California's Adult Use of Marijuana Act

0:01BubblemanHey everybody! Welcome to Hash Church episode 86. A little Richie Spice in the background because I had so much fun the other week starting Hash Church with a little... Dabin. So welcome everybody. I'm going to send out the links and we're going to have some great conversations today. I'm looking forward to it. We've got Mr. Chris Conrad coming on, maybe even Tim Blake from the Emerald Cup.

0:26BubblemanAnd we're going to be discussing OM, the adult use, new cannabis law for California. So let's send that out. Boom. We'll open up down here. Somehow I closed up everything. Ah, there it is. Send out our Facebook link to all the good folks. Hopefully I'm not forgetting everyone. I always feel like I'm forgetting someone. Anyway, let's blow smoke signals to the Vatican. I know Etienne is going to be in right away.

1:01BubblemanWe've got almost 300 people watching. I've got the pipes clean. The mothership is clean, as is the Taurus for Hash Church. So... Let's do this. It's a dab-a-doo time. There's it, yeah? Good morning, sir. Mr. Todd McCormick, welcome, welcome.

1:21SpeakerGood morning, guys.

1:22BubblemanHi, Todd. Got a little music playing if you're wondering what that sound is in the background. Now, the music playing does not give Mark Scaldone permission to go get his guitar and play music, but we do welcome you into the room, brother. We love you. And on a side note, I really enjoyed your ukulele playing the other day, ATN. That was really, really a cool little live book.

1:47Etienne FontanThanks, bud. Yeah, I got inspired by you yesterday on Facebook, so I went out and did a little jam. That's what I do for relaxation. It was fun to smoke a big fatty and enjoy people... Shooting the vibe back to you. It was a lot of fun.

2:14BubblemanAnd then Mark posted a video of him jamming with you, which was also very cool.

2:18Etienne FontanThat was pretty cool, Mark, I have to say. I appreciate it there, Mr. Shelldog.

2:22SpeakerYeah, how cool is that, right? We can actually play together over the internet? That was totally cool.

2:27Etienne FontanYeah, a few thousand miles apart and just get your jam on.

2:30BubblemanGet your jam on. All right, so I'm just trying to make sure I got everyone properly invited this morning. We had a bunch of different people that were willing to come on and talk. But it seems like the conversation was going to be, you know, very much directed at this AUM, the AUM, New, I guess, Policy Law Law.

2:51SpeakerIt's AUMA. It's an initiative. Here in California, we have an initiative process which allows us to collect signatures in a form of direct democracy. To me, it was really surprising because when I got here in 1992, I had never seen people outside of supermarkets with initiatives carrying these signatures. Clipboards in order to collect signatures for a ballot because we didn't have a ballot initiative system in Rhode Island.

3:18SpeakerThis is something mostly in most of the western states where they were trying to stop rampant corruption.

3:26BubblemanOkay, interesting. Well, this is going to be the conversation today, I think, for the most part. We've got a couple of good guests coming in. I also have Samurai Sam from the Omicron Company. He drove up from Bellingham to show me this new... Hercules unit that's a sealed all-oil cartridge that basically lasts for a very long time. You don't have to throw away or replace this particular one.

3:49BubblemanSo I kind of like the idea of that. We're going to talk to him a little bit about that. And we might even have Chris from The Clear come on a little bit later on. I just fired him off an email. And it's tough trying to organize these talks sometimes because, you know, we get into a talk and a conversation could go for three or four hours, the entire church.

4:06BubblemanAnd then you kind of feel bad that you may have invited someone else in with a very different conversation. So we'll go with the flow. Om is on the top of the list today. But if we can get Chris Barone in, we will absolutely get him in and get talking about what we ended our conversation with last week, which was talking about purity and clarity and color of different extracts and whether that's actually an accurate description of what A medicine being good or even for that matter a recreational product being good or if there's a little bit of hype there that we just somehow love that golden clear as nice as possible of an end product.

4:49BubblemanThere's something about it when it's photogenic. You have to admit Todd as a photographer.

4:53SpeakerThe color gold was amazing. When I first started seeing shatter in some of the oils, It was so different from the hash we saw pressed together in Holland and stuff. It's very appealing, to say the least.

5:09BubblemanYeah, that's what I would say as well. And I have to say that very, very rarely, like maybe one out of 10,000, it's also not been great. When you get a really beautiful looking oil or hash... It's almost always going to be probably pretty beautiful. I don't get too much stuff that just looks great but is absolute and utter garbage. So it's a nice, there's definitely something.

5:34Etienne FontanIt happens. You'd be surprised. A lot of the clear stuff fails. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it was very interesting to actually start bringing in the science and start looking at the clear because we started to think, oh, well, it must all go toward the clear and the clear must be better. But then we started to see other issues coming up in residues. I just realized that it's just, would appear to be just visual, but of course, 99% of you watching don't have access to a laboratory, so I understand why you would start to look at, as we were discussing last week, regarding purity and standards, and you would think or gravitate towards something clear, because as we see by most of your alcohols and things like that, the clear, potent, etc., etc., but having this New thing come out to society and it's out in certain magazines.

6:24Etienne FontanPeople are still hearing about them, reading articles all the time. Have you heard about this new dangerous stuff called, you know, wax, shatter, and, you know. So it's still ongoing. There's still a lot of education because I Times and these other magazines are very, they don't really, Punch through the populace itself. So the populace is still learning about it. They're hearing about it from high times, but more people I know, such as when I visited friends in West Virginia in 2013, they're like, hey, have you seen this stuff called wax?

6:52Etienne FontanAnd it looks like butter. So a lot of it still needs to go on about, which is great why we always discuss it every week, because there's so much misinformation that's been put out in the ether about And, of course, people believe in their smoking circles because that's how we all meet, right? We all met in smoking circles. But that's how I also started my curiosity was I was told in my smoking circle a long time ago that, oh, when we smoked, we were just burning brain cells, which, of course, we found out was not the case in any way, shape, or form, but is still the pervasive sociological issue that goes from our smoking circle to smoking circle because it's not like we have advertising or mass media to really spread that issue.

7:37Etienne FontanIt's only recently we've got shows like Weed-A-Kit and the Cannabisness Report that are actually on television, you know, that people can actually see different aspects of the masses can see what's going on in the undercurrent and the underground because a lot of the still shattering wax is still in the underground. It's not in the open market per se that everyone is aware of. People are still hearing about it.

8:02SpeakerRight. Well, let's talk about that open market. I mean, a lot of why we're You know, I've made a whole lot of new friends on Instagram, as we've all seen lately, by coming out in support of legalizing cannabis, which I find amusing. It's not like I've changed my position at any time in all this. And, you know, for me, I'd like to just start off by saying that, you know, my point in supporting an initiative that's on the ballot is just that.

8:25SpeakerOnce an initiative to legalize cannabis gets on the ballot, I think it is an act of insanity to go in there and vote against progress. There is a lot of change that has to happen for us to get to where I think we all want to be. I mean, my personal utopian view would be, of course, completely accepted by society. We would be able to smoke and drink and be treated normal and not be criminals and there wouldn't be plant limits on Mother Nature and This is my fantasy too, you know, but the reality is, is like a baby, in my opinion, is not born jet skiing.

9:00SpeakerYou have to make a transition from, you know, birth to learning to doing. And in cannabis, there's going to be a progression, like there has been, of us slowly getting our rights back, which... To me, it's more important than holding our breath and holding out and waiting for perfection as if cannabis legalization is going to come like a lottery ticket, which I truthfully don't feel is going to happen.

9:24SpeakerI really think it's going to be small incremental steps and we all have to work towards that solution. I don't see any other way around it. I mean, I really don't. And I've been catching shit from people, ironically mostly white and in the cannabis industry, who have basically been coming out and saying that I'm the one that sold out when I see it quite the opposite way.

9:45SpeakerI'm not selling out. I'm not getting paid by the Adult Use of Marijuana Act. I'm not getting anything out of this other than wanting to see arrests stop and the Laws change and us start to make steps in the right direction instead of standing still and being stagnant, you know, and holding out. And the other issue I have definitely wants to come up is the fact that There are people now running other initiatives that have not organized, that have not done the due diligence to get the shit together, that have not raised money, that are not going to be on the ballot, and they're asking us to compare apples to oranges.

10:24SpeakerThey're asking us to compare things that are not funded, that are not on the ballot, that have no chance of even being decided on in November, to an initiative that absolutely will be on the ballot for us to be able to decide if we want to continue keeping cannabis illegal or not. So, to me, once it hits the ballot, the details fall a bit, and we have to see the big picture, in my opinion.

10:49SpeakerI agree with a lot of what you're saying, Todd. There's 12 initiatives that have filed. One is going to be on the ballot that I know of.

11:02Etienne FontanSo let's do this one over here. Well, and it's not officially on the ballot.

11:05SpeakerNo, but they've collected enough signatures. They're going to be on the ballot.

11:08Etienne FontanAnd it's the only one that has submitted enough signatures of all the other 12. So, I mean, this is the reality of... No, that's not true.

11:16SpeakerAll 12 have gotten permission to collect signatures.

11:21Etienne FontanNo, no, no, Sam.

11:23SpeakerWhat's happening, Sam?

11:24Tony VerzuraYou know that I lost me. We hear you, Chris. Okay, I don't see my stuff anymore, but I know what I'm doing for a chat.

11:37SpeakerNo, it's Chris instead of your picture.

11:41BubblemanI see him. Welcome, Tony Verzura. Welcome, Chris Conrad. This is Mark Bubbleman Richardson chatting at you. It's going to be an exciting conversation today, guys, but we're going to have to be real careful that we don't speak over one another, so if you hear someone talking, just let them finish and then we can move on and... Yeah, I think it's going to be an interesting conversation today, guys.

12:04BubblemanIt's great to have you here. Chris, it's been a while since we saw you. Yeah. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say today.

12:12Tony VerzuraLikewise, everybody. Well, thanks for this opportunity to speak to the Hash Church. I still don't have a video myself, so I don't know how I'm looking, but hopefully not too bad.

12:22Etienne FontanThere's no picture. You may want to look up and see if that video thing next to the microphone is checked or X'd off. Because it doesn't seem to be coming through. We were just starting the discussion regarding OMA and just discussing the initiative process itself. Chris has become one of the proponents of OMA and that's why we're having him on today. One of the big questions early on that people were asking Chris, are you one of the authors of OMA?

12:51Tony VerzuraOh, absolutely not. I came into it late in the game. I was actually supporting the reform... For me, an MCLR initiative is hoping when we get funded, when they came down with Alma, and actually Drug Policy Action, as I'm working with, then sent a message and said what I'd like to comment on what the initiative was looking like. So they sent me a text of it and I was able to give some input and I found they were actually quite receptive to, you know, not all my ideas obviously, but some of them.

13:27Tony VerzuraSo I was able to give some input then and then after they filed it they said they had a chance to make more amendments and so we were able to get some other amendments made to it. So I was impressed with what they wrote and I was impressed with the way they responded to our inquiries.

13:44Etienne FontanWhat impressed you about what they wrote that inspired you to get involved?

13:48Tony VerzuraWell, actually, you know, I felt that it covered the different aspects of what I was interested in. Like, the same with the hemp initiative. It talks about medical marijuana. It talks about adult personal use. It creates a regulated market. And it deals with industrial hemp, the four things that I've always put the most emphasis on over the years. So I felt like I was comfortable with that.

14:06Tony VerzuraYou know, the quantities and so forth, I would rather have had different. But nonetheless, especially the second go-round when they made the second set of changes, like getting rid of the... Thank you so much for joining us.

14:44Tony VerzuraNow, excuse me, five nanogams per milliliter of blood content as a amount of cannabis in your system where you're automatically considered to be impaired to drive. And on this, not only did they make it so that they didn't set up such a per se, but they actually funded research to find out overall what causes impaired driving, and they included marijuana as part of that. So that step really moved it to me very importantly.

15:09Tony VerzuraAnd the other important thing was when they took the step of banning local bands on cultivation, I thought that was one of the most critical things to me because I think if you can't grow at home, it's very difficult for me to support an initiative.

15:23BubblemanWhy don't we take it back right to the start and kind of for the people that aren't from California, that don't know what's going on in California, you know, can you kind of give us an idea of what the current cannabis laws and penalties in California actually are?

15:36Tony VerzuraYeah, California is riddled with felony penalties right now, like cultivating one marijuana plant is a felony. If you have...

15:49Tony VerzuraIf you transport it and they think you're intending to sell it, it's a felony. If you sell anything, it's considered a felony. If you possess it with an intent to sell, it's considered a felony. And so there's all these different things where you basically wind up with anywhere from, let's see, the misdemeanors include possession of any concentrate, transportation of any amount, giving away any amount, which a lot of people don't know right now.

16:14Tony VerzuraBut what we have is a legal defense when we pass a joint to somebody else. It's actually a misdemeanor here in California, but you have a medical marijuana defense. And so that's going to be made completely legal. So it's going to be legalizing an ounce of marijuana, eight grams of concentrate. The ability to transport or give away an ounce or eight grams. The ability to grow any amount that you can get from six plants as long as it's in an enclosed and discreet location.

16:44Tony VerzuraAnd so everything I just mentioned there, other than the possession of an ounce, was either a misdemeanor or a felony under the current law. And the medical marijuana law is unlike what people think. They don't actually legalize marijuana. They create a legal defense for marijuana.

16:58SpeakerRight. 215 was nothing more than an affirmative defense to us breaking the law. Right. Right. I would like to read something really quick. It's one little, it's one small sentence, but this is something that's been a bit of a point of contention for a lot of people. And when, one of the reasons I came out and I've been supporting this change is because of this fence. And it says, 11362.45, and for those of you who don't know, California law 11362.5 is the 1996 Compassionate Use Act.

17:32SpeakerSo 11362.45, which will be proposed in this initiative, clearly states that nothing in section 11362.1 shall be construed or interpreted to amend, repeal, affect, restrict, or preempt Laws pertaining to the Compassionate Use Act of 1996. Chris, could you talk about that a little, because it's clearly written into the law that this will not affect the current medical cannabis laws as we know it in California, but yet people have been making a lot of noise that this should be stopped because it's somehow going to stop the medical cannabis rights that we've had in the last 19 years.

18:07Tony VerzuraYeah, that rates up in some of the most ridiculous anti-ALMA claims I've heard so far because basically what it... For, excuse me, five different places in the initiative where it specifies things like what you just said there, Todd. In the section on home commercial licensing, it says it does not apply to medical marijuana. The section about limitations on public behavior, that says it doesn't apply for medical marijuana.

18:32Tony VerzuraAll the parts about possession and cultivation say they especially do not apply to medical marijuana. The purposes and intent of the initiative is to strengthen our medical marijuana laws. And then we have other things like, for example, it adds in that medical marijuana patients that they have custodial rights, parental rights for parents. And this has been a big issue here. I work as a court expert. Over again, I go into court and the CPS, Child Protective Services, is trying to take away people's children because they said these children are exposed to marijuana.

19:07Tony VerzuraThese are medical marijuana patients. And so under this initiative, that won't be able to happen anymore. Likewise, additional privacy protections are given. Likewise, it brings down the price of the state ID card for patients. And likewise, it removes the sales tax for medical marijuana patients. So I counted nine separate places where it either Thank you so much for joining us today.

20:02SpeakerThat has now been being attempted to get on the ballot for years.

20:06Tony VerzuraRight. 26 years later, still trying to get it. It was in 1990, it was when we first tried to have it on the ballot. We wrote it in 89.

20:13SpeakerRight. I helped Jack rewrite the initiative at the end of 94, and we refiled it as the Hemp and Health Initiative in 1995. It was me, Jack, and the lawyers, for those listening. So we both are proponents on this initiative. Yeah, we both are.

20:28Tony VerzuraThe writing initiative.

20:30SpeakerWe're very close to it, and people have been asking me if I've read the initiative, and I'd like to point out to people listening that in the initiative, Jack Herrer taxed cannabis to the tune of $10 an ounce, or $160 a pound, which now sounds rather high listening to last show we had Rick Doblin on, and he was talking about people in Israel making cannabis at $0.50 a gram unit price.

20:52SpeakerSo now if $15 for an ounce, suddenly a 75% $10 tax is going to seem pretty high in

20:59SpeakerAnd a lot of people are not looking at that. And the other thing I'd like to bring up is...

21:03Tony VerzuraBut also, it was about $500 an ounce at the time. We were, again, I don't know about in 94, but in 1990, it was close to $500 an ounce. That was one of the reasons we said we can't let them tax it more than that.

21:15SpeakerYeah, and you know what, when I was doing it with 4,800 a pound, 160 a pound didn't seem like that big a deal, but now when you're starting to look at unit price production and you see prices tumbling, suddenly $10 an ounce seems like a pretty high tariff. You know, and the other thing that strikes me is that Jack was completely adamantly opposed to a medical-only initiative.

21:34SpeakerAnd for the people listening, it was because he felt that people would rest on their laurels and they wouldn't fight for full legalization once they had medical, that it would make them lazy. And now it's ironic to me that the people that are carrying his initiative are really the personification of his nightmare. Because here they are calling themselves activists and fighting for prohibition and making arguments based on fear and lies.

21:59SpeakerAnd this is what really, why people are wondering why I've been blocking people on Instagram, because you can't have a conversation with people that are lying to you and that have the disregard for truth or what the law is written to say. The real truth of it is, Todd, hello Chris, this is Sam. Hi Sam. The real truth is that this doesn't take away people's rights. It expands the rights to recreational users that medical users have had, well, in some form almost had since 1996.

22:33SpeakerThat's what we're trying to do. We're trying to expand it. But you've got to remember, the majority of cannabis users in California and in the United States Our recreational users, they're not medical users. Now, they're willing to use medical as an umbrella to shelter them, but come on, it's time. We've waited long enough.

22:58BubblemanIt doesn't do the medical aspect any favors by using the medical argument as a shield to protect yourself for your own recreational use. We don't need it anymore. That's what I'm saying as well.

23:11SpeakerRecreation can stand on its own two legs. Well, let me say this. This is the only thing, and I get recreation, but a 14-year-old can have recreational use. Trust me, I did it. The truth is that this is about adult use, and it's also not about medical use. Medical use in my heart and in my mind was 20 years ago in 1996. And now this is about adult use of cannabis, stopping the arrest mostly of minorities and the less privileged.

23:37SpeakerBecause I don't want to be rude or anything to my friends, but I've been going to cannabis events for a really long time. It's mostly a whole bunch of white guys. And you know what? This industry, medical marijuana industry, to me has represented something I didn't like for a long time, and it's white privilege. And the truth is, is that people in the ghettos, people in the lower economically depressed areas of California do not have access to these $45 paper note doctors who will stand in an expo and give people they've never met a doctor's note to circumvent the law.

24:07SpeakerThey're busting, cops are busting people that constantly, young adults constantly, because they don't have a doctor's note and no real path to get one. And I looked up statistics. Over 20,000 people a year still get arrested for misdemeanor possession of cannabis in California. That's ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of people over the course of time. Since we decriminalized in 2010, it has not stopped the arrest of pocketfuls of flowers.

24:37SpeakerAnd that's another thing that's been bothering me that these proponents of stagnation have been saying. They're saying, oh, the laws are fine the way they are. Thank you for watching.

25:05SpeakerA proponent of this about is stopping the racist marijuana arrests.

25:09BubblemanWell, look at what happened in Jamaica. You know, that gentleman, I believe his last name was Dobson, he was killed for smoking a joint and it was finally the end. The Jamaicans took to the streets. They were fucking done with it. They were like, this has to change. And that's how this two ounces of cannabis decriminalization occurred. Because every Jamaican walking around in the touristy areas, and even the city of Kingston, a lot of them have cannabis on them.

25:34BubblemanSo to be able to just suddenly now be free of police brutality, arrest, fines, jail, etc., is an absolutely huge foot in the door. And the people that were like, oh, big corporations are going to come take over, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, yeah, have your argument over there. In the meantime, the people that actually live here and that are suffering from this, they need to have it stop immediately.

26:02Tony VerzuraAnd to follow up on what you were just saying, the other important thing in AMA which they added at the last minute was, I think to the American National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is that if you are found to have any of the legal amounts of marijuana, the one ounce, the eight grams, or the six plants, And smell like marijuana, law enforcement no longer has the right to search you.

26:24Tony VerzuraUnder the current law, all the officer has is the odor and the suspicion and they can search you. And so even if you have more than an ounce, unless the cop sees it somewhere, he can't go any further with it. And if I can turn back to the medical issue that Todd was addressing here, this is why the American Medical Association has, excuse me, the California Medical Association is endorsing this initiative.

26:45Tony VerzuraBecause they say, how are they going to get good statistics on medical marijuana when they think like 50% or more of the people who have doctor's recommendations have it just so they can use it for personal use? That completely skews the medical data that we should be getting from the, we've got 20 years of research and we still really don't really know that much about the demographics of medical marijuana because of this big mix-up we have.

27:06SpeakerYeah, the other thing that's happening, Chris, is the people who are fighting this initiative are telling everybody, you can only grow 28 grams, you can only possess 28 grams. It's just an outright lie. If you read the initiative, it's quite clear you can have six plants, and there's no limit to the amount you can grow on those six plants. You just can't transport more than an ounce at a time.

27:33Tony VerzuraRight, and you want to transport it in the trunk anyway. But like I said, if a cop can't get into your trunk, he doesn't know if you've got two ounces back there. So, you know, that's not as, you're correct, technically that's right, but I think that realiztically, the cop, how can a cop say, well, that smells like more than an ounce to me?

27:49SpeakerExactly. What I'm really saying is that the people who are against the initiative are saying that you can't grow more than 28 grams on your six plants. Right, right. What Sam's saying is they're trying to justify that that is the limit of possession. And what Sam's pointing out, it's not true. You just can't transport more than a zip at a time.

28:09Tony VerzuraAnd we were talking about this yesterday, Todd, about the root balls. That means that basically if you have more than an ounce of pot at home, you need to have some root balls.

28:17SpeakerNo, no, it's transportation. It's not at home because, you know, look, we're going to have Tim Blake on, I hope, in a little bit. And, you know, these plates up in Northern California, they've been pulling, you know, three pounds off a plant for years. And you let some of these people have six plants in the yard, and they're going to show you how to make 24 pounds of cannabis quicker than you can blink.

28:36SpeakerAnd I just think this is the reality. I mean, people that are talking to me about corporate cannabis, I think, lose the point that And maybe I feel it so to my heart because as a little 13-year-old boy, I found a book and every single thing other than plant food I needed right in my grandmother's house to start growing cannabis. And unlike tobacco, unlike whiskey, unlike beer, it is very easy to grow cannabis.

28:59SpeakerWhen my grandmother caught me and she found my buds, she asked me, what are you going to spray on it? I said nothing. She said, what are you going to dip it in? I said nothing. And she goes, come on, Todd, if it was that easy, it couldn't be illegal. And, you know, it's funny because she just came to the common sense conclusion, but then when I was researching William C. Woodward actually testifying against the enactment of what became the Marijuana Tax Act, he, back then he was the legislative counsel for the American Medical Association, made the point of saying that they tried to include cannabis into the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, but because it was not refined, distilled, or manufactured, they could not classify it into the controlled substances.

29:39SpeakerAnd This is the point I'm making. Cannabis grows on trees. And if you allow every single household in California to possess and grow six plants of cannabis in their front yard, in their backyard, on their patio, This is going to change the entire face of cannabis in a massive way. I used to walk through the streets of Amsterdam in the spring and when I would see the cannabis plants on the patios, I would honestly feel light and happy inside because it made me feel like freedom.

30:09SpeakerIt just hit me like a little bolt of lightning. Can you imagine what it would be like to drive down streets in California and to see six cannabis plants on the front yard of somebody's house and that be completely legal?

30:21Etienne FontanAnd on top of that, no one would be trying to steal each other's plants either because that prohibition is gone.

30:28Tony VerzuraThe point isn't there right here. Under this initiative, that's down the road still.

30:35SpeakerWell, the price of it, look, if you put cannabis in everybody's yard, I'm sorry, but the price of it's going to drop considerably. If the kid next door could grow his own plants instead of worrying about stealing mine, this is the beginning of the end. I mean, no one's jumping in anybody's faces for tomatoes. Just think about it, Todd. It's simple supply and demand. If you increase the supply tremendously, the demand doesn't increase with it.

31:06SpeakerI have some thoughts on that, but first I just wanted to say to Todd and Chris, thank you for taking the time and breaking this down because I'm someone that's not 100% sold on this particular initiative, but I certainly I certainly agree with everything that you guys said. I agree with the way the current laws are, and I agree with something has to change, and I agree with the freedom of the plant to be used not just medically, but also in an adult use or in hemp, and I think the laws need to change.

31:49SpeakerI think the felonies and misdemeanors, all of that, everything that you guys said is

31:59SpeakerI feel like you have to support something that makes logical sense. I guess my only fear is some of the other aspects of what it would potentially do, which I think you might have answered with the fact that it's not affecting medical. I had a couple of questions for that because I've seen exactly what you just said. That's what Colorado does. Everyone can grow six plants. They may have done it a little bit differently I think from what you guys are saying than they did than what this is presenting.

32:33SpeakerBut I guess my couple questions for it would be the limitation of the grow and the transport, the concerns with that. Yeah, it's great that everyone could grow the six plants. Not everyone's a great grower. But what about the infrastructure that's in California currently? Well, I would like to bring that up because what you're really talking about is non-medical use. Yeah. So now this is, you know, and not to sound weird, medical use was the conversation 20 years ago.

33:04SpeakerThere was a case called Pebbles Trippett that actually was one of the first times a medical person got busted on the way to the club and fought it and won. And this is how we fought for any amount of distribution because they were trying to say, well, you just have a right to have it at your residence. You don't have a right to drive it to the club, and if we catch you, we're going to bust you.

33:22SpeakerSo this has been an ongoing battle.

33:28SpeakerHello, Tim, are you with us? Yeah, I am. You know, ladies and gentlemen, hello, Tim. You might want to try to turn on your camera if you could. For everybody listening, Tim Blake is one of my heroes, honestly, Tim. Tim has founded the Emerald Cup up in Northern California, and it has grown into personally my favorite event on the planet for cannabis. And you did something very brave, Tim.

33:54SpeakerYou came out and you supported change and the adult use of marijuana act. I would love for a minute to hear why you did that and where you're coming from. Well, I didn't really need to come out and do a full endorsement. I was kind of predicating that on the language, Todd. And actually, I'd be honored to be on your show, too, to stop for a second.

34:11SpeakerI respect you immensely also, and I really appreciate what you're doing. But I didn't really come out to, I was a qualified endorsement, but it really came across as a complete endorsement, and it got run. You know, Kevin Saunders and Mickey and a bunch of people were pretty upset about that, and a lot of the growers up here. Because, you know, CGA, California Growers Association, hasn't endorsed yet.

34:30SpeakerAnd So, I mean, they're on the fence. And so they felt like we could negotiate for more. We should really hold out. And I felt like, you know, I think like you guys do. I mean, I'd like to hear your perspective, Todd. But like Chris says, it's not the best initiative we could have drafted. Of course, everybody knows that. There's holes in it. But like Omar Figueroa said, you know, once this gets done, they're not going to convict anybody.

34:53SpeakerJuries aren't going to convict. This is all going to go by the wayside like Colorado and Washington. And we've got to do this so that people stop going to prison and we get medicine to people effectively. You know, all the reasons why we're doing it. I think it didn't help that Parker was so over the top. It's like we would have liked to have had maybe a little bit more lovable character to be our champion, maybe.

35:13SpeakerNo, he's been a horrible hero to many. But you know what? The thing is I'm really glad somebody has come along and put their money where their mind is because we have been the most unfunded movement in the world recently. For a long time, and ironically, we make a lot of money. This is the hypocrisy I think we're starting to bump into. Has the idea that this is non-medical or medical going to take a problem or cause a problem with the medical growers?

35:39SpeakerHow are you guys weighing the pros and cons of this initiative up in Northern California? Well, we're pushing forward an initiative called the Heritage Initiative for Mendocino. And so we were in negotiations with our board of supervisors over the last week. We're going to have a big meeting on Monday because we're trying to get in line with MRSA and OMU so we can get our state permits.

36:03SpeakerAnd so it is a big thing. We realize the importance of local rights, county rights. And so that's what I've been really putting all my time and energy into is the steering committee for the Heritage Initiative, which Basically, it's the best written. Omar came in. We gave him $10,000 for Omar and Omar Figueroa, the attorney, to write this. He didn't take a dime. He gave it to some other attorneys to make sure what he wrote was really good.

36:25SpeakerAnd so we wrote something that basically should have been the basis for, and it should be the basis for all the county initiatives across the state. And so that's what we're spending most of our time on. But I assume Amu Parker is going to go through. Merce is already in there. And Mendocino has to catch up because our county government, because of the task force and some backwards thinking of our government, we're really dinosaurs compared to like Humble, which has jumped and leaped forward into a very progressive ordinance and they're just opening it up and claiming their heritage as a cannabis community and they're trying.

36:58SpeakerOur people are kind of stuck with the wine construction logging model and they haven't quite got it.

37:05Tony VerzuraI think what you're talking about there really shows the forward thinking that we need to be doing at this point. Instead of people trying to resist Alma, they should be embracing the local control aspect of it to make sure that we move forward with what you're talking about there, Tim. And if I can just wrap up a couple of other things people brought up earlier. You know, a lot of this, people are saying about why there's so much antagonism in the movement.

37:27Tony VerzuraA lot of it is really coming from a very small group of people. They're trolls, so they spend a lot of energy online attacking people and confronting people in their own spaces, as you hear with Mr. Saunders there. But, you know, there's this one attorney who does things like she points to the current laws and claims that that's what Alma does. She writes about it and she takes words out of Alma or adds words into it and people think she's quoting the law.

37:52Tony VerzuraAnd so I don't know how we're going to get around that. That's a fight that we were talking about earlier is where is all this, how do we handle all the bad information that's out there. And then the other question that was brought up a moment ago was about the small growers. And Tim, I think you're going to have more to add to this. But it seems to me like what ALMA does to protect the small growers is, number one, it has the small grower and the micro business licenses.

38:13Tony VerzuraIt scales the fees to people so that the smaller you are, the lower the fee is. The micro business license, I think, is a hugely important aspect of ALMA, which we'll talk about more. The other thing it does is it has anti-monopoly provisions. Another thing it does is it brings people in who are currently in the illicit market. It gives them the opportunity to enter into the legalized market and grandfathers in companies that already exist.

38:38Tony VerzuraSo I forget whose question that was earlier about how does it affect the current market. I would say that we can't completely Thank you so much for joining us.

39:15SpeakerWe have a really rough time. You know, you've got to scale up. It's all about scaling up. You're seeing these distribution companies come in. I mean, look at it realiztically. AMU did protect the small farmers in the fact that they didn't allow more than one acre and brought it back to a reasonable level. But when everybody comes on with one acre throughout California, how are these small farmers, these niche farmers going to make it up, you know, 25 plants or 50 plants?

39:36SpeakerAre they going to sell it on the side of the road? I mean, I tell them all, you know, you've got 60% going into the oil market now. It's basically moving into concentrates anyway, so... Like Steve D'Angelo says, his flower is part of the We're going to have a lot of people who are going to have a lot of people who are going to have a lot of people who are going to have a lot of people who are going to have a lot of people

40:16SpeakerHumboldt, they said, is going to grow up to $13 billion in Humboldt and Trinity this year. That's about three times what they did before. I just want to applaud your honesty in speaking so forth about the economics of this. This is one of the reasons why I really love you, Tim. I've been a grower since I was a little kid, and I knew all along I was benefiting from prohibition, and I despised it.

40:39SpeakerI didn't want to be a hypocrite fighting hypocrisy, and I realized my activism was putting myself out of business on a lot of levels, and I had to reinvent myself. You know, I don't see how the old paradigm of high profits for a low amount of work or a small amount of plants is going to transfer. I mean, back when 1996 happened, you and I both know this stuff coming out of them hills was 4,800 a pound all day, and now it's sub-2.

41:06SpeakerAnd we've seen this change so quickly in 20 years. And it wasn't that the retail and retail price of cannabis changed because people still walk into the clubs and pay 50 or 55 and 8th, which is still 400 an ounce. It's still 400 an ounce, 64p. So the retail is still there. It's just that we've seen this middleman pop up. You know, no diss in ATN. I love you, bro.

41:29SpeakerBut suddenly this didn't exist before because we were like, you know, more towards end consumer. And this is something we as producers have had to adjust to and live with. Since medical cannabis passed, the people that have seen the biggest price drops are the guys taking the biggest risks and doing the most amount of work, in my opinion. And that's the growers. And this is, I hate to say this to my friends and brothers and sisters growing, but it's going to get worse.

41:53SpeakerWe had Rick Doblin on a week ago, Tim, saying that in Israel they're reporting 50 cents per gram production costs on greenhouse medical cannabis, $15 an ounce.

42:08SpeakerWhen people start looking at this at price per gram and price per unit and cost of production, I think we're going to see a very different conversation when it comes to cannabis and who's going to farm it. I think there will still be people like me that grow it, but I ain't selling it. Jim, have you figured out how many square miles will produce enough cannabis for the entire population of California yearly?

42:33SpeakerIt's only about 40 square miles. Yeah, we've sat down and heard some of these numbers. I've got a gentleman up here that wants to run us a 15,000 acre ranch. He's got 200 parcels. He'd like to grow up to 50 of those parcels an acre apiece. You know, that's going to be 100 to 200,000 pounds on that one ranch eventually as this comes in. You look at this, I've had farmers in Monterey that have got 30,000 acres and want to know how many one acres I want to do.

42:58SpeakerAnd then you've got the collective dispensaries that You know, Harborside and Spark and Peace of Medicine that are now doing their own cultivation and they're going to really head towards doing their own in-house products. So you're going to see less access to the dispensaries as they come online and do their own production. And you've got these costs going down. I mean, I was talking to the Absolute people.

43:17SpeakerThey were talking about going from $10 a gram for CO2 to a drop in below four after the first year with OM Immersive. So Like Todd's talking about, these numbers are going to plummet and the days of the gold rush are going to be gone. But if you look at the gold rush, it only lasted a few years. We've had a pretty good run.

43:34BubblemanAnd if you look at the gold rush, you know the first people to really make money were the guys selling shovelers. Shovel, shifters, all those tools.

43:42SpeakerWell, you know, my first year on the mountain was the summer of 94 on Spy Rock Road, Mendocino. And, you know, I watched my friend who was Richard Davis. He's now deceased. He had the Traveling Hemp Museum. He was one of my first heroes in the hemp industry. He was pulling over 100 pounds from 30 plants. Thank you so much for joining us.

44:19SpeakerThis is what I think a lot of the struggle is, is people have to realize that that pricing profits that they're setting up business plans at right now are inaccurate and unrealistic for probably what's going to happen. Well, the reason is, Todd, is because the risk is going down considerably. I mean, back in those days, people would get 20 years for growing 100 kilos. Or six plants, in a way, and this is what brings me back around to six plants in every yard being a win for us in California on a massive level.

44:51SpeakerI mean, we've been a criminal. We're still a criminal for growing medical cannabis. All medical cannabis laws are affirmative defenses. That's it. They still come. They've prosecuted me three times since I've been out of prison just for growing pot. No weapons, no distribution, no illicit money, nothing. Just growing weed.

45:11BubblemanWell, and being you.

45:14SpeakerOh yeah, sure. And Chris, what do you think? Do you think this is going to pass?

45:22Tony VerzuraYeah, I think it's going to pass. I think it's going to be closer than I wish that it would be because of the, you know, they're playing a very delicate game. They're pitching it to conservative voters in the south part of the state. So a lot of it is more about the control.

45:39SpeakerDo you think 19 was going to pass?

45:42Tony VerzuraPardon? Did you think Prop 19 was going to pass? No. No, we never had 50% support in Prop 19. We had plurality. It would be like 42 to 44, so they said we were winning because we had 44%. But in reality, we never got to 50% of voters. Whereas we're starting out right now supposedly with 50%, although it's odd because I've been hearing it's like 55% and 60% support, but now after they filed the signatures, everybody's saying 50%.

46:08Tony VerzuraI don't know how we could have lost any support right now.

46:11SpeakerWhat will make the real difference is when the anti-people are getting close to the end, we need to have a blitz television program with commercials constantly bombarding the fucking voters and reminding them why this is good for California.

46:30Tony VerzuraYeah, and we're hoping that we don't have that guy from Nevada throw in a bunch of money or something like that. That's the big risk we have.

46:39SpeakerWell, you know, I think in a way, I don't think, and I want to say this up front, I don't think the movement to legalize cannabis needs our voices anymore to convince people because now a lot of conservatives and republicans have been watching the news and seeing the tax results from Colorado and now they're looking at us like a demographic that is skirting taxes and Thank you.

47:08SpeakerAnd that's against us. I mean, any way you look at it, they're going to come in and regulate us because the writing's on the wall. They can't convict us like they used to. The politics have changed. People are literally learning at the speed of light. We're sitting here having a conversation in front of almost 900 people and tens of thousands will watch it in the next few days.

47:27SpeakerI mean, this is so different now than it was 20 years ago. And there's no putting the cat in the bag. The real truth of it is, Todd, that No matter what they do, the industry exists. Whether it's black or white, they might as well grab a piece and regulate it. And there'll be two markets. I think a lot of what people are overlooking is the fact that there's still people that are going to keep their doctor's note, keep their doctors, keep wanting to go to their same players.

47:56SpeakerWe are creatures of habit. Thank you so much for joining us.

48:22Tony VerzuraAnd that's a really important point because when you talk about getting a job, for example, one thing when we're talking about the economics of cannabis, maybe not everybody has to start their own homegrown business. Maybe they can just get a job in the industry, you know. So the idea that people are going to still have entry point access I think is very true. It's going to actually increase entry point where then they can work their way into things further on.

48:47Tony VerzuraBut when it comes to the other issues that we were just talking about there, it seems to me like once people have a legal right to use marijuana, then all these other rights are going to flow from it. For example, I know some people who actually have told me that they don't like the initiative because it protects the parental rights of patients, but it doesn't extend them to all adults.

49:08Tony VerzuraAs long as it's illegal for all adults to have it, this is going to remain an issue. But once patients have access to it, parental custodial rights, and then it's legal for adults to use it, then by extension, we have an equal right argument we can raise in the courts. But until we have it legal for us, those arguments don't exist. And especially right now, the courts are still taking away people's children.

49:32Tony VerzuraFor medical marijuana patients because they have marijuana in the house with a child and it's not secured properly or whatever they want to call it.

49:39BubblemanSo someone in chat just said, let's take a poll and ask whether six plants is enough. And this is the typical argument against an initiative like this. But what if you were to make the poll more accurate and say something like, is six plants better than having none?

49:55SpeakerNo, even a better poll would be, At this point, at the beginning of the show like this, do you in general support the initiative? And then we can do the same poll at the end of the show.

50:10BubblemanThere you go. Well, you guys heard Junkman Sam talk. What is your answer? It's either a yes or a no.

50:17SpeakerMine is I support anything that will move closer towards our target, which is legalized recreational cannabis.

50:29Tony VerzuraYeah, and I agree with that.

50:31Etienne FontanAnd one argument that I hear is that, oh, well, what's going to happen to medical once it becomes legal? Like it's some sort of affront that, oh, the fear I may lose my business. If I lose my business, that would be because I'm a bad business person. The reality is, is that, you know, cancer is one and two now. So the need for medical cannabis is always going to be there.

50:55Etienne FontanAnd so we're not going away, in fact... As I'm reading in AMA, as I understand it, it's just going to protect and solidify what 215 is and at least puts in some protections. Can you talk about some of those other protections, Chris, that are in AMA that solidify 215?

51:14Tony VerzuraWell, I think we already did a little rundown of those earlier. It says that the rights to medical marijuana for adult use don't change the Proposition 215 rights. It says that the licensing does not apply to personal and caregiver cultivations under Prop 215. It says that nothing in this section is supposed to change the Compassionate Use Act or any of the related laws, which means like the Kelly decision.

51:45Tony VerzuraAnd Mercy, even, and SB 420, which has the eight ounces, by the way. So if you're a patient, you would still be able to carry eight ounces with you, as opposed to a person who doesn't have doxins, people could carry one ounce with them, traveling around. It also has a section, like, things like, it says people can't smoke in public, and open containers in the car, and so forth.

52:05Tony VerzuraAt the bottom of that section, it says it doesn't take away any rights under Prop 215. That's somewhat arguable because we don't really know if those rights really exist under Prop 215, but people think they're there, and so it just makes a point of saying that it doesn't change that. And it says that the production taxes do not apply to patients who are under Proposition 215, and then it reduces the cost of the state ID card, and it says that people who have the state ID card do not have to pay sales tax on cannabis.

52:35Tony VerzuraThose are the main ones I remember. There's a couple of other things in there as well. The one thing that does somewhat modify that is that, and it doesn't really modify this. Prop 215 said that, used the word a physician can approve medical marijuana. The medical board then said that that means a state-licensed physician in good standing. Then after Todd McCorea, the doctor from Oakland who's a personal hero of mine, They went after him for recommending medical marijuana.

53:04Tony VerzuraThen they set up a standard of what a doctor is supposed to do. The initial diagnosis is supposed to be done by a doctor in person. The initial meeting between a recommending physician and a patient is supposed to be in person. There's supposed to be a 15-minute approximately checkup on the patient's health. After that, the patient can get a recommendation renewed without going to the doctor. And so that was codified into Senate Bill 420 and then continued into MRSA.

53:34Tony VerzuraAnd Alma also says that that Thank you for joining us today.

54:07Tony Verzuraof cultivation that's allowed under MRSA plus your unlimited amount under Prop 215. That's all protected.

54:18Etienne FontanThank you for clarifying, Chris. There's some things that people are using this information regarding, so I just wanted to hear some clarification.

54:27SpeakerCould I ask Chris a couple questions that really are some of the specifics? Right now, Chris, possession of up to an ounce of cannabis for someone who's non-medical is what? What is the fine? It's an infraction and a $100 fine. What will it be after this? It'll be completely legal, no fine. If somebody gets caught with like nine grams of concentrate right now on them, nine grams of extracts, nine grams of bubble hash, what would be the fine if they're a non-medical adult?

54:58Tony VerzuraOne, more than nine grams, it's a six.

55:03SpeakerYeah, right now.

55:05Tony VerzuraIt looks like it's one year, $500 fine.

55:09SpeakerOr both. So if somebody's non-medical and gets caught with over a quarter ounce, so to speak, of extracts, they can get a year in jail in California currently? That's right.

55:21Tony VerzuraAnd what will it be after this passes? That'll be the same. It's under the eight grams that it's legal. So under eight grams would be... Legal. Over eight grams. Currently, any amount is one year, $500 or both.

55:36SpeakerSo one gram. So right now, if a non-medical patient gets caught with one gram of oil or hash or butter or shatter or wax or hash or whatever you want to call it, one gram will get a non-medical person up to a year in jail and a $500 fine. That's right.

55:52Tony VerzuraAnd under this, it'll be the ninth gram that we'll put you over.

55:57SpeakerSo you could have up to a quarter ounce and you'd be completely legal. And you could transport up to an ounce of cannabis or eight grams and be completely legal. That's correct. And what would happen if you gave away an ounce of grass or a quarter ounce of oil? You do.

56:19Tony VerzuraCurrently that is a, let's see, giving away.

56:24SpeakerAnnounce a bud. If I give my friend an ounce a week.

56:27Etienne FontanAnd also, also, our concentrates a felony.

56:30SpeakerYeah, all of them are. A gram up.

56:32Tony VerzuraYep. Actually, that Prop 47 changed that. I thought that too when I was starting to do this, but Prop 47 turned it into a misdemeanor.

56:43SpeakerGiving pot away is a misdemeanor.

56:44Tony VerzuraThings that are kind of... It has modified some of these things for us. For example, transportation, Prop 47 changes so you have to have transportation with intent to sell before it becomes a felony. Before that, it was just a felony to transport any amount.

57:03SpeakerWow. Right now, if you home grow one plant, even one plant, how much time will you get?

57:09Tony VerzuraSixteen months, two to three years. Really? Yeah. And that'll be completely legal. Three years of aggravating circumstances. Incredible.

57:21BubblemanYeah, there's people going off in the chat. Some people are saying that this, how we can support OM, it's unethical. I asked the guy how it's unethical. He's saying by putting kids in jail.

57:31Tony VerzuraOh, let's talk about that because actually Alma very specifically currently, see this is an example where they say, they look at the current law and they think that's what Alma does because currently someone below the age of 18 can get a felony, a misdemeanor, a wobbler, or an infraction for marijuana. Once the ALMA passes, there will be only infractions if you're under 18. The penalties are counseling, community service, and drug education, not even rehab.

58:00Tony VerzuraAnd then when you turn 18, your record clears and you get to start over again with a clean record at age 18. And this is, to me, a very huge thing, not to mention also that Alma creates a $50 million a year fund, which a lot of it is directed towards keeping youth in school and keeping them out of prison. So this is really huge for people under the age of 18.

58:25BubblemanSo I guess what I'm seeing a lot of is that people are picking up on these arguments without going too deep into actually reading the initiative and understanding what's being said. And it seems like a lot of the arguments may be coming from a place of ignorance.

58:40Tony VerzuraWell, actually, I call it malice because there's mainly one person who's producing a lot of false information, and she's going to events and distributing them through a couple of dispensary owners. There's dispensary owners down in San Diego, Sacramento, and San Francisco that are funding the publishing of information that's deliberately false and misleading. Like I say, if you say Alma does this and you point to the current laws, that's not an argument.

59:08Tony VerzuraThat's a lie. Right.

59:12Etienne FontanYou know, I want to... Chris, hold on. Can I just stay on our subject here real quick? What happens if somebody is busted between 18 and 21? Because the law now becomes 21. And so you were talking up to 18, but now people are concerned about the criminalization between the 18 to 21-year-olds. What is actually happening there, Chris?

59:34Tony VerzuraWell, for the 18 to 21-year-olds, they are still at somewhat of a risk. What happens is that, for example, cultivation up to six plants currently is a felony. That's going to become a six-month misdemeanor. Possession of less than an ounce is going to remain as it is now. That's a bud. That's a misdemeanor. Possession of more than four grams currently is one year, $500 fine. It's going to be reduced to six months, $500 fines.

1:00:09Tony VerzuraTransportation currently two, three, four year felony is going to change. That's with intent to sell. It becomes six months, $500 a month. So then the remaining felonies all shift down into misdemeanors. So they get the same benefits on a lot of these things as the people over 21, except that the things that are specifically legalized for people over 21 are going to remain either infractions or misdemeanors for people who are between 18 and 21.

1:00:37Tony VerzuraThis is a problem. That is a vulnerable age. I would have liked to have seen a little bit differently there, but they feel like they had to have some way of enforcing these, and so making these into minor misdemeanors instead of felonies is what they chose to do.

1:00:51Etienne FontanI've always felt it frustrating that if I was old enough to serve in my country that I wasn't old enough to drink a beer, and one of the things we've had already automatically capitulate to is defaulting to 21 pretty much on all the initiatives there, so I know it's always concerning being in that trapped period between You know, I'm an adult now, but I'm not officially an adult until I'm 21.

1:01:13SpeakerBut can I just bring something up, and I don't want to be rude. I think America suffers from extended adolescence to a large degree, and that we're babying our children well into their 20s, and that's a different conversation anyhow. I lived in the Netherlands, and I met 14-year-old kids talking about college, preparing themselves for adulthood that were acting like Really young men and young women in their teens and when I was living in Holland, the age of consent to go into a coffee shop and buy your own cannabis was 16 and they had less people in high school age using cannabis than we had in America where it was completely prohibited.

1:01:50SpeakerAnd it's not that I don't like kids, but this isn't about kids. The first word is adult use. And right now, I'm not here to fight the age of consent, and I get you. And age 21, to me, is too high. To me, in a perfect world, it would be 16, because I lived there, I saw what it looked like, and when I was 16, I had a license and a car, and I smoked weed.

1:02:12SpeakerAnd you know what? The law of aside didn't matter, and the truth is, it should be legal. Well, the 21 is, that was something that was argued in Colorado. It's an extension of seven years in prison if you're someone who distributes to someone that's under 21 a controlled substance. You know, so that's like, it has to be 21. And you know, I think it's too high, but I don't know how to fight that right now, and I'm not going to want to stop people from becoming legal because, what, some kid's going to be...

1:02:43SpeakerI don't know what to say, you know? It's just not about kids right now. It's about adults. Right. So I just had a couple questions, though, because I've kind of been on the fence, but everything you guys have said I actually agree with, and I think it has to happen because it's black and white when you look at laws and rights, and it's scary shit, you know, when you're dealing with, like, growing and cultivating the plant.

1:03:06SpeakerBut one, the question I had, and the reason why I'm asking these questions is because I've just seen what happened when things went adult use or quote unquote recreation in Colorado. The IRS and constitutional amendments play in the hand and we're dealing with 280E. I'm personally dealing with it and a lot of people are starting to deal with it now in Colorado. So one, the question I have is does AMA...

1:03:35SpeakerHow do you address this as a constitutional right? Because everything in California so far is really not amending the Constitution. So does this amend the Constitution?

1:03:46Tony VerzuraIt does not amend the Constitution. It does not amend Prop 215. And this is really upsetting to some people who feel that it should have overturned local bans on commerce. That would have required a constitutional amendment because Amendment 10, Section 7 of the California Constitution empowers cities and counties to control commerce. And so in order to stop bans on commercial activity, we would have had to do two things.

1:04:13Tony VerzuraFirst is to agree how that would work, which is very complicated. And the second thing is we would have to make a constitutional amendment, which would require like a 60% vote. So it's not practical to do that.

1:04:25SpeakerOkay, so then the second part would be, and we're talking about, I've got like four questions. The second part would be, this is adult use, so that means anyone that's cultivating or currently cultivating for medical and the whole medical chapter when you said the taxes, the taxes would be dropped. So for the current market for medical and say what, Berkeley patients or Harborside or Thank you for joining us.

1:05:17Tony VerzuraState ID card with them, if they go to the collective or dispensary, they show that card, they get their sales tax back.

1:05:24Etienne FontanSo you only get them great unless you actually register and have the state card then, correct?

1:05:30Tony VerzuraThat's right. And one of the mistakes they made in SB 420 is that because they used the word qualified patients, they didn't really create extra rights for people with state ID cards except that cops are not supposed to arrest you, which of course cops arrest people anyway. But... Basically, what they're trying to do now is to motivate people to get that state ID card because if you do have a state ID card, that's what will get you the 6% sales tax.

1:05:55Tony VerzuraAnd again, like I said, the medical association really wants to be able to get a handle on what's really going on with medical marijuana so they can use it to project further about the medical marijuana where they feel like they're not getting any good data out of what's going on right now.

1:06:09SpeakerYeah, so essentially, if at the register they save money, what does this Bill, if anything, affect the current cultivation and flow of medical cannabis into the market?

1:06:23Tony VerzuraWell, I mean, MRSA has already done so much to that. I don't know how things are going to go forward after MRSA because everyone has to get a local license anyway to provide to the medical marijuana market. So I don't know what groups like Harborside are going to do. ATN, maybe you can answer that. How do you see that working with MRSA? And then from there, we could try to apply to Alma.

1:06:43Etienne FontanMRSA is still very confusing because the frustration is currently, to explain people out there, if you were sitting there and you're the cultivar and you actually grow it and bring it to market, I meet with you. No through MRSA, which is the California Medical Cannabis Law. That was last year. Right. That is now sets up a distributorship. I can have a manufacturing license, a selling license, a growing license, but I cannot have a distributor's license.

1:07:19Etienne FontanA distributor can only have a distributor's license. So you, as the individual patient, now go and deal with the distributor. The distributor now will be doing the testing and handling and not sure, we're still unsure if they're going to be doing the packaging. Am I going to receive it in bulk? Am I now going to lay off my entire, you know, waste staff potentially because I'm no longer receiving product in bulk to break it down?

1:07:46Etienne FontanThere's a whole bunch of questions that because this is new law, we just got the new head of the department and she is very interested in working with us. However, now I'm going to have to pay that distributor. I'm no longer dealing with you, the patient. So, I'm going to have to pay a higher price through a distributor now because the distributor is doing the testing, which I incur that cost currently.

1:08:12Etienne FontanEverything that I test, I incur that cost, and that's just the reality of it. And everything has to be tested at Berkeley Patients Group before it hits the floor by Berkeley City Law. So as we stand now, as we continue forward with MRSA, for us is to reach out and to, Thank you for joining us today.

1:08:59Etienne FontanI am now going to pay a higher price without a doubt to the distributor because they have to pay their people on top of local laws, local taxes because in California, local places can tax. I pay a 2.5% wholesale tax in Berkeley. I pay a 2.5% overall sales tax on my overall retail sales. On top of that, I pay an over-the-counter tax. That's going to be interesting because I handle the OTC tax to the State Board of Equalization.

1:09:34Etienne FontanWill everybody who comes through my door in the future actually have a medical cannabis card issued from the state? Currently, very few. I would say less than a handful because current California law allows for you to just come in with your note. Originally, a lot of people used to go to the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club and And get a third-party verified medical cannabis card. And what these are basically are people who verify that the person is a medical patient of this doctor and that this doctor is in current standing with California Medical Association and doesn't have any strikes against them, i.e.

1:10:11Etienne Fontanany files against them such as this doctor cannot work with women because he's had documentation of a problem with women. That's actually happened. So There's various realities that these doctors have had to deal with and we have had to deal with. So for us, originally, it was easier to go to somebody who had a card and would show up with this third-party verified card because that card, we knew that person was already certified.

1:10:44Etienne FontanWhereas currently, you can now just bring in your doctor's note and we have access to the California Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

1:11:20Etienne FontanThe reality of the current medical situation is everybody has to have their current medical note renewed every year. So for us, it's incurred, and many of us have our own internal databases so that we can just make sure that that date, when it expires or by the time it expires, we have it in-house so that we can say, hey, I'm sorry, we can't see you today. We have to have your updated doctor's note, or they can produce it, and then we can proceed forward.

1:11:48Etienne FontanWill Mercer change that with the forcing people to get the card because now I have to adjust taxation because now I have to know the difference between somebody who is a registered state person because if they don't pay the 9% tax over the counter, I now have to prove to the city and the state board of equalization why that sale was made without that taxation. So that's a reality that falls on me.

1:12:17Etienne FontanThat falls on you.

1:12:19SpeakerCan I ask, you know, it seems like Marissa has obviously already passed and you guys are dealing with regulation in the terms of the medical industry that has grown. Can you talk a bit about how regulation is stepping into this regardless of if, you know, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act passes or not?

1:12:41Tony VerzuraWell, this is Chris. I would just toss it right off the bat that once we lose the SB420 collective defense...

1:12:47SpeakerHold on. Can we unmute Tim, Mark? Could you unmute Tim, please?

1:12:51BubblemanYeah, one second.

1:12:53SpeakerLet me just get over to the old... Tim, it's only because we had echo and we mute our mics when we're not speaking. We use it like a CB, so we turn it on when we're talking and off when we're not. Did you hear my question? It looks like ATN is talking to me. Oh, could you, go ahead, Tim. Well, no, we're working with River Collective, which is a major former alcohol distribution company.

1:13:19SpeakerTed Simmons helped write the protocol for MRSA. He's one of the founders of River, and we made the choice to go with them. They made us kind of an offer we couldn't refuse, and... Give us some really good money up front to do some things. But we've been working at both sides. You're not going to see the cost really get passed on to the patients because the distributors are going to want 25% to 30% of your product.

1:13:45SpeakerAnd so most people now are finding out just how much of a chunk that is. If you've got a $30 price point and you take 30% off that, you're talking $10 off that. So now say you're getting $30, you're getting $20. And then you've got all the taxes and regulations. So for everybody going into the mainstream legal markets from the black market, they're going to be in for a very sobering moment when they realize how much regulation, taxation, and how much they're going to give up to those distributors.

1:14:11SpeakerOn the other side, they don't have to worry about driving down the road and Thank you so much for joining us.

1:14:37SpeakerSo it's been a very eye-opening experience to go into the mainstream markets with distribution, and we're happy we did it, but it's been, like I said, it's been a lot of work to deal with it. Thank you so much for being here.

1:15:07SpeakerThank you for watching.

1:15:27SpeakerThank you for joining us.

1:15:55Speaker15% failure rate. It was about half microbial, half pesticides and whatnot. And we were going to post that. We told people we were going to post that. And a lot of people didn't see the small print. We had a tremendous backlash from a lot of producers of products that were saying, rightfully so, that they got clones from somewhere, they got starts from somewhere, their friends did something, they weren't aware of this, they tested it.

1:16:24SpeakerSomewhere else, you know, there's a lot of labs out there that don't have good equipment. I don't want to name the labs, but when you go to SC Labs, they're going to catch anything that's in there, and they're getting a new piece of equipment because of all the problems with concentrates and some of the concentrates failing. It's a real problem up here. So everybody's gotten away with a lot of stuff going back east to the black market, and they haven't had to worry about ever being tested.

1:16:46SpeakerWell, this year at the Cup, we ended up getting almost 40 people for pesticides. We posted that. People were about ready to have a revolution, a mutiny on us, so we pulled it down for this year. This coming year, we're going to post those results. We're going to be very clear up front in big, bold letters that this is an organic contest and you're going to have your product tested and those test results will be posted because people do want to see the THC and cannabinoid levels.

1:17:12SpeakerWe did a terpene test. They want to see all these levels because it's exciting, but you can't pull out the The past fail, that's got to be part of it. People are going to have to be aware of what's going on. The other thing that SC had was that to test full spectrum like that, most people go into SC labs and they're only getting a THC cannabinoid level test.

1:17:35SpeakerThey're not doing full spectrum. All of a sudden, when SC, who thought they could easily do 850 tests at that level, you're talking about multi-day tests to run for molds and pesticides. They got overwhelmed, and so our contest has to move up earlier. We've always run it from the first of November to the first of December, but we're going to have to do that cutoff date before Thanksgiving now to give us enough time to get all those tests done and get them back to the judges because when you're picking up that material from 14 dispensers around the state, you've got to bring it back up here and then get it to SC Lab and then get it tested, get it back up here, and then get it to the judges and have enough time to go through the whole contest.

1:18:14SpeakerWell, I tell you what, it's a tremendous amount of pressure and work to do, and so for the first time, we're going to have to move that up to probably the 20th or the 22nd or something for a final drop-off. Just for the sake of this, how many entries did you have last year? We had 419, 420 entries, just right there. It depends. You can call it 420, but I think it was actually 419 the year before.

1:18:36SpeakerNow, that's on flowers. The year before, we had 650. The reason why it dropped was because we put that $250 test in, and we told everybody that we're going to have to test all the materials. So that brought us down and got rid of some of the people that were just doing it for tickets or weren't really serious and got much more serious about the entrance. We noticed that the product levels went up also because of that.

1:18:59SpeakerObviously, people are more serious. You've got to put $250 up for the test. You're not going to put six entries in. So it changed it, but it's still a lot of entries to judge.

1:19:09BubblemanChimera's in the chat room. He was wondering when the videos from last year's Emerald Cup or the last Emerald Cup will be available on YouTube.

1:19:19SpeakerThat's a very good question. We're just cleaning that up. One of the things that happened was I'm a very loyal person. I kept some people that have been with me for a long time on the video side, and some mistakes were made on the audio on the cultivation stage. And so it's taken us, we had to get like the highest You know, highest quality audio people in the world and people that work with Neil Young to come in and clean up that audio.

1:19:43SpeakerIt's just been done and we're going to end up posting those because we have standing ovations for like the genetics panels and some of those cultivation stage panels and people have been asking us for four months and we've just gotten that done and within the next week all those panels will be up on the sites. Well, thanks, Tim. That's great. And that guy's not going to work for us this year because we can't.

1:20:05SpeakerWhat dates are this year's Emerald Cup? December 10th and 11th. It's always basically the second week of December. I wish we had more time with that, but that's where it falls. Well, you know, to me, you have created, you have the best vision of freedom. I mean, I've been to events all over the world and put on some pretty cool events myself, but your feeling of a country fair and the lack of police presence and the good vibe and the openness has, it's, It's like walking into the future.

1:20:35SpeakerIt reminds me of the first time I stepped into Amsterdam and went, wow, you know, I could just walk up to the counter and buy some grass and ash. And the feeling at the Emerald Cup is the best ever. And I feel like that to me is where we're going with not just legalization but normalization. You know, you've really made this about the family and about the community.

1:20:58SpeakerAnd that, I think, is the best vibe. I hope, and I don't want everybody to knock you off. Please don't take it that way. But I really hope that people come and get inspired by the Emerald Cup and try to replicate that type of energy in their hometowns and with communities around them because you've been such a fantastic community organizer. And I think right now you're taking a brave stance, and I really salute you for that.

1:21:22SpeakerI mean, I've been getting a lot of... Thank you for watching.

1:21:43SpeakerAnd, you know, I thank you for being part of this, putting on the animal club, and I thank you for joining us, for sure. Yeah, and Tim, I wanted to say thank you, too, because I think what you're doing is great, and I think this testing is absolutely necessary. I was curious about the microbiological that tested positive. Was that for a known disease, or was it unknown, and they just found microbiological DNA in there, so they zipped it?

1:22:14SpeakerYeah, mostly botrytis and PM, you know, traditional stuff we have up here. You know, on the one side, if you use the pesticides, you don't have those issues, but if you don't use the pesticides and do organically, you've really got to be on top of your game because you've got a lot of moisture up here in the fall up in Northern California and around the state, and you can easily get PM or botrytis or different microbials in there, so you've really got to get living soil.

1:22:39SpeakerYeah, I understand pest and diseases very well. Me and Rob wrote the book on it. Well, as you know, most people are getting bagged soil from a store. It's not living soil. They're not amending that well. And now what we're doing, we had Elaine Ingham up here a couple weeks ago. We had Jeffrey Lowenfels. We're really teaching people about living soil and compost teas and compost and mycorrhizae, and we're really trying to raise the bar There's a group that did the Cultivation Classic up in Portland last weekend.

1:23:09SpeakerJesse from BioVortex and Jeremy Plume, a number of those guys up there. And we're going to bring that into the Emerald Cup this year as a new level of setting the bar up really above organic and to the highest standards. We're going to go out to their farms and look at the sustainable aspects of the farms. And we're going to be testing for the salts. And we're going to bring a whole other level of testing for pure organic cannabis.

1:23:32SpeakerAnd I'm really excited about that because that's what Thermo Cuff started as, as an organic contest. I think what they're doing up there is very interesting. The only thing that I'm a little bit skeptical of is whether or not growing under lights, artificial lights, is sustainable if you do it in organic soil. I don't think so.

1:23:57SpeakerI don't think artificial lights, we have mixed light now. There's so much coming in like with our county initiative because so much of it is mixed light now. It's not even, you know, you've got people doing depots year round with mixed light. So it's not even really an indoor issue anymore. It's mixed light. And I'm dealing with some LED companies that are trying to get the right light spectrums down for LED lighting and they're using almost no energy.

1:24:18SpeakerSo if it comes out and we introduce that company. That is my primary concern is the carbon footprint of using artificial lights to grow cannabis where you can use greenhouses, for example. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a company that has LED lighting that supposedly has the right spectrum that's using less than 2.5 watts to get 100 watts. They're almost self-powered, and we're testing those, doing beta testing now, and if they come out right, we're going to introduce those at the Cup as another way to really green your grow.

1:24:50Etienne FontanHi, Tim, this is ATN. I want to also congratulate you on one of the best events I've ever attended, cannabis-wise, in 20-plus years. You tested for pesticides as well, yes? Yes.

1:25:03SpeakerYes.

1:25:04Etienne FontanWhat was the predominant pesticides that came up, just out of curiosity?

1:25:09SpeakerYou had Avid, you had Fluoramide, you got Eagle 20. I mean, some nasty stuff. You had a lot of Eagle 20 in there. You know, nothing that was good.

1:25:18Etienne FontanNo, nothing that was good, but I was just wondering what were the predominant, say, five.

1:25:24SpeakerFluoramide, Avid, Eagle 20 was the primary one. I'll try to go back down the line. You know, really that was the thing that I was so appalled by was the Eagle 20, some of the avid stuff. But it, you know, a lot of these growers, they've taken the easy way out. And, you know, and adding to that, we started a concentrate company. And if you talk to any concentrate makers up here, what's happened is, is that, 80 to 90% of our material we're picking up is also failing.

1:25:53SpeakerSo not even outside the cup you had like 10%, but in the general growing audience up here in Northern California, probably three quarters of it is failing. And if you go to the concentrate makers, it's become such a problem that you can't even test the shake anymore. You've got to take it, make it into concentrate, and then run that as a test because obviously it's not showing up in the shake, but then in the concentrated forms it is.

1:26:14SpeakerAnd there's been so many failures from so many people with concentrates that nobody would even buy shake up here anymore without doing tests on it. And so it's become, we didn't realize what a large problem it is. I'm embarrassed by it. I don't mind calling everybody out on it because we've got to bring it to the light of the day to heal it. But it's time for people to realize that feeding people poison day long so they can make money is not a moral or responsible way to grow or live.

1:26:39SpeakerYou know, Tim, I totally applaud your principles, and I would like to ask you, as someone that lives up there, what's the environmental impact on the people that, you know, when I first went up there 20 years ago, it seemed like there was a lot of hippies up there, and now when I go up there, it seems like, no disrespect, my mom was a hippie I love, I shouldn't use the term hippie, but people up there growing weed and, you know, termagants and the whole thing, what's the impact environmentally that you see happening on people that are just coming in to make money?

1:27:10SpeakerWell, it's an interesting thing. Mendocino had very restrictive policies after they busted the 9.31 program, which was you could grow 100 plants legally with sheriff's permits a couple years ago. So we're very restrictive in Mendocino. We don't have hardly any of the environmental degradation. We were talking about it yesterday. I'm not trying to call out Humboldt. I mean, I live closer to Humboldt than most of my friends in Mendo, and I have many, many friends in Humboldt.

1:27:32SpeakerBut unfortunately, what happened was Humboldt didn't have any of those protections or restrictions. Everybody knows they've blown it up. Around Garberville, 20 miles in each direction, there's a picture of a map that shows that there's 1,000, 1,000 pound grows in those vicinities. Now, in Mendocino, you have a hard time ever finding 1,000 pound grow, let alone 1,000. Now, I'm not opposed to people being capitalists or getting into the marketing aspects, but most of those people aren't the old-time humble people.

1:28:01SpeakerThose old hippies you're talking about and the people who have been up there for 30 years, there's a whole new breed of people. And it's every form of We'll see you next time.

1:28:30SpeakerAnd we were sitting down there with the Board of Supervisors yesterday, and I'm grateful for the fact that we had this restrictive nature put on us because there's no way that I can look at it morally as an environmentalist and say that that much cannabis in those mountains with that little water on hillsides without soil running into all those creeks is going to be anything short of an environmental nightmare in the years to come.

1:28:53SpeakerAnd I wish them all well, but I think they're going to have things that they're going to have to be seriously looking at over the next few years. Wow, you know, I applaud your answer. I didn't expect that, and I'm glad you're so realiztic about it. You know, how do you see legalization change in this? Do you think it'll thin this herd of, you know, opportunists?

1:29:15SpeakerWell, it will eventually, but Humboldt and Mendocino have a good brand. We're doing an Appalachian like the wine here for Mendocino. We're going to be the first county with Appalachians, and Humboldt's going to do the same thing. I mean, we are the Emerald Triangle. We're the Napa Valley of the, We're going to do well and we're grateful for being able to do that. As everybody comes online with MRSA and AMU over the next two years and we start doing 40,000 square foot farms all over California, the numbers for commercial growing are going to move out of here and we're going to be niche markets with the high end brands.

1:29:46SpeakerBut you know what? Like with the Emerald Cup, it's the same people coming back every year winning. It's the same 10, 15 people. They win all the time. You can just look at their names and know they're going to be there. The people up here, I keep telling them, you've got to raise that bar. You've got to get into living soils. You've got to get into incredible growing materials so that you bring those terps out.

1:30:05SpeakerYou can do a side-by-side grow with chemicals, and you're not going to get those terpenes or cannabinoids. It's just not going to happen. So you've got to grow really fine flowers now to be able to hold your brand. And I think that in these mountains, you're already seeing real estate go down in the outer reaches like Island Mountain. A lot of that real estate is going to go down 30 to 40, 50% in the next few years because you're not going to need to hide out in the middle of nowhere on the hillsides with limited water to grow.

1:30:29SpeakerYou're going to be down there in the valley farmland. I just got 10 acres in the valley floor in Laytonville a year ago because I saw this coming. We're putting a big genetics nursery down there. Well, that's fantastic. And I hope that everybody continues what they're doing. I just think that it's going to become more of a realiztic business situation in the old days of having a loop and making tens of thousands of dollars in the summer is not there anymore.

1:30:54SpeakerPeople are going to have to have real business plans and have real standards and have consistency and they're going to have to look at their bottom lines because if they don't, their competitors will. Yeah, we looked at working with the largest concentrate people in the world, the best in the world. We had a number of relationships set up to work together. And when they looked at the numbers and saw how much they were going to give up and the margins, how they were going to drop, they were all like, I think we'll just stay on the outside for a while because they can make so much more money in the black market and going that way.

1:31:25SpeakerI mean, you're going to really see those margins. But us in the rosin market, we've already watched our numbers go down 30% in six months with the competition coming in. It's dropping so fast, so you're going to see everything drop 30% just because of the amount of products coming on the market. Look at how many companies are coming at the dispensers every day. Can I ask you what some of the biggest questions or the biggest concerns you hear from the people that have been asking you why you have spoken in any way whatsoever towards the Adult Use of Marijuana Act?

1:31:57SpeakerWhat are some of the big concerns of the growers around you and how are you addressing them? You know, I'm not quite sure, Todd. I listen to people. The big thing was that AMA was going to allow larger scale acreage, and when they brought it down to in line with MRSA, I felt like they were acknowledging the growers and that they were being fair with us. I tell everybody up here, you guys want a permanent ban on large scale farming, and that's just not going to happen in any capitalist society.

1:32:23SpeakerWe're lucky we got five years. And so because they were reasonable with that and brought it in line, I don't feel like there's a real issue. But so many people have had it drummed into their head that this is an anti-growers initiative, that it's going to put people in jail. The same things that Chris and all of you guys face. It's a few people that have just beat that drum that it's just going to be a terrible thing for us.

1:32:44SpeakerAnd so I spend a lot of my time asking growers, what is it that really bothers you so much? I mean, what aspect of it? And they really can't come up with the answer. So I think most of them are just not well informed. And like most people in the world today, they're just not up politically. Thank you. I appreciate that. I don't want to dominate the conversation, everybody.

1:33:06SpeakerI apologize. It's really a pleasure. Tim, as you know, I've been sending you a message. We've been wanting to have you on for quite a while, and I just want to say thanks again. I mean, we've all been to your event, I think, except for Mark and Dee.

1:33:22BubblemanWell, if I get my waiver this year, I'll be at the next Emerald Cup.

1:33:27SpeakerI'll get you guys all in VIP. We're going to take over the VIP this year because we're going to just run that ourselves. I'll get you guys all in there. I respect and admire every one of you, all the work you guys have done. I'm humbled to just be on the show with all of you.

1:33:42Tony VerzuraSome ways to have some places where we can give some presentations explaining ALMA. One of the things that we found is that once people see how it really works, they realize that the benefits of it, but the problem is that people are afraid actually almost to learn how it works because They're comfortable with things. And it's really based on SB 420, which those collectives are going to cease to exist in a year and a half.

1:34:05Tony VerzuraSo this impression that we can just keep going like we have been isn't really going to be true. But also, Tim, are people excited about the fact that Alma protects local branding for Mendocino and Humboldt County that makes sure that people have to actually be in those counties to use those names?

1:34:23SpeakerWell, yeah, they are. In fact, our steering committee, we put Appalachians together. We're setting up all the branding for Mendocino. We've got a Mendocino marketing campaign. We've got people like this gentleman that owns 20,000 acres. He's got 140 acres of vineyards. He's never been part of the market. Now he's helping us brand the whole thing. So Mendocino and Humboldt, for that matter, I've really jumped in aggressively to get into that branding, realizing that, hey, we're the Emerald Triangle.

1:34:49SpeakerWe better make hay while the sun shines. So we're setting up our initiative to exclude people that don't live here from immediately coming in to grow. We're setting up our initiative to keep limitations on how you can do that and setting up our appellations. And so that's what we're doing with the Heritage Initiative. But we're finding the same thing, Chris. It's like even up here, people are still And so it's really been an educational process for us every day out there trying to get people to understand that this is going to benefit them.

1:35:16SpeakerWe're doing it, everybody, for AMU and the initiative of ours. It's all for the good of the community. One question, Chris.

1:35:35Etienne FontanWill AMA protect individuals from going to places like the Emerald Cup or Chalice or HempCon from setting up? I want to understand they're going to allow day permits so you can actually set up at these events legally?

1:35:48Tony VerzuraYes, and it allows for on-site consumption as well so that a lot of, like we were at HempCon and people were saying, we'll never be able to do this again. Well, that's nonsense. They'll just be licensed to do it the next time instead of kind of doing it without a license that says they can do so. The whole idea of the on-site consumption. You know, one of the things you have to give Alma, they really learned from other states.

1:36:11Tony VerzuraLike up in Oregon, they did not allow on-site consumption, and the places that were doing that got shut down. Madeline Martinez being the obvious example to me. Washington had the per se limit on driving and very high taxes, so Alma specifically prevented both of those from happening. Ohio, we saw all those...

1:36:35Etienne FontanWe also saw in Colorado that it turned away the cannabis cup and things like that, so I guess they learned from that as well.

1:36:48Tony VerzuraAnd the other thing we learned from Colorado is that you have to make sure that the doses on the edibles is marked. And easily broken down because people out there were overdosing a lot. And so that's something that's included in this initiative too, 10 milligrams. And it has to be homogenous throughout the substance. And they have to be clearly broken, marked off as the portions for each dosage.

1:37:11Tony VerzuraSo I think the authors really showed a lot of insight in seeing what was going on and applying it, let alone having to talk about the federal issues as to why the initiative reads like it does.

1:37:24SpeakerYeah, people were saying the same thing about the Emerald Cup. They were saying, oh, you're never going to be able to do it again. And I said, look, Sonoma County has already voted to give us six more years. We have our dates all the way to 2021. And so we're already guaranteed a site for the next five years. And Sonoma said, we don't care about that. We're letting you in.

1:37:42SpeakerSo it's going to come county to county. And most of these counties are just going to want the business, as you see.

1:37:55SpeakerI'm so glad to hear that. That is such an accomplishment and with such a bigoted business economy against cannabis that you have been able to put together such a great event that you have Sonoma County letting you use the Sonoma County Fairgrounds for the next five years. I applaud you. That is fantastic. I always hoped it wouldn't go away because when you walk into it and you walk around it, you feel like you're dreaming if you're a pop person.

1:38:21SpeakerAnd to hear that you have this buffer now and it's fantastic. It's some of the best things I heard all day. You know, I've always had the feeling that bringing together the culture, Tim, is the new commodity. It's the new gift that we're doing. When I met Jack Herrick, he would hold rallies on the federal lawn on Wilshire Boulevard and use their little marble stage as his platform to tell us all what to do.

1:38:49SpeakerAnd I saw the significance of bringing people together, and that's why I always pursued it. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:39:25Tony VerzuraI think another issue that I've heard raised about events like this are the free sample aspects of it because under Alma it appears to me like you would have to pay the taxes on those samples even if you gave them away and that you can't give them away for specific things like promotion and you can't give it away to undercut your competitors in order to create a monopoly.

1:39:47Tony VerzuraBut correct me what you think about this, Tim. Since it says specifically about free samples, it seems to me like if you say that the price of admission includes that you get to sample things, that's not the same as a free sample. And so we kind of just have to approach it the way we discussed this, so rather than, or else we may have to give them a dollar for your dab or something like that, which doesn't seem like it would be that impossible to me.

1:40:14Tony VerzuraWhat's your take on that?

1:40:16SpeakerWell, the samples are a big thing. That's what everybody does at these events. They really hook people in with the samples and the dabs and whatnot. But you know what? People are very ingenious. They'll figure out ways to get around that. Technically, you're not supposed to move product through any of these events. We were doing some math last year and figured that well over $10 million moved through that 215 area in a weekend.

1:40:39SpeakerWell, can I bring something up really flat up? This is the problem I as a producer have had because when I tried to rent the LA Coliseum, the city attorney's office had a meltdown that he didn't want to see me turn it into a big farmer's market. Their big question was how are you going to regulate all of that commerce that weekend?

1:40:57Archive SeedsAnswer me.

1:40:58SpeakerNo, no, that's what he said to me, and that's why he shut me down, because I was all the way up to the point of them at the Coliseum. They gave me dates. They said yes, everything was a go, and the city attorney office went, we don't want another farmer's market. There's no way I'm going to approve this on any grounds. So now we as promoters have the problem of enforcing what happens at this, because normally in these events, people are all honest, and they pay their local taxes, and they keep track of what they do, and the Otis isn't on us.

1:41:27SpeakerYou know, but now they're kind of putting it on us or people like you that are promoting because now they are wondering what the revenue is. Coming through. Like High Times, for instance, the word was is they got kicked out of Richmond because of the unregulated commerce that they're creating. And of all people, it was the cannabis clubs that were complaining to the city council that by letting High Times come in and use that place over the weekend, they were losing money in sales.

1:41:54SpeakerAnd all of it was basically unrecorded and none of it was benefiting the city. So they said no more events here.

1:42:03SpeakerWell, there were a number of reasons that went along with that also that I won't go into, but I know a lot of that. And High Times did quite a few things that could have been done better with that. But like Fiona Moss said, the head of the State Board of Equalization, all they want is their share of the money. They just want to get the money.

1:42:22SpeakerSo if we just give them their share of the money, they're not, you know, look at Al Capone and the rest of people. They went to jail for IRS and tax evasion before anything else. So I paid my taxes every year of my life. I tell people, you know what, get ready for it. If you haven't done it, you know, you're going to be amazed when you give up 35, 40% of your income after you give the distributors 30% and then the IRS gets their piece and you got that little piece left.

1:42:45SpeakerBut if you do that, then you don't get in trouble. So the people that are paying their taxes and doing it straight up, they're not going after those people. It's the ones that are trying to keep it all and spend all the money and not give any back.

1:42:58Tony VerzuraYeah, and Harborside being a good example of somebody who puts a lot of money back into the community and BPG as well since AT&T.

1:43:05SpeakerYeah. Hey Tim, can you talk about the 25 plant limits in Mendo and how that's going to change under the new regulations or is it going to change? Well, our initiative that we just put forth will give you the right to still have your 25. They were trying to make everybody sign up, even on the 25, and we just went to war over that yesterday and said, look, you don't make people sign up for 24 plants, and now you're going to make every person go in there and register?

1:43:30SpeakerSo they backed down on that. They're going to let us have that. They're setting up for under 10 acres, you're going to be able to do 50 plants, and for over 10 acres, you're going to be able to do 99 for this year. Next year, we'll segue into basically MRSA law. But for this year, it's going to be fairly easy for people to get their licenses. But the big consideration up here is that everybody's going to have to do their building permits and their grading, and they're going to have to basically come into compliance with all the Class K and all the illegal structures they've got up here.

1:44:00SpeakerThe average property owner is looking at between $50,000 and $200,000 in fees, permits, architectural designs, surveys, and whatnot. They are going to waive all the fines and give you amnesty for that. And Mendocino in the next two years is probably going to see $50 million go into compliance. So there's going to be a huge uptick in people being hired at the planning departments, the agriculture departments, the building departments.

1:44:25SpeakerAnd Mendocino is going to see all their roads get fixed and see a tremendous amount of money get poured into here. But it's going to be at the expense of these growers having to put up and pay their fair share for the first time really ever. So, I mean, some people aren't going to be able to afford those kind of upgrades to their property. I know some people up there that are just kind of getting by under the 25 limit.

1:44:45SpeakerDo you think that will encourage people to take on investors, kind of work around that? They won't have to do that for 25 or 50. You're not going to have anybody out at your property. If you want to do 99 plants, then that will kick in. And what we're saying with the Board of Supervisors and they're giving us amnesty for two years is, look, you guys get to do some pretty big crops for two years.

1:45:04SpeakerYou better save 20% of that for your upgrades.

1:45:07Archive SeedsYeah.

1:45:09SpeakerAnd I think that's reasonable. But the little person on 25 isn't going to face any of that. The challenge is you get 25 plants, you do 100 pounds. It's 120,000 bucks. You take your $20,000 out for your trimmers.

1:45:21SpeakerAnd your expense, you've got $100,000. You take out the $30,000 of cost to do the crop, and now you've got $70,000 for a year before you've paid anybody to help you. That's not a real living wage. Most people, you know, that's a good, it gets by, but that's not going to make people, you know, really, you know, successful. Yeah. You know, the public still thinks that gold pours out of the ground at any, you know, any minute marijuana grow, and it's just not that way.

1:45:49SpeakerWell, not when you're competing with Humboldt. The average person's got 500, and you've got 25 down in Mendo, and they're selling it for 900 or 1,000. How can you do that? Then you're making 40,000 for the year. So you're not going to be able to survive easily on 25 plants. People are going to have to scale up, unfortunately, unless you're going to be a mom and pop and be on the side of the road, or you're going to have extremely...

1:46:10SpeakerExtremely good products you can do branding with. But look at the last three weeks. You've got Tommy Chong. You've got Melissa Etheridge. You've got Whoopi Goldberg. You've got three Marlies coming out with brands. I mean this is what you're going to be competing with for shelf space. So that mom and pop, they don't grow enough to even get on that shelf space because you've got to have enough product.

1:46:27SpeakerThe thing the distributors say is don't run out and backlog us and backorder us because if you do that two times in a row, we'll cut you out. So you're going to have to have enough product to always satisfy them. And you're not going to do that as a mom and pop. I really feel for those small mom and pops that have done pretty well off 25 plants over the years because they're going to see their margins get smaller and smaller.

1:46:51SpeakerI agree, Tim. It's inevitable that the whole paradigm of growing and profiting is over, and I feel that the loudest voice of contention against change are sometimes these people. I flip through it. They've got greenhouses. They've got more plants than I've ever dreamed I would have on their Instagram publicly displayed, and they're adamantly against legalization. Isn't that amazing? Todd, you see them. They've got their greenhouses, and they're displaying these.

1:47:18SpeakerI mean, they would have been taken away five years ago. They'd have been drug off. And now these people have no fear. They don't care, and they're not being arrested. It's incredible. They dragged me away for far less. I'll tell you.

1:47:34BubblemanThe year that I met Eddie Lepp at the Cannabis Cup, and he was walking around with big printouts taken from a helicopter of his field right by the highway, showing and giving them away. He had copies that he would sign for people. And people were like, I recognize that street. I know where this is. And I was just like, damn, this motherfucker is right straight crazy. And unfortunately, you know, fucking been locked up for, what, close to 10 years?

1:47:59BubblemanYeah. Now there's 1,000 people doing that every day. Now there's a thousand people.

1:48:05Tony VerzuraWow. Holy. But yet that being said, I'm in court all the time, you know, fighting over small grows of a few pounds and stuff like that. So this is one of the things where... It creates this dissonance between what's going on and what the implications are if you do get in trouble. And a lot of people have this sense that they can do anything, but what I'm seeing is we're in court fighting hard-fought battles every day trying to keep people out of prison here at the same time as people are saying you can do whatever you want.

1:48:36SpeakerThat's the small local cases, Chris, but if you look at the feds and what they've been doing, the DEA, they're not really going after anybody. I mean, they've done very little over the last couple years. They didn't even get Jeff down there with the workshop. I mean, what are they doing? They haven't pressed charges against almost anyone in the last 12 months. So on the local level, you're right.

1:49:00SpeakerThey're going after transporters. They're not going after the cultivators in California as much.

1:49:04Tony VerzuraYeah, out-of-state shipments. Anybody who's doing out-of-state shipping is still very much targeted.

1:49:12SpeakerYou know, as a kid in Rhode Island, there was lower taxes on tobacco down in the South, in North Carolina, South Carolina. I lived off of I-95, and I knew people that routinely went down there to buy tobacco and would bring it back to New England and sell it without the taxes of the state. It was totally illegal to do that.

1:49:35SpeakerThis is typically going on and I mean they're still going to investigate illegal activities even though tobacco is legal in both places. You know what I'm saying? I mean we're still going to have to deal with this crap. We're still going to have to deal with cops being cops but it's going to be legal to grow the tobacco and it's going to be legal to smoke the tobacco but it's just that tobacco is going to be cannabis.

1:49:59Tony VerzuraAnd likewise, people have expressed concern to me about the fact that this will allow law enforcement to send minors into marijuana stores, which we can't have right now, of course. But once we get to marijuana stores after Alma, the police can send minors in to try to do buys in order to make sure people aren't violating their licenses. And that's been going on in the alcohol industry forever.

1:50:18Tony VerzuraSo the idea that this is somehow different and targeting marijuana is silly.

1:50:23SpeakerTim, I have a question for you. Go ahead, Sam. Did you ever attend the Harvest Festivals in Fairfax or Santa Rosa in the 70s or 80s?

1:50:36SpeakerYou're asking me? Yeah, I'm asking you, Tim. I never attended anything. I wasn't like Chris. I've been a lifelong outlaw, and I didn't attend anything. I never came forward. No, these were not public events. This was by invitation only, and they blindfolded you and took you in a van to it. Yeah, I heard about them, but being up here for the last 20 years up in Mendo and stuff, we didn't come out of the mountains.

1:51:05SpeakerThese took place in Sevastopol. Okay, but I mean, my girl, my girlfriend now came into town and she said, in Laytonville, she said, how come this town's just coming together? And I said, until five years ago, you didn't go into town except to get your groceries, you didn't drive big trucks, you didn't make yourself known, you didn't go anywhere, because we were really living under a siege.

1:51:25SpeakerAnd so, I wasn't really connected to the Sonoma and the people down south that much. Really, the Emerald Cup gave me the introduction into how cool Sonoma is. I'd just been driving by it for 25 years. And, uh, So I missed a lot of that being up here. And until we did the Emerald Cup, there wasn't anybody doing anything like that up here because we were all just hardcore outlaws.

1:51:43SpeakerThe one at the basketball actually held 24 in a row, one each year. Yeah, I heard about those guys. They're amazing stuff. I'm very proud of them.

1:51:56Tony VerzuraThe first one, I missed all those as well, but the ones at the Mateel Center were the first ones that I started seeing. I think they were the late 90s. But of course, the first kind of events like that I went to, as you know, Sam, is at the High Times Cups in Amsterdam.

1:52:16Etienne FontanWe're trying to bring the... Chris, I'm pretty sure we did events in Mendo in 94 together, a

1:52:25Tony VerzuraYeah, that's what I, well, I think with Sohum, the Mateel Center is where I was thinking of, but yeah.

1:52:29SpeakerI'm thinking of the Hemp Fest. You're thinking of the Hemp Fest, Chris, with Linda Hand and Noel Manners? They did the Hemp Fest up there for almost 30 years. Okay, yeah. That's what that was.

1:52:41Tony VerzuraRight, uh-huh.

1:52:42SpeakerBut that was disguised as a Hemp Festival.

1:52:45Tony VerzuraYeah, right. But we certainly did a lot of smoking. The Hemp, it was a burn. The Hemp, it was a burn.

1:52:52SpeakerWith this impending glut of cannabis that's going to come on the market in California, are we going to see the end to the $55, $60 eighth that is so prevalent in the dispensaries, or are we going to have a market correction, or what do you guys see happening?

1:53:06Etienne FontanIt's inevitable. It's inevitable. The reality is it's going to happen. We have to see how that's all going to shape out. That's a frustration, because now these local municipalities are jumping on, and now Somebody in the State Senate right now is trying to pass another 15% tax. So the struggle continues.

1:53:33Tony VerzuraOne of the things that is an unfortunate factor on this is that a lot of the goal with the taxation is to keep the price high enough that miners don't have the assets to buy it, but low enough to keep people out of the illicit market. And then to prevent imports from out of state, which we don't have a lot of, but exports from California to other states.

1:53:57Tony VerzuraAnd so, you know, this is where there's this dichotomy that within the cannabis community, you want to see those prices come down from the consumer's point of view. The growers want to see the prices up high enough to support them. The parents in Southern California want to make sure the price is high enough. That their kids are not getting hold of it as easily. And so this is part of the delicate balancing act.

1:54:19Etienne FontanWell, and the distributors, now we have to pay the distributors cost and the cost of testing by the distributor and for their people that they hire to be set up as well. So we're still kind of waiting on that one, Chimera, because there's still have to all kind of settle out.

1:54:35Tony VerzuraBut we will be able to eliminate some of the distributors once Alma comes along because it does not make them mandatory to use and it does allow for the vertical integration and people can, for the micro businesses I should say, and people can own multiple levels. Like you can own a distributorship and also own a production license and also own a retail license. It's going to be three different licenses but then you don't have to charge yourself a fee for the transfer if you're providing for yourself.

1:55:05SpeakerOkay, that was the question I had for you. So it's an option then on the distribution.

1:55:12Tony VerzuraUnder Alma, yes.

1:55:13SpeakerUnder Mercer, no. Tim, you have to go at 11 o'clock? Question mark? I'm sorry, question mark. We'll get off in a few minutes so they're enjoying the heck out of this. I was going to jump in and say that, you know, it's really about the access. If we just open up dispensaries or a free market and we actually had like 20 stores in each town rather than one, You see those prices fall quick because you'd have competition.

1:55:37SpeakerRight now, they've restricted us so much that in most cases you don't have much competition because there's not enough dispensaries. If you get it back up to 10,000 dispensaries or get to 10,000 dispensaries, liquor stores in the state, watch those prices drop just like with liquor.

1:55:51Tony VerzuraAnd you look what happened in Oakstradam where we had in the round 2000 there was a big price war. I think ATN might have been around for some of that too. And so the prices dropped and then people started reselling it on the street in front of the dispensaries and so that's why the city actually clamped down on it was because in a sense I thought, and ATN may have a different opinion, that the price got down to where people were just going to the dispensary, buying it, going out in the street and selling it and the city just couldn't handle that so they said we've got to get those prices up.

1:56:20Tony VerzuraAnd pushed it back up to market levels.

1:56:22Etienne FontanThere's never been a push for price. If anything, there was a concern for if people go over the two ounce limits and things like that because the police would catch somebody selling it, et cetera, et cetera. And then, of course, they get banned if they're caught reselling anything like that. So that's how you weed out situations like that. You have to be proactive as well as You know, you work with your local municipality, which it's very rare when you can say, yeah, I get to actually work with my local police department.

1:56:53Etienne FontanBut when the local police department shows up and says, hey, we're under aware that somebody inside your facility has kidnapped a child, we want to come into your facility, what are you going to do? You're going to say no? Because it's happened. And I've actually had to say, okay, well, we'll make, we'll escort this person out and you can handle it from there. But That's the reality when you work with your local police.

1:57:19Etienne FontanThey feel emboldened to come to you and say, hey, we need to work with you on this level. And so that's the diversion level. They've never said you have to raise the price to keep prohibitively away from people in any way, shape, or form. No. It's based off the price that we pay.

1:57:37Tony VerzuraMaybe in Berkeley, but I do remember at the Oakland City Council, that was the discussion, was that people are buying it too cheap in the club.

1:57:43Etienne FontanReally? I wasn't unaware of that, but it doesn't surprise me with Oakland.

1:57:47Tony VerzuraYeah, and then there was too many clubs, so they clamped it down to four, etc.

1:57:50Etienne FontanOh, that's way back when there was 16 there originally, but of course, which is ironic because now the new law that they're pushing for is offering over 100 licenses this past week in Oakland, which will allow for manufacturing licenses, production licenses. More dispensers. I think they're going to go for eight dispensary licenses per year for five years or something like that. So a lot of things happening and change is happening but at the local level.

1:58:21Etienne FontanIt's not really happening on the statewide or even at the county level.

1:58:26Tony VerzuraI think that's really a key point that you just pointed out though is like The situation 15 years ago compared to now is so hugely different. So when people are saying about, well, what Alma does for next year, what it's going to do for 5 or 10 years down the road is going to be, it's going to create the opportunities for us to go much beyond. I mean, look at the progress we've made while marijuana is illegal.

1:58:47Tony VerzuraOnce it's legal, just imagine how much more progress we're going to make in the next 10, 15 years.

1:58:55SpeakerThat excites me. Sorry. I was just going to say, basically I've been on the fence for it, but I think the information shared today is really good. Where I think some of the things that's an issue is really more with MRSA, and it seems like this one kind of comes in, tries to clean up quite a bit of the things that would raise a lot of concerns, and obviously for individual rights and for everything that we're all fighting for.

1:59:27SpeakerSo, I could see all those benefits. I guess my only really kind of concern when we were talking about you guys haven't experienced this yet, but the only thing that really needs to happen is, you know, if it's not a constitutional right, it's not a constitutional change right now, then the next question would be, Does this give state powers or give this individual powers or anyone the wrong powers to be able to change or wipe out 215 or change something after, let's say, we all voted in?

2:00:00SpeakerIs there anything in there that would be, you know, That you would think that was a red flag or would give someone the right or a power or a division or it creates an entity that would have those rights. That was really directed for Chris.

2:00:15Tony VerzuraAnd my answer to that is absolutely not. Prop 215 was an initiative. This is an initiative so the legislature can't modify them. This initiative is very careful to not change Prop 215. In addition, the title and summary, and excuse me, the purposes includes this. The purpose is to legalize marijuana. So the legislature can't come back and say, under the purpose of this, we are now going to recriminalize it.

2:00:41Tony VerzuraThat would not be possible. It sets up a system where the legislature can reduce penalties. It can make more things legal. So if they wanted to change it to like 12 or 24 plants, they could do that just by saying that there's no legalization. Thank you for joining us.

2:01:19SpeakerIf you qualify for the condition at ATN and get the special card, you would be subject to those particular taxes at the register as a true medical patient. That's what this does as well, correct? The over-the-counter tax. Correct. That's a big thing. That's a huge thing.

2:01:39Tony VerzuraSo, ATN, let me ask you a question as someone who's in the dispensary side of it, which is that SB 420 creates this exemption for up to 8 ounces of cannabis, and that's not changed by Alma. And so I know at one point the dispensaries would only sell like one ounce and then at some places they allow up to two ounces. Do you think that dispensaries are going to then kind of stay with the one ounce sale that Alma sets or do you think that we're still going to have some dispensaries that do wholesales of eight ounces and so forth?

2:02:11Tony VerzuraHow do you think that's going to play out?

2:02:13Etienne FontanWe've always had the limit to two ounces. We've never allowed for the full eight ounces. We always consider that diversion if somebody came in every day. Buying two ounces, we would have a conversation regarding diversion as well. So I'm not sure.

2:02:28Tony VerzuraIt's my reading it doesn't change your ability to do that at all because that's unbelievable.

2:02:34Etienne FontanNo, we've just done it again because of talking. This is where feedback from our police were. They were fine with the two ounces per day. It wasn't necessarily a limit. We just said, How do you guys feel about that? And they were like, well, I think we're okay with that. You know, it's not in any particular law or broken down. It's just these are the things that we've had to negotiate over the last 17 years as you, you know, work and live in your community.

2:03:01Etienne FontanBut, yeah, I've known unscrupulous illegal dispensaries will sell pounds out the door, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah. Being held to standards is something we've never had a problem with because we've always set the standards themselves. If we know what the limits are, you know, we always, everybody tries to stay within the line of limits. You know, nobody wants to subject themselves or at least most of us that want to stay respected, we won't put ourselves in that type of risk, you know, because we've had to continue to work in our communities.

2:03:36Etienne FontanOtherwise, you know,

2:03:38Tony VerzuraAnd you're members of CCIA, right? California Cannabis Industries Association?

2:03:42Etienne FontanOf course, and I'm on the board of the National Cannabis Industries Association as well.

2:03:47Tony VerzuraThen you might be able to clarify this other point I wanted to make, which was that from speaking to Nate Bradley, I had the impression that During the MRSA negotiations that CCIA was going back and forth as to how much to support it on account of the various restrictions, and so once it went through with MRSA like it is, I'm double M-ing there for people who wonder why I'm not stuttering, but then They got involved with the writing of the ALMA initiative because they wanted to solve some of those problems like the vertical integration issue, like the mandatory distributorship.

2:04:21Tony VerzuraAnd they were able to get the changes that they could not get through the legislature put into ALMA. And so I'm just saying I'm really thankful to, a lot of people are critical of them because they were involved in MRSA and somewhat in the writing of ALMA. But I feel like I'm very glad that they did what they did in that regard.

2:04:41Etienne FontanAgain, no one's going to be happy there, as Todd spoke to very much early on. There's no one law that is going to fix prohibition. There's no one law that is going to be the magic bullet that's going to fix everything. So was I happy with everything? No. But I can't get, and I'm not going to get everything that I want. It's not just the utopia I'm searching for.

2:05:04Etienne FontanI'm looking at the overall aspects of what's going to lead to people not being in jail. That's why I got into this. It's the whole reason I've continued to work in this struggle was for my patients. And now with legalization, I definitely want to see it legal, but I'm still going to work and fight for my patients because I'm still a patient, and it's not going to change.

2:05:27Etienne FontanHowever, I'm emboldened by these new laws, but at the same time, it holds a whole other air of mystery of what the future is. So I'm Not as excited as other people are, but at the same time, because I have to actually go through this reality. But I accept the challenge because we've worked so hard to be here, so what do I do, just walk away from it now?

2:05:53Etienne FontanNo, we have to walk through the fire that we have laid the coals before us for, right?

2:06:02Etienne FontanI wish it was that.

2:06:04SpeakerThere's no walking away from you. You'll walk through fire, bro. Just like all of us. So I think, you know, it sounds like, you know, it's like a good cleanup of where Mercer was and it has some minimums and standards that you could kind of live with and in any deal, you know, there's a, you try to get a fair deal and when you're dealing with cannabis, like Todd said, I mean, having nothing versus something that's fairly fair for the broad strokes and something you could work on is better than nothing for sure.

2:06:37SpeakerYou know, I think the next move after that is the constitutional change because the one thing I just put out there and I try to tell people about it and they kind of overlook it, you know, when you're on a federal level until they change that it's a controlled substance, number one, the IRS, what they did in Colorado and what you'll see here is when you start distributing, selling cannabis, Schedule 1, to the general public, They applied 280E on a for-profit where you guys have 280E applied to a non-profit.

2:07:13SpeakerIt's perverse and it's unconstitutional when you have a change in your constitution of the state. So originally it started, when you look at every single medical bill that's been passed, they take the 10th Amendment of the United States that gives states rights, the public rights, There are particular rights to look after their citizens and the public safety. And when they change their constitution in Colorado and all the other places that adapted this type of method, it's supposed to give the individual patient a vertical integration of constitutional right to be able to have a script, to be able to have your constitution in your state that's through the 10th Amendment.

2:07:55SpeakerAnd then they pass out licenses. Then they passed out a bunch of licenses and said, hey, you can cultivate, you can distribute to those patients. And you really didn't see any IRS crazy involvement until recreational happened. And then they retroact and say, okay, well, you've been distributing a controlled substance to the public. And 280E applied on a for-profit is really... Something that has to be dealt with sooner than later.

2:08:24SpeakerYou're going to see a lot of it more and more pop up. And it's something to look for. So it's like that's my only concern is like once you get something going, you know, the banking issue and the IRS issue still is a huge red sign for our industry. All of these people that will be quote unquote legal and you'll have everything regulated, you won't necessarily be able to put your money into banks.

2:08:49SpeakerI've gone through 22 banks in the last eight months.

2:08:52Etienne FontanBut that's going to change. Once we get this behind us, then we're moving forward and we're going to see. It's one reason why I'm in the NCIA and work with the CCIA is because we just had 150 people almost in D.C. this week up on Capitol Hill lobbying for, against 2280E and for those rights you're speaking of. So They're out there actively working at that level, but people don't give a shit about our troubles or our problems of taxation because people are still going to jail.

2:09:27Etienne FontanOkay, that's the reality. And so to bring it back to Tim, what's the flack you've gotten? Because I watched you give your speech at the last year and the absolute...

2:09:46Etienne FontanVitriol, people were spitting in the room as well as the reaction that was happening and the rippling going throughout when you said that you would support Alma. What flack have you actually taken?

2:09:59SpeakerOh, I took a lot of flack. The growers really have got it in. You know, CGA and Hezekiah and Casey have done a great job. They're my friends, so I don't want to be adverse with them, but they really kind of plugged into the growers that they should support Alma at that point. And So I got a lot of flack from a lot of people. But like I said, I don't understand really because AMU has restricted it to the one acre like MRSA.

2:10:23SpeakerIt's the same thing. If you look at AMU, there's not much different from that for MRSA. And these same people that were saying MRSA's great were saying AMU wasn't. So I've been up here educating people for the last five months as to where it's going to go with our initiative too. So it's a daily process and it goes on every day. But I'm still proud. It's what we have to do.

2:10:42SpeakerWe're not going to stop until this gets done. After this gets done, we'll do the next one. And we'll finally get it rescheduled. And look, the DEA is already talking about rescheduling for the first time. With all the research and all the pressure and everything that all of us have done, they're finally acknowledging that they're talking about rescheduling. So I think we've done a great thing. Are the growers up here?

2:11:03SpeakerThe growers up here would just as soon have it stay just the way it is. Stay black market, keep their lives the way they are, and never have to come out. And that's the way it's going to be for the most part until we You know, get down the road a year from now and they move. I will say that Humboldt has moved faster than we have though.

2:11:20SpeakerThose people up in Humboldt are jumping in following the MRSA model and they're all blowing it up. So they're not going to stand around and wait. They're going to grow all the cannabis they can and make all the money they can in the next two years before it floods out. So I think Humboldt's got it together. We're just getting everybody up to speed here in Mendo.

2:11:39Tony VerzuraIf I can throw in one other thing here, is that under Alma, a non-profit can get any of these licenses, and so what we've had with SB 420, and I think that Mimursa gets rid of the requirement for non-profits, but over the past 10 years or so, everybody's been making these non-profits for the medical marijuana community. And so, you know, if people are concerned about the prices being too high for the consumer on the end, you could still have a mutual benefit corporation that gets a license and provides your members a discounted price, the Sam's Club.

2:12:11Tony VerzuraSorry, Sam, if you don't mind, Matt, barring your name here. The Sam's Club of Cannabis. Under the way that it's set up now, and they're actually considering, within there, the regulatory agency is supposed to be considering grandfathering in any groups like, say, the Weeds for Warriors or what's shown as group Access of Love that provides low-income people with lower-priced cannabis, that they would have a special way into that process after this.

2:12:38Tony VerzuraI'm a passive.

2:12:38SpeakerI'm a passive, I see. That was my last question, actually, so that's awesome.

2:12:45Tony VerzuraYeah, and I just want to add one other thing about the six-plant issue, too, is that it's one thing to say, well, we can't get by on six plants when you're trying to breed your own and growing them all from seeds, but now under Alma, you maybe just go to the store and buy your six plants, and if one of them dies, you go to the store and buy another one to replace it.

2:13:02Tony VerzuraSo for the personal user as opposed to the patient who can grow as many as they want under Prop 215 anyway, I don't think that that worry about, well, six plants, how am I going to get by? Three of them might be males. Well, go to the store and buy six female clones.

2:13:16SpeakerWhat organizations also regulating the entire state of individuals that are growing? That's enormous. In Colorado, they have an MED, Marijuana Enforcement Division. What's going to happen in California? What's going to monitor that, if anyone's?

2:13:37Tony VerzuraWell, we have a commercial monitoring going on. As far as the personal, then law enforcement have to have like a complaint or something like that before they can go anywhere. Because even if they look over your fence and they see a greenhouse and it looks like there's some plants in there, they have to be able to know it's more than six plants or they have to have some indication that there's some illicit activity like sales going on before they have the right to go in and search.

2:14:00Tony VerzuraSo as long as the cops just look in your backyard and they see a greenhouse and they can't tell how many plants, they don't have a right to go in there and count them.

2:14:07SpeakerAnd they're not permitting individuals either. They're not saying you have to pull, get on anything or... No. No.

2:14:14Tony VerzuraIn fact, it's very specific. The permitting section, they both say that they do not apply to people who are growing for personal use, which includes sharing your, giving away to your friends, by the way. And it does not apply to people who have a compassionate use act protections.

2:14:29SpeakerAnd if I'm an individual and I put something in my, whatever I put in my trunk, they can't go in my trunk.

2:14:36Tony VerzuraNo. Well, if you have theoretically more than an ounce in your front seat, they could probably go into your trunk. But if you have less than an ounce in your front seat, then no, they cannot. And there might be, I mean, I guess the fear is at some point cops are going to say, oh, I'm trained and I can smell the difference between one ounce and one ounce plus one gram.

2:14:52Tony VerzuraBut I really don't see that being a very strong argument.

2:14:56SpeakerCan I just ask, I mean, in a sense, we have to get civil rights before we can get equal rights. And right now you can purchase alcohol, but you can't, you know, open a bottle of whiskey and be, you know, swogging it on the way home from the liquor store. I mean, aren't we going to have to have compromises as we move forward? I mean, aren't there already compromises that we as adults have in order to deal with adult use items?

2:15:21Etienne FontanIn Louisiana, I can buy a daiquiri, and then when I go buy that daiquiri at a drive-thru place, they can hand me the daiquiri, but then they hand me the straw. They can't hand me the straw inside the cup because then that is an open container. So that is the type of bullshit that people have gone around the alcohol rules.

2:15:44SpeakerYeah, no, I actually lived there, and I lived close to one of those daiquiri shops, and when I first moved there from Florida, I sat there and like filmed the whole thing. I was like, I can't even fucking believe this. People are driving through an alcohol, like a, you can just buy alcohol through a drive-thru in a daiquiri, and the way they hand out the straw and everything, I was like, this is insane.

2:16:06SpeakerAnd you would wake, and you wonder why you wake up sometimes, you know, in the morning because you see cars literally parked down the road all banged up because people just will just, you know, there's a lot of drunk driving there. You know, I just, I saw a lot of just perilousness like just, oh, drinking and driving's okay. I mean, you know, but yeah.

2:16:26Etienne FontanHow many of my friends did I lose? How many friends of mine were paralyzed? How many friends of mine were killed by somebody crossing the line drunk? Okay, that was way too normal. Way too normal.

2:16:39Archive SeedsIn North Carolina, we have these brew-throughs, and you can literally just drive through and get beers. It's pretty funny, too.

2:16:47BubblemanHey, welcome, pleasure.

2:16:49Archive SeedsHey, how's it going? I wanted to comment on a couple things you guys were talking about. So, like in Oregon, we have to track, as a dispensary, we have to track the sales to each patient. So each patient becomes like essentially put into the system of the store and then their sales are tracked and the state can ask for those sales numbers at any point in time that they want.

2:17:14Archive SeedsSo to talk about the diversion thing that you see in Colorado a lot and people purchasing amounts and then selling it. And this all kind of relates to the price where it is for the retail person as well because the store or the state wants essentially the price of weed to be as high as possible yet still competitive with black market sales because that's where their highest tax revenue is going to come from.

2:17:40Archive SeedsYou know, people aren't going to smoke twice as much weed just because it's half as expensive or a quarter of as expensive. They'll just spend less money smoking. So I think we're going to see that a lot and how Growers that become legitimate and start supplying stores, and then like you were saying, Harborside and most stores are going to vertically integrate their business, produce most of their own product.

2:18:06Archive SeedsWhere is that product supposed to go when you can't sell it to the guy from wherever that's waiting at the bottom of the hill?

2:18:17Tony VerzuraI'm not sure I understood the question.

2:18:19Archive SeedsWell, I'm just saying, where's all that wheat? So everybody can grow an acre, like we're seeing this in Oregon where it's a 40,000 square foot max canopy. So you're going to have a lot more wheat than there used to be, right? And if, let's say, half of the stores are already growing all their own product, If there's twice as much as there used to be, I think the price is going to significantly diminish to a point that's not very profitable for the majority of the producers out there.

2:18:50SpeakerYeah, I'm hearing that there's a lot of that Oregon bug going to Chicago for $14 that they're actually delivering it into Chicago for $14 right now. And that's what I told people. I said, you're going to get places like Oregon. There's nobody up there to even buy that product. There's nobody there. So what are they going to do? They're all going to have to go black market.

2:19:04SpeakerWhich is what they're doing. And it's the same thing in this state. You know, those dispensaries. Although, we're going to have this huge uptick because we've got people coming online all over the state and all over the country. And so we're going to have a really good burgeoning market. But we're going to be different than you guys in Oregon because you don't have a patient base. There's nobody up there.

2:19:21SpeakerRight. So you guys are going to have a ton of us in that room.

2:19:24Archive SeedsYeah, LA takes much more money. Part of that, too, is with the 10th Amendment, I don't know if I'm getting feedback here. I'm not sure whose mic it is. Let me... Go ahead. So, you know, in terms of... I keep hearing from a lot of these big producers that are like, oh, we're just going to set up tons and then eventually they're going to set up exporting for states, right, where, you know, California or Oregon can sell to Oklahoma or wherever is the next place that has recreational cannabis.

2:19:58Archive SeedsBut that opens up a whole new federal... Problem with the 10th Amendment and governing interstate commerce, right? And I'm not sure the federal government wants to give up their rights to how they govern interstate commerce and what suits that could possibly bring. So, you know, I don't know if exporting products is necessarily going to be possible.

2:20:25SpeakerWell, I want to bring up something. I mean, every bottle of Jack Daniels you've ever seen in your life came out of Lynchburg, Tennessee. And there's going to be a time when, you know, you can order this stuff through Amazon or whatever. People are going to want actual Humboldt County buds for the first time in their life. Thank you for watching.

2:20:54SpeakerTo compete with them because this is even how supermarkets work. They buy the shelf space and it's very difficult to get into retail stores and you learn that as soon as you get a product and a good idea and then they say, okay, how are you going to sell it? So the reality of actual commerce is going to start to kind of dawn on the cannabis industry.

2:21:13SpeakerSome people are going to adapt, you know, and run with it really well. Tony is a great example of products that are in packages or consistent and user specific and People are going to either catch on or kind of, I think, become hobbyist growers. I mean, I would like to think I'll grow until I'm dead, but I'm probably going to think that what I'm growing isn't going to be worth all that much anymore, and it's going to be out of love and not really out of anything but, because I'll be able to, it'll be like tomatoes.

2:21:40SpeakerI can grow my own or I could go buy some, you know, but I'll probably grow some of my own food because it feels good.

2:21:48Archive SeedsSo we've seen exactly what you're saying, Todd, because nobody can vertically integrate. You can't own a store and own a producer. Basically, all the stores have chosen who they like to purchase product from, and that's it. And we're seeing a huge glut of product in I-502, and there's really no one to purchase it. It's just sitting there, and a lot of these companies are basically limping along, hoping that Either consumption is going to increase or something better will happen.

2:22:23SpeakerWell, this is where it's going to change because there's going to be a neutralization of this. There has to be a break in federal prohibition. This is an unprecedented situation that they're in in all of history of this country when you think about it because we've never had the federal government in such a backlash of our civil rights. I mean, these are the feds went in and desegregated our southern schools when states resisted, you know, a more liberal way of thinking.

2:22:50SpeakerAnd, you know, the north and south was over-enslavering people. I mean, so when we talk about what we've done with our rights, it's about expanding them. And not pulling them back. And I don't understand some ways, and this may sound naive coming across, but when I first got involved in this, and I was standing at the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard with Jack Herrer, I felt like the feds are not our problem, because in a way I thought that they were going to be, if you looked at history, the more rational side of thinking, and instead they've been the monster.

2:23:24SpeakerAnd They're now going to have to come to some rationale with all these states changing their laws through democracy. It must be a difficult thing to swallow for them, you know, but this is the undoing of their drug war, and the more we change these laws, the more we undo their drug war, and one thing we're not talking about also that I think should be brought up is cannabis has always been the cornerstone of their drug war.

2:23:46SpeakerIf you look at the amount of arrests, if you look at the amount of budget that was a That implemented over towards a marijuana eradication and ruining the lives of growers and producers and sellers and whatever you want to call us at that point. It was immense and if you take cannabis out of that equation, the drug war as we know it is highly questionable at best.

2:24:07SpeakerSo we're rethinking on so many more policies when we pass this law than just about protecting some small farms or protecting the profits. I mean, I really can't stand it when I feel that the motivation for the opposition is that they want to keep organic cannabis artificially expensive so they continue to profit from it. That bothers me. It makes me want to die a little inside. So...

2:24:33SpeakerYou know, I hope the message that I'm getting across is that people really don't fear change because we've been experiencing nothing but change in the 20 years since 2015 passed and it's only gotten better.

2:24:45Tony VerzuraAnd if we're having this conversation about how it's affecting the economics of the growers, you can imagine what the cops' conversation is about how this is going to affect their economics when they lose $40 billion a year from federal money plus a matching amount in state and local funds to have the drug war going. So you can see why they're fighting for it. You can kind of see why the small growers who have inflated profits right now are fighting it.

2:25:09Tony VerzuraBut yet, you know, just so the people continue to make money is not a good enough reason to send people to prison, in my opinion.

2:25:14Etienne FontanWell, the prison lobby is going to start losing money as well as the prisons are going to start losing customers and then those manufacturing companies are going to start losing the customer manufacturing base as well. So it's going to have rippling effects that currently reside within our current economic system and it's going to take time to unravel. So that's why change has to happen because otherwise, as Todd says, stagnation and more of the same has not worked and is not working.

2:25:42Tony VerzuraAnd especially when the rest of the world is watching us right now. I mean, you know, the thing is that even to the extent that, well, this may not be the perfect law that we would have dreamed of, maybe the perfect law that some mother in Orange County liked or something like that, you know, but even then I don't think it's perfect for anybody's point of view.

2:25:59Tony VerzuraBut the main thing is that with Canada coming on board with legalization and Washington and Alaska and Oregon legalizing and Mexico now increasing the amount of legal marijuana available that you can carry down there, For California to not legalize marijuana, I think, would have a horrible message to the world. And if we do legalize it, it could be the breaking point of the whole drug war.

2:26:20Etienne FontanI think that's the most large point that you point out, because we are also the ninth largest economy in the world. I mean, our failure by just by 3% of the vote caused Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, as well as D.C. So if You know, California were to actually pass this, the ripples would be astronomical. I think you would see a, I mean in time, it will just be inevitable.

2:26:52Archive SeedsOne thing that's interesting about what happened up here in Washington is that when basically a year after the local ABC or Alcohol Beverage Control lost their Right to control alcohol in Washington state. We got legal weed just a year later, right? And in the same people with the same jobs, right? So you guys were talking about jobs. The police worried about where their jobs go or in the case of like the ATF controlling alcohol, tobacco, firearms.

2:27:23Archive SeedsFor interstate commerce cannabis, we're going to need to see some sort of governing body from the federal government happen essentially, right?

2:27:31SpeakerRight.

2:27:32Tony VerzuraAnd it kind of ties to like alcohol prohibition ended and then they had to ban marijuana like four years later because the feds needed jobs for their cops. Exactly.

2:27:41SpeakerExactly.

2:27:42Tony VerzuraHey, guys. Hey, guys.

2:27:43BubblemanI want to thank you for coming on. You're the founder of the Emerald Cup. Exceptional share in the Radical Openness Forum. Really appreciated the way you shared your information, man. It was exceptional. And I hope we can have you back on again sometime. You are absolutely an added bonus to Hash Church. And just keep doing what you're doing. And thanks very much for sharing your time with us, Tim.

2:28:09SpeakerWell, thank you guys for having me. Anytime. Like I said, I respect all you guys immensely. Keep in touch, and I'll hook you guys up with the Cup this year. You guys come in and be VIP with me.

2:28:18Tony VerzuraAll right. If there's any way I can give some presentations on Alma 2 up there, if there's some events, make sure you let me know, Tim.

2:28:24SpeakerIt's done. Fortunately, it'll be done. The election happens before the Emerald Cup, Chris, so pressure's off. You can go enjoy yourself.

2:28:34Tony VerzuraYeah, right, exactly. But I'm down for something between now and then.

2:28:37SpeakerChris, maybe talk there.

2:28:39Tony VerzuraOkay, we'll be in touch. Bye-bye. Thanks, Tim. Give our best to Taylor.

2:28:43BubblemanThank you, Tim. Oh, I meant to ask if it was a kilo or a pound.

2:28:52SpeakerThe one thing that Tim brought up earlier, and we've talked about it before, what Fletch was talking about, was if there's that ripple effect, this passes, let's say there's a ripple effect, Etienne and all of us get our wishes, and 280E goes away, they reschedule, California, you know, is like when Tim was talking about the Napa Valley, you know, 90% of all the wine that we drink in our country comes from one spot and it comes from that area and it shifts across the country.

2:29:21SpeakerSo, you know, Colorado population is 4.5 million, California is over 45 million, the Emerald Triangle Is 10 billion to 20 billion dollar market. Colorado's entire market's one billion. So when we start looking at like the areas in which cultivating cannabis in greenhouses or sun grown, you know, and it's going to drive those prices down and eventually I think you'll see, I think you'll see interstate supply and those people that are growing indoors in big warehouses across the country We're not going to be able to compete with that.

2:30:00SpeakerI am all in favor of bringing the cost of resin down. I happen to disagree with one thing that you said, Fletch, which was people won't smoke more. Maybe you didn't say it, but the state's facts that they won't smoke more.

2:30:14Archive SeedsI can tell you if I can, Not much more. If the price is 300 or 200 percent more. But if we could get grams of full milk,

2:30:28SpeakerYou know, on the shelf to, oh, I see. Okay, maybe it was echoing. So if we could get grams of full amount instead of being $80 and now they're $40 from Bud Runs or Nug Runs or we're able to get the products that we're looking for from substantially less, I mean, I will smoke more and I think everybody else would too. And if we could hang on to it and not be thrown in jail for it, I think you'd see an increase across at least, Where we're at in this state in commerce.

2:31:00Archive SeedsBut it still ends up being about the same amount in commerce. So let's say an $80 gram of bubble becomes a $20 gram of bubble. That person now buys four grams a day. It's still $80, right? Right. Gotcha, gotcha. So typically the cost for the producers goes up substantially while the gross market doesn't increase at all in terms of dollars.

2:31:29BubblemanWell, I'm looking forward to the price basically going through the ground. He said he has a full mouth for everyone.

2:31:39Tony VerzuraWell, you know where I think this is really going to play out a lot, though, has to do with the people who are using FECO, a full extract cannabis oil for, like they call it Rick Simpson oil or whatever. I know a lot of people who are really interested in trying that, but with the current rates, they just don't feel like they can even afford it. And so if we can actually get it down the price to where, say, the recreational users are still paying a higher price, but the people who want to be using that gram a day edible oil Can do that and make it affordable to them.

2:32:08Tony VerzuraI think that's going to be a tremendous benefit to the state and the people in it.

2:32:13SpeakerYeah, I agree.

2:32:16Archive SeedsLowering the price may introduce a lot more users to the... Full milk, half milk.

2:32:26SpeakerAnd that's the... The overall goal, right, it's like if we're talking about medicine and we're really talking about getting it to the people, you know, that's where I always, that's what we're all fighting for. So if it's, you know, you're trying to get something into exposure to a patient, say with cancer or MS, or somebody, most of these patients, you know, they don't have insurance set up.

2:32:50SpeakerSo we don't have, there's not a way to cover for these costs. And hopefully that leads... The ripple effect that you guys are talking about, hopefully it leads to one day being able to get either A, insurance, or B, getting the price down so much that everybody can actually access stuff that might be able to better their lives.

2:33:11Tony VerzuraAnd that's one of the things that really drives me crazy when these people are saying that somehow this is going to be, you know, detrimental to the patients in that regard when, in fact, the matter is I see it quite the opposite. I mean, people think about, like, again, it's the same group down in Southern California who's putting out the bad information, but they say this pharmaceuticalizes medical marijuana, and it's quite the opposite.

2:33:32Tony VerzuraPeople can grow at home, and they'll have more access to the extracts and the cannabis bud than they have before. That doesn't That's not for the benefit of big pharmaceutical corporations. That's for the benefit of the patients.

2:33:47SpeakerThat's right. We have to talk about de-scheduling and not rescheduling. Rescheduling is extremely problematic. We do not want Schedule II listing. The thing is that this thing should be taken off the schedule altogether.

2:34:07Tony VerzuraAnd Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who said he would do that so far. Interestingly enough, in Alma, not only do they say that if the federal government deschedules marijuana, they have to move it out of our controlled substances list as well, but it also, if the federal government deschedules, it automatically repeals all the outdoor cultivation bans statewide in California under the initiative. So this really gives us the motive to work locally, but yet keep it on that global or national level, because if we can get the federal government to change its policies, We are going to get a benefit here in California under ALMA as well.

2:34:40SpeakerAlso, removing it from Schedule 1 will close the 280E thing because that's all predicated on Schedule 1 substance. So if it's not Schedule 1, there is no 280E.

2:34:54Tony VerzuraAnd it will also affect solvent extract manufacturing here in California because the reason that making cannabis extract with solvents right now is illegal is because it's on the controlled substances list. And it says you can't use solvents to produce any of those products, but once it's off of the controlled substance list federally and then they move it down, or even down, I should say, out of Schedule 1, then that's automatically going to make it illegal.

2:35:22Tony VerzuraGive people the ability to do more with the solvents. I'm a little concerned about solvents anyway because I have to deal with, in court, people who are blowing things up and then that's how they get in trouble with the solvents. So my feelings about solvents are mixed but nonetheless I don't think it should be a seven year penalty.

2:35:36SpeakerCan I though, isn't part of the problem prohibition though because if these extracts were available at a more reasonable rate there wouldn't be a need to go and use these gases and these extreme things and buy these expensive, it wouldn't be there, the market wouldn't be there to do it themselves. I mean not a lot of kids are distilling whiskey in their basement, they just go down to the store and pick it up.

2:35:59Tony VerzuraI agree 100%. This is just a matter of the illicit market has driven it to a certain position where it's become dangerous, and then once you get rid of the illicit market, I think that danger is going to go away. I could not agree more.

2:36:11SpeakerOn the topic of schedules, Health Canada announced this week that they're going to allow prescription of heroin, pharmaceutical grade heroin. Good for them. Yeah, so I mean, you know, as you guys are down in the States are having this discussion of I think it's part of the overall change in attitude about drug war.

2:36:38Tony VerzuraAnd this is where I have to give Obama credit. He's like doing without doing. I mean, he hasn't really done that much to help us, but by not having big massive raids and clamp downs, it's encouraged the rest of the world to do stuff too. Like Uruguay, when they were confronted by the UN about how could they legalize marijuana, they said, well, we don't want to talk to you about that.

2:36:56Tony VerzuraWhy don't you talk to Obama about how come Colorado and Washington can legalize marijuana? Then come and talk to us. And so, you know, it's not that Obama did such a great thing in terms of he hasn't descheduled or rescheduled even cannabis. But at the same time, by issuing those memos, the Ogden memo, the Cole memo, the mandatory minimum sentence memo, things like that, he's really changed a lot in the country.

2:37:21Tony VerzuraAnd I think just by being an acknowledged pot smoker president who says things like, it's no more dangerous than alcohol, he's helped to change the social attitude. Now we just need to translate into the votes for November.

2:37:32Etienne FontanThat's a real deal. Well, didn't stop him from going after and trying to seize my property twice or going after Harborside, so.

2:37:39SpeakerNo, in some ways, though, don't you think that was the whip of an old tale, though, that a lot of that was funding running out and such, too? Because, you know, change doesn't happen like right away. It was under his watch. No, I agree. Hey, I was prosecuted under Clinton. I get you completely.

2:37:53Etienne FontanBut I do agree with Chris that, yes, there is positives. I mean, I look past my own minutia of my reality and Also realize the greater good of what's happened out in the rest of the world. So I accept it. I don't like it even though I am caught in that last swing of the dragon's tail. Regardless of what happens either way, there's still positive change from it.

2:38:18Etienne FontanI know that I got into this because seven generations from now they won't know my suffering. Okay. So in the next generation they won't know it. So that means we've done our job properly. So We just have to keep moving forward and keep playing Sisyphus and keep pushing that rock.

2:38:36Tony VerzuraAnd ultimately, I mean, with Obama, with his first memo, he made it discretionary to the prosecutors whether or not, and then this is what Todd was saying, so the prosecutors said, discretion, okay, here's my discretion, and they wiped out everybody in Montana, for example. They camped down and they went after Richard Lee, who's one of my heroes, in Oakland. And they went after you and they went after Harborside and so forth.

2:38:58Tony VerzuraBut then you see a few years down the road, the steam is kind of running out of that. Harborside, they dropped the charges. I don't know if you could fill us in on the status of your situation, but Richard Lee is still not prosecuted. Hopefully he won't be. So it's kind of like... I kind of agree in a way with what Todd was saying, that once Obama said we're going to change his policy, the old guard just said, well, fuck you.

2:39:21Tony VerzuraCan I say that on this show? Yeah. We do curse. Okay. And so, you know, like I say, I'm not, I don't make this mistaken belief that Obama has, like, you know, been in there really working for us in the background, but I think that just by, he could have been so much worse, I guess is what I'm ultimately saying.

2:39:44SpeakerThere's no question he could have resisted what went down in Colorado and Washington and state rights. But it's funny that the more this really takes root, the harder it is for conservatives to really want to uproot it. Because there's two problems. One is that state rights is really a conservative issue. And the second thing is not taxing all this money is also... Not something conservatives want to pass on either.

2:40:09SpeakerSo I think this whole desire to see legalization is changing in a massive way because, you know, with books like Lifeline of the Future and The Emperor and all the work that has been done, people now know cannabis is not only not harmful, that it's beneficial. And they're not afraid of it anymore. They've lived around it for decades. And I think like it or not, you know, I could say not another thing about it until the election, and I think it's going to pass.

2:40:38SpeakerI think that it's not about, you know, us really even advocating anymore because it's in so many minds of so many people for so many different reasons of why cannabis is going to become legal. So I think it's inevitable.

2:40:51Tony VerzuraI think the details don't really matter. The people who don't like marijuana or the people who have a financial interest in it, they have a strong motive to get out and vote. The people who agree with us don't. They just kind of like, well, it's going to happen anyway, and are less inclined to get out and do something about it. And so I'm wondering how the presidential politics is going to play into that.

2:41:10Tony VerzuraLike if Bernie is on there, then I think we're going to have a lot of people coming out that I'm for marijuana, Bernie's going to change it, let's all vote. If it's Hillary, I don't know if people, well, Hillary might move to Schedule B or Schedule 2. Is that going to affect their interest in getting out and vote? So our real challenge is going to be getting the voters to the poll more so than convincing people is what I think, Todd.

2:41:31SpeakerWell, you know, when I think looking at this as a global problem, I mean, as an American, I feel somewhat responsible for prohibition worldwide because when you look in you at 20th century cannabis history, it really was the Americans that peddled it around the world. And they put in sanctions and they wouldn't trade with your country if you didn't have marijuana eradication programs in place. And we were responsible for a lot of environmental destruction in the name of, you know, killing the cannabis.

2:41:58SpeakerAnd it's really screwed up and I think that we need to not only reverse the laws here in California than in America. We need to go make amends because they're still snapping the necks of people in places like Malaysia and it's our fault on many levels. It was our propaganda, our paranoia, our fear mongering, our racism that put out this war against nature.

2:42:22Tony VerzuraIt's quite ironic that North Korea has the best policy on marijuana in the world because they didn't join the United Nations, they didn't sign any of the treaties, and you can still buy marijuana and grow it or buy it over the counter or smoke it in a restaurant there, and yet it's the most repressive country, but on account of the United States not having influence on them, they're the most progressive when it comes to cannabis itself.

2:42:44Tony VerzuraI'm not recommending people do that.

2:42:45SpeakerWhen you hear that, it really makes you put the whole context of what our media tells us. You know, and how much we believe, so it's good to keep an open mind.

2:42:56Tony VerzuraLike I say, you won't get arrested for marijuana. You might get arrested for being in North Korea in the first place, though.

2:43:03BubblemanI run my business out of North Korea.

2:43:07SpeakerYou can't run Hash Church out of North Korea.

2:43:10BubblemanThey're anti-religious. Oh, right. That's right. I wanted to welcome Samurai Sam into the room, by the way, guys. He's been sitting with me here for a couple hours listening to the talk.

2:43:19Samurai SamPleasure to be sitting in on the conversation.

2:43:21BubblemanHe's down in Washington. He came on Hash Church a while ago and shared with us sort of the potential dangers with some of the vape pens and he showed us the Omicron pen and he came up today as well. Once we've gotten a little bit more of the conversation going, we'll finish it off with him showing us the Hercules pen. Cartridge that he brought up and the Omicron and some new attachments that he's got here.

2:43:44BubblemanSo I wanted to welcome you. Thank you.

2:43:46Samurai SamI didn't want to interrupt anything. I think it's a fascinating topic and unfortunately Washington State we've had a couple things go a little sideways with the way that the legalization got implemented there. It's really cool to hear about things happening in a little different way down in California. So I've got a lot of hope for you guys. Thanks for filling us in.

2:44:06SpeakerI'm a big fan of that Hercules. I ended up getting one. Just to throw it in there. I put a couple drops in that thing and it has been vaping and vaping and just awesome.

2:44:19Tony VerzuraCool. Excellent. You got some refillable? Is that what I'm hearing from you?

2:44:23Samurai SamIt's the cartridge we have that is user-rebuildable, so you don't have to buy replacement heating elements for it. It has a ceramic rod in the center. It's the one I demoed a little bit ago. We're going to load it up with...

2:44:33SpeakerIt's sustainable.

2:44:35Samurai SamIt's sustainable, yeah. You can put a couple hundred grams through one of these guys and not have to buy new parts for it.

2:44:41Tony VerzuraYeah, because I really hate the idea of throwing away the pens and throwing away the cartridges, and I just don't like throwing away plastic. And that's one thing I don't like about Alma or Mercer is all the packaging they require for something that, like, you know, it has to be childproof plastic with all these things on it. And it's like, to me, if I buy an eighth, that's going to last me a day or two, you know.

2:45:00Tony VerzuraSo why do I need a thousand years worth of packaging for that?

2:45:02Samurai SamAbsolutely. If anything happened here in Washington, everything's got to be grammed out, prepackaged. You can't really even smell or inspect the thing you're going to purchase because it's all sealed up. They have these little smell jars that have just stale, weak soul bud in them, all dried up.

2:45:15BubblemanTalk about missing the boat on how people like to acquire their cannabis. Imagine going to the supermarket and having all the oranges and apples and fruits in little plastic boxes that you couldn't smell or touch. You could just kind of like see them.

2:45:29Tony VerzuraYeah, there are a couple layers of plastic.

2:45:30BubblemanThat's just the most absurd way to purchase something.

2:45:34SpeakerYou don't want people smelling and handling your herbs.

2:45:36BubblemanYou don't want them handling them. They have to be able to smell it, for sure.

2:45:44SpeakerIn California, a lot of the dispensaries take these... They look like salt and pepper shakers or they're, you know, Parmesan cheese shakers and they have like, it's like a little spice jar with like a plastic lid that has holes on it so you can actually look at the bud and, you know, put your nose up against it without actually rubbing your nasal bacteria all over the flowers, right?

2:46:04BubblemanDefinitely. No, I'm agreeing with that too. I don't want people squeezing and pushing it into their nose, but... Or hairs from beards.

2:46:11SpeakerBeard hairs.

2:46:12Etienne FontanOkay. Okay. I want to steer the discussion here then. All right, so Chris, you just talked about something that you thought was negative about AMA. I know people are watching this and thinking all we're doing is giving AMA a blowjob and this is just all we're here to do is we have this agenda, et cetera, et cetera. You know, I'm one of the skeptical ones, et cetera, and so I want to hear the positive, which you've definitely pointed, but I also want to hear the negative because, as you said, you know, it requires this packaging.

2:46:40Etienne FontanSo what else about AMA? Don't you like? Because I know we all wish it was this utopian situation, but it's already 47 pages and it's quite extensive and what it covers and the basis of what it covers. And it's a pretty ballsy initiative in itself, but it doesn't cover everything and people, of course, are going to be pointing out those negatives. So we need to build arguments around those negatives or discussions around them so that we can understand them because People are now going to come breaking down.

2:47:11Etienne FontanI know Mickey Martin is going to do a breakdown of every aspect of AMA because he has various and others, but what other negatives? Because it's not perfect.

2:47:23SpeakerYeah, I got a question here on that same topic. There's a lot of people in chat that are talking about how their local municipalities have banned cultivation in their zones. So how is that going to be regulated? How does that impact people in California that don't live in a You know, as a left-leaning zone where they're maybe regulated out of being able to grow their own.

2:47:47Etienne FontanYou're shit out of luck. You're left out of it. I mean, that's the frustration of the laws and allowing for... It was fought all the way up to the California Supreme Court that those local municipalities have that right to legislate and to regulate. And so if a local municipality says no and if you can't get a license... Then, unfortunately, you're shit out of luck. And that's a shitty part of the law.

2:48:13SpeakerYou can't even grow six plants, then, in your backyard if you live in, say, whatever, a more conservative, like, rancher zone in California.

2:48:22Etienne FontanYou would legally be able to for yourself, but not to produce or manufacture. I mean, that state law would supersede that county law for your own self-production, but when you actually start to go into the commerce end, that's when, you know... I say as before when I was dealing with you, if you were the individual patient, I dealt with you, paid you, etc. Now that's all done by completely other people and we're completely subjected to a whole other level of taxation.

2:48:53Etienne FontanSo that's why I think you see a rush to, you know, of Mendocino and Humboldt realizing that they need to think of themselves like champagne and better lock down their region and protect it so that When it actually goes to market inevitably, because they're seeing the future that it will, that they are being proactive. So we see Tim and them being proactive, but where's Orange County? Where's all these other counties that are absolutely prohibited?

2:49:20Etienne FontanYou're locked out. You don't have a chance. You don't have an opportunity. And over 100 municipalities are passing bans currently. So that's a significant portion of California as is.

2:49:32Tony VerzuraOne of the ways that that plays out, though, is that under SB 420, and I don't know exactly how Mercer lays this out, but under SB 420, look at San Diego. The city legalizes or starts licensing dispensaries. The county doesn't like it, so the county comes in and raises those dispensaries and charges them under state law. Under ALMA, if the city legalizes Thank you for joining us.

2:50:19Tony VerzuraThank you for joining us.

2:50:50Tony VerzuraAlma doesn't allow people to travel with open containers in their car. I don't know what exactly open container means. So that's my only concern there. I think it would mean like smoking a joint, to tell you the truth. If it's in a plastic bag that's closed, that's not an open container anymore.

2:51:05Etienne FontanI use cannabis concentrate, so now I'm only limited to eight grams. As a patient, am I still only limited to having eight grams?

2:51:13Tony VerzuraNo, no. You still have your eight ounce presumption or any amount if you go to court.

2:51:19Etienne FontanThat's a protection under 215 that's enforced, correct?

2:51:22Tony VerzuraRight. And also your SB 420 and your MRSA presumption of so forth. I think that's a patient protection though. That's not an actual protection of everybody. No. That's right. Okay. They're individual and you need that amount. You better get your doctor's notice. The other two things I would say that I don't like about it are not allowing for free promos just because I think that's the way businesses work and that's what I see all over.

2:51:47Tony VerzuraBut I think there's workarounds on that. And then the drug testing of employees, I don't like that.

2:51:53SpeakerCan I just pause one sec the free promos? If it's medicine, kid, we'd freak out if Prozac was handed out like candy at an expo. We would trip out if Tylenol was given away T3s at, you know, the local fair. I mean, at what point are we going to say it's medicine or it's shots of wine?

2:52:14Tony VerzuraYeah, but I went to my doctor for my back, and he gives me something this for the many profiles of pain, and it's a free sample of a painkiller, you know, so to that extent.

2:52:23SpeakerHow did a free sample of a painkiller? I've never seen this. Okay, I'll shut up. There you have a free sample of a painkiller. There you have it.

2:52:31Etienne FontanOh, go to any doctor's office, Todd. They give you free samples of that stuff all the time. They were giving me free samples back in the VA. They're like, hey, this is new. You want to try it? I'm like, no.

2:52:40SpeakerYou know what's funny is I have an aversion to all pills and I really, you know me, I don't take pills and they gave them to me in such fucking amounts as a child that I just hate them. So I'm not surprised and I'm sorry I'm naive. I really didn't think they handed out free samples of available pharmaceuticals for you to go home and just, you know, fuck off with.

2:53:02SpeakerThat sounds... They've got commercials for it, too.

2:53:08Tony VerzuraI don't think you'd go to a conference where you go from one booth to the next trying out free samples.

2:53:12SpeakerYou know, people giving me shit saying, oh, all marijuana use is medical and all that. I will honestly say to a large degree... I've been one of the people that advocated that. The first person who said that was really Dennis Perrone in People Magazine after the passage of 1996's 215 and he caught a wealth of shit for saying what a lot of people felt anyway because if you're self-medicating with cannabis chances are you may be like me and you don't go ask the doctor for free samples of some pills because you know what?

2:53:41SpeakerIt doesn't even occur to you to do that. Because in my whole adult life, I haven't thought to go ask my doctor for free samples of pharmaceuticals to fucking replace the use of my ganja.

2:53:54BubblemanThere's no fucking way. At the dentist, Todd, at the dentist, they'll have stacks of Tylenols and shit being like, oh, here, take a box.

2:54:01SpeakerTodd, on top of it, your insurance will pay for it. They'll give you free samples. They'll deliver it to your home. They'll do everything they possibly can to get you that, those pharmaceutical bills. I'm so glad I was sick as a child because it made me sick of doctors and pharmaceutical solutions at a very young age, and it pushed me into nature, and I'm so glad it did.

2:54:24SpeakerSo Todd, I have a question. If you would have been given free samples of all different kinds of weed and hash by your doctors, do you think that that would have changed your mind about free samples of medicine? That would have been different though when you say this, because now if my doctor back in 1979 had a whole availability of different varieties of cannabis that might have worked best for me going through chemo and radiation simultaneously, wouldn't that just be him experimenting with the various combinations of cannabinoids and terpenes like we do now, but then already knowing that they were beneficial, so giving them to me in the first place?

2:55:02SpeakerSo, really, it wouldn't be testing free samples. We would already know that the cannabinoids worked. At that time, though, that was what was questionable. Is pot really helping him through these vile treatments?

2:55:15Tony VerzuraDr. See, now, I think you just hit upon one of the keys, though, Todd, is that in that case, it's not really a free promotional sample. It's a sample so that you can see how effective it is for you compared to other things. And so my reading of Alma wouldn't present that. It's just promotional samples that are forbidden or if you're trying to undercut the competition by giving away products and put them out of business.

2:55:38Tony VerzuraSo, you know, that might be the subject of more interpretation, but I think what you're talking about would still work. And like I said, the last thing on my list was the drug testing of employees, but apparently the polls show that a vast majority of people support that nowadays and they couldn't get that out of there. They didn't like it either. Well, how close are we to equal rights with alcohol consumption with this?

2:56:00SpeakerAre we even close to equal rights to alcohol? Like, there's a strong wine industry in California that limits drunk driving, open containers. They must also have laws against liquor diversion from liquor stores. I'm not familiar with that. I barely drink, but I'm sure that's reality too.

2:56:18Tony VerzuraYeah, they send in minors to the stores. I think it's very close to parody. It's like you can make your own beer, you can make your own wine, you'll be able to grow your own marijuana. You can have whatever wine or beer you make for your year, you can keep that at your house, you can keep whatever amount of marijuana you grow at your home, under alma, this is what it would be.

2:56:36Tony VerzuraIt allows you to have a certain amount that you can carry around, but you're not supposed to behave recklessly with it. The one variation, though, I think is in terms of public consumption on account of the odor and the smoke of marijuana. People are more concerned about secondhand smoke, whereas if you had alcohol, they're not concerned about you getting drunk from seeing somebody drinking alcohol. A lot of the onus we have is every bad thing that's said about tobacco and smoking in the past 40 years has been dumped on marijuana, too, and so we've got this public conception we have to get past.

2:57:08SpeakerSo you feel that whatever freedom we get, it's going to be, not only have to be discreet in the way we have public consumption, but also in line with the way that society is falling towards consumption of, hey, listen, as a non-smoker, though, I want to take the side of that, because I remember as a kid getting in elevators in the 70s, and people would be smoking on elevators, and, you know, or in airplanes.

2:57:31Tony VerzuraYeah, when you were in the non-smoking section, and the guy in front of you was a smoker.

2:57:35SpeakerI don't miss any of that. Not to be rude to my friends who enjoy tobacco. I'm not an avid prohibitionist, but I'm a pro-clean air person, and I don't mind that. And if you're getting high, I don't mind that. But, like, don't I, as a clean air person, have the same rights to clean air that, you know, and in a sense, I think this is what's going to happen.

2:57:53SpeakerI think that we're going to have to fall in line with a lot of these regulations. Just because pod's legal, you're not going to be able to get on the airplane and vape your way to Vegas. And just because I don't like that... Yeah, in Canada, you actually can vape on planes if you're a medical user. Oh, Canada. Why can't you evade our country and take over?

2:58:13Tony VerzuraThe borders are wide open. Just come on down. That's not really clear under ALMA anyway because the section that says you can't smoke in public, it says does not apply to medical marijuana. So if you have a medical marijuana right, it still exists.

2:58:28SpeakerRight, and this is the biggest point I can make in all this is that the laws will not go backwards. The public demand of freedom is only growing. It's not waning.

2:58:37Etienne FontanWell, currently, actually, there's somebody trying to pass legislation in California that landlords can make sure that you don't smoke cannabis in your home. Domicile. So they're even trying to pass that type of draconian legislation currently right now in Sacramento.

2:58:53SpeakerQuestion, do they have non-smoking clauses in leases?

2:58:58Tony VerzuraYeah, they can do that anyway.

2:58:59SpeakerThey already exist.

2:59:01Tony VerzuraThey can evict you for no reason.

2:59:03SpeakerThey have those in hotel rooms. You're a renter. You don't have rights. You have to agree by the contract presented by the person renting to you. In Colorado, you can get it, if you have the script, you can actually get it in your lease. I had it in mine, and it allowed me to consume cannabis in my home. Also, technically, isn't vaping like a pen, one of those little vape pens?

2:59:30SpeakerThat's not smoking. It's vaporizing. They're technically different.

2:59:37SpeakerTechnically, I tried vaporizing on a plane, and... Explaining that recently. And they were like, well, what is that? I'm like, I'm vaporizing. It's vaporizing. This was like a year ago. And I was like, I just got some e-cigarette juice. I'm just vaporizing like vape pen, you know? And they were like, oh, you can't do that. And I was like, oh, okay. But it was like, you know...

3:00:03SpeakerI bet you if you go into the bathroom it won't set off the smoke detector because there's no combustion artifacts. Well, you just got to be able to hold it in until it doesn't exist, you know, and that's the only way.

3:00:20BubblemanI would like to know what airlines in Canada allow vaporizing because I'm always hiding it when I'm on the plane vaporizing and if I could just be doing it without hiding it, that would feel so much better.

3:00:30SpeakerYeah, it's not all of them. I think it's WestJet. As an MMR patient, if you contact them beforehand and say, you know, I'm taking this six-hour flight and I have to medicate every two hours, then usually they're pretty good about it. Well, damn, I'm going to be doing that.

3:00:47Tony VerzuraIf I can wrap up on Alma, though, I would just say that, you know, we've got something here. I believe it will be the best marijuana legalization law in the country if it's passed, that it really takes a lot of things into account that we've all been concerned about for a long time. It sets the stage for future improvement, and from my perspective, it's extremely important that we all unify and support this initiative.

3:01:10Tony VerzuraIt's not like there's a plan B on the ballot. Either you're voting for Alma or you're voting for the drug war. Those are your options in November. And we really need to make sure people vote for Alma.

3:01:19Etienne FontanWhat makes Alma better than other states? Well, like I said, it's going to be the best.

3:01:24Tony VerzuraWhat makes it the best? Explain to people why. It's got the lowest tax rate at 15%. Others have 25% or so. It's got the on-site consumption. I don't know what other states have that. It doesn't have per se limits.

3:01:38Etienne FontanWhat about on-site consumption? Go on over that.

3:01:41Tony VerzuraOn-site consumption means that you can get a license to sell marijuana and allow people to consume it on their location, or you can get a permit to have a marijuana consumption. It can't be at the same venue as where alcohol is, so if you wanted to mix the two, you'd have to have one maybe next door to the other, an alcohol venue versus a cannabis on-site consumption venue.

3:02:02SpeakerThe other good reason, Chris, is because Unlike the CCHI, which has tried to get on the ballot, how many times? Maybe ten times?

3:02:13Tony VerzuraAbout, yeah.

3:02:16SpeakerThis is going to get on the ballot.

3:02:19Tony VerzuraRight. And so there is no, like I said, either you're voting for the initiative or you're voting for the drug war. There's not a, I'm voting for a different initiative that doesn't exist. You don't have that option.

3:02:31SpeakerWell, it's progress. Let's say it's voting for progress or the drug war. To vote for what we have now to keep the status quo is literally to keep the private prisons in business. Thank you for watching.

3:03:05SpeakerThank you all, but you really, this has been affecting so few of people that have been represented in this industry because unfortunately I have a lot of friends that aren't white and unfortunately there's not a lot of them that are activists, there's not a lot of women that have been activists because traditionally they've gotten the worst shit about being active. They're the first ones to get picked up if they go try to have rallies and women, they've got their kids, they've got things to worry about, they're trying to keep their families together And it's really screwed up, you know, how we've had this industry not protecting and seeing this reality of how it's destroying families and destroying lives.

3:03:46SpeakerAnd I really think voting no against this is fucking criminal in a sense because you're really voting to keep up those racist arrests and keep destroying those families and keep feeding the prison systems with nonviolent marijuana offenders.

3:04:02Tony VerzuraAnd I think that's wrong. Right, and when you look at the consequences of a no vote, any minor problems that I've seen in the initiative, number one, they're correctable, and number two, compared to what we have now, they're inconsequential.

3:04:19BubblemanSo there's no big worries in the initiative where something like that happened in Washington could happen? It's been insulated and protected from that sort of situation?

3:04:27Tony VerzuraYeah, doubly so. Actually, that's one of the reasons that the MRSA bill got passed last year because we saw that up in Washington. The problem was that the state legislature had not dealt with it. Remember, when Proposition 215 was passed by the voters, we called on the state to create a regulated system. In 2003, they gave us SB 420, which was really just a legal defense, not a regulated system.

3:04:48Tony VerzuraAnd then it wasn't until last year that we got the regulated system. So part of the idea of MRSA was to make sure we don't run into that problem that Washington had. And that's why it's so built. Some people say, oh, they wish that Alma had overturned MRSA. But the fact of the matter is that MRSA was designed to protect Prop. 215, and Alma is designed to make sure we don't screw up anything.

3:05:07Etienne FontanAnd that was learning from Washington's mistake by watching them encompass their medical program into the recreational situation. So it allows for the medical market to continue because as we know it is going to continue and it is still needed. So It was an added protection. I can't say I'm not unhappy to see.

3:05:26Tony VerzuraYeah, and so those are some examples of how I believe it's an improvement over all the other initiatives. I think every other initiative we will learn something from. And the next initiative after us is going to learn something from us, but we don't know what yet.

3:05:37SpeakerAnd this does not stop the progress. You know, those of us that see a more liberal future for cannabis can still pursue that more liberal future. This is literally not going to inhibit our ability to fight for change and equal rights.

3:05:51Tony VerzuraRight. It's like this is the first step was Prop 215. The last step, we're not two yet. This is like a middle step. It's a really, really big middle step.

3:06:00SpeakerIt's a middle step that needs to be made in states all over the country. I mean, we have to also focus on the problem of federal prohibition because it is not aligned with democracy and what we as a community want.

3:06:14Etienne FontanPeople are accusing AMA of being faux legalization, and it is faux legalization. Any state law That passes as a faux legalization until it is actually legalized on the federal level. So to use that argument, I think, is just semantics of language.

3:06:30Tony VerzuraAnd most importantly, Alma gives us a path forward because, as you said, we know once Alma is passed, we know we have to work on the local level. We know what we can accomplish through the state legislature. There are some issues that the courts are going to resolve, and then the federal issue is the one that we can start to focus on next. And so I think it gives us a really clear path forward from here.

3:06:52Etienne FontanI think we can all agree it's not perfect and it's not necessarily something that we all would wish, you know, in a perfect world, but I think it's a step in the right direction without a doubt. And thank you all for your information, especially for Chris for presenting such logical and well thought out and discussed and articulated discussing points because a lot of people are starting to hear these rumblings of misinformation and just like I talked earlier about Saying that, you know, I was burning brain cells when I was smoking pot in my smoking circles.

3:07:25Etienne FontanPeople can take some of this knowledge and when they hear it come up in their smoking circles, dispel some of that misinformation so that they can take it to their next smoking circle so that we continue to be grassroots.

3:07:38BubblemanAnd to quote someone here in the chat room, Michael Manning, he says, I've been imprisoned on two continents for cannabis. Three out of the last seven years I have been locked up for cannabis. And then capital letters. Keeping people out of jail is the most important thing. And I think that it's important for people to kind of understand that when you are in a situation that you're in prison, having your life torn apart, getting put in jail for growing a plant or using a plant or sharing a plant, trading, selling.

3:08:12BubblemanThat's just pretty crazy, and getting the foot in the door with anything that's better than that is definitely, in my opinion, not choosing the lesser of two evils. It's progress.

3:08:22SpeakerSo, on that note, Darren?

3:08:28BubblemanYou've got to unmute yourself, Darren. On rip, everybody.

3:08:32SpeakerThere it is.

3:08:33BubblemanRip.

3:08:34SpeakerThree hours and eight minutes for you to say that. I had to come back to... I had to pick up a friend that needed a ride back to their place because I had their vehicle last night and they went on a terror in the town. So I had to go pick them up and come back and bong rip it. So let's do it. On that note, we're bong ripping.

3:08:56SpeakerI think we had a pretty good conversation today. We deserve a bong rip. That was pretty informative there. That's kind of... I just didn't have a moment even to really throw a bong rip in there. I had one and it just kind of, I don't even know if it was heard. It was just too quick.

3:09:16Etienne FontanYeah, Chris is laying down a lot of knowledge and Todd and everybody, so I appreciate everybody and their discussion points because I had to educate myself. And I thank you, Chris, for being a proponent and educating others and taking the discussion points. Of those 47 pages and breaking them down in ways that, you know, are conveyable so that people can understand and dispel the misinformation.

3:09:42Tony VerzuraCome to chrisconrad.com to read the text for yourself.

3:09:46SpeakerI got to learn a lot of information today I didn't know before. Very thankful. That's why I pretty much kept my mouth shut. Too much good going on. Maybe we should ask everybody in chat what they think about this initiative and whether they think it should be voted for, yes or no. Just put yes or no in your chat.

3:10:11Etienne FontanYes or no, people. That was a question from Sam.

3:10:14BubblemanI want to see answers.

3:10:17SpeakerYou got it if you want, buddy.

3:10:18BubblemanRubble man be dabbing on flights. Well, I don't set up my D-mail per se, but...

3:10:24Etienne FontanYou know, I have seen new airplanes that are having plug-in points all around, so that may not be too far from the future.

3:10:32BubblemanI thought I was hardcore puffing on planes, and then I flew with Tony, and he whipped off a whole batch of turps just in the bathroom.

3:10:40SpeakerThat's awesome. I've come in to do a bong rip also, and it's been great listening to what's happening in California, and I think they're doing a lot of that same stuff here in Canada and I think they're going to be doing a lot of following. But anyways, awesome guys.

3:10:55BubblemanWell, it's good to see people that are considering. I saw this a lot with Jamaica over the last couple of years and how they were really smart in how they looked at all of these other places. They looked at Colorado and Washington and California and Uruguay and Canada and who knows, maybe other spots. But they made sure that they looked at every single federal law, state law, provincial mechanism.

3:11:18BubblemanAnd they took what I, you know, I would hope the best of those things to create the policy that they're now implementing in Jamaica. And I think it's, you know, Chris mentioned the same thing that they, these authors obviously looked at all of these different places and try to create something. You try to create something better. Obviously, there's always going to be the worry in any type of situation like this that people worry about private agendas, personal agendas, biased agendas that, you know, because I didn't even understand the initiative very much until this conversation today, but people on Instagram were going off about, you know, oh, it's going to do this and it's going to do that, and you pretty much said quite the opposite today, Chris, than what a lot of people were worried about, so it's maybe the ones that are worried are Is it chrisconrad.com that they can go and check out to read this at a deeper level and maybe feel better about some of the things that they may be misunderstanding?

3:12:18Tony VerzuraYes, we have ChrisConner.com, and then there's Alma, A-U-M-A 2016.com is the Friends of Alma, and it provides links to other resources. The main problem that we're having, though, is that this one group that has just had a concerted effort, largely through social media, but also through flyers and everything, and they're just putting out wrong information. Like I said, they quote the current law, they claim it's Alma.

3:12:41Tony VerzuraThey say that Alma says things, they even quote the elite words when they Say what it says just to make it sound bad. I've never seen anything quite like it.

3:12:50SpeakerOr they mix, or even like, because I'm new in this area, and like trying to understand 215 and MRSA and this is a bit confusing. And so when people put information out there that cross over and pull apart and take things out of content, it makes it super confusing. And the reality of what's going on is you don't know. And so I thank you very much for today, you and Todd, for laying it out.

3:13:20SpeakerYeah, well, the truth is, Tony, that if you believe a lot of the misrepresentations of the truth that people are presenting on various forums, et cetera, I'd be against it, too.

3:13:35Etienne FontanWell, then just tell them to go and read Alma itself. It's 47 pages. No, I know you did it, but I challenge everybody to tell them. But I challenge everybody who's watching here, don't just listen to us. Go read it for yourself and decide for yourself. I mean, we have. We've also got talking points. But decide for yourself. Read it. Pardon me, it's 62 pages. So educate yourself.

3:14:03Etienne FontanAbsolutely. Yeah.

3:14:05BubblemanWell, I guess we could probably soon get to Sam here. We're in our last hour now. He's going to tell us a little bit about this Hercules unit and maybe take it apart and show it. And I like it because it's something you can actually take apart. Unlike that pen that John took apart one time on Hash Church, which had all these weird kind of parts in the background where it was like, what the hell did he just pull out of his pen?

3:14:32BubblemanThese pens are clean and they're reusable and I'm kind of of the school of Chris. I don't like the idea of this non-sustainable throwaway pens. It was Sam actually that even brought it to my attention that potentially the pens I was using, not that I was using them that often, still could potentially not be safe to use and he taught me a lot about this sort of rebranding low integrity buyer Chinese manufactured pens.

3:15:00BubblemanI'm not bashing on China because they can create great pens, but the low integrity buyers do tend to buy the worst products. So yeah, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Hercules here today? For sure.

3:15:12Samurai SamWe've got a couple of different things. You can try out the Omicron, which was this guy. Oh wow, not with the bubbler. That's an optional attachment. The Omicron is the one that comes with that. This is an easier to use wax fan, more in line with something you can put in your pocket.

3:15:26Etienne FontanThis is the thing I've been using right here. So that's a USB rechargeable base.

3:15:32Samurai SamYep, it's got four wattage settings on it. You tap the button three times and the button will change color to let you know what's going on. And it's simple enough for most people to use. You can put really small amounts, like a dab at a time, inside and vape it up.

3:15:45Etienne FontanAnd then it comes with a glass globe, too, so you can pop out. It escalates with each three taps. It changes temperatures.

3:15:53Samurai SamIt's wattage settings, so the temperature is kind of user controlled. When you leave it on a really low wattage setting, like 10 or 13 watts, you can get really tasty turf rips. And then on the higher settings, like blue, which is 19 watts, you can get really thick clouds. So that's a really nice, easy-to-use vape for most people. But for people that use a lot of concentrates, we have a different type of product, which is a really serious unit called the Hercules.

3:16:14Samurai SamAnd this is a user-serviceable device that doesn't use a wire heating element. It doesn't use any sort of plastics inside it. It does have a PTFE base and then heat shield and a mouthpiece that goes over it.

3:16:29Etienne FontanWhat were those initials? PTFE. What does that mean?

3:16:33Samurai SamSame material that I came on here to report about.

3:16:35SpeakerTeflon, Teflon, Polytetrafluoroethylene, Teflon.

3:16:40Samurai SamIf Teflon's in contact with the heating unit, it's no good. But ours is basically used as a heat shield around it, and it doesn't get to any temperatures that are going to cause any sort of off-gassing with this plastic. So it's a pretty high heat-resistant plastic. It's better than ABS or some other, like, lower... You know, lower grades of plastic that are going to release fumes.

3:17:00BubblemanBorrowhead asked if it tastes reclaiming. Now, I haven't hit the Hercules, and the reason we're talking about... No, it doesn't. Yeah, the taste on this pen, and, you know, when I first got one, I photographed the inside of it, which was these two little coils, and the thing that looked different about them was they looked like they were porous, and when I photographed them with my macro lens, they were porous.

3:17:22BubblemanThey were this weird black ceramic, And so I asked him to kind of explain the difference between the white little ceramic rods that I had seen versus these more porous ones. And really the mentality of it is that it sucks in a little bit of the hit. It's really a technique, too, because if you do it wrong, there definitely is technique. Because you can ruin the taste if you hold the button down too much.

3:17:47BubblemanBut if you learn this simple technique of pressing a little bit and inhaling slowly... It's the first pen that actually made the resins and the full melts taste like the way they tasted. I was so surprised when I blew out a rip that just tasted the way the flavor did rather than What I would just call generic pen taste, which seemed to be a lot of what I had experienced prior to... A lot of that.

3:18:11Samurai SamThere's a lot of generic pen taste thanks to like plastics that are in the base of atomizers or silica wicks or fiberglass in really old pens. And those kind of things can break down and you don't really want to heat them up. My personal litmus test, you should be able to push power in a vape pen and inhale and not taste anything but clean hot air.

3:18:27BubblemanAnd if you get anything else... And what he just said right now is exactly why I had him come on. We don't generally have people come on here and try to up promote any particular company. But when that company is coming from a place of high integrity and they're sharing information and knowledge, then it becomes, that's a safety issue. Smoking these pens, hitting them all the time and having All of the different things that he just mentioned potentially in behind the coil, wrapped around it.

3:18:56BubblemanNot so you can see, and very few people are actually taking these pens apart. We thank Johnny B for ripping his apart last time when we discussed this. Because I'll tell you, when people, they heard what he said, but when they saw John pull that piece of whatever fiberglass cotton thing out, that was too much.

3:19:15BubblemanLike, even feeling it, and then I hit it with it, and I started burning it, and when it, like, it balled up into a black little hard soot, so it was like, and the, and the, and the, I mean, remember, I don't know if I was burning it there, too, but, I mean, it was that black little, it was... It's definitely not something, it's why I invited Sam back on to be able to tell this to you guys.

3:19:36BubblemanWe're not trying to shamelessly promote a single company, but when a single company is the company raising the bar and having a higher integrity and producing a unit like this that's been on the market for years, if I'm not correct.

3:19:48Samurai SamThat came out in 2012.

3:19:50BubblemanAnd there are people that have been using this cartridge for years. They still have their original cartridge. It's basically, you know, Gary, the owner of the company, he said to me that this is a This is a product that is meant to last. It's not a product that you're going to throw away. It's a product that you're going to clean, and it's a product that you're going to use.

3:20:07BubblemanWe're actually probably going to have a nice session with it here. We're just using a standard mod box that I guess people use to power it.

3:20:16Samurai SamPrior versions of the Hercules came in a 601 threading for use with our own vaporizers. And we actually got our company started before 510 was the standard DC threading. But with the way the market shifted, we're moving to 510. So the new Omicron here is our first 510 device. Now we've come out with the Hercules in 510, so it's compatible with a lot of existing devices. So different people with mods can now run this cartridge with all their existing equipment.

3:20:38BubblemanYou know, when I had the ability, right before I met Sam, I... We were talking down in California about potentially doing some type of a pen and I was like, well, what kind of pens are they? And I had seen these standard, I'm not sure if I have, I think I have a pen somewhere on my desk. It was one of those simple little real thin with the post in it that people fill up with oil.

3:20:59BubblemanThey're the ones in California that are the most popular right now and I just, I wasn't really sure on wanting to put my brand in just any old rebranded and marketed pen. I like the idea of really kind of Looking at who's doing it with the highest of integrity and making sure that if you're passing something along to someone, the last thing I want to do is harm people.

3:21:23BubblemanIs have people do something that I put my name on and then they get sick from it or are harmed in any way, shape or form. That's not something that I ever really want to do. And of course the whole purpose of Hash Church is to also share information with people so you can do your own research and find out if what we're saying is accurate and if we are saying what is accurate then it can lead you in a direction that would hopefully be away from the more harmful of the two options.

3:21:54Samurai SamI think it's a, it's a, you know, people ask all the time, how can I create a successful business?

3:22:20BubblemanThank you for joining us.

3:22:42BubblemanThe fact that we can make profit off of the plant in today's marketplace off of the integrity and operating procedures and quality that is produced rather than the old school prohibition profit-based margin of I make profit because, oh yeah, a buddy just got 10 years because he got caught with a 10-pack or whatever. That's like a very bad profit margin. I've mentioned it time and time again here on Hash Church that...

3:23:09BubblemanThere's better profit margins to be had, so should we have a couple of rips out of these units?

3:23:15Samurai SamWould you like to load this guy up here with someone?

3:23:17BubblemanDarren, would you be able to modify your bong rip and maybe yell vape?

3:23:23SpeakerVape rip. The name of that vaporizer is called the Hercules?

3:23:30Samurai SamYeah, this one's the Hercules. This is the Hercules oil cartridge to keep it simple.

3:23:35SpeakerNow, do they have them in stores all over the place, or can you only get them on your website?

3:23:40Samurai SamYou can get them on our website and a couple other online retailers right now. This is our high-end device, and we don't sell as many of them in stores as we do online for people that are really coming to look for it, whereas the Omicron is a device that you can pick up in a lot of smoke shops.

3:23:53SpeakerNice. Turd Dip, what name of that is there? Is that the ACDC?

3:23:59BubblemanYeah.

3:23:59SpeakerNice.

3:24:00BubblemanWe're going to do some ACDC slurry action here.

3:24:06Etienne FontanSam, this is different from the SR-71?

3:24:10Samurai SamYeah, you've used probably more Herbs than anybody, huh, ATN?

3:24:14Etienne FontanI've been using them for four years.

3:24:17Samurai SamRight on. The 71 was a pretty old model. It was kind of difficult to disassemble on the bottom. It had a press fit center post, and the SR-74 had a spring-loaded post. This one's a little bit newer where we added the 510 threading in and a 0.8 ohm rod, so you don't need the 7.4 volts of the Perseus to drive this Hercules anymore. No shit. Yeah, so that's a couple things make it a bit more compatible with almost any box mod out there.

3:24:41Samurai SamThey can do 20 to 35 watts is the operating range.

3:24:44Etienne FontanAnd what do those retail for?

3:24:47Samurai Sam$130 for the newest version of the Dirk. So it's a little bit more expensive than some of the wax pens, but the more you use it, the more it pays for itself because you don't have to buy replacement coils or anything for it. The atomizer...

3:24:59Etienne FontanYou can also take them apart and soak them and clean them too.

3:25:03Samurai SamAbsolutely and definitely. You can add oil or hash to this until the flavor degrades, which if you're using a really pure full melt can be 7 to 20 grams for most people. And then when it finally does taste bad enough to where you want to clean it out, Use it until you want to not vape anymore, and then pull it all apart, throw it in an isopropyl alcohol, and you can even boil the pieces to fully sterilize them.

3:25:26Samurai SamI came over this morning and cleaned this one up so that we could get ready to load it up.

3:25:30SpeakerI actually, I have all of mine in pieces because I was excited to get one, but I saw you taking it apart and I was like, oh, okay, this whole thing comes apart.

3:25:40BubblemanIt's unbelievable how it comes apart, dude.

3:25:43SpeakerNo, it really is because so like you have your, these are little replaceable if you wanted to on the Omicron, these little titanium coils, yeah, and then you could take that apart from here so even if the oil was pulling through here you could clean all that.

3:25:59Samurai SamExactly.

3:26:04SpeakerAnd then on the top, you've got this little catch underneath the thing that if you smoke a lot of it, and like Bubble Man said, if you got the touchdown, my other lid doesn't look like that. Right. Because you're pulling so hard because you're used to a vape pen and you're like, oh, I've got to pull hard and I've got to burn it. Right. It hits so smooth that like...

3:26:26SpeakerI agree. I mean, it was the first vape pen I hit that I tasted it probably better than the D-Nail. Yeah, man. I did the unfortunate thing where I was trying to drop this like... Is that the ceramic head or is that the two-coil head? Two-coil. It's ceramic porous little rods with the titanium grade tube wrapped around them. Gotcha.

3:26:53Samurai SamDid you happen to get any of the 1701 ceramic donuts that have the donut heating element with the black wick on top?

3:26:58SpeakerYeah, so that's what I was going to ask you. There's this little gold device.

3:27:03Etienne FontanThat is the shit, dude. You've got to be trying that. Okay, what are we doing with this? So you take it out, you put the little donut in the center flat, and then you just use that, and that is Flavortown.

3:27:18Samurai SamI would suggest... Let me grab one so I can show you. I'd suggest leaving that wig out the first time.

3:27:26Etienne FontanYeah, let the master tell you.

3:27:29SpeakerThis is it right here, Tony. I'm just mixing up...

3:27:32Etienne FontanI got the best flavor off that little... that combination right there, Tony. I love the two-coil one, but the best flavor, I've gotten off that, and I bet your Terps are stupid off that.

3:27:43Samurai SamSure, this one... Also, this...

3:27:49Samurai SamTake the wick out, actually, first, so that you have just the white element exposed, and put a little bit of your load on that first, and then slap this back inside, and after you hit it a few times, then you can load a little bit more, and from there on out, you can just leave this donut inside, and it'll wick and feed the oil down into the heating element.

3:28:09Samurai SamIt'll also kind of prevent a little splatter, as long as you use nice, gentle sips. I'd suggest trying that glass glove out so that you can learn the right draw technique and not get a bunch of splatter in the mouthpiece.

3:28:23Etienne FontanMan, this is so sick.

3:28:25SpeakerNo kidding. So, all right, the one thing I also skipped over because I was excited was you just mentioned there's three settings on this thing. There's a blue, a green, and a purple. There's a fourth one.

3:28:37Samurai SamThere's a yellow, which is 10, and then a purple, which is 13, a green, which is 16, and a blue that's 19. Blue is the fire I'm on. Blue is the hottest. But I suggest starting on yellow, 10 watts, and doing like five second pulses, letting off. I'll give you a demo.

3:28:59Etienne FontanHey, you might want to move a little closer to the mic, Sam.

3:29:02Samurai SamYou got it. Thank you. We're just talking about it. So now I'm on the lowest setting, and I'll hold this down for some pretty long pulses and draw real gently.

3:29:14SpeakerIt's funny because I accidentally hit it a few times, and I thought yellow meant my battery was running low. So I started charging it again, and I was like, huh. And it changed colors on me, not realizing it. So this makes a lot more sense. Where is it?

3:29:31SpeakerIt's always good to read the instructions, huh? They're sitting right here, like in a box. I just got excited with it because I was like, oh, this is awesome.

3:29:44Samurai SamIt's just like every other customer that gets their new thing, pulls it out of the box, and loads some oil in it, and then goes back later to read the instructions. I take phone calls all day long, and it's why I do what I do. I really like getting to help people out, you know, teach them how to use this stuff and get enjoyment out of it.

3:30:01Samurai SamSo there you go. You can see even on the really low power setting, if you do a couple pulses, you can get really good vapor production. If you want thicker clouds, tap it up. You can go to the higher settings, and then you get shorter pulses will give you thick vapor there.

3:30:18SpeakerSo Sam, is there direct contact between the oil and the heating element?

3:30:22Samurai SamYeah, this has grade two titanium wire on the one that I'm using, and that's the heating element is the wire, is the resistor, and heats up. Then on this, there's definitely direct contact from the oil when it feeds down into that white donut, that piece of ceramic heats up. So it's conductive heating.

3:30:37SpeakerSo, but the heating element is not nichrome?

3:30:41Samurai SamNo, no, we don't use nichrome anymore. Some of our older products from a couple years ago did have nichrome wire, but we've eliminated it in all of our current gear.

3:30:49SpeakerHave you or anybody else done any analysis of residuals left in the pen to see what type of... What type of stuff, like is there a lot of CBN left behind? Is DCARB happening in the pen? Do you know if anyone's sent any residuals analysis?

3:31:07Samurai SamI'm not aware of any studies with residuals or reclaiming bait pens. I would find to think that any type of reclaim that would happen from an email that you're fetching or drop down, so the CBN would take place. That happens more, especially in these load-as-you-go atomizers. The more that you load into them, the more will be left behind. They will pool down into the ceramic cup. Really small amounts of porous ceramic wicks actually just stay inside the wire.

3:31:33Samurai SamSo just enough for two to three hits will mean you get a more complete vaporization of that load instead of it leaking down and cooling up and then going through the degradation you're talking about.

3:31:44Etienne FontanI had done that originally with the earlier SR-71s. I had packed too much in thinking it was going to work like that and then I would end up with my own sludge on the bottom, but I was still able to recycle it and Clean it up and work it. It was just messy as hell, so good job on modifying it. It was pretty messy with the screw top as opposed to just the pop-off top, et cetera.

3:32:06Samurai SamThe cap that goes on top of this?

3:32:08SpeakerYeah. I would tell you that this, right, the other one that you're talking, this other one, this thing was like, Man, it conserves the oil, this oil, this solventless oil that Bubble Man and I have been working on, this blue label stuff.

3:32:27BubblemanAnd this is the Hercules, actually, the one that I held up earlier.

3:32:30SpeakerYeah, it's basically, so you're telling me that you can, because I only put like two or three drops of this stuff in it, and it's been vaping like 50, 60 hits. Wow. I mean, it just keeps going. Oh, yeah. This stuff that I've been showing you guys, this salt on the soil, it's been the best thing I've ever used because it's just the same taste over and over.

3:32:55SpeakerIt keeps vaping it. Yeah, so putting some of that stuff in there. But what's the setting that you would recommend in the watts for this Hercules? Just curious because I have one of these.

3:33:08Samurai SamOkay. It can run on a variety of different box mods. I suggest starting at about 20 watts, trying that out with some longer pulses, and then working your way up if you want to get thicker clouds.

3:33:18SpeakerOh, I'm at like 14.5 watts.

3:33:21Samurai SamSo you're super terp-saving mode right now. Probably getting a lot of paper, and that's why you're getting so many hits is you have a lower power setting so the clouds aren't as thick per hit.

3:33:31SpeakerNo, they're not that thick. They're just super, super, super smooth. I got 40, probably 40 hits off of like... Two drops.

3:33:39Samurai SamThere's a lot of flexibility.

3:33:40SpeakerI was just like, oh my God, this is flavor town the whole way.

3:33:45Samurai SamYou can put, you have this, the titanium wick goes around this rod, right? And we recommend you squish it so that it really stays down there, and you can load about a half gram inside this at a time.

3:33:56SpeakerSay that again, what else is, because there's a rod in there, am I supposed to put something else in there?

3:34:00BubblemanHow much? There's the titanium. Yeah, take the whole thing apart and show it to them.

3:34:04Etienne FontanSo how much can you put in there?

3:34:06BubblemanUp to a gram.

3:34:06Samurai SamHalf a gram?

3:34:07BubblemanFor one coil. What? We're about to shove this in there. Ten drops of ACDC Terps with a little under half a gram of green crack.

3:34:20SpeakerYeah, that's what I'm talking about. Hold on a second. You're telling me there's something else that goes around that?

3:34:27Samurai SamYeah, the titanium wick. Yeah, the little wire wrap thing. You didn't get those little...

3:34:33SpeakerThe wire wrap thing.

3:34:34Samurai SamDid you get one of these? The titanium... Oh, shit.

3:34:39SpeakerYeah, hold on. I remember seeing that. I didn't know what that was for.

3:34:45BubblemanThat's to wick up all your oil.

3:34:47Etienne FontanYeah, so that's what... Yeah, that's more for oil. If your stuff is more waxy, I would go without it. But if it's very oily, I would recommend that. Am I correct on that, Sam?

3:34:59Samurai SamI suggest using this in any case, even if you have... Oh, this.

3:35:02Etienne FontanOr rosin or something really... Dang, that's it, Tony.

3:35:07Samurai SamYou put this in and you squish it so that you have to use the tool that comes with one of these tools. You'll have to poke this coil down and then the coil sits around the rod and you can place about a quarter gram in there. You push the power and it melts inside. You do a quarter gram and that melts inside and this titanium feeds the oil into the center.

3:35:29Etienne FontanSo instead of having all the oil sitting on the… Yeah, so put your turps directly on that little titanium sponge.

3:35:35Samurai SamYep, yeah, so you put it in here and then it feeds in from the side, so as long as you keep the wick saturated, you'll have really good flavor. You can just add oil to it.

3:35:44SpeakerSo you're about to put 10 drops of PCDC in a half a gram? Yeah, yeah. Wow. What would you use for the base, Ash?

3:35:55BubblemanThe oil I used was rosin from the West Coast Concentrates, and it was green cracked rod. It was shattery and beautiful looking shit. I think I was just going to turn. I mean, I just put it in a little while ago. You guys saw me do it, and it's just liquid.

3:36:12SpeakerSo do you unscrew the bottom of this to get that apart? Because yours is silver.

3:36:17BubblemanOh, yeah, show him how it goes in the black piece. He doesn't know how to get it out of here.

3:36:22Samurai SamWhere are you at?

3:36:23BubblemanYeah, that's where he's at.

3:36:24Samurai SamSo unscrew it. I'm going to thread this piece apart, and this will come off. I tried. Yeah, we'll try harder.

3:36:32SpeakerWhat's funny is I've been trying for a very long time to do that and all of a sudden it just like happened. Okay, so I've got this piece. Man, this thing, this is awesome how you like to take, okay, and then this comes apart.

3:36:46BubblemanThat's what I'm saying. Isn't it awesome that you can take it all apart and see that nothing's hidden behind the coil or around. It's just right there. You see everything.

3:36:56SpeakerSo I could take all these, okay. Wow, you could take literally everything apart in Subcool.

3:37:02Samurai SamMake sure you check out those instructions. Those instructions are not going to lie.

3:37:06BubblemanThey scared me. I looked at them and I was like, I'm never looking at those again.

3:37:10Samurai SamYou're going to have to go through them to learn how to use it because if you use this thing and then you get it really dirty and you haven't learned how to put it back together, you're going to have a super hard time your second time around.

3:37:20SpeakerYeah, well, this will never happen again.

3:37:24BubblemanOh my God, someone just asked, what did I miss about OMAP? Let me see. Let me just recap it for you, bro. It should only take me about an hour and 15 minutes. I'll just give you the cliff note.

3:37:38Etienne FontanYeah, just restart the video when we're done. We'll be here all week. Hi, we're here all week. I'll explain it to you.

3:37:45BubblemanIn a sense, you never miss any past church because we went from past church to FaceTime with Tony and Omicron. No, we're just having a conversation, SMAS extracts, you know? Tony's the one talking. He's got a unit, so we're... ATN's on the ball, too. He's been using these things for years, so he's just looking at us as noobs, learning something he's been doing for a long while.

3:38:11SpeakerIt would be interesting to figure out a way to do some testing and actually figure out what comes off at the different temperatures. It would be really good for your business.

3:38:19Etienne FontanI was about to say, now there's some science behind it.

3:38:22SpeakerYeah, I did a bunch of stuff at one point in time where they created some kind of suction tube on a Like it had a vacuum and they pulled the vapor or the smoke through a filter disc and then they did an extract on the filter disc and ran that through the lab. So the disc is actually a way of capturing all the cannabs that are coming off the vapor or the smoke and the terpenes.

3:38:44SpeakerAs I take this thing apart though, I think like I'm surprised that there's not like this, when you're talking about CBN and degradation, even the oil in it, it's still... Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying. Like, you can't really just say that it has CBN unless you have testing that shows that it does. It would be a pretty easy experiment to do with a decent lab. And then you'd know, you know, if you put in 100% decarboxylated oil or rosin, you could do a whole bunch of different extracts and then see how it comes out at the different temperatures.

3:39:17SpeakerRather than just saying, you know, it's CBN because that's not the way it works. You did it. You'll be happy to know I sent 25 samples off to SC Labs of turps. Good. And I sent off Gorilla Glue and ACDC to be pesticide, RSTO, microbial, every single thing that they possibly have. Cool. Did you have the before extract terpene profiles of the flower? I can get those, yeah.

3:39:49SpeakerWell, you should get all that stuff together. I am. I'll get it for you. I'll be, I just, it'll be interesting because I'll have 20, 25 of them. Yeah, well, it'll be good for you. I mean, it'll be good for the Blue River Turf brand. Tony, I would love, I would love to see the terpene profile of the fresh cannabis than the terpenes side by side. That'd be fantastic.

3:40:18SpeakerOh, uh, uh, Run in the same system, fresh, frozen versus dry? No, no, I'm just saying the profile of whatever you're using, fresh or dry, whatever, versus the terpene. Oh yeah, that's exactly what I'm putting together. Okay, well that's going to be fantastic. Yeah, well I'll share all of it and see what... See what the hell it is. You seem to, you know, Essie seems to be legit on the terpene profile, so let's see if the flowers and the terpenes line up.

3:40:52SpeakerYeah.

3:40:55BubblemanThat would be awesome. Nothing to hide. Look forward to seeing that information. Oh, we know you have everything to hide, Tony. We know about you.

3:41:03SpeakerYeah.

3:41:06SpeakerThe other thing I wanted to talk about this week, actually there's a couple of things. Ethan Russo's got a new paper out that Sam was kind enough to send along to me. It's about the endocannabinoid system and different plants that have compounds that affect the endocannabinoid system. So I think everybody should check that out.

3:41:25BubblemanIs it available? Because I asked him if I could post it and he said... No, you can't yet.

3:41:29SpeakerIt's in print, so unfortunately you can't post it.

3:41:32BubblemanWell, that's why. Okay, okay.

3:41:34SpeakerYeah, it's typically authors get a copy first, but it's not really cool for the authors to then go around and start sending it out before the magazine.

3:41:42BubblemanNo, no. You know, he sent it out. I had no idea what the situation was.

3:41:45Etienne FontanYeah, but everyone should read it. It's fascinating. It is.

3:41:49BubblemanIt's good, for sure. That's why I asked before I went to post it, Ryan. I made sure, and it's funny because when I asked him, other people emailed in and said, oh, oops, I already posted it. I'll take it down now.

3:42:01SpeakerYeah. I read that paper and I was really extremely disappointed when I found that he didn't mention the eating mangoes to raise the mercine level so that you get higher. That Ed Rosenthal discovered. That he discovered.

3:42:19Etienne FontanOh, fuck.

3:42:24BubblemanA little bit of sarcasm today on Hash Church.

3:42:32SpeakerYeah, if you search mangoes and terpenes, the only thing that comes up is cannabis related.

3:42:38BubblemanAll cannabis related. It's amazing how you can create reality when you get enough people to believe in it.

3:42:44SpeakerWell, one of the things that I did was I checked how much the amount of myrcines were in mangoes. You're talking tiny, tiny, tiny amounts. But even beyond that, what I did was I tried smoking and eating mangoes to see if I could make it happen.

3:43:01Etienne FontanBut hold on. Which type of mango? Because there's over 3,000 types of mango.

3:43:07SpeakerActually, I tried all 3,000. Sam is that type of person that would actually continuously… Try every mango to see if there's anything.

3:43:19Etienne FontanYou know, there's a festival in India or in Southeast Asia every year where they actually have a representation of all 3,000 mangoes.

3:43:28SpeakerWell, it's pretty hard to do because they flower and they bear fruit at slightly different times, so it's almost impossible to have them. But I've probably tried maybe 500 different varieties in India. I've tried all the big common ones, and my favorite is Alfonso's from Ratnagiri. I mean, those are the one.

3:43:51BubblemanHey, Mark, you mind clicking on my camera for a second? Not at all. Let's see what we've got going on here.

3:43:57SpeakerSo this is from a presentation that Ryan Lynch gave at Canomed. Ryan Lynch is the geneticist that was working with Nolan Cain's lab, and he's now working with medicinal genomics. But Sam and I have had this ongoing conversation about these branding companies, and they've got these new varieties like Marley's Whatever or Snoop's Dream or whatever the names are. And Sam and I had this ongoing discussion about the fact that it was most likely that these clones were just taken out of the regular market and then rebranded as a different clone, as a different name, right?

3:44:36SpeakerSo the first genetic information has come in that whole topic, and you can see right here, I don't know if you can see that on the screen, but there's Snoop's Dream and Blue Dream TLE clones.

3:44:51SpeakerRight here. Yep. And they come out as the same sample.

3:44:57SpeakerSo it's genetic proof that the Snoop's Dream is just a clone of Blue Dream. Well, they're going to owe me big money because I licensed, copyrighted the name Sam's Dream.

3:45:13BubblemanSam's Dream.

3:45:14SpeakerSo, but it's just an interesting content, you know, context of what we were talking about today, how all these people are coming in and You know, saying, you know, you're going to have whatever celebrity's branding. And essentially the only thing that you're doing is adding a royalty onto them to smoke the same clone that you can get elsewhere on the market. Ryan, do you think you can enforce plant variety type protection patent coverage?

3:45:41SpeakerWell, not on these plants, but you definitely could. Well, these are all in public domain now, so all they're doing is grabbing stuff that's been in circulation for years, if not decades, in California. Right, so how do you enforce that? Who owns it, Mark? No one. To enforce to who? It's public domain, but if you had a new variety that was registered or it was patented that you definitely could start enforcing...

3:46:09SpeakerEither plant breeders rights or students. You can't sell it or offer it to people before you do that. No, yeah, you wouldn't. Those clones would never be out in the public domain.

3:46:18Etienne FontanHey, sorry.

3:46:23BubblemanGo ahead.

3:46:25Etienne FontanSo this will become commonplace then, right? People just grabbing whatever is accessible on the market because there's no way to enforce it and just throwing their name behind it, right?

3:46:33SpeakerWell, can I just say, become, excuse me, most of these varieties, when people sought out OG Kush or Cali Orange or Skunk One in a lot of ways, not so much Skunk One per se, but things like Trainwreck that are clone only, You know, people have built fortunes off of the work of others. You know, that's why in the 90s if you could get a clone of something like OG Kush, it was worth it to pay a lot of money for it because if you knew how to use it, you could turn it into, you know, bushes and bushes of bushes of ganja.

3:47:04SpeakerAnd of course it was worth it on every level because it gave you a good variety to grow. A lot of work goes in sex and selection and people don't really realize just getting seeds is half the battle. You know, then you got to go and get to learn it, figure out which is the best representation you have of that batch. You know, this is... And then some of these strains become famous based on their own.

3:47:24SpeakerYou know, some of these cuttings go on to become rock stars.

3:47:27BubblemanAccording to Jabbles, Wiz Khalifa is actually an amazing breeder.

3:47:34SpeakerOkay. You know, in between stage of performances, he's a busy gardener. I admire that. Go in selections, you know.

3:47:44Etienne FontanBut he knows his microsource.

3:47:46SpeakerYeah, there's a lot of work going on in selection, and I think most people have never really done a real selection, to be perfectly honest. It's a lot different growing it down 1,000 plants of one cross, or 100 plants even of one cross than it is from 10 plants, and having to keep all the backups, and then weeding through them and actually being able to pull out the ones that are different or better.

3:48:09SpeakerIf you're using a lab, it's very expensive, and it's a lot of work. But I think that's really going to be the future. And if these brands, if these big names expect that they're going to be able to do more than just take a name, you know, add just like Snoop onto the front of an existing variety, I mean, I don't see the value in that. I don't understand why anybody would pay Top dollar to have, you know, Blue Dream that has Snoop's name on it.

3:48:36SpeakerWell, they're not going to be aware of that per se. And the thing is, is that when you look at his capability of marketing it, you know, people will say that Jack Daniels isn't the best whiskey, but they've got a great marketing team. And, you know, and it's the same with other varieties. You know, if you get people into a new market that's existed for a long time, it's the savvy of the people pushing it in many respects.

3:48:56SpeakerAnd if you get Willie Nelson to go in and say, here, here's a variety of cannabis I liked, I smoked, I'll put my name on it. You know, people pick it up out of trivia, out of respect, out of loyalty.

3:49:09Etienne FontanI would expect Willie to actually come out with a strain that is something that he would actually have had bred properly. I would expect that from Willie.

3:49:19SpeakerTodd, the real, I mean. Oh no, what do you know? He's not a fucking pot grower. Last time I checked, he played a guitar so much, there's a fucking hole in the guitar.

3:49:28Etienne FontanYes, but he had a guitar.

3:49:30SpeakerSomebody asked him what he's going to do if he had a guitar. He goes, all I do is play music and play golf, and which of it is it you want me to give up? So in reality, I don't expect Willie Nelson's going to be out on the farm busting ass with a hoe and some organic soil listening to Tim talk about living soil, okay? But leave the man to play some music, but if he wants to lend his name to a variety of cannabis,

3:49:55Etienne FontanSomebody else made that strain. I'm not saying it was him. He already has a strain that he's been smoking for years that people I know know him.

3:50:03SpeakerHey, I got a shirt upstairs made of hemp that has his name on the pocket. Were you under the assumption that he made that shirt? No, but he did grow the hemp, Todd. He grew the hemp, he dyed it, then he sewed it into a denim shirt, and then he hit the road and peddled them. That's how it went down, isn't it? He's organic, man. You've got to give it up.

3:50:24SpeakerYeah. I think brands are supposed to represent something, whether it represents quality or it represents a vision of freedom or whatever it is. When you ask why are people buying something, well, you have to look at what Snoop represented, what's Willie represented. When Chimera and I were talking about this before it was analyzed and we found out what it was, We were laughing and I was saying, you wait and see, there's going to be a Marley blue dream, there's going to be a, sure enough, the first one tested turned out to be blue dream.

3:50:58SpeakerWe both cracked fucking up. Everybody wants these three pounds of light, man. Everybody's got these daydreams of grandeur. And I mean, it's weird because you watch these people on the CNN shows and they talk about all these like lavish daydreams, three pounds of light, and it's like, That's the shit I don't want to smoke. Big Buds existed for years. They're just so naive they don't realize there's cultivars that do that, but you're not really going to want to live with them from day to day.

3:51:25SpeakerThey're not going to be what you grab for when you go to grab your jars of something to go smoke.

3:51:29Samurai SamDid you kill that? So that wasn't quite the half gram to saturate the wick. I was going to say it.

3:51:37BubblemanI got more here. Sorry, guys. I got so stoned off that rip that I just did on that Hercules. It was quite amazing. The smell that was in the room, I had the mic muted, but oh my God, the ACDC with the green crack God rosin made the most incredible, spicy, exotic smell in the air.

3:51:57Samurai SamIt lingered for like three or four minutes. It was a lingerer.

3:52:01SpeakerThere's something, something about those ACDC terps I've been, I've been telling you about. It's like, you know, it's not like going to give you some kind of, it's not like smoking CBD versus THC, there's just something different. So that was the one that I actually picked to do the full analysis on re-over at SC because it's, every time I've mixed that with other things, you get like crazy mixtures, you know, it just comes out differently, menthol-y to like just, Different.

3:52:29SpeakerLemons come out that weren't there before. Just different things. It's really unique.

3:52:36BubblemanWell, tasty as fuck.

3:52:37SpeakerThat's for sure.

3:52:38Samurai SamSuper tasty. First day down in Terps.

3:52:41BubblemanI want a bong rep. There's always time for a bong rep. I mean, my goodness, we've been at this for almost four hours. I'm ready to call it quits in about seven minutes. We could probably get ourselves right out of here. I'd like to see the entire panel coughing and tearing up and red in the face.

3:52:58SpeakerI want to thank you all for having a discussion about this. It's really nice to talk to people and get your point across in a logical manner and thanks, you know. I think this is a good forum and it was really nice to kind of put our ideas out there. Thank you, Todd.

3:53:16Etienne FontanYeah, thanks for bringing Chris on and thanks for opening up the discussion because I know it's been one of contention and one that will be contentious and hopefully we gave some seeds of thought that people can... Take and plant and educate others, as I said. Spread around your smoking circles. Decide for yourself. And, you know, I'll be here next Sunday.

3:53:41SpeakerUnfortunately, when I look on the forums, what I see is mostly people posting anti-initiative stuff. Very few people posting positive. I mean, there is some people, but the vast majority seem to be anti. If you're fighting to keep cannabis illegal, you're a prohibitionist, not an activist. You know, and this is where I think these people are like misrepresenting themselves.

3:54:11Etienne FontanI think Chris left, but I think that more materials, it has been submitted, it has not officially been approved. So I think once it's approved and on the actual ballot, then you're going to start to see information, because there's just not a lot of information. Todd put out something, a very informative piece on the Hash Church website. Thank you. Thank you.

3:54:59Etienne FontanAnd, you know, people are still going to come out against it, and that's just how it's going to be. But I have to, I'm leaning on the side with Todd there. I think it's, I can't in my own heart of hearts stand behind anything regarding prohibition. It's just everything I've fought against. And, again, it's not perfect. It's not everything we want, but it's more of a step in the right direction.

3:55:22Etienne FontanAnd I'm saying this only as myself, you know. I'm only representing myself here. I represent no one else. But I think that to stand against progress is, yeah, you're just in favor of prohibition.

3:55:35SpeakerWell, I'm representing Team Skunk Worldwide. There's several billion of us.

3:55:44BubblemanTeam Skunk Worldwide. That URL just got purchased. I'll take it.

3:55:59SpeakerHow about the address to the site Hercules.com is the site to get those on?

3:56:05BubblemanI think it was like W9tech.com W9tech.com They're already sold out. Sam and I are going to go film a full like take this thing apart, show you everything up close, macro photograph all the components and do a real nice little review video of where we'll We'll get super, super iry as well. So I should probably call this a day on Hash Church 86. And once again, thanks to all that showed up to share.

3:56:39BubblemanWe thank Todd McCormick for getting Chris Conrad over here, as well as Tim Blake from the Emerald Cup. And it's great to have you all here. D420K, Chimera, Etienne, Skunkman Sam, Johnny B, Mark Scaldone, Tony Verzura. Thank you everyone, really. Much appreciation for everyone making this an amazing event. And thanks Sam for making his way down here and sharing his information with us. And anyone I forgot, I'm sorry.

3:57:10BubblemanI thank you as well. And let's keep doing this Radical Openness Weekly, discussing what needs to be discussed in the world of cannabis worldwide. Peace out everyone. Peace.

3:57:22SpeakerCheers. Peace.