Episode 91 of Utah in the Weeds features Collin Mekan, a beloved patient experience agent at Utah Therapeutic Health Center. Collin’s friendly demeanor, great sense of humor, and knowledge of Medical Cannabis have made him an invaluable team member at UTTHC.
We started this episode with a brief overview of Collin’s work experience within the cannabis industry. Before joining UTTHC, Collin worked in cannabis cultivation. [03:25]
Collin’s knowledge of cannabis and the human body’s endocannabinoid system help UTTHC’s patients feel comfortable with cannabis medicine. [06:23]
Collin spends some of his free time playing music. He said he owns several guitars and he likes to “folk out” now and then. He and Tim shared some of their memories about learning to play instruments as students. [11:57]
Next, they talked about cannabis and other plant-based medicines. Tim and Collin agree that Utah’s Medical Cannabis patients should have the legal right to grow their own medicine. [15:56]
Collin and Tim touched on the spiritual aspects of cannabis use – a topic that doesn’t often get discussed in a medical setting. Then they talked about some of the legal pitfalls Utah’s Medical Cannabis users could face. [20:04]
Collin told us about his experience turning 40, and Tim also shared a few insights about being in his early 40s. [23:29]
Next, they talked about the therapeutic potential of some of the lesser-known cannabinoids, like CBG and CBN. Both hope to see more non-psychoactive products available to Utah’s Medical Cannabis patients. [24:41]
Collin told us about his own use of Medical Cannabis, including the use of cannabis to deal with social anxieties. One benefit of Medical Cannabis is “layering,” or using multiple delivery methods to achieve the desired effect. [31:15]
Tim and Collin discussed the stigma and stereotypes surrounding cannabis, and how Utah is already ahead on that front. [36:18]
Tim mentioned the Discover Marijuana YouTube channel’s series of giveaways in March. This led to a discussion about Tim and Collin’s favorite dry herb vaporizers. [38:41]
Collin talked about visiting Scotland for his 4o birthday and some of his other travels with his wife. [41:30]
Next, they discussed the supportive atmosphere at Utah Therapeutic Health Center, which echoes the familial quality of Utah’s Medical Cannabis community. [42:32]
When asked about his favorite cannabis strain, Collin said it’s more important to focus on the cannabinoid, terpene, and flavonoid content of the product. [45:46]
We wrapped up the episode with a discussion about cannabis cultivation, and the opportunities Utah has yet to explore. [47:55]
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everyone out to episode 91 of Utah In The Weeds. My name is Tim Pickett and I’m the host, here with you and Colin Mekan, a friend of mine, and I think the only person in Utah who has both experienced growing and worked in the patient side of the medical cannabis program. Very excited to share this with you because his perspective and his experience is unique.
Tim Pickett:
For those of you who want to get into this industry, listen to Colin’s experience when he talks about how far he drove and the sacrifices that he made and was willing to make in order to get into the industry, the cannabis space. Which is very heartening.
Tim Pickett:
Then his experience with the patients and how that experience helped him grow into, well, really one of our best experienced agents. And somebody who really cares about people and cares about that education and their health, helping them all along the way, transition from prescription medications to natural therapy and plant therapy with the cannabis plant.
Tim Pickett:
I Also want to mention that right now we have started the March giveaway series. We’ve partnered with DaVinci Vaporizers for March for our Discover Marijuana YouTube channel. You can go to Discover Marijuana on YouTube, subscribe, and then comment on this week’s Discover Marijuana video on our YouTube channel. You must be a United States resident aged 21 or older, or a Utah medical cannabis cardholder, to win. There are, of course, a few people under 21 that are medical cannabis cardholders here in Utah and they would be eligible as well.
Tim Pickett:
But we’ll announce the prizes during the videos launched on Wednesdays. Okay? That is the rule. Basically subscribe to Discover Marijuana on YouTube, comment on this week’s Discover Marijuana video on that YouTube channel, and you’ll be entered to win. Every week of March those prizes are going to increase and everybody who’s entered will continue to be part of that drawing and part of that.
Tim Pickett:
It’s really a cool program, we’re really excited to give back to the community here with some swag and some DaVinci products. They’re a really good medical vaporizer product for dry flower, if you want to use flower in Utah this is a non-flame state and will continue to be a non-flame state for the foreseeable future. There was no discussion in the legislation this year about adding flames, whatsoever. Anticipate that’s going to continue for years to come.
Tim Pickett:
Here’s this interview with Colin. Just a great guy. A lot of talk about the endocannabinoid system. I hope you enjoy this episode. Subscribe on any podcast player that you have access to, Utah In The Weeds. I’m Tim Pickett, thanks for listening.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, okay. Tell everybody your full name and what you do.
Collin Mekan:
My name is Collin Michael freaking Mekan and I am a patient experience agent here at UTTHC, working for UtahMarijuana.org.
Tim Pickett:
What did you do before this?
Collin Mekan:
Oh, at one point I was working for True North in cultivation, moved on-
Tim Pickett:
Our friend Brandon.
Collin Mekan:
My friend Brandon Alonzo, big shout-out to him, taught me everything that he knew. I was in charge of the mothers and their clones at one point, which I really enjoyed.
Tim Pickett:
Did you get to be involved in that, when they were in their new facility?
Collin Mekan:
I did. I was a big part of that move. I was working with them in Plymouth, along with indoor and outdoor Riley, who are now with Standard [crosstalk 00:04:13].
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, for those of you who don’t know Riley Meyer, you should listen to whatever episode that is, it’s probably in the 60s, 70s.
Collin Mekan:
It’s a good one, absolutely.
Tim Pickett:
It was a good one. Yeah, go back and listen to that.
Collin Mekan:
Yes. Riley’s incredibly knowledgeable. We would drive three hours a day back and forth, going to Plymouth in commitment to that job. But at one point we were just in a little warehouse out in the middle of nowhere and it was a lot of fun to help make that expansion.
Tim Pickett:
Was that the first thing you did in cannabis?
Collin Mekan:
It is. I really have to make a shout-out as well to my friend Andrea Silva and Matt [Chiota 00:04:49] Vagabond, just for getting me into the industry once Proposition 2 passed. It was a great experience.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. Talk about that. You drove three hours?
Collin Mekan:
I did.
Tim Pickett:
Who in their right mind, for a job?
Collin Mekan:
Passionate people, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Collin Mekan:
Very passionate, committed people.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. It’s like I set you up for that question.
Collin Mekan:
Yes, thank you very much, Tim. We were very passionate. We all felt the same, that the universe was taking us in a direction and we were just going with the current of it and all meeting each other while were doing. And really inspiring each other and piquing each other’s interest and learning from that.
Tim Pickett:
Do you feel like… What made you switch from cultivation then to the patient side of things? [crosstalk 00:05:32].
Collin Mekan:
I was relieved from duty at one point. I was working for Harvest as one of their managers and they made a switch. I found my position dissolved. Then I found myself without a job for a little while. I just twirled my mustache and thought-
Tim Pickett:
It’s pretty nice.
Collin Mekan:
Thank you. Unemployment and cat oil, ear wax, and human saliva, just twirling away. But eventually I kept educating myself through your videos, Tim, and it was very Utah specific. One day I noticed at the bottom of the website it said careers. I just pressed that button there and here I am.
Collin Mekan:
I like to say this, I feel like I’m on a different side of cultivation now where I feel I get to see this community grow. Cultivating a community instead.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Nice. That’s a really good way to look at it. I haven’t met anybody, except you, who’s been on both sides of this. Right?
Collin Mekan:
I love it.
Tim Pickett:
From the cultivation and the growing side and the patient care side. You have an experience and a perspective that nobody else, you’re the only one, literally [crosstalk 00:06:42]. Yeah, you really are the only one.
Tim Pickett:
Here, one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on this podcast was that perspective. Because you see patients and something, I don’t know what it is, some of it is the passion for cannabis as medicine, some of it is your knowledge it seems like. But there is something different about the way you talk to people than the way, really, everybody else.
Tim Pickett:
I love everybody who’s here, don’t me wrong about that, but there is something a little different about it.
Collin Mekan:
I can honestly say that stemmed from one of our original meetings that you were a part of, where you mentioned treat these people like they’re your family. Treat them like they’re your grandmother and that you have a great connection with these people.
Collin Mekan:
I really took that to heart, Tim, and I try to use it every day. I feel real passionate for these people and I’m excited for them on this journey. There’s still a huge stigma to it and I Feel like we’re breaking that every day.
Collin Mekan:
I also feel like one day we’re going to look back and feel like we were part of a movement rather than individuals getting their medical cannabis card. Because what better place to do this than here? It’s really working.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Walk us through what you do here. How do you talk to patients? When we worked in Bountiful, I’d do the visit, we’d talk through all of their medical history and the evaluation process and give them basically the key to the door. Then they come to you. What are you excited about telling people when you talk to them?
Collin Mekan:
I think that that’s my job. I try to get them excited about it. Recently I had somebody approach me outside of work and tell me that I got her her first card. I was very proud of that, and still I was able to give her some pointers and some tricks to saving some money.
Collin Mekan:
I just like to keep people pretty excited about their endocannabinoid receptor system. It’s pretty fascinating that we even have it, to be honest with you.
Collin Mekan:
But if I can get people excited about that and let them know what their options are, then we can really make the program succeed.
Tim Pickett:
For me with cannabis, it started out a lot about the plant and about the endocannabinoid system and choosing to use the right strains or the right products. There’s a lot to that now and we give a lot of education about that.
Tim Pickett:
But there’s also something that seems to be underlying and cannabis is really just the tool that we use. Because when you talk to patients, you’re not getting them excited, it seems like, about their endocannabinoid system almost as much as you’re getting them excited about learning something new. Right? And taking control a little bit.
Collin Mekan:
Absolutely. They’re 100% in charge of this whole situation. I love to inform them of that because I find that incredibly empowering and kind of beautiful at the same time. Some of our patients, that’s quite a relief for them. You see that every day.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I think that’s one of the most powerful things that we do. I mean it’s like Lance Armstrong wrote the book It’s Not About The Bike. I feel like that in some ways here, that it’s-
Collin Mekan:
That it’s not about the [bowl 00:10:00]?
Tim Pickett:
It’s not about the bowl. I mean it kind of is, but that’s just the key and the tool that we use to get people to wake up.
Collin Mekan:
Also I like to point out to people these new devices. A nice vaporizer really allows you to give new life and respect to your marijuana. Saves those terpene profiles, they’re known as precision vaporizers. Then you can stretch out your product by saving your AVB and really doing whatever you want with it.
Collin Mekan:
Once I realized that, I started eating my AVB, putting it on my ice cream at night. But I sleep the whole night through and that’s a miracle for me sometimes, totally uninterrupted.
Tim Pickett:
How much have you learned here versus what you were exposed to when you were growing or in cultivation?
Collin Mekan:
I’ve learned quite a bit here, because my focus was able to shift a little bit. When I was working in cultivation I was very plant oriented. When I was working with clones, I had a dream I was growing roots out of the back of my neck and that was very unnerving.
Collin Mekan:
But now that I’m working with patients, that’s very rewarding. I feel like I’m very connected to this community, where before working with the plants was amazing but my face was in a plant every day. Here I get to actually communicate and see how this is helping people. It feels like quite the blessing.
Tim Pickett:
Have you… You’ve used a bunch of different ways now, that you weren’t using before even?
Collin Mekan:
Yes. Well, for one I think putting-
Tim Pickett:
Consumed, I guess. What’s the term? Use, consume, whatever.
Collin Mekan:
My dosing method.
Tim Pickett:
Dosing method, right.
Collin Mekan:
I do a little bit of everything, in reality. But now putting fire to my flower seems kind of comical. I couldn’t even do it. One, I know that I’m wasting so much of my product, which costs me money. But then I’m also missing out on medicine which helps me sleep at night. Again, that’s a game changer for me.
Tim Pickett:
What do you do for furn?
Collin Mekan:
I like to entertain my wife actually. I love to make her smile and laugh and I love to cook for her. But I play guitar as well and I like to write a lot of music.
Tim Pickett:
Oh really?
Collin Mekan:
Yes. I’m very good.
Tim Pickett:
Electric?
Collin Mekan:
No, I play acoustic. I had to pin it down to acoustic folk Americana I suppose. I like to folk out every now and then.
Tim Pickett:
Nice. How many years have you been playing?
Collin Mekan:
I’ve been playing since I was 12. I went through that phase when you’re 12, people think you’re a phenom, adults see you sing and play guitar and you’re like wow, he’s going to go places.
Collin Mekan:
I did not. I did graduate from an arts academy. I went to Interlochen, which was one of the number one arts academies in the country at the time. Since there I find myself doing a lot of karaoke, which I find is a great form of expressionism and maybe therapy even. I guess those would be my pastimes.
Tim Pickett:
How many? Do you have one guitar?
Collin Mekan:
I have about five guitars right now. Lately I’ve been playing my acoustic bass quite a bit. Not one that I picked up very often for a while, so been picking it up, slapping it around, seeing what other gifts I have available to me I suppose.
Tim Pickett:
Did you play in a band?
Collin Mekan:
No. I do play with a friend of mine every now and then. But it’s mainly just for fun, a way to express ourselves I suppose.
Tim Pickett:
I mean now we’re going to need to hear it. I mean are you willing to bring it to the Christmas party?
Collin Mekan:
I would 100% bring it to the Christmas party, Tim. I even wrote a jingle for you. I don’t know if I’m going to be sharing today, because there are a lot of swear words in it, Tim. And it’s 15 minutes long.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, sweet.
Collin Mekan:
I do look forward to sharing it with you one day.
Tim Pickett:
I really have always loved music. I grew up singing mostly, played a little piano, played a little guitar. Everybody who sings and grows up playing the piano might play the guitar. Right? I can play three or four songs. I have one, I have a guitar.
Collin Mekan:
You don’t see pianos in many households anymore. You see universal, that universal instrument. Go over to a friend’s house, sit at the piano, play a few songs. Now it’s the acoustic guitar. You can go over to almost anyone’s house, see that acoustic guitar. I never see an oboe or a reed instrument.
Tim Pickett:
No. I played the clarinet.
Collin Mekan:
Like hey man, do you mind if I play that clarinet of yours over there?
Tim Pickett:
I played the clarinet in junior high, moved to the saxophone, played the baritone sax in junior high. Then I had an alto sax. That’s just an instrument that was very popular when I was in junior high, that age group. Kenny G.
Collin Mekan:
Oh really?
Tim Pickett:
Do you remember Kenny G?
Collin Mekan:
Oh my goodness, do I ever.
Tim Pickett:
Right? He played the soprano. [crosstalk 00:14:49] for those of you who are too young to know.
Collin Mekan:
Excuse me.
Tim Pickett:
Know Kenny G, I went to a concert, a Kenny G concert. That is a crazy [crosstalk 00:15:00] long, permed hair too. Right? That brings back some memories.
Tim Pickett:
I did not use cannabis at that time. I was way too young and yeah, that’s [crosstalk 00:15:13].
Collin Mekan:
Can we pop on some Kenny G now? Is that [crosstalk 00:15:16]?
Tim Pickett:
I’ll have Nate put the Kenny G, play it over the-
Collin Mekan:
Really set the mood.
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Collin Mekan:
Oh man, that’s ridiculous. You know, actually when I was working with clones I started doing a lot of research on what they heard. Because I knew that they sensed vibrations, they’re hearing something as well was the idea.
Collin Mekan:
I started doing research on what instruments mimicked nature and it came down to string instruments. I started playing a lot stringed music for my plants and they were responding really well to it. I was thinking of thunder, [inaudible 00:15:51] thunder, how they respond to that. It seemed to work quite well for a while.
Tim Pickett:
Is growing at home something that is important to you, to try to work for?
Collin Mekan:
Absolutely. I mean just the idea of growing in general, I like to promote growth all around me, within myself and the people that I care about and run into every day. But I love my little herb garden. I’ve really came to respect the herbs over the years.
Collin Mekan:
That was one of the things that brought me into it actually. You’ve mentioned this a few times on your podcast or different videos, but that idea of aspirin being derived from the bark of the willow tree. I had a willow tree outside of my apartment at this point. I never made my own aspirin, but I remember making that connection and how close medicine actually was to us and all around us and that really piqued my interest.
Tim Pickett:
For example, van Gogh’s Starry Night painting, the theory goes that he saw it that way because of his heart failure and he was on dandelion root for a diuretic. They used to use, well I mean they still do, dandelion [crosstalk 00:17:02]. If you drink a lot of dandelion tea-
Collin Mekan:
I love my dandelion root.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Okay. If you’re ever in a weight loss competition [crosstalk 00:17:15] here you go.
Collin Mekan:
I don’t know if that is going to be happening for me, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
If you’re ever in a weight loss competition, the last couple of days you got to get some dandelion root at the GNC and you got to overload on the dandelion root and you’ll pee out three or four pounds.
Collin Mekan:
That’s gross, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
But it’s plant based medicine.
Collin Mekan:
All right then. I’m going to trust you and get some of that dandelion root tea. I actually love my home apothecary. I go to some of the local apothecaries around town and they’re amazing.
Collin Mekan:
One of them, you walk into it’s like a classroom in Hogwarts. Just full of all these mason jars, every herb and spice you can possibly think of, fungis, and this and that.
Tim Pickett:
This is something we don’t talk a lot about in Western. Western medicine is so allopathic. You have a symptom, oh yeah, we created a pill or a drug or something for that. Plant based medicine just not at all. Right?
Tim Pickett:
It’s one of the problems we have with cannabis, I think, is the doctors, the providers, they have a hard time using a drug that is so broad.
Collin Mekan:
Yeah. Figuring out how to actually dose with it.
Tim Pickett:
You’re trying to create a solution to one symptom, but you’re using something that affects multiple systems.
Collin Mekan:
Oh, it’s phenomenal.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Which is [crosstalk 00:18:35] for us, for you and I, this is why wouldn’t you?
Collin Mekan:
Why wouldn’t I.
Tim Pickett:
Why wouldn’t you do this? It’s not only going to help you with your pain, but your headaches and your attitude, your anxiety.
Collin Mekan:
I see our endocannabinoid receptor system, I know the way that it works with me when I use marijuana. But to see it affect the elderly, I feel almost like our CB system was designed for them.
Collin Mekan:
As you get older, I mean it’s hard to go through life without one of these qualifying conditions. To even have our endocannabinoid receptor system in the first place blows my mind. People say it looks like we’ve evolved side by side with this plant to actually have that system.
Collin Mekan:
But more likely than not we’ve just been eating the animals that will ingest it, I suppose. But the fact that it’s there for us to tap into as a processing unit, I find that fascinating. The fact that we can manipulate it with layering, I find once you start layering and manipulating your CB system, you really take control of it and it helps you process all types of things you don’t even realize.
Collin Mekan:
I mean I think of the analogy of walking to your car and then dropping your coffee just as you open the door and ruining your day and you’re crying. Or else dropping your coffee and laughing it off and saying typical. You know? How do you process your stress throughout a day? How do you process trauma without even noticing it? It’s so subtle, it’s quite beautiful.
Tim Pickett:
I like your attitude about the plant.
Collin Mekan:
There’s spiritualism to it, in a way.
Tim Pickett:
That’s something we don’t even hear. We don’t almost have time, it seems like, to talk about the spiritual side of cannabis.
Collin Mekan:
No.
Tim Pickett:
But these psychoactive medications and the plants that are so psychoactive, peyote and ayahuasca and these other-
Collin Mekan:
Shifts your perspective a little bit.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. When you talk about evolving next to the plant and the shaman or the medicine person in the tribe would help people use things like this, it wasn’t just about medicine. It really was about that spiritual experience.
Collin Mekan:
Connecting you to the earth, set in the setting almost. Setting intentions.
Tim Pickett:
It’s a whole ‘nother realm of cannabis as a medicine that we talk about quite a bit, I guess. It’s one of the reasons why I think people have a hard time getting away from, like rolling a joint. Right? Because it’s not just the joint, smoking the joint, that was [crosstalk 00:21:18].
Collin Mekan:
It’s the ritual.
Tim Pickett:
It’s the rolling, yeah.
Collin Mekan:
How tight it is.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And that experience of grinding. I think we get that with the vaporizer.
Collin Mekan:
I find that we can. I mean it’s really hard for me to go back to that experience. I mean I feel like I’m wasting so much of it, and I also don’t want to get arrested, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. The law [crosstalk 00:21:39] we have had, in fact, I had a patient, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, who got a ticket for having papers in their trunk.
Collin Mekan:
Oh no.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Collin Mekan:
No tobacco to go with those papers?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, no tobacco to go with the papers and there you go. They got a ticket for paraphernalia.
Collin Mekan:
That’s quite unfortunate to hear those stories.
Tim Pickett:
Even though they had a card.
Collin Mekan:
But I mean we still have to be careful. It’s still a fledgling industry and people are still learning the laws. As we go, even some of our law enforcement, I suppose.
Tim Pickett:
Sure. Have you ever run into law enforcement with cannabis?
Collin Mekan:
No, I am lucky. I have always abided by the laws, Timothy Pickett. But I have been quite lucky. As I got older, I honestly had this… I was tapping into some of my privilege that I didn’t even recognize was there.
Collin Mekan:
Just by the look of me. I like to look fairly respectful to my peers and people that I meet, a way to honor them I suppose. But also I wasn’t somebody that you would really pin as…
Tim Pickett:
Pin as a lawbreaking-
Collin Mekan:
As an outlaw, [crosstalk 00:22:48] Tim. As an outlaw.
Tim Pickett:
As somebody who had two pounds of weed.
Collin Mekan:
Which I never did.
Tim Pickett:
[crosstalk 00:22:53] no, I mean well, I didn’t either. I totally agree with that privileged idea too.
Collin Mekan:
Oh, it’s embarrassing to look back on to now.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So we didn’t get in trouble, which was good. Thank God we didn’t get in trouble. Right?
Collin Mekan:
Ironically too, I have a face that police officers do not seem to enjoy very much as I was growing up. All of a sudden they got a lot younger than me, that was a strange shift as well. When that cop walks up to your window and-
Tim Pickett:
And they’re younger than you?
Collin Mekan:
They’re like 20 years younger than me.
Tim Pickett:
How old are you?
Collin Mekan:
I’m 40 years old now. I’m a man. I’m a man now, Tim. I made it.
Tim Pickett:
You survived.
Collin Mekan:
Yeah, I was in Scotland for my 40th birthday, it was quite the experience.
Tim Pickett:
Congratulations on being 40. 40 was fun.
Collin Mekan:
It feels good, it feels good.
Tim Pickett:
40 was a fun year. It is a novel year, right?
Collin Mekan:
You’ve told me it gets worse after this. You say, “Wait until you’re 43.”
Tim Pickett:
[crosstalk 00:23:53]. Yes. For those of you out there, for those of you whoa re 39, 40’s great. It’s really there’s a novelty to it.
Collin Mekan:
You’re bringing me down, man.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. And 41 is even not so much worse than 40.
Collin Mekan:
Oh great.
Tim Pickett:
42, you start to think shit, I’m kind of knee deep in this.
Collin Mekan:
There is no birthday after this.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And 43 and you realize what everybody says it’s true, Colin. As you get older, it is harder to recover.
Collin Mekan:
Oh, 100%. I keep convincing myself that the weather’s going to be changing any day now because I can feel it in my knees and my shoulders. They’re tight like rubber bands, Tim, it’s terrible. I need to stay medicated.
Tim Pickett:
I noticed when I hurt my back it took a lot more cannabis and THC than I thought it would to really dig in to severe pain.
Collin Mekan:
[inaudible 00:24:57] CBG, CBD, CBN, and CBC. A little bit of THC is great but they really work best in combination with each other. But those other cannabinoids, I mean that’s where the real miracles are happening.
Collin Mekan:
They’re all antiinflammatory, almost all of them help you fight against pain and process that. It’s pretty amazing. I wonder what the rest of the cannabinoids are going to end up doing in the end. I wonder if we’re going to cure brain disease. I don’t think we’re that far away from it, in all honesty.
Tim Pickett:
We might not be [crosstalk 00:25:26]. For those of you who don’t think there is enough evidence for cannabinoid medicine, I think you’d be… I just don’t think… Well, I don’t agree with you.
Tim Pickett:
This is definitely a plant that’s been studied more than probably any other plant that’s ever grown.
Collin Mekan:
It’s one of our oldest medicinal plants, yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Right. And used probably as much or more than any other plant has been used as medicine, ever to grow. That’s a pretty big statement, I guess. I guess I don’t know that for sure.
Collin Mekan:
But, Tim, I am apt to believe you. I feel like I trust the things you say. I’m going to go with that.
Collin Mekan:
With the way that we can dose now too, it amazes me. As I started to educate myself, I like to tell people I found that this is truly the ideal way to be dosing when it comes to flower. I mean still, I mean rolling the joint, passing it around with your buddy, honestly there’s nothing more communal than that. It’s such a unique, personal experience.
Collin Mekan:
But there’s nothing [crosstalk 00:26:28] the peace pipe. You create a circle, you pass it around. I think it’s very communal. Something that [crosstalk 00:26:36].
Tim Pickett:
COVID has ended that too.
Collin Mekan:
Sure.
Tim Pickett:
Not only the flame laws here in Utah, but I mean-
Collin Mekan:
Yeah. People are less apt to pass on a-
Tim Pickett:
Lick each other’s lips, pass it around the circle.
Collin Mekan:
Oh, that’s what I miss before those COVID days, is licking each other lips around the circle. I don’t remember that very well, but I mean if that’s your pre-COVID. I do not judge, Tim. That’s one of the great things about our community.
Tim Pickett:
I love layering and we talk a lot about this with our patients. The oral, using an oral method first and then layering on top of that. I found especially with my back that, to your point about cannabinoids, CBC, CBD, CBG, you don’t get a lot of those with the oral stuff. Where you get a little more of the entourage effect with the flower.
Tim Pickett:
Which really seems to make layering more efficacious, is the word I would use. More useful from a medical standpoint. I hear you talking about that to patients all the time.
Collin Mekan:
Oh, I think it’s really key, is trying to find ways to fill up those receptor sites so you have that entourage effect with full spectrum of all those minor and major cannabinoids that are available to us. It’s really hard to do that because I mean usually your flower’s going to have some THC, maybe some CBD. Same goes with cartridges, can be THC with maybe one or another minor cannabinoid.
Collin Mekan:
If you can find a good non-psychotropic cartridge, I think that’s amazing for layering. I’d love to find some really nice non-psychotropic full spectrum tinctures that we could offer as well.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah [crosstalk 00:28:33]. When you talk about non-psychotropic, we have one, it’s made by Clean Leaf, Kyle Egbert. And Logan. Great guy.
Collin Mekan:
Absolutely. Great job as well.
Tim Pickett:
He does.
Collin Mekan:
In it for the right reasons too, which is something that’s really inspiring in this community. I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but there’s a huge amount of people in this industry that didn’t get into it because of them. They got into it because of a family member or something along those lines, that inspired them to do so.
Collin Mekan:
It’s just really inspiring to see people want to do it because it’s medicine and it’s helping people and that’s their true motivation behind it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. You describe these non-psychotropics and I think they’re really undervalued.
Collin Mekan:
Absolutely.
Tim Pickett:
In the medical marijuana market itself, because I mean you come here, you come to our clinic for an evaluation for a card to use THC. A lot of our patients undervalue the other minor cannabinoids when they come here.
Collin Mekan:
That’s why it’s our job to bring it to their attention, Tim. If they didn’t know about these things, we can’t send them on their path correctly. I feel like it’s almost our obligation to bring these things to their attention, let them know what their options are really. That keeps them excited in the program, I believe.
Tim Pickett:
Over and over people who’ve used cannabis for three, four, five, six months will come back and then realize oh wait, there’s more to it. Right? Phase one seems to be learning how to associate when you get high and what’s that like and dealing with delta nine and that.
Collin Mekan:
Right. It seems so far away to me, I have to remember that it affects people this way.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Then seems like phase two, or phase three is-
Collin Mekan:
Dialing in your dosing.
Tim Pickett:
Yep. And figuring out that there’s, wow, there’s more to the plant than just the psychotropic effects.
Collin Mekan:
So much more to it. I mean I think that the THC gets you into it originally, if you’re younger. But man, [crosstalk 00:30:40].
Tim Pickett:
It’s the rest of the plant that really has probably more, well, certainly more of the actual healing benefits come from the other cannabinoids and things inside the plant, than THC.
Collin Mekan:
100%. I mean THC is lovely as well. I think of it as a vehicular molecule, in combination with all of them together it helps it travel up the central nervous system. Really, they do work best in combination.
Collin Mekan:
A low amount of THC, in all honesty, goes a long way when it comes to the healing properties of this medicine.
Tim Pickett:
You were saying, I caught there, that you don’t get high a lot.
Collin Mekan:
Oh, I haven’t gotten high in years, Tim. But I do stay fairly medicated throughout a day. Excuse me. I was just… I would say my tolerance is fairly high. My wife recently called me a pothead and I was… I won’t lie, that hurt. That cut deep.
Tim Pickett:
Cut deep.
Collin Mekan:
But I could probably utilize a tolerance break, but then I wouldn’t be able to move throughout the day as seamlessly as I do.
Tim Pickett:
What’s a tolerance break look like for you?
Collin Mekan:
Oh man. Sadness. I don’t know. For me it is very habitual, but also I’m very familiar with my body and how I try to fill up my receptor system. It wouldn’t be the same without THC.
Collin Mekan:
I also have crippling social anxieties, which I’m able to mask with this. It’s something that I overcome and I get to decide not to be socially awkward. I face it and just own the awkwardness of the moment. I live in an awkward world too.
Tim Pickett:
We all live in an awkward world.
Collin Mekan:
Thank you. Thank you, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
I’m surprised that you feel like you have this anxiety.
Collin Mekan:
That’s because my tolerance level, Tim. See? That’s manipulating my endocannabinoid receptor system right there.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. If you are listening to this, Collin is a perfect example of what you can do with a cannabis blend.
Collin Mekan:
However, I did start younger than I feel like I should have. I probably started smoking around the ag of 16 and my brain hadn’t fully developed. And look at me now, Tim. Look what it did to me.
Tim Pickett:
When was the first? Take us all the way back to the first time you were exposed to cannabis.
Collin Mekan:
I was breaking into the artistic world in high school, trying to develop my bravery I suppose. I was learning that I can sing, I was feeling pretty artistic. While building my confidence, I had my art friends, I suppose, and I tried it on seven different occasions.
Collin Mekan:
I thought I was immune to marijuana. Then we were on our way to see The Big Lebowski and I remember driving downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan and all of a sudden there’s a joint in front of my face and I took two hits. I remember the spatial, what you call, all of a sudden my seatbelt grew in size immensely and I did not know what was happening.
Collin Mekan:
But it turned out I was just falling towards the seatbelt. In my vision, it was growing as I was getting closer to it. After that I remember thinking it was like walking through a crowd of people at the movie, like I was in a dream and moving so fluidly.
Collin Mekan:
Afterwards I heard that it was because I was walking around, moving my arms like I was underwater. Back then the THC had a really strong effect on me. It was like I was in a dream and I was pretty hilarious I suppose. I made a fool of myself quite a bit.
Collin Mekan:
But I am so far away from that I forget that it has that effect on people. That’s, I believe, part of the stigma about marijuana too. People believe that the effect that it has on them is the same effect that it’s going to have on everybody. So if it made them a fool, they think that there are a lot of stoners out there walking around in a daze.
Collin Mekan:
I found the other side of that. I forget that it has such a strong effect on people because I know the effect that it has on me. That’s knowing your body, I suppose, and really exploring your different methods.
Collin Mekan:
Oh, come back to this. You had mentioned earlier how I dose. I like to utilize everything with layering. I love having a tincture, I really like those non-psychotropic items. I think this is one of the only medicines that layering is actually an option.
Tim Pickett:
It is one of the only. I mean there’s certainly no other medication that I’ve prescribed that you think about. You know what [crosstalk 00:35:29] you should do, is you should take half a milligram of this and then you should-
Collin Mekan:
Drop some under your tongue and see what that does.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And then inhale it. Well, I mean take an inhaled method like albuterol. You’re not going to layer albuterol in a pill form and then an inhaled form. No. Your heart rate, for one, would just go through the roof.
Collin Mekan:
[crosstalk 00:35:50] it made me feel weird.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Or your blood thinner, your blood pressure medication, your insulin. I guess we do layer diabetes medication. We take metformin and then some people take insulin on top of that, if their diabetes is bad enough. But that’s just not a great example, compared to cannabis.
Collin Mekan:
There’s not a lot of things to compare.
Tim Pickett:
There’s just not a lot of, yeah. When you’re talking about how you felt when you first used or you first felt the effects of THC when you have that joint in high school, and I feel the same, that same stigma. Not only for people who use it themselves but for also people who’ve seen one other person high or one other movie with a high person, with that stereotypical on the couch. Pineapple Express comes to mind.
Collin Mekan:
It can happen, though.
Tim Pickett:
[crosstalk 00:36:51] yeah, those definitely can happen. But that’s not the baseline. There are 45,000 Utah patients. You think all of them are-
Collin Mekan:
Intelligent professionals, caring, empathetic people.
Tim Pickett:
[crosstalk 00:37:05] who really want to feel better.
Collin Mekan:
The Uplift program has been such a success. I find that very inspiring, to see that this community, I mean if not generous, we want to share this experience.
Tim Pickett:
We had a patient [crosstalk 00:37:16] today give $104.20.
Collin Mekan:
104.20, yes.
Tim Pickett:
104.20.
Collin Mekan:
Gentleman right after her gave 50, so it’s-
Tim Pickett:
Very committed community.
Collin Mekan:
Absolutely.
Tim Pickett:
Not only of people here who work here and work in the industry, like you and hopefully people say that about me and the providers that we have. But all of the staff here seems like they’re not only just employees but they’re really activists. We have [crosstalk 00:37:45] talked about this.
Collin Mekan:
Well, this is your team, Tim. We’re all into this because we’re real passionate. At least I know I, for one, am definitely into this because I felt the universe bring me here and I feel incredibly passionate about that. I want to share that with other people.
Collin Mekan:
It gets me so excited just even talking about it. I love it. I feel like we’re really going somewhere with this. You’re quite an inspiration to a lot of people, seeing how you’re doing this correctly.
Collin Mekan:
I think you’re setting a template for other states that haven’t been able to do this quite yet. The success that we’ve seen in Utah has been phenomenal, it’s been crazy. I mean they expected 10,000 cardholders. What, we’re at over 40?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, 4, 45 plus thousand and rising. Yep.
Collin Mekan:
Then your podcast. I mean your YouTube, Discover Marijuana. I know that’s over 2,000 listeners at this point.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, over 2,000 subscribers [crosstalk 00:38:38] I think. As of right now when we’re recording this. In fact-
Collin Mekan:
Well, hopefully we can bring that up.
Tim Pickett:
For those of you who are listening to this and on the release of this podcast episode, if you’re not subscribed to the Discover Marijuana channel, we are doing a giveaway in March.
Tim Pickett:
This week I think it’s a micro, DaVinci micro. It’s a glass stash jar, medicine jar. It’s a t-shirt I think. I don’t know, what the heck are the rules? I don’t know. Somebody knows the rules. If you go to Discover Marijuana on YouTube or you follow us on Instagram. Go to our website.
Collin Mekan:
Tim, do you not [crosstalk 00:39:20]?
Tim Pickett:
There are rules to win. Okay? There are rules. I can’t do this all by myself anymore.
Collin Mekan:
Put me in the running. I could definitely use one of those DaVinci micros.
Tim Pickett:
Micros, it is so small. But I use the IQ2.
Collin Mekan:
Yeah, me too.
Tim Pickett:
It’s really become my favorite vaporizer.
Collin Mekan:
Absolutely.
Tim Pickett:
The taste is good. The taste is as good as the Firefly but that seems like for some reason the pull is better.
Collin Mekan:
I will miss the Firefly, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
I do love the Firefly [crosstalk 00:39:52].
Collin Mekan:
But the DaVincis are lovely, the 10 year warranty is amazing.
Tim Pickett:
Have you used the phone app?
Collin Mekan:
No, I don’t have enough space on my phone.
Tim Pickett:
You have to download… Okay, it’s a little bit clunky because you can’t download the DaVinci app in the App Store, from an Apple phone. So you got to download this browser.
Tim Pickett:
I downloaded the browser and then you can connect it to your IQ2 and then you put in how much THC percentage your flower is, if it’s a new loaded bowl in the DaVinci, and it will tell you how many milligrams of THC. I mean it estimates it based on how much you pull on the thing.
Tim Pickett:
But surprising how… And it doesn’t even need to be accurate to the milligram to give you a sense of how much you’re getting, because let’s say you inhale up to where it says 30 milligrams. Well then, all you got to do next time is inhale till it says 30 milligrams again.
Collin Mekan:
Wow. That’s what makes it the precision vaporizer that it is. It dials in the temperature but also you can really see how you’re dosing. It’s pretty amazing.
Collin Mekan:
For somebody like me, I wouldn’t really utilize that very often. I don’t want to say technology is intimidating to me, Tim, but I’ve worked in cultivation for a while and I’ve always leaned away from technology. Up until now I suppose.
Tim Pickett:
It’s you’re more of the dirt grubber type?
Collin Mekan:
Oh absolutely. The friendly fungus in there, helps fight depression and keeps you happy.
Tim Pickett:
When you… What’s your favorite place to go? You went to Scotland for your 40th birthday?
Collin Mekan:
I did. My wife and I travel fairly often. I wouldn’t be able to do this at all without her in my life. But our family lives in Scotland, so we got to go over there and see them.
Collin Mekan:
It was beautiful, it was amazing. But we were also locked down. My birthday is the day before New Year’s, it’s December 30th. We wen there for Hogmanay and we’re not able to really experience Hogmanay. But I do have some heritage there, I got to follow that ancestry line and it was fascinating. It was a beautiful experience.
Tim Pickett:
Where’s the next trip?
Collin Mekan:
We are going to Costa Rica. Yeah, it’s my wife, the amazing saleswoman that she is, she got top sales and won us a trip to Costa Rica. Last time she won us a trip to the Bahamas. So I need to request a little time off, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
Well, if it’s to Costa Rica, there you go. It’s fine. Take all the time you need.
Collin Mekan:
What a guy.
Tim Pickett:
You know? Health and happiness in the team has got to be… We are literally in that business. If you don’t live it on the employee side and on the team side, I think that would be pretty hypocritical.
Collin Mekan:
This is a pretty amazing job, Tim, because of those reasons. It’s a job where you really feel as an employee that you matter. You can give you some direction and helps motivate you. At least me I know. But I really appreciate [crosstalk 00:43:05].
Tim Pickett:
Thank you, Collin. I think that you get a lot of that from everybody else on the team too. I think we-
Collin Mekan:
Oh, we uplift each other. Right?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. We do. I’ve never worked at a place like this. When I worked in surgery, people were always pissed off at us for all the pain and suffering we caused. We did solve a lot of problems for people, surgically.
Tim Pickett:
But here it seems like everybody’s happy when they leave. Not only the team is happy but the patients are all happy. Before COVID hit, I mean I would get a hug from two out of three patients.
Collin Mekan:
I’ve gotten a handful of hugs. I used to gauge my success of the day on how many hugs people would try to give me.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Go into another area of medicine and that’s just not the case. For most people who are here, they’ve never worked in any other part of medicine. They came into this because of the cannabis draw.
Collin Mekan:
Sure. Something about it’s appealing. I don’t know what it is. It’s specialized, I mean [crosstalk 00:44:07].
Tim Pickett:
We get to bridge both worlds. You get to bridge something that you love already, that you’re into already, you want to share with everybody else, the cannabis part. You get to work in medicine where you’re part of something that’s an industry that’s really been run by the pharmaceutical companies for so long. It’s like a movement against… It’s like the anti-medicine.
Collin Mekan:
Yeah. What do you call it? An exit drug.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we’re doing a pretty good job in Utah. And thanks to this program, thanks to what we do, I think that’s the case.
Collin Mekan:
I’ve been reading up a lot on this, Tim. We are the people that keep ourselves educated. I know that California got the ball rolling but the way that Utah’s doing it, ironically, I mean what better place to do it for one. I mean reeducate, remedicate, and destigmatize.
Collin Mekan:
I mean the success rate of this is pretty amazing here in Utah. I give it up to our community. We’re destigmatizing it every day, just by sitting in front of each other and educating ourselves.
Tim Pickett:
Talking about it out loud.
Collin Mekan:
Out loud.
Tim Pickett:
As if it’s not illegal.
Collin Mekan:
The fact that it’s so patient oriented too, that we’re excited for these people. It’s not just about pushing the medical card. It’s about assisting them and giving them the tools to succeed and want to continue with the program. That’s why the program is working in Utah, I believe, is we’re doing it right somehow.
Tim Pickett:
It seems like there’s a lot of good things happening. What’s your favorite strain?
Collin Mekan:
Ooh, I love this question because I’ve really come to realize it doesn’t really come down to favorite strain for me. They’re all hybridized as it is. It’s all about terpenoids, flavonoids, and cannabinoids, Tim.
Collin Mekan:
Once people start paying attention to that, they can believe that they love Bubba Kush and Bubba Kush has never done them wrong. But in reality they probably loved one of those harvests, because every harvest and every batch is different from the next.
Collin Mekan:
Unless you’re paying attention to that one did you right, let’s see what the THC level was, let’s see what the terpenes involved were, once you can dial into that I think then that’s what people are really into, I believe.
Tim Pickett:
Do you think that having the consistent flower choice is important for patients? Or do you think patients should be using multiple strains and that’s just an evolution? There’s some people in some camps who are like I want the same strain every time, that’s what I need and want. And then there’s this reality that a mother won’t last forever, a cannabis mother plant won’t last forever.
Tim Pickett:
So that is just not [crosstalk 00:47:08] a realistic expectation. When you talk about every harvest being a little bit different too.
Collin Mekan:
Also your CB system’s always changing. Every day you wake up it’s a little different than it was before. I really think it is great. Keep a journal, we bring this up quite a bit. Keep a journal of what’s working for you and go back to it.
Collin Mekan:
But as your tolerance builds and you can utilize [inaudible 00:47:35] a little bit more, it’s always changing. It’s as unique as we are and just as we’re changing everyday so is our endocannabinoid receptor system. I just love saying it, it’s a beautiful beautiful thing.
Tim Pickett:
It is. It’s funny to hear you say it too.
Collin Mekan:
I’ve really figured it out. I say it trippingly off the tongue.
Tim Pickett:
What about if you could grow any strain? Would you be able to pick one or would you just grow a bunch? Would you grow some 73 dayers, some 62 dayers?
Collin Mekan:
If I could, I would grow the longer.
Tim Pickett:
Why the longer [crosstalk 00:48:12] ones?
Collin Mekan:
I think that with these shorter cycles, unfortunately there are some strains that we’re never going to be seeing in Utah because of that. Unless there’s some cultivation companies that take it upon themselves to do these longer strains.
Tim Pickett:
[crosstalk 00:48:26] I know I hate to bring this up, but there’s some production. There’s a lot of just straight up production happening in Utah. They’re limiting their strains to not even [crosstalk 00:48:39] yeah, not allowing the full maturity. Right? They’re not letting clear, they’re to getting clear on the trichomes.
Collin Mekan:
Sure. Well, they go from clear, they get a little milky. It’s a beautiful thing. But also I understand why they’re doing that right now. As the community grows every day, these companies are still trying to expand and keep up with this growing community.
Collin Mekan:
Right now there’s not… I mean they’re doing the best they can. I got to give a shout out to all those cultivation companies, because I’ve worked for two of them and I can honestly say they are amazing. Buy locally.
Collin Mekan:
I think of it like local honey curing your allergies for the season. The closer to your backyard the better. I think the same thing about these plants. They’re breathing our air and drinking our water and they’re in the same environment that we are in. I think they help out quite a bit.
Tim Pickett:
I think the intention actually does make a difference in the medicine. That’s one of the reasons why I think homegrown would add that different level of care. I think if you are growing your own medicine in your own backyard, I think that would change your experience a little.
Collin Mekan:
You say production-wise too, I can say I know that these cultivationists, they put their heart and their soul into it. And they love these plants. I would go in and greet my mothers every morning, say good morning, ladies, how is everyone today. How was your evening? I’d tell them my dreams and ask if they had any nightmares from the night before.
Collin Mekan:
I loved these plants, though. When they’re tending to them, they take great great care of them. They truly do.
Tim Pickett:
They do. Well, just like everything else in this industry, you don’t get into… You get into it because you want to get into it. Right? I don’t feel like there’s very, if any, people I’ve met in growing, production, that literally just got in it because they were-
Collin Mekan:
Look at me now, Mom.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Collin Mekan:
Shout out to my mom, by the way. I love you, Mom. And look at me now.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I mean we want to be a part of this movement.
Collin Mekan:
Absolutely. I feel really passionate about that and excited to see where this is going to take us. I don’t know. I feel good about it. Like something’s telling me stick with it, you’re making a difference. I get to see that in these patients almost daily and it’s really inspiring. Makes me feel like I am doing something right and that I truly am part of something that’s bigger than me.
Collin Mekan:
I feel like I’m part of this community and helping it grow all the time.
Tim Pickett:
You certainly are, Collin.
Collin Mekan:
Cultivating the community.
Tim Pickett:
This has been really fun. It’s fun to chat with somebody face to face. I don’t do the podcast face to face very often.
Collin Mekan:
It’s always a pleasure to chat with you, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
It’s really fun. Is there anything else that you think we missed, you wanted to talk about that we didn’t?
Collin Mekan:
I’m probably going to listen to this later and I’ll be in the shower putting in my conditioner in my hair and thinking why the hell did I say that. You know? Shame, right?
Tim Pickett:
Too late, buddy. Too late.
Collin Mekan:
Let’s discuss shame in the cannabinoid.
Tim Pickett:
It’s totally fine. Just switch over to CBN or use some other cannabinoids. Reduce that anxiety and-
Collin Mekan:
Layer.
Tim Pickett:
Layer.
Collin Mekan:
There it is. Stay safe out there, Utah.
Tim Pickett:
I’m going to let you… Okay. There you go. For the sign out today, before we sign out or we sign off, Utah In The Weeds podcast, if you’re not subscribed and any podcast player that you have access to, please subscribe. Go to Discover Marijuana on YouTube, subscribe there. You can listen to the podcast there, that’s a great place.
Tim Pickett:
That’s actually a better place, in my opinion, because one, I can see it. But two, if you have questions you can comment and we answer all of the comments.
Collin Mekan:
Please comment.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Please comment, because your questions are questions that somebody else has and we can answer them and we don’t have to keep it a secret just between you and I, Collin.
Collin Mekan:
Isn’t that a way to get in the running too?
Tim Pickett:
It is. I think commenting on the videos plus being a subscriber. Again, there’s rules to giveaway and I don’t know all the rules. But I promise in the intro I will give you all the rules.
Tim Pickett:
Utah In The Weeds, thank you for being here Collin.
Collin Mekan:
Tim, it has been a true pleasure. Thank you for having me, absolutely.
Tim Pickett:
Everybody-
Collin Mekan:
Play the Kenny G. Oh, yes. Stay safe out there, Utah. Did I say that right? Is that… Thank you, everybody.
Tim Pickett:
You just… Perfect job, Collin.
Collin Mekan:
Appreciate it.
Episode 90 of Utah in the Weeds is for anyone interested in using cannabis for pain management. Listen to a presentation on this topic from Tim Pickett and his Discover Marijuana co-host, Blake Smith.
Tim Pickett:
Welcome, everyone, out to Utah in the Weeds. My name is Tim Pickett, and this is episode 90, episode 90. This episode is the episode before my two-year anniversary, and you know what? We go along so fast and we’re doing these episodes. Chris Holifield reached out to me and mentioned, “Hey, you know what came up in my Facebook feed? The fact that this is the two-year anniversary of Utah in the Weeds this month.” I wasn’t even thinking about it.
Tim Pickett:
Next week, we’re going to do something special and give away something for the two-year anniversary of Utah in the Weeds, so stay tuned. Subscribe at any podcast player that you have access to. Subscribe to Utah in the Weeds. Tell your friends we’re going to give away something, something cool. Definitely a sweatshirt, definitely a Utah in the Weeds sweatshirt is coming at you, probably a t-shirt, as well, and then something else that’s a surprise, so there’s the hook.
Tim Pickett:
Today’s episode is with Blake Smith. We did a webinar. We’re going to rebroadcast that because we talk a lot about pain, and we talk about cannabis for pain, so a little more educational, maybe, this podcast. I love to rerelease these webinars because they’re kind of a different style, a little more educational format. You can always catch that webinar on Discover Marijuana on YouTube, just about to hit 2000 subscribers.
Tim Pickett:
If you’re not subscribed to Discover Marijuana, you’re going to want to be subscribed because March is a massive month for giveaways. We’re going to be giving something away every single week on Discover Marijuana on YouTube. If you know what we gave away last time, we gave away a PAX 3 complete kit. We gave away some, I think, PAX 2. We gave away a bunch of clothes and swag. We’re going to blow the doors off this time. Excited to keep these episodes coming at you. Again, subscribe. This is Blake Smith and Tim talking about pain and the Utah cannabis program and how it might help you. Enjoy.
Tim Pickett:
Welcome, everybody, out to our webinar, Discover Marijuana webinar series. I’m Tim Pickett.
Blake Smith:
I’m Blake Smith.
Tim Pickett:
Blake is the chief science … You’ve got so many titles. I can’t even keep them all straight. CEO of Zion Medicinal, chief science officer.
Blake Smith:
Yup.
Tim Pickett:
Zion Medicinal.
Blake Smith:
I’m also-
Tim Pickett:
I … Go ahead.
Blake Smith:
I’m also the chief science officer and CEO of Intrepid Biosciences and the chief technical officer for [inaudible 00:03:08] and probably the chief science officer for the Henderson Group.
Tim Pickett:
I think you may need to start saying no to some things.
Blake Smith:
That’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right, but they’re all doing good things. They’re trying to make life better for people, and they want to do it doing cannabis science and nanotechnologies and so how can I say no?
Tim Pickett:
I know. That’s what’s so hard. Tonight, and for those of you who don’t know me, I’m a medical cannabis provider. I specialize in taking care of people who need to use medical cannabis for their medical condition. I teach people how to use cannabis. I educate them on all of the things surrounding cannabis. I love it. It’s so rewarding and so fun to watch people feel better with something natural instead of something and reduce the use of pharmaceuticals.
Tim Pickett:
Tonight, we’re going to be talking about pain specifically, kind of all about pain, chronic pain, acute pain, cannabis use for pain and so well titled here, The Hurt Blocker. Yeah, again, we’ll talk about acute and chronic pain. We’ll get into a little bit of the mechanism of action of cannabis and cannabinoids, what we know and maybe what we don’t know. We’ll talk a little bit about cannabinoids and terpenes that may be good for pain, deep dive into THC, and, of course, our favorites, some suggestions at the end.
Tim Pickett:
Let’s talk about acute pain first. What is acute pain? We’re talking sharp pain, sudden pain. Ten days ago, my psoas spasmed up, and I was completely incapacitated. That’s acute pain, couldn’t walk from the bedroom to the kitchen. Acute pain disappears as injury heals. That’s the key with acute pain. It happens now, but it’s going to go away. We have a good process in the body for acute pain, broken bones, surgery, of course, labor and childbirth. God bless them, dental and orthodontic work and everything, bump your hand.
Tim Pickett:
Chronic pain is a little different. In Utah, for the cannabis program in Utah, chronic pain is two weeks or more of pain that is not well controlled with a typical treatment or medication or therapy. Typically, chronic in medicine is something that is longer than three months, tends to be kind of that threshold of chronic when we talk to patients and something lasts a little bit longer than three months.
Tim Pickett:
The issue with chronic pain is sometimes the … With acute pain, you get a broken bone. You have pain. You have healing. You have no more pain. What if your bone healed, but you still had pain? That’s kind of one of the keys with chronic pain. It’s a disassociation with what’s happening physically, and it becomes this longterm thing almost regardless of whether or not you have some type of physical or mechanical dysfunction or problem in the body, but you just have this pain response. [crosstalk 00:07:02]. Go ahead.
Blake Smith:
One other thing that often causes this is when you think about injury, so you break a bone, for example. You have nerve bundles. You have nerve fibers. You have certain areas in the body that are hard for your body to get all of the repair mechanisms into those spaces. Your bone may heal within eight weeks completely, but the nerve fibers themselves may not heal in that same amount of time and so longer. What will often happen with chronic pain is your acute pain masks something that’s going to last much longer and so as the acute pain starts to go away from the broken bone or the burn, you’ll discover that you had other injuries that you were unaware of that is going to take a lot more time to get fixed.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Nerves are notoriously hard to heal, if they ever heal, a lot of times. I think in school, we were taught that nerves can grow about a centimeter a year, so sometimes, you get some nerves back. Arthritis here, I want to highlight arthritis because arthritis is it’s the number one cause of chronic pain, I think, nationwide. It has to do with the aging population, frankly. Everybody’s going to get arthritis, eventually some type of arthritis from overuse. We just, we’re not built to live forever.
Blake Smith:
Well, and arthritis particularly occurs where you have joints and you’re not using bone or muscle or tendon. It’s, literally, like the material in your nose, the material in your ears, but in your joints, typically, because the way this typically works is you have all these self-recognition proteins that tell you in the case of Tim, “Hey, I’m Tim. I’m a Tim cell.” Then an immune system cell will go by and communicate and say, “I’m also a Tim cell. Everything’s cool.” Those transmembrane-bound, self-recognition proteins inside your body identifies things that are foreign invaders and so it mounts an immune response when it says, “Hi, I’m Tim.” And the other one says, “Well, I’m not,” or, “I’m Bob,” or whatever it is.
Blake Smith:
What ends up happening there is when you look at your joints with collagen and things like that, you break off through multiple use those was transmembrane-bound proteins and so all of a sudden, your immune system doesn’t recognize your own joint cells as being self cells. One of the first immune responses you have is to attack it with chemicals, histamines, [isophils 00:09:50], neutrophils and all of these other things. That is where you get this red inflammation and the locking of the joints and pain with arthritis. The problem is you can repair those proteins for most cells. You cannot repair them for your joints, for cells that are, basically, fixed, that don’t have an ability to multiply and then replenish themselves. Sorry, I went on a diatribe, but [crosstalk 00:10:21].
Tim Pickett:
No, you didn’t. No, you absolutely didn’t. Now let’s switch over to the mechanism of action, what we know about … Well, we were really talking about kind of the mechanism of pain, right? We’re talking about when we talk about the mechanism of action, explain a little bit more about the mechanism of action. It’s hard to describe the mechanism of action of the endocannabinoid system as a whole, right, other than to say from my side, when I talk to patients, I talk about the fact that cannabinoids are going to stimulate healing when it needs to be, when something needs to be healed. Cannabinoids are going to inhibit things when they need to be inhibited. I use broad terms when I talk to patients because the endocannabinoid system is a system that strives for homeostasis. It strives for balance, right?
Blake Smith:
Yup.
Tim Pickett:
And cannabis tends to, I feel like it tends to try to balance things.
Blake Smith:
So a body enters into homeostasis because, ultimately, it’s thermodynamically more favorable for a body to do that. The whole purpose of organic life is to fight entropy. I’m getting kind of really big here, but when we think about it, we’re thinking about it like there’s a finite amount of usable energy in the universe. When we say usable energy, we’re talking about energy that can do other things, convert and so forth. Heat energy doesn’t convert back to, say, kinetic energy or heat energy doesn’t convert back to usable other forms of energy.
Blake Smith:
Your body uses energy to stay organized. We’re now talking about the second law of thermodynamics, all ordered things start to move to an unordered state and the only way to maintain that order is to use energy to do so. What ends up happening is your body has been designed, and whether you believe in God or evolution or whatever it is, your body has been honed in based on these laws of thermodynamics to specifically be in its most energetically favorable state.
Blake Smith:
When we talk about homeostasis, what we’re talking about is expending the least amount of energy to do all the functions that your body has to do. Endocannabinoids, or your endocannabinoid receptor system, is a helper to your normal central nervous system at maintaining homeostasis. Think about it like if you have a bag of M&M’s and all those M&M’s are neurotransmitters. If you have more brown ones, your body’s natural inclination is to get more brown ones into equal piles onto both sides. What ends up happening is if you have imbalance, cannabinoids can help reestablish balance in places where you’re either having deficit or too much. Anyway, sorry.
Tim Pickett:
No. I think what’s important there is we understand the broad piece of the endocannabinoid system, right? We understand broadly what it does and we’re trying to figure out all of the little details. There are certainly too many details that we don’t know, but we know it finds balance. Chronic pain, when you’re talking about pain, it’s essentially trying to figure out the system and try to balance it back out.
Tim Pickett:
There’s a theory. It’s a growing theory that because humans evolved next to the cannabis plant, that cannabinoid deficiency actually almost can be a cause of these chronic problems.
Blake Smith:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Let’s go to we’re talking about cannabinoids for pain relief, terpenes for pain relief. I feel like my favorite terpene for pain relief is beta-caryophyllene. It’s a good antiinflammatory, tends to be strong in strains that are good for pain relief, Kushes and Hazes, but talk [inaudible 00:14:51] information about cannabinoids for pain.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. Again, most cannabinoids are mimicking a natural neurotransmitter that’s already being produced. Now, we don’t know all of them, but we know some of them. When we look at CBC, CBC is typically an anticonvulsant, and it is most effective for things like Parkinson’s and seizure-type conditions that are energetic seizures, not necessarily freezing-type seizures, where all of a sudden you lock. Instead, this is one where you’re having misfires of energy, energetic signals. CBC can help with pain, specifically, because if you’re having nerve misfiring, CBC can help regulate that.
Blake Smith:
When we look at CBD, CBD is mimicking normal GABA pathways. Now, one of the things that’s cool about CBD is it doesn’t inhabit all the normal receptor sites that GABA does, but it inhabits some of them. This is why when people talk about CBD, well, it’s great for pain. It’s great for inflammation. It’s great for stress. It’s great. If you want to know all the things that CBD potentially can affect, start looking at all the different receptor sites and uses that your body has for GABA. That’s why that one becomes so effective in terms of pain relief.
Blake Smith:
When we think about CBG, CBG is absolutely, and you’re going to get to this in your slides, basically CNS pain that comes from the brain down versus pain from an acute place moving back up to the brain. CBG is extremely effective at blocking signaling coming from an acute source to the brain that basically says we don’t have to enact the sympathetic nervous system to start having a histamine reaction, epinephrine, cortisol, and all these other things associated with a pain response, which are almost always associated with fight or flight, right? CBG is effective in that particular space.
Blake Smith:
CBN downregulates, when you’re awake, serotonin pathways. It downregulates also, when you’re going to sleep, the melatonin pathway. If you’re having overall stress or anxiety or sleep issues and that’s causing longterm pain, CBN is effective. Especially if you think about your body does almost all of its repair while you’re sleeping, so if your pain is keeping you awake and you’re not getting good sleep, you’re not fixing the thing, your body’s not fixing those areas of pain, so CBN can be extremely effective there.
Blake Smith:
Delta-8 has a very high absorption cellular rate and so when we look, especially, at organ pain, stuff that’s in the trunk of the body, Delta-8 is extremely effective at lowering inflammation or, at least, the pain response associated with that. Whereas Delta-9 is a more CNS response where your body then responds and stimulates the dopamine pathway, ultimately, and so you mask pain using Delta-9.
Blake Smith:
The terpenes are particularly interesting. You brought up beta-caryophyllene. Beta-caryophyllene and your other caryophyllenes in general are all derived from pepper plants and so at some point, humans were growing weed with pepper plants. Most likely, what we’ve seen genetically is that mostly came from the Middle East. Plants have a unique thing where they will often share genetic and chemicals back and forth with each other. Terpenes are one of the things that plants will freely share back and forth over periods of time in generations and so it’s likely that most forms of weed that are high in caryophyllene were originally derived from the Middle East, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is we know pepper plants are often used for acute pain and relief of those type of things in several ways or forms and that’s the reason why.
Blake Smith:
Here’s the biggest problem with terpenes in general is I believe very, very much that they’re effective. The mechanism of action of terpenes is almost impossible to determine. It’s just like lavender and some of these other things. I don’t think they don’t work. I mean, there’s plenty of studies that show that enough people are affected in a positive way by taking certain types of oils and natural products that it’s effective. When we try to break it down how it actually is a dose response, 10 milligrams of lavender oil equates to this lowering of stress, it’s really hard to do. On the terpene profile, I believe in it, but I don’t know how it’s doing what it’s doing per se.
Tim Pickett:
That’s where you come into more than these cannabinoids, as well, right?
Blake Smith:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
We’re describing these, the mechanism of action a little bit, or the function of these cannabinoids in the body, but there are 120 cannabinoids, so most, the vast majority we still don’t know much about.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. Really, most of these start with the precursor molecules. GABA is a precursor molecule. In the case of Delta-9 and Delta-8, it’s anandamide that are initially starting that process for the production of dopamine and so forth. We can look at those precursors, but they’re pretty tightly linked with an ultimate outcome of a final chemical. The terpenes are like, the precursor molecules with terpenes are, like, there’s 30 or 50 of them or even more, so it’s like, well, where does humulene go in and actually cause an effect? I don’t know. We have a grab bag of all kinds of places it could go and all kinds of things it can do. That’s why when you find a really cool combination of cannabinoids with terpenes, high five. Stick with it because there’s something synergistic going on with that combination that is providing the relief that you need.
Tim Pickett:
That particular point right there is good enough to be repeated. When you find a strain or a product and a combination of cannabinoids and terpenes that work for you, you’ve got to write that down. Write the strain down. Write the product down because it’s no kidding that one strain is going to work for somebody and it might not work for somebody else. I think there are probably countless examples of this. One I know of in Israel, a seizure patient who is using a cannabis product, a natural cannabis product, seizures are almost completely gone. Change the formulation, seizures come back. They had to do a lot of research to figure out the breakdown of what they grew.
Blake Smith:
Tim, so you’re very smart, too, and really, really good job on this one because that bears repeating, too. This is the biggest challenge in the marijuana industry as a whole, both on the medical side, as well as the adult use side, getting the same product every single time, produced in the same way, with the same outcomes, is really not many people are doing that or doing that well. That’s one of the things that makes this really important as we do this because we have to treat this like medicine and so that somebody who’s relying on this for relief gets the same thing every time they take it.
Tim Pickett:
Yup. Okay. Let’s dive into Delta-9. Really, in my opinion, Delta-9 is one of the biggest factors for pain relief. It’s because of the disassociation. You’re, essentially, putting your pain over there on the couch. That’s what Delta-9 does, from a practical standpoint. It disassociates the brain and the thought process from that pain and that symptom. People will have headaches or toothaches, and it’s almost like I am my headache or I am my toothache. THC takes the toothache, puts it over there. It doesn’t necessarily take away the pain. It takes away the perception of the pain so that a person can move on and do what they want to do during the day.
Tim Pickett:
I think it’s important to talk about that because we talk about a lot of cannabis users just want to get high. Then we talk about chronic pain and people just want to get high. Well, the truth is people being high, for some patients, is part of the process.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. Look, especially if you’ve been self-medicating for a really long period of time, if you’re self-medicating, how do you know that your self-medication is doing what you need it to do? Well, a head change is a really clear indicator that you know the medicine is doing what it’s supposed to do. We’ve talked about this before. It’s a challenge because you have this legacy group that uses, that that’s the indicator they use, but as we’ve talked about before, it would be really odd if you take a Tums and you got high from that to let you know your Tums is working or your aspirin or something. Most medicine is not designed to have you feel a particular way as an indicator that it’s doing what its job is.
Blake Smith:
This is one of the reasons why a lot of people who are high in THC think that CBD is not very effective because they’re expecting to feel this grandiose change. What I would say is from my case, I have bum shoulders from being too rowdy in my younger days. Without CBD or a lot of NSAIDs, I can’t raise my arm above my head. I just did it right now, but I can tell you it’s because my inflammation is so much lower. It’s not like I take CBD and I’m like, oh, I could do cartwheels now. I don’t feel like a billion bucks. The difference is when I’m sitting here talking with you, I can raise my arms, whereas if I’m not taking it, oh boy, that would probably cause me pain for about two to three days.
Tim Pickett:
It is going to be different for chronic pain. It’s going to be different for acute pain. One thing that I really noticed recently with my, frankly, with my back injury, is you have … Let’s talk about chronic pain for a minute and then acute pain. With chronic pain, I like to have people learn how to low dose or microdose more consistently and then use inhaled methods on top of their low dose because it gives you a more therapeutic, kind of tends to give you more therapeutic effect. The microdose may be at the head change level or below and so just enough maybe disassociation that you know it’s there or, like Blake said, maybe you can raise your shoulder. You don’t feel high, and there is THC on board. It’s disassociating you from your pain, but you don’t know. It’s not enough. It’s enough to reduce your symptoms, but it’s not enough to get you high. That’s ideal.
Blake Smith:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
That would be ideal.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. One of the coolest things about THC Delta-9 as a pain reliever, especially for acute use, is like you get a root canal, for example, and they traditionally would give you codeine or whatever it is. What really just needs to happen is basically, you’ve just had your jaw punched a bazillion times. You just need to heal. That’s all that really needs to happen there. You don’t. And so you need some time-
Tim Pickett:
You need time. You need time to heal.
Blake Smith:
That’s right. You just need to heal. Okay. Rather than being loopy with your codeine or something like that, we’ll just go ahead and disassociate using some THC, which is not as much as you have to take on the codeine side. It doesn’t have the negative effects, and it can get you over that acute pain pretty quickly. It’s really a kind of a cool way to think about it.
Tim Pickett:
This is exactly what happened to me with my back 10 days ago. I mean, you lock it up and there’s healing that needs to take place. There’s anti-inflammation that needs to take place. In my case, there was prednisone involved to try to really lower that inflammation and get that going. There was a significant amount of and there was a lot of discussion with a couple of other providers about this, but there was a lot of THC use because really, what I needed was time. I needed muscle relaxation and I needed time. Me personally, I tend to be a person who’s very, very motivated to get a lot done, so it is extremely hard for me to lay in a bed all day long for two or three days. It really takes some disassociation in order to do that for me to kind of keep me down.
Blake Smith:
Yeah, and it’s more effective to use an indica-like strain so that you want to sink into your couch versus wanting to go do pushups. Right?
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Blake Smith:
Sometimes, you’re going to want to disassociate, but still have to get up and run around and do stuff, and so that’s one type of sativa-like strain you would want. Then there’s other times you literally just need to be in bed and sleep it off, so let’s get you sinking into your couch. That’s why there’s two ways to kind of think about using the different types of sativa versus indica.
Tim Pickett:
And that comes to, really, product selection. There’s going to be products that are going to be better for chronic issues, some better for acute issues. Obviously, pain can be mechanical, can be in the gut. There’s all kinds of places it can be. That’s where we try to, we, as providers, and Blake, as a producer, he’s trying to design products that are specific for specific conditions or specific types of pain. I’m trying to figure out with the patient, listen to the patient. What type of pain is it? Where is it? What do we know about the cannabinoids? What do we know about Delta-9, Delta-8? How can we build a product or how can we choose a natural flower that is going to help, help you get through, help you get more time, do more things, if that’s what, where you’re at in the pain cycle.
Tim Pickett:
I found that there was a couple of strains from local growers that I used a lot of that did not work near as well as when I switched to a Fatso or a Mad Max. It was really night and day, so in the physical therapy situation, it was very, very strain specific. If you’re using one strain, it’s not as helpful. If you’re using another strain, it is. Every strain is different for people. Temperatures seem to be a little bit deal, too. Not a part of this webinar, but …
Blake Smith:
Well, one of the things, if I can address, is I think this is super interesting, by the way, because if you go and look at the genetic profile of most flower that’s in the universe, the THC is always going to be somewhere within a couple percentage points one way or another. Really, the only difference is a couple percentage points on the terpene profiles, so what makes one more therapeutic than another?
Blake Smith:
Really, it has to do with those profiles and how you’re metabolizing those profiles. The reason why Mad Max, and I’m going to throw down with Mad Max because I like it so much. The reason why I like Mad Max so much is because it’s high enough in CBG that even if it’s not your normal strain that would help, like if you’re used to Dutch Treat, for example, or you’re into-
Tim Pickett:
[crosstalk 00:31:50]
Blake Smith:
… Golden Spike or something [inaudible 00:31:55] progeny, so-
Tim Pickett:
Did you see that?
Blake Smith:
I saw that.
Tim Pickett:
That’s Mac.
Blake Smith:
If you’re using those and those are usually helpful for you, they don’t typically have much difference in the profile. Mad Max, specifically, always has somewhere between 6% and 8% CBG, so I know it’s going to lower inflammation. Now, it may not be enough to fix you, but I know you’re at least going to get an anti-inflammatory effect from it. That’s why I like that strain so much. The Fatso is really high in caryophyllene, which makes sense of why that one is usually quite therapeutic. Anyway, that’s kind of the thing. It becomes hard to find your right thing, but there are some ways to sort of tip it in your favor, right?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Blake Smith:
Get out your [crosstalk 00:32:45]-
Tim Pickett:
When you’re going to the pharmacy, you’re trying to choose. Sometimes, it’s choosing an eighth of two different things and then going home and trying them both. Sometimes, it’s mixing them and that can be a thing. For when it comes to flower, it’s a journal. It’s a journal issue. It’s what did I take? How do I feel two hours later? What did I take? How did I feel two hours later? Then you can go back and you can look at the profiles a little bit more and you can make a little bit better … You can tip the scales even more in your favor when you choose new strains because there will always be … I’m talking to Brandon at Two North and there will always be strains that come and then eventually, the mothers, the genetics will change. The mother will change maybe. I don’t know. The genetics are going to change just a little bit through time, I feel like, with flower. Would you agree with that, Blake?
Blake Smith:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s one of the main reasons why almost every flower that’s out there is a hybrid now There’s very few true sativa or true indicas. You’re getting an indica or a sativa experience based on the terpene profile, but yeah, true, unique by themselves strains sort of don’t even exist anymore.
Tim Pickett:
They don’t, and they just don’t last forever.
Blake Smith:
That’s right.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, the plant eventually won’t … The mother eventually will be discarded.
Blake Smith:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right. And if you’re treating your weed like the soup of the day, people are just cycling as many combinations as they can cycle as quickly as they can cycle it, just like I want to try Kitchen Sink. Next week, I want Donuts. The week after that, I want Cherry AK. The week after that, I want Fatso. That’s also a challenge because a lot of growers are cycling their flower so quickly because just trying to appeal to a taste or a sensation, like getting a new candy or a soda, which is awesome, in some ways, but it’s also like, well, if you found the right flower for helping a particular illness, you can’t find that flower anymore, it’s a problem.
Tim Pickett:
Right. Oral, I’ve chosen a couple of my favorites here. The Plush gummies I like because they’re a mix Delta-8, Delta-9 and so they tend to be a little less psychoactive, a little better in the GI system from a absorption standpoint. I don’t have experience with the fuel cubes, but have had a lot of people have good results with that.
Blake Smith:
I hear a lot of people like them. I hear a lot of good things about the fuel cubes. I think they’re probably a pretty cool product out there. I haven’t had any myself yet, but there’s time.
Tim Pickett:
There’s a lot of products.
Blake Smith:
There’s a lot of products.
Tim Pickett:
There’s a lot of products out there.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. It’s hard to get through them all.
Tim Pickett:
Then topical, I always go to the Sage balm, but I go to the Sage balm because it’s an ointment and ointments tend to stay on the skin longer, absorb longer. To me, it’s just a practical thing from a medical, from what we learned in dermatology, a cream or a lotion. It’s nice and it feels nice and it’s not greasy, but an ointment, eh, stays on longer. It’s going to absorb a little bit better and so it’s going to work a little better.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. Really, we have found now we have a lot of patients that use the Cypress Sage for foot pain because what you do is you slather it on your feet because your feet have a lot of callouses and so forth, so you’re having to get through a lot more skin in the feet, so a lot of topicals don’t really hit it the way that it needs to. Standard Wellness produces a pretty cool patch that works for certain things. The patch doesn’t work great on feet because it can’t get through. In the old days, we used to throw things like DMSO in with it, which makes you can bypass your skin and get right into the bloodstream using DMSO. DMSO is not healthy for you. It has some implications for your liver and some other things and so you don’t really want to do that. You get a thicker balm. You literally put it on your feet, put a sock over it, whew. You’re golden. It’s going to absorb. It’s going to make your feet feel better. We have a whole bunch of people that even have avoided bone spur surgery as a result of using the Cypress Sage balm.
Tim Pickett:
I’m so surprised.
Blake Smith:
Sorry. This is not designed to be a plug for my stuff [crosstalk 00:37:22].
Tim Pickett:
No, but topicals in general are surprisingly effective in ways that you don’t really think that they will be, like with back pain. Again, coming back to that, you think well, the muscle, the muscle belly is too big. It’s too deep. The psoas is too deep. It just works. Some things just work. Topicals just kind of, they just tend to work.
Blake Smith:
We have found also with menstrual cramping and so forth that a nice balm, especially with little CBN, is really effective at relieving pain there. I [crosstalk 00:38:01]-
Tim Pickett:
Whether it’s distracting or it’s working down into the tissues doesn’t really matter because it’s safe and it works. Some things just work.
Blake Smith:
That’s right.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. Let’s get to some questions. We have-
Blake Smith:
Four so far.
Tim Pickett:
I’d like to … Okay. Let’s look. Let’s look. We’ve had a little bit of chat discussion. I’m familiar with a little bit of the chat discussion. Let’s go with, okay. Terry. How long would it take for the cell to heal? I’m going to say different different times. Depends on the cell.
Blake Smith:
Totally depends on the cell. Typically, cells have different life spans. Blood replenishes within about 24 hours and so forth. Muscle cells repair pretty quickly because they have a lot of access to ATP and energy, plus, they have high oxygen rate. Typically, when you think about healing for cells, you’re looking at oxygenation is a huge part. Oxygen is a huge part of that whole process. That’s because of the CREB cycle and the citric acid cycle. Essentially, it’s the conversion into energy that’s important for healing mechanisms.
Blake Smith:
Protein is also important, areas that have higher amount of protein, so you have little, tiny machines, essentially. I mean, they’re little organs, but your endoplasmic reticulum basically chart out and make proteins and so you use amino acids to, basically, allow your endoplasmic reticulum to make proteins. Those proteins are essential.
Blake Smith:
When you have muscle, muscle has tons of endoplasmic reticulum. It has tons of mitochondria for producing energy. Muscle will heal quick. Nerve cells already are firing electricity back and forth. You don’t move a lot of excess energy into nerve cells. You don’t oxygenate nerve cells the same way as quickly, so nerve cells take a lot longer. Some cells heal really fast and some don’t heal almost. It takes really long periods of time.
Tim Pickett:
[crosstalk 00:40:07].
Blake Smith:
That probably was an unsatisfactory answer, but it depends on the type of cell.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. What if the pain is all over the body? To me, this is kind of the same question is how do you figure out what will work? I know they seem unrelated, but to me and the patient discussion, they’re related. You start from scratch. You learn how … Here’s what I would say. You need to know your lowest effective dose for a head change. That’s a dose that you absolutely need to know. You need to know kind of how many milligrams THC you can take orally and get a head change. That’s the threshold dose. That’s kind of the baseline. You want to stay with that. That’s a dose you can take very consistently and be very productive, not have a lot of psychoactivity, be very functional. Then you need to know your maximum dose, the dose at which you are-
Blake Smith:
Paranoid.
Tim Pickett:
If you take anymore, you’re going to get paranoid, right, the maximum dose of THC that you can have. While not everybody needs to know that dose, it is helpful when you’re trying to create a therapy for somebody with pain all over the body or trying to figure out what will work. You need to know that. Then for me, it’s going through what Blake said earlier, which is try to tip the scales. Use the pharmacist. Use the Q and P, the provider, to try to choose products that maybe in that window, and then you’re keeping a journal.
Blake Smith:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
That really is kind of a practical answer. It’s not really cannabinoid or a terpene answer. It’s just practical.
Blake Smith:
One of the reasons I like doing this with you, Tim, is because your answer was spot on and really practical. I tend to go off into these weird tangents, which I’m about to do.
Tim Pickett:
Lay it on us.
Blake Smith:
When you think about whole body pain, you need to actually affect the central nervous system. It’s different from putting a balm on because a balm is acute. It’s going to fix your joints in the area. It’s going to fix your lower back for arthritis. It’s going to fix things locally. You need to affect endocannabinoid receptor system, one, and you need a full across the blood-brain barrier to affect the entire system for whole body pain. That’s the only effective way to start thinking about this because you need to actually start shifting the way the body is thinking and dealing with the pain structurally across the entire organism versus just something that you’re fixing in an area.
Blake Smith:
I also like layering. You talk a lot about this, Tim, and I agree with you on this one a hundred percent, layering your products. I take a tincture before bed. I wake up the next day. I take my gummy or rub, vice versa, whatever it is. Then all of a sudden, I’m at work and I feel like I’m going to die. This is now an inhalation method or this is now I’m going to dose again. It’s that’s to get immediate relief, but I’m keeping the normal under control through my daily ritual of taking something. That’s my response.
Tim Pickett:
We’re going to get to more questions. We kind of answered this question earlier. Can topicals help with deep tissue pain, and for some reason, for some reason they do. Blake can’t tell me the mechanism because you can’t get it deep enough. You cannot get the THC deep enough in the tissue, but it works.
Blake Smith:
So I don’t fully know the mechanism, but I do know this. There’s cellular to cellular communication and if one cell is in pain and the cell right next to it has been relieved, the one that’s relieved says, “I’ve been relieved. I don’t have a stress response anymore.” That tends to calm down the cells that are next to it, as well. For treating, I only have to get to a nerve cell to start treating it with cannabinoids and nerves are about an eighth of a millimeter in, so I’m not going to, to your point, Tim, and I agree with you. If I’m trying to hit my glute or something, I’m not going to get deep enough. I don’t really need to get all the way to where my muscle is hurting on my quadriceps. I only have to get to the nerves around the quadriceps to start downregulating the pain response. That seems to be one-
Tim Pickett:
I’m learning something right now. This is interesting, and it makes a lot of sense.
Blake Smith:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
This is besides the mechanical help that you’re getting really from the massage of rubbing in the topical, too. Touch is a very powerful healing tool, as well, and so if you can combine the cellular communication things with the natural product and you don’t have to get high, why not?
Blake Smith:
Yeah. I like topicals a lot, and plus, they last a long time, so you’ll go and you’ll buy one. They’re a little bit pricey, but they should last you 3/4 of a month or a month and so you’re not buying them. Most of the people I know who are buying flower are buying flower every week, sometimes multiple times. I don’t have to do that with tinctures and balms. Typically, those will last me a month.
Tim Pickett:
Next question is, let’s see, we’ll go to-
Blake Smith:
Can you get a card for migraines as in the slide? Can you do-
Tim Pickett:
As in the slide?
Blake Smith:
Yeah. You’re the guy on that one. You know better than I do.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. In Utah, qualifying under the pain qualification, I wrote an article about this in 2020, in the very, very beginning when we were starting out, so pain lasting longer than two weeks that is not well controlled with a typical medication. Every provider is going to have a little different approach for this and with migraines, if you have migraines and you’ve been diagnosed with them and tried some medications for them and they’re not working and you want to try cannabis, then we look at well, do you qualify under the pain? Are you missing work for a migraine? Do these migraines bother you over and over and over in a pattern?
Tim Pickett:
Then most providers, myself included, I would say, “Look, yeah, that’s a chronic pain issue.” It’s pain. It lasts longer than two weeks, and it is not well controlled. We are, with migraine patients, we’re trying to use indica and hybrid medications, trying to stay away from sativas. Inhalation methods tend to work. A lot of CBD sometimes helps, but technically, migraine is not a qualifying condition in Utah, but pain is a qualifying condition.
Tim Pickett:
Let’s see. What would you suggest for a very busy, active person who has been diagnosed with chronic back pain, with the only solution being pain management for during the working day? Easy at night.
Blake Smith:
Can I make one quick comment about migraines?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Blake Smith:
We have found it’s pretty effective, actually, to take like the Cypress Sage balm or an equivalent topical. You put it right at the base of the skull right here, rubbing on when because most people can feel them coming on. You start getting your tunnel vision and you can feel it happening, so you put the topical right there. You also put a little bit right across your forehead. Go into a dark room. Sit and close your eyes for about 15 minutes. We’ve had a lot of success on people arresting or stopping their migraine from starting because what ends up happening a lot with migraines is you get tons of vasoconstriction. You get optical restriction around the optic nerve and so getting stimulation for all your senses down won’t cause as much energy influx in the head, so you’re going to want to take all of that down. Then the balm, the topicals in those areas will help relax blood flow and everything within those areas and so it’s an effective way to think about migraines.
Tim Pickett:
Great recommendation, Blake. Okay. Excuse me.
Blake Smith:
Very active person.
Tim Pickett:
Active chronic pain person. It feels like I’m talking to myself.
Blake Smith:
Teresa is running around everywhere. Can’t stop.
Tim Pickett:
Running everywhere.
Blake Smith:
Just going crazy.
Tim Pickett:
Got running shoes on all the time, all the time. Yeah, what are you going to do? So this is where I layer. This is where layering comes in big time because you want, first of all, I feel like you want CBD at a milligram per kilogram. Take the pounds you weigh. Divide it by 2.2. You need that much CBD every day. That’s where I would start. Then I would layer a oral cannabis method with THC or Delta-8, Delta-9, whatever works better for you. I would put that at the threshold of psychoactivity or just barely below because on a scale of one to 10, 10 being maximum dose, three being where that head change is, I want you at a three or a two, 2.7, but I want you to take regular doses morning, noon, night. I want to make sure that those doses are pretty consistent. Then when it’s bad, then I can use an inhaled method on top of that and go up to seven or five or six.
Tim Pickett:
The three, this does a lot of things. The layering does a lot of really cool things. It keeps you at that level so that you’re using inhaled. You’re going up to the seven, but you’re only coming back down to the level three when that wears off, which it will do earlier than the oral. It keeps your inhaled methods down over your lifetime, so you’re inhaling 10, 20, 30% less over your lifetime. Your lungs will thank you. You won’t get COPD and chronic bronchitis from. Not that you will, if you’re not using a lot, but the inflammation in your lungs will be less.
Tim Pickett:
That low threshold tends to be something that patients get used to. They don’t have the psychoactivity, but they keep the therapy. A lot of patients can continue to use the same dose for two to five years. I have a patient that has been using the same dose for five years for his chronic pain, same dose.
Blake Smith:
Tim Pearl asked earlier, too, was asking about well, does your tolerance always go up? It doesn’t have to. It’s only when you keep stimulating and taking more that all of a sudden, you’ll start noticing tolerance changes. If you find an effective dose, that will stay effective as long as all things being equal don’t change. Right?
Tim Pickett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yup.
Blake Smith:
The other thing I would just … Tim, you’re so smart at all of this stuff. I mean, you are exactly right. I will say this. I have lower back pain. I have arthritis in my lower back. After sleeping in the same position for multiple hours and I need a good sleep and so I will often take CBN or something and knock myself out. Then I wake rested, but my back is so stiff, it’s hard for me to move out of bed. I have a topical by the bed. I put it on a little bit in the morning and within 30 seconds to a minute, I can move out of bed and I can move for the day. Then I layer on top of that.
Tim Pickett:
Hmm. That’s a great idea. Let’s see. We’ve got a stage four metastatic pancreatic cancer. What can I use for abdominal pain? I don’t know about you Blake, but this is one of these specific conditions where you go no holds barred.
Blake Smith:
Yup. I agree.
Tim Pickett:
You go all the way. We’re going to jack up the CBD dose, if we can tolerate that. We’re going to do oral methods consistently through the day. We’re going to learn what’s good in the daytime, what’s good in the bad, what’s good when I have a really bad day, what’s not. Then I’m going to layer on not only flower, potentially, but I’m going to layer on even concentrates.
Tim Pickett:
Here’s where, before we get too far into the discussion, because I know you want to add to this, here’s where tolerance to me, it becomes a little different discussion. I want to build up tolerance here because I’m not so concerned about using more and more and more because we have metastatic pancreatic cancer. The reality is there, right? What we want to do is we want to have a high enough tolerance that we can use a lot of cannabinoids because I now think I need to load this person up with cannabinoids. I need to be getting a lot of milligrams of cannabinoids in this person to help.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. Tim, I am a hundred percent in agreement with that because most people who have pancreatic cancer, it’s not whether or not you had a good day or a bad day. I either had a bad day or I had a worse day and so really, it’s no, I agree with you. There’s no holds barred. You want to build up a tolerance to multiple cannabinoids and you want to hit it with everything. Unlike certain types of cancer, we have not seen cannabis directly solve that as a cancer issue. There are some implications that cannabis can help with certain types of cancer. Pancreatic cancer has … I’ve heard of people being healed, but there’s not a lot of data to support that. There’s pretty good data to suggest that CBG helps with glioblastoma in the brain. Pancreatic cancer, you need relief to enjoy your life, what life you have left, and so you do what you got to do. Your doctor should [crosstalk 00:54:57].
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, and this is where journaling is important because if one strain is not working, you need to discard it and move to another strain. If one product isn’t working, you need to either increase the dose. This is where you’re really trying to get religious about it. Get technical about it, I think, too, because some things, there’s going to be some strains that help with appetite more than others and finding those might be helpful during the day. Then at night, other products. I also put a plug in for RSO here, true RSO, because I think for some reason, there’s something to the whole blend up the whole cannabis plant kind of mentality.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. I agree with that, too. Really, Delta-8 may be helpful taking the edge off, too. If we’re talking about specific products, Delta-8 may help taking the edge off. It won’t be sufficient for all your pain, but at least it will start that process because Delta-8 will just give you more of a body high than a head change. In the trunk, you have a high absorption rate of cannabinoids and so I like Delta-8 in those circumstances.
Tim Pickett:
But excellent question. Okay. We’re available for this type of discussion outside of the webinar series. Okay. Colin asks non-psychotropic cannabinoid cartridges. Yes or no? No question a CBD, a heavy dose of CBD vape cart helps immensely. It’s like topicals to me. I’m just surprised at how effective they are when you use a straight CBD product or a CBD-CBN-CBG. There’s more and more of these good products on the market. I’d say yes.
Blake Smith:
Yeah, so yes, definitely. Be careful where you get it.
Tim Pickett:
There’s a bill on the hill. We don’t want to go down this rabbit hole, but you’ve got to-
Blake Smith:
You’ve got to be-
Tim Pickett:
I can give you two products I carry. I know where it’s made, the cartridge in Logan. I know where your tincture is made and grown. Just limit yourself to good, reputable products, adequate testing.
Blake Smith:
You have to.
Tim Pickett:
Yes, especially with inhaled and especially with cartridges.
Blake Smith:
Especially with cartridges. Trust who you have making them.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Yes. Okay. What if you can’t get the same product? Yup.
Blake Smith:
Okay. Here, I can answer this from a Zion perspective. If it’s a Zion product and you can’t seem to find that same Zion product, literally just email the company. If it’s a product that we have that worked for you, but for some reason we discontinued, I will make it just specifically for you. Tell me what pharmacy you go to and I will ensure that they always have that product for you, always. I can’t offer that for everybody else. I can offer that for Zion products because we typically don’t phase out a lot of our products very often and so because when you make a medicine, people become reliant on that medicine, so you always have to have it available.
Blake Smith:
That’s actually a good indicator about companies in general. I don’t just mean Utah. I just mean in general in the universe. If somebody is changing their product so often that you can never find the same product repeatedly over and over and over again, they’re not doing it from a perspective of trying to make a medicine for somebody to have for the rest of their lives and so make it.
Tim Pickett:
He [crosstalk 00:58:57].
Blake Smith:
Send an email that is strongly worded email that says, “Hey, I use this for medicine. Keep making it.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Okay. Last question, and a difficult one. This is a patient. I know specifically the patient. If the Delta-8 is causing vertigo and headaches, this is a patient with a lot of chronic pain, lot of chronic abdominal pain, flares. It comes and goes, but it’s hospitalizations, that type of thing, so if I change to a different, but the Delta-8, so we talked about Delta-8, recommended it. For some reason, causing vertigo and headaches.
Tim Pickett:
Here’s my question. I don’t think we’re going to get to a great answer on this tonight, but I guess I could generalize it for the rest of the audience here a little bit, too, is when you have a chronic pain issue and the products that you’re trying to take are causing a side effect that you don’t love, that is, it’s causing a problem and you can’t get through the side effect to get the relief, what do we do? I think that really is more of the question here, like we have this problem. We think we’re leaning, we’re again, tipping the scales to products that we want, we think are going to help based on what we know, but we’re getting a side effect that we can’t get through. So what do we do?
Blake Smith:
Yeah. My initial gut, man, I would love to know what the product is and the administration route is the first two things I think of because a lot of times, I’ve heard this specifically around vape carts, around Delta-8. Sometimes, I’ve heard people getting vertigo from an inhaled method of Delta-8, but they don’t seem to have the same problems with like a gummy with Delta-8, so I’d want to know the route of administration. Also, the product in particular, because it could be the terpene combination or if somebody’s using botanical terpenes, not … By the way, I’m not against botanical terpenes per se, but it may not be the right thing. Also, if you don’t know where they’re being made, so it looks like try gummies, tincture, and capsule. Do we have Delta-8 capsules in Utah?
Tim Pickett:
Mm-mm (negative). I don’t think so.
Blake Smith:
Because if all-
Tim Pickett:
Oh, this is … I-
Blake Smith:
Oh, you’re in Colorado. Okay. I’m going to even take a couple steps back. This is the whole debate around Delta-8. Delta-8 is a cannabinoid that is an analog to Delta-9. It’s typically made the way most people make it is they take sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid and they dump it into either CBD or Delta-9 and they start to force the bond to shift thermodynamically under heat. The acid serves a catalytic bridge to move that bond over, and then they either take the acid back out. They neutralize it. They should be washing it. There’s a whole bunch of stuff to do to clean that Delta-8 up. If they don’t clean it up, you can notice a lot of health implications around that. You can get vertigo. I mean, I have heard headaches. I’ve heard all kinds of things associated with that, so knowing your source and how they make it becomes really important.
Blake Smith:
Now, you don’t have to make Delta-8 that way, by the way. I’ll just speak for my own company. We use energetic oxygen, heat, and UV light, and you can still get the bond to move without having to use harsh acids to do that. I would try one from Zion or somebody else that’s local, where you know where it’s being made. I would try that first to see if it helps. If it does help and you don’t have the exact same experience, it tells you that your Delta-8 you were using before is adulterated. If you do use it and you get the same effect, what that tells me is we need to think about different forms or higher levels of Delta-9 with lower levels of Delta-8 so that you’re getting a masking of that.
Blake Smith:
I would continue to use Delta-8 if you need … If it’s giving pain relief and you find unadulterated and it works, that’s the right way to do it. If you can’t find unadulterated Delta-8, I would switch strains because if you don’t know how it’s being made and somebody’s in their garage with radiator hoses dumping hydrochloric acid in something, that’s sketchy. You need to be careful of that. That’s not the right way to think about it.
Tim Pickett:
And let me bring this back to medicine with the medicine that I was practicing before, which is to prescribe a pill. If you come in with a problem and I make a prescription, usually, we are taught that you should try three different medications, basically at least three, if the first one didn’t work, so we’re going to give one a trial. Then we might give a different one a trial, and we might give a third one a trial. In many cases, in some conditions, we’re trying up to five medications before we’re giving up on that even almost class of medication.
Tim Pickett:
This isn’t to say this is common. I’m not trying to dilute the issue, but this is it’s unfortunately kind of where we’re at is sometimes, these things take a while to figure out and again, why keeping a journal is probably a good idea. Trying multiple products is a good idea, but like Blake said, when anything you know about with Delta-8 is just such a controversial topic that you want to know. You want to know where you’re getting your products.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. I-
Tim Pickett:
And to Terry’s point, comment there, getting help for chronic pain is hard because providers are we’re busy. We’re impatient. You come in. We write your prescription. You’re out the door. Thank you for your copay. That’s just, we don’t like that. It’s the reason why Blake and I or part of the reason why Blake and I are in this.
Blake Smith:
Well, and this one, in particular, hits a home with me a lot because when we had the stuff going on with my daughter and thinking about what the implications of that are, when I went and got product from everywhere, I was getting inconsistent results, metals, pesticides, horrible chromophore showing up, all kinds of things everywhere, which is why I got into this in the first place because I decided I had to go just do this on my own.
Blake Smith:
I’ve been trained as a bioanalytical chemist. My background is bioanalytical chemistry and so I’ve been used to making medicine the way Tim is used to it in the pharmaceutical company. I’m like why can’t cannabis be the same way because that’s the thing that helps my daughter. I’m moving away from all this craziness. There are more producers of cannabis products in the US than most other businesses at this point, but you can’t trust 80% of them.
Blake Smith:
I do like medical markets a lot because medical markets typically are more tested and more rigorous than often adult use markets. That doesn’t mean there’s not good products there. It just means that typically in Utah, I’ve been audited. My company’s been audited by the state every week for the last, like, month and a half. Maybe it’s because they’re just really trying to find something wrong. The point is every single thing I make is tested. The state is in my business all the time and so you can trust it.
Tim Pickett:
Well, Blake, this has been a good discussion.
Blake Smith:
It is.
Tim Pickett:
I like this one. I think we’ve done a good job. Let’s see. How do we know-
Blake Smith:
There’s so many smart people who have been on tonight and so many people who are just so great. Thank you everybody for attending. I hope it was useful. If you have more specific questions, you can always come to Tim and if he needs [crosstalk 01:08:18]-
Tim Pickett:
Well, yes. One of the best ways to do this, too, is to go to Utah, is to go to the YouTube channel. In fact, we’re answering questions all the time. If you go to the YouTube channel on Discover Marijuana where this would be posted and you make a comment on one of those videos, you ask a question on one of those videos, we’ll try to answer it. That way, we can answer it for everybody and we don’t have to just keep the answer to ourselves and keep it secret just between us. I think that is probably the best way to get ahold of us. Subscribe to that YouTube channel. We really appreciate feedback that we’ve gotten tonight and Teresa, to your question, yes, all the pharmacies are selling mostly the same products. There’s a little bit of variation, but most are selling a lot of similar products from the same companies, all tested. Anyway, take care, everybody.
Blake Smith:
Thanks everybody.
Utah in the Weeds host Tim Pickett is heavily involved in the 2022 Utah legislative session. In this 89th episode, Tim gives us an update on recent cannabis-related discussions on Utah’s Capitol Hill.
First, Tim talked about Utah Therapeutic Health Center’s new educational partnership with Gray Matters. Gray Matters is dedicated to educating the public about the risks of adolescent cannabis use. [00:58]
Next, Tim gave an update on UT THC’s Uplift program, which subsidizes Medical Cannabis evaluations for terminally-ill and low-income patients. [05:32]
Then, Tim talked about the Discover Marijuana YouTube channel’s recent activity. The channel has a new series of videos to help viewers get to know Tim and his co-host, Blake Smith. [05:52]
To start the discussion about Utah’s 2022 legislative session, Tim talked about Senate Bill 190, a Medical Cannabis bill sponsored by Sen. Evan Vickers. SB 190 would add restrictions to cannabis advertising and labeling, and ban synthetic THC analogs like Delta-8, among other changes. [08:15]
Next, Tim talked about SB 195, sponsored by Sen. Luz Escamilla. The bill would add further restrictions on advertising for Medical Cannabis businesses, and add “acute pain” as a qualifying condition, among other changes. [27:11]
Tim talked at length about both bills, and their potential impacts on patients and healthcare providers.
Podcast summary coming soon.
Podcast transcript coming soon.
Episode 88 of Utah in the Weeds features Daniel Jones, a war veteran who uses Medical Cannabis for PTSD. Jones says cannabis has helped him retake control of his life.
We started this episode with a discussion of Jones’ decision to join the armed forces at age 18. He says he didn’t see a future in his home town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, so he decided to join up. [02:06]
Jones says he spent about 4.5 years in the service, and he went on tours in Kosovo and Iraq. Jones shared a few memories of his time in the service, including a close call with a land mine. [05:55]
Like many people, Jones’ first experiences with cannabis happened when he was a teenager. He says he didn’t use much cannabis then, but an experience with the VA made him want to revisit cannabis. Cannabis has helped Jones retake control of his life by helping with his anxiety, panic attacks, and other PTSD symptoms. [12:07]
Jones and our host, Tim Pickett, agree that some cannabis strains can worsen symptoms like anxiety. Jone says the cannabis strain “Blue Dream” made his anxiety worse, but “Blue Cheese” gives him the mellow, calm feeling he’s after. [15:25]
The conversation then shifted to Utah’s Medical Cannabis program and Proposition 2, the 2018 ballot initiative for Medical Cannabis. Jones, like many others, is disappointed that the state didn’t pass the proposition as it was originally written. [18:45]
Jones says he wanted to join Utah’s Medical Cannabis program as soon as he could. He says he contacted a company called Truu Med to get his card. Jones says the company misled him, and he ended up paying them thousands of dollars for unnecessary monthly appointments. [20:00]
Jones buys his Medical Cannabis products at Deseret Wellness in Provo. He uses some of the cannabis flower sold there, and he also finds their gelatinous cubes useful for sleep. [30:51]
We wrapped up this episode with a few more of Jones’ insights about the VA, the US Military, and his use of cannabis to replace alcohol and other drugs. [35:32]
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everybody out to Utah In The Weeds. This is episode 88 and I am your host, Tim Pickett. Today’s episode is a discussion with Daniel Mark Jones, a veteran. This is a heavy conversation in two regards. One, his tours… I’ll let you just listen to it. Kosovo and Iraq. This is serious trauma that these… They’re we don’t give enough credit to those in our country, I think, who are willing to do this, right? Willing to go out and serve in this way. Just always very strong and powerful to hear these stories.
Tim Pickett:
But the second piece of his story with his experience getting a medical cannabis card here in Utah and what happened to him, and how he was basically fleeced for thousands of dollars. And just the opportunity that people take, I guess, to take advantage of other people, especially veterans, come on.
Tim Pickett:
Anyway, great conversation. Very, very genuine guy. From a housekeeping perspective, I’m excited release this episode. We’ve got our own [Colin McCann 00:01:26] next week and going to record with him soon. Looking very forward to that.
Tim Pickett:
I’ve also got a product review that I’ve been doing on my own. Sprained my back over the past week and have been just debilitated and unable to walk, really. So been doing some research on my own with what’s working best, trying to just recover a little bit. So stay tuned for that. Utah In The Weeds, download and subscribe on any podcast player that you have access to. I’m Tim Pickett, again, enjoy this conversation with Daniel Mark Jones.
Tim Pickett:
First off so we can get your name right, would you mind saying your full name so we get the pronunciation, right? And tell me a little bit about you.
Daniel Jones:
My name’s Daniel Mark Jones. I was born in Salt Lake City, grew up in Wyoming for 20 years in a small miners town of Upper Reliance. That’s about three miles from Rock Springs, Wyoming. That’s where I joined the 1041st Engineers. I joined them November 13th, 1999. It was living under a bridge, it was a negative 50 and I just couldn’t do it. So I went and joined the service. I walked in the cold up towards the mountains, right over the college, right down to where the mall is and then I joined them. So I was able to join the 1041st, so it was pretty cool.
Tim Pickett:
So what was that like? How old were you at the time?
Daniel Jones:
I was 18. I was 18 working on my GED. Most of my life I was homeschooled. Mom was falling behind on her bills, everyone else was able to go to public school, and I was stuck getting my college… Up at the college to get my GED.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. What was the service like?
Daniel Jones:
The service, it was different. But for me it was a life changer. I was able to get out and away from people that were going to bring me down. It got me away from the drug scene. It got me away from the basically just destroying my life. It was an opportunity for me to leave Rock Springs, Wyoming, and that was the chance I took.
Daniel Jones:
One of the reasons for that is Rock Springs is called rock bottom. You’re going to be stuck at the bottom of nowhere and you’re going to be stuck on either drugs or end up locked up, and that’s something I didn’t want to be. I wanted something better for my life.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Did you ask your parents before you joined up?
Daniel Jones:
I didn’t tell anybody I joined.
Tim Pickett:
What’d they say?
Daniel Jones:
Basically when they found out is when I was in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri training. They had us all coloring our parents to invite them to graduation. Everyone in my family thought I was dead, even my friends. They couldn’t find me, I just disappeared. When they found out I was in Fort Leonard Wood, my adopted dad, he was stoked.
Tim Pickett:
Was he?
Daniel Jones:
He was.
Tim Pickett:
Because, one, you were alive.
Daniel Jones:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Right? And they didn’t know where you were. How long had you been gone before you contacted them?
Daniel Jones:
It was about probably seven weeks.
Tim Pickett:
Holy cow. As an 18 year old, you’re living under the bridge. You joined the service. You’re gone for six, seven weeks. Yeah, I’ll bet they were pretty excited to hear from you.
Daniel Jones:
Yeah, he was pretty stoked. He drove three days to come to my graduation ceremony.
Tim Pickett:
That is awesome. So what was the rest of that like? Did you do tours? How long were you involved?
Daniel Jones:
I did. I did about four and a half years in that gate. That pretty much put me in two different war zones. My first tour was in Kosovo in 2002. I went with 54th Engineers Company, Bravo Company, out of Bamberg, Germany. They were short staffed on the soldiers and they were looking for volunteers and I was the first to volunteer out of my unit out of Hanau Germany. That was an interesting experience there.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Talk about that. So it’s interesting, I’ve been to Kosovo, I’ve seen the statue of Bill Clinton in the square. I don’t think it was there when you were there, but talk about that a little bit and what you saw.
Daniel Jones:
We were stationed in Klokot. It’s about probably 12 miles from Camp Magrath, and then about probably four or five minute drive from Camp Bondsteel. We were in charge of checkpoint 417, and that’s the longest checkpoint. You just look down the road for miles one way and one way or the other, it was all flat. It was a church in the middle. We did a lot of our searches right there, vehicle searches. Lot of our main focus was there.
Tim Pickett:
What other war zone did you go to?
Daniel Jones:
Everything around us was a war zone.
Tim Pickett:
Was it?
Daniel Jones:
Most of the people that were living in homes were destroyed by bombs. We were even protecting cemeteries. The Serbs, they would come dig up to Albanians graves and scatter their bones everywhere. They were pretty much ruthless. One race thinks they’re better than the other and needs to annihilate the other race. One of the things that we found there was a couple more massive graves where they lined them up and shoot them, and then just dumped the bodies in one big hole.
Tim Pickett:
Wow.
Daniel Jones:
Kosovo also is a minefield. About 90% of the mine fields that have been planted were never recorded. So wherever you drive, you had to be careful. My unit, we were out doing our regular drive arounds, we ended up on a back road and we ended up in the middle of a minefield. If I didn’t [inaudible 00:08:57] to ask the Sergeant and ask him what was sticking up out of the ground out there and stop the vehicle, we were probably about 10 feet from hitting that mine.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. Is this something that you still deal with? It sounds like you have some pretty vivid memories of this still.
Daniel Jones:
I do, I do. I still remember that was pretty hectic driving in a minefield. I was at the church guard guarding, and that’s when the seven bombs went off. It just constantly went off one right after the other. Sergeant Bergess, Sergeant Mcdevitt, they were injured. They were literally putting bombs on people’s homes and just blowing them up.
Tim Pickett:
So what other war zone did you go to other than in Kosovo in 2002?
Daniel Jones:
After Kosovo in 2002, three months later, my regular unit, the 54 Second Engineers, we end up going to Iraq just three months after I got back from Kosovo.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, wow.
Daniel Jones:
My unit was a combat unit, a multi unit bridge unit. We were the river wraps. We put the biggest world float bridge ever built in a war history, a 98×2 float bridge across the Tigris River there. Which is really funny because the river, it’s not a very big river. It’s like a creek. You can even probably just run across it and jump across. But Saddam’s idea was if he blew the dam that was like 30 miles up the river, his idea was to try to take out the dam. It didn’t work that way. So we ended up putting the float bridge across. From my memories from that, that was pretty hectic. One of our sergeants in the boats, the boat went under and it dragged the sergeant down. He didn’t pop up until 150 feet from the bridge.
Tim Pickett:
Wow.
Daniel Jones:
We’re facing white waters. The river itself had blood disease in it. If you go further up the river from the little town, the Tigris, you could actually see the sewer dumping into it. People fishing, people washing their clothes in this river, just five feet from where the sewage is dumping into it. You sit there and wonder, it’s like, “Wow, can’t you just dump that sewage somewhere else?” But they don’t have what we have, the cleaning facility for it.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. So when did you get out?
Daniel Jones:
I got out November 3rd, 2004.
Tim Pickett:
Let’s switch gears a little bit. When did you first get introduced to cannabis?
Daniel Jones:
Oh, probably about 17, 17 and a half. But I wasn’t a really big user of it. It’s not until about seven years ago from today is when I got really into it. One of the reasons I got into it is the VA likes to give a lot of pills out.
Tim Pickett:
I’ve heard that. I have heard that rumor.
Daniel Jones:
Oh, there’s an escalator. If you ask my old lady here where we first hooked up, she found one of my Tupperware was full of pills. They keep sending me more and more and more. There’s pills I never asked for too that they’re sending me.
Daniel Jones:
When someone with PTSD has a flashback or has a hard time trying to get under control, a pill can only work for so long. It takes 45 minutes to an hour. If you do one hit of cannabis, you’re having faster reaction of calming the person down. That’s one of the things I started using the cannabis for was to help get me back in control of my life.
Tim Pickett:
What was happening in your life that you needed to get control of?
Daniel Jones:
Panic attacks. My anxiety was taken off. I was starting to actually see shadow figures walking across my living room. I always, even to this day, I still feel like I’m being watched. I feel like I hear people walking outside around the house. There’s times where I don’t feel safe in my own home, and with the cannabis, it kind of restores my sanity back knowing nothing’s really there.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. When you started getting into it, you’re just getting it off the black market, yeah?
Daniel Jones:
Yes, I was.
Tim Pickett:
So did you really have a choice of what you were using? Or it was kind of like, “Hey, I got this indica, I got this sativa.” Or, “Hey, I just got a bag.”
Daniel Jones:
It wasn’t really much of a choice. It was just I got a bag. You’re paying like $50 for a gram.
Tim Pickett:
Really?
Daniel Jones:
For 3.5, you get like $50, $60. But you’re still paying pretty high.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Did you run into flower cannabis that ended up making things worse sometimes, or was it always helpful? I guess I ask that question because now you have a little bit of choice in the process here, right? You can choose what strain you buy, who grew it. When you’re buying it off the black market, you don’t really know what you’re getting. I don’t know. I know sometimes strains like a real sativa might make people more anxious. Did you ever run into that?
Daniel Jones:
Yes. I ran into where the certain strains, I would say blue dreams, it left me with high anxiety. It got to the point where even my chest, it felt like my heart was trying to pound out on my chest. Compared to where I did something like blue cheese, which blue cheese has a different effect on me. It has more of a mellow and calmness. That’s something I’m more looking into is something to help with the calmness because I feel I have a battle going inside my own head and in my own heart. I feel like I’m always at war or being in a tug of war.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, makes sense. What do you do for work?
Daniel Jones:
I work for Love’s Truck Stop. I am a maintenance man. I fix the pumps. I will get down in there, change hoses out, pump handles, diesels, DEF handles. The pumps go down, I go reset the pumps. I make sure the store runs. I’m basically the backbone of the store, keeping it flown.
Daniel Jones:
People have a hard time with running their cards or they can’t get their cards run, I go out and help them. If the elderly need help and they can’t go in the store, they’ll pay me. Then I’ll go in, pay it, come back with their change and their receipt and hand it to them. We show our courtesy to our customers because that’s who we need to keep going because they keep this country going. The truckers, they keep the fuel going. Our job is to make sure everyone’s taken care of and helped.
Tim Pickett:
It’s really interesting to hear your story about joining the service and being 18. You were 17 and you didn’t get caught up in drugs. You left that scene, which ended up being a good choice, but at the same time it caused you a lot of trauma. But staying would’ve caused you a lot of different trauma probably.
Daniel Jones:
It would’ve prolonged it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Daniel Jones:
That’s what I felt like. Going through two different war zones and seeing a lot of the dead laying around, it’s unnatural. For me, it’s unnatural to take another man’s life. The reason I say that is because when you take somebody’s life, you’re trying to be God or something. It’s not really our choice to take another life unless it’s to really defend your family or your country. But what Saddam did to his own people, it was wrong and he needed to go.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So fast forward to the program here. You’re living in Utah, 2018, we legalized medical cannabis here. What are you thinking at the time?
Daniel Jones:
I was excited. I was stoked. But I wasn’t happy with how they changed the people’s vote on the original prop two. That kind of really made me mad because then that’s taking the people both rights away and then dictating another person’s right into putting in what they wanted to believe. I think prop two was destroyed when the LDS church got involved. It’s just wrong. If somebody votes on something and that’s what we voted on, then that’s what it needs to be, not changed.
Daniel Jones:
I was really disappointed on that, but I was still stoked they still passed through the laws. Something when Truu Med came out, I jumped on it.
Tim Pickett:
Yep, yep. And that’s one of the big reasons why we wanted to talk is because this whole experience with Truu Med. Yeah, let’s talk about that. What the hell happened?
Daniel Jones:
So when Truu Med came out, they were about 90th south and I would say 13th and 14th, a hundred west or somewhere like that. That’s where they first started out, somewhere up in there. They were charging a heavy penny. So me living all the way up here, gas was expensive. You’re looking at almost $3.80, $3.75. It took almost $120 just to fill the whole tank up in the truck. The old lady, she has brain damage, so I worked on her too at the same time.
Daniel Jones:
So first appointment, I took about $800. $400 for me, $400 for her to get it going. I seen their doctor and all that. I was excited, I was stoked. I signed a letter from a medical provider. Turns out this medical provider is no longer with them. He pretty much lasted about four months and he quit on them. So they called, whenever they would call me about three weeks to a month and I’d come down and paid them another $300, $400.
Tim Pickett:
This is how many weeks after?
Daniel Jones:
About six weeks. Not six weeks.
Tim Pickett:
Six months.
Daniel Jones:
No, it wasn’t even six months. They were having us come down every month.
Tim Pickett:
And paying them again? What date is this? What’s the timeframe of this happening?
Daniel Jones:
Beginning on October 20, 2019.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. So for context, I’m going to mention what I’m doing at that point. I’m starting to look into becoming a Q&P, I’m starting to think about how I’m going to set up a business, how I’m going to start seeing people, thinking about insurance. I’m kind of looking into this because 2020, we’re going to have a pharmacy open. So Truu Med is ahead of the game so to speak, right? They’re one of the first people out there. The only other person at the time that I know was writing letters was Corey Anden in Ogden. But Truu Med was out there. So you’re going down there every month, you’re having to pay… So what total amount did you end up paying them?
Daniel Jones:
I paid about $6000. $6000 came out of my pocket. Even you got to put the gas in there too, and it gets expensive.
Tim Pickett:
Because where are you driving from?
Daniel Jones:
Salina. It’s about a two hour and a 20 minute drive to Salt Lake City.
Tim Pickett:
There’s no information anywhere else, so there’s no way really for you to get information that tells you, “Hey, this isn’t right. This is something you need to be concerned about,” because there’s no state website up really. There’s no other cannabis clinics, doctors aren’t doing this. Is that right? Am I getting that right? You’re really only getting information from them. And they’re telling you, “Hey, we need you to come back. We need you to renew your letter.”
Daniel Jones:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Holy shit.
Daniel Jones:
There’s times where me and the old lady showed up, me and Casey, we did show up a couple times where there was no doctors and they still took the money. He gave us back $40 for gas to get back home. That was about it.
Tim Pickett:
Who was this? Was this the guy who ended up in jail?
Daniel Jones:
It was Troy Martinez. I tried calling them last week and the week before. The number on the website doesn’t work.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I think the guy Ramone, he got arrested for kidnapping a woman and beating her.
Daniel Jones:
I didn’t know that. No.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, so interestingly enough, there was a news article that… And I think this is all allegedly, I guess I should say. This is an opinion of us, right? Utah In The Weeds is a podcast, we’re talking about things that we… We’re trying to get the facts of course, but we’re just people talking. But yeah, Ramone allegedly kidnapped a woman, carved numbered in her hand and has been arrested because, yeah, it was a crazy, crazy story. But he’s the owner, or was the owner of Truu Med, one of the owners of Truu Med. There was a lot about Truu Med came out just in the past few weeks about this, essentially, predatory behavior.
Tim Pickett:
I heard about this as somebody who does medical cannabis and who has been pretty open and honest about what the fees are, what the costs are, what you get for your money, how long you get a card. That just seems reasonable, right? I don’t see how you could charge somebody and take $6000 from them and have you drive and the letters. I can see how, I guess, you would do that, but it is just crazy to me that this happened. You’re not the only person that I’ve heard something like this from. This is certainly the most money I’ve heard of. How has that affected you financially?
Daniel Jones:
I took a major hit. I’m struggling right now. That’s money I could have saved and used because right now I’m at home and I’m stuck with COVID. I’ve been with this disease for about eight days now and it’s really taken an effect on me. I wish they have done something right, something different, because I could have put this money to something, a better use.
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Daniel Jones:
For this problem now, I’m facing criminal charges.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, talk about that. What’s that?
Daniel Jones:
I got hit with two ounces because they didn’t tell me how much I could have. I didn’t get like how I got with UTTHC, I think it is. They gave me information about what I can carry, what I can have or how much I have on my possession. Well, with Truu Med, I never got anything like that.
Daniel Jones:
So when I got pulled over about 30, 40 minutes from home, I showed the cops these signed letters I got from Truu Med. They just looked at me and then they went and talked with each other. The other came back and says, “We never seen anything like this before.” I said, “What?” They said, “These signed letters from Truu Med.” I said, “This is what they sent me and said I would be safe and I would be good.” Pretty much the cop just pretty much looked at me and said, “Well, I’m thinking you pretty much got scammed out of it.”
Tim Pickett:
Wow. And then they still charged you.
Daniel Jones:
Yep. It’s my first offense with it. I don’t know what else I can do with it but talk to the judge and let them know what’s going on.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Daniel Jones:
I got a court date. My first court hearing on it is on February 9th in Nephi, Utah.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. Well, we will all be in support. You got a community now, and hopefully if you need something, this gets cleared up because it sounds to me like you’re the reason, you’re literally one of the reasons why this program exists. So it seems tragic that somebody like yourself can be taken advantage of in such a horrible way financially. And then on top of that, get charged for possession in a state where you have legal product. And two ounces is under the legal limit of what you can possess. You can legally possess up to four ounces of flower and plenty of concentrates. So hopefully this works out in your favor.
Daniel Jones:
I did get my card, my cannabis card.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, good.
Daniel Jones:
What I was really impressed with HTT was that they stayed there, made me stayed there until I got everything done and make sure it was done correctly. And that’s something that Truu Med never did. They got me all email set up with EBS and all that. So when I’m looking on the EBS, there’s no doctors that I actually met with in Truu Med. There’s not a record on it. When I looked up the BBB reports, there’s someone filed a complaint on Truu Med and that turned out to be a big mess. From what I read is that has never been resolved.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I don’t know that it ever will be, but I guess here’s hoping. But I don’t know whether or not we want them seeing patients anymore at all. At this point I think there’s been multiple red flags kind of come up in my opinion on that whole organization.
Daniel Jones:
I think the course really need to do a thorough investigation of these people because a lot of people, I feel like they’re taking advantage of people who really need the cannabis. There’s a lot of people who can’t afford a lot of this money. And whatever they come up with, they’re taking advantage of them and robbing them. They need to be put a stop to it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Couldn’t agree more. So question on your use too, now that you have Utah product, what’s your favorite pharmacy?
Daniel Jones:
The one I’ve been going to so far is the one in Provo.
Tim Pickett:
Deseret Wellness, Josh Fitzgerald is the pharmacist down there. I like that place. Nice, easy access off the freeway, pretty cool people.
Daniel Jones:
And they were very, very helpful and they took care of us, took care of me and the old lady. It’s the best place to go.
Tim Pickett:
Cool. I’m glad they got a good recommendation from you. You’re buying mostly flower there?
Daniel Jones:
I bought the flowers, but I’m also buying the edibles for sleep.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Daniel Jones:
I have sleep apnea. I got a sleep problem.
Tim Pickett:
Nice thing about cannabis is it doesn’t make you breathe worse like opioids. I think it’s safer than Ambien, too. And the gummies last all night, right? You got a favorite?
Daniel Jones:
Oh, I got a favorite. This one I bought, it’s called Calm, True North Organics.
Tim Pickett:
Yep.
Daniel Jones:
It is one of my favorites because if I need to, I could take half of it and I sleep like a baby. I don’t wake up during the night.
Tim Pickett:
Yep. And with somebody like yourself, the nice thing about edibles is they suppress dreams too. They not only make you sleep a little better, but they suppress a little dreams so you actually sleep better, especially if you suffer from PTSD or nightmares, and with sleep apnea. Do you wear a mask?
Daniel Jones:
Yes, I do.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, so you need to shut it down at night.
Daniel Jones:
There’s times that mask gets on my way and then I feel like I got a chemical mask on. It drives me nuts.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I could see how that’d be hard.
Daniel Jones:
Yeah, it is.
Tim Pickett:
So what’s your favorite strain to use in… We’ll call it vaporize, right? Smoke or vaporize. You’ve got a favorite strain of flower?
Daniel Jones:
My favorite strain is probably more of sleeper. I pretty much like something that’s going to calm me and relax me down more. I already feel like I got enough hyperactive during the day, so at night when I’m wide awake and sitting there laying, I feel like I’m hyperactive because my ears are listening to everything. They hear every little creeks in the boards all the way down to hearing something walking on the gravel around the house. So it makes me get up and want to go out and look, feeling like I’m back on guard duty doing my fire watch.
Daniel Jones:
But at the same time, it’s also taking care of the pain and the joints. It’s taking care of the pain in my back. It’s been a miracle helper ever since.
Tim Pickett:
That’s cool.
Daniel Jones:
Like I said, it’s a lot better than taking the pills.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. It sounds like you’re able to control it better, right? You’re choosing. You’re in the driver’s seat.
Daniel Jones:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Where before it didn’t sound like you felt like you were driving.
Daniel Jones:
But it kind of sucks because with the VA, half the VA’s for it, the other half of the VA’s against it. They’re still split on that decision. So you sit and wonder. It’s like half the doctors say, “If it’s working for you, then continue using it.” The other half says, “Well, you’re a bad person for taking it.” I’ve run into doctors like that.
Tim Pickett:
What do you say to them?
Daniel Jones:
I say, “Well, at least I’m not getting hooked on something. At least cannabis you can quit and not affect you in any form like an opiate does, or like an Ambien.” I was on Ambien for a while. Ambien hit people differently. You could take it the night before, wake up in the morning fine. Two hours later down the road, you could be sleep driving from your Ambien from the night before and not realize it.
Daniel Jones:
One of the things I think they don’t like people on cannabis is because they are losing their money in their pharmacies.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I hate to say it. I guess it could be. I hope that’s not true, but it certainly could be true.
Daniel Jones:
The VA has an escalator going straight to the pharmacy and home.
Tim Pickett:
Do they?
Daniel Jones:
Yeah. There’s times where I sat waiting for two hours just to pick up my medication because the pharmacy’s filled with vets waiting for their medications.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. Do a lot of vets who smoke weed?
Daniel Jones:
I know probably like 10 of them.
Tim Pickett:
Do you find that your family and friends are pretty supportive of your cannabis consumption? What’s going on with you?
Daniel Jones:
Yes. They prefer me doing the cannabis. One of the reasons for that is I’m not on opiates and I’m not a raging alcoholic. Because if you actually look at the statistics, a lot of vets are alcoholics. They drink and drink and drink. When you’re in the service, what did we do? We drink and party, drink and party.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And the only options are not marijuana, not cannabis, so you got alcohol.
Daniel Jones:
Yep. And they’re big supplier of alcohol, the military is.
Tim Pickett:
Are they?
Daniel Jones:
Oh, yeah. When I was in Germany, in Hanau, Germany, my wall locker, I had like six, seven cases of beer, four bottles of Jack Daniels. It was always stocked in there. We’d drink every single day, every night. One of the things I’m happy is I don’t drink.
Tim Pickett:
Congratulations.
Daniel Jones:
The cannabis helps out with that.
Tim Pickett:
Is there something else that you want to talk about, you want to bring up, you want to make sure everybody hears?
Daniel Jones:
Yeah, I just want everybody to know is that they need to stay away from Truu Med. Those who’ve gone through Truu Med and been screwed over by Truu Med, they need to come forward and put a stop to it. We do better as a group than one single person trying to take them on. If everybody who’s had a problem with them, if everybody came together as a team, we can do something about it.
Tim Pickett:
Well, absolutely.
Daniel Jones:
That’s what I really need to let people know.
Tim Pickett:
Well, if you’re listening to this podcast on Utah In The Weeds and you you want to make a comment or you want to share an experience about Truu Med or another clinic that took advantage of you in the system in Utah, let’s do this. Let’s go to YouTube, our YouTube channel. It’s called Discover Marijuana. This podcast is posted on that YouTube channel. Make a comment there on this episode and we’ll start a little group of people there. If there’s people who have stories, make a comment. Again, Discover Marijuana. This podcast with Daniel Jones. Daniel Mark Jones, this has been a great… I am glad to get to know you, man.
Daniel Jones:
Same here, Tim. It’s really good to be seeing you, to meet you this time.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. If we can do anything for you and help you in any way, you reach out to us. Shout out to Deseret Wellness who’s helping you get your medicine. I love those guys down there. Stop in next door. We’ve got an office right there and we’ll hook you up a sweatshirt, Utah In The Weeds sweatshirt, next time you’re up there in Provo.
Daniel Jones:
Sweet.
Tim Pickett:
All right, everybody. Exciting times in Utah as the legislation gets kind of underway, and appreciate you listening. This has been great. Stay safe out there.
Episode 87 of Utah in the Weeds features Blake Smith, Chief Science Officer at Zion Medicinal. Blake frequently collaborates with us in educating the public about Medical Cannabis, and we were happy to invite him back for another episode of Utah in the Weeds.
Tim and Blake reminisced about the last couple of years working in Utah’s ever-changing cannabis industry. [02:17]
Blake talked about Zion Medicinal’s growth over the last two years and some of the products they’re producing now. [05:22]
They talked about the customizability of a Medical Cannabis treatment plan. Patients can experiment with different ratios of THC, CBD, CBG, and other cannabinoids to tailor their treatment. [11:30 ]
Blake responded to recent research about cannabinoids and COVID-19. He says the research isn’t quite as exciting as sounds, and he explains why. [13:44]
Tim noted reproducibility has been a challenge in the cannabis research field, and for science as a whole. Blake explained some of the challenges in conducting pharmaceutical research. [16:12]
Both Tim and Blake appreciate the enthusiasm with which Utah’s Medical Cannabis patients have provided feedback about their treatment. [21:32]
Next, they talked about the current state of Utah’s Medical Cannabis program and the changes they’d like to see. [25:12]
Blake talked about entering the retail space in Cedar City and his philosophy of making a wide variety of products available. [33:14]
He also spoke about the plans for Bloom Medicinals to begin a delivery service. [39:16]
Blake is also involved in cannabis-related projects in other states and even in other countries. One project involves producing hemp-based products for pets. Blake says cannabis products for pets should be made with the same high-quality materials used in making products for humans. [40:54]
The pair reflected on the quality of Utah’s cannabis products before shifting to a discussion about Medical Cannabis legislation. [44:13]
Blake talked about Delta-8 THC and another lesser-known synthetic cannabinoid called HPP. [45:27]
Blake says it’s “silly” to define hemp according to a low THC percentage. A hemp producer, he says, could still legally make a product with several milligrams of THC. The key to making that type of product legal is basing it around a dense food product. [50:06]
Tim and Blake then discussed potential legislation regarding cannabis, and the continuing need for quality assurance in cannabis products. [51:07]
We wrapped with a quick discussion of a new video series to help Discover Marijuana viewers get to know Tim and Blake. [57:18]
Tim Pickett:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Utah in the Weeds. I’m your host, Tim Pickett. And I’m excited for this episode, an interview with Blake Smith, the chief science officer, as you were, for Zion Medicinal, and just a good friend of mine and somebody that I’ve wanted to bring back on the podcast for quite some time. We talk a lot about a lot of things in this episode. So, I’ll let you listen to it all. Again, Blake Smith, he knows pharmacokinetics, he’s very, very interested in minor cannabinoids and how those interact in the body, and just making good medicine. So, some housekeeping; also, we just wrapped up the month of January, and again, raised over $6,000 for the Uplift subsidy program for medical cannabis patients here in Utah. We’ve added two more partners that will be starting to contribute in February. So, if you have not donated, we are going to match your donation. I believe it’s eight times now; eight times those donations to Uplift at utahmarijuana.org/uplift.
Tim Pickett:
Stay tuned, we have upcoming episodes with Daniel Mark Jones, a veteran of basically, two wars, was in Kosovo, was in Iraq. And you’ve got to hear his story about how he was basically fleeced for $6,000 in Utah, trying to get medical cannabis access. You’ve got to listen to that story. That’ll be coming up in a future episode. We’ve also got [inaudible 00:01:44] from the department of health coming up, and we just have a line of guests now, as we dive into the winter and the spring. Subscribe to Utah in the Weeds on any podcast player that you have access to, stay up to date with the conversation on YouTube. Discover Marijuana is the channel. Leave a comment there, and we answer all of those comments. We want to engage with you. So, I’m excited to have you with us, and enjoy this episode with Blake Smith. Cool. Well, Blake Smith.
Blake Smith:
That’s me. The one and only.
Tim Pickett:
Do you remember, the only real-time we’ve had you on the podcast was in the very beginning, right? So, you haven’t been on the-
Blake Smith:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
This is going to be like episode… We’re high 80s now.
Blake Smith:
Holy crap. Awesome.
Tim Pickett:
…Episodes, right? And maybe a few more people are listening to the podcast than were when we had you on before. I remember sitting in the room when we were recording. We were in our Mill Creek office, we had like these cheap Amazon desks, and we were talking, and man, things were so different. We’re talking episode one, two, or three. We’re talking-
Blake Smith:
Yeah, I think that was episode three or four. Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So, since then, holy cow.
Blake Smith:
The world is very-
Tim Pickett:
Are you tired?
Blake Smith:
Yeah, I’m exhausted.
Tim Pickett:
Because just remembering a couple of years ago, it just makes me tired.
Blake Smith:
This industry, more than anywhere I’ve ever worked, is accelerated. A year in this industry is like five in any others. And so, anyone who’s in here too long will age and age significantly.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I mean, I guess they talk about how being president of the United States is just really, really stressful and it ages people. Of course, Biden’s into his administration, what? A year. But he already looks a lot older. I feel bad for the guy in some ways, but in the cannabis space, yeah, it’s like that; it’s just a rocket ship.
Blake Smith:
That’s right. Well, because every day is different. Every day, something is happening. I mean, just yesterday, we were up at Capitol Hill, and then the week before that, there’s people who were interested in doing different things with their licenses. And the day before that, the state comes by. And then the day before that, there’s an announcement in Mississippi, and then the next day… It’s just nonstop all the time.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. It’s nonstop. It is an industry… I feel like the medical programs, it’s still really… For any other industry, this would be in its infancy. So, we’re two years into the program. And when we were talking to you before, we were barely getting tinctures out, lemon dream, your vape cart lemon dream. Wasn’t that the first vape cart you made?
Blake Smith:
Yep. It was the first vape cart we made.
Tim Pickett:
And one of the first-
Blake Smith:
It may have been the first vape carts created in the state.
Tim Pickett:
In the State of Utah.
Blake Smith:
That’s right.
Tim Pickett:
And there was hardly any flower at the time.
Blake Smith:
Almost nothing.
Tim Pickett:
And now there’s quite a bit of flower in the state. So, take me from before, take me from Zion Medicinal, when we talked two years ago, to today. Give me just an overview of some of the stuff that’s changed.
Blake Smith:
Oh, wow. Well, all eight licenses are growing now. And so, there was about a year period where several licenses were not activated, and we started off with zero patients. So, when the program first started, they say, “Okay, everything starts March 1st, and we want products available, and then we’re going to be getting our first patients, and we’re going to be doing this.” Boy, that’s a real hard way to start planning how much you’re going to grow, how much product to make.
Tim Pickett:
Right. This is back when we were thinking, “Oh, there’s going to be 6,000, maybe 10,000 patients the first year. How much operation do you need? How many plants do we grow? Can we afford it? Because we’re maybe not going to get our investment back for a long, long time.”
Blake Smith:
Yeah. I’m mean these are the issues. So, a lot of people, also even if they got their grow going… And you remember, we started off in our own warehouse. We had grow tents and stuff [crosstalk 00:06:48].
Tim Pickett:
Oh yeah. I recorded with Sean in, now what is your processing facility, and there were like three grow tents back there.
Blake Smith:
That’s right. And it’s because we had no idea, plus, creating a clean grow space in a warehouse was challenging. I mean our isopropyl costs alone were outrageous. I mean, it’s just one of those crazy things. And now, I’ll speak to Zion, we have two grows going. One, we’ve maximized our license. We produce a lot of biomass, we produce massive amounts of products and distillate. We have all kinds of different products out there. And we continue the science, figuring out mechanism of action of specific cannabinoids, and tried to create specific medicines for specific conditions. But now, we have a lot more cannabinoids to actually do that with. There’s like the 1:1:10 tincture for pain. We’re right in the middle of the 1:1 tincture with CBN.
Tim Pickett:
Tell me, what’s the 1:1:1 for pain?
Blake Smith:
It’s a 1:1:10, and it’s one part THC, one part CBG, 10 part CBD. And then we’re about to do one for sleep, which is a 1:1:10, but instead of CBG, it’s CBN. And we’re also looking at doing some vape carts that are going to be some mixes like a 1:1:1, something along those lines [inaudible 00:08:16].
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Because there’s no vape carts in the Utah market with other cannabinoids that I know of.
Blake Smith:
Their White Widow had CBG.
Tim Pickett:
In a vape cart.
Blake Smith:
In a vape cart. There’s a couple. What I would say is it’s been lacking a little bit. And part of that’s because if you don’t get your ratios right, the other cannabinoids, other than THC, will crystallize in the cart, so you got to get it just right with the right amount of terpenes, with just the right amount of agents in order to get it to keep from crystallizing. So, that’s just science. We can figure all that out.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So now, would you say you have an abundance supply of biomass and flower for what Zion needs to do?
Blake Smith:
Yeah. I mean, I have enough flower and biomass to produce pretty much anything anybody wants. I mean, we’ve started now producing concentrates, [crosstalk 00:09:18].
Tim Pickett:
Which takes a lot of biomass.
Blake Smith:
Which requires a lot of biomass and it requires a lot of good flower, quite frankly. And so, good flower was always at such a high demand. There was not excess flower to put into the market in this other products. So, you talk about raws and carts and things like that. There’s just not enough material to make that worthwhile, considering that flower will all sell. We’re getting to a point now in the industry where there’s enough flower to start seeing some other products come out, and that’s cool. That’s a cool place to be.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Have you landed on things that you really like over the past couple of years; the products that you feel like are kind of your favorites so far from Zion? What are those?
Blake Smith:
Yeah. I think, a little bold on this one, I think Zion makes a lot of cool products, but I think the tincture market is probably our strongest. And the reason I say that is because we specifically put a lot of different types of cannabinoids and very specific formulations for very specific conditions. We make a really nice delta-9 cart. The delta-9 cart is designed to really help you get the head change and mask pain. We make some cool delta-8 carts which are good as antiemetics. They’re really nice in terms of helping with nausea and things like that, nice flavor profiles, and they’re all cannabis-derived. But our tinctures, without trying to sound too bold, we’ve seen miracles with some of these. We’ve seen people stop having seizures, we’ve seen people who cannot sleep, all of a sudden, their back pain goes away. And so, I mean, we produce some cool flower too. Our Mad Max flower is one of my absolute favorites. It’s always a high percent THC, but also a high percent CBG. So, people are happy to make their own and splits with it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, the Mad Max, it is a favorite strain and just because it’s kind of different. As you get into this and you learn a little bit about it, start keeping a journal as a patient, and you start to experience these different cultivars, different strains, different products, you start to think or you start to realize what the difference is. I know CBG, I’ve seen it marketed as a bubble bath for the brain, and it is kind of that way. It’s like a little different… The head change is a little different. And so, for patients who are experimenting with THC and CBG, and THC and CBD ratios, I’ve had people come back to me and tell me, “When I needed the chill, then I really just go to the THC, CBD, but when I don’t need that, there’s just something different about the CBG.” So, from a medical standpoint, it’s as if we’re manipulating our own drugs for our own effects, and it’s working. It seems like it’s working for people.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. I mean, the thing is we’ve learned enough at this point, that we can draw some actual dose effects, like we know about, for the typical person, how much THC will affect… a masking element for pain and create a head change. We know about how much delta-8 is required. We know about how much CBD is necessary to cut into if you’re overly high, but also how much CBD is necessary for helping with pain management. We know enough about CBG, how many mgs of CBG are required to do things. But now we’re also in the fun world of like, “Okay, well now, let’s start mixing more of these together.” And then you get these entourage effects where you get heightened effect from any of the individual cannabinoids, by putting them in certain ratios. And that’s this whole other world that’s kind of awesome, where individual patients get to figure out what their right dose is that’s working for them in this mixture of cannabinoids.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I wonder what, once you get through the CBN, the CBG… Oh, okay, totally going to change this topic here. What about CBGA and CBDA. This is your COVID study article? What about those?
Blake Smith:
Yeah. Well, I mean, somebody may try to come and hang me after I say this. They’re not as exciting as I think people want them to be. Here’s the thing. In vitro, you’re putting in a Petri dish, you can get the same effect out of coffee, actually, with tannic acid. It inhibits proliferation of viral load. That’s not to say the CBDA and CBGA don’t have a physiological effect, but how are you going to get your CBGA? How are you going to it in? Are you going to smoke it? Well, guess what, the second you light it on fire, you decarboxylated it.
Tim Pickett:
You’ve decarboxylated it.
Blake Smith:
That’s no longer CBGA. So, what are you going to do? You can do a crude. Well, crude oil has other health implications. I don’t know that you want to be delving into armfuls of crude. So, that may not be the right answer either. And we also know that with the acidic forms, you’re not going to get into CB1 receptors. You potentially will get into CB2 receptors. Cellular uptake for the as acidic form seems to be a thing. We don’t have tons of data on it yet, but there could be medicinal value with both of those. Could you get a protective index from them? How about this? Maybe.
Tim Pickett:
I’m glad we’re bringing this up.
Blake Smith:
[crosstalk 00:15:23]. We don’t have CBGA and a nebulizer, so it’s not going [crosstalk 00:15:27] viruses.
Tim Pickett:
Right. And you don’t have… Okay, so what about this other issue with the reproducibility problem that we have with this data? So, there was this study, the CBGA, CBDA study, there was another study that was done, retroactively looking at CBD patients, seizure patients, and looking at their incidents of COVID, and saying that, potentially, CBD had this protective effect. Some confounding factors, certainly, one being that maybe people with seizures were not in the public and getting exposed to COVID as much as the general population, but that all being aside, it also seems like, in general, in science… And I want to hear your opinion about this. We have kind of this reproducibility problem. We have these studies, and then we’re having a very hard time reproducing the results of a lot of science. Not just in cannabis medicine, but even outside of that. What do you think about that?
Blake Smith:
So, I’m not going to speak directly about cannabis for one second. I’m going to just talk about science and science process in general. So, I got a bunch of degrees. I started going and working for a contract research organization, and my first boss I had there said, “Hey, you got hired in this contract research organization because of your background and your degrees. However, we’re going to now teach you real science.” And I was like, “What? What does that even mean? Man, I studied my butt off, I passed my test, I’m a scientist.” And they, very politely, were just like, “Well, there’s a difference between getting N of 20 people and getting 10,000 people, and reproducing it with 10,000 people.” In fact, there’s difference between that, and then six months after all your tests are done, randomly picking a thousand of those 10,000 samples, pulling them back out of the freezer, running the same method, and being within 2% of your original value.”
Blake Smith:
That’s hardcore science. I mean, that’s reproducible science, where we know that aspirin has a dose-effect because we now have so much data and have done this so many times that we know what aspirin does. Now, we have that much data around THC. We know about how much THC it takes for a head change. How many science experiments do we have with THC in two different hundred types of cancer? And how many variables? So, this part of the whole science and medicine stuff is still nascent, it’s still new, we’re all of this stuff. Could THC, CBD, CBG help with COVID? Maybe. Scientifically, can we prove that yet? Do we have an end of 10,000 that show that? No, we’re not-
Tim Pickett:
And not only do we have an N of 10,000, but we can we take another N of 10,000? And when you say N, that means just the number of people treated.
Blake Smith:
The number-
Tim Pickett:
Right. Number needed to treat, but then can you then take another 10,000 people that kind of match those first 10,000 and do this again, and then do it again? Then you get into this issue where… And again, another kind of rabbit hole, but you look at SSRIs for example, and there’s so many studies, and some of them didn’t get published because the results didn’t match what the drug companies needed. So, you end up somewhat biasing the publishing of some studies over the… It’s not that you’re withholding data in those cases. You’re just not promoting some of these things. How does that fit in with cannabis? I don’t feel like we have enough of those studies with cannabis to even make that argument.
Blake Smith:
It’s an interesting point though. And I think it’s actually probably very relevant to what we’re talking about, because, in the cases where you have some drug companies that aren’t releasing all studies to the public, what I would say is this, it’s not that those studies don’t ever get released, because what does happen is those studies do get released to their peers, other companies, FDA, and so that’s where you start getting your contraindications. I mean, you, as a doctor, know what the side effects of most of these drugs are, not because the drug company initially came out and said, “Hey, we saw this in a study, but it’s like, upon full scientific review, we know this is a contraindication of this particular SSRI or whatever it’s.”
Blake Smith:
And so, that scientific process is the part that needs to continue to play in cannabis. Because what I hear a lot in the industry is this sort of war against synthetics versus non-synthetics, or this war of whole plant medicine versus non-whole plant medicine. And I don’t think we need to war at all. What I think we need to do is have qualified individuals talk about the data, and then we need to peer-review all of our data, and then come up with conclusions that we either can agree or we don’t agree on, and that’s okay. Scientist don’t always agree, but one thing we will agree on is, this data is here and this is what the data itself sets. So, that’s kind of my feeling; I just feel like we’re so new in how we even think about the science on all this. It’s really hard to get real hard conclusions. Having said that, we’re getting there. We’re getting a very good understanding of CBGA and all those [inaudible 00:21:29].
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Or we’re certainly better of. Well, and we have 40,000, here in Utah, we’ve got 40,000-plus patients that are using cannabis in various forms and types and delivery methods and products, and they’re responding to questionnaires that we’re giving them. And what’s nice about the cannabis population, the cannabis consumers, is they seem interested in providing this feedback. Like, “I want to prove to you what’s happening. I want to legitimize what I’m doing as a patient.” There’s a lot of that in cannabis.
Blake Smith:
Cannabis is awesome because it involves the enthusiast around the medicine they’re taking. I don’t usually see somebody who’s like, “Man, I can’t wait to go home and take my Warfarin,” but somebody who’s like, “Look, I can’t sleep because of my pain, and this flower or this product, I sleep with this. My life is better and I want you to have a better life too. Let me tell you about it.”
Tim Pickett:
I haven’t heard one human being, in my lifetime, say to another, “Hey man, I couldn’t sleep. You know what you need to do, you to get on Ambien.” Like, “Oh, I just started Ambien last week, and it is so awesome. I sleep so good, and I’m now…” That never happens. I hide the fact… Most people would be hiding the fact that they take this, but cannabis is the opposite. “Sally, you know what, I have been using these Gummies that my sister brought back from wherever, and now I got my card and I’m using the tincture and it has changed my life.”
Blake Smith:
Yeah. That’s right.
Tim Pickett:
That’s what’s happening.
Blake Smith:
And part of that is the stigma. There’s a stigma around it, so people are trying to break the stigma, but I think you can also run into the other problem too where people can be so over-enthusiastic that it comes off as being hyper drug culture. And here’s the thing; personally, I don’t really care about any of that, but somebody might be like, “Oh man, how much Mescaline do you take? Do you follow the White Rabbit? And that’s going to be the best high you’ve ever had. Let alone, don’t worry about the cardiac palpitation, don’t worry about the [inaudible 00:23:57], don’t worry about… But if you’re trying to get lit, man, it’s the only way to fly, whatever.” So, I think there’s this balance that you got to play out. “I use this medicinally or I use this for this purpose.”
Blake Smith:
And look, here’s my experience. And please correct me if I’m wrong. And viewers or listeners out there, please correct me on this. But even most recreational or adult use is still usually centered around treatment of some kind. I very rarely have somebody who’s just like, “Man, I just light up all the time because I like to just be lit all the time.” I mean, there are people that do that, but almost everyone I know who even use it as an adult-use product, they’re like, “Man, I just sleep better. I feel better. I have this pain, I’m just off. I’m not in my right place, and this helps center me or whatever it is.” And so, they’re taking it medicinally even if they’re not identifying it with a card saying, “This is my condition. This is why I’m doing it.” And that’s why medical programs become [inaudible 00:25:02] because you can bring them in and say, “Yes, what you’re complaining or what you’re sensing is a real thing. Now come onto the white market and let’s do this in a way that makes sense for everybody.”
Tim Pickett:
Is the program in Utah getting better, getting worse, staying the same? What do you think?
Blake Smith:
That’s a great question. Despite what I think detractors will say, Utah is a pretty good program. That doesn’t mean it’s all right, but overall, I mean, we are allowed a lot more concentration forms and different things than many states have allowed on the medicinal side. We have a lot more producers producing lots of different types of products, so even the number of products is pretty wide in terms of what we can do. I mean, we haven’t got there yet for everything we need, obviously, but we’re moving in that direction. Legislatively, our legislature’s been pretty open to changing things that needed to be changed. And that’s been really, even in this session that’s going on right now. We’re looking at changing a couple of things to make the industry better. Do I think we’re there?
Tim Pickett:
What types of things…
Blake Smith:
No, but we’re getting there. I think we’re continually trying to improve.
Tim Pickett:
What types of things is Zion interested in changing or is the “Industry in Utah,” trying to change?
Blake Smith:
The biggest thing, I think, everybody in industry can agree on, no matter… Because there are different companies that have different philosophies about how we think about medicine, and that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think universally, the industry can all agree that we need more patients. Patient counts have got to go up because that helps fuel innovation, it helps fuel business, it helps fuel getting rid of the stigma. I mean, there’s so many advantageous… And so many people who still just need help who are still on their opioids, or still on their Ambien, or still taking all these other drugs, that could be helped by cannabis, and so we need to increase patient counts. So, I think that’s a universal thing we all agree on. I think the other thing we would agree on as an industry is we need to get the right amount of licenses with real data. Because if you go back originally and you look at eight grows, 14 pharmacies, and now there’s a 15th pharmacy, I mean all these numbers are sort of arbitrary.
Tim Pickett:
Sort of arbitrary. They’re like literally arbitrary. Somebody could say they’re correcting me and they have data around how many pharmacies there could have been, that… bullshit. It’s just arbitrary. [crosstalk 00:27:53].
Blake Smith:
Tim. I like you because you’re bold. I was trying to give a little bit more of the benefit of the doubt, but [crosstalk 00:27:57].
Tim Pickett:
I know, but like it’s… [crosstalk 00:28:00].
Blake Smith:
You’re right. The numbers were arbitrary. Now, does that mean the numbers are necessarily wrong? Well, how do you know right or wrong without the data. So, the whole point would be, I think the industry would all be okay with getting data around it and saying, “Look, how much do we really need?” I mean, because right now, even if you look at the amount of flower, there’s now enough flower for the most part. Almost every pharmacy has flower in stock. Does it always the best flower? No, I think we still have strides to make there. And we need to lower prices. Prices need to come down, but generally speaking, we’ve made huge advancements.
Blake Smith:
Over half companies still aren’t utilizing their full license either. So, if everybody has flower in all their pharmacies and so forth, and we can start lowering prices, maybe we don’t need more grows. But the only way to do that is to start doing a real assessment. And then I would say the same thing on the pharmacy side. How many people are not being served because they can’t get access to it? And so, we need to have data had to suggest how many pharmacies we should have. I think the industry is okay with those ideas, but we should make all decisions based on data.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And at least I can see, I think, Ray Ward is trying to do maybe an appropriation for some industry questionnaires, asking the QMPs and the patients, how the program is going, what’s happening, what’s good, what’s bad? I can support that from my side, from the medical provider side, that we need practical data, on my side, on how the program is being used. On my side, it’s more of a question of who’s providing the recommendations? Who does the legislature want to be providing the recommendations, versus who is actually making those recommendations and helping the program grow?
Blake Smith:
Yeah, that’s right. And we’re still lacking in education too. I mean, one of the biggest challenges, I think, with the government, in general, is that they stepped into this without actually knowing how the cannabis industry actually works. And then not only that, but then there’s always this standoffish like, “Well, of course, industry is going to suggest things because they’re so self-motivated that the industry can’t be trusted.” Well, the industry’s the only one who has all the knowledge that’s necessary for everybody to know everything, so it’s a very weird stance to say, “I’ll be ignorant and make rules based on my ignorance, but I can’t trust industry who does know the answer to this because they’re only going to do it in their own interest.” I mean-
Tim Pickett:
You’re exactly in the same spot that I am too. Nobody trusts me as a QMP that that owns a cannabis specialty clinic, because, “Oh, you have all of your interests. Utah Therapeutic, their interests are in seeing more patients and doing more evaluations.” But on the other hand, just like you, but yet, I’m the one seeing all the patients and doing all the evaluations.
Blake Smith:
Right. I’m the guy who’s making medicine, so like-
Tim Pickett:
Right. You’re like, “You’re the guy who’s making medicine, so you’ve got to listen to what people are buying, what people are using, how people are responding, what’s the accessibility.”
Blake Smith:
And this is the science of what we do know.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. This is just practical. It’s that practical knowledge that’s hard. And it is hard for a state… Ironically, you have a state that’s very libertarian and right-sided on the political spectrum, and yet, they have got their clauses deep in regulation on this side. So, it’s a very interesting place to be. I’m glad you feel that same way. And it’s…
Blake Smith:
Tim, I always laugh. I laugh about this a lot because I have been told to my face that, “Well, we wouldn’t want to trust data coming out of a cannabis company because it’s going to be self-serving in terms of doing the research.” I worked in pharma for a good portion of my career. Every study we did, we paid for, and it was promoting our material we were making from pharma. The difference was it was okay because it was being peer-reviewed, it was going through this regulatory process. And so, why is cannabis any different? Zion, I think I have done clinical studies, I know how to do this, but if Curaleaf gets a study done and they open up the data and everybody can review it and scientists all can weigh in, that’s good for everybody. It doesn’t really matter that it was Curaleaf or Zion or whoever, it doesn’t really matter. Good data is good data, and that will win out at the end of the day.
Tim Pickett:
How do you… Switching gears a little bit on Zion’s portion, so you applied for the 15th license, Dragonfly ended up with the award. Sounds like they’re going to put a pharmacy in price. You fought hard, Zion fought hard, I know.
Blake Smith:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
You and I talked for that license, but you have a retail establishment. How did that play out? Talk to us a little bit about that because not a lot of people understand or even know.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. And that’s been… I mean, that was pretty intentional on our end. I mean, there has been differences of opinion in the industry about different companies and different things. I mean, I’ve heard people say, “Well, Zion, those are those lab guys, and they’re full of chemists and scientists, and they’re doing weird stuff.” And so, people are entitled to the way they think about it. I would like to think that we make good medicine and we follow good scientific practices as a result of that.
Blake Smith:
But what ends up happening is, because of these differences of opinions and different things, that we had an opportunity to acquire the business, which included the license for pharmacy 127, which is the one that’s in Cedar City, and that became important. I mean, it’s important for us for a lot of reasons, but we need to be able to give all different patients, access to all kinds of different medicine. But we also wanted to make sure that we didn’t want people to not want to get us products because it was going to be a Zion affiliate in some way, shape, or form. Because if you go to Cedar City, what you’ll notice is that pretty much every company is represented there. Every company.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. You buy products down there from everybody. We have a clinic in that same building, and it’s one of the things that our staff… And when I ask my staff about loyalty programs and which pharmacies they like to shop at, which pharmacies they like to get their medicine at, always, the availability of all the products at Bloom at the Cedar city location, is one of the things that comes up. Always stopping by that pharmacy on the way to St. George, that’s what I’m hearing people are starting to do, because, the variety’s good, the prices are as good as you can get around in the state. And that variety isn’t the case in all of the pharmacies.
Blake Smith:
That’s correct. Yeah. So, to that point, Tim, I mean, we purposely have lowered prices on all products a little bit. I mean, I would like to do more, but at the moment, it is what it is, but I think we’re one of the cheapest pharmacies in the state for the daily price. I mean, there are pharmacies that run some specials, that do a little bit better than that, but on average, the daily price is cheapest, and that’s very intentional on our side. And the other thing is we want to carry everything. Because here’s the thing. And again, I’m going to be bold, Tim. You know I like to get bold.
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Blake Smith:
I think I produce some of the best products there are. I believe that. I come from a background of making medicine, and I think I’m really good at this. And some of my products, I think are better than others. I think we produce the best tinctures. I just think that that is the case, but having said that, that doesn’t mean there’s not room for other tinctures in the market. And in fact, I would make the argument that says, everybody should be able to make the things that they think and hold value. So, for example, if somebody thinks that it’s better to have whole plant medicine, where they don’t pull out certain terpenes that have sulfurs, and they think that’s valuable, that should be available to patients.
Blake Smith:
Patients and providers should be able to start talking about what types of medicines are going to be the best fit for that individual. And even though I think I make great medicine, there are plenty of other processors and people who make good medicines as well, that may be a better fit for an individual. And as a result of that, it’s our philosophy at our pharmacy, at Cedar City; we try to carry everything. I mean, we don’t always have everything, but we try to carry everything because we want patients to have the biggest selection they can possibly get.
Tim Pickett:
Well, you don’t go to Walgreens and expect that, “Oh, they don’t carry that brand of my thyroid medicine.” Like, “Oh, can’t get that one because I don’t order that.” That’s not the case. We write prescriptions, expecting that no matter where you go in the pharmacy world, you can get what I write for.
Blake Smith:
That’s right.
Tim Pickett:
Now, that’s not happening… It’s not the same in cannabis, but what you’re talking about is essentially that same thing. You should have… If what you need is this flower that is grown at a processor in Garland, then we’re going to need to carry that stuff because you’re not driving to Garland or Brigham City to go get it’s.
Blake Smith:
That’s right.
Tim Pickett:
You’re in Cedar City or Southern Utah.
Blake Smith:
I think almost every company now is producing gummies of some type, gelatinous cubes of some type. You should have the ability to choose. I mean, “Am I going to get the Kroger’s brand of aspirin? Am I going to get the Walmart version? Am I going to get the one from Bear?” Look, there’s a price point differential for all of them, and that’s okay. Give the patient the ability to make that choice, and that’s valuable. So, that’s how we think about it.
Tim Pickett:
Do you guys plan on doing delivery out of Cedar City?
Blake Smith:
We do. One of the things that’s becoming important to us is trying to figure out if there’s a way we can do broader delivery out of multiple locations. Since we have a pharmacy, we can do delivery anyway, but the way the rule is currently written is, I would need to have a delivery vehicle leave from Murray to go down to Cedar City, then Cedar City, potentially coming back to Salt Lake to do a delivery, and it could be the same medicine. That’s a little odd. And so, legislatively, we would love to be able to say, “Look, as long as you have a pharmacy and a pharmacist who is actually reviewing every single thing going out, then it should be able to come from any of the locations that have the right licensure.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, it seems silly that you would have to-
Blake Smith:
And that’s a difference for most of the industry, by the way. That’s something that Zion cares about, but I don’t know that everybody in the industry would care about that, but that’s something we care about.
Tim Pickett:
Sure. What… I lost my train of thought there.
Blake Smith:
That’s because it was so groundbreaking. Just playing.
Tim Pickett:
What other projects do you have going on? What other projects does Blake… You’re involved in… I mean, I’m sure you’re involved in other states and their scientific process, working on bills, to pass bills.
Blake Smith:
Yep.
Tim Pickett:
What else are you involved in right now, what other projects?
Blake Smith:
We have some projects that we’re working on in multiple states, all cannabis-related. We have some ventures that are actually outside the United States, in Europe and New Zealand, and some other places, that are actually more on the hemp side. We have a whole hemp side of our business. I’ve started developing specialty in cannabinoid science for animals, specifically mammals. And so, we’re doing a lot of work and we’re doing some clinical studies with another company. And I can mention them, I’m sure. [inaudible 00:41:39] pharmaceuticals. They’re producing animal cannabinoid therapies. And so, I’m their chief technical officer as well. And we have a study at University of Sydney and a study going on at UPenn, measuring arthritis and elbow joints for dogs. And CBG and CBD are far superior than the gold standard.
Blake Smith:
And that’s awesome. That means not only is your life better through cannabis and cannabinoid, but we’re going to start making pets lives better through cannabinoids. And one of the biggest failings in the industry right now, on that side of things, is people think, that’s for an animal, we should be using substandard materials. We treat them just like we treat everything else. We use medical-grade everything because like in the case of my dog, that is for my daughter and so forth, I’m not giving it subpar material. I want it to have the best.
Tim Pickett:
No, and this is billions of dollars. The pet industry’s billions of dollars a year. I mean, people are willing to spend the money on the right product and get good products for their pets. Why would you do… I don’t know, it does seem odd that you would use low-grade products for pets, but I guess-
Blake Smith:
Because it’s cheap.
Tim Pickett:
It’s because it’s just cheap.
Blake Smith:
If we’re going to be honest, it’s the same thing with anything. Why are some products better than others? Well, can we make it cheaper? I mean, if you think about medicine even, like the different brands of medicine for aspirin, what is the real difference? If they’re both 25 milligrams of acetylsalicylic acid, then they’re both 25 milligrams, well, what’s the difference? Well, what are they using as the filler for that pill? And so, your fillers, all of those different types of things, have different cost value. And so, the biggest issue, I think, in all of cannabis, whether it’s hemp or medical or even adult-use, is who’s out there trying to make hay while the sun is shining and they don’t care about the product, they’re just trying to move it as quickly as they can and as much as can, and consumers buy it, versus who’s trying to make something that’s going to have a lasting effect and be a quality product?
Tim Pickett:
Well, I think in the medical market here, we’ve done a pretty good job. I don’t see any real bad actors making, for lack of a better term, really just shitty products in Utah. I don’t see that either.
Blake Smith:
Look, I think Utah is a great place with great producers. I don’t have any complaints, but I can tell you this, having done business now, looking at things outside of our state, not all places are created the same, not all bills and legislation are created the same, and not all processors are created the same, especially, as you start to follow cannabis around the country and what the black market’s doing and different things, some people still are using dirt floor radiator hoses, and hexing to do a bunch of business. And that, I don’t know, seems a little sketchy to me.
Tim Pickett:
What on the hemp side is changing in the legislature now? I know they’ve combined the Utah Department of Agriculture with… They’ve made their own department up there for the hemp and the medical cannabis that’s going to be combined, I guess, at the department.
Blake Smith:
In legislation, we’ll see if it happens.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. What about what other hemp things that are happening? Do you know?
Blake Smith:
The biggest thing is getting like delta-8 and other THC analogs out of the general public and moving them into the medical industry.
Tim Pickett:
Do you think that’ll happen?
Blake Smith:
Yeah, I do.
Tim Pickett:
It seems like there’s a pretty good appetite in the system and in the legislature for that.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. I think so. I mean-
Tim Pickett:
To remove delta-8 from the over-the-counter products.
Blake Smith:
And what I would say is delta-8 is only one part of that. I mean, if you look at delta-8, the rules around delta-8 is it has to be significantly pure to be in the medical market; 95%-plus. So, the response to delta-8 now being eliminated out of general circulation, is people are moving to HPP, which is basically another THC analog. And, oh my gosh, if you were sketched out by delta-8, you should be really nervous by that, because, the way that you make it is you end up usually combining sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, an acetic acid because you actually have to donate carbons. We’re no longer moving a single covalent bond. We’re literally changing the molecule, adding things, taking stuff away, and manipulating the molecule. And what does it do? It gets you high, but I haven’t seen any that’s really pure. So, it has just-
Tim Pickett:
I’ve seen some of this on the market. I’ve literally been given a vape cart of this because it’s the new thing. It’s the new thing. You should-
Blake Smith:
And it’s sketchy. I’m going to be honest, it’s sketchy because I have not been given any material or created any material that I can throw on the mass spec and show that it is extremely pure. I haven’t seen any yet. I mean, there’s some stuff that’s not bad, but people were complaining about delta-8, that like, “Well, what’s the other 5%. If it’s 95% pure, what’s the other 5%.” AJ, HPP, I haven’t seen anything that’s better than about 82%, ever.
Tim Pickett:
I mean, how do we adjust for this? Is the black market and the hemp side just going to always be one step ahead, are we always going to be chasing?
Blake Smith:
[crosstalk 00:48:01]. Yeah. I mean, the legislators could fix this real quick. “Okay, any analog of THC is now going to be regulated.” Done. It’s over. Because this is just another analog of THC. And so, if you do something like that, then it falls into the same category as spice and some of these other things. And so, let’s not do that. Let’s not go down this rabbit hole. I mean, there’s ways for us to cap CBD molecules. And what I mean cap, I mean literally binding the ends of these molecules so that it will sit in your stomach long enough, so that it’s subjected to warmth and acid. We can get it to convert in your liver to 11alpha-hydroxy. And so, we can get you high on CBD.
Tim Pickett:
Which will get you high.
Blake Smith:
We can figure that out. I mean, in fact, we know how to do that. Let’s not play that game. That’s a silly game to play. We’ll just keep doing this over and over again until somebody at the legislative level says, “Look, if we’re going to regulate THC, then we should regulate.” And even if this were to become adult-use market, even if that happened, I would still want to regulate these rogue analogs because they’re not shown to have be safe. Typically, if Joe’s growing it in his backyard or in his basement or in his bathtub, and the local-
Tim Pickett:
And then converting it in the garage.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. But even if the neighbors just goes and buys weed from Joe, it’s probably pretty safe. Joe’s probably not spraying it with arsenic, he’s probably not getting lead or cadmium in there, and he is probably not dousing it in hydrochloric acid. Okay. Joe’s brother, who’s out on the farm, who ends up having massive amounts of hexane hydrochloric acid, who just starts taking all their hemp and dumping it in there, and then is like, “We got some of it out. Let’s go ahead and make a bunch of vape carts,” that’s sketchy, that’s weird. We shouldn’t allow that in the system even if you are a pro adult use. It’s just the way that you think about processing things.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. It’s just not safe. What about also, the… I’ve made a gummy that is 0.3%, but I’ve made it so big that it’s got eight milligrams of delta-9 in it. Is there a legislation to fix that?
Blake Smith:
So, here’s the trick. Here’s how to beat the federal government. Everybody, are you ready? What you do is go buy some Kashi, which is sticks and stones and berries cereal. And that’s going to add density. Just pour that into your party gummy, and you can get about 20 mgs of THC in there, and by weight, it’s still going to be below 0.3%. So, you could eat that whole party pack and get 20 mgs of THC and be legal. Look, the whole thing that’s craziness too; to define things by percentage is a real silly way to think about this. Just because, from a weight density perspective, look, I could just add denser and denser materials to my gummy, so I can up or increase the amount of THC that’s in there.
Tim Pickett:
And is that part of the bill… If we limit analogs of THC, are we going to limit total milligrams of delta-9? [crosstalk 00:51:19].
Blake Smith:
I don’t believe [crosstalk 00:51:21] now.
Tim Pickett:
You don’t think so.
Blake Smith:
I don’t think it’s in there. I mean, I haven’t seen the draft yet.
Tim Pickett:
I haven’t seen the language either on any hemp side or medical side.
Blake Smith:
I would love if it was in there. Because here’s the other thing-
Tim Pickett:
I just don’t want people… Look, the reason why you come see a medical provider is so that I can help you just adjust the dosage, plus I can make sure the pregnant woman, breastfeeding woman, and the kid who’s under 21, doesn’t get access unless they absolutely need it through the Compassionate Use Board. There’s a system of access for these folks. I get that. That was what we designed. We’re going around it. We’re actually making the medical market kind of look foolish.
Blake Smith:
Yeah. Well, and the other thing I would say is, I’m pretty pro-free market when we think about things like this. If somebody creates something innovative and so forth, then they should be able to have a right to sell it. But I don’t think this qualifies as innovative. This is not like… If somebody went in their backyard and threw in a bunch of seeds and you did this hyper mix of boswellic acid and all these type of things, you don’t know anything about it. And it’s like snake oil in some way, shape, or form, but it happens to be a high-demand snake oil. And so, you’ll sell it, but there’s no guarantees about anything about it. Could it kill your liver? Could your kidney suffer failure? Maybe. Does the person making it even know that? No.
Tim Pickett:
Nope. Nor do they really care.
Blake Smith:
Nor do they probably even care.
Tim Pickett:
And they know that it’s only going to last so long. And we’re going to get a ton of comments on this, the people that disagree with me on this. And I get your point, I get people’s point that we should have access, but if you want that, then create an adult-use program and get it done legislatively so that it’s legal, and that’s the right way to do this. You don’t-
Blake Smith:
Even if it’s an adult-use program, Tim, it’s still going be sold at a dispensary.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. It’s still regulated.
Blake Smith:
And still [inaudible 00:53:32] rules.
Tim Pickett:
Rules and processing and testing. That’s what we want. We need safety.
Blake Smith:
That’s the point. If Joe’s making cereal… Sorry, if there’s somebody listening that’s named Joe. I keep using Joe. We’ll call him Bob.
Tim Pickett:
It’ll be fine.
Blake Smith:
If Bob is making cereal in his kitchen or in his bathtub, and he says, “Look, it’s just like Marshmallow Mateys,” I’m not sure that I want to eat Bob’s Marshmallow Mateys out of his bathtub. I don’t think that’s the right way to think about cereal. And so, because, at least the general meals has rules, and GMP is good manufacturing practices. There’s rules around how to do it. And so, I just think it’s the same case for all of these things. I don’t trust somebody just dissolving some willow bark and making aspirin on their own. I think that’s a weird thing to do.
Tim Pickett:
No, but alternatively… Okay, this brings up a good point. And about home-grow and flower, and what you said before about Joe growing a plant and then providing it to his neighbor, that’s probably reasonably safe.
Blake Smith:
Sure. Yes.
Tim Pickett:
So, Joe grows his vegetables, takes them to the farmer’s market, sells them, reasonably safe. Joe starts manipulating and doing gene modification on things, and now processing in the garage, that’s where this breaks down. So, there’s a very big distinction for me on flower and safety, of flower and potentially home-grow and that type of stuff, versus processing THC, which we need regulation.
Blake Smith:
And I’ll take it further. Do I have a problem with Mary taking willow bark, making her own aspirin, and then Mary taking the aspirin? No.
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Blake Smith:
That’s fine. Look, that’s your deal, you get to decide what to do with you and your individual family. Do I think you should start making that in pill form and giving it to the kids on the street, or selling it to all your neighbors? Nope. I’m out. That’s where we have a problem. And so, it’s the same thing. Look, if you want to make your own HPP in your garage and take it just yourself, well look, man, go do your thing.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I guess that’s something because you should-
Blake Smith:
But you put it in a kiosk in the mall, and you’re telling me to trust you that it’s all safe and done the certain way, yeah, man, I want to see the certificate of analysis. And it needs to actually come from an accredited lab, and it needs to have a full profile, and I want to see the mass spec. That’s the point. Where it’s individuals doing their own thing, I don’t know that I care that much about it. I think people should do whatever they need to do for them. But the second you try to commercialize that and you don’t have a safety profile, you don’t have GMP, you don’t have any of those things, I’m out. I can’t support it.
Tim Pickett:
So, back to… You and I can go down the rabbit hole a little bit.
Blake Smith:
Okay. I’m in.
Tim Pickett:
No, we just did.
Blake Smith:
Oh yeah. I get that a lot. I’m like a wind-up toy. You just wind me up and let me off.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I love it. Okay, so we’ve got Bloom… Well, Cedar City, which is retail, we’ve got bills at the legislature that are happening. We haven’t read the language yet. We’ve got hemp stuff. We’ve got multi-state projects going. I mean, when do you… Oh, and I should mention this. For those of you who listen to the end here, congratulations, because, you’re going to get a preview. Blake and I, we just spent the last week videoing ourselves. Okay. That was a little awkward for me. Was that a little awkward for you?
Blake Smith:
It was sort of terrible in some ways. I know I talk a lot, but I don’t necessarily actually like the sound of my voice that much, and I certainly don’t like talking about myself.
Tim Pickett:
In a way that they were trying to really get us to talk about ourselves, because, you and I kind of try to thread this needle between all of these different things; our kids, our involvement in the program, the fact that we deal with cannabis for a living, our own use. All of that sort of stuff is just a little awkward.
Blake Smith:
Well, one part was pretty upsetting, actually. I mean, so the question got asked to me, how do I balance my work life?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, me too.
Blake Smith:
I don’t.
Tim Pickett:
I know. They were like, “Well, but you make it to all the soccer games and all the dance concerts and all of that sort of…” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, I do that, but it sure doesn’t feel balanced. It feels like I work all the time. I love it.” What do you think?
Blake Smith:
Yeah, I like my job. I wouldn’t spend so much time doing this if I didn’t think it had value.
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Blake Smith:
And so, I have this weird dichotomy that I hold my family… My family’s like my number one thing, and then work is also important to me because I feel like I’m doing good things. I’m doing good things for lots of different people. Okay, so now I have two competing things. And so I try to do both, but what that does also mean is I don’t take good care of myself very well. There’s all these other things that happen as a result. And the thing that was hard during the interview, was like it was kind of a little bit of a slap to my own face. Like, “Oh, I don’t do a good job at balancing everything in my life. I don’t do a good job of taking care of myself.” And I don’t talk about that very often because I try not to think about myself or talk about myself very much. And so, saying it out loud was like, “Oh my gosh, wow, do I need to reassess how I think about things?”
Tim Pickett:
Right. And what I’m prioritizing for me. And I’m very, very excited and terrified at the same time. For listeners, Ramble Content does a lot of our video production. And great guys. Dave Trevino, friend of mine, and very, very talented organization. We’ll be putting these videos together on our YouTube channel, Discover Marijuana. If you’re not subscribed to that channel, you should just go there right now. YouTube, Discover Marijuana, hit subscribe right now, because, in the next few weeks, you’re going to see these videos of Blake Smith, close-up look at Blake, close-up look at Tim Pickett too.
Blake Smith:
You got to find out, I guess, what makes me tick, I guess.
Tim Pickett:
I’m interested to see how they put it together. I think that they’ll certainly do a better job than you and I would’ve. And I think what’s good about having other people involved, is they see what’s happening for the industry, they see what’s happen for you and I, and I’ll bet they put together something that’s true in a way that you and I wouldn’t have seen.
Blake Smith:
Oh, I guarantee that. Yeah. That’s absolutely. And you and I, when we sit and talk, we tend to be able to… We enjoy each other’s company and we can talk about anything for a long period of time. Having somebody else come in and view this objectively… I don’t know that you and I are always fully objective about the way we do that.
Tim Pickett:
No, certainly not.
Blake Smith:
Having somebody else do that for us, I think is valuable.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Well, I’m looking forward to those and I’m looking forward to the new content on season four, frankly. Well, I think there’s going to be a lot of… We had a meeting about that today. There’s going to be a lot of really amazing content coming out, and a redo of some of the stuff that we’ve already done on that channel, that’s just, let’s just step it up a notch. We know more, we can do better, so let’s do better.
Blake Smith:
Yeah, absolutely. Do better.
Tim Pickett:
Just do better.
Blake Smith:
Better.
Tim Pickett:
Just do better, work more. One year, my motto was, go to bed later, wake up earlier, show no mercy.
Blake Smith:
And how did that work?
Tim Pickett:
It was awesome. This year, it is, let’s do that again. And it has a thumbs up with it too. Let’s do that again.
Blake Smith:
Do it again.
Tim Pickett:
Let’s do it again.
Blake Smith:
I don’t have anything, quib or anything, saying that’s awesome like that.
Tim Pickett:
You can use mine; “Let’s do that again.”
Blake Smith:
Okay. Let’s do it again. Hey, let’s do this again.
Tim Pickett:
Let’s do this again, Blake. Okay. Well, there you go. Okay, well, I guess that’s it. Anything else you want to talk about?
Blake Smith:
No, you’re awesome. Look, it’s really fun to be in this industry. It’s really fun to see patients get benefited from this, and it’s really fun to be able to be part of making history in some way, shape, or form. I mean Utah, cannabis, medicine, treating people, it’s wild. This is all wild.
Tim Pickett:
It’s really wild. All right, everybody. Stay tuned, thanks for listening to Utah in the Weeds. If you’re not subscribed to Utah in the Weeds, please subscribe on any podcast player that you have access to. This has been a great conversation, Blake, and I look forward to talking to you again. Stay safe out there.
Blake Smith:
You too. Thanks, buddy. Bye.
Episode 86 of Utah in the Weeds features Kylee Shumway, Pharmacist In Charge at WholesomeCo Cannabis in West Bountiful.
Shumway is also the Medical Director for the Utah Patients Coalition, a cannabis advocacy group. UPC led the signature-gathering initiative that brought Medical Cannabis to Utah’s midterm election in 2018.
Like many people, Shumway’s first experiences with cannabis happened when she was a teenager. Growing up in Lindon, Utah, she noticed cannabis seemed to be more popular among her religious classmates than it was for people outside of the dominant religion. [3:33]
Kylee told us about her education and early career as a pharmacist. Her first job out of college was at a Smith’s pharmacy. [05:54]
Shumway says she was interested in becoming a cannabis pharmacist as early as 2012. When Utah passed Medical Cannabis legislation in 2018, she knew it was time to take her career on a new path. [12:24]
Kylee’s passion for Medical Cannabis began while she was in pharmacy school. Her father, a cancer patient, had lost 80-90 pounds during the course of his treatment. But cannabis helped to restore his appetite and his ability to swallow. [13:44]
In January 2020, the Utah Dept. of Health announced the recipients of the state’s first 14 Medical Cannabis pharmacy licenses. Kylee immediately started to apply for work as a cannabis pharmacist. [17:21]
Kylee is very interested in cannabinoids and how they interact with the body. She and Tim agree there is a vast amount of research about cannabis yet to be done. [24:09]
The conversation turned to Utah’s Medical Cannabis program. Kylee says it’s “astonishing” that Utah has Medical Cannabis. She’s glad to see healthcare providers working to educate each other, and their patients, about Medical Cannabis. [27:38]
Kylee is heavily involved in educating patients and her fellow healthcare professionals about Medical Cannabis. She says WholesomeCo enables her to research cannabis and put together educational material as she sees fit. [33:25]
She told us about her involvement with Utah Patients Coalition and her duties as their medical director. She spends a lot of time with UPC at the Utah State Capitol, where they continue to advocate for patients’ access to Medical Cannabis. [36:47]
Shumway is also interested in the therapeutic uses of psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. She’s involved in a political push to form a task force for Utah to investigate psilocybin’s medical potential. [37:42]
Tim and Kylee are keeping a close eye on the Utah Legislature’s 2022 session, and any Medical Cannabis legislation that could be passed in the session. We expect to see better protections for patients, including some who are public servants. [43:58]
Kylee talked about her favorite cannabis delivery methods: tinctures and edibles. She likes them because they’re discreet, effective, and are available in a variety of cannabinoid ratios. [47:34]
If you’d like to get in touch with Kylee, she recommends reaching out to her via the Utah Patients Coalition’s social media channels. [53:13]
Kylee Shumway:
That is actually why I’m up there, is I’m helping the Utah Patients Coalition with whatever they need. Essentially I am their expert on cannabis and patients, and we are doing some stuff with a psilocybin task force still, and so I’m also their expert there.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, just stop right now. Let’s talk about psilocybin. Welcome everybody out to Utah in the Weeds. My name is Tim Pickett and I am your host. Today is episode 86, an interview with Kylee Shumway, a friend of mine in the cannabis industry and medical cannabis space. Somebody with whom I share a lot of familiar opinions with, frankly, as you listen to this episode. Kylee Shumway is the pharmacist in charge at WholesomeCo Medical Cannabis Pharmacy, here in Bountiful, Utah. WholesomeCo is one of the growing medical cannabis pharmacies in the state of Utah and they currently offer delivery services to every corner of Utah for free. I want to mention that, because they’re the only pharmacy to do that. And Kylee runs their medical program as a pharmacist. Here in this interview, we talk about her background, how she got into cannabis and what things are really important to her with regard to the patients here in Utah in her patient care.
Tim Pickett:
Kylee is also the medical director for the Utah Patients Coalition and activist group here in the state of Utah, and along with Desiree Hennessy, the executive director of that Utah Patients Coalition, is very, very involved on the Hill during the legislative session now, that’s in session here in Utah, working for patients, working for us, right? Patients and providers, trying to increase safety, increase access, decrease costs, make those tweaks and changes that we’re all hoping, hoping that the state will move forward on. Additionally, she is working with the Utah Patients Coalition on a psilocybin bill, which we talk about here in the interview, so make sure you listen to that as well.
Tim Pickett:
We talk all about her background and how she got into pharmacy, what she loves about THC and compounding cannabinoids. Very, very fun conversation to listen to. From a housekeeping perspective, stay tuned. One of our next episodes will be with a veteran who has experience with Truu Med. Now you may be familiar with them, because their owner and operator was recently arrested for kidnapping and torturing a woman. We are going to talk to a veteran who was a patient of theirs and had that experience, and listen to what he has to say about that whole thing, how he feels like they were very unfair to him in that didn’t really take care of him. If you’re not subscribed to Utah in the Weeds, go ahead, download it on any podcast player that you have access to. Again, my name’s Tim Pickett. Enjoy this episode with Kylie Shumway. Okay. Kylie, what started this all, your journey into cannabis? When was the first time you were exposed to cannabis? Tell me about that.
Kylee Shumway:
I think-
Tim Pickett:
And don’t lie. Your mom’s not going to listen to this.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, my mom’s never going to hear this. I had friends that used cannabis when I was in high school. I wasn’t as into it. I definitely did use cannabis in high school, but-
Tim Pickett:
Did you grow up in Utah?
Kylee Shumway:
I did. I grew up in Lindon, Utah.
Tim Pickett:
Wow. We’ve met a lot of people on the podcast who have actually used cannabis in high school, and frankly I’m surprised, because I didn’t think it was that prevalent, but evidently it was a bigger deal than I thought.
Kylee Shumway:
It was really prevalent with more of the religious kids. They actually seemed to use more cannabis than maybe the kids that were outside of the dominant religion.
Tim Pickett:
Cool. Used it a little bit in high school, but didn’t really love it?
Kylee Shumway:
I tried it, but I didn’t love it for a whole lot of reasons. One being that I had a lot of anxiety when I was younger, so it just made me more anxious. And so I was like, I don’t love this-
Tim Pickett:
Classic. This, to me, is like… My experience was pretty similar. I did it a little bit, but honestly, the funnest part about smoking weed in high school is the moment right before you actually get high. Right before that, because then you’re like, I’m doing thing that I’m not supposed to. It’s really exciting, you’ve got all that adrenaline and then you get high and you’re just paranoid. Right? This is not fun.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, and then paranoia kicks in and then this is awful. I’m not having fun, but yeah, you’re right. The time leading up to that, the camaraderie and with your friends and you’re having so much fun and then you’re not having fun.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, then all of a sudden you’re really not having fun. Kids, don’t smoke weed. It’s really not really worth it.
Kylee Shumway:
I did not have fun.
Tim Pickett:
Because it’s just not fun.
Kylee Shumway:
I did not have fun. I didn’t actually find any medicinal benefit from cannabis until I was an adult and I could make more well-informed decisions with my pharmacy knowledge, with the background that I then had.
Tim Pickett:
Ah, really? When did you go into pharmacy?
Kylee Shumway:
I started my… In 2011 was my first year of college.
Tim Pickett:
2011?
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, so 2011. And I knew, I was pretty sure that I wanted to be a pharmacist. I tried some other things. I took some programming classes and just some other stuff to make sure that that’s what I really wanted, but after my first biology and my first chemistry class, it was like, that’s it.
Tim Pickett:
You’re like, “Wow, this is really cool.”
Kylee Shumway:
This is exactly what I want.
Tim Pickett:
Why pharmacy?
Kylee Shumway:
I thought about going to medical school, but when I started college, I was actually 25 and I was concerned about how long medical school takes. I felt a little rushed, which wasn’t true. I should not have felt rushed. But at 25 in Utah, I was like, I’m too old. I didn’t start soon enough, which was all a fallacy. That was all not true, but that’s how I felt. I was like, “I’m going to be a pharmacist, I can do that in between five and nine years, instead of 15 years. I can get done with it.” Because I wouldn’t need to do… It’s not required to do a residency or anything like that, but you can do a residency if you want.
Tim Pickett:
You can do a one-year intensive-
Kylee Shumway:
I think they do two-year residencies.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, they do?
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, uh-huh (affirmative).
Tim Pickett:
With PA school, there’s only a couple of what they would consider residencies in the nation, right? And they don’t make you more money. There’s a few. There’s one trauma program at IHC for PAs.
Kylee Shumway:
Oh, interesting. There’s quite a few residencies now for pharmacy school, but again, I just had this idea that I was in a hurry and that I needed to hurry up and pick a job and hurry up and do something with myself.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, hurry up and do all the… Yeah, right.
Kylee Shumway:
Hurry up and be an adult.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, hurry up. Geez, Kylee, 25.
Kylee Shumway:
I was 25 and I was-
Tim Pickett:
Come on.
Kylee Shumway:
… in such a rush.
Tim Pickett:
2011, you go back to school?
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, that is when I go back to school. I had graduated years earlier, but I just knew I wasn’t ready for college when I graduated from high school. I still had all that anxiety that I was working on and I still had this idea that maybe I wasn’t smart enough, which was also a lie, but anxiety makes it hard to see what’s true.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I could totally see that. Then did you work in retail pharmacy?
Kylee Shumway:
Yes, that was my very first job out of college, when I graduated in 2016. I rushed through college. I actually, at the end, I think I was taking 37-and-a-half credit hours a semester or something, in two-week blocks.
Tim Pickett:
Oh wow, yeah, uh-huh (affirmative). You were really in a hurry.
Kylee Shumway:
I was really in a hurry.
Tim Pickett:
You were really in a hurry. Do you feel like you’re in that big of a hurry now?
Kylee Shumway:
No.
Tim Pickett:
Not quite? You’re busy though.
Kylee Shumway:
I’m busy.
Tim Pickett:
You’re really busy now. We’ll talk about that in a second. But so 2016, what was your first job as a pharmacist?
Kylee Shumway:
I was a retail pharmacist at Smith’s and I actually enjoyed it. I got a lot of patient interaction and it was really a way for me to become comfortable with myself as a healthcare provider. I had a lot of really good pharmacists around me to help me out and I was really glad that that’s where I started. Though pretty soon after that, I think I was a retail pharmacist for about a year, and then I got into compounding pharmacy. I loved retail pharmacy. It was great, but there are some problems at the corporate level that have come to light actually, recently. There’s a big movement all over social media right now. I think it’s called. She Waited, and then Pizza Is Not Working.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, okay. Describe that. What’s happening?
Kylee Shumway:
There was a pharmacist in a retail pharmacy chain that got sick, called corporate and said, “Hey, I need somebody to cover me. I’m really sick.” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t have anybody.” And they had all these excuses. “You can’t shut the pharmacy down. You have to wait until somebody else gets there,” because she was the only pharmacist and the pharmacist can’t leave the pharmacy or the pharmacy has to shut down. She waited, and while she waited, she had a heart attack and died.
Tim Pickett:
Oh man!
Kylee Shumway:
It was so bad. And I’m pretty sure it was CVS.
Tim Pickett:
Interesting.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, there’s some stuff in retail pharmacy that I think needs fixing and it needed fixing while I was a retail pharmacist.
Tim Pickett:
Did you like compounding better?
Kylee Shumway:
Much better.
Tim Pickett:
Compounding, the difference is with compounding pharmacies, you get a lot more providers calling in and then saying, “Hey, I need you to mix up this.”
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, or-
Tim Pickett:
That’s like mortar and pestle, the whole… Did you do that?
Kylee Shumway:
I actually used mortar and pestles all the time, and capsule machines. It’s so fun. It’s so fun and I love to bake as well, so it’s right up my alley. I was just like, “This is great.”
Tim Pickett:
You’re like a drug baker.
Kylee Shumway:
This is everything that I could have ever wanted and I loved it, so I specialized in bioidentical hormone replacement, and that’s a lot of what we were compounding. I loved it. I loved it so much. I worked there for years. I did compounding pharmacy for years in a couple different compounding pharmacies, and it was so fun. And then I got to the point that I was really confident, I was doing really great and I really knew what I was doing, and then the law passed in Utah for cannabis, in, what was that? 2018?
Tim Pickett:
Yep.
Kylee Shumway:
And I started telling everybody around me, I was like, “That’s what I want to do.” And that had started. Me talking about being a cannabis pharmacist started in probably 2012.
Tim Pickett:
Interesting. That is… Because in Utah, there wasn’t any discussion about really even the law at all, passing before that big push in 2018, when it passed.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah. I would tell people that I was going to move out of state to become-
Tim Pickett:
To become a pharmacist?
Kylee Shumway:
A cannabis pharmacist.
Tim Pickett:
There’s a couple of other states that require pharmacists in their programs. It’s Connecticut, I think?
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, Connecticut does, because we had looked at Connecticut’s program for this program. We were looking at some of the similarities, and then I think Columbia Care keeps pharmacists on staff, no matter what state it’s in.
Tim Pickett:
Uh-huh (affirmative), and I think Curealeaf does a very similar thing. They like pharmacists there in their programs, even in states where they don’t require one.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, yeah. There was there was that going on, and then I would tell people that that’s what I was going to do. And then in pharmacy school, my dad got sick. While I was in pharmacy school, my dad got cancer and he got really sick and the chemotherapy was so hard on him. He was on cisplatin, which is the one that makes you the most nauseous, and then he was on doxorubicin and vincristine, and those are really hard on your body, especially the doxorubicin, so he was really sick all the time. We had to leave the state to get cannabis for him, because he had lost so much weight.
Kylee Shumway:
He had lost 80 pounds or 90 pounds, or something crazy like that. We finally took him out of state and he started eating again and the sores in his mouth weren’t so bad and he could swallow, because he’d lost the ability to swallow, and when he started using cannabis again, he could swallow. We couldn’t tell anybody, because he’s at the VA. We can’t tell anybody that we’re using this, but the nurses were like, “Oh, I can’t believe how great you’re doing. You’ve totally turned around. This is wonderful.”
Tim Pickett:
Wow. And it was all because the cannabis he was using, and all of a sudden he’s got a little appetite.
Kylee Shumway:
So he could eat. Mm-hmm (affirmative), some pain relief.
Tim Pickett:
Is that where you learned all your real cannabis medicine, really?
Kylee Shumway:
I think that’s where my passion came from for it. I saw my dad do a 180 and I was like, “I could do that for people.” I had joked about it in 2012 and be like, “I’m going to be a cannabis pharmacist. Ha ha. So funny.” And then that happened and I was like, “I know really I could do this.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, now all of a sudden it’s real. I feel like sometimes, with my experience, in the textbook you assume it is real and you believe it and you know how it makes you feel and you know it stimulates your appetite or it makes you relaxed or it helps your back pain, but you don’t really see the benefits for other people until you actually see them have benefit. There’s a difference in reading it in a book and having-
Kylee Shumway:
An experience.
Tim Pickett:
… and experienced… Yeah, or by your patients even too, right?
Kylee Shumway:
Uh-huh (affirmative), oh yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Having your dad… Wow, no, this isn’t just… This is actually real.
Kylee Shumway:
This is real and I knew, once my dad had finished his chemo and he was doing great, and he’s still alive and he’s still doing so good-
Tim Pickett:
That’s so amazing.
Kylee Shumway:
I was like, I could do this for somebody. I could be that person that helps somebody like that and then helps their family too. Because to have my dad get better didn’t just have him get better. It was better for my mom, because she was his main caretaker. It was better for me, because I was helping. It was better for everybody involved, because he had a better attitude. He didn’t hurt so bad, he could get up and move himself around better, because he wasn’t just in so much pain and so sick.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, he was able to disassociate with what was physically happening.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
That’s really great.
Kylee Shumway:
It was amazing. All of that, and then becoming… Yeah, so all of that, I was a retail pharmacist, a compounding pharmacist and then the bill passed and I was like, “I don’t have to move. I’m going to stay here.”
Tim Pickett:
When did you get your job with Wholesome?
Kylee Shumway:
I started emailing as soon as they announced who had got the licenses in January of 2020.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I remember that. I remember I was lifting weights at the time, with Sean Hammond, who had applied for a license and we were waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for those to come around. Yep, yeah, that was fun. That’s a fun time. Then you become a pharmacist at Wholesome and now you’re in charge. You’re in charge of the place.
Kylee Shumway:
I am in charge of a lot of things. Some of the stuff I’m in charge in, I’m actually going to split it up with Kelly now, because my job has gotten to where it’s three or four people’s job. I am going to get some help. Kelly has been really fabulous, so she’s going to help me out and I’m going to take over much more of a… I’m going to do less of the day-to-day, writing the schedule and checking on people’s consults and stuff like that. I’m going to be working-
Tim Pickett:
And now you have to check every transaction number.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I haven’t really talked to a pharmacist since that’s happened. I think we talked about, like with Rich last year, that it happened. And what I’m describing is the, for those of you who are listening, is there was an update to the legislation last year in Utah, where a pharmacist has to now verify that a patient’s dosing and purchasing ability is matching with what they’re purchasing, meaning they can’t go over their limit. And that has to be verified at every transaction.
Kylee Shumway:
Yes. And then along with that, what the pharmacists are also verifying is that what is in the bag is what’s on their receipt. It’s a lot like doing the final check in an actual retail pharmacy, where we’re making sure-
Tim Pickett:
And that was why it was passed. That was… Right.
Kylee Shumway:
Now we’re making sure that, just like we do at a retail pharmacy, where I’m looking, I’m physically looking in the bottle and making sure that those pills are what they say on the screen, because sometimes they’re not.
Tim Pickett:
Interesting.
Kylee Shumway:
And I don’t know how many times I’ve either caught the wrong pills in the bottle, the wrong strength is in the bottle or the wrong medication has been typed in from the prescription, or that the prescription actually has the wrong drug name on it. The prescription from the… There’s a lot of things to catch. But the big thing is, is that I’m actually checking and seeing what’s in the bag is what’s supposed to be in the bag, and it’s just another way… It’s that final check to make sure that everything is in there is in there, but I think it’s also a way to… Everybody’s really worried about diversion, and it’s just one more way of not having-
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, looking the patient in the eye and saying, “This is for you. This is not for somebody else.”
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, yes.
Tim Pickett:
And I think diversion… What do you think? I think diversion’s a bigger issue than… Nobody really wants to talk about it, but-
Kylee Shumway:
No one wants to talk about it. I was even nervous saying the words. I was like, oh-
Tim Pickett:
I know, because let’s be honest, your sister, your brother, your mom, your son, they need to try something. You’re like, “I’m a patient. I’ll just run down there and you can try some of my tincture.”
Kylee Shumway:
Right?
Tim Pickett:
That is against, not just state law, that’s against federal law and state law. That’s really dangerous. But I don’t know, it’s like it’s no big deal almost.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, and nobody wants to talk about it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, nobody wants to talk about it, but people, it’s a real thing. People divert. It’s called diversion.
Kylee Shumway:
It’s called diversion.
Tim Pickett:
It’s essentially like… In fact, it’s probably worse, from a legal perspective, to divert cannabis than it is to divert opioids. I don’t know. It may be-
Kylee Shumway:
Because they’re more illegal.
Tim Pickett:
It’s less dangerous to your health, but they’re more-
Kylee Shumway:
It’s a schedule one drug, which-
Tim Pickett:
Weed’s more illegal.
Kylee Shumway:
… I think is going to change.
Tim Pickett:
I think that’s ridiculous.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Right, yeah, okay. Let’s not go down that rabbit hole yet, but-
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, that’s a dangerous road for us to go.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, now you see patients at Wholesome, you come all this way from Lindon, and every time I see you, you’re really happy. You seem like you really like your life right now.
Kylee Shumway:
Well, honestly, I cannot believe that this is what I get to do. I can’t believe it. I’ve been talking about it since I started college, “I want to be a cannabis pharmacist. That’s what I want.” And here I am. Who gets that? Who gets to have that in their life?
Tim Pickett:
There’s only 10 of you. Actually, maybe there’s 30 of you now in Utah.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, I get to have my dream job.
Tim Pickett:
Right. You get to literally… What I tell people is I literally teach people how to use cannabis. I literally teach people how to smoke weed for a living. It’s pretty awesome. Pretty fun.
Kylee Shumway:
It’s incredible. And I have the chance to do all the research that I want and look at anything that has anything to do with patient care and have a real impact on how patients are taken care of in the cannabis space. And it has been incredible. I love it. I love it and I feel like sometimes outside of medical programs, my patients are forgotten. My true medical patients… Not true, all of them. Everybody’s a medical patient, really, in my opinion, but sometimes they’re forgotten when the medical programs go away, and I get to make sure that they’re taken care of here.
Tim Pickett:
Yep. In Oregon, there’s been a 70% reduction in the medical patients. And there’s certainly going to be a reduction in any adult use program, but I do like that it’s medical here first. I think legitimizing it first, it was the right move.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, and making sure that people have good information and that the QMP and the PMPs, we’re doing all we can to educate patients on what’s true, because there’s so much misinformation on the internet. You can just go on the internet and find whatever you want, and there’s a lot of it that’s wrong.
Tim Pickett:
You can really find whatever you want.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, yeah.
Tim Pickett:
You really like terpenes. This is your thing.
Kylee Shumway:
I like terpenes. What I-
Tim Pickett:
Or is it cannabinoids?
Kylee Shumway:
Cannabinoids, that’s really… There’s studies on terpenes, and we think that they do the things that we think they do. There’s more science on the cannabinoids, so I’m actually more focused on them. And recently, I don’t know how recently, we have found a whole bunch of the receptors that they interact with outside of the endo cannabinoid system, which has been fascinating for me.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, describe what you’re talking about.
Kylee Shumway:
They interact with GABA receptors. They interact with the TRP receptors, serotonin receptors, so receptors that we would think of classically as outside of the endo cannabinoid system. They are involved in a bunch of pathways in our body, which is so incredible, and it’s why we get the effects that we do. But terpenes, we don’t know if they interact. Well, we know they don’t interact directly, most of them, with the endo cannabinoid system, but we don’t know how they interact with these other systems now, that we’re finding that cannabis interacts with.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I love the science of cannabis, but I also… A lot of times we say, “Yes, there’s plenty of evidence. There’s plenty of evidence.” And there is for certain things. Does it work for pain?
Kylee Shumway:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Does it work for this? Yes. But there’s so much that it’s kind of daunting how much we don’t know.
Kylee Shumway:
And the more I learn, the more I know, the more I know how much we don’t know, which makes me more careful now, speaking about cannabis, than when I first started, because there’s so much minutia that we don’t know. There’s a ton of mechanisms of action that we don’t even understand yet. We don’t know how it works. We just know that it does work. Which is true for a lot of medications, so it’s not something that’s overly concerning, but it just shows me how much we don’t know and how much more research we should be doing. We need more, better science.
Tim Pickett:
We need better science in a lot of fronts too, but cannabis is… There’s just a glaring hole in side-by-side studies. The double blind, randomly controlled stuff, then the side-by-side, does cannabis work, does THC work against Ativan? Does THC work against Prozac? Does THC work against… Where there’s-
Kylee Shumway:
I don’t know if we even have anything like that.
Tim Pickett:
Where there’s side-by-side stuff-
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
No, I’ve never heard of anything like that. And there needs to be stuff like that so we can say, “Look, in these types of patients, comparing these two medication modalities, this tends to work better or this doesn’t.” Yeah, that type of thing we’re really missing. I don’t even know if we’ll ever get there.
Kylee Shumway:
I believe that we will. I just wish it was faster. It’s hard for me to have to wait on something that I know is important and we need the information, and just because it’s a schedule one drug, I can’t get the information that I need.
Tim Pickett:
Are there things about the program? Could you say what’s your favorite thing about program, or what might be working well with the program? I see you kind of smirking. Don’t smirk. And then, or, alternatively, we can talk about what is not working in the program, what we think we want to change.
Kylee Shumway:
I think there’s a long list of both of those questions. I’m glad that we have a program. The fact that we have a program here in Utah is astonishing. That is good. I think the program being so focused on education and having medical providers and healthcare providers working together the way we are is so important. I love that about the program. There are fiddly bits in the program though, that are so hard to work with. MJ Freeway is so hard to work with.
Tim Pickett:
This is the software program that does seed to sale tracking, and it also is, there’s a sister of it that’s called the electronic verification system, where we house all these patient deadlines and certifications, and then MJ Freeway’s also tied into the retail.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah. It’s access to point of sale. And I don’t know if it’s robust enough for a medical program.
Tim Pickett:
How about the limited medical provider program? Have you interacted with that program yet, since they launched it last week?
Kylee Shumway:
All of my pharmacists are signed up to do and work in the EVS with the limited medical providers, but I have not had a single patient come to me with a limited medical provider-
Tim Pickett:
With a letter?
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
You’re the second pharmacist… Here, it’s been launched for a little less than a week. At the time of this recording, we’ve been a little less than a week for the limited medical provider program. There are 16,000 controlled substance licensed providers in Utah, who basically received the ability at this to authorize 15 patients with medical cannabis. That’s a lot of providers, it’s a lot of patients. There are 14 pharmacies and I have not talked to a single pharmacist who’s interacted with that program one time yet. I’m not saying it’s a-
Kylee Shumway:
I’m not surprised.
Tim Pickett:
I’m not saying it’s a bad program, but it is, and I am saying that, I guess, but I don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to do what they think it’s going to do.
Kylee Shumway:
I am not surprised you haven’t seen anything, because how… I know, I’m sure they sent an email to all the providers, saying this is available, but how many of those provider are actually going to sit down, truly read that email, understand the implications of the email and then act upon it. They don’t have any resources. They don’t know where to go to start. They don’t what pharmacies to call. They probably-
Tim Pickett:
I think there’s still people that come into my clinics who don’t know weed is legal in Utah.
Kylee Shumway:
Exactly.
Tim Pickett:
Let alone a provider who is knee deep in COVID and medical practice and all this stuff now-
Kylee Shumway:
And a million of-
Tim Pickett:
Thinking, okay, I’ve got to learn all this stuff so I can write a letter, when I didn’t yesterday and I was just fine.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, and then-
Tim Pickett:
Yesterday, I was fine without it. Today, I’m probably fine without it. I just-
Kylee Shumway:
Exactly. And some of them aren’t going to want to write the letter and hand it to the patient. They’re going to have to track down a pharmacy that they can then fax it to. I think there are just some logistics of the program that make it difficult and very… Maybe not as accessible as they had hoped it was going to be.
Tim Pickett:
Well, to me-
Kylee Shumway:
That’s the diplomatic way-
Tim Pickett:
Last Monday… Yes, thank you. And on Monday, I talked to a patient who was having a bad trip, a very bad experience. We care for a lot of people in once in a while, somebody has a problem. And as the program grows, the number of phone calls we get about this actually grow too. Surprise, surprise. And I thought after this phone call, she was headed to the ER-
Kylee Shumway:
Oh my goodness!
Tim Pickett:
This patient was headed to the ER, “I am freaked out of my mind. I took an edible. I know I took too much, but I’m headed to the ER.”
Kylee Shumway:
Oh my gosh.
Tim Pickett:
I was thinking to myself, as an LMP, what would I do? Where would I-
Kylee Shumway:
You would send them to the ER.
Tim Pickett:
What would I even do? Yeah, I’d just send them to the ER. I wouldn’t even know the questions to ask. That part of it, to me, worries me for patients, because I want my patients to have a good experience and so I want the providers to be educated. I know we’re spending a little time on this and I’m on my soapbox now, so I’ll stop and we’ll get back to the real thing, but you and I… Kylee and I, for those of you who are listening, Kylee and I talk every couple of weeks. We’re involved in a medical cannabis advisory group that’s semi-related to the Utah Cannabis Association and this is important stuff to us, right?
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah. To me, this is important.
Tim Pickett:
Together, we see a lot of people.
Kylee Shumway:
Holy cow, yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, so that’s Wholesome, and Wholesome, I love… The whole outreach side of Wholesome is good, and I can see that they’re really encouraging you to do research and videos and talk about this stuff, right?
Kylee Shumway:
Yes. They give me almost total free reign to do the research that I think is important, to put together educational material that I feel like is important. They really have allowed me, they have deferred to me on all of these things, that I’m like, “Patients need this. QMPs need this. Other PMPs need this. And then patients’ caregivers need this information.” And I have been allowed to do whatever I feel like is important for the… Because I see so many patients that I was starting to get a really good idea of what people know and what they don’t know, or what more information they would like to have, or information for their spouse or someone like that, that maybe isn’t going to take cannabis, but is going to be with them on this journey.
Tim Pickett:
Yes, and you’re repeating yourself over and over, and then finally saying, “You know what? We should have a handout.”
Kylee Shumway:
I should have handout for this. And I’m happy to repeat it over and over, but maybe if I have this handout, they can come to me with other questions, more in depth questions for themselves, that are more relevant for them If they have some information up front. Now we have a booklet that we hand out, we have tons of educational material. We do cannabis night school, we try to do other educational videos. I go out into the community and do education. And not just for patients. I’ve done it for QMP’s offices, I’ve done it for healthcare providers that just have questions, that aren’t QMPs.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, and here’s a plug. A plug for your education is twofold; one, Cannabis Night School, if you missed Kylee and I talking about terpenes at Wholesome’s Cannabis Night School, check that out.
Kylee Shumway:
That’s fun.
Tim Pickett:
And two, Kylee is on a ton of videos on Discover Marijuana on YouTube, and if you are not subscribed, as everybody loves to say, slam that subscribe button on Discover Marijuana on YouTube and you can watch Kylee and I talk about all kinds of things on those videos, that were just wrapping up that season, season three of that channel. That was really fun.
Kylee Shumway:
I enjoyed that so much. And I still get text messages from people that are like, “I saw you on TV. I saw you on YouTube.” But, “Oh my gosh, I saw you. I loved that.” And I get text messages all the time from people that I used to know from school and stuff.
Tim Pickett:
Oh really? That’s great. Yeah, it’s just a fun project. It kind of puts you on the spot to be videoed and then have a question asked, now all of a sudden you’ve got be like, whoa, I got to know what I’m talking about here.
Kylee Shumway:
I’m glad we did it. It got me ready for some other things that I got myself involved with. It was-
Tim Pickett:
Talk about those, because you’re involved at the legislature now. We were talking before we started recording, every Wednesday, it seems like you’re up there during the session, all day.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, last Wednesday I was up there a ton, and I was trying to balance being at the Capitol building and doing all the things that I need to do up there, with some meetings and some stuff that I needed to do at Wholesome. It was-
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, what’s your role at the Capitol?
Kylee Shumway:
Actually, while I’m at the Capitol, I am now the medical director for the Utah Patients Coalition, and that is a volunteer position. I don’t get paid for that, but-
Tim Pickett:
Got it.
Kylee Shumway:
That is actually why I’m up there, is I’m helping the Utah Patients Coalition with whatever they need, essentially. I am their expert on cannabis and patients and we are doing some stuff with a psilocybin taskforce bill, and so I’m also their expert there.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, just stop right now. Let’s talk about psilocybin. I have never experienced psilocybin.
Kylee Shumway:
Psilocybin?
Tim Pickett:
Psilocybin, but there’s some really cool research. There’s some really cool research about it.
Kylee Shumway:
It’s some amazing research coming out. They actually were able to do a blind… A double blind or just blind, head-to-head study with escitalopram and psilocybin. Escitalopram is an SSRI. It is an antidepressant, for those of you who don’t know. They did a head-to-head with it and psilocybin was outperforming it on a whole bunch of different scales that they were using to look at it. I don’t want to get too into the study, because I haven’t memorized the study, but I did read it and understand it. It was amazing. And they had done one last… Johns Hopkins is doing a bunch of research on psychedelics right now.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, PTSD, smoking and addiction research.
Kylee Shumway:
Depression, anxiety.
Tim Pickett:
The depression, the death, dealing with death, I think, is another big issue-
Kylee Shumway:
Cancer patients, that was the big one.
Tim Pickett:
Cancer patients, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kylee Shumway:
Death, yeah acceptance. Accepting that you’re going to die. The results that they’re having are incredible. Sometimes I’m reading it and I’m like, how did we miss out on this for so long?
Tim Pickett:
This is different than cannabis, because this is specific and extremely accurate, seemingly extremely accurate, data-driven science on something that [crosstalk 00:39:42]-
Kylee Shumway:
On hard science, the real-
Tim Pickett:
It’s not wishy-washy. This is legit stuff.
Kylee Shumway:
No, and this is the kind of science I want to see done with cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
Yes, but they’re not doing it, but for some reason… Okay, what’s the bill that is proposed? There’s a psilocybin bill at the Utah-
Kylee Shumway:
What we’re trying to propose is we’re going to put together a taskforce. A bunch of healthcare professionals, people at the Huntsman Mental Health… Oh my goodness. A bunch of people, a bunch of professionals-
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, the Neuropsychiatric Institute.
Kylee Shumway:
Thank you. We’re going to bring together this taskforce where they will meet almost all this year, look at the research on psilocybin, see who, what, when, where and how, and hopefully, in October, we would have them presenting what their findings were, what we envision… I guess not we, I guess the taskforce, what they would envision that that would look like in Utah. What the clinics would look like, who would need to be involved, what kind of laws would need to be written, and then hopefully a bill would be in the works after that to pass it medically, possibly.
Tim Pickett:
Basically, we’re looking at a taskforce that would study it, get the experts, do a big report for maybe the Department of Health, where they say, “Okay, here’s the research, here are different programs that exist, here’s what it might look like in Utah, based on current law-
Kylee Shumway:
Here’s our opinion on what it should look like.
Tim Pickett:
Here’s our opinion on what providers should be licensed to do this, what the visits might look like, what the patient qualifications would look like, and so we’re essentially maybe two years away from a bill. If you get a taskforce passed and some money to do the studies, you’re looking at a couple of years to get something done.
Kylee Shumway:
Yes, it’s a few years out.
Tim Pickett:
It’s fascinating though.
Kylee Shumway:
It’s fascinating. I don’t even know where to start. There’s so much good information, there’s so many things to be excited for about it. It’s almost overwhelming, but the taskforce bill hasn’t passed yet, as far as I know, not as of today, but I’d love to see it pass, so at least we could look at it, the possibility of it. This is just looking at the possibility. This isn’t a bill to legalize anything. We should just look at it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, this is just a little bit of money to look at it, and so what… Have you seen any language on a bill or proposal to update the medical cannabis program up there?
Kylee Shumway:
There is some language on… There’s a lot of language going on. There’s a lot going on, and I’ll know a little bit more tomorrow. This is just the first week, and there was not a lot of people at the actual Capitol building. It wasn’t as crowded as it usually is. But there’s some stuff-
Tim Pickett:
There is a pandemic.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
COVID’s not real up there.
Kylee Shumway:
It felt that way.
Tim Pickett:
Apparently.
Kylee Shumway:
I was accosted by one man that asked me why I was wearing a mask.
Tim Pickett:
Well, I don’t even know if I want to get into this.
Kylee Shumway:
I just did, because it felt like the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter what my opinion is on it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. It just felt like the right thing to do.
Kylee Shumway:
So I did.
Tim Pickett:
I don’t know, when I work in the ER, I wear a mask.
Kylee Shumway:
I wear a mask all day when I work in-
Tim Pickett:
Surprise, surprise.
Kylee Shumway:
… the compounding lab.
Tim Pickett:
Yep.
Kylee Shumway:
I wear a mask all day.
Tim Pickett:
And if you were working around somebody with the flu-
Kylee Shumway:
Wear a mask.
Tim Pickett:
… it’s a good idea to wear a mask. I would recommend it. As a medical provider, if you’re working around somebody with the flu, it is my medical opinion, professionally, that you should be wearing a mask.
Kylee Shumway:
I love this for us.
Tim Pickett:
That’s all I have to say. That’s all. That’s all I have to say about that. Okay, you’ve got the psilocybin bill and we haven’t seen language on what’s coming up for the cannabis bill, but between you and I, I think we’ve got patient protection?
Kylee Shumway:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Right?
Kylee Shumway:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tim Pickett:
We’re going to-
Kylee Shumway:
We’re working on-
Tim Pickett:
Pretty much a lot of patient protection stuff.
Kylee Shumway:
A lot of patient protection stuff. A lot-
Tim Pickett:
because there was the firefighter up North.
Kylee Shumway:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Hey, by the way, we had a firefighter come in and get his card, specifically because he was like, “This is bullshit that guy’s getting fired-
Kylee Shumway:
Good for him.
Tim Pickett:
… and I’m getting my card, because-
Kylee Shumway:
Because you should be able to.
Tim Pickett:
… if they’re going to fire more… Because we all should get our cards as in support. Then fire us all, and they can’t fire us all.” I thought it was pretty cool.
Kylee Shumway:
I love that. Good for him. Good for him. Yeah, we’re going to change some language around firefighters and police. There’s some stuff about caregivers cards in there. The LMP was a big one. There’s a lot of stuff. A lot of it hasn’t been decided, so I hate to say it and then have it just disappear into the ether.
Tim Pickett:
I know. I know. The patient cap thing, we always talk about that-
Kylee Shumway:
Oh, the patient cap thing. Have we heard anything about that?
Tim Pickett:
Not that I am aware. I’m I’m working hard. If anybody knows how to get this done-
Kylee Shumway:
I swear I saw someone post something on social media that was like, “We got it taken away.” I’m like, did we?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, no. Yeah, we’re definitely having patient caps and we’re definitely going to have a problem this year, because all of the QMPs are going to expire. All of the first year QMPs like me, we’re going to expire and there’s going to be a lot of QMPs, this just happens, that have moved out of state and they’re leaving us with 200 patients and where the hell do those patients go? They’re going to be lost. I think, my proposal is that we allow a QMP to authorize another QMP in their group to take over their patients. I’m the QMP, I saw 200 people. I’m going to move to Oklahoma to take this hepatobiliary job and I’m going to leave, so I don’t want to leave my patients in the lurch, so I’m going to authorize Tim or Adam or whoever in my practice group to take over my patients. They’ll just add them to their… Doesn’t change their patient cap, per se, but it just allows me to see those 200, those specific 200 people-
Kylee Shumway:
Then you don’t have orphan patients.
Tim Pickett:
Exactly. Just take care of the orphan patients, because this year, the orphan patients issue is going to be big.
Kylee Shumway:
It’s going to be a big deal. And there are some… A lot of my patients, I get phone calls and they are like, “How do I renew my card?” If they’re not sure how to renew their card, because it is a little convoluted, how are they going to find a brand new QMP when they’ve been abandoned? And abandoned isn’t even the right word.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, that’s a bad… But it kind of is. We don’t want them to be abandoned.
Kylee Shumway:
But I feel like they’re being abandoned-
Tim Pickett:
We want to support them.
Kylee Shumway:
… so I use that word.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, we’re leaving them. We’re leaving them in the lurch and saying, “Hey, well, whoever you went to-
Kylee Shumway:
They’re gone.
Tim Pickett:
… they’re gone, so good luck.”
Kylee Shumway:
Okay, bye. I feel sad for them, because some of them are… Maybe they’re not as good with technology. Maybe they’re a little bit older. Maybe they need a little more hand holding, and a lot of them are going to get left behind.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, back to back to cannabis, back to weed, what’s your favorite delivery form?
Kylee Shumway:
I prefer a tincture or a gummy, because generally I need longer term relief. I also find them to be more discreet and that can be really important when… It’s pretty much just important for my whole life. I’m not going to carry a cannabis vape to the Capitol building.
Tim Pickett:
No, I don’t think that’s a…
Kylee Shumway:
Well, I’m not going to.
Tim Pickett:
I guess you just do what you got to do.
Kylee Shumway:
Well, other people could do whatever their heart desires. I’m not going to.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. It seems like an odd thing, an uncomfortable thing to put that thing through the metal detector.
Kylee Shumway:
I don’t want to.
Tim Pickett:
Empty your pockets and your vape pens.
Kylee Shumway:
I’m not having that conversation with the guy with the gun.
Tim Pickett:
Nor, we already have to have conversations about the masks, so might as well not add to that problem.
Kylee Shumway:
I had just finished-
Tim Pickett:
That’s a rough-
Kylee Shumway:
It was such a strange interaction. I had just finished the interview that I was doing with Fox 13, and this guy just comes up to me and he’s like, “Who are you? Why are you wearing a mask?” What?
Tim Pickett:
Well, sir, I am a weed pharmacist.
Kylee Shumway:
Oh. Yeah, it was… I’m obviously still shocked by it, because I’m talking about it, but yeah, there’s just… I like a little more discreet usage form and I generally need longer acting, and then I prefer lower quantities of THC and higher quantities of CBG or CBD. That, I can really pick and choose that when I use a tincture, or even a gummy. We have so many good gummies right now that have great ratios.
Tim Pickett:
Name a few.
Kylee Shumway:
Boojum makes some great one to ones. [Q-ga 00:49:41] makes good one to ones. True North, I think they do some, and Standard does.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, True North is-
Kylee Shumway:
I can think of a bunch of ones that I can use ratio products that way, which is what I prefer.
Tim Pickett:
Yep. Well, as a compounder, you can also, I think pretty soon, you’ll be able to get higher CBG tinctures, meaning you could just buy a CBG, CBD tincture over the counter-
Kylee Shumway:
I can put them together the way I like.
Tim Pickett:
Right, then you could put them together in your body the way you like. And I think that’ll be fun, especially with tinctures going forward, when we have more minor cannabinoids as their own products, because you can’t compound in the THC world-
Kylee Shumway:
Not yet.
Tim Pickett:
At least that’s not in the bill.
Kylee Shumway:
Someday.
Tim Pickett:
Right, we’re not… Maybe someday, but people could. You could design a product for somebody, say, “Hey, go home, take three drops of this, two drops of that, half a slug of that and call me in the morning.”
Kylee Shumway:
And that’s something that I do with the gummy and the tinctures. There’s a lot of great tinctures. There’s one to one to ones, there’s one to one to tens, there’s one to ones, there’s one to fours, there’s one to 25s. You can get a whole bunch of ratios. And I like to put them together with the relief I need, and generally lower THC, because I do have… It makes me anxious. I don’t want anxiety. I’m using this and I don’t want to get anxiety from it.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, we want anti.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, a lot of the times I am using it for evening pain. For some reason, it seems to be this thing where everybody’s pain is worse at night. That’s why I love the tinctures. It’s why I love gummies. They’re just so easy for me to put together the way that I want them to be. There’s not a lot of guesswork for me when I’m using that kind. I think inhaled forms are great. I just can’t seem to get the cannabinoids that I want in them right now. But I think that will change.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I hope so.
Kylee Shumway:
I hope so.
Tim Pickett:
I’ve been doing a lot of recommending on layering. Layering a cannabinoid product, like CBG, THC or one to one to one, like CBD, THC, CBN in the oral form, and then adding an inhaled form on top of that.
Kylee Shumway:
I love that.
Tim Pickett:
Plus, you’re getting the cannabinoids. Where you’re not getting the CBN and the flower, you’re getting it in the tincture, so you’re mixing forms, and I think think what I’ve been recommending a lot.
Kylee Shumway:
It’s such a great way for patients to use their cannabis. They can get immediate relief and then long term relief and it’s so… I think it’s almost comforting in a way, that they can have that and use it that way. Because they know that they’ll have something for breakthrough pain, but they’re not going to have to use their inhaled form every two hours or something, maybe the way they don’t want to. I love that.
Tim Pickett:
They can dose it to a way they’re not high all day either, and then if they need to be high-
Kylee Shumway:
They can be.
Tim Pickett:
They can get there, they can be, and that’s not going to last as long. I think this has been really fun. It’s fun to watch people reduce their medication use and it seems fun to be involved.
Kylee Shumway:
I love it.
Tim Pickett:
You and I, we have a lot of that. We’re a lot alike.
Kylee Shumway:
I love when people come back and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m off 15 of the medications that I was taking for my back pain.” And I’m like, “That’s great!”
Tim Pickett:
What’s the best way for people to get involved right now, do you think? Or get maybe even in touch with you, about the legislative effort-
Kylee Shumway:
Oh man, through UPC would be a great way. I am super involved on the UPC’s, the Utah Patient Coalition’s social media, I can see messages that come through there, but you can also send us emails and I’ll do everything I can to get back to you. But I would love to hear from people.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, but if you go to the Utah Patients Coalition site, you can go to the contact us page and you could reach out there. But social media seems like a great way to go too.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, social media is easy. We do have a Facebook page and then we have a public Facebook group that we allow public discourse on. You can get on there, you can put a comment on there, you can ask a question. The page is private, but the group is a public group that you can post to.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, that’s cool. And then you’ll update how the bills are going there, hopefully.
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, we have quite a few updates on there about cannabis stuff, and I think we posted three times in the last couple days, because there’s been enough information coming forward that we’ve been able to post a little bit more, and I’ve had some really good help with that, from Des and a new girl we’ve been working with. Her name is Haley. It’s been amazing. They’ve been really helpful, because I can’t do it by myself.
Tim Pickett:
I’m sure you can’t, no. It’s too big of a job to do. And especially with you being involved so heavily, full-time at Wholesome, and the program is really just growing so fast. Is there anything that you feel like you want to say, you want to talk about?
Kylee Shumway:
Man, we covered so much. I just want people to reach out, ask me questions, even if you think they’re stupid. I bet they’re not. Let’s talk about stuff.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I bet they’re not. And whether you’re a patient or not-
Kylee Shumway:
Yeah, I don’t care.
Tim Pickett:
You’re cannabis curious, that doesn’t matter. If you have a question for Kylee and or you have a question for me, for that matter, reach out on WholesomeCo, their website from the pharmacy standpoint, Utah Marijuana.org. If you have a question for… Even if you have a question for Kylee and the only place you can find is to go to YouTube, the Discover Marijuana channel and make the comment there, we’ll get you the comment. We’ll answer the comment and the question. If you have a legislative priority or something that you think is very, very important, we’re-
Kylee Shumway:
I want to know.
Tim Pickett:
Kylee, she’s right here.
Kylee Shumway:
I want to know about it.
Tim Pickett:
The medical director of the Utah Patients Coalition. This is the person to reach out to and talk about it, so that know. We’re interacting with the program more than anyone else.
Kylee Shumway:
I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me with opinions and I want to hear them all, because I’m just one person and there’s only so many things I’m going to think of on my own. If we don’t have this public discourse, if we don’t have people asking questions, if we don’t have people making suggestions, I won’t be able to think of every single thing.
Tim Pickett:
Right. You’ll only be thinking about the stuff that you see.
Kylee Shumway:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, yeah. Well Kylee, thanks for coming on. Kylee Shumway, pharmacist in charge at WholesomeCo, and medical director of the Utah Patients Coalition. Congratulations.
Kylee Shumway:
Thank you.
Tim Pickett:
On both. You’re living your best life.
Kylee Shumway:
I’m living my best life. My dream.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. And for those of you who aren’t subscribed to the podcast, Utah in the Weeds, download it on any podcast player that you have access to. Thanks so much Kylee, for coming on and talking to me.
Kylee Shumway:
This was so fun.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, it was. All right, everybody. Stay safe out there.
Episode 85 of Utah in the Weeds is for anyone interested in using cannabis to treat PTSD. Utah Therapeutic Health Center clinicians Tim Pickett, PA-C and Clif Uckerman, LCSW, hosted an online webinar and Q&A session on the subject.
We started with some details about Clif’s background as a licensed clinical social worker and therapist. [4:18]
He and Tim talked about some of the ways post-traumatic stress order can be defined. [8:35]
They went over some of the most common symptoms associated with PTSD. Clif says anxiety tops the list of the most common PTSD symptoms. “Hyperarousal” or, as Clif puts it, a state of “hypervigilance,” is another common experience among PTSD patients. [10:10]
Clif went over the clinical processes for diagnosing PTSD, and some of the other mental health issues that can accompany PTSD. [13:35]
Tim talked about some of the existing research regarding PTSD and cannabis, and some of the related biochemistry. [17:45]
Clif discussed the use of cannabis in conjunction with a therapy session. According to Clif, some patients find their therapy sessions are more meaningful when they’ve used cannabis beforehand. Clif says a good therapy session can be cathartic, but it often leaves the patient feeling anxious and insecure afterward. This, he says, is another time when cannabis can be very useful. [23:05]
Tim talked about the “mechanism of action” by which cannabinoids like THC and CBD interact with the body’s endocannabinoid system. Then, he talked about some of the most common cannabis delivery methods and their effects. [29:45]
Next, Tim went over the importance of keeping a journal when using cannabis to treat a medical condition. [36:38]
Cannabis has several chemical compounds (cannabinoids and terpenes) useful in treating PTSD. Tim talked about some of the most important compounds and their effects. [37:50]
Tim recommends hybrid and indica strains for PTSD patients. He says the Ice Cream Cake and Do-Si-Dos cannabis strains are easy to find at most of Utah’s pharmacies, and they work well for treating PTSD. For PTSD patients who prefer edibles, Tim recommends Zion Medicinals’ Plush Wild Cherry gummies. Tinctures also work well for treating PTSD. Tim recommends tinctures with THC/CBD ratios ranging from 1:4 to 1:10. [40:24]
Clif says low-THC, high-CBD cannabis products work well for his patients. Most of his patients who use cannabis prefer edibles. [41:51]
Next, Tim talked about finding the right cannabis doses for treating PTSD. He said scientific evidence shows a “sweet spot” for THC dosing between 7.5 mg and 12 mg. Too much THC can worsen anxiety associated with PTSD. [42:44]
Tim answered a question about Utah’s Compassionate Use Board, which can approve cannabis recommendations for people under 21. [44:48]
If you’re interested in talking with Clif about using Medical Cannabis to treat PTSD, call 801-851-5554 to schedule an appointment.
Tim Pickett:
Tonight’s webinar is by utahmarijuana.org. I’m Tim Pickett, a medical cannabis provider here in Utah. We’re going to do just a conversation really around PTSD and I am so happy that we have an expert essentially on PTSD and behavioral health, Cliff Uckerman. Will you introduce yourself, Cliff and talk a little bit about your background and you?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. Well, thanks for inviting me to this webinar, if that’s what we’re going to call it, the metanar. So I’m a licensed clinical social worker. Graduated from the University of Utah, 2010. So since then have been providing substance use addiction, mental health services, clinical services for the last, what now, 12 years.
Clifton Uckerman:
And a lot of different settings, cradle to the grave, all different ages. Where I’m at right now, in my career, I think I’ve gravitated towards treating PTSD, trauma, understanding really what that is, what that can look like for so many different people. I’ve worked with thousands of different people, one on one, in groups, with families, and also gravitating more towards the use of medical cannabis in conjunction with trauma treatment or trauma therapies.
Clifton Uckerman:
So I also teach up at the U of U as an associate instructor and I am currently the senior clinical director and founder of Altium Health which is an addiction and wellness center out in Jordan Landing. But I’m just in the process of really trying to be a behavioral health provider in the medical cannabis industry. Unlike, I think, anybody is doing right now, I think a lot of us are trying to figure out with insurances and philosophies of therapy and trying to break down all the stigmas and stereotypes around marijuana and cannabis, trying to figure out where a lot of us behavioral health providers are trying to figure out how does this work and how can we make this work and be a good thing for a lot of people with PTSD. So I’m really interested in continuing to find the model that works for this in the medical cannabis industry.
Tim Pickett:
It’s cool to have you as part of this, and I think we’ll get into some discussions that I haven’t been able to have with anybody in the clinical setting regarding PTSD specifically and medical cannabis. So topics, we’ll try to go over tonight. What is PTSD? Some symptoms of PTSD. What the effects of THC and CBD are in general, but also specifically four symptoms of PTSD.
Tim Pickett:
We’ll discuss a little bit of the mechanism of action, what we think is happening. There’s some of this we know and some of this that’s assumed, right? You think, “Well, maybe we should know more before we use it, but frankly we don’t know the mechanism of action of a lot of drugs we use in “normal medicine” Right? So then we’ll talk about suggestions and uses of medical cannabis. And at the end, I’m going to make a couple of product recommendations that I think are similar to products that you might want to try or really products you might want to go out and try yourself.
Tim Pickett:
This webinar and more videos can be found at Discover Marijuana. This is a QR code. You can just take a picture of it right now. If you are not subscribed, and you’re somebody who is interested in medical cannabis, there are a lot of videos there. There’s a lot of videos with me and Blake Smith who’s a bio analytical chemist for Zion Medicinal, lot of mechanism of action for other conditions. A lot of discussion around different forms and delivery.
Tim Pickett:
I like this YouTube channel. There you go. Subscribe to that. So let’s talk to about PTSD in general. So Cliff, this is really your wheelhouse, right? What is PTSD?
Clifton Uckerman:
Well, the way that you’ve got it listed up here referencing the APA, American Psychiatric Association. So the DSM, the Holy Bible of Psychiatry where we get all of our mental health diagnoses disorders would say anybody who’s experienced or witnessed a traumatic event or been threatened with death, sexual violence or serious injury.
Clifton Uckerman:
So that’s one way to define it. But when I work with patients and the way that I define it is it’s that negative life event that a lot of us may experience in our lives at one point in time in our life, that kind of leaves a sense of shock, internalized shame, grief, and makes us feel really bad about ourselves in a lot of different ways. A lot of times the trauma is something that leads to detrimental development, and we look at it and we can’t see any good from it. We can’t see any positive coming away from it.
Clifton Uckerman:
So it just leaves the mind, the body, the spirit in a lot of distress. So we later on, if we don’t talk about it and we’re not processing the trauma in order to reverse the trauma or heal the trauma, then we end up having nightmares flashbacks, lots of anxiety. Anxiety is probably number one when it comes to PTSD in terms of symptoms. So that’s how I would probably define PTSD. You got a list of symptoms right here, again, nightmare effects.
Tim Pickett:
Do you find that there are symptoms that are more common in this list or is everybody really different?
Clifton Uckerman:
Well, everybody’s symptoms express and manifest differently in different kinds of ways, but generally across the board, the common things that I see is lots and lots of anxiety. And that would include social anxiety, sleep problems, insomnia, of course the flashback and nightmares. But essentially, one thing that is common between everybody with a PTSD diagnosis is this kind of state of hypervigilance, being very hyper aroused.
Clifton Uckerman:
So getting triggered from something or someone in some kind of setting or context, and having a really bad, negative, distressing reaction to that. So that could lead to some kind of flare up of blowing up, acting out, getting angry and explosive. Running away, avoiding, shutting down hiding out and isolating from people is typically what I would see between a lot of different people diagnosed with PTSD.
Tim Pickett:
Is this something like with chronic pain, when we look at it clinically, we would say, “Okay, is this pain something that is affecting your ability to do the things that you want to do?” Right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
So that’s the physical part of you use a physical symptom and then you say, “Well, is this actually harming or keeping you from doing other things like your leg pain? Then I would say, “Oh yeah, you have chronic pain. We need to deal with that because it’s affecting your ability to do things.” Is that one of the criteria when you’re diagnosing somebody with PTSD? It’s not just I’m anxious all the time, or I have these triggers, it’s that I’m actually doing things differently because of the trauma.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. And with PTSD and all disorders in the DSM, you really can’t make a formal diagnosis unless there’s some life domain impairment. So between all of the people that I work with that have an actual precise accurate diagnosis of PTSD, employment is disrupted. A lot of people have a hard time going to work or being at work. Relationships with family, spouses, children, friends, parents, siblings are pretty impacted and there’s a lot of relational distress that can occur and happen.
Clifton Uckerman:
Then so many other life domains can be affected too. Sometimes in an attempt to escape or even avoid a person can start to maybe self-sooth or use different types or forms of medication, whether it be legal and prescribed or elicit and off the street. So sometimes with that kind of use can come health problems, emergency room visits, sometimes criminal charges and incarceration. So anytime there’s a life impairment, that would be one criteria of meeting a diagnosis.
Tim Pickett:
Is typically the diagnosis done with like a paper evaluation. You have of like a questionnaire people fill out and then you score it and then you take that with a behavioral health like evaluation?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yep. There’s so many different instruments, but we use the instruments that were developed and certified by the VA, which diagnosing PTSD originally when it came along to be a formal diagnosis was with military coming from post deployment and combat. So the VA has a lot of specialty in diagnosing and screening for PTSD. So we use what’s called the LEC-5 and then the PCL-5 which screens for the life events and the symptoms. It’s like a symptom checklist.
Clifton Uckerman:
If that has a positive suggestion for PTSD, then we do a full on behavioral health assessment which takes about an hour. And we look at self-reporting, we look at presentation in the symptom. We’re making observations around the information that’s being provided. And then we do a collateral kind of clinical collection of documentation from other providers or history of providers.
Clifton Uckerman:
Now, what we notice is most people that I work with, chances are have some kind of trauma that’s still affecting or impacting them and causing some disruption in life domain. A lot of times we look at a diagnostic matrix, how many symptoms or sets of symptoms come into the picture or with that patient that might indicate a particular mental health diagnosis like anxiety and depression and bipolar and those kinds of things.
Clifton Uckerman:
What we notice is a person that comes in with a history of three or more diagnoses in their diagnostic matrix, chances are that is all falling under the umbrella of a PTSD diagnosis.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. I think in medicine that I have experienced in, it is much more… It’s 15 minutes. I get 15 minutes, 20 minutes with the patient. We’re going to talk about it real quick. And then I’m going to pick a medication to put them on. What you’re essentially saying is that that doesn’t really help people in some ways, right?
Clifton Uckerman:
It’s part of it. It can help and it’s part of it, but it’s not the end of the road for a lot of patients for sure.
Tim Pickett:
Right. Okay. So in Utah, PTSD is the only condition that is in the mental health world, in the behavioral health world. PTSD has to be diagnosed by one of these psychiatrist, psychologist, LCSW, psychiatric APRN. And you also have to be in ongoing treatment, in ongoing treatment. So it’s the only condition in Utah that requires not only the diagnosis, but you must be an ongoing treatment which I think is a good thing. Would you agree with that?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. I mean, I think people have a hard time when they feel like they’re forced to do something. So if a person has choice and control and they’re getting good quality therapy to treat trauma takes a lot of expertise. I think most people probably would want good therapy over the long-term. We screen patients and we say how long do you think you want to be in therapy? And most people with a true precise, accurate diagnosis of PTSD are wanting to be in therapy for a year or more because there’s so much that they need to work through and be able to process.
Tim Pickett:
So let’s talk a little bit about… We’re not going to go through these very much, but there are some studies and I find these are particular ones that I picked out. So some Israeli research is very interesting. They have given a hundred grams of cannabis flower per month to some of their soldiers, right? A hundred grams. That’s a lot of flower. Okay. In Utah, four ounces, 113 grams. So we’re talking more than three ounces, three and a half ounces of flower.
Tim Pickett:
You’re smoking more than not quite an ounce a week. I don’t know how much in this study, the patients we’re actually using, but they’re measuring symptoms before. They’re measuring symptoms after. And they’re showing really good results with access to cannabis flower in this study.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
In 2017, there was a really good review too about CBD specifically that it produces an enduring reduction in learned fear expression. So one of the things that we’ll go into, and maybe we have a slide on it, I don’t really know. But what’s happening from a brain chemistry standpoint is you’re building callouses between the amygdala, the emotional part of brain and the frontal lobe, which is your reasoning. You’re building these pathways that it’s hard for the brain to get out of. And that is what we would consider learned fear. Right? If we can reduce that learned fear, then in theory, we can reduce the impact of the trauma to the patient’s life experience.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. Yeah. Lessening the anxiety, reducing the symptoms so that we can slow things down and lessen the reactivity that a person often exhibits to be able then to do more work below the symptoms of it all.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So that makes sense. You’re basically utilizing it to soften the clay so you can mold it a little better.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yep.
Tim Pickett:
Right?
Clifton Uckerman:
That’s a great analogy.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. So the effects of Delta-9, this is kind of a fun little video where Blake talks about it.
Tim Pickett:
What’s happening in the body chemically with depression? Why is cannabis good or bad? Tell us about that.
Blake Smith:
If someone is having depression, this is not going to really inspire you not to be depressed, right?
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Blake Smith:
This is just a chemical explanation about this and really work with your doctor. Everyone deserves to be happy and have joy. It’s not just the interplay of dopamine by itself. It’s melatonin, it’s serotonin, and you have a whole slew of other neurotransmitters that are all oscillating. So what you’re trying to do is get to homeostasis or this natural typical curve.
Tim Pickett:
I show that partly because if you want more information about this, you can go to Discover Marijuana and you can listen to Blake talk a lot about stuff like that. All these different pathways that THC and CBD are affecting, and really not necessarily what we’re talking about here in depth, but that’s the chemical explanation of how these things are helping because CBD and cannabis in general is really trying to get the body back to homeostasis.
Blake Smith:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
It’s a very, very interesting substance that will stimulate certain pathways in the neurons and inhibit other pathways in order to maintain that balance. It’s what you and I really like about the cannabis treatment in general. We find that the things that cannabis can be really good for is improving sleep, decreasing anxiety to a certain extent if you’re using it correctly in the correct dosing and delivery forms for the patient, having the right kind of intention around the cannabis use tends to help lower anxiety, anger outbursts, and avoidance behavior.
Tim Pickett:
Have you found, Cliff that the avoidance behavior goes down? This is somebody who doesn’t want to interact with that individual because in the past they had a traumatic event with somebody who looked like that.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. Or sounded like them.
Tim Pickett:
Or sounded like that.
Clifton Uckerman:
I said the same things that they said. I think that with the use of cannabis… And lot of times I think the CBD, that’s part of the ratio. A lot of these symptoms are lessened. I think when they’re in session and doing therapy then… Because trauma is really memory. So you have a traumatic memory with a lot of feeling embedded into that memory. So anything that triggers the memory is going to trigger a feeling.
Clifton Uckerman:
So if I have somebody that’s coming in to do trauma therapy and it’s in conjunction with medical cannabis, then they have a whole hour that they can sit without running away and really confront and face the memories and then process the emotions. The trick in the trauma therapy, which is why I love the use of medical cannabis, because it allows the person to be able to release and relinquish themselves from those feelings being calm enough and slowed down enough, and less anxious enough to be able to have a really good cry.
Clifton Uckerman:
A cathartic moment like that releases those emotional molecules, which are just really built up toxins stored in all of those old memories that’s creating disturbance internally. So that’s what I love about the medicinal cannabis. [crosstalk 00:20:27]
Tim Pickett:
Are you specifically having certain patients or are certain patients choosing to use cannabis during their sessions?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. Whether it’s cannabis or an anti-anxiety pill or an antidepressant, typically people who are on some form of medication are taking their daily dose in the morning before they get up for the day and get ready and do something with their life including therapy. So if it’s medical cannabis that they’re using when they get up and before therapy, that’s what they use. And oftentimes if that’s what they do, the therapy session is just a much more meaningful for them and much more quality with the time that we have to be able to work through and process things that they normally would be hyperaroused by, hyperreactive to avoiding, not wanting to talk about being afraid or too anxious to talk about.
Clifton Uckerman:
Sometimes the medical cannabis actually helps restore the memory because a lot of times people don’t remember what there is to talk about and they can’t recall what to talk about in the first place. And that’s just because of that hyperaroused kind of state of mind that they might be in or that hyperactive emotional state that they might be in.
Clifton Uckerman:
So if they take their medicinal cannabis in the daytime and the morning when they get up, they come to therapy, they’re much more able to remember and recall, have an emotional release and then be able to confront and face those fears without all of the anxiety.
Tim Pickett:
I love this, and I don’t think there’s enough of this going on in… Certainly we’re not talking about it enough, and I think people really need to hear that this is an option. When you talk about like the mechanism of action, which is the next slide, which we don’t really… This isn’t something that I want to spend much time on in detail, but we’re… Cannabis enhances the present by disconnecting us from our short term memory a little bit. But you are bringing up that you can access these long-term memories, and it seems like that would be more clear because there’s not so much distortion or noise. There’s not so much noise in the mind. Right? You’re able to really focus like you say and slow down and talk it out. Right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
And like you say, have a good cry. I think there are a lot of us and probably even in the participants, in the audience here that have experienced that. It’s not all just euphoria and giggles with cannabis. There are times when you can have an incredibly meaningful conversation with somebody and learn a lot about yourself and about your perception of reality and very, very meaningful experiences.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. Getting real with some stuff. The other thing too, that I don’t think most people realize is that in trauma work, even being able to talk about these kinds of things in session, and a lot of times people are sharing things in ways of themselves that they’ve never shared before with anybody else at all, because it’s been so buried and it’s been kind of trapped and contained in shame and secrecy because a person feels like it was their fault. They’re to blame. They did something wrong. They weren’t good enough. There’s something wrong with them.
Clifton Uckerman:
Now, the thing that most people don’t realize is that after that session, because that person has been able to disclose so much in such a vulnerable way, it likely will leave them feeling insecure when they walk away and after they go home questioning, “Should I have brought that up? I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have told him that. I wonder what he’s thinking about me now.”
Clifton Uckerman:
So there’s a really can be in trauma work after a really good, meaningful, positive session, a whole lot of increased anxiety and securities in the aftermath of it. So that’s one thing that I also think that medical cannabis can help with. Oftentimes, I tell my patients, “Go home and take a good nap and try to sleep really well tonight.” And the one thing that helps them sleep and take a really good nap so that their brain can do pruning after all those oxytocins are released because of that good cathartic cry is use cannabis to help them get there to lessen the anxiety and to help them get to sleep so that their brain can do some repair work.
Tim Pickett:
I think the other thing I would add to that is allowing your… The nice thing about having a therapy session and having a professional that you work with, or a really, really good friend, somebody that you have as a trusted confidant giving you permission to be vulnerable so that you don’t have that. There is this anxiety associated with THC use as well. And a lot of times people have to give themselves permission to talk, and to be open.
Tim Pickett:
And to use and to be a little stony, I guess, for lack of a better word. Nathan has a question, but we’re going to get to that in just a second. And I think we can help with that question. So this slide talks about the mechanism of action of the endo cannabinoid system, which really the keyword there is modulation.
Tim Pickett:
So we’re creating things. We’re consolidating things. We’re trying to get back to a balance. We’re trying to get back to this homeostasis and we’re using the CB1. The CB1 receptor system is in the brain and the nervous system and the CB2 receptor system is in tissues. And we’re using both in trauma therapy and PTSD therapy.
Tim Pickett:
There’s this hypothalamic pituitary… This is emotional brain talking to the frontal lobe. That’s the simple version of that. And then the 5-HT1A, that’s that serotonin kind of pathway. That’s that depression pathway. It’s modulated a little bit, not so much activity with depression specifically with THC and CBD use more help with anxiety and that part.
Tim Pickett:
So let’s move on to some interesting stuff. So the tinctures and edibles, I want to teach everybody, remind everybody that tinctures and edibles are going to be a slower onset to peak effect. You’re looking at, I would say an hour to two hours to peak effect. You’re going to have a slow decrease over the course of four to six hours typically with oral methods of cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
Really good for consistent dosing. And if you’re taking it morning, noon, and night. If you’re taking it at night, tinctures and edibles tend to be really, really good because they last a long time and you can sleep. Then you have flower and vaporizers, inhaled methods, which are quick to action, but they decrease over a shorter amount of time, much more rapid.
Tim Pickett:
So this tends to be good for triggering events, things that you either know something is going to be triggering. So you can dose, or you have a triggering event and then you dose where an edible or a tincture is going to take a little too long to take effect. And this goes to the question, and I’ll read this question out.
Tim Pickett:
So the question is really around, “So there’s edibles before bed, but found myself super groggy in the morning.” And over the last few months, he switched to a dryer vaporizer, usually a one-to-one type strain. So that means a one part CBD, one part THC. We’ll talk about that in a couple of slides coming up, does not have the same effect, meaning not groggy. I’m hoping that I’m getting that right. “Any suggestions on methods might be better that will lead me functional in the morning?”
Tim Pickett:
So using these two slides as your guide, if you’re using a dryer vaporizer, you’re only going to get effect between two and four hours, but if you’re using an edible, you’re going to get effect for a long period of time. So usually it’s depending on the dosing and how long before bed, or how early you wake up.
Tim Pickett:
We can get a little more nuanced than that with absorption. Absorption can happen depending on what you eat, either slower or faster. So if you weigh a high fat meal, you might have more effect because it’s a absorbed with the fat, and that may actually last longer as your gut slows down with these big meals. So you can tend to get an eight to 12 hour sometimes almost high from an edible and leave people groggy in the morning.
Tim Pickett:
So I think if the question is trying not to feel groggy in the morning, then the answer is using shorter methods like flowers. That’s the answer. If the question is you want to sleep as good as you did with the edible, and you’re not getting that effect with the flower, that’s probably strain related or level of dose related more so than the duration of effect. And there’s a couple of suggestions in my last slide about products.
Clifton Uckerman:
Is it also possible too that with the edible before bed that all has to digest and then it has a longer span of time to take effect and stay in effect?
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Because you might only be absorbing one or two milligrams at a time and you might be absorbing clear through the night.
Clifton Uckerman:
Right. Go ahead, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
No, go ahead.
Clifton Uckerman:
I was going to say, so just my part as a therapist, as a medical cannabis therapist because we really want to try to have the greatest and most positive effect of what’s being consumed, be on the most effective of the least amount of things, right?
Tim Pickett:
Yes.
Clifton Uckerman:
So something that I’m seeing here, if Nathan came to me to therapy, I would probably really want to explore, also, what is the antidepressant? What is the anti-anxiety? And what kind of edible is it? What strain and ratio is it? Because I want to understand the interaction risks between all of these things, but I would want to also understand is sometimes if I wake up groggy and still tired, something has been flooded, chances are, and you got antidepressant and an anti-anxiety depending on what types of medications those are and the dosage that he might be on in combination with the edible, whatever that is, could actually be not the best concoction or mixture of medications.
Clifton Uckerman:
So I’d want him to explore that and really then talk to somebody like you, and see if there’s a way to get on the least amount of the most effective. As a medical cannabis therapist, I typically would tell my patients, “Gosh, you know what think about one or the other.” I mean, medical cannabis is very natural, organic. It’s a plant based medicine and the antidepressants and anti-anxieties come from the lab and are based… It’s pharmaceutical based.
Tim Pickett:
Completely synthetic, yep.
Clifton Uckerman:
Synthetic. So you never know, and there’s no recurrent research that tells us, “Hey, this is what happens when you put these things together in your unique body.” So that’s the kind of conversation that I would also probably want to be having as well.
Tim Pickett:
And that brings up Colin’s point, which is here, that it’s best to start low and go slow and then keep a journal. So keeping a journal, not only of your cannabis use, but of your other medications that you take, and maybe even what you’re eating for dinner. I know that these journals… We don’t want these journals to be so detailed that you’re not going to do it, but if you have a set of things that you’re tracking and then a couple hours later, how you feel, especially with cannabis, if you’re tracking how much you take and when you take it, and then how you feel a couple of hours later, then you’re going to… Over time, you’re going to get a sense.
Tim Pickett:
You’re going to be able to go back and get a sense of what’s working and what might not be. But the whole old point of a journal is to keep the record. And like Nathan said, I mean, if you’re tracking too much data, you’re not going to do it. So only track enough data that you’re going to do it every day or do it every session. And over time you find like I definitely have things that I will not take at certain doses. I promise you.
Tim Pickett:
I am very specific at about a couple of things. Let’s talk about that specifically, what to take and what to look for, for PTSD and mental health really. And maybe what to avoid a little bit. So terpenes are found in everything, right? When you go through the forest and you smell, you’re smelling pine. When you eat a lemon or smell an orange, or there’s a lot of limonene in that. Myrcene is the most dominant terpene found in cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
It’s up to, I think, 4% in some strains, but definitely the most common. Linalool is very much like lavender. That’s the smell that we have. And caryophyllene, beta-caryophyllene is a common anti-inflammatory terpene. It’s very common in strains that tend to help with chronic pain, but these three are my favorite terpenes when it comes to PTSD symptoms. If you have the ability to look for terpene, product with these terpenes, either added or these terpenes are dominant in the flower, then these would be pretty good.
Tim Pickett:
The cannabinoids, there’s about 120 cannabinoids we know of. THC is a cannabinoid, CBG, CBC, CBD, and CBN. CBN is known for its relaxing properties. It’s known to be very calming. It is very good for sleep and calming anxiety during the day.
Tim Pickett:
So if you’re looking for products with cannabinoids or terpenes that may help a PTSD type of condition, these would be where I would start. And you can find this particular graphic on utahmarijuana.org. And you can find information on terpenes. It’s readily available online. Terpenes are essential oils, right, which a really common thing in Utah to treat things.
Tim Pickett:
One warning about terpenes, you do not want to inhale terpenes on their own, right? You’re not vaping terpenes. Don’t vape your essential oils. That is very, very dangerous. It’s not recommended. You’ll notice in these products, there’s very small percentage of terpenes added because they can be very strong in low doses.
Tim Pickett:
And then product recommendations, for me, I’m going to tend to recommend indica or hybrid type products. A couple of things in Utah that are fairly common and easy to find are ice cream cake and Dosie Dough. Dosie Dough is a vape cart and a flower. There’s a bunch of different companies that make these products with the Dosie Dough kind of breakdown.
Tim Pickett:
The only edible that I could find with a breakdown of what’s actually in it was a Zion Medicinal, the Plush Wild Cherry gummies. The reason why I like this one is because of the ratio. I think you want that ratio of THC to CBD, which brings me really to my favorite products for PTSD and for new patients, which are tinctures. I recommend ratios of one to four, up to one to 10 THC to CBD.
Tim Pickett:
If you go back in our slides, you’ll find that that CBD research is really good and CBD tends to smooth out the rough edges of the THC effect. So patients who use them together tend to have better sessions when they’re in that one to four ratio or at least one to one ratios. Cliff, do you have any favorite products?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah, I think anything that is higher CBD, lower THC. For me and my patients, the one to one sometimes can be a little too much. The one to four, what do they got, one to 10, one to 30. And then some people really do like flower and there are flower products out there that are mostly, if not all CBD with a little bit of THC, which can be really helpful. But they’ve got vapes and tinctures and edibles. But I think for me and my patients, the tinctures are great, but edibles tend to kind of be what I hear a lot of my patients using a lot more is the edible.
Tim Pickett:
This is good slide for reference for dosing. Just like Cliff was saying, the one to 10 THC to CBD, that seems to be a really good sweet spot for people who are new to cannabis, to people who want to decrease anxiety, help their sleep, decrease their dreams. That 2.5 to 12.5 milligrams per dose also seems to be, when you look at the evidence, we tend to come to this 7.5 to 12.5 has the sweet spot for THC dosing.
Tim Pickett:
A lot of that is around, if you get too much THC, the brain starts to spin and you’re watching the waterfall. You’re behind the waterfall and this is just going and going and going. And that can ruin your sleep.
Clifton Uckerman:
Especially the sativa. I you already come with a lot of anxiety and anxiety is a big part of PTSD, but if you already have a lot of anxiety and then you’re using really high dosages of THC and sativa chances are, you’re probably going to get a little bit more paranoid. Anxiety can turn into paranoia if your brain is overactivated.
Tim Pickett:
The last thing I’ll say before we get to questions is if you are concerned about the high start with CBD one milligram per kilograms, take your body weighting pounds, divide it by 2.2, that’s your kilograms. One milligram per kilogram per day. Start with that, right? So I’m 170 pounds. That’s 80, 75 kilos. So I’m going to take 75 milligrams of CBD every single day divided. So I take a slug, I call it. Just take a good slug in the morning, good slug in the middle of the day. And that will help on its own without any psycho activity, and can be used during the day, because it’s not psychoactive and you don’t get that high feeling.
Tim Pickett:
So let’s go to some questions. We’ve got a question about a teenage child who’s been diagnosed with PTSD at a loss for how to handle the compassionate service board. Yes. I have some comments about that, if I have any advice. She has a diagnosis from her therapist who’s an LCSW. Her therapist is supportive, but not a QMP. So this is a great question and there’s a couple of things about this. Cliff is an LCSW, right?
Clifton Uckerman:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
So Cliff cannot be a QMP under state law because he doesn’t have a controlled substance license or a license to prescribe controlled substances in Utah. That requires somebody like me, a PA with a controlled substance license. So in this case, no matter what, if the patient is diagnosed with PTSD from a LCSW and you then go to see a QMP, you can take that diagnosis and that letter of treatment, and you can then get a recommendation from the QMP for medical cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
So these two things go together, right? You’re going to get the cannabis recommendation from the QMP. You’re going to get the help and the therapy from the clinical social worker. And I hope that makes sense. That’s just in general, the process. Then you add on to that the Compassionate Use Board for somebody under 21.
Tim Pickett:
So that application has to be done through the QMP with help from the social worker. So there’s an entire application process that has to be done. They have to take that application to the Compassionate Use Board, which is seven physicians in Utah. And that board will make a recommendation for medical cannabis and allow them access.
Tim Pickett:
Then you, as the parent have to have a guardian card or a caregiver card to help them access that medication, if they’re under 18. The process takes one to two months. And really if the patient is between… If they’re 16 and over, you can go to utahmarijuana.org, and you can see us. We will help. The Compassionate Use Board has been a little hesitant to use specialist providers as QMPs. It’s a tricky scenario, but we can help guide you through it.
Tim Pickett:
So give us a call. We have somebody who’s actually an expert on the Compassionate Use Board and, and does all of that for us. So hopefully that helps, and we can get you more resources as well.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, perfect. I’m going to answer that one. There we go. And then we had a nice comment. Very thankful to us for… We’re exploring the cannabis family. Yeah. Thank you. I don’t know if it’s Jeanie or Jean, but thanks for those kind words.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. Cliff and I actually really like this stuff. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re all jazzed up about this, about this topic, right? I’m fascinated with the idea that you can manipulate the mind and you can change like you can change behavior and you can change your perception of your own life and your experience. I think that’s so important and I think that’s missing with modern medicine. I just feel like a lot of the times we just prescribe, and prescribe, and prescribe and dull everything.
Clifton Uckerman:
Yeah. Yes.
Tim Pickett:
And cannabis is like a turning point. It’s not about the cannabis. The cannabis is just unlocking something that is allowing us to take a step forward in our life and in our growth.
Clifton Uckerman:
And there also may be some healing properties too. I mean, I think for me, I grew up as a delinquent youth. So I was in the system a lot. As a way to prevent youth from getting into trouble, they made us feel like all drugs and alcohol were bad and to never use it. Well, when my brother had diabetes and it went blind because of glaucoma, he started using cannabis and brought his vision back. And with all the people that I’ve worked with, especially when I worked in the jail and I ran a program there, we could not talk about it, yet most of the people in there were in there because of drug charges and a lot of it marijuana and were also using cannabis when they were in jail. Sometimes they would use it in jail too.
Tim Pickett:
Oh my gosh.
Clifton Uckerman:
But we couldn’t talk about it. So in the last couple years, as I’ve been working more with patients with trauma and seeing how much this can help and have healing properties, I think it’s something that I want to be a part of and be involved in the conversation about, for sure.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. We have a last question and it is perfectly timed, so thank you Nathan for asking it, and that is this, “Any recommendations to find a therapist willing to work with a cannabis patient like him?” Well, yes, there you go. Call Cliff. And you can get a hold of Cliff by reaching out to us because that’s not part of this presentation as far as our… And I think probably just an oversight on my part, frankly, Cliff, so sorry. So go to utahmarijuana.org, reach out to us, mention the webinar. We will set you up, right?
Tim Pickett:
We’ll give you all the information you need and you can just call our office. We have locations and Cliff is going to be involved with us clinically in our locations, specifically in Bountiful, if that’s somewhere that you want to go. To be honest, I want to do it because I’m just interested in utilizing cannabis like going to the next level and getting really serious about my mental health and use some cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. We’re on all the things. And at the end of this, hopefully if you’ve signed up for this, then there’ll be a feedback poll. So we really appreciate the feedback. One way to get ahold of me or Cliff is when this is posted on YouTube. If you make a comment on any of the videos that I have, we answer all those questions. It’s better than email because when we answer the question, we get to answer it for everybody and not just keep it a secret for only you.
Tim Pickett:
I think that’s the best way to get the information out is just go to YouTube, comment away and we’ll get it. Anything else that we missed, Cliff?
Clifton Uckerman:
Nope. I think that was great. I appreciate it. It sounds like everybody had a good time. The one thing I wanted to mention is if you can’t journal, some people have a hard time writing and tracking stuff, come to therapy. Let me be your journal. I’ll keep a documented record of it. Every time you come in, we’ll measure it every time. We’ll send it to Tim and we’ll all work together to make something work for you in the best kind of way.
Tim Pickett:
That is a great idea. All right. Thanks, everybody. Stay safe out there, will you?
Clifton Uckerman:
See you later.
Episode 84 of Utah In the Weeds features Shawn Hammond, a co-founder of Proper Cannabis Co.
Shawn told us about his transition from Oregon’s recreational cannabis market to forming a national hemp brand, Proper Hemp Co. [05:45]
His company was unable to secure a cannabis grow license to serve Utah’s Medical Cannabis patients. So he began overseeing cultivation for Zion Cultivars. [08:59]
After a time, Shawn wanted to go back to his original dream of expanding Proper Cannabis in Utah. [10:45]
He told host Tim Pickett about Proper Cannabis Co.’s science-based approach in making cannabis products. [12:28]
Shawn and Tim had an interesting discussion about “bioavailability,” or the body’s ability to absorb cannabinoids and other chemicals. [13:07]
They also talked about the differences between isolated CBD and full-spectrum CBD. Both agree the latter has much more medicinal value. [14:02]
Shawn talked about the nano-emulsion technology that Proper Cannabis uses to make their products easy for the body to absorb. [16:45]
Proper Cannabis Co. plans to launch a number of new products in Utah throughout 2022, starting with a THC tincture. [21:28]
Shawn talked about Proper’s medical condition-based approach to formulating cannabis products, and the challenges of testing products to be sold in Utah. [28:50]
He announced a beta test of some new Medical Cannabis products, for qualifying patients. See his Instagram for details. [32:00]
The two talked about some of the challenges of state licensing and procuring source material. [34:30]
Tim and Shawn talked about their shared love of Olympic weightlifting. Then we wrapped up the episode with a discussion of Shawn’s recent out-of-state cannabis taste-testing. [44:00]
Tim Pickett:
Welcome everybody out to Episode 84 of Utah in the Weeds and a big shout-out and welcome to 2022, right? Here we are. I hope you enjoyed last week’s episode. We got it out a little bit late. The year in review, the 2021 year in review, if you missed that, go back and listen to it. It was I think released on the 3rd of January. We’ll be back after this episode. We’ll try to be back to this Friday episode release every Friday at 4:20 a.m, coming to you from Utah here. My name is Tim Pickett. I am the host of Utah in the Weeds and I’m looking forward to this entire year because there’s so much good that has been happening in the cannabis space and in the medical space from my perspective over the past couple of years since the program started, and I hope to outline some of that in 2022.
Tim Pickett:
Today’s guest is Shawn Hammond. Shawn Hammond is a good friend of mine. You may know him, you may have listened to the episode before when we had him on. He is the owner and partner in Proper Hemp and Proper Cannabis Company. Proper is a company that’s been around for a little while. You may have seen it in Utah, you may not have. It’s in multiple states, they’ve been doing CBD products and hemp products for a while, and they’ve come to Utah. Shawn’s brought that to Utah to develop cannabis products or THC products for the medical market, and we talk a lot about his nano-emulsification process. He is really into bioavailability, which just means the absorption of the product into the human body, and he’s also into strong products. I like that about him. We talk a little bit about weight lifting too, so stay tuned for that at the end there, and I think you’re going to enjoy this episode.
Tim Pickett:
From a housekeeping perspective, what to look forward to over the next few months. The legislative session is coming up and there’s a couple of things that we are really focused on this year to try to get changed with the program, and one of them is covering for other providers that are in the same group, right? Covering for other providers that are in the same group, so I can see my partner’s patients when my partner is out of town or sick or gone or moves out of state even, and then the other thing is this patient caps. Patients should I believe have a choice of who they see. I think that that’s becoming more and more evident. People are migrating to the folks that they want to take care of them, just like normal medicine, you get to choose your own doctor, you get to choose your own PA. Why not in the medical cannabis space, right?
Tim Pickett:
So look forward to episodes with … Hopefully we’ll get Rich Oborn back on from the Department of Health. We’ll talk to the advocacy groups. We’ll talk to some pharmacists. I want to bring on some pharmacists from WholesomeCo and last but not least, before we get into this episode, I want to update you on our subsidy program Uplift. So Uplift launched in December 2021. It is now the largest subsidy program that I know of in the state of Utah for medical cannabis patients. We are going to be able to see 22 patients in January for free or reduced cost. These are low income and terminally ill patients. You can find out more about that at utahmarijauana.org/uplift. Again, largest subsidy program in Utah for medical cannabis. I think this is what I would consider finally a good subsidy program that is transparent, that is clear for the requirements to be approved for the system, and has the ability to scale and see hopefully as many patients as need to be seen who are low income terminally ill here in Utah.
Tim Pickett:
So check that out. Utah in the Weeds, download it on any podcast player that you have. My name is Tim Pickett. Enjoy this episode and interview with Shawn Hammond.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, first of all, we’re in Salt Lake, we’re at the Proper Cannabis Co. headquarters. Is that we call this? What is this place?
Shawn Hammond:
So we’re at … Call it Proper HQ. Right?
Tim Pickett:
Proper HQ.
Shawn Hammond:
Because we’ve got multiple companies under Proper and we’ve got a lab, a medical cannabis processing lab here in the state. We can’t touch any THC here at this spot.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, will that change?
Shawn Hammond:
No. No. This is zoned for hemp processing, but across the street is okay to be a medical cannabis processor, but right here is not.
Tim Pickett:
What the –
Shawn Hammond:
But that’s fine. Because we’re working with another license holder to be able to do our processing there.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, so talk about that for a minute. Because you were with Zion as the grower. You’re now –
Shawn Hammond:
So yeah, should we just back up?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, I mean okay. I feel like we should because people know you from Zion Farmer and [inaudible 00:05:54] social handle and we had a podcast before and you were involved with Zion and we had a podcast before and you were involved with Zion. So as much as you want to get into that or not, how did you get from there to here?
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. Well, yeah. Let’s back up and give a little history. I think on our first podcast I have a brief history on how I got into the space. But in 2017, when my partner Mike Madsen and I were leaving the Oregon rec market, we decided to focus on hemp. So we started Proper Hemp Co. The Oregon market early on got really saturated with cultivators, we talked about that.
Tim Pickett:
It’s still saturated with cultivators. I mean [inaudible 00:06:42]
Shawn Hammond:
[inaudible 00:06:42]. Yeah, man, I guess it hasn’t changed so much, right? They’ve got a moratorium right now on new licenses.
Tim Pickett:
Oh really?
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. They needed it a long time ago. So we decided to focus on the medical side of the hemp plant. My experience growing up in Oregon allowed me to understand the value of CBD. That’s where I really first learned about it, because the grower that … One of my main growers there, she had an inoperable brain tumor that she medicated … Well, it caused her to have seizures, back up. So she had seizures associated with her brain tumor, and she was all the way off of her pharmaceutical drugs and simply controlled her seizures with a high CBD strain of cannabis. So that was my first real close experience, so I wanted to understand more about that, so I started learning more about the medical side. CBD was newer at that time. Some people had heard of it, most of them hadn’t. The farm bill still had not been passed but it looked like it was going to. So we thought it was a good time to pivot into the hemp space and take our brand national.
Shawn Hammond:
So we focused on building a national brand, Proper Hemp Co. We were in early. We were really a science-based company that focused on high end delivery systems, maximizing cannabinoid absorption in the body, and launched and so did everyone else in the U.S. I think too, about two years later.
Tim Pickett:
That sounds like the same time, right? Just as the boom was happening and then the crash.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, I mean in 2018, when the farm bill happened, a bunch of people jumped in. You had farmers jumping in, you had brands jumping in, into a new market, and then it got oversaturated, and COVID happened and now … At one point, I think they were tracking over 5,000 CBD brands, and now I think over 3,000 have fallen out. So the industry will stabilize but that was our background and when licensing came available to Utah when Prop 2 passed, I and we wanted to apply for a cultivation license.
Tim Pickett:
Well you knew what you were doing. They needed Utahns who knew what they were doing at the time, right?
Shawn Hammond:
That was my thought. I was looking at some other opportunities out of state, in fact out of the country, but I had traveled quite a bit and just really wanted to stay in state. So I put in a cultivation license with the idea of being able to bring proper cannabis here to Utah, and that’s the THC side. We didn’t get awarded a license and still wanted to try to participate in the Utah market. We wanted to try to get a deal with one of the cultivators or processors to bring Proper here, and that didn’t work out at the time, which is fine, because things work out or don’t for a reason a lot of times, right? But I did end up working with Zion and was excited to go work in the cannabis space here in Utah and took a position with them to oversee and run their cultivation operation, and that was an awesome experience, to be able to get in here and design and build and be part of creating a new industry and a medical space. I love cultivating flower, I love smoking flower, vaping, whatever.
Tim Pickett:
Right? Whatever the term is right now.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, whatever state I’m in depends on –
Tim Pickett:
Yes, depends on the state you’re in. Yes.
Shawn Hammond:
But about just over six months ago, I decided to get back to my dream or idea of really bringing proper cannabis here to Utah. We developed a lot of really cool products with Proper Hemp. Industry-leading, award-winning. We got written up in magazines, we’ve been in Women’s Health and we’ve got awards sitting there behind you for our branding. So we learned a lot about our customers, because we had a broad customer brace and we took really meticulous data sets on conditions and what people were using our products for and then of course we have the data of which products were selling and we had a large catalog. 20-something SKUs. But we really understand the main things that were driving customers to us. Sleep was a big thing. Pain, anxiety or mental health. Those were kind of really the main three things.
Tim Pickett:
It seems like when you were talking about the hemp side, the CBD side, those are the big … Mental health pain –
Shawn Hammond:
Those are the same ones that people for cannabis. For medical cannabis.
Tim Pickett:
Yep. And then that translates, you’re right. I mean it just translates right over to the THC side, right?
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
I really like those … You had some curcumin softgels, and I was taking them, I remember we were lifting, and I hurt my back and I was loading up on those things because they were … They helped.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. They were based on this high end delivery system that I mentioned earlier.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, talk about that now. Like that seems to be Proper’s thing.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, so at Proper Cannabis, we really … We took a science-based approach. Initially in the CBD market, there were a lot of really bad products out there. Mislabeled for one thing and that’s a whole different category but even … Let’s talk about products that were labeled and formulated correctly. It started out in the industry with CBD isolate, which the bioavailability is incredibly poor. Not only is the bioavailability poor, the effects are nowhere near what say a full spectrum CBD would provide.
Tim Pickett:
Right. Two things there. Bioavailability is how good your body absorbs a medication or substance. So for example, the bioavailability of an IV drug is almost 100% because you put it right into the system.
Shawn Hammond:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
But the bioavailability of a drug you take orally can vary so widely.
Shawn Hammond:
Sure.
Tim Pickett:
Like so widely.
Shawn Hammond:
Right. Is it going through first pass metabolisms in the process through your liver –
Tim Pickett:
And it’s not really tested in the hemp side, right? Like in the normal drug side in Western pharmaceutical medicine, you take the drug, they test your blood when you take the drug, then they test your blood 15 minutes, 30 minutes.
Shawn Hammond:
Your PK values, [inaudible 00:13:46].
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, all these values of bioavailability and that’s not done hardly … I don’t know if it’s –
Shawn Hammond:
Not by most.
Tim Pickett:
Not by most, right?
Shawn Hammond:
That’s right. But we employed a high-end … Well let’s back up. Let’s talk about the difference between isolate and full spectrum.
Tim Pickett:
Oh yes. Yes, because the second thing I was going to talk about was isolating and we have this in THC too, right? You have isolate, you have distillate, you … Okay, explain that for us.
Shawn Hammond:
So yeah, I kind of want to get into like a history of modern medicine. But before I do that –
Tim Pickett:
All right. I mean you can, you can. We have all day. We’ll just split it up. We’ll split it up two podcasts.
Shawn Hammond:
Let me just keep it real simple. So science likes to take a compound and isolate the molecule that provides a specific response. Right? That they think … That’s … System works.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. That is how our medical system works.
Shawn Hammond:
Okay?
Tim Pickett:
Aspirin, ibuprofen.
Shawn Hammond:
Often, that is not the best delivery system because I’ll go into plant medicine in a little bit after this, but most of these isolated medicines that your pharmaceutical companies are slightly altered molecules of natural plant medicines. Okay? But the plant –
Tim Pickett:
Aspirin is a good example. It’s white willow bark.
Shawn Hammond:
Exactly.
Tim Pickett:
Right? And then we just made it into aspirin.
Shawn Hammond:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
Van Gogh. He used to be drinking dandelion tea as a diuretic and that’s what made the haloes for The Starry, Starry Night.
Shawn Hammond:
See? Plant medicine.
Tim Pickett:
Right? Yeah, plant medicine is the thing.
Shawn Hammond:
That was the thing. And we’ve gotten away from that. And what we’ve found, like let’s just keep it specific to cannabinoids. An isolated cannabinoid, particularly CBD is what we’re talking about, does not provide the same benefit, overall absorption, or experiential benefit as a broad or full spectrum. Meaning a distillate that has other cannabinoids and terpenes and flavonoids. So –
Tim Pickett:
Even if it’s residue. I mean I would say, even if it’s residue from the other cannabinoids and terpenoids, it makes a big difference.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, a small amount makes a really big difference, right? So they found out that, “Okay.” And it’s called the entourage effect. This is easy science, most people listening probably are aware of what the entourage effect is, and you don’t get that with an isolate. But you do with full spectrum or broad spectrum. Still you’re limited on bioavailability. It’s a very thick oil, right, CBD and your body has a hard time absorbing that. So we sought out companies that were doing interesting things in the space and quite frankly that were drug delivery companies for the pharmaceutical industry.
Shawn Hammond:
So we started working with a group that had been doing some really cool research and we licensed their process which is patented to apply to the cannabinoids and what that does is first of all it makes it, number one, water-soluble. And what we create in our lab with the cannabinoids is called a self-assembling colloidal solution. Fancy words, meaning that you’re creating a … I don’t want to get too sciencey, but when our SDDS hits an aqueous phase.
Tim Pickett:
Basically when you drop that shit into the water.
Shawn Hammond:
Into water, it will become water-soluble and I showed Tim kind of an experiment –
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, we were downstairs, right? Yeah, you dropped it into the water and most oils, they go down and they’ll separate a little and then they kind of rise [inaudible 00:17:54].
Shawn Hammond:
And they’ll sit on top, right? If [inaudible 00:17:56].
Tim Pickett:
They go right back to the top. Yeah, they go right back to the top and then they become oil. This is how I keep my … The noodles from boiling over. I spray some oil on the top of the pot.
Shawn Hammond:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
It stays on the top.
Shawn Hammond:
Well, when you take a cannabinoid, which is an oil-based, and you take an oil-based delivery system like MCT which is common, that’s not water-soluble and it’s not the most bioavailable. What we do is we create a product that … Just break it down to the science, it’s water-soluble, it stabilizes at under 50 nanometers, and there’s published studies in Molecule Magazine, which I was showing you a little bit earlier, that show that our … The comparison between an MCT-based delivery system versus the self-assembling colloidal solution delivery system results in 4.4 times greater absorption and blood plasma levels.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And when you were dropping it in the water solution, it really … It doesn’t go back up to the top and you didn’t even seem to spin it.
Shawn Hammond:
You see it all –
Tim Pickett:
I mean you did spin it to make the point I think, but really it just … It just hangs out all over the water solution.
Shawn Hammond:
A colloidal solution is a solution that can’t be broken down, right? So it took that entire vessel of water and it distributed the cannabinoids completely evenly and it will not separate. Because now it’s colloidal.
Tim Pickett:
Now what you’re saying is you’re not making coffee, you’re not changing the water into the cannabinoid solution.
Shawn Hammond:
No, no.
Tim Pickett:
You’re breaking down those. You’re essentially breaking down those to the smallest point you can so that they absorb body as fast as –
Shawn Hammond:
Into your body. What’s your body made of? Water, right?
Tim Pickett:
As fast as and as consistent as possible.
Shawn Hammond:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Right?
Shawn Hammond:
Yes.
Tim Pickett:
Which is really what we need. I talked to a patient today. The biggest problem they’re having is consistency with the edibles.
Shawn Hammond:
Edibles are a challenge. They’re a challenge. It’s kind of a funny drug delivery system for a medical market, if you think about it. I don’t eat sugar.
Tim Pickett:
It is so much more now. We were thinking about doing it … And it’s the new year, right? We were thinking about doing the whole 30, and I was thinking, “Man, how are you going to do that? There’s all this sugar and all these additives and all these gummies.” You’re going to have to switch the delivery method I guess.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, and that’s what we’ve developed with Proper Cannabis is alternative delivery methods based on what we learned and what we got feedback from our patients in Proper Hemp, so those curcumin softgels, our Proper Relief Softgels, they’re nano-emulsified, so they have that technology applied, which is why you can feel them, they work. And they absorb into your body and they do it quickly and they last effectively longer. The relief is longer.
Tim Pickett:
So when you talk about … They absorb quicker, so you’re going to get … And we were looking at the graphs. I mean based on this article and this research, it’s going to absorb into the body at over four times greater bioavailability. So essentially if we switch over to this THC stuff that you’re making now that’s going to drop … And when is it? When are we thinking that this stuff is going to be available in Utah?
Shawn Hammond:
So we’re going to be launching new products all throughout 2022. So our first product that’s coming to market is just a straight THC tincture. The next product that’s just awaiting testing is a tincture formulated to help with sleep. And then we’ve got two topicals that are based on our nano-emulsion formulas that we’re going to be introducing hopefully January if again –
Tim Pickett:
If everything goes –
Shawn Hammond:
Testing is … It takes a minute.
Tim Pickett:
Remind me to bring back up the barriers to entry to bring a product to market as a non-grower, right?
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. For sure.
Tim Pickett:
It’s one thing when you had access to this grow, but now Proper is not a grower.
Shawn Hammond:
No.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, but finishing on with this bioavailability, you’re going to have a tincture –
Shawn Hammond:
And then we’re going to be working on bringing products based on our Proper softgel, or our hemp-based softgels to the THC market. So yeah, it’s going to be … We’ve already developed them and we’ve developed them, we’ve got to get the ability to manufacture them at a –
Tim Pickett:
A little bit more scale, right?
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. We got to scale.
Tim Pickett:
Instead of filling every single capsule yourself and banding it yourself and then putting it all in the bottle, come on.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, there’s a lot that goes into the delivery system but the technology has been developed and we’re excited to get it launched. The first product, like I said, I don’t really eat sugar, so edibles have not really been my thing, but we’re bringing a high strength straight delta-9 tincture to the market that’s going to provide similar or better results than a lot of your edibles. It’s –
Tim Pickett:
But high strength –
Shawn Hammond:
High strength.
Tim Pickett:
Like most of the tinctures out in Utah are 250 milligrams per bottle.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
What do you think is going to be in your bottle?
Shawn Hammond:
So we attempted to launch at 1,500 milligrams per bottle. Test results came at 1,750, which again, I can … Yeah. Utah testing is interesting.
Tim Pickett:
Should we go back to the Cody James podcast I just released last month? It’s okay Cody, we don’t hate you, but a couple of times now, your tests have come back a little high maybe.
Shawn Hammond:
Well, and it wasn’t him. There’s other labs in the state.
Tim Pickett:
No, there’s a group. We’re just … It’s like Fauci, we need somebody to blame.
Shawn Hammond:
It’s interesting. So when you’re formulating, you’ve got to have accurate data. Because all of your data is based on potency and the amount of milligrams per gram of your source material. So you do all of your math and formulations based on that.
Tim Pickett:
Based on your source material.
Shawn Hammond:
And if a C of A comes back saying your source material is at 75% THC, you formulate based on that percentage.
Tim Pickett:
I see.
Shawn Hammond:
Well, if that distillate happens to be 85% THC because your initial test was wrong, now your formulation has more.
Tim Pickett:
Has those –
Shawn Hammond:
So the first bach –
Tim Pickett:
The difference is not necessarily errors. We’re just going to say those differences are going to translate all the way down the [inaudible 00:24:50] –
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, and it’s funny math, because it’s like, “Listen. Here’s the amount of liters used,” which you can see, “And here is the math.”
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. That’s all just chemistry and physics.
Shawn Hammond:
I did not generate 190,000 extra grams of THC in my formulation process.
Tim Pickett:
Sure.
Shawn Hammond:
But anyway, so bottom line –
Tim Pickett:
But either way, this is –
Shawn Hammond:
No, this is high strength. I mean a lot of medical patients need a high dose, right?
Tim Pickett:
Well, and the other thing is … I mean it’s probably going to be a pretty good value too because –
Shawn Hammond:
That’s the idea. We’re formulating it and we don’t have control over what pharmacies price products at.
Tim Pickett:
You could sell it a certain but –
Shawn Hammond:
Growers don’t have it, processors don’t. We intend, we could have a manufacturers recommended sale price, an SRP or whatever, and we would like these to hit the market for $125.00.
Tim Pickett:
I mean you’re putting it out there.
Shawn Hammond:
And we’re pricing to allow that. Because a lot of medical patients really do require a high dose, and that gets expensive. It gets cost-prohibitive.
Tim Pickett:
The consistency too. If you want patients … And I talk about this a lot to patients in reducing their inhaled products, just in general, right? Because we’re seeing more younger patients use a lot of cannabis and so to me, if I can reduce the amount of inhalation that a patient does over their lifetime by 20%, that’s a lot of inflammation that we reduce and potential damage. Because there’s plenty of research on smoking weed, but there’s not a lot of research on longterm vaping and who knows. Maybe there’s another chemical in there that over time will be … You want less of, right?
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, well you hear the Department of Health? Joints are best, right?
Tim Pickett:
So you’ve got this … We talk about microdosing tinctures and then adding inhaled on top of it, and your tincture would be ideal, right? Because you basically have the delta-9 –
Shawn Hammond:
Well I mean you could take whatever dose you want. It’s a value-based product that’s high quality, all of our products are high quality.
Tim Pickett:
And it doesn’t melt together in the bottle, right?
Shawn Hammond:
Right? And it’s designed so one dropper full is 50 milligrams. So I don’t know, maybe you’re a 12 milligram person. Well you take a quarter dropper full. It allows you to really kind of maintain that dosing protocol and –
Tim Pickett:
And if it’s absorbing faster and it’s more bioavailable than the competing or the other products and you can get it 10 minutes earlier, right? You can get that effect 10 minutes earlier, why wouldn’t you want that, right? You take it to have the effect as fast as possible.
Shawn Hammond:
And I do want to clarify, just the initial tinctures that we’re putting out, they are not our nano-emulsified products. But they are a higher strength and formulated for condition. The nano-emulsified products we’ll be dropping later January, February, March.
Tim Pickett:
And those are going to be the –
Shawn Hammond:
Those are the ones that have the 4x absorption plus.
Tim Pickett:
Got it.
Shawn Hammond:
So these are –
Tim Pickett:
I mean really a lot to look forward to.
Shawn Hammond:
Oh yeah. Kind of the idea … I mean, a lot of people … Let’s say you smoke, vape your flower in the morning, right? Well, a lot of people don’t have time or the ability to vape all day until they get back from work or whatever it may be. This provides kind of that all day predictable help to … Maybe you’re not high, but you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m not thinking about smoking a joint. I don’t feel- ”
Tim Pickett:
Right. I don’t think about my pain.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
And those two things, you’re home free and you don’t … And then there’s the smell and really there’s still a stigma around the smell of the flower.
Shawn Hammond:
So we’re excited to get that launched. I mentioned we formulate for conditions, right? We don’t formulate just to get you high. We formulate for conditions and one of the biggest things that we’ve talked about is sleep, right? So many people take edibles for sleep. Most people won’t take an edible during the day, because of the waves that it comes in, the kind of unpredictability and then when it wears off, you crash out, right? You want to go to sleep. So a lot of people end up taking their edibles at night. We understand that and we developed a tincture that’s designed to help you fall asleep. It’s not designed to get you high and it won’t, if you take it during the day, it’s going to put you down, you’re going to want to take a nap. And it’s formulated with 1,000 milligrams of THC, 1,000 milligrams of CBD, 200 milligrams of CBN, valerian root, lavender and getting back to that natural plant medicine. And it helps you sleep. There’s no doubt. We’re really excited to get that one launched because we know it’s going to serve a large number of patients.
Tim Pickett:
How is it possible, I’m sitting here thinking about formulating these products and how you’re going about formulating these products, and maybe you don’t even want to answer this because I can imagine that this is pretty hard. But how do you go about formulating a product and testing it in Utah when you can’t have THC –
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, you can’t. I mean it’s a problem.
Tim Pickett:
Right? You’ve essentially got to be a patient … If we’re going to brainstorm this, you’ve got to be a patient –
Shawn Hammond:
Let me walk through what I would have to do to test my product in the market, right?
Tim Pickett:
Or on your own, while you’re formulating it.
Shawn Hammond:
Well you can’t.
Tim Pickett:
Right? There’s no legal –
Shawn Hammond:
There’s no mechanism inside the law … See, like with proper hemp, and the good thing is, I have base formulations that I have developed here.
Tim Pickett:
Sure. That you can go from, right?
Shawn Hammond:
So I have –
Tim Pickett:
So you know, and you know how much 10 milligrams of delta-9 makes people feel like, “Okay, that makes some sense.” But formulating a CBN, valerian root, lavender product and then having people try it and test it and make sure that you can get all the materials –
Shawn Hammond:
You would have to be doing that out of state, right? You’d have to be doing beta testing out of state.
Tim Pickett:
Out of state.
Shawn Hammond:
So –
Tim Pickett:
But out of state, you’re not going to have a license out of state to have it, and to do the testing either.
Shawn Hammond:
No, but we can work in someone’s lab there.
Tim Pickett:
You could work in somebody’s lab. You see how these little things, like I don’t want to get anybody in trouble, but I want to point out that we don’t think a lot about these little hiccups that are real problems for people and these businesses.
Shawn Hammond:
So I can tell you how we’ve also looked at addressing this. I mean this is a problem, right?
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Shawn Hammond:
So we’re going to be … I’ll just announce it here, I’m going to be doing a beta test program for my followers for each product release that we do. So prior to releasing, we want to allow … Get a bit of a database on patients here in Utah that want to be beta testers for us.
Tim Pickett:
For a product.
Shawn Hammond:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tim Pickett:
So you got a new formulation.
Shawn Hammond:
So yeah. I’m going to put this out on my Instagram, and there will be a link where if you want to sign up as a beta tester, go to this link and let us know what your conditions are. There’s a little short questionnaire that you’ll fill out and from there we can see, “Okay, Patient A is taking cannabis in this delivery form for these conditions. I think they would be a good fit to beta test this product.” Right? If you’ve got insomnia, that’s your primary reason for utilizing cannabis, “Okay, well let’s have you beta test our sleep product. Then you can give us your feedback on taste and texture and experience.”
Shawn Hammond:
So the cool thing about being a small little craft brand like this is we’ve got the ability to move and shake and do that type of thing. So we want to get that feedback and we will … If we need to alter our formulas, we can do it based on feedback of patients. Or if we need to create new formulas. So that’s kind of how we’re trying to address it and the idea being, “Okay, you signed up as a beta tester. Go to this pharmacy here and you can go pick up your deeply, deeply discounted product.”
Tim Pickett:
And then your responsibility is to give us feedback on how this worked.
Shawn Hammond:
You give us the feedback and if you don’t give us the feedback, then you’re out of the program.
Tim Pickett:
Then you’re out of the program.
Shawn Hammond:
And you will never beta test for us again.
Tim Pickett:
No, but I think that a lot of people would be very interested to do that, especially in a small market like Utah where they could maybe make a difference on, “Wow, that sleep formulation was really strong. I was a little groggy in the morning when I took this much.” Essentially you could give the pharmacies, you could give QMPs, you could give –
Shawn Hammond:
Here’s data.
Tim Pickett:
The public, right? Here’s a little bit of feedback on –
Shawn Hammond:
That’s kind of the idea. So there are challenges.
Tim Pickett:
We need to do more of that type of stuff. But how do you even source? We talked about this a little bit before. Like how do you even source your material? Because you have to work under a … You have a Tier 2 license? Tier 1?
Shawn Hammond:
We’re working under a Tier 1.
Tim Pickett:
You’re working under a Tier 1. So somebody could come in, so Proper Cannabis can come in, they can work under a Tier 1, make an agreement with the Tier 1 license holder. That’s the one that you’ve got to pay $100,000.00 for the application, right?
Shawn Hammond:
Correct. Then you have to get material.
Tim Pickett:
Well then they have to get the material technically, but it’s you paying for it.
Shawn Hammond:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Right?
Shawn Hammond:
Correct.
Tim Pickett:
But you got to go … How do they do that? Because they’re not … Not all of the processors are growers.
Shawn Hammond:
No, and it’s a challenge. Utah, I mean there are always unintended consequences I think when programs are devised and then administered.
Tim Pickett:
Oh, the QMP program is … Like I totally get it. I totally get it. But from the grower, right? You decided on ten licenses, you ended up issuing eight. You then have an unlimited number of $100,000.00 licenses that can be purchased, right? And there’s been, I don’t know, a handful of those purchased. There’s got to be five, six, don’t you think? At least five or six of those. So now you have 13 to 15 companies who can process, but eight of those can grow.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, so that’s the challenge, if you’re not vertical, when you don’t control the source for the material.
Tim Pickett:
Oh yeah, this is besides the fact that not all of those eight have retail.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Right? There’s only two or three that have … Four.
Shawn Hammond:
Three or four now I think, yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Three or four maybe now.
Shawn Hammond:
So it’s a unique market, but I can tell you the price of raw materials, if you can get it, and for people that don’t know how products are made, when flower is grown, if it’s a high enough quality flower, then it should be sold as flower but then you have a lot of residual material, your trim, which typically in most markets, in most states, that’s what you’re utilizing to create distillate.
Tim Pickett:
And trim is going to be the leaves, not the main –
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, your sugar leaf. No, just the sugar leaf.
Tim Pickett:
Just the sugar leaf, not the fan leaf.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, because you want … Yeah, you don’t want the fan leaves, they don’t have cannabinoids.
Tim Pickett:
Got it.
Shawn Hammond:
But most of the trim here has fan leaves and everything which ultimately reduces your total THC content by weight.
Tim Pickett:
Do you think that’s because … I mean this is kind of an opinion, I don’t know. I mean do you think that over time, the trim will get better, because they’ll learn how to grow it better? Or do you think it’s just kind of a function of the market.
Shawn Hammond:
A lot of is not necessarily function in growing, but in harvesting and processing or … Part of it is growing, because indoor [inaudible 00:37:32] deleafing a lot, you’re pulling off a lot of those big fan leaves that don’t have cannabinoids. Outdoor which is greenhouse, you don’t manicure as much, at least most here because of the size or mass. So they harvest the plant, chop it down, grind it up and there’s your biomass. But in most states, in most markets, trim costs anywhere from $50.00 a pound to $150.00 for good trim. And in here, Utah, it can cost 10x that. So you start … You can buy pounds of good flower in other states cheaper than you can buy trim here to process.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, okay, now … And it’s these types of things that –
Shawn Hammond:
And it requires a certain amount of weight of trim to produce a liter of distillate.
Tim Pickett:
To produce. Yep.
Shawn Hammond:
So maybe one of the unintended consequences that gets slammed down to patients is the fact that if you’re not vertical, you’re buying really expensive trims or distillate to blow down just because it’s the cost of goods sold, all the way up the chain.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Do you feel like … I mean, and even if the legislature looks at a solution to this problem, increasing the number of growers I’m sure would be one solution, allowing –
Shawn Hammond:
I think what they ought to do, I mean here’s something to throw out, kick around, they won’t, but you mentioned they are going to do eight licenses or they were going to do 10 but they issued eight?
Tim Pickett:
But they issued eight.
Shawn Hammond:
Those were 100,000 square foot licenses. Take one of those next licenses, that ninth license. Break it up into 10 or 20 licenses. Little micro grows, little craft grows to allow mom and pop or some other smaller companies to come in and do this.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. And not do it at that big a scale, do it on the craft type thing, right?
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. I mean you don’t need 100,000. Not everyone needs 100,000 square feet. I’d be stoked. Have a 2,500 square foot of canopy growth.
Tim Pickett:
Well I don’t think there is 800,000 square feet of cannabis being grown in Utah now. [inaudible 00:39:51].
Shawn Hammond:
But if it is, it’s mostly going to be outdoor, right?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Of course.
Shawn Hammond:
I mean so just think of the logistics, the economics of it. People, to build out indoor grow, it’s really expensive for a small amount of square footage. So I don’t know. It would open things up for patients, it would allow smaller brands and other brands to come into the market.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, with different motives. It’s a really interesting idea. Definitely won’t go anywhere though [inaudible 00:40:20].
Shawn Hammond:
Definitely won’t go anywhere. [inaudible 00:40:23] first in line to resubmit the same application I did three years ago because I called out all these problems in my application.
Tim Pickett:
About this type of –
Shawn Hammond:
About the program in general.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, program.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
When you try to force certain things, it’s just … And you know, I mean they’ll probably admit it when they’re doing it. I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be willing to admit, like, “Look, we’re going to do the best we can now and we don’t know every single thing that this is going to bring up that’s good and bad, but we think this is a good start and here we go.” Do I think that happened? Sure.
Shawn Hammond:
And I look at it from the state’s point of view. Okay, we have to administer this program. It’s a lot easier for us to administer eight –
Tim Pickett:
Eight people.
Shawn Hammond:
Eight operations than 40. Okay.
Tim Pickett:
In the beginning, definitely was a consideration I’m sure.
Shawn Hammond:
But the unintended consequences are source material costs and 10x what it does in other markets.
Tim Pickett:
In other markets. Yeah, and then that just really translates right to price.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, it has to.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. There’s no way around it. And because the initial cost of the tier licenses too.
Shawn Hammond:
Oh you’ve got processors that all spent millions of dollars, buying the license, getting the equipment to process and then unless they were awarded a cultivation license, now their probably main job is trying to source material.
Tim Pickett:
Yep. Yeah, well we’ve talked to them too, and it is the hardest … I guess it’s the most consistent problem you have in Utah right now as a processor which is getting source material. I mean maybe even Dragonfly and Wholesome would say the same thing. Their main problem is getting source material because they can’t grow it fast enough.
Shawn Hammond:
I don’t know, I think Dragonfly grew almost 50,000 pounds last year. That’s a lot of weight.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, and I went up to … I did visit [inaudible 00:42:28] Northern Utah, and I don’t know if I have permission to say the name of where I went, but there was 50,000 pounds of flower up there, getting ready to be turned into distillate. So they are definitely growing a lot of –
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, but they can turn their own flower and their own trim into distillate, right?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, they were doing that right there in the room.
Shawn Hammond:
So that’s the advantage. And if I, again, if I was the state, I would probably … If I was going to open up cultivation, I’d probably open it up to Tier 1 processors first so they could provide their own source. I mean that doesn’t help me because I don’t have a Tier 1 processor.
Tim Pickett:
Sure. That’s like –
Shawn Hammond:
But I mean for fairness for the market to really kind of help. But it’ll –
Tim Pickett:
Sure. They would be the quickest to market anyway.
Shawn Hammond:
I suppose it will balance out. Free markets generally do, right?
Tim Pickett:
So did this … Back to talking about work. Does this take a lot more time than it was growing? Or was it just a –
Shawn Hammond:
It was really busy initially, getting things.
Tim Pickett:
You were down there all the time.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. I mean when you’re doing managing and build-out in a couple of different locations.
Tim Pickett:
I mean I remember we were … This was back before COVID times.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. And then COVID happened.
Tim Pickett:
When we were lifting weights and you were never there at the end because you were always driving all over the valley to build the grow-out.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. So I wouldn’t say I’m more busy. I’m just busy doing different things.
Tim Pickett:
When was the last time you picked up a bar bell?
Shawn Hammond:
Two months ago probably.
Tim Pickett:
And just to move it back on the rack or what?
Shawn Hammond:
That was pretty impressive. I don’t know, my daughter posted [inaudible 00:44:16] workout.
Tim Pickett:
Your daughter posts some crazy workouts. She’s lifting her brains out.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, she’s getting really, really strong. Yeah, she’s … She’s a competitive weightlifting athlete. She’s strong. Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. You’ve got Chloe … Chloe’s always like, “I’ve got to get as strong as Mia.”
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, she just … We do Olympic weightlifting, so people probably wouldn’t relate to that, but my little 120-pound daughter just deadlifted 285, her max I think [inaudible 00:44:49]. That’s pretty good for a little girl.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Right? Yeah. Olympic weightlifting. I have been so struggling, trying to get some consistency, right? I can do three days in a week and then it’s two weeks before I –
Shawn Hammond:
Well and I shut down my gym so now I don’t have a place to go as easy.
Tim Pickett:
It’s harder to go when you don’t have other people to go see. Even though the social aspect of the gym I feel like is made up by the lifter. Like if you go to the gym, tell me if I’m wrong. You go to the gym at the same time every day because you’ve got these people that you get to know at the gym. Whether it’s CrossFit or EOS, wherever you go.
Shawn Hammond:
Oh yeah. Sure.
Tim Pickett:
The Olympic gym. And you think, you get this in your subconscious mind, that they, they expect you to come, right? That they’re rooting for you.
Shawn Hammond:
There’s accountability, right?
Tim Pickett:
There’s accountability. But that is legit made-up, right? These people, they do care.
Shawn Hammond:
They don’t care.
Tim Pickett:
But that’s not the reason why they’re going.
Shawn Hammond:
Now your coach would care.
Tim Pickett:
They’re going because they think you care.
Shawn Hammond:
Right. If you got a coach and he’s sitting there waiting for you at the gym –
Tim Pickett:
Oh now, that is … Yes, you’ve added a whole nother layer to Olympic lifting specifically too. Don’t get as much done without a coach in Olympic lifting.
Shawn Hammond:
Yep.
Tim Pickett:
So those of you out there who want to try a new sport, Olympic lifting, Shawn Hammond and Tim Pickett, our vote is you give it a try.
Shawn Hammond:
Do it.
Tim Pickett:
Do it.
Shawn Hammond:
Do it.
Tim Pickett:
No matter how old you are.
Shawn Hammond:
Oh, it’s great for mobility and strength and all of that. Especially for dudes our age. Even though you’re a lot younger than me, I can’t say our age.
Tim Pickett:
Our age.
Shawn Hammond:
Okay. My age.
Tim Pickett:
It’s fine, it’s fine. I feel so old. I mean I started wearing readers. Okay, what’s your favorite strain? We can wrap this up. What’s your favorite strain right now? And I think you might have to say what your favorite strain … What’s your favorite Utah strain.
Shawn Hammond:
Well, I don’t know. So I’ve been traveling and doing some work with some breeder friends and in doing that I’ve got to test a lot of new flavors that aren’t out anywhere yet. So my favorite strain right now is [inaudible 00:47:16] from Umami. That’s fire, that’s got some old school grape terps, with some kind of creamy gas along with it. So yeah. I’ve been helping do some [inaudible 00:47:34] hunting and testing and tasting outside of Utah.
Tim Pickett:
Right? Because that’s where it has to be done. But fun. That just sounds like fun.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, yeah. And I’d love to be able to grow some flower here in Utah again some time. We’ll see if that happens or not, but if we do, man, we are going to have some incredible flavors. Absolutely proprietary, proper flower that won’t be anyone else.
Tim Pickett:
Always, we can always look forward to it.
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s exciting. But like I said, I’m excited just to be back in the Utah market, getting our brand launched. It’s been a dream, we’ve been working on this. We came from the cannabis space, we developed our processes and companies and products in the hemp space but we really wanted to get back into our original love which is cannabis and launching the brand, Proper Cannabis Co. here in the state, so …
Tim Pickett:
Where is it located on social? Do you just want people to hook up with you on, with your social handle?
Shawn Hammond:
Yeah, let’s see. So I’m properpharmer.
Tim Pickett:
Properpharmer.
Shawn Hammond:
P-R-O-P-E-R-P-H-A-R-M-E-R. So properpharmer and I’ll be making some announcements and some posts and getting back active on Instagram. I haven’t been active for –
Tim Pickett:
A little while?
Shawn Hammond:
Six months or so.
Tim Pickett:
Right? But it’s time.
Shawn Hammond:
It’s time. I’ve just had my head down working, grinding, trying to get things ready to go. Now they’re ready to go in 2022, we get to go pop off, man. Excited.
Tim Pickett:
All right. Well Happy New Year. It was good talking to you.
Shawn Hammond:
Happy New Year. Good to see you again, Tim.
Tim Pickett:
Stay safe out there.
Shawn Hammond:
Peace.
Episode 83 of Utah In the Weeds features some of our favorite moments from 2021. In this episode, you’ll hear from a variety of patients, industry professionals, legislators, and others with a hand in the cannabis jar.
Valerie Blaylock, who uses Medical Cannabis for MS and other health conditions, engages in a discussion with us about the dry herb vaporizers we use. This is just a short piece of a long and interesting discussion about dry herb vapes.
Randyl Nielson, a PTSD patient, sets a good example as someone who takes cannabis medicine seriously and follows the state’s rules for Medical Cannabis patients.
Beverly Astin, the owner of Jilu, talks about destigmatizing cannabis, and helping to educate others about cannabis as a medicine.
Maddie Morrison uses Medical Cannabis for her PTSD and lower back pain. Here, Maddie offers her advice for newcomers to Medical Cannabis.
Toby Larson is a performance psychology expert who also works as a coach for MMA fighters. Here, he talks about how athletes can use cannabis as a performance-enhancing drug.
UT THC’s Adam Toller talks about his decision to start using cannabis for his own pain management, his first experience with the drug, and how his use of cannabis has made him a better QMP.
Former State Representative Brad Daw talks about some of the legislature’s resistance to raw flower, and what made him change his mind about it.
Medical Cannabis patient Amber Franke talks about her realization that cannabis is a versatile drug. So here’s why she started using cannabis, and some of the other uses of cannabis that she’s found.
Representative Jennifer Dailey-Provost of the Utah Legislature talks about some of the changes she wants to see in the Medical Cannabis program. These changes include improvements for patients who are terminally ill, and improvements for patients with children.
Riley Meyer, one of the cultivation managers at Deseret Wellness, talks about some of the challenges of maintaining an outdoor cannabis grow operation in Utah.
If you’re new to the podcast, this is a great episode to start with.
We want to thank all of our listeners and guests for helping us spread the word about Medical Cannabis in Utah and beyond.
Tim Pickett:
Welcome, everybody out to Utah in the Weeds. This is episode 83 of Utah in the Weeds. My name is Tim Pickett. I am your host, and here we talk about cannabis and cannabis culture here in Utah where it’s legal medically for 15 medical conditions. I’m a clinician. I see patients as a QMP here in Utah, and have been really excited to do this podcast, share a bunch of information with you, and talk to a lot of people. This episode is a best-of special with 10 highlights from some of our most interesting guests of the year. Hear from a variety of patients, industry professionals, legislators, others with a hand in the cannabis jar. If you haven’t listened to the podcast before, this is a great episode to get used to what we do and who we talk about.
Tim Pickett:
From a housekeeper perspective, remember that as of this year, January 3, 2022, coming up, 90 day cards in Utah are no longer part of the program. The first card will be issued for six months. The second thing to note is our Uplift program. Just a shout out to every partner involved, Deseret Wellness, WholesomeCo, Beehive Farmacy and Zion Medicinal. Just a great partnership there with Uplift. We will be adding at least two more partners, and I’ll announce those in January. We’re going to be able to see at least 15 to 20 patients our first month in January. Those are low income and terminally ill patients. So looking forward to a great 2022 with more access for more people as the legislative session gets underway. And we’ll be keeping you updated on activities and things that are going up going on the Hill.
Tim Pickett:
So let’s get into these clips and this 2021 best-of. The first one is from episode 40, Valerie Blaylock. Valerie uses medical cannabis for MS, other health condition. And we engage in a discussion with her about dry herb vaporizers. And this is just a short piece of a long and interesting discussion about dry herb vapes. Go back and listen to episode 40 if you want to hear it. What’s your favorite dry herb vaporizer?
Chris Holifield:
What are you currently using?
Tim Pickett:
All of them.
Valerie Blaylock:
Yes.
Chris Holifield:
Do you have a lot of them?
Valerie Blaylock:
I do, actually.
Chris Holifield:
That’s awesome.
Valerie Blaylock:
I do.
Chris Holifield:
That’s awesome.
Valerie Blaylock:
Yeah, I actually have two Fireflys, which you just started using a little bit too, Tim, didn’t you?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah, Firefly is super cool. And you are the one who told me that one of the reasons the packs isn’t, I don’t know, there’s a silicone thing in the packs. And so the silicone absorbs the flavor. And then the next round or the next bowl of flower tastes like the old one because of the silicone. I didn’t know that.
Valerie Blaylock:
Yeah. And you know-
Tim Pickett:
I didn’t know that before.
Valerie Blaylock:
It doesn’t bother. I mean, I know people in our clinic even who absolutely love the packs. And to be honest, the packs is really, really good for people who want just something fairly simple, fairly easy. And it’s really pretty easy to clean. There aren’t a whole lot of parts. It’s just pretty simple. I mean, I think honestly, all vaporizers have a place, even the crappy 30, $40 dry herb vaporizers that are going to give you maybe two or three bowls and then maybe go out.
Chris Holifield:
If that.
Valerie Blaylock:
I actually, yeah. I actually encourage people, especially people who have smoked for a really long time. And even some of our older folks, like our older hippy people, that generation, which is not far from me. I’m 52. So I’m not calling anybody out on their age. Just saying. I think that once you get a vaporizer in somebody’s hand and they can actually experience it and realize that man, I’ve been smoking and it’s really harsh. And it’s like when I quit smoking, smoking and went to vaping. And then I would be around smokers and I’d be like, oh my God, I smelled like that all the time? So I think it really is about getting a vaporizer in somebody’s hand and letting them experience that.
Tim Pickett:
I really like this discussion with Valerie, as we talk about really just trying to get a vaporizer in patient’s hands. Because there’s a lot of people who still want to consume cannabis with a lighter and a joint. And personally, I would say more, I think that’s your decision. I don’t know that we should outlaw that. However, from a medical perspective, vaporizers are a healthier. So far the evidence is really that these are much healthier way to consume cannabis when you want to use raw flower. And additionally, once you try it and get used to, for example, the DaVinci vaporizers, they really are easy to use, and they don’t smell near as much like Valerie was saying.
Tim Pickett:
Okay, let’s get into Randyl Nielson. Now, Randyl Nielson’s episode 48. He is a PTSD patient, and I love his photography, by the way. But he really takes his medicine seriously and follows the state’s rules for medical cannabis patients. Let’s take a listen to what he has to say about it.
Chris Holifield:
I mean, no offense. It’s like this is Utah and people don’t know how to use cannabis and or how to even approach it.
Randyl Nielson:
How to even approach it. Yeah. And that’s why for me, I’m not judging anybody for smoking or doing anything that’s not spot on with the law. For me, I try to follow of the law as well as I can to the letter so that I’m promoting it as a medicine and not as somebody just getting high because that’s the big … The big argument from everybody against it was it’s just going to turn into recreational. In my eyes, if you’re posting on Instagram, you doing bong loads with the lighter, that’s smoking it. And you signed a document that said you weren’t going to do that.
Randyl Nielson:
And so I think being on point with it and following those rules and treating it like a medicine. That’s what brought my mom around and made her more understanding about it was saying, “Okay, Mom, here’s the law. This is what I can do. This is what is allowed.” And the fact that I wasn’t smoking it around her and stuff like that, I think it really had an impact and helped her understand a little bit better that people in Utah are trying to treat this as medicine, not just as a subversive way to get recreational weed.
Tim Pickett:
Again, can we call the Department of Health-
Speaker 5:
Just get a job.
Tim Pickett:
… And have you be their spokesperson? I just-
Randyl Nielson:
If they want to pay me, let’s go for it.
Tim Pickett:
A subversive way to get recreational weed. Very well spoken there. And that’s really not what the medical program is designed to do in Utah. And it is not what the medical program is doing in Utah either. I’m here to tell you that patients are using less prescription medication. They’re using less alcohol. 79% of the patients that we see and survey as they come back to renew are using less other medication. And he’s absolutely right. I think taking bong rips on Instagram, I guess it depends on who you are and what you want to represent. Right? That’s why you don’t see it necessarily on our Instagram, things like that. That consumption, because we really want to treat this as a medical product and just another tool in the toolbox from a medical standpoint. Right?
Tim Pickett:
Okay. Now, Beverly. Beverly is one of my favorite people in the industry, and I love her energy. And she’s always at all the events and so friendly, and her products are phenomenal. Beverly Astin is the owner of Jilu. That’s J-I-L-U. And she talks about destigmatizing cannabis in episode 56 and helping educate others about cannabis as a medicine. And her story is interesting because she comes from a place where she didn’t know a lot about cannabis before. She comes from the business side of things. So let’s listen to her.
Beverly Astin:
And I feel like Tim, like you, that people are looking for alternative medicine. They’re looking for something to different than a crappy opioid that makes them feel sick, that makes them feel constipated, that has all these side effects. The yucky feeling and side effects you get from Ambien. And just all of these pharmaceutical drugs that have just been shoved down our throat. People are sick of that. They don’t want it.
Tim Pickett:
It’s twofold too in my opinion. You say shove down people’s throats, which essentially is true. Right? We sit there. We listen to patients talk and complain about their ailment. And then we write a prescription. “Here, take this twice a day, or take this at night or whatever.” And people don’t don’t really have a lot of choice.
Beverly Astin:
They don’t.
Tim Pickett:
At least they didn’t feel like they do. And cannabis does those two things. It gives them the choice to experiment with their own health and to make choices on their own about their medicine and access to things that in the long run could be less harmful [crosstalk 00:10:57] in a lot of ways. And so it’s a fun industry to be a part of. And it’s fun to see the growth of the marketplace, right? Of the patient, growth. It’s fun to hear people’s stories.
Chris Holifield:
Oh, absolutely.
Beverly Astin:
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Beverly Astin:
And what’s exciting to me is too is educating the state of Utah. And I feel I, as a woman, if we educate the women of Utah, we educate Utah. Women usually are the ones going to the doctor, calling for their husbands, for their prescriptions, calling for their kids. And I feel like losing that stigma of just THC or cannabis for getting high. I want that to be gone. Yes, there are people who need it that are suffering miserably with anxiety and depression that that stony effect, they need that to relax and to unwind as well.
Beverly Astin:
But it’s not just for everyone. Everyone doesn’t like that stony feeling. And so if we can offer both, that’s great. But I think if we can lose that stigma of cannabis just being around for people to get high. That’s not the only purpose for cannabis. And so I feel like women’s job in Utah will really be to let’s take, let’s back up three steps here and look about the history of cannabis. It’s our oldest medicine on the planet, and it was demonized mid-century 50, 60 years ago. And now we have to retrain people on a different way to approach cannabis as a healing drug, instead of just a get stoned [crosstalk 00:12:52].
Chris Holifield:
It’s something to buy in the back alley.
Beverly Astin:
That’s right.
Tim Pickett:
Right.
Beverly Astin:
Yeah. And I think we have a … I think we’re doing good though. I think Utah, I see a lot of people putting their feet forward to try to debunk all of that garbage and say, no, this is something that saves people’s lives, whatever you’re using it for.
Tim Pickett:
If we educate the women of Utah, we educate Utah. And yes, Beverly, you’re absolutely spot on there. And I love her energy about, and the passion about getting people off of other nasty prescription medications. I’ve been doing a lot of research on that because we’re expanding our services at Utah Therapeutic. And part of it is 69% of Americans, adult Americans are on at least one prescription. Damn near 70% of people. I mean, we have got to do something about this. Holy cow, we take a lot of medicine.
Tim Pickett:
Okay. So, you know what? Is next is episode, right after Beverly, episode 57. Maddie Morrison came on and talked about PTSD, as well as some low back pain. And she offers her advice to newcomers to medical cannabis. Let’s take a listen to this because this is exactly what we’re talking about, what we were talking about in episode 56 with Beverly. When you started to use this more medically, did you have a plan? Did you figure out the dosing first?
Maddie Morrison :
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Or was it like-
Maddie Morrison :
I just wanted to try a bunch of things, figure out the dosing right away, write it all down and figure out what works for me. So that way I have a solid set routine next year or something. So I want to have this first year. I want to keep experimenting with it because I mean, my body can change. The same things that helped me now could not help me in a year from now. So I think the biggest part of it is just keeping an open mind, trying anything that I can, and just making sure that I keep track of it and keeping an open mind. And then if I do get anxious, then I’m like, okay, that’s not for me. That’s fine. I’ll move on, or I’ll decrease the dosage or whatever the case.
Maddie Morrison :
Or if I’m like, okay. So that tincture helped me feel good for about an hour. But then after that, it made me feel really anxious. So then I know, okay, maybe I’ll decrease it by five milligrams or something. I’m very hyper probably because I’m a very anxious person. I’m very hyper-aware of my body, of things around me, of what I’m hearing, of what I’m tasting. I’m very hyper aware of everything. So whether I’m using cannabis or not, I’m always hyper-aware of how my body is feeling. So I think that definitely helps with my journey because I feel like I’m way more in tune than I used to be or than some people that I know who use cannabis.
Chris Holifield:
What would you tell somebody listening that just started using, and they don’t know where to go, where to look at. They just got their medical card. They maybe been to a pharmacy once or twice, but they’re still really, really new.
Maddie Morrison :
I would say don’t start with edibles because they, I mean, even five milligrams … If you’re starting, start with five or less or two and a half or something. Just start out with a good one to one of CBD THC start low, go slow. That’s the best thing with cannabis. But for me, I’m glad I didn’t start with edibles. I didn’t have an edible until I was 20. So I just smoked flower up until that point. And I feel like that was a good … By the time I had tried edibles, I had a pretty good tolerance with flower that going into edibles was a really easy transition for me.
Chris Holifield:
You had a good idea on how it worked, how it works with your body and so on.
Maddie Morrison :
How it might feel. Exactly. So I had quite a few more years to my cannabis history at that point by the time I tried edibles. So I feel like don’t start with edibles. Maybe start with a one to one tincture or one to 10 tincture, more CBD even. And just start with that. Start with a low amount of THC and just increase from there.
Chris Holifield:
Good advice.
Tim Pickett:
It is great advice.
Maddie Morrison :
Yeah. And even if you want to just, if you want to get high, you want to feel that edible high, I would say don’t go there because that’s not a good mindset to … Don’t consume cannabis with the sole purpose to get high because once you’re there, you could be anxious. You’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, this is too much.” You’ll be very hyper aware of how high you really are.
Tim Pickett:
Yes. You’re hyper aware. Again, you’re over-emphasizing the present and that, it just makes you really aware of how things are going. And edibles, you’re in for a long ride.
Maddie Morrison :
Oh my gosh. They last so long.
Tim Pickett:
They last a long time. Whereas if somebody was, I guess, headed for that, maybe a vape cartridge would be a little bit better choice.
Maddie Morrison :
Vapes are great for like microdosing and-
Tim Pickett:
If you get a little over … Yeah. And if you get a little too much, it’s only going to be an hour or two.
Maddie Morrison :
Yeah, totally. Yeah. I like vapes for that aspect because it’s quick onset. It’s discrete. It’s microdosing throughout the day. You could take one drag off of it and you’re like, okay. All right, I’m good to go again. It’s just like a little sip of coffee or something. I don’t know.
Chris Holifield:
Little get up and go.
Maddie Morrison :
Yeah, exactly.
Tim Pickett:
I like that we’ve been comparing cannabis to coffee today.
Maddie Morrison :
Yeah.
Chris Holifield:
Little stimulant.
Maddie Morrison :
That’s on me. I love coffee.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I mean, there’s two of my favorite things.
Maddie Morrison :
Yeah, same.
Tim Pickett:
They go together.
Chris Holifield:
Coffee and cannabis.
Maddie Morrison :
Coffee and cannabis. Yeah.
Chris Holifield:
Yeah. I’m so glad we got you on the podcast. I’m glad you reached out to come on. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about? Was there anything else you wanted to make sure to discuss or say on the microphones before we wrap this up?
Maddie Morrison :
Totally. Yeah. So I think my biggest advice, and I don’t want to put a heavyweight to advice. Just, I recommend going slow. Experiment, but don’t push yourself too hard. Don’t be too competitive with yourself to the point where like, oh, five milligrams, that’s not enough. And just lower your ego a little bit and have a lower dosage, and you’ll be okay.
Chris Holifield:
Be a cheap date.
Maddie Morrison :
Yeah.
Chris Holifield:
It’s not a bad thing to have a low tolerance.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Don’t be competitive with yourself.
Maddie Morrison :
Yeah.
Tim Pickett:
Don’t get that ego.
Maddie Morrison :
Don’t try to compete with yourself.
Tim Pickett:
Good things to tell. Good things to tell people, Especially here. There’s a lot of people who are trying this for the first time, and I mean it’s really, it’s opening up, like talked about. Not everybody loves it, but there are certainly more people who want to try it than ever.
Maddie Morrison :
Absolutely. And also just have conversations with people. It’s a heavy topic. I totally get that, but just, I think it’s good to have these conversations with people and just be like, “Hey, what is your stance on cannabis?” Or, I don’t know. Just start a conversation with somebody and pick their brain.
Tim Pickett:
Maddie is so knowledgeable about her cannabis use and so aware, self-aware of what’s happening with her. And it really only comes from a real dedication to cannabis with intention. And that’s what I really liked about Maddie’s episode and talking to Mattie. And listening back over to that episode makes me really think, oh yeah, you know what? It really does get to be that way where you’re using it. Don’t use it just to get high. Just use it with intention. Right after that, there was another great episode with Toby Larson. And this is episode 59. So Toby Larson is a performance psychology expert who also works as an MMA coach and an adult athletic coach. And he talks about how athletes are using cannabis as a performance-enhancing drug. And this is right around, remember the whole Olympic trials and all of that sort of thing? I remember talking all about that as cannabis, is cannabis a performance-enhancing drug? Let’s listen to some of that with Toby.
Tim Pickett:
This is something I’m really into. And I haven’t talked a lot about it on the podcast, but I’m into physical training and performance, especially adult athlete type stuff I think is super healthy for people. Very, very motivating. Lots of things happen in the brain, the metabolism to make people better when they’re exercising. And one of the things that is for sure, anti-aging. Right? We want our lives to be a square. We want to go right up until the end and then just die. But in order to do that, you have to be mobile, right? You have to stay mobile. How does cannabis fit into that piece then?
Toby Larson:
Multiple ways. And in fascinating ways I’ve found. So obviously just the basic effect of pain relief at night is massive. Being able to get to sleep and stay asleep is huge for anybody doing anything performance related. That I think is generally accepted and thought of as a common effect that we’re going to see. But then if we start thinking about some of the psychotropic effects.
Toby Larson:
Marijuana decreases anxiety. That’s super excellent from a performance standpoint. Not only from a I’m actually competing today, maybe in a golf tournament and I don’t want to shank my putt. Probably will help you there. Most of the PGA tour players are on beta blockers. That’s why they putt better than you or I do. They never feel their palm sweaty during a tournament. Beta blockers help you do that. Cannabis has a similar effect, maybe not as strong as beta blockers and maybe better in a long term situation than beta blockers, especially for a performance purpose.
Tim Pickett:
Interesting. I didn’t know that about golfers. But it makes sense that you would want to manipulate. I mean, this is how you make your living. So you’re going to do everything you can to manipulate your physiology to maximize your performance. I know looking at okay, so switch gears to long distance athletics. Right? So I ran for a while, and I’ll be honest with you. I mean, cannabis, medical marijuana, whatever you want to call it, it is a super drug when it comes to long distance running really or long distance biking. Well, you think about it.
Tim Pickett:
In fact, I’ve heard and never read that they’re trying to eliminate it from these 100-mile races because you can focus. Your perception of time is diminished, right? Here I got to go run five hours and it doesn’t bother me because I don’t know what time it is, and I get dry mouth. So I stay hydrated and hungry the whole time. And these are things that you need, is the golden egg for long distance performance enhancing.
Chris Holifield:
Wouldn’t it wear off though after the first hour though?
Tim Pickett:
Well, just take a little more.
Chris Holifield:
Yeah, that’s true. Just take it. Bring it along with you.
Toby Larson:
I’d say the other thing. Once you get your brain really going in that, marching in that direction, it’s easier to keep it going that way. The effects can wear off. And I can be in the middle of a long distance mountain bike ride going up just continuously pounding up hills, but I’ve already taught myself to have my brain in that mindset for the first hour, whatever it is. It’s easier to stay there. It’s getting to there that’s very difficult for a lot of people. If we think about obesity and sedentary lifestyle epidemics going on in the U.S. right now, the hardest aspect in exercise psychology is getting somebody to actually take that first step out the door, not getting them to run once they’re out the door. It’s just getting the shoes on and exiting the house. That’s the biggest barrier to exercise for most people.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. The barrier to exercise is just getting out the door. And that episode, I was so jazzed up to talk about performance enhancement with cannabis and the athletic discussion. And man, I need that episode right now, right? Because here it is the new year. I haven’t been exercising like I wanted. It’s such an important part of my life and yada yada yada. I’m sure that some of you can relate as we go into 2022, and we get going with these new year’s resolutions, right? These new year’s systems. So get up, get out there, get active. Okay. So we moving on to episode 68 and Adam Toller. He’s a great friend of mine and a really great QMP here in Utah. An advocate for the program, an advocate for patients and works with us at Utah Therapeutic. He talks about his decision to start use cannabis for his own pain management and his first experience with the drug and how his use of cannabis has made him a better clinician, especially with regard to the medical cannabis program and helping patients. Let’s give a listen to Adam.
Adam Toller:
When patients would ask me, “Well, have you taken it before?” I’d tell them no, but I’ve written plenty of prescriptions for GI medications. I know exactly what they do, and I don’t take them. And so that was my insight to it was. I know enough about it. And so I don’t need to take it just to have that experience. That was my approach to it. But I’m so glad that I actually got on cannabis. Not only because it helped my pain, but because I can understand a lot more where the patients are coming from, especially when you’re trying to avoid those negative highs where you start to have the world cave in on you and you get a bad panic attack.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. So you feel like, because I’ve always preached this, and it’s hard to say out loud in the medical community a lot. But there’s something about somebody who I understands the use and what’s happening in the brain from an experience standpoint to explaining it. Now you’re like, “Oh yes, I can totally explain this in a way that I understand a little bit better.” You feel like that’s the case?
Adam Toller:
Absolutely. I feel like not only can you explain it better, but you can empathize with people a lot more, and understand where they’re coming from. And I think that’s one of the most basic human connections that you can have with somebody is just that empathy. And so I feel like I can connect better with patients now, now that I’ve actually gotten on cannabis.
Chris Holifield:
Did you mention how did you … did you vape it or edible or what was the first … Let’s talk about time.
Adam Toller:
First time? First time was a vape. I remember doing the vape and going, “Oh my gosh, what did I just do?” That was my first initial reaction. I remember going downstairs, sitting on the couch and suddenly it just hit me like a ton of bricks. Just came in super strong, super fast. And I remember turning towards my wife and my eyes were wide and my mouth was a bit open. And I’m like, “Is it supposed to feel tingly?” And then all of a sudden I just started, my body got heavy and I started melting into the couch and I was just laughing, just started laughing uncontrollably. I don’t know how much I took. I don’t think I even took that much, but man, it definitely knocked me down pretty good when I very first took it.
Chris Holifield:
That’s awesome.
Adam Toller:
Yeah. Luckily I avoided any panic attack or anything like that. I didn’t get to that point. But oh man, I just laughed and giggled the whole hour that I felt it. And then it starts slowing down and got out of it. But when I came out of it, I was like, what just happened? Oh my gosh. It felt like a dream. And I’d never had that sensation before, being conscious and having everything feel like a dream or the time warp. Feeling like I’m just going to be in this present moment forever. I remember going to the bathroom and sitting there on the toilet thinking, am I ever going to get out of here? Am I ever going to get off the pot? Just going, oh my gosh. It was crazy. But again, good experience to be able to empathize with patients, and I can see why they want to avoid that.
Chris Holifield:
It’s important to share the stories so listeners that haven’t tried yet. They’re they’re like, “Oh, what’s that first experience going to be like?” But you’re a perfect example, Adam. I mean, even when you don’t know what to expect, you’re still smiling and you’re just chilling and relaxed and happy.
Adam Toller:
Yeah.
Chris Holifield:
It’s not like it’s painful or …
Adam Toller:
No, it wasn’t painful at all. Not at all.
Tim Pickett:
No. And you’ve got, but you’ve also got somebody around you who, who cares about you, who kind of … you’re being honest and open about it with and I feel like that is probably some, if not most, of the paranoia and the anxiety coming from, oh my gosh, I’m not supposed to be doing this. Where at least you didn’t have that. And that kind of allows you to flow through the experience a little better.
Toby Larson:
Yeah. I definitely appreciated my wife being there for me. I remember apologizing a million times to her, but she just kept saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” Reassuring me. But yeah, that kind of support and coming from someone who loves me and who supports me in everything, that was a really big help. And I would say that if you’re trying it for the first time, have someone there. Someone that you trust and who can talk you through and help you just in case.
Tim Pickett:
I personally think that that lack of connection is one of the big causes in the decline of primary healthcare in the United States. And as we’ve gone towards a more prescription based medical society over the decades, and Big Pharma has been really active in medicine. I think that connection to patients has been lost in some ways and has been brought back in cases like Adam, where he’s a very, very empathetic provider, a sympathetic provider, and does a great job with patients.
Tim Pickett:
Former State Representative Brad Daw was on episode 71. And he talked about some of the legislature’s resistance to raw flower being allowed in Utah. And he talks specifically about what made him change his mind about it here. So what does the legislature have against the flower? Is it really just because … the argument I’ve heard that and that I tell my patients, frankly, because we’re a no flame state in the THC side is there’s a lot of lung damage that you’re avoiding by not using a flame. But is that the only argument that’s that was happening at the time? I mean, is it this image to, this image of raw bud?
Brad Daw:
It’s depends who you talk to. Law enforcement doesn’t like it because there’s no way to properly distinguish between legal and illegal marijuana. Right? I mean, that’s a problem for them. And people say, “Well, I can put in a container. Yeah. I can go buy a container and put my bud in it.” So that’s a problem for them. You can dispute whether marijuana should be illegal or not. But for law enforcement, since it’s still illegal, they have a concern with that. There is the notion that raw bud is just a little bit easier to abuse. I mean, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it seems at least to be more related to what you do recreationally, and it feels a little less like a medicine. So it’s kind of an image thing about it.
Brad Daw:
Now, I was concerned about it because it seemed you got real problems with dosing and accuracy. I mean, especially me as a novice, you take raw bud from two different pins and one of them makes you higher than a kite, and the other one makes you drowsy. And dosing a little bit tricky. Now, maybe it’s not. But I’ve talked to Ed Redd. He says, “Well, the fact is you take raw bud, and you measure pretty carefully and you know what you’re getting to begin with and you vape it right. You got a pretty accurate dosing.”
Brad Daw:
I’m a little less leery of raw bud. And really for me, the only angst I have left about it is it’s too, it’s kissing cousin to illegal use of cannabis. It was just kind of the same thing where we sell morphine. We don’t sell heroin. We sell morphine and pills and shots and that sort thing. We don’t sell the black tar that you heat with a spoon and then mainline. I mean, you know what I’m saying?
Tim Pickett:
Yeah.
Brad Daw:
It’s the concept of if it’s medicinal, let’s create genuinely medicinal forms. So if raw bud is a medicinal form, so be it.
Tim Pickett:
Got it. And it’s kind of heartening, frankly, to hear you say things that I would anticipate. I would hope that the legislature understands. I like that Brad Daw goes into the legislature and the thinking behind some of these processes. As somebody who’s involved in cannabis, I don’t see vaporizing or the smell. It’s become de-stigmatized to me. But there’s still that stigma surrounding smoking cannabis, smoking weed and the illegal, the recreational market, which Utah did not want to do, to get any closer to than they … They wanted to stay as far away from that as they could.
Tim Pickett:
Let’s move on to another representative, and we’re going to skip here one. Skip an episode that we’re going to go back to. But in episode 73, Representative Jennifer Dailey-Provost of the Utah legislature talks about some of the changes that she wants to see in the medical cannabis program. And these changes is include some improvements for patients who are terminally ill and improvements for patients with children and protections and stuff like that. This was a great episode. Let’s give it a listen. Do you feel like Utah’s medical cannabis program is one of the better programs that you’ve seen?
Jennifer Dailey-Provost :
I guess it depends on how you define better. I think it’s better than what we used to have, which was nothing. And going back to what you were saying about unscrupulous people taking advantage of desperate patients and stealing from them and tricking them. This was one of the main reasons we needed to have a medical cannabis program to start with. Because prior to that bill, that was what was happening. People were, patients were trying to get access to cannabis and they were meeting, getting money, hundreds, thousands of dollars stolen from them in parking lots. They were just hopeful that they might find somebody who could provide them with access to something that would help them with legitimate health concerns. Knowing that it was illegal, knowing that they had to break the law to do it and having no recourse when somebody stole something from them. And so the fact that this is still happening in the construct of our legal cannabis, medical cannabis program is deeply concerning. And it just tells me that we’ve still got a lot of work to do.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I agree. What else are you working on?
Jennifer Dailey-Provost :
So I’ve of course got a medical cannabis bill file open. And one of the things that has come to my attention that I really hope we can focus on is to eliminate situations where in custodial issues, parental custodial issues, that a patient who has a medical cannabis card who is legally using medical cannabis, the other parent cannot use that cannabis use as a reason to limit access to their children. I’ve heard some really harrowing stories of a father who has a significant pain problem, well controlled on medical cannabis. But his ex-wife insists that he have a clean drug screen before he can have unsupervised visitation with his own kids.
Jennifer Dailey-Provost :
It shouldn’t be that way. If he is under the care of a physician and receiving a medication. If he was on massive doses of opioids, she wouldn’t be able to do that. And I would like to see an end to that. So that’s really one of my priorities right now is to make sure that people can’t weaponize prescribed cannabis against other people, especially in custody and child and divorce cases.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. I have a personal relationship with that type of case as well, and could not agree more.
Jennifer Dailey-Provost :
It’s a travesty.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. That we’ve got to figure out ways to educate those people because like you say, you could have your Percocet bottle, your benzos all over, and that’s totally fine. You have a jar of cannabis flower on the table and now everything just changed is based on what? I feel like we [crosstalk 00:40:00].
Jennifer Dailey-Provost :
It’s nonsensical.
Tim Pickett:
Yeah. Do you feel like you’re going to get pushback from that?
Jennifer Dailey-Provost :
Probably.
Tim Pickett:
Do you get pushback from everything just because of the [crosstalk 00:40:07].
Brad Daw:
Pushback on everything just because the D, yeah.
Tim Pickett:
You’re like, oh, you have a D.
Brad Daw:
It’s pretty rare that … Yeah. I have a D by my name. I admittedly I run some, I run legislation that really pushes the envelope. Like I said, I feel like representing the district that I do, I think I have an obligation to run legislation that really takes people out of their comfort zone, that looks at really new policy areas. I run legislation that I willingly inherited from Representative Chavez-Hauck and that is end of life prescription options for terminally ill patients. This is the policy that I really believe in and runs up against a brick wall. But if we don’t run these bills, if we don’t have these conversations, we’re never going to get there. And so I think that this custody issue with regard to medical cannabis is definitely going to be a heavy lift. But in a state that claims to be family friendly, if we’re putting up barriers to parents who want to see their kids, the problem that we have in society is deadbeat parents, not parents who finally have found pain control through medical cannabis and are legally using it, losing access to their children.
Brad Daw:
I am divorced and remarried and I have two kids with my first husband. And it is critical to me that my kids have a healthy relationship with their dad. And that everybody doesn’t feel that way. And this is me getting up on my soapbox and my trying to … I’m not trying to assert any moral authority, but the last thing that we need right now is for parents who want to be in their kids lives, have to put their kids through the trauma of weird supervised visits. And it just doesn’t need to be that way. And so I’m hoping that we can really push the narrative that, that this kind of policy is one of the most family friendly things that we can do. That this will absolutely lead to better outcomes for children in our state.
Tim Pickett:
I agree 100%. Cannabis use should not affect your access to your children, especially in custodial issues. And I was involved in … We’ve been asked to get involved from time to time in these legal battles. And it is just so hard to see somebody have to go back on Percocet because a judge says, “You can’t use cannabis if you want to see your kids.” So great episode there. And now let’s jump back to episode 72, because episode 72 is Amber Franke.
Tim Pickett:
Now, I did mention at the beginning of this episode that the audio was terrible, which was true, but her story was so great. Her story is so great. And her realization that cannabis really is a versatile drug. And here’s why she started using cannabis. And some of the other uses of cannabis that she’s found. Episode 72, if you want to go back and listen to this one with Amber Franke.
Amber Franke:
For me, I was taking … the reason I started taking it because I was going to, I was coming off my SSR. I was coming off my anxiety medication. So whatever the outcome of that looked like for me, I was going to [inaudible 00:43:40]. The main reason I tried it … what I told myself, okay, I’m going to allow myself to try it for this specific reason to see if it helps. The excuse that I gave myself was my TMJ because I was breaking two teeth a year and having to call the dentist and go in for an emergency dental visit when my teeth are splintering, my molars are splinting, clenching my teeth [inaudible 00:44:05]. So for me, it was like, I’ll just use it at night. I’ll just use it for sleep. And if I break a tooth and I have it for pain. So that’s why I qualified under. That’s how I got my medical card.
Amber Franke:
And it wasn’t until I started to experiment, because I tried the flower. I tried the capsules. I tried the tinctures. I tried the stuff you rub on your jaw, the balms. I try out the vape, I tried all of it. And that’s when I noticed, holy shit, this is actually helping my anxiety. I wonder would happen if I use it during a panic attack. And so I would try it that way. And I think that’s when I was like, oh my God. This isn’t just a party drug. Just actually … and there’s so uses. There’s so many different things that this is helping with.
Tim Pickett:
Amber Franke and the cascading effect of cannabis. Once you start feeling better, and I’m not going to give credit to all the credit, to the cannabis in that story, because I think once Amber started feeling better, it was really just a cascade of things that started to improve medically. I just love that episode and her story.
Tim Pickett:
Shifting gears a little bit to episode 78, Riley Meyer and a recent episode here. And Riley Meyer is one of the cultivation managers at an outdoor grow for Standard Wellness. So he talks about some of the challenges of maintaining an outdoor cannabis grow operation in Utah and his opinion about the program. And we really dig in to the growing cannabis outdoor. And then his product dropped here locally, Standard Wellness’ flower dropped, and we have a review coming out about those strains, those three strains, what type of effects they have, the quality of the flower, that type of thing. Stay tuned for that. So let’s listen a little bit of this discussion that I had with Riley Meyer. Okay. Yeah. This gets into outdoor indoor. What’s the difference really? Other than the plants grow outdoor. Do you grow different strains? Is the process different?
Riley Meyer:
Yeah. 100%. You’re at the mercy of mother nature obviously when you’re outdoors. So whatever she presents to you is the quality that you’re going to get out of that plant. But you can still get really high quality flower out of outdoor just as you can indoor. It just depends on your location. Utah I truly believe is an amazing place for outdoor cannabis. We obviously have a short growth season here. So it comes down to the strains cultivars that you pick because they have to be early finishers. Right? If you want to beat that frost, then they have to be done before fall comes rolling in and freezes your whole crop. But yes.
Tim Pickett:
So an outdoor, are you … I mean, is it like growing tomatoes? You got to wait until the frost, the frost risk is gone or do you start these plants indoor and then move them? What’s-
Riley Meyer:
Yeah. It all depends on how you want to go about it, but at Standard for our first year, last year, we germinated early. So what we did, we got a late start, because it ended up being a little bit of a hail Mary for us this last season. Future seasons are going to be a lot more dialed, but this last season we propagated or germinated, I should say in early April, somewhere in that first week of April. And they had all that time inside before we threw them outside and leveled them up pot size to pot size. We started in a red solo once they were popped. Red solo cup, that is to one gallon to five gallon. And they ended up in big 45 gallon pots. And that first day to you can put them out is usually around May 20th that they’re good. The temperature’s consistent enough to let them hang out overnight.
Tim Pickett:
Right. It’s always like when you plant your home garden, you got to wait till Mother’s Day, then you can plant. And in Utah that seems like that’s about right. Mid-May and then you’re away from that frost risk.
Riley Meyer:
Right.
Tim Pickett:
You just throw a bunch of weed out in the field, all these plants. They’re all out there. What’s the fence? What’s the security situation like where you guys grow?
Riley Meyer:
Yeah. So we’re totally, we’re enclosed. We’re dialed. Our security’s awesome. So don’t be trying to come.
Tim Pickett:
So it’s like fences. The only other one I’ve seen and I haven’t been to your facility, but there’s fences up. There’s barb wire at the top of the fence. It seems like it’s pretty secure, but still, I mean, I guess somebody could break through the fence or something. But are you in a pretty remote area? We won’t discuss where exactly these places are really because even though I don’t think a lot of people would go there, might as well not. Might as well not tell the people. I mean almost out of respect for the neighbors.
Riley Meyer:
Right. Yeah. Right.
Tim Pickett:
People driving by, trying to figure out what’s going on.
Riley Meyer:
We’re definitely out in the boonies, man. Yeah. I will say we’re northern Utah, but we’re out there. Good luck trying to find us, man. But yeah. As far as concern for people breaking in, I mean, there’s always that concern, but those people I feel like wouldn’t know. If they’re trying to come in and clip a bud off or something, there’s a whole process that goes into getting that final product off of the plant. You got to cure it. You got to dry it. You got to cure it. That takes a while. That’s in itself two weeks dry and usually in two weeks curing before it’s a final product. So it’s not a huge concern, but yeah, we’re definitely, we’re aware that that could potentially happen.
Tim Pickett:
I love that conversation, and I like growing tomatoes in my own home garden. And I know that I could get really into growing cannabis plants in my yard and hopefully one day we will be able to as things progress here in Utah. That does it for the recap, the best-of 2021 and some of the interviews and stories and discussions, conversations that we had here right here in Utah. Make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast. Utah in the Weeds on any podcast player that you want to listen on and subscribe on YouTube. You can listen to this podcast on YouTube on the channel. It’s called Discover Marijuana and subscribe there.
Tim Pickett:
I’m Tim Pickett. Thanks for an amazing year. Thanks for all of the patience and the stories and the people who came on the podcast, the guests. Could not obviously do it without you. And we learned so much here in Utah from hearing your stories and listening to these discussions. I think it’s so important for our state and region to be having these discussions. Special thanks to David Wells, who helps with the production of Utah in the Weeds. I certainly could not do this without him. And Nate Brown, our audio engineer, who does all of our audio editing. You can find him at rocketskatesrecording.com. Well, everybody, 2021 is gone, and let’s bring in 2022. You know what I’m going to say. Stay safe out there.
