Advocacy and Unity in the Cannabis Industry

0:02SpeakerHey everybody, welcome to Hash Church, episode 94. We are here at the Vancouver Hemp and Cannabis Conference. We're going to put you over to our introduction here. Boom. Ladies and gentlemen, we're about to... Episode 94. Oh, shit. You're at the Cannabis Conference. At least we know it works. We're going to put you over to our intro. There's a delay on a live feed, yep. We're about to take you to church, as I said.

0:30SpeakerLadies and gentlemen, northwest corner of the auditorium, convention center, conference room, Bayshore, banquet room. If you've logged on to YouTube at 9 o'clock in the morning on Sundays over the last two years, you'll undoubtedly find yourself glued to the screen for three to four hours of hash church on the Bubble Man's world channel, just like hundreds of other hash connoisseurs and enthusiasts. Bubble Man, a.k.a. Marcus Richardson, creator and owner Thank you so much for joining us.

1:17SpeakerAsh Church, this one could be especially epic considering all the people who are in the building today. Ladies and gentlemen, I know you're going to enjoy this. Please welcome to Canada's Hampton Conference demo stage, Marcus Richardson, bubble man for Ash Church number 94. All right, all right. Have a great show, Bob. Yes, thank you so much. All right, I'm here with my good friend Joel Poderski. He is the co-founder of Craft Cannabis Association of British Columbia.

1:46SpeakerI hope that you guys can all hear me before we get Joel to talk. I just want to do a little confirmation that all the links are working and that you guys are able to hear us. Let's confirm, can you guys hear us okay? Are we listening? Yes, good, wonderful. Well, welcome, Joel.

2:03JoelIt's a pleasure to be here.

2:04SpeakerYeah, nice to have you on Hash Church. There's Todd McCormick just came into the room. We got Wood Thrush in the room. We're definitely going to talk a little bit about PTSD today as well. Todd's going to talk a little bit about Chalice. Hemp Guy is in the room. Always appreciated to see Mr. Skunk Man Sam in the room. We're going to pass it over to Joel and we're going to have Joel discuss a little bit about what he was discussing yesterday on stage with a really wonderful panel.

2:28SpeakerIt was sort of MMAR as well as MMPR, a combination of both, and I'll pass it over to Joel. Thank you, Mark. I really appreciate it. So yesterday we did a little bit of a talk, a little bit of a panel here at the conference about small medium-sized producers, LPs, the dynamics of that whole world. And I was fortunate enough to get up on stage with someone who is here representing an LP, Medigreen to be precise, and have him...

3:00SpeakerLiterally stand arm in arm, sharing a mic, delivering exactly the same message to the crowd. And I think that's really important. You know, the one message that we wanted to convey yesterday was that all of the other Jedi Knights in and around this world right now that are like Cannabis, Cannabis Association of British Columbia, CGC, CTAC, and all the other ones out there, as well as our brothers and sisters in the LP world who feel the same way about the coming oligopoly as we do.

3:35SpeakerAnd that's a very, very important point. There are people out there that are like that. These conversations can happen. It's very important that they happen. And it's basically just a call to everybody and anybody who feels this way, who does not want to see oligopoly, doesn't matter what their position is in the industry. Who wants... Go ahead. Who want communities not to be harmed by centralization of the industry going forward after legalization.

4:03SpeakerWho do not want a dishonest approach in regulation and statute development to find each other, come together, and really see each other as brothers and sisters and put aside people, put aside professional differences, put aside all kinds of squabbling that's going on so that we can really Thanks. What we want to affect. We get what we want to get because we can have it. We're entitled. Absolutely.

4:30SpeakerIt's nice to see the MMAR and the MMPR kind of working together rather than what has naturally occurred, which is Health Canada played both sides against one another. LPs and MMAR felt like they were on different sides of the fence. But as we slowly tear the fence down, we understand that we're on the same side. We need to work together. It's about more access, not limited access.

4:56SpeakerAnd it's about letting the majority of the people who have been involved in this industry for the last 40 plus years to at least get a chance to be involved in the industry. That's exactly it, Mark. It's about being human. It's not about artificial provision lines. It's not about being the CEO of a large corporation or just an outdoor grower. And everybody has a role to play.

5:20SpeakerEverybody just needs to follow their heart and move forward in unity and stop the swaddling, stop the infighting. And there may be forces out there that want to try to, you know, usurp those who have been operating this industry for decades and quite simply have the right to continue to do so. And not just the right to continue to do so for themselves, but with all of the...

5:45SpeakerSorry, the mic's no good, so just talking about that. With all the... With all the benefits that are reached by local communities and by the tens of thousands, potentially more than 100,000 people here in British Columbia alone, who work in this industry and who break no other law in their lives except that they work in this industry in some capacity. And that is something that the government needs to acknowledge, that the small number of corporations that are cooperating with the policy of oligarchy, which we acknowledge as well, And if we come together and let them know with a unified voice that that is in fact what we want, then we're not just a bunch of lobbyists in one room with a whole bunch of other lobbyists.

6:27SpeakerWe're constituents. We're the constituents that are voting for these people that are on the local level, the provincial level, the federal level, are saying, we don't want this. If we write letters, make phone calls to your municipal representatives, your provincial representatives, your federal representatives, Then we have a tidal wave of people that are just saying, we don't want this. I think the one thing that I would add as I'm reading the chat room as you're talking is, you know, it doesn't serve any purpose, Pangea, to say things like fuck Tweed or fuck Tilray.

7:04SpeakerThese are just large companies trying to sell cannabis to patients. I think if you have a focus, it's better to focus on the positive. These companies are giving access to patients. So great, let them do that. In the meantime, the rest of us should focus on what we want to get done, not what we want to see not get done, if that makes any sense. We need to understand that.

7:28SpeakerThe division is what's keeping us from moving forward, and if we were able to work together, we would have a much easier time in navigating this particular landscape at this point in time, which is not an easy landscape to navigate. But here in Canada, which has been kind of a really sort of a bonus for us, is although it's been very slow moving, we do have a federal program, and we do generally get everything we want.

7:55SpeakerIn the end, we usually, you know, it's very rare that it's like, wait a minute, like they came in with the MMPR and I was like, whoa, this will be the first time they ever moved backwards in the entire 20 years of this program. They've never taken anything away. And in fact, we fought them in court and they were unable to take it away. So all those people maintained their MMPR licenses.

8:15SpeakerSure, they stunted a lot of other people's abilities to get those licenses, which was unfortunate because I did feel a lot of people were like, oh, I got mine, hopefully they grandfathered me in, and I was kind of like... No, that's unacceptable. That is completely unacceptable to be grandfathered in when you could be fighting still for everyone else's right to do what you have permission to do.

8:36SpeakerWell, that's exactly it. Can I ask a question? There are a number of important points there, Mark, and one is to focus on the positive. And instead of focusing on the dividing lines, focus on the bridges that are being built here. That is not just between people in the independent marketplace, but also...

8:58SpeakerI feel the same way about this issue as we do and just because there are a few that don't doesn't mean we need to vilify each other, doesn't mean we need to focus on trying to tear each other down and thinking that this is a war where we have enemies all around us because as much as there may be enemies for many of us all around on both sides, there are a whole ton of allies and it's a lot easier and a lot nicer and you get a lot farther by focusing on your allies than focusing on your enemies.

9:24SpeakerAbsolutely. I just, sorry about that guys. I had typed something. I wanted to welcome ATN into the room, welcome Sam and Todd and Wood Thrush again as well. And when I typed in the Google chat, it muted the mic, so that's why you got a slight bit of dead air while Joel was talking. So we apologize. We do have an incredible sound man who's been like working like non-stop trying to get all this logistics.

9:45SpeakerTodd, you'd be super stoked on this. We got like, we got a sound man, Todd.

9:53SpeakerWell, we're focusing on a consumer campaign at the moment. It'll continue through the summer. We produced some videos up until now. We'll have some more coming. We're organizing our volunteer list. People are volunteering from all over the province to do some local organizing. The number one thing that people can do right now, today, without having to interact with anybody, is phone and write letters to your local Representatives, municipal, provincial, federal, go to craftcannabis.ca, sign up, go to Facebook, like us on Facebook, sign up for volunteering, and hopefully, you know, collaboration will continue to happen too.

10:40SpeakerThis conference, for all of you who are not here, has been like a catalytic event and not just a conference. There has been so many different people from so many diverse areas in this industry who Uh, whether they be, you know, Tilray or us and SeaTac and dispensaries and anybody you can imagine. Uh, everyone, you know, the list of scientists here alone is unbelievably impressive. Uh, you know, the gamut that people here are running is truly heartening to see.

11:12SpeakerUh, so hopefully, uh, That will, not hurtfully, but it will lead to good things in the future. So if everybody can put some good energy into that, good energy into people coming together here and coming together everywhere in this country. Coming together is the key. Unity is the key. Absolutely. And we can just make things happen. If we come together, then magic will start happening. We don't have to worry.

11:32SpeakerWe don't have to be...

11:36SpeakerIn Sucure, we just simply have to have unity, and we have to, as much as we possibly can, be in the space of the heart, come from the space of the heart, and do what this planet wants us to do. This is a healing plant, and its healing energy needs to come to this planet. It needs to be manifested in this planet in all of its potential.

11:57SpeakerSo we need to manifest that first in order to be the stewards of this plant's healing potential. Did you have a question, Todd? Well, you know, it was... Shit, I can't hear him now. Now you can't hear me. I'm talking, testing, one, two, three.

12:13Etienne FontanI can hear you, Todd.

12:15SpeakerOkay, that's great.

12:19Etienne FontanHi, John. John, can you hear me?

12:21SpeakerI can't pick you guys up at all. Woodrush, can you hear me?

12:27Etienne FontanWe can all hear each other. We can't hear. The bubble man can't hear us apparently.

12:30SpeakerI can't hear anyone else in the room talking. Connecting to the HDMI so that the sound's going through there now. Tell everybody this is what happens when we get a sound. You can talk to the room. Check your output from your computer to your headphones.

12:49Etienne FontanMark's just behind us over there on House Church, guys.

12:52SpeakerThis is great. Which is quite awesome. But, I mean, this event here, guys, is pretty fantastic. John, you're looking healthy. Fantastic. I've been eating a lot of CBD lately. My friend in Northern California says he can hear us. That's pretty funny. That's fantastic. Yeah. Headphone jack is... Can you hear us, Bubble Man?

13:15Etienne FontanNo. We'll figure it out. Don't worry. Well, basically, everybody, just continuing on what they were saying, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

13:25SpeakerSorry, guys, I am unable to hear anyone. I'm sure you can hear me, but all of this HDMI and all these different cables, it's just, I don't know what to say. I can bring you my computer so you can listen, Mark. I'm not hearing anything that anyone says in the room. It's beautiful. So what I'm going to do just because... Thanks for joining us for Hash Church today, everybody.

13:48SpeakerThat was 14 minutes, a little bit shorter than the last 17-minute episode, but if I can't hear anyone, there's probably no point. Run, Johnny, run!

13:57Etienne FontanHere, here, here, march. If you use my laptop...

13:59SpeakerI got it. You got it? I got it.

14:02Etienne FontanHey, can you hear us? All right.

14:05SpeakerJohnny was running with his computer to make sure it didn't get shut off. I'm like, okay, guys. We're going to make this work. Thank you, Johnny B. You know what? I'm going to walk you guys around now. It was all for Hash Church.

14:19Etienne FontanGood call, Marcus. Good save. I'm Jared. Good job, sound guy. Okay, so what else?

14:23SpeakerYeah, we've been on this for an hour and a half trying to make this work, so I'm glad that we're pushing through. So you can actually hear me now? You can hear me, Mark? I can hear you now. My statement was is that when we're talking about legal medical use in Canada, it kind of is just, it blows my mind that you have to get approved. I mean, I wish I got approved to get cancer.

14:48SpeakerThat would have really changed my childhood, you know. My mom might have said no to cancer is what I'm saying. So if you're sick, there's really a bureaucratic process that can tell you no, you don't get cannabis in Canada.

15:03SpeakerWell, yes and no, right? They've fought it. There's 45,000 MMRs? Yes. So we have about 45,000 people that are federally exempt in Canada to grow their own medicine. And then it's a little bit easier to go and get the MMPR, which is really just permission to buy cannabis. At the same time, you know, the division between those two things is that...

15:31SpeakerThe price obviously is expensive. There's also dispensaries, but the majority of the dispensaries are also very expensive. You can go in there and find things for very, very high prices. So we're definitely not in a great situation, but we're working it every day, and I think that what Joel's doing, the sort of combination, what Hilary Black is doing, having a foot in both worlds. Thank you so much for joining us.

16:21SpeakerThank you. Thank you. Thank you.

16:54SpeakerThat's a point that needs not to be lost on the regulators and the lawmakers, because quite simply, if that was the case in this industry, why exactly are we not allowed to open retail banks next week? Yeah. You know, to bring up the banks, major problems with the banks throughout the U.S. State laws are purveying but federal law is still in control and the banks are afraid of it.

17:20SpeakerI myself had my own bank of 20 years recently because I applied for a Blue River credit card. Put all of my accounts, my personal accounts, my Fresh Hatties accounts, my Full Metal Glass accounts, all of my companies have been put in review by the Royal Bank of Canada because they've decided that the business and the marketing that I'm doing is maybe a little suspect and I I'm like I've been doing business with you guys for 20 years.

17:46SpeakerAnd so I am very much looking forward to bending the Royal Bank over backwards and teaching them a few things about the education of this plant and how we need to move forward with it.

18:01SpeakerI did it already with Moneris, which was the merchant account that tried to tell me I couldn't sell terpenes online because they contain THC. Well, after a few SC Labs readouts and some more flaming hoops to jump through, I bent them over backwards and they actually gave me my merchant account. So we need to not be afraid of these groups. We need to face them head on.

18:21SpeakerWe cannot any longer...

18:29SpeakerWe have to move away from doing that and sit down with these people and explain to them that this is a legitimate business. It's going to be billions of dollars. You will not be able to avoid running this money through your banks. So I hope some of the banks are listening.

18:50Etienne FontanWell, as one who's been kicked out of 35 banks here in the United States, you know, we'd love to see you guys make some headway because maybe it'll make our Federal Reserve, you know, start to deal with us because, you know, we're talking, you know, 25 states here in the United States and we can't do any banking currently. So we feel your pain, man, altogether. It is beyond, like I said, 35.

19:10Etienne FontanI've been kicked out of 35 banks.

19:12SpeakerWith me, I don't even sell any of the cannabis. I have the plasma. And I got raped by my bank. They said it was all cannabis related. I had to educate them on what a plant is and stuff like that. So I think with the new process of legalization and stuff like that, I think something is going to have to all start happening with our institutions and how we can deposit the money and stuff because in reality, I mean, it's a thriving business that's fueling this country, this world right now.

19:42SpeakerAbsolutely. The banking is very important, as are the merchant account numbers, as are all of the things that we're going to be engaging in. It really makes no sense to me, particularly in a country where we have federal law allowing cannabis, that my bank would say, oh, you sell products that may or may not be used with cannabis. We're putting your accounts into review. This is bullyism.

20:03SpeakerThis is the standard thing that the cannabis user has been, you know, if they're not kicking down our doors, if they're not smashing us over the heads with a baton, they're closing our bank accounts. They're making it very hard for us to do legal business. We want to pay taxes. We want to show them all the money. But if you can't put it into a bank, it makes it a little bit difficult to do that as that is a very important part of their system for all of this, you know, business, tax, monetary gain.

20:29SpeakerLet us in the banks is definitely... Is what I'm saying. Yeah, I think that's a very important point. People in this industry, they want to be tax compliant. Yeah. And they're simply not allowed to. Tilray and Canopy have no problem opening bank accounts, any number of bank accounts that they want, any number of institutions nationally or internationally. And the rest of us, they're not in that same kind of boat.

20:54SpeakerMy association, because we have cannabis in the name, is having a difficult time finding a bank that will actually allow us to open a bank out, even though we're not a profit society with a constitution that clearly defines our allowed actions and demonstrates that we are not a profit society. It's really unfortunate. And whether it's, you know, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

21:30SpeakerYeah, it's a gong show for sure, but we're moving forward ever backwards and ever here in Canada.

21:54SpeakerSometimes the forward ever part is really slow, but we're moving forward as fast as we can. There's some wonderful people that have gotten on the side of the argument. I spoke with Dr. David Hepburn earlier, who's just a really great, well-rounded guy who's doing all that he can to engage and educate doctors. It's almost as though we need these individuals to educate these individuals. It's almost as though we will need a banker to educate the bankers.

22:24SpeakerWe will need a doctor to educate the doctors. And the police need to educate the police. It's like that because they are such strong groups of belief. That they very rarely allow the outside source to come in. You know, certain people will. I guarantee David Hepburn has. He's allowed to be a foot in the industry to absorb the education, but his other foot is in the medical practice.

22:47SpeakerAnd he's able to educate doctors, which I think is going to be a very important factor in all of this. We need to educate these people. Doctors need to stop being afraid to lose their licenses to prescribe cannabis. And banks need to stop worrying about getting in federal trouble for accepting cash that comes from cannabis sales. I mean, the bottom line is we know that the majority of the bank's money has already been laundered.

23:14SpeakerIt's all sorts of illicit money that goes through banks. There was a very good case regarding agents we received a few weeks ago where they were essentially... The solution was not of the authorities, was not to charge the directors of the holding company with crimes even though it's clear that this could not have been orchestrated without their knowledge.

23:52SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

24:14SpeakerYeah, I definitely think that it's getting to that push here. You know, I'm starting to feel a little bit like Todd when he gets antsy and goes off on one of his awesome rants. Enough is enough. This is absolutely ludicrous that we are not allowed to be involved in banks, to be involved in to pay our taxes, to do all of these things that we need to be a part of for this industry to move forward.

24:37SpeakerAnd it seems like, well, it doesn't seem like, They are completely doing it on purpose. They're keeping us from that ability. And I know ATN feels the pain for sure because running Berkeley Patients Group and running the amount of money they run through there and not being able to use a bank, I can't even imagine what you're going through, bro. It puts you in danger. Not being allowed to put money in the bank...

25:03Etienne FontanThank you for joining us.

25:24Etienne FontanThank you so much for joining us.

25:44Etienne FontanIn the United States, every way that we can, and so it's lobbying up on the hill and, you know, in Washington, D.C. and having lobbyists up there that are trying to change the issues and get different insertions into bills so that we can carry this forward so that just in the legal states we want to be able to do it, you know, and we can't. And it's only putting us further in danger because we have to take this money down to them.

26:08Etienne FontanWe have to pay it in cash. We all have to have, you know, cash. Thank you for watching.

26:30Etienne FontanThank you for watching.

26:48Etienne FontanAnd people ignore that so completely about reaching out to their local congressperson or their representative. It's all lip service to them. They just hear it in one ear and it goes out the other. But if they actually started to call and put pressure on these people, we would see the, look what you're doing in Canada. You're actually actively up there taking educated people and going out there and getting involved.

27:10Etienne FontanYou're not sitting on your laurels and waiting for Health Canada to actually do something about it. And so here in the United States, we're too apathetic. We're just sitting here waiting around and we're just going to sit and complain about it because we're too afraid to pick up a phone or go visit our representative to do anything about it. And it's fucking shameful and annoying because we'll be here again next year if we don't get up and actively do something.

27:32Etienne FontanAnd we'll be here next year saying the same thing that we said last year. Boy, wouldn't it be great to have a bank. So people, how many people are watching this currently? Almost 746 people. So if you're Canadian or American, you know you can reach out to your local jurisdiction and get involved and get active and let your voice be heard because it represents not just yourself, it represents unheard patients who can't see for you.

27:57Etienne FontanIt can't hear for you. It can't represent you. But your voice can represent them. Just by reaching out, it's a simple act.

28:05SpeakerIt's almost as though we are at the point where it's important for people, and I'll use the term, to come out of the closet. People that are still hiding their cannabis use, that are respected people in society, those are the people that need to let people know. Those are the people that, you know, don't be afraid to talk about it, don't be afraid to share the education, whether it's from your son or your daughter or your nephew or your Brother or your father or whatever it is, I want people to be able to stop being afraid to talk about this and get excited about talking about it.

28:37SpeakerIt's exciting to tell someone that you can help them with an ailment. It's exciting to tell them about a preventative medicine that can prevent disease in old age. And it's really exciting to tell people about a plant that when inhaled creates such a wonderful and beautiful euphoria that it just has to be a good thing.

28:59SpeakerI am not optimistic, in all honesty. I think, you know, when I got into this 22 years ago, they couldn't sell high times in Canada, and now you're complaining about not being able to move your pot money through banks, and I think it's an incredible advance. And when you look at it in perspective... Thank you so much for joining us.

29:34SpeakerI love you, ATN, and you're telling people to call is very, you know, it's a good thing. But the truth is we're up against people with briefcases full of money that have law degrees that are sent by corporations that have a vested interest in keeping cannabis illegal. And it breaks my heart. I mean, right now in California we're dealing with people that are now marijuana growers, marijuana doctors, marijuana pot clubs.

29:57SpeakerThank you for joining us.

30:21SpeakerTo usher this culture into acceptance. And we're not going to have an accepted culture unless we keep working at it. You know, this whole medical cannabis thing, as a kid who had cancer ten times, obviously I'm greatly for it. But I'm an adult now, and we should all have the right to grow up and not have to drink whiskey or not have to smoke a cigarette. And we should fight for equal rights because...

30:44SpeakerWe know what they are and this is something we all have to realize isn't going to happen in just, you know, the turn of a politician or the change of a law. This is going to be something we all have to work towards changing because realiztically this has built up over decades. This institutionalized or bureaucratic bigotry has built up for decades and we all have to work to educate our neighbors, educate our bankers, educate our friends as to why they're wrong in perpetuating it.

31:13SpeakerAnd most importantly on that, Todd, is I would add this, that when you're educating about cannabis and you want to get everyone learning about it and you're excited to get people involved, I think it does us a disservice once the straight folks, the people who have not, they've maybe been more listening to the propaganda, they don't really know about cannabis, once they have an excitement for it, once they want to be involved, for God's sakes, please embrace them.

31:41SpeakerDo not say, why is that guy, he hasn't been involved in cannabis for 40 years like I have, he shouldn't be allowed to be a part of it. That is bullshit. The entire reason that we're fighting for this, for mainstream to become a part of this, is that so everyone can be a part of this and share and educate. And it's not preaching to the choir that we're going to get that done, it's preaching to the mainstream society.

32:02SpeakerAnd I've seen it happen already where people are getting, go ahead Todd. Well, is it not an example of our work that people are changing their minds and their positions about cannabis? These minds are being changed, Mark, because of books like The Emperor Wears No Clothes or films like The Union and people being able to do research and learning the truth and the history, resonating with them and then cross-referencing and realizing...

32:26SpeakerWe're not making up fairy tales. This is not some long, foolish story. These are historical facts. Cannabis played an important role in the cultural evolution of humanity and continues to do so. And now through science, we're learning that the medicine plays a crucial role in the human development and the endocannabinoid system is a crucial part of our everyday being. Yeah. I think that's a really great point.

32:51SpeakerI think

32:57SpeakerIt brings people together on the human level. It doesn't matter what your education is. It doesn't matter what your income level is. It doesn't matter what your position is in society. This is a plant that, even if it's happening behind closed doors, brings people together on the human level. And that is something that humanity needs overall, and that Mother Earth needs from humanity in order to move forward.

33:18SpeakerAnd I think that's something that needs not to be overlooked. I think that cannabis has that role to play. And is starting to play that role. And so many people that are in the industry now are such an important part of playing that role going forward. And I think Martha makes a good point as well that reaching out to the general public that perhaps doesn't know a lot about cannabis, doesn't have a lot of experience with cannabis is very important because for a number of reasons.

33:47SpeakerOn the practical level because statutes and regulations are being developed right now, being developed here in Canada, being developed all over the United States. And there are a lot of stories being put out, a lot of excuses being put out by regulators and lawmakers that they need restrictive, prohibitive, even punitive regulations and statutes in order to protect the public, in order to keep organized crime out of the legalized industry.

34:18SpeakerAnd there's a lot of data out there that simply explodes all the myths like that cannabis causes schizophrenia, that cannabis harms the brain development of children, that cannabis is addictive, all these things out there that are still put out there in major media outlets that are spoken on television and radio by our political leaders, people from the It's always good to engage with reality.

35:08SpeakerI will give it up to Health Canada for one thing, and I couldn't believe this. Maybe you saw this, Joel. I went on the website, and they actually announced that cannabis is not a gateway drug on the Health Canada website. They had a whole page thing, and I was reading it like, this is very unlike Health Canada. Health Canada, who is in charge of our medical marijuana program here in Canada, has stated on their website that they believe there is no medical benefit to cannabis.

35:35SpeakerThis is the branch of government that is currently running our cannabis program, if you can imagine. But, on a side note, they have recently announced at least slowly dissipating a stereotype because it's unfortunate, but the majority of people, when they read it there, they'll just believe it. If they read it in their newspaper, they'll just believe it. If they've got their son who's telling them, no, this is a real thing, they're like, well, you know, I'll wait until I see it in the newspaper.

36:04SpeakerGo ahead, Todd. You know, let me say this. You know, right now, this weekend, I'm at an event in Southern California called Chalice. We had Dougie on a couple weeks ago talking about it, and he did a really fantastic job of bringing the community, a very conservative and inland community. This is not a liberal L.A. city. This is not the Bay Area. This is no Santa Cruz.

36:25SpeakerThis is a very Republican inland community. I had one guy tell me that he was stupid.

36:52SpeakerSome, he was moving some edibles and what happened was he saw a police officer came and he was nervous that the cop was going to basically give him a hard time and the cop asked him, are those medical edibles? And he said, yes. And he said, are you giving them away as samples? And the guy said, yes, thinking he might get in trouble but he wanted to be honest.

37:13SpeakerAnd he said, is it okay if I ask you for some? My father has cancer. And the guy was blown away. Yeah, absolutely. And he gave some to the cop. And he goes, it was such a shift for me to have them actually ask me for their help rather than give me a hard time. And events like where we're at at Chalice are the catalysts for social change because these police officers and city officials and the hotels that are selling out around the event are Thank you so much for joining us.

38:12SpeakerYou can see this picture.

38:14Etienne FontanBubble Man, you can see this picture. It's an actual San Bernardino County police officer blowing glass at Chalice.

38:22SpeakerThat is awesome. I saw some of those pictures up on Facebook and I was like right on. I just wanted to thank Joel for coming in. He's got to go back to his booth right now. Thanks, Joel. Yeah, thanks Mark, I really appreciate the opportunity and I appreciate the presence of all the other guests here as well. Everybody just keep up the good work and tell your local politicians, go to papcannabis.ca and let's make this happen.

38:45SpeakerAlright, well I have Chris Bennett on standby, he's going to come up here and join us for a little bit of Hash Church, talk a little bit about what he did, what he spoke about yesterday and talk a little bit about his latest book, all of his Cannabis Historium information. And Chris, it's awesome. What an event here in Vancouver, that's for sure.

39:22SpeakerI've been watching him talk about this literally for 20 years and one of the very unique things, and this is definitely a props to you, is that he always learns more and it's always ever changing and it's really cool in the sense that you're not just saying the same thing over and over again, the breadth of history that you're learning seems to It's just getting deeper and deeper.

39:47SpeakerYou know, well, the thing is, is there's always these new discoveries every few years. It seems we get some new great archaeological discovery. And it's great to see, you know, just last week, a couple days before the conference there, there was this Botanical Academic Journal had an article by archaeologists, geographers and stuff talking about humanity's 10,000 year odd relationship with this plant showing that both in China and in Europe independently 10,000 years ago they were starting to grow hemp for fiber, food, medicine, that type of stuff.

40:21SpeakerAnd, you know, it's basically what I've been, you know, saying for quite a while now. And then there was this massive 5,000-year spread of it, they say, and it led to headlines in like New Scientist that the founders of Western civilization were dope dealers and in Men's Journal, marijuana, the first cash crop, you know. But those sensational headlines are, it's true, man, you know, the whole Indo-European culture that's spread out into Western Europe, even up into China with the Gucci culture, into India and Persia.

41:00SpeakerIt's this mic, too. Yeah. Into India and Persia. All this stuff was taking place 5,000 years ago. Cannabis was a huge part of it. They were going around and trading in cannabis. And that's why we have this common root word for canna in Sanskrit, French, German, Dutch, and English, and all these different languages. It's because they're all options of the same Indo-European culture that spread the use of this plant throughout the age of world.

41:30SpeakerAnd it is the roots of our economy. The Silk Road was more of a hempen highway than a Silk Road. Just got this weird thing showing up on the screen and I can't get rid of it. It's bugging the hell out of me. I don't know if anyone else can see the draw stamp text thing on our video. Do you guys see that in the room right now?

41:48SpeakerOkay, great. So keep going, Chris. Yeah, that's good. So, yeah, it's great to see the academics catching up with the potheads once again. You know what I mean? It's the potheads that led the way in things like growing hydroponically. It's potheads that led the way in the medicinal reunification of humanity's relationship with cannabis. And, you know, it's the potheads that lead the way in the areas of history and culture in the setting of that and cannabis' relationship with it.

42:19SpeakerYeah, I saw that article. It was pretty incredible. So what's going on with the latest book? The latest book is called Lieber 420, Cannabis Arcanum. That just means Book 420. Arcanum can mean hidden or occult or it can even mean an elixir of some kind. And it's a real study of something I wrote about in my first book, Rain Gold, which came out in 1995, about the relationship of cannabis with things like alchemy and ceremonial magic and And there's a huge, huge, huge relationship there, even more than I'd realized when I'd started out on this project.

42:53SpeakerAnd it's fascinating, you know, like even the founder of, you know, alchemy, European alchemy, Zosimo, the Greek philosopher and Gnostic in the 4th century was writing about cannabis infusions. So it's like, it's pretty fascinating stuff. Figures like Rabelais, a 15th century monk and bachelor of medicine, alchemist, he encoded references to cannabis, I mean, I heard Patrick Rulian, to avoid the persecution of the church. These guys had to be kind of careful about how they approached this thing.

43:25SpeakerSo how far back does prohibition go with cannabis? How far back? Because I'm thinking, you know, when they find the guy in the tomb and he's got the Scythian pole or whatever, I'm wondering if that guy had to hide that when he was traveling. Hopefully not at that time, but we know, you know, he's like part of this, say, the New European culture that the Soma cult came out of.

43:49SpeakerAnd there were major prohibitions around both Haoma and Soma, you know, a few centuries B.C. And this is probably related to cannabis and is pressed a little bit. And if you take a look at these kind of awesome references and kind of references in the Old Testament, there was definitely points where it was really celebrated and I appreciate it, and other times where it was really seen with disdain, you know what I mean?

44:15SpeakerA lot of times it has to do with moving away from shamanic culture into more religions of control where it's all about rules and how you control the society, how much money they're supposed to give, you know? I just wonder who the real Henry Anslinger is. Who was the real first narc? Who decided this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, one of the things, like, I always thought the Roman Catholic Church was really solidly against it.

44:38SpeakerI've seen lots of books, and I've even quoted it, this alleged 1484 papal bull against cannabis, which described it as a sort of devil's sacrament. But that actually doesn't even exist if you go back to the Latin text. It doesn't mention cannabis at all. It kind of mentions a broader reference to witch's drugs, which may include cannabis. But there's not a specific reference to it. In fact, it was a 12th century pope who had a recipe for cannabis-infused wine and prescribed it for a number of medical uses.

45:08SpeakerAlthough, you know, things are always changing. You know, like the Catholic Church, I think its relationship with cannabis really changed from pope to pope.

45:19SpeakerIt just seems like a natural thing that they would be like, well, we should probably avoid letting the people have access to this. You know, I think everywhere they went, anywhere that people were using entheogenic substances, whether it be in South America and Mexico with things like peyote and ayahuasca, Thank you for watching. See you next time.

45:53SpeakerI think the real impact of those, which is yet to be felt, is that what it reveals is the plant-based shamanic origins of even the biblical Abrahamic traditions, along with the Vedas and the

46:17SpeakerThe best in these other ancient traditions. And that's something that these cultures have always fought against every time they've come in contact with it and tried to persecute it into non-existence. Well, I'll tell you one thing about cannabis when you bring in the entheogenesis of all these plants, because it was, you know, cannabis wasn't separate from all of these plants when you go back in history, the way we have separated and divided it today.

46:41SpeakerFor me, I never call cannabis a gateway drug, but I certainly will call cannabis an absolute inspirer for me to take psychedelics. From LSD to mescaline to peyote to psilocybin mushrooms of all varieties, it really opened my mind and I felt like after some of my most intense psychedelic journeys, I would often have people ask me what university I went to, where did I go to school, and I would say I went to the school of Terrence McKenna's Five Grams of Dried Mushrooms in the Dark Room.

47:11SpeakerThat's where I went to school. And it really helped me articulate my message. It's, you know, Terrence always called it the logos, that sort of language energy, and the guy definitely had the gift of gab. Definitely one of my big inspirers, but yeah, I just wanted to sort of... I see Sam put up there, too, on the screen a minute ago, Franz Rosenthal's The Herd, Ashish vs.

47:33SpeakerMedieval Muslim Society. And fantastic book, pretty rare. You know, I think you probably pay about $600 American for a copy of that right now. But you can actually get the whole book on Google Books online and check it out. And it's a wonderful collection of medieval poetry, both for and against Ashish. And Islam's a classic example. You know, the Islamic world went through periods of harsh prohibitions where they pull your teeth out for using cannabis, as well as times where it was totally celebrated.

48:03SpeakerIt's not specifically prohibited in the Quran like alcohol. So there's this kind of gray area where some people interpret it that it's a lot, and others say, no, it's intoxicating. It's not allowed, but some of the poetry, that medieval poetry in the Islamic world is just beautiful. Here's a saying from 11th century Sheikh Hadar, a Sufi guy, founder of a Qalandar order. God has granted you the privilege of knowing the secret of these leaves.

48:31SpeakerThat's when you eat a bit. Your dense worries disappear and your exalted minds become polished. You know what I mean? It's like cannabis kind of suppresses all those little nagging wants and desires and unhappy thoughts and kind of helps you to kind of get more down to that essence. That's what the Sufis and Dervishes really use it for, get down to that common essence that animates us all, the God spark, you know?

48:56SpeakerAbsolutely. I'm just going to plug the computer in so we don't die. There you go, man. And a similar saying from like 2,500 years ago in China, a Taoist poem. First a yin, then a yin. No one knows what I do. Jade buds of holy hemp for the one that lives apart. And that's kind of like life has its ups and downs. But with that cannabis, you're in that kind of steady middle road of centeredness.

49:23SpeakerDude, I just like listening to you say those quotes. Those are beautifully well-written poems. You know, one of the things about when you really begin to learn the history of this plant and the amazing, magical, religious, spiritual history of it is when you... Take on that information. The plant itself is cloaked back in that romantic magic and it becomes this magical thing once again, you know what I mean?

49:51SpeakerAnd that door is wide open again. Absolutely. It was magic for me from the first joint I ever smoked at 14 years old. Man, I'll tell you. It's just, I've said it once and I'll say it again. It was right out of the movie Half Baked where they all go into the candy store and he's hugging the big Abba Zappa bar. I just, I've had a great relationship with cannabis since the beginning and it's been a long 25 year road.

50:14SpeakerI still can't believe the more I learn about cannabis, the less I know. Absolutely. You know, the whole, like, spiritualist movement, table wrapping, seances, all that type of stuff, directly grew out of cannabis users. People like Louis Alpha, Hans Kahagene, who were founders of the spiritualist movement. Helena Blavatsky went on to become the founder of Theosophy. All this stuff grew out of cannabis. It was when people in Europe We've kind of got reintroduced to cannabis in the 19th century when there was this big influx after Napoleon went to the Mideast and all this hash started pouring in.

50:52SpeakerCreated like a virtual, like the New Age movement today, you know what I mean? It all has its roots in that. And it totally revitalizes, kind of like dead in the water religious thought. It was just the Bible. You believe in the Bible, you go to church, you don't have religious experiences. And then all of a sudden people started, you know, ingesting cannabis and opium and things like that and started accessing these alternate states of consciousness.

51:15SpeakerAnd it totally fueled both the occult revival and the 19th century spiritualist movement I've been researching this book. I've been going over literally hundreds of these newspapers and journals from the 19th century that were very popular, magical, philosophical journals. And the glowing stories about cannabis in there, the praises and the advertisements praising it, it's so odd to see compared to what happened afterwards with the drug war, the prejudice and And these people weren't bagged down with the sort of prejudisms and paranoia that the drug war has kind of laid on this planet, and some people are still taking it.

51:55SpeakerWell, let's pray we don't have a revamping of the drug war. I had a really horrible thought the other day that if Hillary got elected as president, I wondered if she would potentially... Pull another Nancy Reagan or if she's actually going to just leave cannabis alone. It was a frightening thought. Well, Trump, you know, he's talking about Chris Christie as his vice president for New Gingrich and both of these guys are insane in their thoughts on cannabis.

52:22SpeakerNew Gingrich wanted to bring the death penalty for anybody bringing in more than an ounce of cannabis into the United States at one time and Chris Christie is well known for canning bills and gone through other, we're almost

52:46SpeakerSo I don't think there's hope for either of these people in regards to cannabis, you know what I mean? At least the Democratic Party is kind of taking a stance itself, you know what I mean, regardless of what Hillary is, but the Democratic Party seems to be kind of spooking out more towards the states aside and that type of thing. Absolutely. Well, Sam held up another book really quickly, but I missed it.

53:11SpeakerI missed that. What was it? He's probably got like 85,000. Oh, it wasn't a book? Oh, yeah, no, some ancient medicine, you know. Grimwald, so wonderful, the asthma cigarette that was around in the 19th century. Paris, France. Yeah, yeah. This was like a cigarette that was actually used, a cannabis cigarette that was actually used for treating asthma. And you know what, that's another amazing thing. When I had, when I was putting together the museum collection here that Donnie Wershaft recently bought off David Melmo Levine, who bought it off of me, and what Sam has done as well with collecting these bottles, you know, you hear about cannabis medicine, but when you see the literally scores of different types of bottles out there for everything from uterine problems to Asthma, cough medicines, anti-psychotic type stuff, and corn plasters.

54:05SpeakerThat was probably 90% of the corn plasters prior to prohibition were used for, contained cannabis indica. And it worked probably the same way for corns and bunions as the way that it does for tumors, but stopped with the blood flow and the feeding of the corn or bunion. Have you been to Ben's? I suggest right here and now that we get Ben to fly you out there and talk because you could literally give a history lesson on everything that is in his book.

54:36SpeakerThank you for joining us.

55:00SpeakerGet in touch with Ben in a way that we can facilitate getting you involved some way to do that because I've been to the museum and the only way that museum would have been better is if you were there explaining everything because the museum is so profound. It's un-fucking-believable. You can't believe the shit. Well, you know all of it. You know everything that he has. You know, there's been a lot of great documentaries on cannabis in recent years, but there's nothing that has really delved into its capacity Religious history, what's going on in India.

55:34SpeakerAnd that's what really, really incredible cannabis is. Because when you start to understand, you know, plants are a natural right. And we're talking about a plant like cannabis. We're talking about a plant that, you know, yesterday, the first speaker in the conference, he showed evidence of fibers, the fossilized fibers there.

56:00SpeakerThank you for watching.

56:23SpeakerAnd it's like this amazing biological link between us and this plant. And that means the co-presence for the incredible relationship between the cannabinoids of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system of the human body. The co-relationship of us evolving together. Awesome. Well, I'm definitely going to be helping get in touch with Todd and Ben and try to facilitate that because I just pictured this incredible event that it could occur, you know.

56:53SpeakerWe could have people come to see it, and I know a lot of people would travel to see that, maybe right before Spanibus or something. And then, you know, also the recording of all of it and being able to use your historical knowledge in conjunction with each. He's got so many of those bottles, like, Chris, one thing I can tell you, Chris, is that the museum in Spain is easily four or five times the volume of the one in Amsterdam.

57:21SpeakerIt's funny too because the one in Amsterdam gets more walk-in traffic than the one in Spain. And the one in Spain is a work of art. It is. Yeah. Wouldn't you love to see Chris explain the historical context of a lot of this stuff, Sam? Yes, but I disagree that he'll be able to understand everything there because, let me tell you, I've been doing this longer than anybody.

57:44SpeakerThey've got stuff that I've never seen before. I know what it's for and I know how it functions, but I've never seen it before. Right. Well, hey, even if it was half of it, it would be incredible. I mean, the museum is... Truly a work of art. And it covers all issues, every issue of cannabis. All of them. How does that happen? Sorry about that, guys. A little bit of technical difficulty there.

58:14SpeakerAccidentally putting some music on. I wanted to welcome Tony into the room. I know he's off to Chalice today. He was going to be here from 9 to 10, but he hung out later, so he's got a few things that he wants to share with us. I definitely want to thank Chris Bennett for coming on and just dropping knowledge as always, dude. So, yeah, thank you so much for coming on, Chris.

58:35SpeakerI hope we can see you again one of these Sundays. Absolutely, brother. Yeah, you know, I just want to say one thing. I first became a cannabis activist here in British Columbia 26 years ago. And there was like, I couldn't find, the only other person that I could find that was even doing anything remotely like cannabis activism was Paul DePolice out in Nelson. Yeah. And... It has just come so far and gotten so big and become so mainstream.

59:04SpeakerIt's just such a pleasure to see just how incredible this meme of cannabis and the revitalization, you know, and with this plant, We can heal our planet. We can save our forests. We can get away from fossil fuels. We can feed the world with the most nutritious seeds in the world. We can clothe ourselves without the soil depleting cotton where all the pesticides and chemicals are used.

59:27SpeakerAnd I think that what it really offers too is a revitalization of our spiritual world. That this ancient knowledge is a window of opportunity. A door is opening back to this ancient sacred tree of life, the Soma Haoma. It's literally a holy grail, this planet. Right on, brother. Thanks so much, dude. Cheers, brother. Cannabis warrior Chris Bennett right there. Thank you so much for coming on, Chris.

59:54SpeakerTony, did you want to get into a few of the things that you were going to share today here? Yeah, man. Thanks for the intro. I had posted on my page regarding CBN. So we had once upon a time talked about this. We kind of barely went over it. It seemed to be a mystery for a lot of people. So I am uploading in the Hash Church group a couple things right now for you guys to look at.

1:00:28SpeakerSo let's see if we can get this up. Yeah, dude, stop. What's up? I said I'm stoked to see you. And tell me, have you ever smoked pure CBN? Yeah, I have been working with CBN for a couple years now, and this is how you get to CBN. So I'm going to show you guys. I really wish in this pure CBN, you know, it can be, You know, it's 90% less psychoactive than THC, but I can definitely tell you, like, pure CBN may not be for everybody.

1:01:11SpeakerCBN could, you know, I would say in a small percentage of patients that are out there, they might experience different things. If you just smoked pure CBN or had CBN, obviously it's a sedative, it's a muscle. Relaxer, things like this. But you might have like sweats or you might have like different types of psychosis or different types of experiences with it. So there's not a lot of information that's out there.

1:01:45SpeakerI personally pair it with CBD. I don't serve CBN on its own. So I don't like CBN on its own. I like it paired with CBD. I think it has a lot. I was really speaking recreationally, of course. Yeah, I've smoked it. I've smoked it. It's generally, if you've ever seen it, it's generally a degraded process, you know, so a lot of people are, I don't know, they just have theories of like how they can go from THCA to CBN, but I'm putting up in Hash Church the starting material of where like some farmer grade keef, Basically started at and then what temperature and oxygen and a little bit of UV can do to that same starting material.

1:02:39SpeakerAnd what was the best conversion rate you got, Tony? Well, the test that I was hoping SC would have done for today, they had it early in the week, maybe like Wednesday or Thursday. I'm looking online right now. Because I do a two-stage process and the first stage is to get it to where it's almost fully converted and then I just, because I don't want to go past a certain point because then you just start breaking down the CBN.

1:03:05SpeakerSo what I try to do is get it to where there's like, you know, conversion where it's, right now I'm going to show you 73 milligrams of CBN to like 15 of THC when it started at 300 milligrams of THC. So that gives you... That gives you 25% conversion. Yeah, you lose. So if we started with 300 milligrams, then I'm going to end up with 80 milligrams of TBN.

1:03:36SpeakerSo that goes from, we lose, yeah, almost 70% or something. Do you do it under an inert gas? No, I don't. I definitely used a NERC gas, though, in the process, but not... What method were you using? I'm sitting here with one of the owners of the Whistler Medical LP. Well, one of the people involved in Whistler LP up in Whistler, and he just missed the first part.

1:04:07SpeakerSo what was the actual conversion? How were you doing it? Okay, so I just basically... You know the tumblers that you sell? The Keef tumblers? Okay. So, you know, you've got to keep that cold, so you can either build a... A freezer that it sits in or you could use like a liquid nitrogen or however you want to do it, but the colder the better, the drier the material the better, obviously, if you're carrying out your buds or your smalls or trim or whatever, just getting it as dry as possible, cold as possible in that tumbler.

1:04:41SpeakerYou know, you could build a freezer very easily and just drill a little hole in it and Yeah, so you've been coldness to extract Keith, but what was the conversion method that you took? Yeah, just heat. Just heat. Heat and time. Have you tried using UV? I have tried to use UV, and I don't see it on a massive level working that great right now. Because the chamber that I built was small, high intensity, 500 watt UV.

1:05:20SpeakerStill working with that, but I think there's definitely something in taking like a SIF that's 30%. I mean, I just go with what I know works. So obviously in the background, I'm working on a lot of other things to try to make the conversion better. But I can tell you that I've been converting 300 milligrams of THC A from Farmer's Grape Keef to about 80 milligrams of CBN.

1:05:47SpeakerThat's like been the standard. So if I can get better than that, great. But when people are asking about what is the... You always do, dude. Yeah, but that's still pretty good. I mean, it's not, you know, that's how I make CBN. So, you know, that's why it costs a lot of money too when people are like, oh, I don't understand it. Well... That's going from farmer's grade, Keith.

1:06:11SpeakerIf we went from like flowers, you only get 120 milligrams, right, per gram, or 150 milligrams or 200 milligrams per gram, depending on the potency that you're starting with. But if you're losing that much, you know, at 75%, you have 150 milligrams per bud, you know, you lose that conversion, you're only getting like 30, I don't know, 35, 38 grams. And you, the volume lost as well, if you wanted to know that, that's important.

1:06:46SpeakerYou know, it's going from 370 grams, say, 400 grams, to, I think this example I did 370 grams and there was like 320 left. So, out of 370 grams of starting material, times...

1:07:08SpeakerI don't know, it's a 15% loss in volume, as well as a 75% loss in conversion. Well, it definitely sounds a lot quicker than the Breeders Steve method, which was, forget about 12 grams, sorry, 112 grams of moonshine bubble hash in his garage, then bring it to me years later, like almost a dozen years later, and Give it to the West Coast Concentrate guys, and they pressed it into rosin, and it was the purple-red rosin on my Instagram.

1:07:40SpeakerPeople were tripping out on it, actually. They haven't tested it yet, but it has got to be, like, you take a puff of it, and then you just go to sleep. Yeah, it's sleep. Use it in my P4 for that. I'm going to post on the Hash Church group, the starting key was roughly 30%, THCA, or 300...

1:08:04SpeakerHey, welcome Mark Scaldone to the room, our hash panelist chemist. The minute Tony starts talking about conversion rates, Mark pops in. Oh, of course. Hey, what's going on? Conversion rates? I know about that.

1:08:24Mark ScaldoneWell, what's it converting to if it's not converting to CBN?

1:08:28SpeakerYeah, what's the rest converting to? That's a unique, that's the question to ask, you know? I also did terpenes on these too, so you can see the terpenes going in and out. Hold on a second, because I knew that was going to be the next question. Excellent.

1:08:45Mark ScaldoneWell, remember that you need oxygen from air to convert THC to CBN, so... And typically, you're doing this at a temperature that's elevated and beyond the boiling point of air or beyond the boiling point of water. So if you see white smoke coming out, that's typically the water vapor from the reaction of the oxygen in air and the hydrogens that are on the methylcyclohexene ring that are basically being removed in that oxidation process.

1:09:20Mark ScaldoneWell, thanks for the heads up, Mark.

1:09:22SpeakerI don't have any smoke on mine, and I turned mine into what I call a CBN cocoa. So it's like a hollow, almost like chunks of cocoa, kind of aerated. It's like foam, but like red kind of color.

1:09:45Mark ScaldoneSo you're not limiting the transfer of air into the reactor, right?

1:09:50SpeakerNo, no. This heating chamber has a built-in in and out for oxygen or for whatever gas that you wanted to use to help speed that up.

1:10:03Mark ScaldoneYeah, well, it needs air to convert THC to CBN. You need oxygen and air for that to happen.

1:10:10SpeakerYeah, this has an in and out of oxygen.

1:10:17SpeakerHey, well Tony's checking things out and looking there. I wanted to introduce Daniel who's next to me here. He grew up in North Van and he currently works for Whistler Medical Marijuana Corp. And he's making the cannabis oils and he's doing quality assurance. So yeah, he's also a good friend of mine's cousin up in Whistler who I do a lot of backcountry snowmobiling with. So we sort of got introduced through Ryan Nadeau.

1:10:42SpeakerAnd he's just sitting here with me as well, listening, and he was willing to share maybe a little bit about what Whistler Medical is doing. Whistler Medical is a licensed producer here in Canada, so it's one of the federally exempt licensed producers. So yeah, while you're looking, maybe I'll get Daniel to tell us a little bit about what's been going on up in Whistler for the last couple of years now.

1:11:06SpeakerHi everybody. Yeah, so Whistler is Canada's first and only certified organic licensed producer. So that's, you know, part of the Whistler lifestyle. We, you know, recycle things from the ecosystem. So, you know, you're getting stuff that is organic. Part of Whistler, you know, restaurant scraps of the vegetables and then from farms from Pemberton and all these products go into making our cannabis. And that's what we're really passionate about, you know, repping that, you know, West Coast ecosystem.

1:11:38SpeakerAnd that's what's going into our cannabis. And we're really passionate about the organic process. It's going to, you know, I think it makes an amazing product. And it's really about the sustainability, helping improve our communities. And... Making great medicine. Yeah. It often shocked me that more LPs weren't involved in at least having an organic line. I saw right away with Thrush, his eyebrows went up when you mentioned organic and he went like this.

1:12:05SpeakerAnd I'm guessing that PTSD is the sort of sensitive... I don't know too much about it, but it would seem like the kind of thing that you would want to keep all chemicals away from your body because obviously you're working with the chemistry of your brain. Maybe having non-organic chemicals in the cannabis is going to affect the medicine. Is that something that happens with thrush? Do you choose to look for organic medicine for your PTSD?

1:12:33SpeakerI choose organics for everything. I was raised, my parents had a garden, we had a compost pile. So ever since I was a kid, that's just how life was. So yeah, I grow organic. It's really difficult for me because I go into the grow store and it's like, okay, does this stuff have salt in it or not? And they're like, well, it's organic. So that's definitely kudos to you for going organic.

1:13:04SpeakerCool, yeah, I mean, I look at it as the normal, everyday thing as well, but I was definitely, it didn't surprise me when I saw that Whistler was going to go for the organic aspect, and I definitely salute you guys for doing that. Can you tell us a little bit about the extraction processes that you guys are currently involved in? Of course. So we make bubble hash, first off, from fresh frozen materials.

1:13:26SpeakerSo we make oils, and my vision for the oils was terps, to retain all the terps we can. I think it's really important for making a full spectrum product, and one thing we see about organic, I think, is that you see maybe a bit more balancing of the medical components. I think with Certain grow systems, you can push everything into THC and get a really high THC number, but we're seeing with the organic, the THC is a bit lower, but the terpenes are going up.

1:13:55SpeakerSo we really wanted to capture that in the oils. We use fresh frozen product. We run it through bubble bags and then take that resin and without drying it, we put it straight into oil and then dry the oil later. And this allows us, and we decarboxylate in a way to retain all the terpenes. So some is lost, you know, you can't keep everything. Once it hits the water, you're losing terpenes in the cooking process.

1:14:19SpeakerBut we end up with a product that has the same ratio of terpenes to cannabinoids as you see in dried marijuana. So that's really important to us and Because we use the bubble hash to go straight into the oil, there's no plant matter. Even if you're blasting good material with CO2, you're taking... We're just taking trichromes, a bubble hash, which maybe is 70% THC or cannabinoids, and we infuse that into the oil, and then we filter out all the solid parts that are left over, which is a good 25% of the weight of the bubble hash.

1:14:57SpeakerSo you're only getting, you know, 5% impurities and 95% cannabinoids and terpenes coming into the oil, and we use organic, you know, cold-pressed coconut and Olive oils, and it's just the same philosophy I have for cooking and anything. You take good quality starting ingredients, and with not much processing, you make an amazing final product. So that's a simple process, and we're getting amazing oils. You know, there's not much chlorophyll at all in there, and great terpenes.

1:15:28SpeakerAnd obviously you guys are limited by Health Canada. They're not allowing you to do everything right now. You guys obviously have an interest to produce raw product extracts and to produce... Probably a variety of products. I'm guessing. Is that something you guys are... Oh, of course. There's obviously a big demand for extracts and sticking with our organic vision. We don't want to use any solvents that are bad for the environment or harmful to patients, so we stick... We want to do...

1:15:59SpeakerAll these great extracts that help patients. It's really silly. Health Canada comes at it that THC and cannabinoids are dangerous. So we're going to do everything we can to limit them. Not thinking about... You know, we don't... You know, if you're getting a pill of Tylenol, Canada's not saying, oh, you can't put that much acetaminophen in there, and the rest has to be nothing. So they're coming at it completely of what could go wrong.

1:16:30SpeakerWhat happens if a child takes this? What happens if someone who's not a patient takes this? And very little thought into how can we make this program good for the people who actually need medicine. It always goes back to the children. We're always worried about the children, the children. Don't let children have access to cannabis. It's the terrible cannabis. In the meantime, children have access to tobacco, and they have access to alcohol, and they have access to harsh pharmaceutical pills that kill you, like oxycodone and fentanyl.

1:16:57SpeakerWorse, when they get addicted and they are forced to go to the black market, the fentanyl is laced with W18, which is 100 times more stronger, and 0.05 milligrams will actually kill you dead. So... What kind of an argument is this to keep it away from the children? From what I heard, many epileptic children have benefited greatly from cannabis, and I don't think there's really any negative side effects from those benefits, unlike The pharmaceutical poisons that are currently being prescribed to people that obviously have a very high LD50, or sorry, a very low LD50, whereas cannabis has no LD50, people don't perish from cannabis.

1:17:36SpeakerI'm always wondering about this argument about, you know, that we have to keep it out of the hands of the children, because obviously you would rather have your children stealing your alcohol and your pharmaceutical pills out of your medicine cabinet. For me, I just don't really understand it myself, but hopefully we can move to a place eventually where it's not vilified.

1:18:02SpeakerYes, so someone just yelled out, they don't want us to see through the bullshit. If you give cannabis to a child, they will see through the bullshit. There it is. I'm not promoting that the kids go out and get high. What I'm promoting is that we stop using children as the shield to keep cannabis from being accessible to adults. We are adults. We have adult use with tobacco and alcohol and many other things.

1:18:29SpeakerThere are things that we don't want children doing, but we don't shun those things from society. They still exist and they're still accessible. To adults, so all we're asking for is for the same thing for cannabis. And it's a plant. What's that? Fire plants. How can plants be illegal or legal? It's something that actually grows out of the ground. Yeah. Well, it's like when you... We have to spray poison on it to kill it and eradicate it.

1:18:57SpeakerBut I'm just, I'm to the point where it's a plant, let it grow. Indeed. Well, you know, and also, you know, because they've lied for so many years about the dangers of cannabis, now that they're coming out about cannabis, and they found out about CBD and the lack of euphoria that you have with CBD, You know, they have this situation where cannabis has become the ugly stepsister, put her in the back row, and then the CBD is the valedictorian, blonde-haired, blue-eyed dude who throws the best football.

1:19:31SpeakerIt's not really the case. THC shouldn't be treated any differently than CBD. They should all be sort of lumped into the same, vitocannabinoids, terpenes, cannabis. We're fighting for the access. You know, one of the things we do here on Hash Church is we discuss in a radical openness form of dialogue to try and get these conversations heard. And, of course, we never know where they're going, but with 700 to 800 people who are watching currently, we do appreciate the attention that you guys are giving us.

1:19:56SpeakerIt lets us know that people are interested in this and they want to learn more. That's like having a one-piece band. You know, it can be done. There's a couple individuals out there like Beardy Man... The beardy guy that can literally make every single sound with his mouth and sing and rap and do everything in the drums and the bass. It's possible. But that's usually not how music's made.

1:20:23SpeakerYou know, CBD can't stand on stage by itself and do what he does. Yeah. You know what a good proof of that is, have you ever seen Mick Jagger play music by himself without the rolling stones? It's like the most painful thing. But then he gets on the stage with the Rolling Stones and there's this weird synergy, this ensemble, this entourage that occurs where all of those members have created a new energy that otherwise did not exist in the singularity of each individual.

1:20:52SpeakerAnd that's what makes the Rolling Stones the Rolling Stones and that's why they've been doing what they've been doing for damn near 51 years. Well, I posted, so that information's up. I've got a run here soon. But if you want to look at the Hash Church group that I just posted in, I don't know how you want to get it out to your audience if they're not in this group.

1:21:14SpeakerWe can just tell them. You can just tell them? Yep. Okay. So if you go on to it, I know Scaldone's going to like this. You know, I felt like when you post something like that, you should have all the tests. So if you go through it, basically that's my starting material. Some of you will get a very big kick out of this. I finally found a good use for Blue Dream.

1:21:41SpeakerBlue Dream works great in candles, and it works great in converting into CBN. So for those that aren't Blue Dream fans out there, you know, this finally has a purpose. So I used Blue Dream, and if you look at Blue Dream, it was roughly 297 milligrams per

1:22:08SpeakerTerp Candle. Per gram. And then if you look at the terpene profile, this is pretty interesting. The terpene profile shows pinene. It shows some beta-carophyllene, some humaline, B-pinene. It shows a couple little tiny nips of phytol and some other things at the bottom. And then it's like, you know, it's saying about 10 milligrams of that. Of that 300 milligrams, so not a lot of terpenes in the keef itself, but if you look at the conversion, this is phase one, you can see it went from, the picture shows it going from a blonde kind of nice sift or keef, and then it's this kind of cocoa product I was telling you about.

1:22:55SpeakerIt's like a, you can see the degradation in it, and it ends up becoming like a lightweight brick in the process that I'm doing. Again, no chemicals on this at all, so not even water or anything like that. You can see the conversion where it's almost converted all the way, the THC out, so the next test that I'm literally waiting on should show the final conversion to 100%.

1:23:20SpeakerThere won't be any THC left. I shared that test result with you guys from when I was in Denver as well, but I think it kind of got overlooked when we were talking about it, but this way it's a lot better. Now here's what's interesting. This is what's interesting. The terpene profile of the CVN, after it's converted, look at the spikes on those particular, not that there are a lot, but all the pinene's gone, all these other things have obviously boiled off and they're gone, but you've got a little bit of a spike in the bottom.

1:23:59SpeakerIt looks like Geritolin, Acetate, Valencian, and Phytol.

1:24:07SpeakerMade it through. So those spikes that are there, they didn't boil off or they didn't aggregate off. They made it through.

1:24:15Mark ScaldoneYeah, those are just tire boiling sesquiterps, that's all.

1:24:18SpeakerOkay. Yeah, I'm not very familiar with sesquiterps. So they made it through the process, which I thought was kind of interesting.

1:24:28SpeakerYeah.

1:24:32SpeakerTony, what color is the product?

1:24:34Mark ScaldoneIf you're not limiting the air exchange and you're not trapping what's going in and out, you are going to lose some stuff because you definitely need air to come in to do that oxidation, which means that you're going to be able to essentially boil stuff through that opening, right, if it's exchanging air between inside the reactor and out. Sorry, Sam.

1:24:58SpeakerNo problem. Tony, what color was it when it was 100%? What color is it when it's pure CBN? Correct. Well, you can see there's a little picture on there in the group. It gets to like a very, almost like coffee, like a red dirt color. Yep. Because this is pure CBN. Let me see.

1:25:33SpeakerIt's a very awful white amorphous powder. Looks like somebody used hexane or something like that to clean it. They probably washed it or did something chemically.

1:25:44Mark ScaldoneChromatography.

1:25:45SpeakerYeah. Yeah.

1:25:48Mark ScaldoneYeah, the color is primarily the degradation of the flavonoids, which are the most prevalent compounds in there, and there's only a very, very little

1:25:58SpeakerSo, yeah, you know, I mean, it's important, like, when you're going to make CBN to kind of get the before and after and see what's going on with it. Some labs, you know, depending on this, like, what you put it in, like, the guy was talking about coconut oil and different types of Like glycerin or agave, when people make their infused products, those sometimes can kind of give those, it seems to give labs a little bit of a problem.

1:26:38SpeakerYou know, so I think it's, like in this state, this is just raw sift into a CVM, so you can kind of see the rawness of like the conversion and everything. There's no We had a discussion on our panel yesterday. I was on a panel with AC from Eden Labs and Horatio, the LHO gentleman, and basically we were speaking about the differences between whole plant medicine and the whole breaking it down into components and what was sort of the better of the two.

1:27:12SpeakerIn the end, I sort of thought that both were very important, but Tony, maybe if you could mention like How much learning and education has occurred with you just in, you know, fractioning and separating out all these compounds into pure form? Whether you're using them in pure form as a medicine or not, how much has it taught you about using cannabis as a medicine by being able to break them up into their components?

1:27:38SpeakerWell, I think first of all, the challenge that I kind of took on myself a while ago, which was kind of suicidal back then maybe. Was to try to figure out to do it without chemicals. So, or solvents. You know, yes, in some cases we're using water to wash. We're not using water particularly as a solvent, but besides water, not using any chemicals or washes or hexane or different types of acids or any other kind of wash.

1:28:09SpeakerSo that first is the hardest challenge. How do you do things without chemicals? Because You know, there's nothing wrong with them, and if you do them right or use solvents, you can get to pharmaceutical grade or pure extractions, you know, that everybody's striving for, and if you do it really right, you can get it down to zero parts per million, not have any of those solvents that seem to be present in You know, obviously we talked about proton NMR and there's always going to be a footprint left, but the challenge is always like how do you make whole plant medicine without any footprints that are broken down into categories that we can deliver them to patients and ourselves in the safest way possible.

1:28:55SpeakerSo in that challenge, everything that I do with hash or extracts today has come from those challenges that I've Based with, say, trying to create these prana lines, prana one, two, three, four, five. Each one of those one, two, three, four, five has been anywhere from a three-month to six-month to a year process of understanding. And there's a lot of failure and a lot of, like, letdown.

1:29:26SpeakerI would say most of everything that's created is from failing over and over and then one day sitting there without any answers and then you go oh wait a minute I think I can do this completely in opposite way usually that thought usually comes creatively from an outer experience like not working with it right away but taking a break or you go to a park or you go watch a movie or other things in life would inspire me to think outside the box so like seating with like crystals you know finding that terpenes have different accelerations when you want to make Crystal's, and when you're like trying to grow crystals, as example the strawberry banana goo in this clear sap, one little dust, one little anything, boom, this thing starts turning into a crystal within an hour, two hours instead of weeks.

1:30:20SpeakerThe ACDC watching the terpenes interact with the ACDC oil and how fast that can grow and make these little crystals teaches you a lot, you know, and Every step along the way is inspiration to the next chapter. So I think I was explaining this to someone else. It's like the reason why I obsessively stay up and you're seeing a lot of extracts or hash being made is because there are actually little breakthroughs that happen making those categories of prana that then are now swinging into like that turned into Blue River.

1:30:56SpeakerLike I wanted terpenes in my activated line that turned into Blue River. I wanted to create... Different types of pure products without using, you know, N-butyrol or butane or anything like that and those end up creating different types of solventless saps or different types of products that are coming out. You know, they just, it's a creation that keeps moving forward. Like you said, it's like, you know, I've come to the realization that I don't know anything about it And every day I start my day acting like I don't know anything about the plant, you know?

1:31:40SpeakerLike, I don't know. Anything's possible at this point. I see things happen all the time. And so the only thing we can do is write those things down And keep these little data points and then work on them and try to get them to the purest form that we can. Just like what you do with SIFT. Like you'll see a SIFT and you're like, ah, it's 90%, it's 91, it's 95.

1:32:03SpeakerEvery time you'll be like, well, it's not really 99. You know, same thing with these products. Like with the FOMO, the freeze dryer, these things are... Constant progression, and how do we get them better and better and better? I think eventually you do reach a wall, and then you're satisfied. I'm very satisfied with the way these solventless saps are coming out, the texture of them, the quality of them, the modulation of them, and I think that I concur that a 15 to 20 percent terpene volume with a flower or hash rosin is a really, really, really good balance And it's a really good combination of modulation.

1:32:49SpeakerI've taken it up to 50-50, which is the turpoil, which is amazing too. I mean, it tastes exactly like the garden in your mouth. It has a totally different response. I almost feel like tryptophan or some other kind of almost psychedelic when you hit 50-50. You know, at 20%, 15%, I feel everyone's happy. It's a great response. Like, I'm uplifted. Like, it's not like... I use the term giddy, honestly, because after people puff the turf oil, they are giddy.

1:33:23SpeakerGiddy. Yeah, it's different. And then you look at what 1% does. 1% to 3% is in flowers. It has a different change. But I think when I... Like, I've been smoking a lot more flowers and trying to do a comparison of that. The flowers themselves are, like we talk about the quote unquote contamination, it's really the leaf matter. You know, we're converting leaf matter into smoke and then we're inhaling that.

1:33:51SpeakerSo of that smoke, I would love to see like Scaldone, he once upon a time talked about this. Let's get the smoke from the joint The smoke from like a denail, a vapor, a smoke, and different types of actual clouds that he can put into that machine. And I think we would find why, you know, perhaps why we're getting a response from smoking flour versus a hash in a vaporizer, you know.

1:34:25SpeakerI also think a lot, you know, I've mentioned it before on Hash Church, but a lot has to do with the surface area that you're inhaling the smoke from or the vaporizer you're using. These things are affecting... The molecules that you're inhaling and it's bizarre but there really is a science behind the thermal dynamics and how certain temperatures are kept and released from titanium or quartz or sapphire and just they change the effects.

1:34:54SpeakerWhen I take low temp dabs on sapphire it's very different from like a high temp dab on a titanium. And when you spend as much time as we do sort of perfecting these extractions and getting them to the proper ratios, You are going to pay attention to the methodology or the apparatus that you're using to consume the final product because I think it's going to be, well, it's constant, right?

1:35:18SpeakerThere's constantly people trying to push new products to better this, but you really don't see, I mean, the electric nail was a big one. When the electric nail came out, that was a game changer for a lot of people. But we haven't seen as many game changers as I thought we would see. In the industry, focused on really getting these cannabinoids and terpenes inhaled without altering or changing the molecule, but letting them get into our body and then letting our bodies interact with them the way they were extracted and the way they were tested, not test for something and then throw it in your stomach and it changes into a bunch of other things.

1:35:54SpeakerThat's just not quite what I'm looking for. Well, as you know, that's around the corner. We've been talking about it, and the next thing will be ultrasonic handheld nebulizers that can break down that. They're here today, actually, Tony. They're here today? Yeah, they're here today. I'll try to get them on later if they're around. Okay, yeah. That's funny. But, yeah, you know, those, I think that... That took a special, there's special companies out there like that.

1:36:31SpeakerThere's a friend of ours that we're working with on using their device, but medical devices, it takes a certain type of group and certain companies to really create those types of products. And this is going to be able to monitor the milligrams and not cause combustion and be able to nebulize instead of vaporize. Tony, I tested a nebulizer, an ultrasonic nebulizer, 20 years ago. Yeah. We used it, and it worked, but I prefer smoking.

1:37:12SpeakerWell, I've used them in the past, and I feel like they've come a long way. So when you see the next wave, the next generation, what's happening now, I'm eager to And I'm excited to see it because... What we found was the most important thing was you had to get your particle size way down because otherwise it makes you cough and retch when you take a hit.

1:37:37SpeakerYeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, these are the next moves, you know? Like it has to... Like Bubble Man says, you got to... It's got to... There's got to be the next moves in production in that. So... I think you'll see a lot more progress as cannabis starts to get in more of the mainstream and companies can bank and there's more of a legal mechanism.

1:38:08SpeakerBut anyway, to answer your question, Bubble Man, it's like I've been on that mission of trying to create those As we call organic compounds without chemicals and those actually led into different divisions because yes, it's a lot more work, a lot more work to create them than running say load a chamber, run a solvent through it, get THC out, you know, and that byproduct, you know, no one talks about the byproduct of butane flowers.

1:38:46SpeakerAsk them what they do with their product. You know?

1:38:53SpeakerIt sits in a bag or it sits in a bucket. It smells awful. The herb is then disposed with post-run butane. That's what they do with it. So there's environmental impacts that I don't like with certain types of solvents that have to be, you know, what's that going to look like in the mainstream if we're doing a billion pounds a month of cannabis? And then you're blowing it all.

1:39:17SpeakerAnd then you're taking that byproduct and then you're dumping it. Well, where is it getting dumped? You don't have to dump it, Tony, though. You can use it to light your barbecue. Yeah, I always ask people that. I'm like, well, what are you doing? Don't worry, I purge it. I'm like, where do you purge it? Into the air? Yeah, I think that's what they miss. So not the footprint of the medicine, what's the footprint of the environment?

1:39:45SpeakerSo that's also the next consciousness that we need to evolve in our industry, not just with packaging of things like our industry where everything has to be childproof and certain packaging and double packaged and triple packaged. I understand the safety of it, but there's got to be a point where that also emerges into a more sustainable practice. You know, our planet is expanding at rapid rates of population.

1:40:13SpeakerWe only have so much virtual water, so much raw resources, and, you know, I'm big on that, too. So that's also part of the reason why I try to always try to seek out ways to do it without solvents. But, you know, I don't have anything against them. I think they serve their purpose, and when they're used correctly, they make good medicine. I like what Horatio does, because he uses...

1:40:38SpeakerHe uses like a terpene. He uses a D-limonene as his base. So he's obsessed with trying to figure out ways to pull out different cannabinoids using D-limonene, you know? So that's also commendable. So there's no one else on the planet that's trying that to create those type of different products using that base. And I feel like that's what I've been trying to do for the last year is push that direction of no solvents in that process too, you know?

1:41:06SpeakerA lot more work, and you've got to be able to distribute the hash that doesn't melt, doesn't, you know, press out. And so, you know, that's what I told a lot of people at the booth. They were asking, like, how come we don't have other runs? And I'm like, we just, as Bubble Man, I just give you first run, five, six star, 73, 90, 120. Anything that's not that gets pressed out.

1:41:30SpeakerAnything below four or three, I'm just collecting them. It eventually works itself into Prana. Tony, where do you think Horatio gets his limelight from? How do you think it's produced? He buys it from Blue River. Oh, he does? Really? No. You got me, man. I believed you. He buys it wholesale, five-gallon drums of it. Yeah, but then he cleans it, so he does, he also, I think he cleans it because it contains citrus oils that are not delimiting.

1:42:08SpeakerYeah, he showed a video of how he cleans it, which I thought was really cool, and that's, you know, with everything else, that's their safety there. And he preaches that quite often. It's like if you're going to try to follow his tech, he showed you a few. He's like a magician that said, hey, let me show you. I have 10 tricks that I do on stage, and I want to show you how we cut bodies in half.

1:42:31SpeakerAnd he just simply showed you a portion of his show of where a human body gets put into a box and is cut in half and split.

1:42:40Mark ScaldoneWell, I showed him where in the chemical literature all those tricks were already So I'll take the credit of pointing him to the chemical literature on limonene that already existed.

1:42:52SpeakerOkay.

1:42:54Mark ScaldoneThere it is. There it is.

1:42:56SpeakerAbout time I did something useful.

1:43:02SpeakerThank you for watching.

1:43:19SpeakerSo I'm thinking about sustainability of the cannabis industry. Same thing with the organic. It's not just about the product that you're going to consume, but how it affects everybody else. We're all on this planet together. What I do affects everybody else, and that's what we have to think about. It's not just, oh, is the patient going to get it? Thank you for joining us.

1:44:00SpeakerThere's a lot of people trying to make cannabinoids in yeast and they're going to add it back to whatever terpenes they get from whatever sources. And then the other line is going to be whole plants. We're going to specialize the plants in genetics to individual people and populations. So we can find plants that have ICBG and ITHCV. CBN, you'll have to do some sort of process with the degradation products, but I think that's a lot of the future, and then you can have, you know, special terpene profiles in these and take, you know, a CBD strain and mix it with your CBD or your THC strain and get whatever mix you want, but I think genetics and making those the plants to produce what you want is the future, and then we can use all sorts of solventless procedures to extract those cannabinoids and finally blend them with whatever carriers or whatever even to ingest them could be.

1:44:50SpeakerDabbing or vaporizing or eating or any other. Just so you can think of.

1:44:59SpeakerI was just trying to reply to some people. The chat room is getting all gnarly. Yes, it's Ego Church. Feel free to leave if you're not enjoying the show. Anyone who's watching, if you have a negative, sarcastic comment to make in the chat room, maybe just go look in the mirror and say it to yourself. For those of you that are in the chat room, 740 people.

1:45:20SpeakerYeah, we're just talking. We're just sharing information. If you don't like the information we're sharing, by all means, fuck off. Johnny B. All right, Tony's split. He's got to run. He's heading over to Chalice. We've been at it for a couple of solid hours. We might continue for a little bit longer. I definitely thank Daniel for coming out from Whistler Medical Corps. Much appreciated to get your perspective.

1:45:52SpeakerIt's nice to have Chris Bennett right before that. It was good to have Joel in before that.

1:46:01SpeakerI'm having a fantastic year time, Mark. How are you doing up there? It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I'm kind of looking forward to getting to the booth eventually. It was really nice to meet all the different people at the conference and have some pretty interesting discussions. All right, well, Johnny B, go find us a guest.

1:46:25JoelWell, in the meantime, we've got...

1:46:45SpeakerConference that we're going to be doing in Jamaica on the second, third and fourth, I believe, or third and fourth. I have it on my Facebook event, September in Montego Bay. We're going to be doing, oh, it's Mother Lover. It's D420K, Mother Lover. We're going to be doing a conference in Jamaica in Montego Bay. Our company, Cannabinoid Research and Development, will be there with a booth. We're hoping to get a bunch of other good companies representing.

1:47:12SpeakerThey've got a good speaker list. And Jamaica is a really great place to enjoy a conference. So if you can squeeze it out early September, it's before school starts for the kids. It should be a pretty good one, Mo Bay. So what's going on, mother lover? How are you enjoying the show, D? It's nice. A lot of people, a lot of ideas. It's very good. Yeah, it's good to see you at the shows, man.

1:47:41SpeakerI've never really, you know, this is a new thing for me. You started coming to the, I guess, Lyft was the first one. And now you're here at all the shows. It's wonderful. There's Hilary Black. I'll be at the next Lyft event as well. Excellent. Well, I will as well. Hello, Hilary. We're going to have to have you come over. Oh, that's fine, though. So we're going to have to have her come over and talk to us at one point in time.

1:48:06SpeakerI think he's getting her over right now. Sweet. I think he's on his way with Hillary right now. Well, let's get it nice and loud. Ball Riff, Mother Lovers. Classic on Hash Church. 94 episodes in a row and D420K's been telling you to take ball riffs.

1:48:24JoelEvery one of them.

1:48:25SpeakerBecause, you know, one of the things that we like about doing Hash Church is, you know, we want to share wonderful information and bring really articulate speakers up, but we don't want to hide our cannabis use, we don't want to hide our love for cannabis, so we want to sort of normalize the idea of having articulate and intelligent conversation, much like they're doing at the expo, but what you don't see at a lot of these expos is, you don't see people actively engaged in using cannabis while they're talking about it, and in fact, most of the expos that I've gone to and conferences Have celebrated using alcohol at the end of the night.

1:48:57SpeakerThe majority of the speakers and the people that are here will end up drinking and I'm just like, you know, as we talk about cannabis and as we celebrate cannabis, don't forget to use cannabis. You know, don't get lost in this business aspect of it all being about business and monetary gain. It's really about sharing and it's about enjoying cannabis. That's We didn't learn about this from a university degree.

1:49:22SpeakerWe learned about this from smoking cannabis. That's how the cannabis activists became activists. They smoked cannabis. They got a message from smoking cannabis. And it led them down a path of activism and sort of promotion of this plant. So for whatever you do, if you're finding yourself getting involved in cannabis or a cannabis business, Don't forget to use cannabis, whether you're just taking it orally for the endocannabinoid saturation effects, but not the euphoria, or if you just want to enjoy cannabis and get high, either way, don't forget to enjoy cannabis.

1:49:58SpeakerThat's what I wanted to say. We're going to have Hillary on here real quick, so I'm going to duck out. But I wanted to put out there a question that I've been thinking about and was put on the star chart, the star system, the star ratings. Is there a seven star? What makes a five star? What makes a three star? What are the ratings? Maybe this isn't a question now for the panel, but when the whole panel's up there, or if you smoke that sound, what is the star chart?

1:50:28SpeakerWe didn't explain, maybe during this episode or another one. I don't think there is a common star chart used around the world. Well, Jeff Church created a star chart, the Bizarre Brothers, mainly for melt factor. What was the top number? The top number was six, and that's something that would burn, basically that was what you have, Sam, a six star. And then, of course, Horatio added terpenes to some dry sift, and he called it a seven star, and then Tony added Terpenes and something else, the bubble hash, and it was eight stars.

1:51:05SpeakerSo you can go as high as you want, I guess, but legitimately what they started it for was because they had a small little group. They would sell hash and enjoy hash, and people wanted to know the melt factor because dispensaries and other companies... I do agree with you, Marcus. You can definitely rate melt factor because that's... Thank you so much for joining us.

1:51:51SpeakerYeah, absolutely. That was like very, you know, late 90s, early 2000s. First there was Full Melt, then there was Full Melt Clear Dome. Yep, exactly. And Full Melt Clear Dome was basically the six star. I don't get too hung up on the star rating systems. People are confused by it. They associate it with rosin, and I'm like, rosin is an oil. There's no melt factor to that.

1:52:12SpeakerYou can't star rate an oil because it obviously is a liquid when you heat it up.

1:52:22SpeakerWell, I think we're going to try and get Hillary up here for a little bit. Founder of the BC Compassion Club, currently working for Bedrocon, and really just a good friend of mine. Been friends with Hillary for I don't even know how long, but definitely since we were children. There she is. How's it going? Welcome. Hi, how's it going? Yes, I'll give you the mic and you can tell us a little bit about either...

1:52:47SpeakerThe conference, your media interviews, the companies you're working for, whatever you want to talk about, I just wanted to pass you the mic and let you share a little bit with Hatch Church.

1:52:58JoelHello Hatch Church world. I rarely see you because usually on Sunday mornings the last thing that I want to do is talk about cannabis because I talk about it all week long. But we're here at the conference talking about cannabis. There was something that was up for me this week that I thought was really relevant to this community in that the media was talking a little bit about THC caps.

1:53:21JoelWell, not capsules, but limits. And so, you know, part of the survey that the government has put out inviting people to give their invitation around, or not their invitation, but their input around what the future regulations are going to look like, one of the questions is about THC limits. And so You know, Mark and I had some conversations before I did my interviews and we were talking a lot about how we need to stop demonizing THC, that in many ways, you know, CBD has been used as like the cannabinoid superstar that is like harmless and it won't get you high and don't worry about that nasty THC, we can just use CBD.

1:54:00JoelAnd as we're moving forward into legalization, it's really important that we don't let We don't have a hangover from the Reefer Madness era where we continue to sort of demonize THC because of course we know that it's a wonderful molecule that's got all kinds of great therapeutic applications and that when you use more potent strains or extracts you're inhaling less plant matter and actually your more potent products can be healthier and I wish that we could get to the point with our government where instead of instead of them talking about Limiting THC levels in the products that are available in the regulated market.

1:54:39JoelWe should be teaching people about solventless hash. We should be teaching people about the healthiest possible ways to use their really potent extracts.

1:54:48SpeakerAgreed, absolutely. I thought it was a great interview. She did it on CBC, I believe. And yeah, it was just, you know, not to treat THC like the black sheep of the family. You know, the THC is extremely powerful and extremely important to cannabis as both a recreational and a medicinal, and as well as a preventative. I always like to add that third one that often doesn't get added when we talk about recreation versus medicinal, because preventative is also, you don't have to get sick to use cannabis medicinal.

1:55:23SpeakerWe call that preventative. Terrible lady. You don't like the lighting? Don't worry about the lighting. Yeah, I know. Here, I'll push this back a little bit. But this little microphone is the one that's picking us up for the people on Hash Church, so. We do have 700 people watching live right now from around the world, and maybe everyone could tell us where they're watching from right now.

1:55:44SpeakerWe could whip through a quick little... This is always fun when the chat room tells us where they're all tuning in from. It usually gives us a good idea of, you know, the sort of Amount of the world that we're covering in this dialogue and in this conversation. And I definitely want to thank Salome and the Cambridge House for allowing me to do Hash Church here at the... Oh yeah, Boulder, Holland, Seattle, Ontario, Denmark, Australia, New York, Amsterdam, Pennsylvania, Sam's here.

1:56:21SpeakerSam's here. Sam's with us. I'm watching every move, Hillary. Yeah, we know. That's why you're not on camera. We're watching Sam's every move, but he's a doll. Look at this. UK, Brazil.

1:56:38JoelOne of our forefathers in Wisconsin. Teachers.

1:56:40SpeakerYes, exactly. Hilary just mentioned one of our forefathers and one of our most important teachers, Skunk Man Sam, definitely, I was saying earlier to Joel, he may very well have forgotten more about cannabis than this entire room currently knows, but me included. But then again, I did earlier say that the more I learn about cannabis, the less I feel I know. Because it seems to open up more and more and more, and so you realize as you Dig deeper into these subjects and you uncover a new subject, you realize that's an entire subject you don't know about.

1:57:17SpeakerLibraries and libraries of books could be filled and should be filled on the amazing benefits of cannabis. Still pumping out Sweden, Illinois, Frisco, NorCal, Phoenix, Arizona, very nice, Maine, Good to see Connecticut. Definitely, oh, Glasgow, Scotland, Haywards Heath, England. It is very cool. I love to see all of those. And the other one we usually do, which we'll do right away, is what is everyone smoking on right now?

1:57:48SpeakerWhat are you all enjoying while you're watching Hash Church here? We're actually in our second... There you go. There you go. You'll see them write what they're smoking right now on the big screen. It'll start coming up soon, and... I'm sure there's going to be some great cultivars in there for sure. Yeah, man.

1:58:11JoelI'm going to go. You're going to go?

1:58:13SpeakerYeah.

1:58:14JoelI'm going to try to find you.

1:58:15SpeakerAll right. Well, thanks, Hillary, for stopping and just making a quick little hello for us. We appreciate it. Bye. See you later. Alright, so I've got still a little bit today of being at my booth. For those of you that are here at the event, feel free to come by and check out 18 cultivars of terpenes and all the bubble hash tools that I randomly and everyday do.

1:58:36SpeakerSomething I don't talk about very often here on Hash Church, but I actually sell products called bubble bags and other hash making tools that people make a lot of these products with. I feel, you know, in 93 episodes is probably enough that I can now mention them. I never wanted to shamelessly plug my own products, but when we're talking about water hash, you know, the majority of the times here in Hash Church, we're talking about hash made with bubble bags.

1:58:59SpeakerSome bags that I came up with about 17 years ago had originally seen a two-bag system in Amsterdam. They had only been on the market for a few months. I was very interested in becoming a distributor for them. It didn't work out. And just like that, my wife and I started a little company in our home with a sewing machine, a computer, and a digital camera. And 17 years later, you know, we have fresh eddies.

1:59:24SpeakerWe have bubble bags. We've taught literally thousands of people worldwide how to make hash. And we pride ourselves in the knowledge that literally tons and tons and tons of hashish have been produced using our bags in almost every country in the world. So that's quite an exciting thing to give people the power and the ability to extract glandular trichome heads at a near pharmaceutical grade in their kitchen or their living room, wherever they choose, their backyard.

1:59:52SpeakerThis is a powerful thing, and I think back in 1999 it was a real game changer before we had a lot of the concentrates. You know, there was always oil, but we didn't have the concentrates. Sorry, Johnny, I've got to mute you. Did you have something to say, bud?

2:00:14SpeakerGreat. Yeah, let's bring up Rob. He is a... Absolutely. Hey, right here, dude. Good to see you. Welcome to Hash Church. Hey, thank you very much. Rob. Rob or Robert? Rob. Rob Laurie. Okay, Rob Laurie in the house. So you want to give us a little breakdown of what you've been spending the last year or so doing here in Vancouver? Sounds good. So where am I looking?

2:00:38SpeakerThat's the camera there? Yeah, right in there. All right. So my law firm, Adelusi Law Corporation, we've been working, doing, essentially representing about 22% of the Board of Variants clients and dealing with the Board of Variants procedures. I had my first Board of Variants for Vancouver Pain Management last month, and we were very successful, had a five-book suite, were able to prove... We had a site-specific hardship, and we were also very successful in getting the members of their dispensary.

2:01:15SpeakerWe had 37 people, including J-Mac, was out to speak, and we had a very good result. And in addition to that, Chris and I have been working and collaborating on the Vancouver City Injunction situation. Explain to the audience a little bit about what these things are. So this is basically fighting for the ability and the rights for dispensaries to sell cannabis as a medicine, but also for dispel lounges, I'm sure, vapor lounges, so give a little bit of a background.

2:01:48SpeakerSo all of those issues are actually being lost in the shuffle because the recent issue involving

2:01:59SpeakerWhat those are about was because these dispensaries simply are not operating without a business license, the city of Vancouver is saying that, well, if you don't have a business license, you can't be in business, so you have to close down. Well, they didn't even have the right bylaw listed in the petition. They said that according to bylaw 4450, section 3.1 says that you can't operate a business or trade without a business permit.

2:02:26SpeakerWell, actually, it's bylaw 3575 that states that. So I suggested to Kurt, let's just respond to the city and basically say we don't know what the hell you're talking about. You have to plead the proper case. So we did that and agreed to dates to file so we could delay this out. But we did put the city on notice of our intention to bring a constitutional challenge under sections 2, section 7, and section 15 of the charter.

2:02:57SpeakerSo here's the question I have for you. Is this mainly a provincial thing right now, or are you doing this federally as well? And just for the Americans that are watching, they have this state thing going on. We have a federal thing going on, but we have really no provincial mechanisms that allow for these businesses to exist. Uh, legally, like they do down in the state mechanisms, so just maybe kind of explain a little bit about the differences between the provincial and the federal, and whether or not we're going to be in a position that we can use our provincial laws to create something unique in this province.

2:03:31SpeakerOkay. Well, I'll do my best to try to do a very brief constitutional law 101, both American, Canadian, so we can get what's going on. So the United States, like Canada, is still a federal system, but The state law, in certain instances, trumps federal law. Whereas in Canada, we have the rule called, well, under federalism in Canada, paramountcy, meaning that federal laws will trump provincial law. So under the Canadian Constitution, you have Section 91 deals with federal law, Section 92 deals with provincial law.

2:04:08SpeakerSo where you have an overlap is, well, the feds are... We have jurisdiction to deal with health care. That's a federal issue. They also have jurisdiction to deal with criminal law. However, under the provincial law, the provinces are responsible for the implementation of criminal law. They're also under section 9213, I believe, provinces have the power to regulate industry and trade. So let me just explain this in a very simple context.

2:04:44SpeakerCanada is one of the only countries in the Western developed world that has provincial securities regulators. So if you deal with the states, any of our American friends out there, and you want to list public securities, you have one federal regulator, that's the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, in Canada, each province more or less has its own securities regulator, because that goes back to The Constitution and so on.

2:05:11SpeakerBut you can see that securities like cannabis is now an international issue that certainly transcends provincial, federal, and municipal law. So there is really no law at the moment. The municipal government in Vancouver has said, well, we consider the dispensary situation a crisis. And because of this crisis, we need to regulate it, similar to what Vancouver did with the Safe Injection Center. Right. But, and here's the big but, you have the federal government saying, no, you can We're also involved with that.

2:05:50SpeakerSo here you have

2:06:17SpeakerThe first time when a prime minister meets with a provincial, or sorry, with a municipal speaker, the mayor, and that hasn't happened since 1972 when Trudeau Sr. met with the mayor of Vancouver. But we've had two recent meetings with the prime minister and our mayor. I'm pretty sure the meetings went something like this. My minister says to the mayor, Mayor, your municipal pro-dispensary program is, forgive my language, fucking up our federal program.

2:06:53SpeakerYou better do something about it. Municipal mayor says back, fine, but we need TransLink money. Where do you think they got the TransLink money? Yeah, it was billions, eh? Hundreds of millions? Well, 30 million. 30 million, okay. Where we're going with all this is where this dispensary issue is really coming to foot here is there was never an intention, I believe, to regulate dispensaries. It was not a regulation policy.

2:07:20SpeakerWhat was put in place was an elimination strategy, right? Because if liquor and alcohol and tobacco can be sold within 200 meters of school, then why do we need the difference for cannabis when if used as directed, alcohol and tobacco will kill you. At least you give a little benefit of a doubt that there might be some help from cannabis. So, why are we treating it this way?

2:07:46SpeakerAlso, some of the regulations like no dispensaries in the Vancouver Entertainment District makes no sense. I live in the Gravel Entertainment District. So you're telling me that I can go down to Gravel Street, I can eat cheap food, I can go to endless nightclubs, I can see strippers now at the Gravel Strip, I can buy some sex toys if I wanted to. You can see 40 cops walking hand in hand.

2:08:10SpeakerI can see endless string of bars and nightclubs, but yet I could not go down there as a medical patient and buy cannabis in a reasonable, dignified, patient manner. So something is wrong and then You go down to Gravel Street on Friday, Saturday nights. Well, by 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, the dispensaries are closed. That's when the Gravel Entertainment District essentially opens up. They close the streets to cater to the alcoholics and the bars and the teens and so on.

2:08:40SpeakerAll that policing money is not from dispensaries. It's... To do with the nightclubs and alcohol. And there's dozens of cops down there. So if you want to deal with dispensaries, maybe 300 meters isn't necessary at all. Put a bouncer on the door and have a system of secure access. How about we mention as well, I saw Kirk posted this, and this was in regards to cannabis tourism and how we absolutely can't have cannabis tourism.

2:09:08SpeakerIt's like, well, why not? We have... We have beer and alcohol tourism. We have these other types of tourism that exist. Why would we not want to promote cannabis tourism here in British Columbia? Well, it makes no sense. In fact, I'll tell you a story of my personal life. Last year I was on holiday with my family and we went to the wineries in Okanagan. And I started calling them wine dispensaries just to piss my wife off because they're basically the same thing.

2:09:38SpeakerAnd I said to her, like, honey, isn't this amazing? You know, you're coming here and you're learning wine and you're getting to talk to the head venters and the growers and you can pick the dirt and smell it if you want and sample wines. And I said, that's fantastic. I mean, you're having a good time, right? And she said, oh, this is great. And I said, well, this is the fun I have when I go to a dispensary.

2:09:58SpeakerRight? You know, I can walk in there, I can talk to the staff, find out about the product, and so on. So really, these wine dispensaries or wineries are a billion dollar industry for the BC government. But, you know, this all comes from a legal background, too. Earlier on that trip, I had breakfast with Remo Colasanti, the urban grower, and his wife, and I asked him, you know, how do you guys get your product there to, when you compete in tournaments?

2:10:29SpeakerHow do you get your product into these other countries? Of course, even though it might be a legal tournament, getting the product there is still illegal. So I asked back at the winery some of these people, well, tell me the origins of some of your crops and grapes. How did they come to Canada? Well, sure enough, this was in front of my wife, they're like, well, we had to smuggle them into Canada in about 1965.

2:10:53SpeakerSo the long and the short is a lot of good industry seems to come out of illegal industry. And I was talking to Jody about this the other day on Carly's show. I mean, stock car racing, NASCAR, is the most popular sport in the United States now. But what are the origins of NASCAR? It's bootlegging. It was where other bootleggers would take stock cars that he would buy direct from the factory and soup them up.

2:11:20SpeakerSo the cops would think it was just a regular vehicle. They would then go to either arrest the vehicle or apprehend it and they couldn't keep up. Well, all these moonshiners and bootleggers like Jack Daniels got together and said, you know what, it sure is fun out racing the cops, but why don't we get a challenge and race each other? And that's how NASCAR started. They'd race on beaches, race on tracks.

2:11:43SpeakerI mean, hell, the show Dukes of Hazzard, big hit of the 80s, was all about basically normalizing and glorifying Alcohol prohibition. So who knows what legacies and industries we're going to have from cannabis dispensaries. But certainly we know that the city of Vancouver is doing their best to suppress this cottage grassroots industry. Yeah, which is insane when you think of the numbers that this city has produced in cannabis over the years.

2:12:11SpeakerHow much of the cannabis used to get sent down to America before they entered into their dispensaries and their state laws. Billions and billions of dollars. We've got a lot of people who have funded this province. Some years it was higher than forestry. They were guessing the numbers of cannabis smuggling down into the US were higher than forestry numbers. So can you imagine the amount of money that got pumped into this province from cannabis industry, from cannabis growing and from cannabis selling?

2:12:44SpeakerIt's hard to imagine what this province would look like without it. Also, the numbers. When they say that British Columbia is a $7.1 billion industry, well, What does that actually look like? Well, is that money that makes $7.1 billion actually coming back to Canada? So in the old days, you know, you'd have a pound or whatever. It would have to cross the border. You'd have to engage a border jumper or a broker to take that product across the border.

2:13:12SpeakerIf it made its way as far to Miami or New York, that pound of BC bud, which would have gone for maybe $2,500 in the good old days, certainly would go for $6,000 in Miami. So is that money, the $5,000 to $4,000 margin that's made on that product purchased in Miami, is that money actually making it back to BC? The answer is no. If you really know how the drug market works, if I'm a BC grower and I've got $250,000 worth of product that's now being sold in California, well I'm not going to risk that cash being brought up to Canada, no.

2:13:53SpeakerThank you for watching.

2:14:07SpeakerThen the person that sent the marijuana south is going to realize a significant margin with a gain on top. And that money and product hasn't moved anywhere. It's just because of a legal system which uses the same system and processes as the legal system. Well, I can definitely say from knowing a lot of people involved in the trade in the late 90s in BC that an enormous amount of money came up.

2:14:34SpeakerI saw it. Millions of dollars, in fact. People were not trading cocaine for pot. They were not cocaine people. They were pot people. But there were people in the industry that had money on both sides of the border, and it was very easy for them to be like, how much money do you need in Canada? Spot pricing. Yeah, it was just spot pricing. It was like a thing that a lot of the Asian gangs offered up.

2:14:54SpeakerAnd it was a prohibition-based thing, but it was definitely something that was happening. We weren't getting the massive profits here, but we weren't also getting extradited and serving 10 to 20 years in prison down in the US. The people that were the smartest in Canada just sold their herb for a reasonable price. Trust me, when you're growing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cannabis and you're selling it, that money is still going into the BC economy.

2:15:17SpeakerNow, the majority of the money that he's talking about, because when you say buying a pound for $2,000 US dollars and selling it for $6,000, that's $400,000 profit on every hundred pack. And I knew people that they could themselves almost do hundred packs just... Just running it over the border in the Kootenays. That was a classic thing. Young people did that all the time because it was their trails.

2:15:40SpeakerThey grew up there. It wasn't really... Creston, Idaho. Yeah, exactly. Right into Creston. Borders Crossing. Yeah, exactly. Well, no, no. Everything you're saying is true. But there's, again, when Neil Boyd tries to do the calculation in his book, Bud Inc., about $7.1 billion industry, he even looks at that. But... Really, money's not the question. It's really the issue of what is this industry going to look like?

2:16:05SpeakerAnd really, what does reasonable dignified patient access look like? Because that's still what we're grappling with, which goes back to Harvey Parker. And the federal government keep inching. And reluctantly moving closer to what a system of reasonable dignified patient access looks like. And thank goodness that we have lawyers like Rick Tussaud and John Conroy and the Charter, or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because other jurisdictions like the states, although they have a Bill of Rights, it's Really not the same as we have in Canada.

2:16:40SpeakerAustralia doesn't. And while the UK and the EU both respectively were looking at something like this, but Canada is very unique. So let's see where we go from there. Definitely shout out to those lawyers. Kirk was new when I had my problems. I was obviously, I helped the BC Compassion Club quite a bit. I helped the BC Compassion Club quite a bit in the past. I'm not sure why we're off the screen.

2:17:08SpeakerWhat I was going to mention was, sorry if you guys lost sight, you can still hear. No, this is the window right on here, it's just not working anymore. I'd have to unplug it, plug it back in maybe. We'll see, maybe this will come back. I was busted in 1998 at a roadblock with 16 and a half pounds of cannabis. I was carrying that cannabis for the BC Compassion Club due to the fact that people thought it was a good idea to drive their cars through their front window and try to steal their safe.

2:17:41SpeakerThis was back in the 90s when not a lot of people were doing this. Hillary was really practicing a civil disobedience almost alone. You know, she built an amazing team over the years, but in the beginning it was very much alone that she was the one person standing up to practice this level of civil disobedience. So I kind of felt like I better at least get in behind her and do the best that I could do.

2:18:01SpeakerOffering to help with that cannabis going through that roadblock at night. Ended up getting arrested. John Conroy, of course, represented me. That's Richardson versus Regina. And I was given in the end. What year was that again? 1998 that I got the charges, about $99,000 or $2,000 by the time everything finished. I just started law school in 2000. Wow. Interesting. Yeah. So John did an amazing job. Started.

2:18:29SpeakerThe judge, Judge Paradis, he developed prostate cancer. He's passed away since from that. So I think he was listening a little bit, you know, deeper than normal. And the BC Compassion Club patients coming and representing for me and showing up with little signs saying, show mark compassion for he showed us compassion. It meant a great deal to me. And I'll never forget being at the table, you know, in court.

2:18:56SpeakerAnd the judge is asking when the next court case should convene. And he's saying, how's November 25th, Mr. Conroy? And Mr. Conroy says, oh, the 25th is no good for me. We'll have to push it into December. And then he puts his hand over his mic and he goes, because I'll be at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam with you. We actually went to the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam together that year, which was a pretty cool thing for your lawyer to say while you're being charged for trafficking your possessions.

2:19:25SpeakerDefinitely a unique situation.

2:19:28JoelAnything else you want to share in regards to...

2:19:30SpeakerWell, it's been an absolute pleasure to be on Ash Church at the Cannabis Conference, and it's been a cool weekend, and a big shout out to Salome and her crew, and everybody I've met at the conference, and if you want to follow up with me or have any questions, you can reach me. My name again is Robert Glory, I'm at Addison Law Corporation, and I'm going to be down at the conference for Pretty much most of the day.

2:20:01SpeakerAwesome. Thank you again. Yeah, man. Thanks for coming. Good to have you. Thank you. All right. All right, guys. Nice to have this variety of guests that you can just choose and pick from here at the conference. It's pretty sweet. Sometimes at Hash Church we end up in these sort of slow-going sections. I know the majority of my panel, Todd, Etienne, Tony, they're all enjoying Chalice right now, so very stoked for them to...

2:20:25SpeakerTo tell us all about that when it's over, probably next week we'll get a really good lowdown from three of those guys. I guess in the meantime, you know, I can talk a little bit about some of the things that I'm involved in. A company in Jamaica that we started a few years back called Cannabinoid Research and Development is in the midst of applying for licenses along with the rest of the companies that are finally in that situation.

2:20:51SpeakerJamaica's been pretty fast watching and following the rest of the world. I'm sure some of you even saw their newspaper article of how, you know, first they decriminalized two ounces. This is how fast Jamaica moves, which is awesome. They decriminalized two ounces for everyone. And then within two years of that, they propose to put kiosks at the airports where you can actually buy your herbs or your concentrates.

2:21:20SpeakerSo you would show up at the airport, you get stamped at the immigration, you might go to the next desk where they might say, would you like a smoker's license for your stay? I don't know, it's going to be some sort of a money grab, but really, who cares? I mean, if I can get a little license from Jamaica that says I'm allowed to smoke in Jamaica...

2:21:38SpeakerI'll pay $50, I'll pay $100, whatever it is, and then go to the kiosk if you prefer. I'm not sure I would prefer to do the kiosk thing. Generally speaking, in Jamaica, the worst herb has always been at the airport. But we'll see what happens there. It's definitely an interesting scenario with how they're looking at... You can go on the website, actually, and you can look at all of the...

2:22:01SpeakerThank you. Thank you. Thank you.

2:22:31SpeakerI know I'm going to be there, September 2nd to 5th. Won't you be able to travel with your hash back and forth to Jamrock? Well, that's a great question. Right now, I'm currently not able to travel with my hash.

2:22:55SpeakerAnywhere other than in Canada, I'm a federally exempt MMAR patient with a license to grow 99 plants and possess, I think it was about 650 grams as well as 6 or 7,000 grams at my house. Once the MMAR was under fire and MMPR was created, they slashed a few of the limitations for driving around with, so I think now I'm allowed 150 grams until the Health Canada comes out in August and explains to us the new regulations.

2:23:23SpeakerSo I'm able to take 150 grams anywhere in Canada, but even though there are, you know, Washington is a medical state, I can potentially get a license in Washington, but the problem is there's a federal border between the two places. So we're a federal law, we have to wait for America to become federal, then reciprocity can occur between the two countries and we would be able to potentially travel between our two borders with our medicine.

2:23:50SpeakerSo very much looking forward to that. Bubble Man, what do you think prices in Jamaica will look like? Well, you know, with cannabis it's always funny because people always want to charge the most that they can possibly charge. It's a prohibition mentality. You know, once you can get $4,000, $5,000 for a pound, you never not want to get that again if you're in that mentality of prohibition-based profiting.

2:24:15SpeakerFor me, the profit margin of prohibition is terrible. Making money Based on people going to prison is a terrible profit margin. And I truly believe that it comes with a karmic debt that you're going to have to pay off. I've been paying mine off from the time that I spent making profit off of cannabis. Even though I was helping out the BC Compassion Club and I was doing all these little sort of philanthropic things, it still wasn't enough to pay off the karmic debt of selling so much cannabis for a profit margin that was based on people going to prison.

2:24:50SpeakerI'm hoping that the new profit margin for cannabis will be based on standards, operating procedures, and quality and access. And those things, to me, you know, being able to make the best product possible and making it accessible to someone at a reasonable price, to me, is a great profit margin to get behind, particularly from a medical standpoint. I don't really have the same ethics when it comes to a recreational standpoint.

2:25:13SpeakerDo you want to create a business and sell cannabis products recreationally? I support it, but I definitely don't think that you have to go in with the same ethics that you do when you're dealing with patients. It's a recreation. It's a fun. People don't want to pay the price. They won't. But when it's medicine, it's different, and we need to make it accessible both in price and availability to the people that need it.

2:25:36SpeakerWhat do you say, D? Bring it in the trees? Yeah, I thought I'd bring you something to eat. So, wheat! I'll take it, man. Bubble man, do you think that Jamaica will be a top quality hash producer in the future? I think with the right growers, and the right processors, and more importantly, very, very importantly, the right breeding. I personally think that the breeding Has to be done immediately.

2:26:12SpeakerIt's the breeding of the cultivars that will really push Jamaica to the next level. I've spent 20 years going there. I can tell you that I can always find great herb, but I can also tell you that the majority of what people have access to, thanks to the pollen and the inbreeding, is very low quality in a sense. Not the THC content, not the terpene content, because the sun's very powerful and it definitely produces that.

2:26:37SpeakerWhen I talk about the quality, I mean the power of the plant, the ability for it to fight mildew, the ability for it to fight bugs. Just the strength behind the genetics are deeply weakened from all the inbreeding that has occurred. And I think that, like Tony says, that lion needs to be bred back into the jungle. And right now they have a lot of kittens, and kittens don't fare well in the jungle.

2:26:59SpeakerThe jungle's a dangerous place. You need those lions to take care of business. So one of the projects that we're most excited about for Jamaica is to breed proper cultivars to grow in that environment, field environment, so that also, not just for us, but obviously for the Jamaican people, they'll be able to have access to that. Jamaican growers will be able to come and get access to these bread plants and Thank you for watching.

2:27:43SpeakerThey have to climb mountains and be very, very, very far away from roads and whatnot. Some of them will even plant acres of another crop of peanuts or whatever. And they will actually tend and garden and process that entire crop of peanuts because that's their front story. When they get caught near their grow, they take the police to the peanut farm and they say, I'm a peanut farmer.

2:28:07SpeakerCan you imagine planting acres of peanuts as your front to grow cannabis that you have to climb a mountain to get to the top of your field? These are all things that are going to change for the Jamaicans. They're not going to have to do that anymore as the law subsides as we're allowed to do this. We're going to choose better agricultural properties. We're going to choose areas that are accessible by roads and we're going to be able to be in Thank you so much for joining us.

2:28:47SpeakerHe lived in a very, very harsh environment. They called it the dungle, which was basically where the jungle and the dump was combined. Trench Town is a very harsh environment, and if you ever go there, you will see that it's a shocking environment for such an incredible messenger, prophet, if you will, to come out of. You don't think that you can get quality hash from almost any quality herb in Jamaica?

2:29:13SpeakerNo, Laszlo, I do not. I've made a lot of hash in Jamaica, both with sifting as well as bubble hash. And, you know, Sam could attest that you really have to know the right growers there and the people who have access to the right cultivars. If you just grab anything and try to make some bubble with it, you'll end up with some hash, but you won't end up with what I would call, yeah, the fire, the highest quality, 60-70% THC, like 10-12, you know, 5-8% terpenes maybe, like the sun produces an incredible melt factor in Jamaican hash.

2:29:46SpeakerWhat's next after dry sift? Wasn't that a rosin? No, rosin is oil to me. I don't think rosin is after dry sift. I think the dry sift is potentially the holy grail. I mean, it is, in simplest form, the unadulterated oil. Profile of cannabinoids and terpenes extracted without any footprint. You're using just mechanical screen separation and some other little tricks and tips that we've shared over the years.

2:30:16SpeakerActually, what it is is micro-encapsulated cannabinoids and terpenes. All right. Say that again, Sam. Micro-encapsulated with a natural wax covering. Exactly. Without any water solubles removed, which is really the only difference you get with the water hash where you're removing water solubles. People that disagree with that can merely look at the color of the water. The last time I checked, it changes color every single time you wash.

2:30:44SpeakerIt never comes out clear ever. So I'm not exactly sure of exactly the constituents that are in that water, but what a wonderful test that would be, wouldn't it, Mark?

2:30:55Mark ScaldoneYeah, sure. Just boil it down. Yeah, just mess it up, see what's in there. I'm sure that's been done, right?

2:31:04SpeakerYou know, you would think it has been done, but I've never seen it, and I've been involved in this for almost 20 years. Neither have I, but if you smell the water, it smells like terpene. How about your bubble hashed water, it's a salt, it's taking some color out, when you freeze that, the terpene starts,

2:31:34SpeakerHave you done this? No, I haven't, but it makes sense, doesn't it? It doesn't work. I've done it. I've tried it. I've seen a few people try it. I don't know why, but I've frozen gallons of bubble water and it just turns to a pock and there's nothing really floating on top the way you would see in a terpene extraction through like a hydro diffuser or a vac diffuser or something like that.

2:31:58Mark ScaldoneYeah, because it's soluble. It's soluble in the water phase, so it's infinitely dispersed.

2:32:05SpeakerSee you everybody. Thanks, Steve. Oh, we've got another guest coming up here. I'm going to meet them at the same time as you guys. Hello. Welcome. All right, well, we're going to have to get you to do a little introduction. We've got about 600, 700 people watching live right now here on Hash Church, and we've got a little conversation going on inside. And I'll just let you introduce yourself.

2:32:30JoelHello.

2:32:32SpeakerSo I'm Dr. Natasha Riz, and I was speaking today about how cannabis can affect gut health and also how cannabis can affect skin health. So my background is in human nutritional sciences and I have a PhD in experimental medicine and I'm an expert in the gut. So basically inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, those types of conditions can really be helped with cannabis and I'm interested in pursuing research in those areas.

2:33:07SpeakerAnd I also own Srammy Organic Skincare and make topical anti-aging products with hemp seed oil. Great. I was going to say, when you mentioned that you were focused on skin, I thought for sure that you were reaping the benefits from the essential amino acid-rich seed embryo of cannabis. So that's wonderful. I don't know if you could tell us a little bit about some of the things you've learned in regards to, I mean, we talk about the gut a little bit on Hash Church with Mark Scaldone, and he's another PhD chemist here in the room right now, and we talk about sort of, you know, when you put cannabis into your gut, how there's all sorts of different chemistry going on there, and so you may think that you're acquiring a certain ratio of cannabinoids, but once it kind of goes into the gut, it can change.

2:33:53SpeakerAnd so have you learned much about that, or...? Not really about that specific question. And I'm not sure if there's a lot of research quite there yet. The research with cannabis on the gut is still pretty new. And so in my talk I kind of went over six main areas that cannabis could help with gut issues. And so one of the main ones is nausea and vomiting.

2:34:21SpeakerSo that was really one of the first things that THC in particular was shown to be medically helpful for. As an anti-medic. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so it was originally shown to be really helpful for patients going under chemotherapy with cancer and suffering the side effects from that. And THC was very helpful for them. Just from anyone suffering with gut conditions who's suffering anxiety, vomiting, THC can be very helpful for that.

2:34:53SpeakerAlso for appetite issues and weight loss. So patients with Crohn's disease often suffer from dramatic weight loss and wasting conditions. And so again, cannabis has been approved for wasting conditions with HIV and AIDS patients. So this type of research is also applicable to patients with Crohn's and colitis. And then the area that I'm really interested in is inflammation. So there is a lot of preliminary work, you know, test tube experiments, animal experiments, and some human experiments showing that cannabis is a very effective anti-inflammatory compound.

2:35:31SpeakerAnd there's a lot of different compounds in cannabis that can calm inflammation. So, for instance, THC, we know about that, but there's also CBD, and then you guys were talking about terpenoids, so people think terpenoids just smell nice and can affect your mood, but they also are very effective at targeting inflammation, in particular, limonene, linalool, so there's a lot of different interactions going on with that. Interesting.

2:35:55SpeakerOne of the questions in Brett Maverick, one of our... Fairly intelligent members of Hash Church here. He was wondering what your opinion is on the cyclical vomiting that doctors, he says like to, but often, you know, say that it could be in regards to cannabis. Do you think that because, I know that cannabis can regulate appetite both to increase an appetite or to suppress an appetite. I've known people use cannabis to actually lose weight.

2:36:21SpeakerSo it's obviously can regulate these biological functions. If it is going to help certain people with nausea and vomiting, there may really be something to this, I can't remember the name of it, hyperemesis, hyperemesis, right. So this is where people want to have showers and they tend to vomit over and over and over again. So do you, how do you, what do you think of that? Like is that something that For some reason, the cannabis is interacting in a unique way because I know it's a very small part of the populace that occurs in, but that is something in the gut.

2:36:54SpeakerIt is something in regards to the anti-emetic properties of cannabis working in the opposite way that they should be working. Yeah, so lots of people are asking about this recently. So this is not a new condition. It's been around in the literature anyway for at least 10 years. And it is rare. There's some case studies reporting it. And I think this condition is often confused with cyclic vomiting syndrome, which is also another confusing condition where vomiting, chronic vomiting can happen for a number of reasons, including just a stress response.

2:37:27SpeakerSo the thing that makes the cannabis-type emesis syndrome unique is the patients seem to be Get better by showering in hot water, hot baths. So that's kind of the thing. And also when they... So that's really the only way they can actually tell at this point if it's due to cannabis. So there's a lot of confusion. I'm sure now with cannabis being more popular, it may be over-misdiagnosed.

2:37:57SpeakerBut again, I'm not a physician, so I don't see patients in this condition. I can just tell you what I've seen in the literature. They don't know why it happens. They think it's an overstimulation of the cannabinoid system, which Thank you for joining us today.

2:38:36SpeakerSo these are receptors that play a role in pain and also heat. So when you put chili pepper on your skin and you feel that heat, that's the TRPV receptors that are responding to it. And cannabis can also signal through these receptors and interact with heat and pain. So I wonder even if it's something to do with these TRPV receptors that maybe even some of the terpenoids or other things

2:39:07SpeakerAnd it's just kind of my musings. This hasn't been shown in any research. And really, we don't know why it's happening. Right. So in regards to Crohn's, you had mentioned, I have a good friend, Colton Turner, who's come on Hash Church. He's become well known. He had a very bad case of Crohn's. It seemed like it was going to kill him. His colon was just black in the photos.

2:39:28SpeakerAnd he was very young at the time. He actually developed his Crohn's from drowning in a lake. He was saved from the drowning. But the shock to his system of drowning Thank you for joining us.

2:39:54SpeakerI'd rather be illegally alive than legally dead. And it's a very profound and powerful sort of story, but when you look at the photos of his colon now, they are so healthy and so pink that it almost seems as though it's a remission. Like it doesn't seem like there's... Do you believe that cannabis has that ability to push Crohn's almost completely out of the body to the point where a person can live a normal life?

2:40:20SpeakerHave you seen that? Well, again, I don't personally deal with patients, so I can tell you what the literature shows and what the research shows. So you said a few interesting points. First one was that his Crohn's was triggered by a stressful environment or a stressful drowning. So that's very common for these conditions to be triggered by a very stressful response. So that's one of the ways cannabis can help with these conditions is it can bring this system, our endocannabinoid system that plays a very important role in bringing our body back to homeostasis.

2:40:54SpeakerSo we can use cannabis or even trigger our endocannabinoid system through natural ways. I mean there's other foods, herbs, dietary strategies, exercise strategies that can also Thank you for joining us today.

2:41:21SpeakerThis isn't necessarily the disease that causes the stunting. In some people it is because they don't eat enough so they get massive nutrient deficiencies. But a lot of the drugs that these patients have to take actually causes the stunting. So unfortunately that's a side effect of steroids and a lot of Thank you so much for joining us.

2:42:01SpeakerWell, at this point in time, there is no cure for the disease, so we can't really say that, but it definitely can help patients get into a state of remission and stay in remission. And there's not, there's really only one clinical trial looking at this. So, Dr. Naftali, a group from Israel, they did a double-blind clinical trial with looking at smoked cannabis and Crohn's disease. And so they had two groups.

2:42:27SpeakerIt was a small study, 21 patients, but These patients were unresponsive to steroids, TNF, alpha blockers, all these other conditions, so they had no hope for them, basically.

2:42:37JoelAnd then they put them on cannabis, smoked cannabis with about 150 milligrams of THC,

2:42:43SpeakerAnd it was a neat study because the blinded group also were smoking cannabis cigarettes, but they didn't have any THC in them. They developed a method to take the THC out so they could have a true blinded study. And so they found that the patients who consumed cannabis had less pain, had less anxiety, and even I think three of the patients were able to go off all their steroids so it could help with reducing some of the medication.

2:43:09SpeakerSo...

2:43:13SpeakerI know, I read them too, I know, because he's like, seven years remission, Natasha Cumbercross, Regards to Cannabis, and then someone asked about celiac disease. We'll try to answer. You guys got to slow down. You guys can also email me or hit me up on Twitter at Tashriz, T-A-S-H-R-Y-Z. I talk gut stuff and answer questions on there. So if I don't get to your question... Ask me another time and I'll get to it.

2:43:41SpeakerBut yeah, so the main things that cannabis is going to do for Crohn's is it's going to target the inflammation. It's going to help with the symptoms. But we should also think about all the different ways of consuming cannabis because just smoking or vaping cannabis has some benefits, but for patients with Crohn's, the issue is in the gut. So they want to be consuming, using it interactively, using it topically for some in case.

2:44:06SpeakerAnd again, Crohn's and Colitis is not... My Twitter was at TashRiz. T-A-S-H-R-Y-Z. Sorry. So yeah, there's

2:44:18SpeakerA lot of opportunities for cannabis for Crohn's and Colitis, but more research is desperately needed because there's not a good amount of data that doctors can look at right now and say, like they can trust. Whereas I'm trained to look at the basic animal models, the cell culture models, and so I can understand those mechanisms and I can understand how that can be translated to human studies.

2:44:41SpeakerSo what do you think about the ability or the amount of people today that have just developed celiacs or gluten intolerances? Obviously the wheat has changed quite a bit. I personally am a believer that it's glycophosphates from Roundup that are doing it more so than just people becoming allergic out of the blue to gluten. But do you think, is there any literature that says maybe cannabis will be able to help some of these people?

2:45:08SpeakerBecause man, I seem to Half my friends seem to have celiac disease now or be gluten-tolerant, and it's just a very sort of confusing thing in this day and age to see. So celiac disease is a complicated condition also. Of course, these patients have to avoid gluten and stay on a strict gluten-free diet, but even that, patients can follow that and still have issues. And then a lot of these patients find out that they have other issues like they may be sensitive to dairy or they have to find other foods that they can't tolerate.

2:45:39SpeakerSo a big part of this condition is keeping a food diary and being really like what works for you because it's going to be different for every patient. But cannabis can really help with celiac disease just for pain, for inflammation, because what's happening is it's an allergic response to gluten in the gut, and it's causing gut inflammation, gut barrier disruption. It's changing up the gut bacteria so that you're getting issues with overgrowth of bacteria.

2:46:06SpeakerSo all these other things are also contributing to the disease. So cannabis can help with these parts. It'll indirectly help with the conditions. But I don't think it's ever going to... I don't think it's going to be a point where, oh, you can take some cannabis and now you can eat blue. It's not going to help like that, but it can help with symptoms. Well, that's very interesting work that you're doing.

2:46:25SpeakerIt seems to be so many different aspects of cannabis that you are able to focus on. It's now that we're actually allowed to do this work. It's an exciting time, in my opinion, to be an educated person involved in this level of, you know, this new cannabis education that's going on right now. We're going to share this message literally with 10 to 20,000 people in the next seven days that watch this video.

2:46:52SpeakerSo really, thank you for coming on and sharing your time. I really appreciate it. Yeah, that was amazing. I know the group really liked it. If you guys have any more questions in the chat room, she's still sitting here next to me, and I should probably answer. Or just hit her up on Twitter. Hey, why don't I punch your Twitter account into it? What is it?

2:47:20SpeakerJust put it in the chat for you guys there. Is this IBD sufferer and cannabis cultivator here and using cannabis helps? Absolutely. It does. It heals my psoriasis. I'm not done. Okay. Psoriasis, someone just wrote a comment about psoriasis. Psoriasis is an interesting condition because it has similarities to Crohn's disease in the type of immune response. So cannabis definitely can help with psoriasis also, and it's targeting TH17 immune responses if you want to get geeky and look into that.

2:47:58SpeakerThey do, they do. Hash Church is all about getting geeky. It's all about getting as educated as possible and sort of normalizing this information in a context that... Sort of puts us all together instead of divides and separates us into different groups. So yeah, once again, really, thanks for coming on and sharing that information.

2:48:15JoelI wish I could have seen you speak, but I did get to sit next to you and listen to you speak, so that's very nice.

2:48:20SpeakerAll right. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm going to call it short here, guys. I have not been at my booth all day. I was going to go until 2 o'clock, but I think we're going to just cut it short as we have the short small panel. Thank everyone for coming. Mr. Scaldone making it in, Johnny B for walking around the rooms, and Skunk Man Sam.

2:48:39SpeakerWe had Todd and Etienne and Tony in earlier. Thanks to all the guests from Joel and Chris Bennett and Rob Laurie and Dr. Tash, all of them. Thank you so much for being a part of Hash Church here at the Cannabis and Hemp Conference, the Vancouver Cannabis and Hemp Conference. Thanks Cambridge House, thanks Carly and Salome and all the people that made it possible here. Just obviously thank the people who are constantly showing up for Hash Church every Sunday.

2:49:09SpeakerYou, the audience, make it possible for us to want to be here and share our knowledge. So thanks everybody. It's been a great day. We'll see you for episode 95 in about a week. And Marcus, maybe you can mention that next week we can talk about CBD. Peace, guys. Have a great day. About what, Sam, sorry? With Fred Gardner. I think he'll be talking about CBD next week.

2:49:35SpeakerOh, wonderful, right. We're going to have Fred Gardner on next week, so he's going to be coming in and talking about CBD. I know Chimera's going to make it in for that. I think it'll be a really great dialogue, so try not to miss it, guys. Peace out.