walking and my blood pressure gets too high or too low and I can feel it coming on, I just have to sit and kneel and my kids will sit there and just comfort me and people walk by. They’ll be like, it’s okay, mommy’s just a little sick. Don’t worry. You know? So especially my daughter, she’s now lived half her life knowing me as her “sick mother.” And even today, I’m not out of the woods. So from my chemo port, I got sepsis last year, spent 10 days over Christmas in the COVID overflow floor. That was awful. Right? So this last Christmas, since I got to be with my kids, when they wrote their letters to Santa, they didn’t ask for toys, they asked Santa please help mommy be home for Christmas. That’s all they wanted. It was for me to actually physically be there for Christmas, because they had missed me for 10 days.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
So it’s been fascinating. My kids have become amazing at understanding my condition. A lot of people try to hide that from their kids. I’m actually open with my children. They’re now almost eight and 10. And I say to them, this is mommy’s medication and it keeps locked up, but they understand that my medicine is a plant that comes from God. And they also understand that because of my diseases, there are days that I can’t fulfill a promise or go for a walk or play as long in the park. And they understand that because I’m open with them to help them understand what my condition does to my body. And instead of making it a hindrance, we’ve turned it into a family team project. You know, we help each other. We understand what I’m going through and they aren’t hard on me when there’re days that I can, there’re days that I can’t. And I appreciate that.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
It’s really hard to have a chronic disease if your family doesn’t support you, but my family has been nothing but supportive. Every single member, including my great grandparents that are like, no, marijuana’s bad it destroyed her son. No. Now they actually sit back and go. I’m so happy. I’m so happy that you found something that worked and it’s natural and it’s not going to hurt you. And I’ve not had any other family members be negative towards me about it.
Tim Pickett:
You’re bringing tears to my eyes, Vanessa. Just such a great story. For you regardless of the cannabis, really the cannabis in your story is really just a tool that you found to help. It just happens to be a big topic of discussion. I can read the words in your book that will certainly as you write all of this down and you write the book of your story and the 20 days of misery and of just hell coming at you.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And then being able to find one solution after the other, that’ll be a fun story to read.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I agree. Thank you. Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I’m so glad too that the system in Utah has such strong advocates for legitimate use of Medical Cannabis. Because I have said on this podcast many, many times that I’m an avid supporter of legal medical programs well before we even consider moving to adult-use or recreational programs because it’s stories like yours that legitimize it as medicine and we have to legitimize it to de-stigmatize it. And one day maybe we’ll get to the point where everybody understands it like you do.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And understands that it’s just another medication in the medicine cabinet, the ibuprofen for the inflammation, the Tylenol for the fever, the 20:1 tincture for the neuropathy and the pain. Right?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
And the inhaled stuff for the flares.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Because it does work. It does.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
It really does.
Tim Pickett:
It takes the edge off. Right. It puts your pain over there on the couch.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct. And that’s why I tell people it doesn’t take the pain away and some days it does, it just kind of makes you a little disassociative from it. It’s just like, yeah, the pain’s there, but I can manage, it’s just put in the back burner. And I appreciate that a lot. Because imagine living your life where you’re trying to concentrate, you’re trying to work, even do a load of laundry and to feel the millions of pins and needles in every inch of your body. And I envy other people, they’re just like, oh yeah, I have my neuropathy in my hands and feet. And I look at them and I’m like, I wish I only had it in my hands and feet. It’s on every single inch of my body that I can physically feel. The neuropathy went up and over into my cheeks, up over my eyes.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I feel like they’re going into my eyes. I’m slowly losing my vision because now the neuropathy’s degrading the optic nerves back into my brain. And then the only places I don’t feel it are just maybe a couple of parts of my back. So over the last three years, neuropathy has continued to stay aggressive. And I mean, aggressive enough that a judge, regardless of my age, young age, looked at it and said, this is some severe damage. You’re absolutely disabled because of this and the person who is the one who determines if there’re any jobs that I can do, because first they determine whether I can do my own job or not sit at a desk and work on a computer. And that was determined no. And then this representative goes out and figures out if there’s any job I can do, can I even just sit in a wheelchair and greet people at a Walmart, right?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And this individual came back and said that there’re no jobs at all that would accommodate my disabilities. And once that was said, the judge said all right, you’re ruled disabled. And if people were to look me on the streets, they would not see someone sickly unless I’m walking with my cane. Then they kind of question, that’s a pretty young woman to be walking with a cane on a flare day. But for the most part, I’ve worked very, very, very hard to not look sick. And that’s hard. When people say, well, you don’t look sick. A lot of people could be offended by that. And I smile and say thank you. I worked very hard. I worked very, very hard to be able to look at you, speak clearly, stand without falling over so that you don’t feel uncomfortable seeing my symptoms.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
But at the same time, I love having my friends and family where I don’t have to hold that up. It does take a lot of energy to hold that image up. So they see me sitting down, throwing up, kneeling down, whatever and they understand and I can be myself around them and I can show my struggles around them. And that needs to happen just as much mentally to cope. Another thing that I’ve done is ketamine psychotherapy. I’ve done 16 sessions and ketamine is also my secondary pain medication that has helped as well. So a little combination of both, but especially CBD has been fantastic. I’ve given it to so many people who are wary about THC.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
At least I teach them about CBD. I have a really good friend. He owns, it’s called Dr. Monroe’s CBD Emporium. And he has created some of the yummiest tinctures I’ve ever had really high doses that he even created some custom high doses for my needs. And he also creates a chocolate version that I gave to my grandparents and it helped them with their neuropathy. And I have friends that are teachers and I gave it to them for anxiety. So they can cope with teaching a fourth-grade class and I’ve got some friends that just have some-
Tim Pickett:
You get CBD and you get CBD.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I go into the store and he’s fantastic. Thomas Cross Whites the president. I call him my CBD dad because every product that I can get from him, I’m handing them out to friends with autistic children even. And they’d call me two weeks later and say, you know what? I rolled my eyes when you gave me this, but I have a whole new child because of you. My child’s actually doing homework. I’m not having these outbursts anymore. My child actually listened to me and had a conversation with me and those make it feel like my purpose is fulfilled. And that was the second thing, it’s finding a purpose. When you become chronically sick, the first thing to adjust is your own attitude and I said, okay, I’m going to be positive. I’m going to be joyful. I’m going to show hope.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
The second thing to keep you going is you have to find a purpose. And my new purpose was to share my story, share the medications that helped me, share my experiences on different ways to find your healing journey and trying to help others to find their own healing journey with whatever feels right for their own body. And that’s been huge for me. I run a lot of groups as well on MRI poisoning and it’s very rare.
Tim Pickett:
Really, really rare. I’ve never ran really into anybody in the years that I’ve been in medicine, certainly haven’t run into anybody with that diagnosis.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Correct. Rare enough gadolinium deposition disease or gadolinium toxicities, what it’s called. And again, most people that are healthy can spit it out. But in my case it was just a perfect storm. Or I could have just already been broken from the encephalitis that by the time I got the injections from the MRI, my body was just like, nope, I’m done this isn’t this isn’t helping. So yeah, it’s a fascinating healing journey, but I’m still on it and I’m not going to give up. And even though I’ve been real disabled, I’m still aiming to be able to return to work someday if possible, if my healing can be made enough that I can cope being with the sitting down at a computer and working again, I miss my job. I really do miss being productive. But at the same time, this has been a great opportunity to be a stay-at-home mom. And I’ll take that too.
Tim Pickett:
What’s your favorite product? Do you have a favorite product here in Utah?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah, definitely. So the CBD product is Dr. Monroe’s CBD Emporium. It’s here in Orem and their CBD tinctures gummies. And they’re probably the yummiest tinctures I’ve had. The second dispensaries that I go to is Pure Utah and I go to Desert Wellness in Provo. And the first year that our dispensaries opened, I was a little disappointed in some of the products, but I am very impressed now. I recently found the bujaBoojum pills and some mints that are two and a half milligrams, the exact dosage that I need to just get that pain and edge off are now sold in simple capsules for a price that actually feels reasonable. So it’s been really cool to watch our dispensaries grow in inventory.
Tim Pickett:
Not a lot of low-dose products out there for patients who want a standardized dosing. There seems to be a growing number of high dose products. You can buy a hundred milligram metabolic and you just have to cut that thing up too much to make it useful.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
When I went to San Diego last year and I bought a package of gummies and I didn’t pay attention to it, for some reason I saw a couple of zeros. I’m like, okay, it must be a hundred milligram. You see them as 10 milligrams. No, I had bought a package of a thousand milligram, 10 gummies. They’re a hundred milligrams each and they’re peach rings. And I had failed to notice that when I took a peach ring thinking it was 10 and that was quite the experience. I probably laid on the beach for 12 hours just going, wow, the world is lovely. I’m actually so fascinated. If my dose of THC is too high, it actually makes me hyper-aware of my pain. So strangely enough, I actually have to stay low dose on the THC.
Tim Pickett:
I’m not surprised actually.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Yeah. I become a little hyper-sensitive to the way that I feel and that’s not the greatest feeling.
Tim Pickett:
No, I’m sure it’s not.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
That was my only mistake because yes, double-check your dosage. Don’t pop a hundred-milligram peach ring.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Truth in advertising, right? And making sure you read the label. Is there something about the Utah program that you’d like to see changed?
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I have only felt a little bit sad towards my friends who wanted to grow their own cannabis, even though we’re not quite the climate for it. I do know that there’s hemp growers that are successful here. And if there was a change, it would be to allow people to be able to grow this medication. The cost of flowerI think is absolutely ridiculous. When you’re looking at 300 to $400 for an ounce of flower, I mean, come on, you’re growing a plant and up-charging that right way too much. I would like to see flower to either be more accessible or to allow people to grow their own flower. If I do use flower, it’s very rarely I have my own vaporizer for it because my lungs have struggled a lot. I grew up next to Geneva Steel. Strangely enough, I breathed in all of those black particles from Geneva Steel.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
And even though I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, I’m on watch for cancer because I have all these black spots in my lungs. They call it miner’s lung, typically miners get it for mining coal. I got it simply because I grew up next to Geneva Steel breathing in all of that stuff. So to smoke or vape, anything into my lungs hurts really bad. So I watch for that. But I have other friends that are patients that’s the only way that their body can tolerate it the best is using flower. So I would hope that the program would eventually make flower a more decent price. Or let us grow our own.
Tim Pickett:
Sure. Well, Vanessa, this has been one of the most fascinating conversations that I’ve had on this podcast. I am so glad you reached out and we got connected.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
I appreciate it.
Tim Pickett:
Or we reached out to you and got connected with you and your story. Just phenomenal that you are where you are today.
Vanessa Kyrobie:
Thank you. I worked really hard to get here. But yeah, like I said, I love sharing my story. So thank you for having me on this.
Tim Pickett:
Yep. Keep it up. For those of you that are not subscribed to the podcast, Utah In The Weeds, subscribe on any podcast player that you have access to. And Vanessa Kyrobie, thanks again. Everybody stay safe out there.
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.
