Irvin Rosenfeld: Federal Medical Cannabis Patient

0:03BubblemanAlright, hey everybody, welcome to Hash Church episode 87. We are three episodes away from the infamous 90 micron. We had a great episode for 73, so I see there being no reason why we can't have a great episode for number 90. Also one of our favorite, favorite, favorite grades. Why wouldn't we? I'm just going to send out the links to the folks that need it. Let's see if I can get this all out here real quick.

0:32BubblemanEmails... All right. Got a little bit of me talking in two different levels. I got a lot of things open today. I want to make sure everyone gets the invitations. Good morning, Etienne. How are you doing this morning?

0:50Etienne FontanI'm doing wonderful, Bubble Man. And how are you?

0:53BubblemanYou know, no complaints. We got 250 people that popped into the room in the first minute with us, so that's pretty darn cool. It's a little bit of chaos this morning. I woke up a little bit late, like 10 or 15 minutes ago. And I usually like an hour to gear myself up and go chat with people and find out what's going on with them in the chat and, you know, make sure everyone's got the link sent out through Skype and through the emails and through the Facebook messengers and all the other different ways that I send these morning links out.

1:25BubblemanBut I think we're good.

1:27Etienne FontanSo what made you so late this morning? Were you up late partying?

1:30BubblemanI watched a movie last night with my daughter. We don't usually get to hang out as often. She's 15 now, so she's getting older and obviously out in the world more often than not, but we got to hang out last night and watch a movie, so that was nice.

1:46Etienne FontanThat's awesome. So not too much movie nights for you and the kids too much anymore?

1:52BubblemanWell, I mean, they're getting older, you know. They're out and about, hanging out and living their life. My son is out to the Oh my God, I just read something hilarious in the chat room. I have to mention that. And for the record, fuck Dry Sift Wizard. Well, I guess if you've got to call someone out, he's the guy to call out. How are you doing today, Mark Scaldone?

2:13SpeakerPretty good. How are you guys doing?

2:15BubblemanOh, you know, pretty darn good. We're up to 420 viewers in just two minutes. That's fun and awesome. What a good number. I should have screenshot that for a second. It changed already, but... I have headphones on. And I'm going to be getting mine really soon. I have a really nice fellow from chat. Jeff offered me a pair of headphones. He says he works for one of the big companies that sells all the different headphones.

2:43BubblemanSo he's going to send me a little pair as well. Welcome, Mr. Todd McCormick.

2:48MrGood morning, everybody.

2:49BubblemanHow are you doing? Hi, Todd.

2:53MrI am a little high. It's true. We better work on that. Hi, guys.

3:01HeidiIrv's coming. I just got him hooked up.

3:04MrThank you for hooking us up. We appreciate it. Thanks, Heidi.

3:08BubblemanWelcome, Heidi. Welcome, Irv.

3:11HeidiCan you hear us okay?

3:13BubblemanYes. We can hear you great. Loud and clear. Which is always nice when new people come in and we haven't had the ability to go through the troubleshooting.

3:22HeidiWe have no sound here.

3:24BubblemanWell, you have no sound. Aha, so we are troubleshooting.

3:28MrNo, it worked a minute ago. We just did this. Can you guys turn up the volume? No, they don't have the camera. Turn up the volume.

3:36HeidiOkay, well we can't hear you guys at all.

3:39MrOkay. Maybe they hang up and try to call back.

3:43SpeakerTurn the volume up. Yeah, turn the volume up. I just had a conference with them on this. Okay.

3:55BubblemanWe'll get them to reboot it. Welcome D420K in the house. Hello. D420K's bro in the house. Actually, that's your dad. That's my dad. I recognize them.

4:06SpeakerDad's back. Dad looks younger than you a lot of times. You got to get on dad's program, bro.

4:15BubblemanI've only seen D's dad twice, so sorry for calling him your bro, but... He's my bro, too, actually.

4:22MrYeah, no disrespect to the dad, but you've got to start working out with your dad, dude. Your dad looks way healthier, bro. I'm just going to throw that out there. I can't line up who's older, D420 or dad. I'd go D420.

4:35SpeakerWell, he had to put up with me, and he didn't go great, and I had to put up with him, and I'd go great, so... That's how it goes sometimes, man.

4:44BubblemanThat's how it goes. You've got to toughen up.

4:50MrToughen up.

4:51BubblemanWell, I say, 557 viewers, we need to do some puffing. We've been in Hash Church for already five minutes, and we have not blown any smoke to the Vatican. Of course, over my left shoulder, you can see Baba Rob with Nate Dizzle here on the Swiss perk photo. Whoa. We're blowing smoke signals to the Vatican for you, Mr. Clark. I know you're out there somewhere.

5:15Etienne FontanAnd what are we all puffing on this wonderful morning?

5:19BubblemanWell, I'm going to be puffing on some lovely dry sift rosin that I pumped out just last night when I was running low. Hold on a sec. Long rip. There it is. Little Chemdog Turp Dip.

5:42BubblemanOh, yeah. Well, I'm excited for the show today. I hope it all works out. It's always exciting when you have a big show planned, and hopefully Irvin can come back and tell us about his $150,000 joint with the federal government. I'm still hoping Alec and Josh are going to make it in for the science conversation in the next hour. Okay, we have sound. All right, that's great.

6:10BubblemanWell, nice to meet you.

6:12MrSo this... Can I do a little introduction for those watching?

6:17Etienne FontanIf you don't, I will. Go ahead.

6:18MrOh, go ahead. Go ahead, ATN. You've been around long enough. Go ahead.

6:22Etienne FontanIrvin Rosenfeld is one of the... I do believe two now that receive medical marijuana from the United States federal government. Irvin has been a professional stockbroker and a professional human, even performing with his medical marijuana for the past 20 plus years, so... Irvin, welcome to Hash Church.

6:45SpeakerThank you. Appreciate being here.

6:48BubblemanAbsolutely. I want to welcome you as well. I saw your news story the other day that you celebrated recently your 115,000 federal joint.

6:58SpeakerActually, I'm about 130. 130? Yeah, about 130,000 right now. Leave it to media to get it wrong. I might have an old story.

7:09MrIt might have been an old story. How long have you been receiving cannabis from the United States government for?

7:15SpeakerFor over a third of a century. Over a third of a century.

7:20MrFor those that think this is the most craziest thing they've ever heard, however did you get into the program, the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program, and however did you get Uncle Sam to start sending you tins of cannabis pre-rolled joints, sir?

7:37SpeakerWell, I discovered cannabis, the medical aspect of it, in 1971 in college. And when I realized it was working for me as a muscle relaxant anti-inflammatory pain without any euphoric effect, but worked better than the narcotics and the drugs I was getting, then I researched and found out the government had a forum on the campus of the University of Mississippi. And so my premise was to put together my own scientific study with my bone disorder being so rare and my orthopedic surgeon and try to get the cannabis out of that forum.

8:07SpeakerAnd so it was a 10-year struggle, which is, of course, all spelled out in my book, but it wasn't that easy. Finally, through University of Virginia Law School, through my congressman and senator, and the state police, and the crime commission in Virginia, we were able to threaten the FDA with a lawsuit. And FDA said, no, don't go to court yet. We're going to have hearings for Irvin.

8:25SpeakerSo in October of 82, I had 15 minutes to convince 20 doctors, or 19 doctors, that my project was valid. And I was very fortunate. That I was able to do that with the help of a person in the audience, a doctor from Venezuela that made a suggestion to the government, because the government had no intentions of giving it to me. And one of the things I had said in the 12 minutes that I had to speak was that my doctor and I had noticed that when I had marijuana and I took Dilaudid, which is synthetic morphine, the marijuana enhanced the effects of the Dilaudid and I took less.

8:55SpeakerWhen I didn't have much marijuana, then I took more Dilaudid. And I said that we researched this for the last 10 years. And when I finished speaking, and the government, the doctors had no intention of giving it to me, a person in the audience stood up and said, I have a statement to make. I'm a visiting oncologist from Venezuela, and I'm here studying cancer treatments and pain treatments for cancer, and I found the best medicine you have is Dilaudid.

9:16SpeakerAnd if this patient is saying that they've done a 10-year study with marijuana, when he said he had marijuana, when he didn't have marijuana, this needs to be researched on a regular basis. And when he said that, you could see the look on the panel's faces that, oh, shit, they just lost it. And so that's how I became the second person in the United States, Robert Randall being the first person.

9:34SpeakerI became number two, and my first shipment arrived November 20, 1982. So long story short, in 1992, they shut the program down. George Bush Sr. shut the program down. Grandfather, 13 of us in, and a bunch of those were AIDS patients. They didn't have the AIDS cocktails, and they died. And today, there are just two of us left in the country that receive by prescription, not recommendation, but by prescription, medical cannabis from the United States federal government.

10:00Etienne FontanIrving, could you tell us a little bit about your medical condition, which is a unique condition in itself?

10:05SpeakerYeah, I have multiple hereditary exostosis, which means bone tumors on most ends of most long bones in the body. I was diagnosed at age 10 with one of the worst cases I had seen. The research center was Boston Children's Hospital. They taught me how to take care of myself. I made all decisions on surgeries to have, not my parents, not the doctors, because I had over 200 tumors.

10:26SpeakerAnd so you couldn't operate on me 200 times. So I had six operations where a tumor was taken out that would have gone malignant. And then the tumor stopped growing when I stopped at 18 and a half. And then at 19 and a half, they started growing again. And that's when they diagnosed me with the second disorder, a variant of the syndrome pseudo-pseudo-hypo-parathyroidism, which is prevalent in people who have multiple hereditary exostosis.

10:49SpeakerIt means you can develop new tumors at any age, and existing ones can grow at any time. And I've not had a tumor develop a new one or an existing one grow since I was 21. And the doctors don't know why. And I attribute that to the use of medical cannabis. It's kept the tumors in check.

11:04MrWhat's the quality of cannabis they send you?

11:08SpeakerOh, the quality, I get medium strength from the federal government. And the medium strength is about 4% THC. So it's not what you consider very high in cannabis. But since I don't get a euphoric effect off any cannabis, it doesn't bother me. What it serves is medical, and it does work for me. In fact, here's a can I just picked up. I don't know if you all can see that, but here's one I just picked up the other day from my pharmacy.

11:35SpeakerAs you can see, it's 300 neatly rolled cigarettes by a cigarette machine in Raleigh, North Carolina, and then they're putting this tin can in frozen and then shipped out to the patients who have the prescription. So LV and I are the only two people in the country that get this tin can.

11:51MrCould you hold it up a little higher and people can see it? So that's how the United States government delivers their medical cannabis to patients.

11:58Etienne FontanSo that is still with seeds and stems, right, Irvin?

12:02SpeakerNo. That kind of stopped around 2001. The seeds and stems kind of stopped in 2001. They came with better rolling machines. So really, from about 2001, 2002 on, there's very little seeds or stems in the cannabis.

12:19BubblemanBut they do use the entire plant. Is there a cost to this every month that comes to you, or is it insurance paid, or how is that covered?

12:28SpeakerNo, there's no cost to me because the federal government can't sell pot. So therefore, they can't charge for it. It's considered an experimental drug. And so what I have to do, though, is I do pay the pharmacy to label the tin cans with my prescription and for my baggies, like this bag right here, which I would roll my joints in and then light up. So it does cost me about $250 a year for six pounds.

12:57SpeakerSo I don't complain about it at all. Our tax money is well spent.

13:02BubblemanUnbelievable. It must have really been a serious journey from 1971 to 1982. I mean, you literally were doing the impossible, trying to convince the federal government to supply you with cannabis.

13:15SpeakerIt's amazing.

13:19SpeakerIt was quite impossible, and for every step forward, it was two steps backwards. But I had no choice. I mean, I knew that without the cannabis, I wouldn't live. And the federal government's the one that was growing it, so therefore, if my doctor could give me morphine, he should be able to give me marijuana. And that was the premise.

13:36Etienne FontanHow did those around you react when you were using cannabis? Was it, had to be initially strange for those around you?

13:43SpeakerIt was, it was, especially my family. You know, they weren't used to it, and, you know, the smell, and, you know, the, of course, I wasn't getting any euphoric effects, so that didn't, you know, cause any problems. But they didn't think that I would ever get the federal government to supply my marijuana. And, you know, at some points I had my doubts too. But I met Bob, I tried for five years as a scientific project and got stonewalled.

14:06SpeakerAnd then I met Bob Randall. And Bob suggested I turn my protocol, my scientific project into a compassionate care investigational new drug program. And we did that for five years. And like I said, with the help of the University of Virginia Law School in the state of Virginia and with Bob and Alice, we were able to get those hearings before FDA. And I miraculously won those hearings.

14:27MrGo ahead. I'm just going to say Robert Randall is the person who streamlined what was and created Alliance for Therapeutic Cannabis, or Cannabis Therapeutics Act. And by doing so, what he did is he streamlined the paperwork of the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program so that more people could get access to this program. For those listening, Robert Randall was really the catalyst for patients getting cannabis from The Old Miss Marijuana Project, because when he was living in D.C., he was a speechwriter.

14:59MrHe got basically busted growing his own pot for his glaucoma use, and he proactively sued the government for basically access from the government's own Mississippi Marijuana Project farm. When he received it, he didn't just keep getting it. He actually helped other people, and you were the first. I didn't realize that until right now. Obviously, get onto the program as well. Could you talk a little bit about Bob?

15:24SpeakerBob was my hero. He's a brilliant, brilliant person. And I enjoyed being number two behind Bob. Because Bob was just so brilliant in his thought process and the way his demeanor, the way he presented himself. I mean, he had a degree in rhetoric from college. So he knew how to argue and how to debate very well. And so it was real easy for me. I mean, he appreciated my opinion.

15:46SpeakerI always gave my opinion. But even if Bob disagreed, at the end, we would go with what Bob thought. And I loved being number two. It was really simple. People thought that once Bob died and I had to take over in 2001 that I was happy to be number one. And on the contrary, I really have never been happy number one. I really liked being number two, but number two to Bob because Bob was so much better than me.

16:09SpeakerI'm good at what I do, but Bob was better. Bob was a brilliant, brilliant person. He just knew how to talk, how to act. And I try to emulate him in every way I can.

16:19MrWell, you know, that's really, just speaking about what you do, a lot of people don't realize the way I met you 22 years ago was through your activism. You know, you're one person that isn't just receiving medical cannabis and going home and worrying about himself. You've been actively advocating other people be able to get this as a medicine, and you've supported me through every legal journey I've ever been through, and I love you for it.

16:41MrBut can you talk a little bit about why you're an activist and not just a patient?

16:46SpeakerIn 1982, when I became a federal patient, Bob and I decided that we were going to teach the entire world about medical cannabis. That we knew about it, but other people didn't. And so that's what we set out to do in 82. And the reason I've been an activist is when somebody has a devastating disorder, it sucks. It sucks. You know how to deal with it. But you want to make something good come out of something bad.

17:08SpeakerAnd so I've been able to use my disorder effectively. To allow me to get the word out about the medicine, about how good it is, and about how well it works. And so that's why I've always been an advocate for the plant, and I've always thought that this was put on this earth for a reason, and the reason was to help patients. And so that's all I care about is getting medicine in the hands of patients, no matter how it's done, whether it's through what they consider legalization, through medical use, whatever.

17:41SpeakerAnd I believe that patients are allowed to grow their own, too, because it gives them self-worth, especially people that are on disability. It gives them something to do.

17:49BubblemanAnd not only that, but also to be able to travel throughout the U.S., which you and Elvie can do, where a lot of the patient stories we've had come on, people like Colton Turner. He's in Colorado. He's not able to go to visit his family in Indiana because he doesn't have access to his cannabis there. And he requires it to be healthy and happy. So talk a little bit about the ability to travel throughout the U.S. Is this something that they're extremely surprised at when you go across a state line and you have cannabis with you?

18:24BubblemanHave you ever found yourself in any situation where they're questioning the validity of your license, your permit?

18:33SpeakerThere's been problems with the police over time by traveling with this. But again, what I try to tell people is this is just a prescription, just like Valium or any other prescription that you can go across state lines. And in fact, when the Oakland, California Cannabis Buyers Club had the Supreme Court case in 2001, the government didn't want me there, and they told Delta, don't let me fly.

18:55SpeakerAnd the excuse they used is that I didn't have letters from each individual state from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to D.C. Because I didn't have permission, they weren't going to let me fly. So I had to sue Delta, and I won the case. Didn't win any money. But to be able to travel with this, it's my medicine. It's all it is. It's just like any other medicine. But yeah, I've had trouble with the state capitol.

19:16SpeakerWhenever I fly to Fort Lauderdale, I always contact the police a week in advance and give them the flight number I'm going to be on and what approximate time I'm going through security. So if TSA does pull me, then they can call the police. Then the police will go, hey, that's Irvin. We know about it. And now with Google, it's gotten much easier because now I can just tell the police, hey, look, just Google my name.

19:35SpeakerAnd the first 500 stories that say federal patient, federal patient, federal patient, you know, you don't believe, well, you know, that's, it's right there with all the major networks, you know, that's interviewing everything else. Plus now that I have my book, I mean, that helps too. I mean, you know, I'm holding up a picture of me, you know, I'm holding up a tin can. And again, you know, it's my medicine, how I convinced the U.S. government to provide my marijuana and help launch a national movement.

19:58SpeakerSo, you know, I've got enough proof now, and what's funny is I had to go to a business meeting in Jacksonville about two months ago. And so flying back home, my bag got pulled, and they pulled me off to the side, and the person said, oh, there's a tin can in your carry bag that we can't see in it. You know, we need to see what's in it.

20:18SpeakerAnd I said, go ahead. And he opened the tin can. He saw, you know, like 250 joints in there. And then he looked back to me and says, oh, wait a minute. I saw you on the Discovery Channel last week. I know who you are. So he looked at the prescription date and saw that it was up to date. He closed the tin can. He said, Irvin, have a good day.

20:37SpeakerI said, thank you very much. You know, it's these reports that get the word out, and that's the whole idea of when we started this in 82, was to get the word out, let people know that this is new medicine, and because I didn't have to worry about being arrested, I could stand up and say that. You know, at the time I worked with my father on a furniture business, so I didn't have to worry about, you know, fired.

20:58SpeakerThen when I became a stockbroker 29 years ago, I got the SEC to approve it, you know, because this was a regular prescription by FDA, and so they had to give me special tests, you know, to be able to become a broker. And so I've always had firms that understand that I don't look at each work effect, and so it doesn't interfere with my work. And so I've been able to stand up all these years and say, hey, look, I'm living proof.

21:18SpeakerI use this. If there's anything detrimental about it, not only have I used it 33 years legally, but 10 years before that. So I've used it for 43 years. So if there's anything negative about cannabis to the human body, I think I would have shown it by now.

21:31MrRight. Can I ask, you brought something up I didn't realize was a connection. It was your use of opioids and cannabis helping you decrease your need for those. You know, obviously you've been a living lab here for a while. What's been your experience comparatively cannabis versus opiates?

21:49SpeakerWell, I haven't used any opiates since 1990. Okay, I haven't had to use Dilaudid. Now, recently with this last operation, they put me on Dilaudid because I was used to it, something that didn't bother me. And cannabis still enhances the effects of Dilaudid, but with the cannabis, I don't need the Dilaudid anymore. It's not necessary. After the surgery, it was. I'm glad I had it, okay, because surgery was rough and a lot of pain.

22:14SpeakerBut once I finished the prescription, it wasn't like, oh, God, I've got to have more. You know, it's like, okay. Unless I have surgery again, I don't ever plan on touching a lot ever again in my life. But cannabis is definitely much better because, again, for me, I don't get a euphoric effect. I don't get a high. I never have. And as my friends say, I don't know what I'm missing.

22:37SpeakerBut at least it works for me medically, and that's what counts.

22:40MrWell, I'd say you're a pretty gay guy to be around, buddy, so I don't think not getting high is ceasing you to be happy, because I've had many good times with you, so it seems like you're high.

22:52Etienne FontanIrvin, I have a question. Since you say you consult with patients, so when the Compassionate IND program was shut down in the 90s, that had to be very difficult and challenging.

23:04SpeakerIt was, especially what happened with the Clinton administration. When Clinton was running against George Bush Sr. for election, the Democrats wanted the medical marijuana movement to support the Democrats. And they contacted me, and they said, can you get the support? And of course, at the time, the Republicans had just shut the program down, so again, we weren't going to support the Republicans anyway. But I said, what's in it for us?

23:28SpeakerAnd he said, well, I'll tell you. Clinton is going to, once he gets elected, he's going to nominate Jocelyn Elders Surgeon General. And she's going to say, hey, we don't know much about medical marijuana. We still need to research it, but we need patients. And so we're going to reopen the compassionate care protocols. I talked with her an hour later, and she confirmed this to me. So I really was very happy when Clinton won, and then when he nominated Jocelyn Elders as Surgeon General, I thought finally we're going to have the compassionate care program reopened because if they shut it down, they can reopen it.

24:00SpeakerIt's very simple. Well, I don't know if you remember Jocelyn Elders, but the first thing she came out saying, instead of that we're going to reopen the compassionate care protocols, is that she thought all drugs should be legalized. And at the time, this was 1992, and that was a repolarizing statement in 92 to say, where we had it all set up for her just to say we're going to reopen the compassionate care protocols.

24:20SpeakerAnd I don't know if you remember what her second statement was. She thought masturbation should be taught in schools. And so those were the first two statements that she made and lost all credibility at that point. So again, it never got reopened, the compassionate care protocols, and I tried to get Clinton to do it. I tried to get George Bush Jr. to do it for his two administrations.

24:40SpeakerI've tried to get Obama to do it. I mean I've made personal pleas to Obama, and one I know got right to him about, hey, look, at least reopen the compassionate care protocols. Let's take it. Take, you know, the opposition says it's harmful. Well, if it's really that harmful, then why don't we take 50 research centers, one in each state, let them have 50 patients apiece with different disorders that we believe works for, and compare it with patients who have the same diseases.

25:02SpeakerThey don't use marijuana. Let's compare them for two years, and if we find that, you know, patients are better off with it, then that would prove, and I'm willing to try to do that, but no administration has.

25:14Etienne FontanIrvin, another question was... Can you tell people why the Compassion to IND program was shut down in the first place?

25:24SpeakerIt was shut down in 1992 because Bob Randall made a protocol for AIDS patients that was fill in the blank. He sent it off to the AIDS organizations and they bombarded then George Bush Senior with thousands of protocols. Because he didn't want to exhaust on drugs by substantiating more use of cannabis and because he was getting a lot of his campaign funds from the pharmaceutical industry, somehow he arbitrarily shut the program down.

25:48SpeakerAt the time, there were 13 of us getting medicine at the time. There were another 28 patients that had been approved by all three government agencies, DEA, FDA, and NIDA, National Institute of Drug Abuse. But they never received their medicine. So when the program was shut down, the 13 of us were grandfathered in so we didn't sue the government. The other 28 patients were told to use Marinol.

26:09SpeakerAnd that's how it happened. A bunch of them had AIDS. In 92 and 93, they didn't have the AIDS cocktails they do today, and so they died. You know, so literally it was like seven of us, six to seven of us for many years. And then Corinne Millett died. She lived in Nebraska. And then Bob Randall died in 2001. And then there are two other patients still supposedly on the program, but they lost their doctor in Iowa, George McMahon and Barbara Douglas.

26:33SpeakerAnd until we can find another physician willing to take on their project, they don't have a doctor to prescribe. So, you know, we're looking for a doctor, supposedly, hopefully in Iowa, but somewhere that would be willing to take over two federal patients.

26:48MrAmazingly enough, there was a bit of a support program that happened within the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program where you and LB and George and all these people really somewhat became friends. I mean, when I first started my activism 20 years ago, 22 years ago, You know, LV and you, this is how I met you. You know, it was through LV and the networking we were doing.

27:09MrAnd, you know, could you talk a little bit about that? Because it's not often people take the same medicine and become, you know, community members trying to help save the earth. And can I just ask you about that? Because it seems like all of you compassionate SME family drug program people are vocally trying to expand the program and get other people medicine.

27:31SpeakerWell, we've been an elite club And like I said in my book when there was just four of us, that our club was more elite than ex-living U.S. presidents. So we all had something in common, and that was the plant helped us with a medical disorder. And in different ways, whether it be glaucoma, whether it be muscle relaxation, whatever it's for, is we were a very special group.

27:53SpeakerAnd so we all knew how lucky we were to be able to have the medicine that helps sustain our life. And so therefore, yeah, we couldn't just sit back and be quiet about it. None of us could. And so that's why we've always been very active and also very, very close and very, very friendly with each other because we all understood that if it wasn't for the grace of God, there go I.

28:13SpeakerAnd they wouldn't have the medicine. If I didn't have the medicine today, I wouldn't be a productive member of society. If I was still, I probably wouldn't be working. I'd probably be on disability. And I might not even be alive because the tumors can, I can hemorrhage real easy. In hemorrhage, a clot can break off, go to your heart, you break your lungs, and can kill you.

28:32SpeakerSo, while I have something very devastating, just like, you know, LV has her eyesight that's, you know, without her eyesight, you're blind. And so it saved her eyesight. It saved Bob's eyesight. Even when Bob died, he still could see. So, it's just something that we're obligated, we feel, all of us feel obligated to do. That's why I wish we could get George and Barbara back on the program, because they would want to speak up too.

28:54SpeakerBut right now, it's just LV and I, and we do the best we can. You know, but it's just two of us. Bob, sorry. No, go ahead, 18.

29:04Etienne FontanAfter the IND program was done and prior to 215 and other legal states, what did you tell patients that came to you that were searching for medical cannabis? And what do you tell them today?

29:18SpeakerI tell them three things, especially here in the state of Florida. We have a medical necessity defense. And so what I've always told them is, number one, you need to convince a doctor that this medicine works for you medically. And once that's done, have that doctor write you a letter that would not go public, that just says that I'm so happy that medicine helps my patient when nothing else does.

29:39SpeakerAnd if it were legal in this state for me to recommend for this patient, I would. And have them sign it, date it with a phone number, but again, not to go public. Then I suggest to people, if they're religious at all, to go to their clergy, let them know what they're doing. And that they're using this medicine, and even though they're breaking the law, and get that clergy to write you a letter.

29:57SpeakerBasically saying the same thing. I'm so glad that my parishioner gets relief from medical marijuana when nothing else works for their disorder. Sign it, date it, and with a phone number. Again, not to go public. Then take those two letters to a good lawyer and get the lawyer to give you a letter. And that letter would read, Dear Police Officer, if you're reading these letters and you're thinking of making my client a criminal, You have the right to do that, but they're a patient, not a criminal.

30:20SpeakerSo if you decide to make them a criminal, you don't need handcuffs. They'll follow you wherever you want to go because they're a patient. They're not a criminal. But understand that we're going to bring this up at trial and that, of course, if it's in a state that has a medical necessity defense, such as in Florida, patients can win in half. So, you know, I've always tried to tell them that.

30:37SpeakerI've tried to tell them to be very careful, to try to get it from a source that you know, don't want to somebody you don't know. A, they could be an undercover cop. B, they could rip you off, which happened to me when I first started, you know, with cannabis. It wasn't knowledgeable. So, you know, it's just, it's something that you just, and again, kids with my own disorder, I mean, I've had parents call me up and say, look, you know, my 13-year-old child has what you have.

31:01SpeakerAnd would you recommend me getting the medical cannabis? And it's To a hard parent to do it for a child, and I won't. But when the parent asked me, well, Ervin, if you knew then what you knew now, would you have used it? I said, yeah, at age 13 I would have started using it. I would have. But you have to make your own decision for your child.

31:19SpeakerSo I try to be as helpful as I can.

31:22BubblemanI got a question in regards to the federal program that you're a part of, and of course all the different state programs that have popped up over the last 20, 30 years. Do you ever see it going federal in the U.S.? Do you see a federal program coming back up that can protect all these patients' rights for traveling between state lines and sort of things like that?

31:47SpeakerI do. I do see that eventually happening in a federal level. However, it scares me in respects because if the government makes it Schedule II, they can also basically say that the only people that can grow it are a pharmaceutical company. And the only people that can dispense it is Walgreens and CVS. And so other than that, you know, it could restrict use of it nationwide. Well, I would hope there'd be enough backlash from growers, you know, that would come and say, hey, look, you know, we've been doing this.

32:17SpeakerWe're the ones who know the different strains, grow the different strains. And so, you know, hopefully they don't want to come down to that.

32:23MrYou know, I don't trust the government. You know, because there are a lot of people talking about the rescheduling of cannabis, and it is inevitable. There's no question. There probably will be, it probably will go down to schedule two before it goes out of the schedule. You know, Dr. Todd McCorea, who I know was a friend of yours, used to joke that it should be in the same schedule as alcohol and tobacco, and that's no schedule.

32:45MrAnd The reality is, though, is that if they move it down to Schedule 2, don't you think that it'll just continue what it is now? We'll continue to break the law. We'll continue to be outlaws. We'll continue to do what we've done for decades because Schedule 1 and guns and prisons hasn't stopped us. I don't see how Schedule 2 and more lenient penalties are going to slow us down.

33:07MrHow do you feel about that?

33:08SpeakerWell, there's a lot of truth in what you say, and I hope you're right, because the growers themselves really care about making a plant correctly, and each strain is different. And the pharmaceutical industry is not going to grow 100 different strains for different diseases. They're going to grow three strains, high, medium, and low, and that's what you're going to get. You're going to get pie. You're not going to get a strain that might help you, and have knowledge.

33:31SpeakerI mean, a lot of these dispensaries really are very knowledgeable. And if somebody comes in that's not knowledgeable and says, hey, look, I need something for sleep, they can say, well, you know, we've had very good results with this strain, this strain, and this strain. Why don't you try this or try this? Well, a pharmacist isn't going to know that. They're just not going to know it.

33:48SpeakerAnd so I hope you're right that people still continue to be criminals, but I hate for them to do that because we're not criminals. None of us are. All we are is, we're criminals because we're labeled that way.

34:00MrAnd I agree with you completely. I, you know, remember Bob Condor, you know, we used to always, I am not a criminal on the shirt, you know, and I feel that way too. I just think that when you're forced into a situation of your health or breaking the law, the law seems so minimal in comparison to I'm going to die in pain. So this is the struggle the government's up against with us patients because, you know, focusing on our death is motivating our life.

34:28MrAnd there's nothing that clears us. When you're facing death, it's hard to throw fear into the heart of somebody who's already grappling with life's, you know, in a sense, final exit.

34:39SpeakerWell, that's very true, and that's why I became the activist that I did. I mean, I was facing a life and death situation as far as I was concerned. So what were they going to do to me, you know? And so that's why when I went public, and it just turned out to be public hearings in Virginia, and that gave me immunity. And so, therefore, I've always tried to be the moderator.

34:58SpeakerI've never tried to be the educator. And so, thank God, you know, the federal government's never really come down on me, and hopefully never will. But, you know, all we're all trying to do is survive. And take Elvie. I mean, when Elvie's case, when she was arrested and she went to court on a medical necessity defense in 1988, the judge ruled basically in her favor as a reverse insanity plea.

35:19SpeakerMeaning it'd be insane, knowing what she knows, that's the only thing that's saving her eyesight, it'd be insane for her not to use it. So, you know, a lot of people do recognize that, but people today still believe that it's detrimental, it's not, you know, it's going to harm you.

35:34MrOkay, you know, you just kind of blew my mind that a judge made that ruling, because it is, we are in a place where we're faced with either dealing with what we feel is insanity, don't smoke a plant to, you know, basically mitigate your glaucoma damage or your tumor damage and follow these rules, so it is reverse insanity in a sense, because We're becoming completely sane by choosing the smarter of the two is really what's happening.

36:04SpeakerYeah, that was a judge, Paul Palmer. I mean, I forget the judge's name, but he was a great judge.

36:13Etienne FontanIrvin, can you take us through, you just found out that medical cannabis will work for your condition back in the early 70s. How did you go about finding cannabis for the first time and How did you feel knowing that you now had to break the law to get your medicine before you had gone through your case?

36:32SpeakerI was an advocate in high school against illegal drugs. And in fact, one of the chapters in my book is how I invented the DARE program, which of course I didn't. But I spoke at assemblies in high schools in 1970 and 71 saying I'd hold up a baggie with prescription bottles and say, you know, don't, don't, be thankful you're healthy, don't do illegal drugs. And look at the drugs I have to take.

36:51SpeakerSo I wanted to try college and they suggested the warm climate of Miami. And I thought, why not? So when I came down to Miami, I lived in an apartment complex with a bunch of students, and they'd be outside swimming, and they'd go, let's go drink some wine and smoke some pot. And I had prescriptions for Dilaudid, for Methaquilone, for Valium, Butazolid and Alka, Paraffin Forte, I mean, you name the prescription, I had it.

37:12SpeakerAnd so I wouldn't break the law. I wasn't going to smoke marijuana. And after 30 days, I realized I wasn't making any... Friends in school. And I'd been a homebound student for five years in high school in Virginia. So I wanted to make friends, and I realized the only reason I wasn't making any friends was I wouldn't try marijuana. And it didn't seem to be harming the kids any.

37:28SpeakerThey seemed pretty normal to me. And so after about a month, I gave in to peer pressure and tried it. And I smoked it, and to me it was pure garbage because nothing happened. And they said, well, you don't get high the first few times. But I really didn't care. I mean, I've accepted, you know, if I wanted to get a buzz, I could drink a little bourbon is what I did or wine.

37:46SpeakerSo it was about the 10th time I did it, and I was sitting playing a game of chess, and I hate chess. And it took me 30 minutes to lose. And when I got up, it dawned on me that I had sat for those 30 minutes. And I hadn't sat for more than 10 minutes in five years because of the tumors and the deformities in my legs.

38:00SpeakerI'd sit for 10 minutes and stand for 10 minutes. So immediately I thought, in what way did I take all the narcotics that allowed me this 30 minutes? And I said, gee, I hadn't taken a pill for like six hours. Well, then how could I sit? And just then they handed me the joint. It was my turn. I looked at this piece of garbage because to me that's all marijuana was, was garbage.

38:18SpeakerAnd I thought this is the only thing I've done differently. I've smoked this garbage. I wondered is there any medical benefit to this garbage. So the next day I called my orthopedic surgeon who knew me at age 10 and I told him what happened. And I said is there any medical benefit to marijuana? He said I have no idea. Contact your family. And at the time my great uncle was head, at one point was head of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins.

38:37SpeakerMy regular uncle taught pediatrics at Yale and was in private practice. And my sister was head of nuclear medicine at Duke. So I contacted them, and I said, hey, I was able to sit for the first time in five years, and all I did was smoke marijuana. Is there any medical benefit? And they didn't know of any, and so we all researched it. And that's when we found that it was a medicine in this country from 1850 to 1937, manufactured by all the major pharmaceutical companies, Squibb, Burke, Eli Lilly, mostly in tincture form.

39:03SpeakerBut most of our medicine foods had cannabis or hemp in it. And then once they stopped it in 1937, that's when it was taken out of the pharmacopeia. And we weren't utilizing it, but it was used as a muscle relaxant anti-inflammatory for pain. And when I read that, I said, my God, that must be what it's doing for me. I've got to research this. So that's when I really started smoking.

39:23SpeakerAnd I would use it every day for like three weeks and miraculously better. My intake of the harmful narcotics would decrease by up to 10%. But I was still in the warm climate in Miami, plus I was now almost 19, and so the tumors had stopped growing, supposedly. So maybe I was actually getting better. So I'd stop using it, and I'd go downhill. For a week or 10 days.

39:42SpeakerAnd so I did this four times until I was convinced that it was this goddamn illegal drug that was doing it for me. So my friends were starting to get popped for possession of marijuana. And it was only a matter of time before I got arrested. And I wasn't a patient. I mean, I wasn't a criminal. I was a patient. So that's when I decided to call my orthopedic surgeon and tell him what my findings had been and my family's findings had been and that the government had a form in Mississippi to write up my own scientific project and try to become a patient.

40:10SpeakerAnd now I need an orthopedic surgeon to sign it. And as he joked, he said, look, I'm an orthopedic surgeon. I operate on people. He said, you know me. I'll sign anything you put in front of me as long as it's legitimate. And he said, but I don't have time to help you write up a scientific project. I go, no, I'll do it myself. So I went back home to Portsmouth, Virginia.

40:26SpeakerAnd of course, I called my parents out of school after three semesters. And I came back to Portsmouth, Virginia and immediately went to the chief of police in my hometown and told them what I was planning to do about taking on the federal government. I said, but until then, I need a source of marijuana. And I found out that we had an incinerator in Ports of Virginia that all the marijuana from the East Coast was shipped there and incinerated.

40:46SpeakerSo I asked them to turn over confiscated marijuana to me. And while they couldn't do that, they turned me down on that. The police officer, the chief of police says, Irvin, only buy marijuana. Don't ever sell it. And if anything ever happens, you have to call me because you're not a criminal. You're a patient. And that was 1972. So I've always felt comfortable with the law knowing what I was doing and what I was trying to do.

41:09SpeakerAnd then, of course, once I became a federal patient, it was, you know, no holes barred. I was going to do whatever I could do at that point because now, not only did I have to worry about being arrested, but now I had a platform to stand on and I could do it.

41:21MrYeah. Could you talk a little bit about the National Institute of Health? They've been funding, how long has it been, 40 years now they've been growing cannabis down there? 68. 68. 68. How much are they spending per year, do you know? What the budget is. Could you talk a little bit about what you know about the Mississippi project?

41:43SpeakerRight. I do know that in 1982, Bob Randall and I looked into maybe getting the government contract. And the government was paying the group that was growing it $0.08 an ounce to grow it. And the cost per ounce was $0.90. So the rest was security. $0.82 was security. So it was $0.08 an ounce it was costing. We couldn't get the contract. We couldn't figure out how to go about doing it, and we really didn't have the expertise, and neither of us were farmers.

42:07SpeakerSo today, I do know today I saw a study that said the government, NIDA, is paying the processor to grow it in Mississippi $10 a joint for marijuana and about $11.5 a joint for placebo.

42:26MrSo the government's getting in on the prohibitionary profiteering too. You know, you just freaked out a lot of people at 90 cents an ounce. If people start seeing unit production at under a dollar an ounce for cannabis, yeah, the world as we know it is going to be very different for cannabis. And now you say that they've gone, do you think that that's something practical, the price jump is, or do you think it's just bureaucratic greed?

42:53SpeakerI think it's bureaucratic greed because it doesn't take $10 a joint to get it to grow marijuana. It doesn't cost anyone near there. That's what it's been costing to get good weed for 20, 30 years.

43:04MrI mean, if you break the $400 ounce into 28 joints, right?

43:08SpeakerI have a question. My name is Sam. I'm a little bit late today, but here I am. Do you prefer CBD or THC for your medical conditions? I've never had enough CBD to test it. And the government herb is like 0.01% CBD. So really it's negligent. And all you've ever had from them is the Mexican strain they grow down at Mississippi? Right, the Mexican-Jamaican strain. It's been the same strain for 33 to 33 years.

43:43SpeakerThe only difference is how they clean it. I've been to the facility. I'm personal friends with Dr. Al-Soleil. Oh, well, good for you. They forbid me to come down there as of right now. I wanted to come down. They said I wasn't allowed. They invited me, and when he introduced me to his friends who were working with him, he says, this is the real man who knows cannabis.

44:08SpeakerHmm. Dr. El-Soli, very well. Well, Dr. El-Soli, I've never had the pleasure of meeting or talking with him. I wish I did have the opportunity. Because I would thank him for supplying my medicine. He's a personal believer in cannabis for medicine. He developed THC suppository.

44:29MrYep. He was really, really nice to me. Actually, when I was being prosecuted for the THCV in the 90s, he was the one that did the testing and In open court, he accidentally called me by my first name, Todd, and the magistrate stopped the proceedings and asked him if we had a relationship outside of the court proceedings, and he said, yes. The judge couldn't believe it. And the judge was all, how did you meet him?

44:52MrAnd he was like, oh, the ICRS. And that was before the name changed to Cannabinoid, so it was the International Cannabis Research Society. And the judge just sat there for a muse, couldn't believe it. But he's been a really nice guy. I mean, I'm sure it's not easy working within a bureaucracy of the government, especially when you're into science and gardening and cannabis therapeutics to any degree.

45:17SpeakerThe problem is the Death Star pays his bills.

45:22Etienne FontanIrvin, we are aware that supposedly the University of Mississippi is going to be growing a CBD strain. Would you be interested in reaching out to them to try that, or are you just satisfied with the THC that you're receiving currently?

45:35SpeakerI'm happy with the THC that I'm receiving because I don't get a euphoric effect. You know, it's, you know, I don't want, I wouldn't mind experimenting with it, but I really think the plant needs as many of the cannabinoids as it can have. And so I wish they were higher on a lot of the different cannabinoids. And one day, again, if we can research and find out why the strain that LV gets for glaucoma and the strain I get for muscle relaxant pain, might there be a better strain?

46:02SpeakerYou know, how can the same strain work so good for both of us? You know, so there might be a better strain out there, and it could be CBD oriented, it could be THC oriented. Or it could be the terpenes. It could be the terpenes, but a lot of people believe that non-psychoactive is what's best, and because I don't get the psychoactivity from cannabis, it doesn't bother me either way.

46:22MrHow fresh is the material you get? I've seen LV scans. In some cases, it looked to be five years old. Is it the same in your situation?

46:30SpeakerFive would be good, okay? We've had it 13 before. Right now, like the tin I just showed you, this tin right here, it says it on here from the federal government that it was packaged January, here's a label, January of 09. When was it tested? So that's the seven year old week. Yeah, it was tested then, and what they do is they freeze dry it, and then they seal it with wax.

46:58SpeakerSo it doesn't really degradate that much. And, you know, whatever degradation there is, it still works for me. And that's all I care about, you know, that I don't pull muscles, that I don't hemorrhage, you know, and... Have you tried high quality fresh cannabis like what's being grown in Colorado and Washington? Have you tried concentrate or any of the concentrates that are happening right now? Well, I have tried a little bit of the concentrates because I really don't get an opportunity to here in Florida.

47:30SpeakerBut one time when I was in Canada, I was up there for a program called Teaching Yourself. And they picked me up at the plane, and they took me to a vape room, and they said, well, here's some cannabis that's 25% THC, and this will get you high. And I tried, and of course it didn't. And they said, well, now we're going to let you have something called butter, B-U-D-D-E-R, they called it.

47:51SpeakerAnd they said it's a high concentrate, and this will really get you high, and it can get you high for two to three hours. So, never being high before, I said, let me try it, you know. So, and I was still standing from the flight, and my legs were still tight. So I took the, and they said, the hit you take, it's going to expand in your chest, it's actually going to hurt.

48:08SpeakerBut that's normal, so expect it. Okay. So I took the hit, I held it in, and blew it out, and sure enough, my chest really started hurting. And so about eight minutes went by, and nothing was happening. They were shocked. I mean, you know, they said you should be high, and I'm not. It was like a light switch. All of a sudden, I was perfectly straight, then I was completely messed up.

48:30SpeakerI turned to my friends, and they go, my God, your eyes are terrible. I go, oh, this is great. I've never been high before. I mean, I was wasted. It wasn't like, oh, I'm starting to feel it. No, it just happened like a light switch. So I stood about another four minutes, and then I was ready to sit down. So as I'm sitting down, it's like I'm going through layers of clouds.

48:50SpeakerThis was great. I had my three friends there, and they were talking. I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to do anything. I just wanted to sit back and enjoy. So I said, now how long is this going to last? They said two to three hours. And we had like six hours before we had to get to the conference. So I thought this is great. I can't, this is fantastic.

49:05SpeakerSo about eight minutes went by total, and then all of a sudden the light switch went off. I was completely straight again. And they looked, I said, it's gone. And they looked in my eyes, I go, your eyes are perfectly normal. I said, it's gone.

49:18HeidiI said, I was completely wasted for eight minutes and then, now I'm totally straight again.

49:22SpeakerThey said, do you want to try another hit? I go, no, because my chest hurts, you know. But, so that's one time I was high and off of concentrate for eight minutes. And that's been the only time concentrate's ever gotten me euphoric. And so I enjoyed that eight minutes. I wish it would have lasted for two hours. So. I need a different variety because eight minutes is not normal for anybody.

49:45SpeakerWell, that's what my friends said. I mean, that's what they all said. But that's my metabolism. I mean, you know, it's just like why are my cannabinoid receptors not getting high? And Mishulam, you know, has said, well, maybe your receptors, you know, are defective, that you're just getting the muscle, you're getting the pain medicine or the medical effect, but you're not getting euphoria. And I think it's because my condition's using the cannabis for my condition, therefore I'm not getting high.

50:14SpeakerBut as he said, he said it doesn't matter as long as it works. And that's the way I look at it. Because your weed you're getting from the government is shit. Well, again, I'll go back to 1996. Friends of ours, which we'll not mention on the air right now, I had not known them, and we were at a normal conference in D.C. And they came up to me, and they introduced themselves, and I knew of them from California.

50:37SpeakerAnd they go, look, you know, let's go to our room. We brought a bunch of really good herb. We're tired of seeing you smoke bad herb, and we're going to get you high. So we went to the hotel room, and they said, now pull out your bag and let us see how you roll. And, of course, I roll in big and fat. He said, we can do that.

50:51SpeakerSo they rolled up three ounces. We rolled up three ounces of top, top, top grade that they brought from California. So all afternoon, and then the conference, this was 96, I could smoke in the hotel and in the meetings. That's when you could smoke, you know, cigarettes in the hotel. And so I'm smoking all afternoon the cannabis from California. And that evening we partied together, you know, a bunch of us.

51:11SpeakerThe next morning, the next morning I'm in the meetings and I'm smoking. They come to me at lunchtime. They go, Irvin, how much of that do you have left? I go, about an ounce and a half. Why? They said, could you give it back to us? We're tired of seeing you waste a good pot. You really don't get high, do you? I said, yeah, but I feel better.

51:27SpeakerI said, you know, muscle relaxant-wise and everything else, I feel better. I'll give you back half. I gave him back half. I just, my body just does not get the euphoric effect. That's why I can drive. If you've got it for eight minutes, you can get it for longer. We'll work on it. We'll figure out a way for you, bro. I hope you can. It would be nice.

51:47SpeakerCan I ask you?

51:48MrAre you specifically, if Florida were to legalize tomorrow, are you forbidden from utilizing anything other than your source, or are you allowed, like, could you get edibles, could you try other forms of cannabinoids?

52:06SpeakerThere's no form that I ever see that says that I can only use cannabis from the government. However, that's what I do, okay? I mean, publicly, publicly, and, you know, if I get an opportunity to try something else, I'll try it, because medically speaking, you want to try it. You want to just see what it does to you. And, but... I've never had another source that was plentiful enough to where I could really, really sit down and try it for weeks at a time.

52:33SpeakerSo even if we pass it here in Florida, I might try different strains here and there, but I'd still want to be able to utilize the government program because this way I can travel. And that is important to me, to be able to go out of state and travel and carry it and not be breaking a law. And I don't have to worry about it.

52:49MrI agree. You know, a lot of my motivation with my international prescription back in 94 and 95 was hanging out with, you know, LV and then you later and realizing that, you know, a lot of this was a mental breakthrough that having this paperwork and like you were just saying earlier, setting up an affirmative defense to potentially knowing there could be a problem. Not wanting there to be a problem, not hoping that you get busted or hooked up by the police, but if you do, you actually already have established a doctor relationship, a clergy relationship, a legal relationship, and you are going to be able to defend yourself.

53:23MrAnd that is hugely something that a lot of people don't have when they finally find themselves in that moment of problem. And I thought that advice you gave was fantastic. Being proactive is really important, you know. What advice do you give patients when they come up to you and they say, is cannabis right for me? Or, you know, how would you recommend they go about trying it?

53:47SpeakerI usually recommend that they try leaf form first. Okay, and that depending on what their problem is, and, you know, if they're not savvy, they've never used it, that they should take a hit or two, and that's it. Okay, then put it down and wait about 45 minutes. And if your problem's been alleviated, fantastic. If not, take a couple hits. And do that like every 45 minutes until the problem that you're using it for is sufficed.

54:13SpeakerI tell them that I'm against edibles. Or Dabs or whatever because that's very, very concentrated, very, very strong. And that it should only be for somebody that knows what they're doing. That's, you know, understands. Because that's what's happening in Colorado. People are, because it doesn't, because edibles, it doesn't diversify as well. Let's say the THC, you could be getting all of the medicine in one bite or one part of the candy or something.

54:40SpeakerAnd so somebody that's knowledgeable in cannabis and they get too high, they know that they're not going to freak out. But somebody that's not knowledgeable, they're going to freak out next thing you know they're in the hospital, the emergency room. When in reality, the only worst thing that's going to happen to them is they're going to fall asleep, but they don't know that. And so therefore, we don't need to give the opposition any more ammunition to go against us.

55:00SpeakerSo like I tell people when I speak, especially when I speak at college campuses, I look at two people in the audience, and I look at the first one. I go, you're a procrastinator. It's Sunday at noon. And your class, you had a paper to write that's due tomorrow, and you forgot all about it. And you say, oh, God, I forgot all about that paper. Then you sit down and you smoke a joint, maybe even two.

55:21SpeakerThen you sit down and you write your paper. Next day, maybe we make a few corrections or whatever, then you hand it in. Then I look at the person beside him. I said, you're in the same class he was in, and you're a procrastinator. It's now Sunday at noon. You forgot all about that paper that's due tomorrow, and then you go smoke a joint. And after you smoke a joint, you go, oh, screw it.

55:38SpeakerI don't feel like writing that paper. And you don't write it. I said, you're giving me a bad name. I said, I'm telling you not to do it. I said, you've got to understand what cannabis does to you. If it enhances your thought process, fantastic. Do whatever you want to do. But if it makes you a vegetable, then only use it when you can afford to be a vegetable.

55:53SpeakerBecause otherwise what's going to happen is you're going to give good users a bad name, and we can't have that. And the same thing with kids. I mean kids that are using it that are underage are making it more difficult for kids who really need it to get it. You know, because the opposition is saying, oh, it's bad for kids, and look, high schools, kids are getting it more, and if we legalize it, it'll be easier for them to get.

56:12SpeakerAnd of course, like I always tell them, is I said, you know, when I was a teenager, it was real easy to get cigarettes. And then once they passed a law and said that nobody can sell a cigarette to somebody under the age of 21, now you have to prove how old you are. I said, so did cigarette smoking get easier after they made the law? No, it got tougher.

56:28SpeakerAnd that's what happened with cannabis. If you make the law and enforce it, and anybody who's selling it doesn't sell it to anybody under age unless, of course, it's with a parent or guardian's approval because they medically need it.

56:41MrYou know, it's funny. We brought this up before. There's statistical evidence that shows that back when cannabis, The age of consent for cannabis in Amsterdam was 16. In the 90s, Holland had lower rates of teenage cannabis use than we had here in a prohibited country. And they could walk into the coffee shop, legally purchase hash or grass at the age of 16 on, and they had less incidents of use than we did in a place where you couldn't get it so easily.

57:06BubblemanSo I guess when you were answering the question too, Herb, that you're dealing with people that don't have a lot of experience with cannabis, that it might be even their first experience, and I think it's important that when You know, I'm the same way when people want to dab for the first time. I don't find it to be a cool thing to give someone so much concentrate that their chest hurts, that they're spinning, that they're maybe becoming extremely uncomfortable in an environment where they might not have wanted to do that.

57:39BubblemanI always like to really make sure that the dab size that I give people are nice and small so that they can enjoy it, feel the effects, and if they want more, they can always take another one. It's hard to untake that giant one that puts you on the floor, though.

57:55SpeakerThat's true. Irving, I know the guy that rolls your joints for the last two decades. He rolls it on a Bonzac cigarette rolling machine at Research Triangle Park, and a friend of mine in California has a Bonzac machine, so I'm going to roll you up 300 that are identical to yours, except for they have something good in them.

58:18MrYou know, can we speak about this, though? Because even though they're sending him stale pot, bunk pot that none of us would ever care to smoke, you are still feeling a medical relief from this. LV tells me this all the time. You know, could you talk about this? I mean, people may be laughing right now and finding this a bit peculiar, but the truth is the government cannabis that you've been receiving has been helping you, right?

58:41SpeakerCorrect. And really, what I tell people... People is of a muscle relaxant that eases the muscle tension, thereby easing the muscle pain. It also serves as an anti-inflammatory. It keeps the bursa, sacca fluid, over each tumor less inflamed, so less chance of it going to augment. And then it is an analgesic to a certain extent. But I think it's more of a muscle relaxant easing the muscle tension, thereby easing the muscle pain, than it is a pure analgesic.

59:08SpeakerAnd the fact that I've not had a tumor grow since I was 21, and nobody knows why. I think it inhibits tumor growth.

59:33MrBy activating our endocannabinoid system with cannabis, we could be helping or aiding our own immune system in stopping this invasion of tumors or growth.

59:44SpeakerWell, you know, one thing that I talk about, and I'm not a doctor, okay, but the way I look at it is nobody gets enough cannabis in their body. We don't produce enough naturally, just like a lot of people don't produce enough insulin, so they need to take insulin outside the body. We don't produce enough cannabinoids for our cannabinoid system for our receptors. Therefore, from 1850 to 1937, we were getting our medicines, we were getting our food, so we were getting outside source coming into the body besides what we were producing.

1:00:10SpeakerSo we didn't have the autoimmune diseases that we do today. The body wasn't attacking itself because we were getting enough endocannabinoids in our system back then. We didn't have MS. We didn't have lupus. We didn't have Crohn's. All these autoimmune diseases that we have today I think come from the fact that they took it out of our systems from 1937 on. Now, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist.

1:00:31SpeakerIt's just observation that I've made. And so I feel like people always look at me and go, my God, for 63, you look so young. Well, I'm a doctor, and I'm a scientist, and I agree with everything that you just said, Eric. So you're absolutely right. I mean, the endocannabinoid system has a lot to do with underpinning all these natural regulation that happens in the body. It's our body's way of communicating, and it's our body's own pharmaceutical company that, again, pays no attention to the other things that the pharmaceutical companies are trying to shove down our throats with all those horrible side effects.

1:01:07SpeakerCan I ask something?

1:01:09MrIf we are completely devoid of cannabinoids, In a sense, would it be like our endocannabinoid system is like a laboratory that is turned off in our body? And when we start bringing these in, it gives it the fuel it needs to kick on and start working in the way we work, in the way our immune system works, in the way that we develop. I believe that. And like I said, I'm not a scientist or a doctor, but I truly believe that.

1:01:38MrDr. Scaldone is nodding his head, but that's in a sense that I've never really thought about it until this conversation, but in a sense is it like, you know, like you're in school, it's a shut off laboratory, the lights are off, all the equipment's there, but nobody's in there working it.

1:01:51SpeakerThat's correct. I mean, the receptors are the locks and the molecules like THC and CBD are the keys. And if you don't have enough sets of keys to go into the lock to open up these receptors and activate them, yes, absolutely. In fact, I think it was actually Professor Mishulam who said it himself that the National Institutes of Health And several other of the National Institutes have now come to the realization that the endocannabinoid system underpins all human disease.

1:02:22SpeakerAll human disease is somehow underpinned by some imbalance in the endocannabinoid system. And these are only for the cannabinoids that we know of, the endocannabinoids that we know about, like anandamide and 3-AG. There's probably a whole host of molecules out there that have these types of effects. So it's more than just disease. It's also emotion, schizophrenia. It's key to everything. So it promotes body harmony.

1:02:52MrRight. Well, we only have, Irv, for 15 more minutes, everybody. So I want to thank you very much, Irv, for taking this hour with us and joining us this morning. And I would love to invite you back if you have time again on any other Sunday. I think we all feel the same way. And I wanted to throw it out, you know, for any of the panelists, do you have any more questions?

1:03:12MrYou know, anybody in the chat have questions?

1:03:14SpeakerYeah, I'm wondering, Urban, do you get certificates of analysis with your medicine? And do you see that there's interlock variability? There are forms that I used to get from the government that the pharmacy would give me, and now I haven't gotten them for 20 years. And so just on the label is how much CBD or how much THC is on the actual medicine. That's right on the government label.

1:03:38SpeakerBut the rest of the analysis we used to get, I haven't seen, like I said, since the pharmacies, I'm getting it from a pharmacy now for every 20 years. It used to be like a, yeah, originally, and I have a copy somewhere because I did have it in my book, was that there was like a 13-page report, or not really a report, but telling you how to use the medicine.

1:04:00SpeakerAnd basically it came down to telling you to steam it, to raise the moisture level. And of course they use cigarette paper, so the paper is horrible. I mean you can light a joint and put it in an ashtray and the whole thing will burn. So I found the best way just to humidify the cannabis is just to put like 35 cigarettes out of the paper, put them in a baggie with some moist paper towels for like 30 minutes.

1:04:22MrI'm going to. I'm going to send you these packages for your, these are two-way humidity packs that if you put into the cans will actually, it'll maintain it at a very usable humidity for you, especially in Florida. You'll get more out of every day. I'll actually make that happen for you this week. I've been using them for like a year in there. It makes an amazing difference, an absolutely amazing difference.

1:04:48MrOkay. Yeah.

1:04:51SpeakerOn that testing topic, Irvin, I was thinking it would be really interesting if you were to find yourself in California to have your medicine run through a lab. Oh, actually I have done that several times. Oh, great. Over the 33 years where I've been in an area that had a testing facility. I also tested it in my lab on my GC. Have you managed to get any terpene data from the... No, we didn't test it for terpenes.

1:05:17SpeakerWe just did cannabinoids. Yeah, they don't, they don't, I never remember anything about terpenes. No. It'd be interesting to know what variety you're smoking. It'd be interesting to know after those years that there's any terpenes even remaining. I mean, how old was that, that herb was grown, what, four, five, ten years ago? January of 09. Okay, and remember that El Soli last year reported a lot of degradation products as new cannabinoids.

1:05:48SpeakerThank you so much for joining us.

1:06:13SpeakerIt was probably already degraded before it was frozen, Sam. That's what I was thinking. You know, it might be, but the way I always say is, thank God I have it, it works, and I appreciate every day that I have the prescription that I have. I had a question about your prescription. Do you pick it up at your local pharmacy? Do they ship it there? No, they ship it to a pharmacy at University of Miami.

1:06:39SpeakerActually, the same pharmacy that LV uses, I use, which is Baskin Palmer Eye Institute. And so they ship it there. Do they have a safe to keep it in? Yes. Yes. They have a refrigerated safe. I knew it. Yes, they do. And what they do, the government ships them six tins at a time. And Baskin Palmer is nice enough to me so I can take all six or I could take one.

1:07:02SpeakerThey don't care. Whatever I don't take, they keep. And then I just go down and pick it up as I need it. And they've been very good to me for the last 20 years. They've been great. They're great people.

1:07:14BubblemanWell, it goes to show you the incredible properties of cannabinoids and how much we need them in our systems because you can have people making this Unbelievably nasty, concentrated Rick Simpson oil, and I've met people that literally put their cancers in remission with that stuff, and who's to know if the cannabis was even grown organically. It just seems like it's such an incredible, the healing properties are so strong that it comes with its own protector ingredients within it, you know, like the way when we smoke it, there are the, the, it protects our lives.

1:07:51SpeakerIt's far more protective, Mark. What's that? It's hard to fuck it up. It's hard to fuck it up. It's amazing. You can beat the shit out of cannabis oil and pyrolyze the shit out of it, have it all mold infected, and still it could be effective.

1:08:04BubblemanAnd it still works. That's what I'm saying. So it's pretty incredible. Chocolate up to cannabis for just work.

1:08:10SpeakerI would also say that the vast majority of medical effects come from the resin, not the plant material. That could be. That could definitely be. But that's all we need, the natural plant and the whole plant.

1:08:28BubblemanSorry, one last question, really important one. You said that you could potentially see a federal program opening up for everyone eventually, not just the last two grandfathered people. How do we move that forward in one at least baby step? How do we go about doing that? Because it seems like most states are really focused on their state And those particular policies or laws or initiatives that they're trying to pass, who's working on the federal program?

1:08:58SpeakerI would say the only person that's really ever worked on the federal program that's really tried is a gentleman by the name of John Getman. He's worked quite a bit on it over the years. And that's one way, once we get 33 states recognizing and passing laws, we could try to do a constitutional amendment. Okay, in Congress. And, you know, and I think just the pressure that we put on DEA I think is also very important.

1:09:21SpeakerAnd the fact that doctors are finally starting to research this now. I mean, doctors are finally starting to say, hey, you know, it's been so much, we've had so much resistance to research and now the rest of the world is researching this and we're falling behind. And so I really think that the more doctors that come out saying that we really need to research this, of course, as Bob Brown used to say, when they said we need to do more research, his way of saying we just need more prohibition.

1:09:46SpeakerBecause I was unable to do research in America, I moved to the Netherlands to start a pharmaceutical cannabis company. I was the first one in the world. Okay, there you go. So that's the sad part, that doctors who do want to research it can't. And when I speak publicly, one of the things I compare this to And the audience, I'll say, with a show of hands, how many people have heard of the endorphins?

1:10:12SpeakerActually, everybody's heard of endorphins. Everybody raises their hand. Well, you know, 40 years ago, before they started teaching this in medical schools, nobody knew about endorphins. Then you ask them, who's heard of the endocannabinoid system? And again, you get a smattering of hands, but not a lot. I said, 40 years from now, when somebody asks you that question, everybody's going to have heard of it. I said, that's the difference with modern medicine.

1:10:33SpeakerIt takes time. Until medical schools start teaching this, you know, you can't expect your doctors to know much about it because medical schools aren't teaching it yet. But they're starting to come around. When you went to the ICRS meetings, did you meet Bill Devane, the man who discovered anandamide and the endocannabinoid receptor? I've never been to one of those meetings. Oh, okay. Years ago, there was one in Orlando.

1:10:57SpeakerAnd I asked Ethan, Ethan Russo, I said, Ethan, you know, should I come there? He said, no. He said, really? He said, if you want to come meet some people, yeah. But he said, you know, the knowledge that you're not going to gain much knowledge, it's going to be over you. You're not going to understand it. He said, so you really, you know, don't need to come up for it.

1:11:13SpeakerAnd I didn't. Now I look back now, I wish I had. Orlando's close enough to me, I should have done it, but I didn't. I've been a member for 25 years. Well, it's something to be proud of. It's definitely something to be proud of.

1:11:26MrWell, you know, Irv, thank you very much for spending this time with us. I've been chatting with your wife. She's helped put this all together, so I want a huge thank you to her.

1:11:35SpeakerYes, she's very special.

1:11:38MrYes, we wouldn't have you on right now if it wasn't for her technical savviness, so thank her very much. And please, you know, I would say come back anytime. I'm sorry you have to leave early today. And, you know, but thank you for spending some time with us talking about this today. Your story is unique and inspirational, and it's unbelievable that more people don't realize that there are people like you in this country, and that in many respects we're fighting hypocrisy on the highest levels.

1:12:05MrYou know, and thank you for speaking out.

1:12:08SpeakerAnd I want to just plug the book one more time. Absolutely. Again, My Medicine, and where you can get it is MyMedicineTheBook.com. Plus it's on Kindle. But MyMedicineTheBook.com will get you a signed copy from the author, me, and it's not only just my history of my bone disorder and what marijuana has done for me, but it's also the history of the medical marijuana movement in this country, as seen through my eyes, the second longest surviving federal patient.

1:12:34SpeakerSo to know how we got to where we are today, you really need to know the history, and my book will give you all that. Plus, what's important about the book, it's a great lobbying tool. So if you are trying to do something and your family's against you or somebody's against you, get them a copy of the book. Once they read the book, they'll understand what we've been doing and why we're doing it.

1:12:53BubblemanWell, I'll be picking up a copy of that book.

1:12:55HeidiI'm going to pop in for a second, everybody, and say hi. I just wanted to give everybody a heads up. We're aiming to go to the Michigan Campus Cup. So if anybody listening is going to be there, we might be there and come say hi.

1:13:07SpeakerAnd bring samples.

1:13:08HeidiLook us up.

1:13:09SpeakerThat's awesome. Thanks, Ervin. Okay, and again, anybody who wants to sponsor us to go to Michigan or whatever can do that, and they'll get one of my signature tin cans. Of course, empty, not full.

1:13:22MrYou know, that's another thing, you know, people don't realize, you know, for 20 years that you've been doing this, this has all been just out of passion and love. I mean, very rarely... Does anybody really step up and sponsor you? This has been self-sponsored for a zillion years now. I mean, even trying to encourage you to write your book some years ago. And I did. You did, but all it was was you making time to try to be an activist and be a You know, and bring your voice to people and help them out, and I appreciate that.

1:13:53MrYou motivated me, Irvin, and I want to say thank you.

1:13:56SpeakerTodd, you had the same with me, I tell you. You had to fight a lot in your childhood, and I respect you for that. That's for sure. And everybody on the panel, thank you very much, and I hope to join you another Sunday. Absolutely. Thanks, Irvin. All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

1:14:10BubblemanVery cool. Yes, Bong Rip from B420K. In the meantime, we're going to welcome Tony into the room, as well as Alec from SC Labs. Thanks for joining us, guys.

1:14:26SpeakerThanks for joining us. Welcome, Alec. Nice seeing you, man.

1:14:33BubblemanAnd welcome, Chimera, as well. I don't think I got to say that to you either since you came into the room. Thanks for popping in today.

1:14:40SpeakerThat was a great group.

1:14:43BubblemanYes, yes, Todd always accesses wonderful guests, and we're going to have some more great guests. We're going to talk a little bit of science. We're going to get into, I don't know exactly how we're going to get into it, but it's going to happen. It's starting to build already. Alec has shown up, Chimera has shown up, we've got Mark Scaldone in the room, Sam's in the room, and Tony just showed up.

1:15:08BubblemanHow are you doing, Tony?

1:15:12SpeakerI'm good, man. How are you guys doing?

1:15:15BubblemanDoing well. Just had a great hour with Irvin. He laid it out. He's a great speaker. He had a great story. It's inspirational to hear from someone from a federal perspective. And I like the fact that he's positive in his Perspective that it's going to become federal one day. It's a pretty major thing to give someone the medicine but not give them the ability to travel around the US.

1:15:44BubblemanIt seems like a very not American thing to do.

1:15:49MrWell, that's because he was going to be a political witness in the Jeff Jones case, and he didn't really enunciate that, but actually, he was going to actually testify in favor of OCBC and of patients' rights and how they're impeded under federal law as an example of people, you know, that should have access, like he has access. I mean, the beauty of Irvin and LV is that they have not been hypocrites.

1:16:10MrThey've really been... All these brave people who faced losing the medicine they were getting themselves, speaking out against the government for only giving it to them. And that's why I have so much admiration for both LV and Irvin. They've been brave beyond the measure of most.

1:16:30BubblemanAwesome. Sorry I got bumped there for a second, and now it seems like there's two of me, and I don't see Alec anymore. Did he get bumped as well?

1:16:39SpeakerYes. Yes.

1:16:47BubblemanAll right. Well, he'll be back. And we've still got Josh. We're waiting for Josh to come in as well. And I'm not sure if Etienne was going to be inviting his friend from the analytical lab that you sent me, Todd.

1:17:01Etienne FontanI have it. I'm just waiting to know to send the link.

1:17:06BubblemanI sent the link as well to Chris Barone from The Clear. He hasn't replied yet, so I'm not sure if he's having a late start to his Sunday, but that was a great conversation with Irv. I really enjoyed his stories and his ability to speak from a very, very, very unique perspective On cannabis. Yeah, I sent the link to Mike West as well, so he's in the chat, and I know he has the link, so he can come in as well anytime and break into a nice little conversation, maybe talk a little bit about different forms of isolation, molecular isolation, and different forms of...

1:17:53SpeakerThe worst thing that I heard about Irving was that he doesn't get the eye off of it.

1:17:59BubblemanYeah, that was a wild situation, although the fact that he did get high for eight minutes that one time goes to show...

1:18:06SpeakerI mean, to me, that would be worse than being sick. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, but that's Death Star Cannabis for you. I mean, what are you going to do? I'm actually looking forward to his book. I heard about it, and, you know, I think that eventually the federal stuff's going to change. This is one of my prized possessions from one of the federal patients, George, of all the little things that I've collected.

1:18:36SpeakerAnd having SC Labs on there is pretty cool because I've held on to two of the joints that were in here to be tested. So I've got two of the joints from our federal government, 1996 of their joints. So

1:18:55SpeakerThere's probably a half gram, maybe a little gram each, but I don't know if anyone's ever looked inside their joints before. I did. Yeah, their program, for those that are watching, the federal government that grew in Mississippi, they would send you a case like this, and there was 300 joints in here, and their program is for you to smoke 10 joints a day. So if you smoke 10 joints a day, and you look at how much percentage of cannabinoids is actually in there, that would tell you what your conversion rate is.

1:19:32SpeakerSo if we had, you know, It's about equal to one dab.

1:19:41SpeakerIt's like, I would say that I tested it one time in Colorado, and as we know, the labs were a little shaky, so I've been kind of waiting for SC Labs to test it, because Everyone's point to them is the go-to. I tested it one time, and it was like 3% to 5% THC.

1:20:04SpeakerThat's like 30 milligrams a joint. If you smoke 10 of them, that's 300 milligrams at a conversion rate of about 30%. You're losing 60 in this. You're getting 30% of 300 milligrams. Right.

1:20:22SpeakerI could tell you that a lot of patients did have some success with smoking it. Now, it might not be the greatest quality, but if they smoke 10 of those joints a day, they are getting some cannabinoids into their body, but the joints were filled with seeds. It's pretty obvious that he is getting medical benefit, and he doesn't want to particularly get stoned, so he's getting what he wants.

1:20:49BubblemanYep, exactly. There's no denying that. It's the one time the connoisseur doesn't seem to like, because I've always, most of the time, it seems like what the connoisseur wants is what, like, Many med patients need. But in Irv's case, it's not that case. He's really happy with what he's got. You can tell it's working. It's been working for, I don't know what he said, 30 years or 20 years or something, 25 or 30 years?

1:21:16SpeakerYeah, well, how can people not be grateful for their medicine? I mean, you know, see it with people that are federally legal and see it with everybody else, too, you know? Well, you guys, do you guys remember seeing that, like, CNN report? I think it was with Gupta. They visited Mississippi, and I could have sworn I heard them say that they grew 30 to 40% cannabis. If anyone remembers that, I'm sure Todd probably has the... What are you talking about, 30 to 40% THC or cannabis?

1:21:49SpeakerI think that the... It was in the weed... The first Sanjay Gupta documentary, I remember they were walking through El Soli's lab in Mississippi, and he did describe some strain that he saw Over 30% total cannabinoids. I think he even said 36% or something like that. So I remember definitely catching that myself. When I visited his facilities at the time, this was maybe 15 years ago, the highest one he had was 29.6.

1:22:18SpeakerBut, yeah, I'm sure he's found some that are 32, 35. Well, they also do the testing for the potency monitoring project, right, with the DEA. So I wonder if that was like a... A honey bud sample or something like that. Now, the sample that was 29% was from Alaska. It was herbal cannabis. I saw it.

1:22:41BubblemanThere's just no denying Sam, you know. He's just like, I was there. I saw it. I actually touched it. It's absolutely, inequivocally.

1:22:49SpeakerI tried to smoke it, but El Sole wouldn't let me. You're saying that they test cannabis. Those strains, but does he cultivate strains that are 30% for medical patients? I think he's trying to. From what I've heard, he's now cultivating like 100 different varieties. He's trying to be all things for everybody because the DEAs loosened up the tight strains they had on it. Well, they gave him a big financial injection a couple of years ago or last year, and I think that they're supposed to be growing a bunch of CBD stuff now also.

1:23:24BubblemanWe've got some new people that just came in. Justin, welcome, Justin.

1:23:30SpeakerHow lame that they don't let Irv visit the farm. I mean, University of Mississippi is a public institution. He should be able to visit there, and because he's actually one of the guys getting medicine... Fuck El Soli and those guys. They should let her visit the cannabis farm. They're following DEA protocols probably. Fuck DEA protocols. Those motherfuckers work for me because I pay their salary because I pay taxes.

1:24:00SpeakerFuck those guys. Go visit the fucking herb farm. End of fucking story. That's criminal. Mark the angry idealist.

1:24:11BubblemanI like it. I like it. I'm feeling it. I feel the same way, but in reality, it would be like, well, who knows? Maybe it'll get set up. You going to set that up, Sam? You going to get Herb in there or what?

1:24:20MrI would like to say this. I think it's more of an accomplishment that he gets the Herb out of the farm rather than he gets in the farm.

1:24:26SpeakerThat is a big accomplishment.

1:24:29MrPretty good accomplishment. And for the last 30 or so, three years, he's been getting it. And he's been a vocal advocate of them changing the system. So, You know, more power to him.

1:24:38SpeakerIf Irving wants me to, I'll send an email to Mohamed El Soleil asking him if Irv can come visit. I bet you he'll say yes.

1:24:46MrI bet he would too. He's always been nice to me. He wouldn't grant me a public interview, but he was always nice to me when I talked to him.

1:24:54BubblemanWell, that'd be pretty cool if Hash Church could help facilitate him getting into the facility where they've grown his medicine for the last 30 years.

1:25:01SpeakerIf everybody on Hash Church will say that we swear Irving's a good guy, then we'll handle it for sure. Hey, Sam, do you think you could get Mississippi to go live on Hash Church maybe on a Sunday? Sure, sure, right from their field.

1:25:18MrRight there. Hey, be careful, guys. You know, political winds are changing. You might just get what you ask for. Just be careful what you ask for. It would be weird to see a cannabis garden surrounded by gun turrets. I don't know how I'll feel.

1:25:31SpeakerThe thing I posted in the chat right there was USA Today 20 hours ago about the DEA.

1:25:41BubblemanRight. Schedule 2?

1:25:44SpeakerWell, they're finally coming around, you know.

1:25:48MrIt's inevitable. Everybody should go back and reread the rescheduling of Marinol, which happened in July, July 1st and 2nd of 1999. It gives you a good idea of what it took to get it, to make it happen, what it went through. And, you know, this is huge. I mean, really, and the reality is that we said, we were talking about this earlier, Tony, when you were not on, but even if they reschedule it to two, it's still going to leave our activities outlaw-ish.

1:26:17MrIt's still going to put us in the same perspective that we were, where we have to break the law and we have to basically risk ourselves. It's just going to make it harder for them. Every step is harder for them to put us in jail and convict us now with all the science floating around, in my opinion.

1:26:33SpeakerIt's step by step, Todd. We'll get it to two, then we'll get it to three, then we'll maybe get it tossed off. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Anything like a one, when we were talking, you made good points the last time we talked about just laws in California, but having it being a one, criminally speaking, is just awful from taxes, from everything that's going on in our industry.

1:26:58SpeakerWe can't do shit.

1:26:59MrRight, but look where we are now. And we've gotten really far. I mean, from the perspective of sitting on the sidelines for two decades, we've come a long way. But, you know, and this is in Schedule 1 with most restrictions. And I only think that however it goes, it's only going to broaden. I mean, a lot of people won't like what the broadener scope looks like. It's going to mean unit production cannabis.

1:27:20MrIt's going to mean inexpensive cannabis. It's going to mean home growers probably won't be able to compete with really Thank you for watching.

1:27:57SpeakerIt'll be an act of Congress, not a DEA rescheduling. An act of Congress could remove it from the schedule. That's what we need. We don't need rescheduling. De-scheduling is what we need. I disagree. It's not the DEA. It's the NIDA. Congress could take it out of the Controlled Dangerous Substance Act, period. An act of Congress is what we need. That's what you need.

1:28:27SpeakerI think that might be harder than rescheduling to remove it completely. Yeah, but the question is, is rescheduling it to two now, basically the pharmaceutical companies are going to come in and, you know, I don't know about you guys, are you going to buy your herb from a pharmaceutical company at a drugstore?

1:28:46BubblemanNo, no, Mark, but I certainly wouldn't want to stop someone who did want to, who uses that system, that platform, because that's the whole point of activism, when we're crying for something to be Thank you for watching.

1:29:08BubblemanAs long as we can do our own grows, as long as we can still have the dispensary type models, I'm not opposed to more access. And if the pharmaceutical companies want to stop selling poison... How could there be too much access? And start selling cannabis? Exactly, Sam.

1:29:23SpeakerHow could there be too much access? And not to mention, what also that does is insurance, Mark. So, I agree. You know, it's like we're getting... Rid of the criminal. You're getting into banking. You've got medical dispensaries. And now if the pharmaceutical companies or Walgreens or Shoppers Drug Mart wants to distribute cannabis products that qualify for that type of market and insurance covers it, now there's full access across the country, fully insured.

1:30:00SpeakerSo it's not that bad. Those big companies are only going to do it by putting you people in Colorado and California and Oregon out of business. Schedule 2 is basically going to end recreational and medical cannabis as we know it. It's going to put it into big pharmaceutical companies who are only going to make that investment.

1:30:18BubblemanI don't think so because Schedule 1, which is totally illegal, go to fucking prison, didn't kill it.

1:30:24SpeakerNo, but look at the drugs in Schedule 2, Mark. All those drugs in Schedule II are so important.

1:30:30BubblemanThey're not cannabis, though. They're not cannabis.

1:30:32SpeakerAll I'm saying, Right. The point is that cannabis is a medicinal herb, and it shouldn't be regulated. That's wonderful, but we're living in reality.

1:30:42BubblemanI love your YouTube perspective, but in reality, we're talking about what's the most likely way to get closer to what we want.

1:30:49SpeakerWe want the same thing. I agree, Mark. I agree with you. That's it.

1:30:55BubblemanThat's it. It's super simple.

1:30:56SpeakerI love the idea. Schedule 2 is just wrong. People have to change the Schedule 2 definition as to not being something that has to be dispensed by a pharmaceutical company. You're right. Schedule 3, Schedule 4, and I believe Schedule 5 requires a pharmacist to dispense it. However, we're in a Schedule 1, and you've got bud tenders dispensing it. I don't think that model is going away.

1:31:20BubblemanThat's what I'm saying. Schedule 1 and bud tenders dispensing. It's not going to kill anything cannabis related. Cannabis is like the bladed grass that grows up through the fucking concrete sidewalk.

1:31:33SpeakerI said it a year ago about this. We were talking about this Schedule II thing. Here's the thing. I think if it goes to Schedule II, they're going to give state rights. They're already leaning that way. If it goes Schedule II and they give state rights, those states then have their own constitution like Colorado. Those states will be able to To regulate and mandate how they want recreational and what the fear really is, is what I've always feared, is that perhaps the medical cannabis scene would get sucked up into that.

1:32:09SpeakerBut there again, the trade-off is insurance. So where I was coming from, like, yeah, I'd love to provide medical products to as many patients as possible. And if it's insured, then great, but I don't think that the recreational or adult use is going anywhere. There's too much tax money, and there's no way Colorado goes backwards and says, you know what, we don't want the tax money. That is the model in the Netherlands.

1:32:36SpeakerYou get a prescription from your doctor, you go to the pharmacist, and you order cannabis, herbal cannabis from VendorCon, because they're the only licensed company in the Netherlands that can distribute to pharmacies.

1:32:50Etienne FontanSo speaking of Netherlands and pharmacies, we have Dr. Justin here. Justin, do you want to pronounce your last name there, sir?

1:32:59SpeakerFischetic.

1:33:02Etienne FontanDr. Fischetic has actually studied at Leiden University and actually worked with the Dutch government cannabis for many a year, and now he is here in the United States and runs Excelsior Laboratories.

1:33:14SpeakerNice to have you, Justin. Hey, how's it going? Good to see you, man.

1:33:18Etienne FontanSo you got to actually test and deal with the medical cannabis in the Netherlands, yes?

1:33:24SpeakerYeah, definitely. Yeah, we worked closely with Bedricon and, yeah, the university I was working at, Leiden, had a bunch of research on medical cannabis. Do you like Bedricon cannabis grown in the Netherlands? I'd say California's better. Hey. That's a pretty way of getting out of my question.

1:33:47SpeakerSorry, say that again? No, I was saying that's a slippery way to not answer my question. Justin, what do you like better about California? Let me put it that way. Well, one, you know, I mean, well, for example, from the patient perspective, the Dutch government only really allowed a few strains. I mean, of course, bedricon research is more strange, but the government only allowed a few, so, I mean, in California, you have way more variety.

1:34:14SpeakerAnd also the Dutch cannabis, again, from the patient side, you know, I mean, it does get irradiated. So, you know, that might clean off some mold or whatever, but it also, you know, you lose about half the terpenes or a quarter of them doing that. So you lose flavor, you know, all these things. But I mean, overall, they grow a very consistent product. But Arno says that terpenes aren't important.

1:34:37SpeakerThey're not really the medical parts of cannabis. Well, who knows if that's true or not, but I mean, it definitely affects people's perception of how they experience it. You mean he's not just saying that to further better come? No comment. Sam, just going for the hard shots, eh?

1:35:00BubblemanWell, that's because I know better come. Of course you do. You are in the Netherlands.

1:35:08SpeakerSo tell us about Excelsior's work in California for people that don't know. Well, we're just, you know, an analytical lab trying to get into the, basically, the state's now going through all these regulations here, so we're trying to get involved in all that. Where's your lab located? Sorry? Where's your lab located? Oh, in the East Bay. East Bay of, like, south of Oakland. Yep.

1:35:40SpeakerIs it mostly dispensary clients or are you working with growers or what kind of clientele are you serving? Both. Growers, dispensaries, manufacturers, there's some different things like that. And are people more interested in cannabinoids or terpene contents at this point? Both, but I would say some of my clients specifically want to work with me because of what I know about the terpene stuff, so I guess I do a bit more of that kind of stuff too.

1:36:09SpeakerWhich is, I think, really interesting to continue kind of the work that we started at Leiden, you know, characterizing strains based on their terpene profile. Now seeing all that in California is really interesting to me, I think. There's a lot of cool chemical types.

1:36:26SpeakerWhat are the most interesting types you're seeing?

1:36:31SpeakerWell, I guess it depends. I mean, everyone has their different opinion on what kind of strains they like. So, yeah, I mean, I couldn't really say. I mean, to me it's interesting just seeing the variety. What's rare? What's unique? What are you seeing that you're not seeing often? Well, I mean, I would say that's a little bit biased, too, because it depends on the people bringing you the samples.

1:36:56SpeakerSo I think it depends a little bit where you are. I mean, California is hugely dominated by like Kush-type strains, OG Kush-type strains, so that takes up like probably half the strains that I see could be classified in that way.

1:37:11SpeakerAnd then of course, yeah, I mean there's purple strains which are interesting, sativa strains which are interesting, I don't know, yeah. So Justin wrote a paper called From Cultivar to Chemovar. Yeah, I did that with Arno. And that was on coffee shop cannabis. We basically tested White Widow and Amnesia to look at the kind of differences. And we chose those two strains just because they were popular at the time.

1:37:38SpeakerThey were easy to get. And we thought they were different. They smelled different. And they were prevalent, like, everywhere in all the Dutch coffee shops, right? Yes, you could randomize your sampling that way. It's the blue dream of Amsterdam. Yeah, sure is. Makes sense, yeah. Yeah, that's another strain to see a lot of. Yeah, definitely.

1:38:04BubblemanAlex said he was going to be right back. Oh! That's Mike West just popping in now. Welcome, Mike.

1:38:13SpeakerYeah, we have this ongoing nomenclature debate going on on the show about what's the proper term to use for, you know, unique genotypes of cannabis. Is it cultivar? Is it chemovar? Is it screen variety? So I'm pushing the cultivar camp. Yeah, I think that's a good term. I like it. We're trying to ban the use of strain. It sounds classy.

1:38:36MrStrain is the worst. It sounds classy. Cultivar sounds classy, right? But hey, I think Rob's right about strain. I think there are strains of wheat, and Rob has some good points, man.

1:38:50SpeakerLook, I love Rob, but Rob is completely wrong about strain. I love Rob. I've worked with Rob for 30 years. He's completely wrong. Yeah, thanks for backing me up there, Sam. I'm glad to hear all those items.

1:39:05MrHold on. How dare you? No, I'm just kidding. No, that's cool. No, hey, maybe he'll change his mind in a decade or two.

1:39:12SpeakerI saw that email chain going around between you guys, and I didn't respond. I was waiting for you to Google to hammer that out.

1:39:23SpeakerSo you're saying that basically just calling it a strain is absolutely wrong, Sam? Yeah, strains, that's not for plants. It's for viruses or bacteria or things like that. It should be a clone cultivar or maybe a land-raised seed variety.

1:39:43BubblemanBut aren't there strains of rice?

1:39:46SpeakerNo, see, Rob was saying that last time. That's not really true. Rob was saying that last time that people go wheat and strains of rice, and I actually went back and googled wheat strain or rice strain, and the result cell came back saying wheat variety, right, rice variety. Google didn't suggest you anything that said rice and strain together, so... I don't know. I'm totally, you know, of the mindset that strain is not correct.

1:40:15SpeakerThe real reason that Rob supports strain is because that's what everybody calls it. But everybody in Europe used to call resin polym. Polym, yeah. Should we call it polym? I don't know, guys.

1:40:28MrAt phys.org, scientists announced development of wheat blood strain that produces 30% greater yields.

1:40:35SpeakerYeah, but that's a secondary, listen, that's a secondary reference. So in science, what happens is that, you know, the scientist writes the paper and then you get people like Newsweek or all these different, you know, just regular... Media stories picking up on it and kind of interpreting it for the population.

1:40:53MrSo viz.org is just using a new strain of wheat?

1:40:57SpeakerYeah, that's because it's what people understand because they hear it, you know, but it doesn't mean that it's right.

1:41:02MrBut it has been used with wheat for a long time.

1:41:07SpeakerYou can make the argument that we use it in the vernacular, but it's not right, you know. It's the same thing with Indica and Sativa. We use Indica and Sativa, but that's not really correct. It's Afghanic and Indica.

1:41:18MrI agree with you completely. So it's kind of the same thing.

1:41:21SpeakerIt's like, you know, the people are using the words wrong. So, I don't know. I apologize. I just cut back in. My reception had gone out. This is Alec. Seems like a good time.

1:41:35BubblemanYes, welcome back, Alec. If you want to maybe tell us a little bit about what you've been up to down in California for the last couple of years.

1:41:45SpeakerYeah, absolutely, and I'd love to weigh in kind of a little bit about what I kind of pick up what your guys' conversation was on kind of from the spectrum range of effect from, you know, what has historically been described as sativa, you know, through indica and, you know, every effect in between and, you know, we've definitely seen some really interesting novel trends of how the data stacks and You know, essentially classes itself, you know, just from the number of samples that we test for, you know, chemotypic profile.

1:42:16SpeakerBut, yeah, SC Laboratories, we've been around for about five and a half years now, and we're largely in California. Our main lab's in Santa Cruz, California, which is just south of the San Francisco Bay Area, about an hour and a half. We have another lab in Southern California, down in Orange County that services most of Southern California. Our Math specs and our micro program are all still coming up to our lab here in Santa Cruz.

1:42:42SpeakerBut in general, between the two labs that we have in Santa Cruz and Orange County, we test about 7,500 samples a month. So we've definitely... Been working really hard for the last five and a half years to build a program, build a service, and the demand of our service, you know, in an unregulated market. So, you know, it's without testing regulations to require or have people buy into the services.

1:43:10SpeakerWe've, you know, figured out over the last five and a half years different ways where we could add value to help customers. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:43:33SpeakerOur service, we've been building in substantially to everybody's program so we can help kind of identify where testing makes the most sense in an infused product maker's arsenal or extract manufacturer's arsenal or cultivators. But as far as the chemotype stuff, I kind of came back in hearing some of what Kaimara was mentioning. But yeah, I mean, the From all the research that has been built upon, a lot of it really highlighted from Ethan Russo's work with the entourage effect and such.

1:44:12SpeakerIt's a really exciting time because I feel like terpene conversation is what's, you know, one of the most exciting conversations to get on. Before terpenes were really starting to kind of be caught on by cultural kind of awareness, you know, largely whenever people would contract a testing laboratory, they would, you know, just do some potency tests for cannabinoid content. And so there was, you know, in a bit of a way labs somewhat did a disservice to the community in the way that There is this cultural identification that highest testing THC strains somehow associates with the best in some capacity.

1:44:49SpeakerAnd so because of that, so many of the really incredible lower testing THC cultivars that had interesting or substantial presence of certain Thank you so much for joining us.

1:45:24SpeakerYou know, recommend for certain types of effects over others or to just substantiate how well they did cultivating their plant in optimal growing conditions and optimal harvest, et cetera, et cetera. So I think chirping sounds is just going to open everything up.

1:45:40Etienne FontanIt has been very helpful, especially for dispensaries, because one of the early things and the early frustrations that we had dealt with was exactly what you had stated is that A lot of patients started to gravitate toward whatever was the highest THC content, thinking that that was the predominant source to go toward, or at least that was the deciding factor. And we saw a lot of frustration from many of our patient cultivars who were growing for us because what was coming in now at a certain price, everything changed because Thank you so much for joining us.

1:46:44Etienne FontanNow, how many terpenes do you screen for now and how many are you looking to open up toward?

1:46:53SpeakerCurrently at SC Laboratories, we're testing for 34 different terpenes. Of those terpenes though, you know, really six to nine terpenes are kind of what we see Thank you.

1:47:26SpeakerYou know, far left sativa type profiles. You know, all those strains are similar in that they're dominant in terpenylene, and they usually have a little bit of osamine, but all the other terpenes in there are relatively expressed in very small amounts. But the difference in smell that characterizes J1 to Jack to XJ to Trainwreck to Dutch Treat, although all those strains have a very interesting similarity, They're very different from each other in their own, and so these minor terpenes also make a substantial presence in how that chemotype smell fully comes out.

1:48:06SpeakerBut I think it's so important, and I apologize to take it away from what your question was about to go down to Etienne, but I just wanted to make the point of being the fact that I'm a veteran of the Navy, I work a lot with veterans that have post-traumatic stress, and Recognizing how important it is whenever somebody is first starting to use cannabis, especially somebody that's prone to some type of stress or psychiatric stress type issues.

1:48:33SpeakerIf that person were to start smoking, even if it was like a 15 or lower percent testing THC strain, but it was high in terpenylene versus starting off on a strain that may be lower in THC but higher in something like beta-carotene or myrcene, You know, it's just how to not do it right whenever you set up somebody trying to use cannabis and how do you set it up in a way that doesn't set them off from ever using it again.

1:49:00SpeakerAnd so I think when we start getting into the nuances of the terpenes, we can really start to help, you know, customize or tailor, you know, a certain terpene profile towards a certain person's, you know, case.

1:49:15BubblemanDirect the effect. Effect, right.

1:49:20SpeakerSo that's one thing I've been really, we've been talking a lot about terps, obviously we always do, but we've been trying to get into some, looking at results, and one of the things about the SC lab report format is that you guys give so much information on terpenes, was, you know, some of the steep hill lab reports were presented here, and they only look at like eight or nine different terpenes.

1:49:44SpeakerMaybe they test for more, but they're only showing those on the lab report. So, yeah, I think that's really important for people that are looking at that kind of thing to be able to spot all the trends and the nuances.

1:50:01SpeakerJustin, what's the Excelsior lab report format? How many terpenes do you guys test for? How many do you put on your report? Well, we usually screen for about, yeah, around like 40 But you really only see like, yeah, again, like 10, maybe 15 dominating the profile. And that's, you know, pretty standard. There's also some unknown compounds, which, you know, aren't really being reported, which would be interesting to figure out what they are.

1:50:27SpeakerDo you have MS at Excelsior? What's that? Do you have MS at Excelsior? Yeah, yeah, but they're still unknown. I mean, some of them have been unknown to me for years, and I've been wondering what they are. Are they just not in the NIST databases? Well, they are, but they're assessment terpenes, so they're really tricky to figure out. I mean, they're just tough. They're capable of being isomers, and when you have isomers, I mean, actually terpenylene Can actually be an isomer.

1:50:57SpeakerThere's four different isomeric forms. One of them is terpenylene. And I think what happens in the GC, this is known, is that all the terpenene isomers sort of funnel into that isomer because that's the thermally stable one. So in the GC itself, there is chemistry going on.

1:51:17SpeakerAnd I think to speak to the sesquiterpenes, some of those sesquiterpenes too are metastable, meaning that they might exist one way in the plant, but certainly just exposing caryophyllene to air will start to oxidize at the caryophyllene oxide. And I know that there's some other oxidation products that happen with some of the other sesquiterpenes. I'm not exactly sure if they're known to occur in cannabis, but Caryophylline Oxide, I know, is one particular one.

1:51:47MrCan I ask something? I was reading about the beta, how do you pronounce this one, guys?

1:51:52SpeakerCaryophylline.

1:51:52MrCaryophylline. Thank you. And it was saying that it was the only one that actually interacted with our CB2 receptors?

1:51:58SpeakerYeah, beta-caryophylline is a CB2 receptor agonist. Yes.

1:52:04MrWhen you say agonist, could you define that?

1:52:07SpeakerIt turns the receptor on.

1:52:09MrYeah. Turns it on. Okay. Okay, so...

1:52:13SpeakerInterestingly too, yeah, Ethan Russo just published a paper recently kind of on beyond cannabis. I don't know if you've seen it yet, but it starts to open up the idea of cannabimimetics and looking to other compounds that have stimulating effects on the endocannabinoid system receptors. And it kind of gets into like beta-carotene. It gets into certain like terpenes that are in compounds like copal, which is this old kind of smudge that's used to kind of burn as an incense.

1:52:39SpeakerBut, you know, Echinacea, many different types of compounds or different terpenes and other plants that are now being looked to to modulate the endocannabinoid system. And so, yeah, beta-carotene being one of them is really interesting, especially since it's like dominant in a whole class of strains like cookies and gelato and sherbet and all those strains.

1:53:01MrCan I ask this to the panel then? Is there an 11-hydroxy effect with terpenes as there is with THC? Y'all know what I mean. So does that happen if you eat a terpene? Is it different from if you vaporize or smoke a terpene?

1:53:15SpeakerYeah, I don't know how they're processed in the gut, terpenes. Mark? Sheldon? Dr. Sheldon? Dr. I would say yes. I mean, the gut is just a completely different environment than if it passes through the mucosa. Dr. It's not so much the gut. It's the liver.

1:53:29MrIt's the one-pass effect, I'm asking. Is there a one-pass effect associated with terpenes like there is THC?

1:53:35SpeakerDr. Yeah, terpenes would be metabolized by your liver. Dr. Yes. But do they create metabolites that are actually more potent? Because with THC, that is what happens with hydroxy. Yeah, the amount of actual THC that you take compared to the amount of any given terpene is a lot higher. So I would probably think that going through the gut is not a very delicate process for terps. They get

1:54:03MrWell, that's how we're consuming them in the sodas, in the foods, all the flavorings that we're getting. This is how when we chew gum, aren't we getting terpenes in the gut?

1:54:12SpeakerYes.

1:54:13MrI'm just asking it not to be argumentative, but this is how they're using these things. I just got a starter kit sent to me from this company, True Terpenes. I was looking for something that would let me learn These things. And, you know, so they're sending these food-grade, natural, organic, non-GMO, steamed, sterile, separated, and it's fucking crazy. And I haven't really been trying to vaporize them or anything, but they smell really interesting, and they are for food use.

1:54:44MrSo they're dropping them in water, and they're mixing them and using them, like, homeopathically.

1:54:51SpeakerMm-hmm. Chimera, is caryophylline oxide produced by the plant or is it a breakdown product? No, I don't know. It might be in different... It's a breakdown product. I think it's only a breakdown product though. That's correct. Yeah. We were looking at that as maybe a marker for when you're looking at oils or extracts and then you have terpene tests, that might be a marker for like post-harvest degradation.

1:55:19SpeakerHmm. You're agreeing, Justin? I'm sorry? I said, you're agreeing, Justin, that it is a breakdown product?

1:55:32SpeakerYour mic is muted.

1:55:37SpeakerOh yeah, it's definitely more common in degraded material. So does a plant produce any oxide? No. Terpenes are like hydroxylated and they're given oxygen groups. That happens in certain strains more than others do. The oxidation of caryophyllene is happening by microbes. Right? Because that oxygen just doesn't come for free. You can't just transfer an oxygen to caryothylene. It has to, you know, microbes and oxidase, you need enzymes to basically carry out that chemistry.

1:56:13SpeakerDoes that happen on the living plant or only after you've harvested it? No, Sam, I think it happens after harvest, but I don't have any data to share with you, but my experience with mint oils is on freshly harvested mint oil, we don't see any caryophylline oxide. If we let that oil sit around for a little while, where caryophylline is, again, maybe about a fraction of a percent, one or two percent, we start to see oxide start to creep in.

1:56:39SpeakerIt's what I suspected from all our terpene work, but I didn't know for sure. Yeah, and also I just wanted to mention that those hydroxylated derivatives that start to form also observed in the El Soli work where he published a quote-unquote new cannabinoids, all of those are hydroxylated on the methylcyclohexene ring of CBD and THC. I will bet you a dollar to a doughnut. Those are hallmark signs of bacterial-mediated oxidation and degradation.

1:57:14SpeakerBasically, what's happening is bacteria and microbes are starting to chew on the THC, starting to oxidize it and turn it into bacteria food. Same thing with caryophylline oxide. That oxidation is microbial, I think. Dr. That's interesting.

1:57:34SpeakerWait, then if the gamma irradiated fresh weed and you got rid of all the bacteria and had a sterile environment, would you then suspect that you're not going to see any caryophylline oxide? Perhaps, yeah. That's a good hypothesis and certainly a good experiment to test. Yeah, I wonder if it is bacteria-mediated or it's just as a result of the oxygen in the air. Well, and again, Chimera, when you start hydroxylating the methylcyclohexane ring, when you heat those up, it creates two double bonds in that ring, and now it's very easy to take that up to CBN.

1:58:10SpeakerSo I think that a lot of those are basically just bacterial intermediates on their way to CBN. So I just posted the title of a paper I've been looking at again this week, and it's They did storage conditions of cannabis or storage of cannabis and measured the degradation of THC to CBN because we all talk about this and you hear about this people saying all the time you start to read you get more CBN or you even hear people attributing effects to CBN and these guys did a study and it showed that the loss of THC was definitely not one to one linked with the creation of CBN so that maybe as THC breaks down you only get a quarter of it turning into CBN.

1:58:54SpeakerWell, some may be stuck in intermediates on their way to CBN, right? So those hydroxylated intermediates need to actually be heated up to be converted over to CBN. Yeah, that still should all be showing on a GC trace, though, right? You'd think that you'd see the intermediates. Anyway, I just want to caution people again. We make these assumptions based on things that we all learned in the past, but we don't really have the data to show that it really backs up a lot of the claims that you hear people making.

1:59:22SpeakerSo... Just be wary and I think that, you know, we're really, we're lucky to have people like, you know, Justin and Excelsior and Alec and Josh at SC being able to actually show us some of these things because we've got the tools nowadays to, you know, to investigate and understand these things. I think it's better than just repeating the old dogma that we all kind of have for 20 years.

1:59:43SpeakerYeah, I would say on the CBN level, people really don't understand it that much. I convert to CBN all the time and there's many ways to do it I've converted just straight Keith, like a dry sift, tumbled Keith to straight CBN. But the loss, like people don't realize, I would say it's even, and every time we do that, I would say if you had like, man, if you have 300 milligrams of THC, you're left with like 50 milligrams of CBN.

2:00:22SpeakerLike, not very much. So it's not like a one-to-one. It's not even 50%. It really depends on the process. I have high-intensity UV chambers. I have heat. I have oxygen. There's a lot of ways to do it to rosin or different types of things like Keith, but the loss of volume as well. So if you have, like, you know, a gram of Keith that's 29%, that's 300 milligrams, you're going to lose quite a bit of volume as well.

2:00:50SpeakerThank you for joining us today.

2:01:17Etienne FontanJustin, you've tested, let's see, you've tested just the Dutch medical cannabis. You've also tested the Dutch cannabis shop cannabis as well as now you've tested the California cannabis. Can you tell us differences between the three because I think that would be fascinating because I know It's the difference between the Bedrocan cannabis versus the Dutch coffee shop standards, as well as how many different varieties did you test there of the Dutch stuff?

2:01:52SpeakerI mean, the Bedrocan, probably like 10 to 15 different varieties that they were doing research on. Unfortunately, they never told me what all of them were, so I can't say exactly what they were. I can only show their data. And then the coffee shop maybe... Originally it was just cannabinoids, so I screened a bunch by that, and then later, only really the amnesia and the white widow did we study the terpene profile of, besides the better constraints, so California's really the place where I got to see a lot more varieties in that sense.

2:02:27SpeakerBut there are other quality differences. I would say the... You know, of course, again, the... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

2:03:02SpeakerIACM meeting that was there in Leiden. I think it was right after, yeah. Yeah, right after that, yeah.

2:03:09Etienne FontanJustin, what made you decide to take up cannabis and make it your research specific?

2:03:17SpeakerOh, well, when I got there I found out they had this project going on and they wanted somebody to work on it and I didn't think I would ever have an opportunity to work on something like that. So, I mean, you couldn't pass that up really, I mean.

2:03:30Etienne FontanBut it was labeled cannabis specific, so you knew it was.

2:03:34SpeakerOh, yeah. I mean, it was a specific project to do specific, answer some specific questions, so. Nice.

2:03:43Etienne FontanHow has your family reacted to your lifestyle choice?

2:03:49SpeakerWell, I think now that the laws are going, well, I think realizing, one, that, you know, there really is medical benefit changes a lot of people's parents, I think, opinion of cannabis, and Justin, I have a question.

2:04:19SpeakerDid you, whenever you were at Bedrocan, did you guys do any kind of comparison to kind of before and after gamma irradiation on strains to measure whether or not there are certain terpenes or overall terpenes that kind of overall, you know, degrade or dissipate, whatever? Well, the stuff, for example, the strains that we studied when we studied, I think it was 11 strains, 11 varieties, 11 cultivars, whatever.

2:04:44SpeakerNice. We, you know, those ones weren't gamma radiated. We were looking at, you know, we did compare fresh to dry, but, you know, there wasn't, it was better to show the dry data. But the, where was I going with that? Arno just published on that. Oh, yeah, I was just going to say, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Arno just published a paper on the gamma radiation. Yeah, they did show that you lose some.

2:05:09SpeakerYeah, it doesn't affect the cannabinoids hardly at all. The terpenes, it zaps. Oh, that's huge information, though, because there was always a common thought that that might not be the case.

2:05:20Etienne FontanNo, it definitely shows, at least in that paper, it does. I'd like to see more research on that. Were you involved in any of that research, Justin?

2:05:29SpeakerNo, that's totally new. No. I mean, yeah, when I was there, they had studied the gamma radiation for cannabinoids, like THC, but there was no effect, so that was good. But, uh, Yeah, the terpenes, you lose some for sure. Yeah, and there was also, it looked like there was some created. I don't know if they could have been, I mean, you didn't really see it very well.

2:05:47SpeakerIt could have been through the harvesting procedure. You know, it might have been interlot variability. But, yeah, there definitely was a couple of cases where, like, pinene was created. Well, it makes sense. They're reactive, right? They're going to react with each other. It wasn't just some. It was, like, 30%.

2:06:04BubblemanYeah, 23%.

2:06:07SpeakerYeah, it was in the mid-twenties, mid-twenties. Yeah, that was the largest variability, but I think the largest increase was, I don't know. But if you didn't see chemistry happening, that would be more puzzling than chemistry actually happening, right? Well, I mean... I mean, this Hashishin paper shows that essentially these things can react under, you know, light conditions to rearrange into other molecules. Yeah, but I mean, if you put them under magnetism, they're probably not going to change.

2:06:40SpeakerYou know, it just depends on the process that you're putting on.

2:06:42Etienne FontanWe also know that when we ignite them as well, it changes them.

2:06:45SpeakerYeah, absolutely. There you go. No, when you irradiate them with light, yeah, stuff's going to happen.

2:06:52MrI wanted to ask Alex if it's okay. You know, I was looking at the SC Labs website, and you have a really wonderful explanation of different terpenes, linaloo, alpha-pinene, myrcene, and I'm over here playing with these things now. You've got a bottle of myrcene. And I'm wondering, you know, like when you're talking about, you know, this, it's found in hops and lemongrass and citruses. Are people like, you know, linalool, you know, it's effective in anxiety and stress reliever.

2:07:19MrAre people just taking it, dumping it in food like homeopathically and, you know, ingesting linalool?

2:07:28SpeakerYou know, what I can see, I've seen is besides the extraction process, Of all the different types that preserve and completely preserve the natural terpene profile of the plant, besides that you see these new products that are kind of coming on the market, all these really high purified THC distillate products that are fully decarboxylated in the high 80s, early 90s in percentile THC decarbs, and we're seeing a whole host of Concentrates kind of really proliferating and getting really popular now with these added blended terpene profiles that are attempted to be mimicked after the profile that the plant expresses itself.

2:08:13SpeakerAnd so you're seeing people are sourcing these specific Thank you for joining us.

2:08:42SpeakerI don't, you know, I have personal... Well, there's my concern.

2:08:45MrCan I bring this right up? Because, you know, these things are all obviously food grade. The ones that were, I was sent were food grade, organic, blah, blah, blah. And that's why I was asking, guys, can I drop this into some sparkling water for a medicinal effect, if that's what I guess I'm asking. And is it different? And is it harmful if somebody's putting this on shatter and smoking it?

2:09:06MrI thought it was. I think some of them are harmful if you inhale them.

2:09:09SpeakerYou can correct me if I'm wrong. There's absolutely two people that bake just essential oils of all kinds. It's very common.

2:09:20BubblemanYeah, people have been inhaling essential oils for a long time, and even those little nebulizers that blast essential oils into the air, those essential oils are inhaled.

2:09:31Etienne FontanIsn't that incense in itself?

2:09:35MrIs this what's being used in the various... Nicotine pens, nicotine cartridges, same stuff.

2:09:43SpeakerThis is the question, you don't really know, right? There's no regulations about any of this kind of stuff. So it's like you have people that are ordering lower grade impure terpenes, calling it little oil off Amazon or Myrcene or whatever. Bubble gum. You can see it right, I mean Josh will tell you this, you can see it right in the cost. If you look at the analytical standard that's 99 or 98% purified, it's like $50 to $150 per milliliter of any given terpene.

2:10:16SpeakerExactly. Yeah, you can find larger amounts on Amazon.com for a lot less because they're less pure. The absolutely pure 99.9 is a few hundred dollars for a few milliliters, whereas you can buy a very high quality food grade that's only 98, 97% pure, and it's a small fraction of that price.

2:10:41MrI believe the jars I have are between 97 and 98% and they're steamed, distilled. Tony, how do they make these things? When they're saying they're steam distilled, what's the process they get to make 97% myrcene?

2:11:01SpeakerYeah, so the ones I've seen that are 97%, they actually are hexane extracted. So those say steam, huh?

2:11:12MrYeah, the company said, and they have organic certification and all that other shit, natural organic, non-GMO, and food grade. Food grade is what got me wondering, can I drop it in water and eat it? And they said, yeah. And that's when I started wanting to make questions because it's neat to have this. It's finally like getting a box of Crayola crayons and being able to play with the different colors and to be able to pull them out and smell what myrcene smells like or what limonene smells like.

2:11:39MrIt's really quite a trip. You know, I've never experienced it quite like this, where it's like playing music and ATN hitting a note and saying, that's an E. You know, it's kind of cool.

2:11:51SpeakerYeah, it is really neat. I would say, if you can, and since you've got some lab guys here, I mean, it would be cool to have a couple of those samples of food grade put through the lab and see if they break apart or what the levels of contamination are as far as other terpenes. Yeah, we've been testing these kind of products more now. And the big thing is to try to figure out if it's natural cannabis terpenoids or if it's a fake blend of cannabis terpenoids.

2:12:15SpeakerThese are not cannabis derived.

2:12:18MrThese are just limonene and mercine and beta-pinene. This company is not advertising that this is cannabis derived at all. I actually was looking for this for a while because as I was trying to learn it, You know, it's one thing to read a list of long names, but to be able to pick up a bottle and smell it and just, okay, this is beta-pinene and, you know, stick it under your nose and kind of get to know it a little bit, it's definitely a different experience.

2:12:47MrI feel like a little kid playing with crayons.

2:12:49SpeakerIt's really cool. I think it's really cool. Food grade terpenes are used in all kinds of flavor and fragrance industries, so as long as the food grade really is certified, they should be generally regarded as safe, most of them. Just don't consume too much. But if I may, you know, if I may add, you know, jump in, you know, kind of being, this is hash church, you know, I have this internal personal dilemma just with some of these like high refined THC distillate products because, you know, it can be made from, you know, fresh material, not even dried yet or, you know, it can be made also from year old outdoor, you know, that came out of, You know, came out of a closet or a hot warehouse.

2:13:32SpeakerNow, you'll identify certain things, obviously, like if there is any oxidation happening or degradation of cannabinoids, but typically we just see, you know, bulk material extracted, highly refined into this, you know, clear product, terpenes added back in to try to get these flavors, and although, you know, sure, I do very much enjoy a lot of the flavors, you know, kind of starting to bridge that gap towards the e-cigarette realm where, you know, people are, you know, hitting, like, Vanilla Caramel and all these very, you know, random kind of artificial type flavor profiles.

2:14:04SpeakerYou know, and although there's a place for it and it does taste good, you know, myself, I see that high THC distillate product as a very useful input, you know, that in my opinion is the best food grade extract that somebody could ever take or just to straight fill them to syringes to provide as a Simpson Oil type, you know, THC distillate product. I really like the application of These oils in infused products because it's almost tasteless, the nauseous type, a little bit of that taste from all the chlorophyll and stuff is gone.

2:14:38SpeakerAnd it's a really high THC distilled product that you can get much closer towards standardizing or creating whatever type of product you are. But arguably, it's interesting because can a spiked terpene extract ever Be side by side on the level of connoisseur demand or what somebody might want, who's looking for these live resin or live rosin, these really well artisan level extracted and preserved chemotypic characteristics. Ultimately, that's what I feel like people pay such high dollars to for making a connoisseur choice.

2:15:23MrCan I just say this? I have friends that have traditionally, like Vernon Phillips, traditionally made what he makes when he makes an extract smells just point on to what the cannabis smelled like, just amplified and happier and brighter. He just has a real nuanced way of capturing the things, no matter if he's doing water or butane or what have you. I think that has been what other people have been trying to mimic.

2:15:50MrWhen they smell these very aromatic butters and such, they think that they can just take a package like I got and mix them together and make their stuff more loud. I just don't think they can come close to what nature does in her own combination of incredible perfection.

2:16:09SpeakerAlso, too, Todd, what people are doing is adding terpenes which have not been found in cannabis.

2:16:18BubblemanThere it is. And not derived from cannabis as well. I mean, I trust the cannabis plant in producing a profile. I'm not sure that inhaling pure terpenes in any single pure terpene would be something you would want to be doing.

2:16:34SpeakerEven more than that, there's no history of people doing it. Well, yes, there is.

2:16:38MrHold on for a minute. In a sense, there is. Homeopathic people have been using terpenes, and this is where all this data from... No, they haven't been smoking them. Well, that's why I asked about eating them.

2:16:50SpeakerThey've been inhaling them in a million different products, whether it's a cleaner. I think these products are definitely different. You're not going to confuse them with cannabis extracts, but they're not necessarily intended to be that. You know, rather than 50 or 60 different compounds in varying amounts, you might have three or four or ten that the person mixes in, but there's a million products out there that use terpenes that people inhale and that are meant to smell pleasant.

2:17:18SpeakerSame thing with flowers. When I go up and smell a flower, a lot of times... But they're not smoking them. They're not smoking them. You're inhaling them. You're inhaling them, so, I mean, you're not combusting them, yes, but... That's pretty... I don't smoke menthol. I mean, that's a terpene.

2:17:31BubblemanThey do.

2:17:33MrThat's how they get that scent? Wow. That's just an infused terpene that's mentholated. Sorry if I'm naive.

2:17:44SpeakerMenthol is found in cannabis. Very small amounts. But it is there. Yeah, but tiny, tiny, tiny amounts. I've had varieties that were high in menthol. I just wanted to say on the topic of terps and smoking them, you know, if you actually look at, like, limonene, for example, it's listed as a skin irritant. So we can't just say that we know anything about what that means if you inhale, like, large concentrations of it, right?

2:18:15SpeakerSo we do got to be, always put the caveat that it's like this is all untested and we don't know the long-term effects of... Right, purely... Yeah, pure limonene is used as an extraction solvent in many cases. Yeah, and a cleaner, right? And same with some of these, like these mitre compounds.

2:18:33MrWell, isn't it a cleaner because it's high alkaline and that makes it emulsify oils and waxes?

2:18:40SpeakerNo, it's for the same reason that Horatio uses it as an extraction, you know, thing. Okay, well, I think it's because of the high alkaline, it breaks down the oil.

2:18:49MrWell, we also did a talk about...

2:18:52SpeakerNeat, it can be a degreaser, but in a water-based formulation, the reason why orange cleaners work so well is because they need a whole lot of surfactant to keep that limonene in there. And so, yeah, of course it's going to work well as a cleaner because you have a whole lot of chemicals in there to keep it from crashing out. Right, but, yeah, well, I mean, I don't know what it does on other plant rosins, but you take a little drip of limonene terpene.

2:19:17SpeakerNo, I think your point, Ryan, is really well taken, and also... Let me just say what I'm saying. It's like if you take a drip of limonene and you put it on like an extract, like some wax or some rosin or something, you see pretty quickly it starts to dissolve. So it also does that on other plant resins too, like pine pitch.

2:19:38SpeakerYeah, I mean, these pure compounds, I mean, the bottles that Todd's showing, which are, I guess, pure terpenes, I mean, I don't like the notion of pure terpenes unless they're a common... No, they're like 97.

2:19:50MrOkay, okay, so that's close. 97 to 98%.

2:19:53SpeakerClose enough. So those are pure terpenes, right? So I think the point is that humans aren't supposed to just be taking pure terpenes. They're supposed to be taking them... In a mixture where they're basically very, very dilute and not very strong. I don't know if we're supposed to be doing anything, but I'm just trying to say for people that are watching, you have to keep in mind, again, look at the data that we do know on them.

2:20:21SpeakerWe know that limonene is a skin irritant, so your lungs are a very different type of tissue. You know, your skin's evolved to be on the outside of your body and withstand the rigors of life. Your lungs are a little more sensitive. Yeah, actually, Ryan, just to interject for a second, one of the dangers of limonene is that it's very prone to hydroperoxidation. And that hydroperoxide is not volatile and could be essentially explosive.

2:20:48SpeakerHydroperoxides are typically explosive. But I think that that's hydroperoxide when it's in limonene in a very trace quantity can show deleterious biological effects. Yeah, and so, I mean, if you look at all the other terpenes that have similar chemical structure like terpenylene, you know, it's just a difference between limonene and terpenylene is the location of a double bond. And so... You know, Sam used to talk about having these bronchitis problems after harvesting, you know, haze-type varieties in the Santa Cruz area.

2:21:20SpeakerHappened to me every year for five, six years in a row. At the same time of the year when I smoked weed that was only dried for two weeks. But these plants are known to be high in terpenylene, too, so... And I also have terpenylene varieties that are the same. It's like you almost want to let them sit a little bit before smoking them too fresh. They're too hot.

2:21:42SpeakerTerpenylene is really a hot kind of, it feels like a little bit of an irritating terpene. I would smoke the same material after it had cured for a couple of months in a box. It didn't do it to me at all. Yeah, so all this, anyway, all this stuff is not known. I don't think we can really fairly say these are the health effects of any of this stuff.

2:22:02SpeakerYou know, we've got to be cautious and at least say, hey, we don't know exactly what the deal is with all these. Right, and we're in a very interesting moment now, too, because since the terpene cat is out of the bag, you know, you see people kind of I mean, because for a long time, people have gotten myrcene in whatever quality, and if they botched their cure, you know, it's been known to like, you know, take a couple sprays, spray a bag, make it a little more loud, be able to have more bag appeal to sell it, you know, but now that kind of people are exploring with all these blends, it's like, You know, and with more and more information coming out about how, you know, using propylene ethylene glycol or vegetable glycerin might not be the most ideal when you're combining cannabinoids to load pre-filled cartridges that you're selling to the public.

2:22:48SpeakerSo people are now like more and more looking into, okay, well, let me thin out, you know, and, you know, kind of liquefy You know, kind of get the viscosity of an oil cut with terpenes to add straight into these pre-sale cartridges. And it's this huge kind of come up for them because you can make really crappy oil or bulk kind of crappy oil with no terpenes and all of a sudden cut it with a terpene that makes it taste and smell like something and then try to go turn around and sell it for like $50 a gram wholesale.

2:23:16SpeakerBut it's this brave new world of You know, what are we doing and how delicate should we step into this new path of not, you know, of adding back in. To be honest, that's the reason why I held back on the terpene information for five years. I was afraid of what was going to happen. So I got a point. I guess, again, we're having this ongoing conversation about is the shade or the texture Like the tint of the extract is darker extracts not being as valuable on the market as a clear extract.

2:23:50SpeakerYou know, maybe, I just want to bring that up in this context. So we have like people making clear products out of like really low grade, you know, low grade materials that they can't do anything else with in the long run and they end up with like a, you know, a clear high cannabinoid mixture that's made from low products, you know. Well, you know, it's really funny because I'm certain you do see, I mean, I can't really speak on the specifics of it, but, you know, knowing a lot of extract makers and kind of farmers in Santa Cruz County, having worked with for a long time from back before SE Labs and the hydro industry to SE Labs, you know, you see these certain extracts like Blue Dream is a great example.

2:24:31SpeakerBlue Dream can

2:24:35SpeakerIt's made especially fresh. It can turn so light, almost white as an extract, you know, whenever it's buttered or crumbled or what have you. So whatever the blend is of that strain, Thanks for watching.

2:25:07SpeakerBut the loudness of this, you know, I think the overall bouquet of how it pops is such an indicator, you know, that should be the guiding light a little bit above and beyond necessarily the color because recognizing that certain strains come out darker sometimes, you know, routinely than other types of strains. And so there might be something to do with terpenes, but it's not... Mutually exclusive, I guess they're not.

2:25:39SpeakerYeah. Light color doesn't mean quality. I guess that's kind of what I'm saying. It can mean quality, but it doesn't have to mean quality. Yeah.

2:25:53BubblemanYeah, I just invited Chris Barone in from The Clear. He was supposed to be coming in earlier, and he sort of missed the memo. ATN was kind enough to bounce and make a spot open up, so hopefully he'll be able to come in and get his two cents as one of the things that the guy does. He cleans up stuff and creates this clear distillate product. I think Alec put it pretty well from a perspective.

2:26:20BubblemanDistillate definitely has its place as an option for people that want to use it. I liked it for... Really, truly understanding through my own bioassay that terpenes can modulate the effects of cannabinoids and there's Chris now, so welcome Chris. What's happening guys?

2:26:44ChrisSorry for being a little late this morning.

2:26:46BubblemanNo problem. The clear has come up a few times and we've been talking about just sort of this You know, does clarity or color or lightness really mean quality? It can, absolutely. Does it always? Probably not. I'm not sure if you heard what was said, but if you want to weigh in on your two cents, we'd appreciate it.

2:27:10ChrisYeah, I mean, I think when it comes to, like, color, obviously, like, pigment being something that, like, creates its color with not necessarily a high concentration. It's not necessarily something that is relevant to potency, but I think in general just quality of extracts. I mean, I think we all are looking for the lightest colored, turpiest, highest grade products that we can. I think in a lot of the distillates you see, people get some red colors depending on their process, their temperature, but I think at the same time you're still seeing very high potencies So what's coming into play now I think with distillates is sort of the distinction of what makes a good distillate because you're sort of comparing apples and oranges when you're comparing a distillate to a rosin or a Nug Run or a PHO or really anything.

2:28:01ChrisSo a porter for instance or a stout is a dark black color on a beer and there are certain reasons for that but I think when people compare that you see them talking about the color of a porter, how midnight black Something is, so I think we're just coming into a new realm of sort of quality and our understanding of it. I mean, I had posted a post of some rosin like about a couple weeks ago that got all kinds of comments and all kinds of shit, but when I said, it was like, here's some dark hash rosin that I've got.

2:28:37ChrisThat literally looks dark, but is the best tasting hash I've ever smoked. And people get all up in arms about it and call it a poop soup and I don't know shit and who made this and blah, blah, blah. And at the end of the day, I'm not lying when I say it tasted that good, but it is a conundrum because it was certainly dark. So it's kind of like, I think...

2:28:57ChrisIt's a perspective thing that we need to look at and sort of start to come up with a better understanding of what those rules are. I mean, they have things called the tintometer. No one's really gotten into them with the extracts yet, but you essentially load your product into a photo spectrometer and you get like a red reading and a yellow reading and a green reading and a blue reading.

2:29:18ChrisI think as QC comes into play and more regulation gets put in, these will be tests that need to be performed and Sort of QCs that we'll be looking at.

2:29:28BubblemanInteresting. That's cool, the tintometer. I like that.

2:29:32SpeakerI once upon a time said, made some comments about terpenes affecting colors of resin and the material of those resin heads, and Mark Scaldone didn't like it, I remember. I've always wanted a way to prove it. Hey, what do you mean I didn't like it? You didn't like it. What didn't I like about it? Just a theory about it. What was the theory, Tony? The theory of particular terpenes having a play on the color of the resin itself or the product.

2:30:05SpeakerThere's nothing about that I don't like. You've got to remind me what I don't like about that.

2:30:09ChrisWe have to sit around long enough. We have to sit around long enough. All this stuff loses its color. It oxidizes. I've got some CBD solutions, pure CBD solutions with a small amount of terpene. And these things go purple, dark purple in like a very short period of time. And so you just have a color play. There's reactions on small levels. There's all kinds of things that are going to create different colors.

2:30:38ChrisYou know, I think, Tony, if I remember correctly, you had spent a lot of time getting the color out of some of your terpenes. But you know the fight that you're going to be sitting there battling this on a long term basis. You know, things oxidize and things foul and things, you know, obviously without wanting to put antioxidants or anything like that and you're kind of, you're at the will of nature in the sense that Angie terpenes might go darker than Blue Dream terpenes in a very quick period of time or the extract might be high in certain plant oils that want to, you know, get nasty or get different colors.

2:31:14ChrisSo, in a way, before we learn enough.

2:31:20SpeakerThere's definitely validity to that. I stored terpenes that were sealed in little packets for five months. So it's been five months, pulled them out, and they were held below zero and no light exposure and no air exposure, and they were exactly the same. But I also at the same time left those things without a lid on in the sunlight. I mean, you'll see a drastic change. It'll look like a jelly, or things could change.

2:31:52SpeakerSome of them are hydrophilic or phobic, and you get weird stuff. But I was thinking, I was talking more about, like, every time you run, like, a Gorilla Glue rosin, you get very clean, white rosin butter. Perhaps maybe the Humaline in that or the way that terpene profile is in that is affecting the color, like TNG having a terpene profile maybe translating in color. I see it a lot, especially with rosin, especially with terpenes that I'm doing.

2:32:22SpeakerSome of them are very, very, very light and buttery in color. Some of them, like the sour D terpenes, are always like this orange, this darker brown, real greasy. Um, color, even fresh or not, so I don't know. I just, it's just a theory that perhaps like... Hey Tony, I think I remember what, now that you're rekindling this conversation. Okay, so I wanted to make the point of saying that, again, whenever you're looking at color, a very, very small amount of material can, I think Chris was saying this too, can, a very high extinction coefficient material can be highly colored and can really Make something that should be clear yellow or even much darker.

2:33:12SpeakerBut the most, the chromophores that are the strongest in cannabis oil are the flavonoids and the isoflavonoids. And a really very, very small amount of these things can highly, highly color material. And they're also, they're sensitive to oxygen. So again, if you can look at, Like when you first press it or if you first extract it and it has a particular color and you leave it exposed to air, that could very well be again oxidation that's happening not on the terpenes but on the flavonoids.

2:33:49SpeakerThe flavonoids are very highly colored and it's not necessarily that they're, it's not the terpenes that are making colors but What happens is if you look at all of those terpenes, almost all of the terpenes without exception should almost be colorless. There's a few of them that have color, yes, but most of the popular terpenes that are in cannabis like caryophylline should be a colorless liquid. Myrcene should be a colorless liquid.

2:34:15SpeakerAll of those should essentially be colorless. So I think some of the color that you might be seeing in some of these concentrates are from some of the minor components that have very high extinction coefficient materials like the flavonoids. Isn't caroline oxide a solid?

2:34:36SpeakerNo, caryophylline oxide, I think, is a liquid. I've actually made, Dr. No, it's a solid. Dr. Oh, it's a solid. Okay, I stand corrected. Dr. I smoked it. I was pretty sure it was solid. Dr. I actually made that once before by bubbling air into a caryophylline solution. We made it and hydrogenated it. Dr. One other thing that, Mark, you made was we were talking about how in Hellenic, Bubble Man brought up a nebulizer.

2:35:06SpeakerOr how we're inhaling now. We were specifically talking about, you know, vaporizing terpenes directly on the nail. But, you know, what about the fact that they sell, I have this ultrasound diffuser with eucalyptus that I use, and I've been using them with cannabis terpenes. So they sell this, like, on Amazon for you to, you know, that's a very small amount, though. This is two to three drops.

2:35:35SpeakerWhat's the concentration?

2:35:37MrSome of these bottles have danger warnings. Some of them have warning labels. We shouldn't generalize terpenes when we lump. We shouldn't lump them because some are flammable, some not so much. Some are highly volatile. They are, I guess, high alkaline. They emulsify oils, a drop of them. They're different. If we generalize terpenes, I think we kind of missed the point. If I'm wrong, Hey, correct me.

2:36:02SpeakerYou're exactly right. There was a good post from one of our buddies in this terpene community, and I liked the chart. I'm going to see if I can find it for you. And it breaks down all of the different terpenes and what they're in and what they're used for. And I put it on the Blue River Facebook thing, so let me grab it for you.

2:36:24ChrisWe need to like, you know, I think it's got to be an understanding that like every Pure chemical is going to come with a myriad of warnings and I think I understand what Todd was saying. Certainly we need to be aware that in pure form these things are dangerous. Most chemicals can be easily abused not in the sense of substance abuse but just they're dangerous. Chemistry is a dangerous thing inherently especially with volatile chemicals and flammable stuff but at the same time You know, I think it's like an order of scale to understand what's a safe range.

2:37:04ChrisAnd so I think it's a little bit, you know, certainly a lot important to make sure that, you know, for instance, that nebulizer is a great thing. You know, entrainment with the gas and ultrasonics are going to be a cool way of... You know, bringing those aromas out. But, you know, the question is how much do you put on there? Do you leave it to the user or do they flood the whole nebulizer with the stuff?

2:37:31ChrisAnd what happens if there's too much on there? I mean, Tony, have you had, I mean, that's the first time I'm seeing that nebulizer. Now, would you use that personally? Would that be like an inhaling device that one would, So, check this out.

2:37:43SpeakerSo this is how they recommend it. So I'm going to do it. With cannabis terpenes instead of eucalyptus. And I agree, there's a long list of terpenes that you should use, but that you should be aware of. You know, even like latex terpenes. Are we going to inhale those? But I think it's important to know that they all should be used as a dilute. Those are good, Tony.

2:38:04SpeakerThey put more bounce in your step.

2:38:06MrWell, can I ask this? Like, Linalool has a warning label, okay? But then, then Mersene only has a danger label, and then Beta-Carifoline only has nothing. It says it's not a hump. It's got a little blank spot where the other two had a danger and a warning. Oh, why?

2:38:25SpeakerSo what was the three? Todd, was that Mercy, Labyrinth, and Caryopoly?

2:38:30MrMercy had a danger. Linalool had a warning. And I think it was flammable. And then the beta one has nothing on it. And when you read real close, it just says not, not, not.

2:38:44ChrisMark, doesn't that seem a bit crazy as a chemist to have that spread of warning labels on the same?

2:38:52SpeakerI think this speaks to the lack of standardization in the industry. And I think what it also might speak to is the fact that at one point there was a company that had to register a product that had one of those compounds in it. So they had to do a lot of toxicology testing, say on beta-caryophyllene. And because all of that's now in the public domain, it could be viewed as being, okay, it's not that dangerous.

2:39:21SpeakerWhen it's not been tested, I mean, I could tell you that myrcene isn't something that's isolated from natural sources. Myrcene is made industrially from the dehydration of geraniol, which is isolated from rose oil, I believe. Rose Oil and Citronella. So again, some of these terpenes, yeah, they're naturally occurring and myrcene is naturally occurring, but it's made in a big chemical process by a big badass chemical company in some place over probably in Liechtenstein or something.

2:39:56SpeakerSo, I mean, yeah, who knows what kind of regulation you have on, on, This kind of thing that's going on.

2:40:03MrThey are, for lack of a better thing, selling them as food grade, organic certified, non-GMO, and they're out of Oregon, and, you know, they're way eating a lot of granola in Oregon. I'm just going to throw that out.

2:40:17ChrisYeah, well, I mean, the FC and the FG grade, I mean, I think are common, are easy to get, are relatively easy to get when you've got, like, you know, if you source correctly, I think those grades are sort of standard, but... Yeah, it's unsure if someone's repackaging them, which probably, I would guess in the case of those terpenes, it seems like they might be. Probably, yeah.

2:40:41SpeakerAnd with a lot of these things, too, I think people conflate natural with safe, and speaking in general terms, not even necessarily just terpenes, it's kind of always the assumption, well, someone out there is looking out for me, and someone really has tested this, but a lot of these compounds just don't really have much toxicological data on them. Yeah. You know, you've got to take it with a grain of salt.

2:41:02SpeakerThe warnings, like you said, the warnings someone might have had to register it and done some toxicology on it, or maybe they just put every warning they could think of on there and left it. You know, I think, especially in the U.S. with a lot of these, you know, isolated chemicals, they're not necessarily, hasn't had a lot of toxicology data on them. Right. It's helpful to look at the levels that are in plants that you find naturally.

2:41:32SpeakerA lot of these terpenes are in other plants, and these are very low amounts, so when you're globbing terpenes on products, it's a lot more than what's typically found in plants. You don't need a lot of terpenes. Two orders of magnitude, right guys? Two orders of magnitude, because we're talking about Something that's at like a fraction of a percent and taking it up to like a percent.

2:41:51BubblemanSo here's a question. How many orders of magnitude is it when we create a concentrate and we go from a 2% to 3% terpene to a almost 10% some of these extracts, live resins and water hashes and even...

2:42:06SpeakerI guarantee you that we found it 10 to 15% terpenes. Yeah, 10 to 15%.

2:42:15BubblemanAnd when we smoked it, it made no problem. So five-fold, five-fold increase of terpene inhalation and... Doesn't seem to have like a big sort of... And it's like was the most illegal plant where they were always constantly looking for, you know, something. I mean, I'll be sure people... I got some news for you.

2:42:37SpeakerWhat's that? I got some news for you. I think I'm in like the 17 fold. I get like, you know, this is like 10 drops to a half a gram. So that's like, I don't know. We don't know the safety.

2:42:51ChrisWhere's the limit? I mean, I could, we could, anyone, I mean, the thing is, there you are. You could make something that's 1% THC and 99% terpenes. Where's the, where's the... Like some extra virgin?

2:43:05ChrisThe extra virgin, yeah.

2:43:06SpeakerYeah, so, I mean, Chris had, Chris had, you had the, what I was calling like the ninja gabs at the time with the little dropper at the cup. And that was, you know, 10 drops of, You know, if something was in the 90 percentile, 900 milligrams, and you've got like 0.05, I don't know how many milligrams of terpenes that would be, but it's 10 drops to about a half gram ratio there.

2:43:34SpeakerAnd I mean, it's terpy as fuck. You know, I gave you that little sample, too, of the sour kush. So, what do you, I mean, I think the bioassay is important, too. It's like, I think going past that point is probably Thank you for watching.

2:44:19ChrisAnd certainly that's a good thing if that's what you want, but like temperature of the nail changes, like duration of the dab changes, flavor, head feel, I mean all of it changes, but for me, personally, like I would maybe go more cannabinoids, but again, it's also as to like what the flavor impact of those terpenes and those terpene blends have, if it's light flavored, it's super gassy, or if it's super tangy, I mean there's That's a huge spread.

2:44:46ChrisSo I think as these things get formulated, we'll come up with some pretty cool products that will sort of define themselves by those unique characteristics. Well, this is a really gassy one, but it's not very thick. It's not very thin or it's not oily. So I think that would be the unique.

2:45:02SpeakerI think I would agree that 15% has got to be safe because that's what we can find in dry sift, and I'm sure it's safe. Yeah. Yeah. If I may chime in too, from the testing data and what we see at SC Labs, I mean 15-20% terpenes is really high and typically what we've seen in that upper range of terpene percentile is the kind of runnier, holy water type extracts that we see made from low pressure CO2 or often is done through some hydrocarbon extract process.

2:45:41SpeakerAs far as Like live resins and some of the, you know, higher testing, you know, natural processing, processed extracts, we see kind of, you know, usually at most like 9 to 12%. I'm sure it could be higher, but yeah, I was just kind of chiming in on that. Dry sift is higher because it's intact resin heads. Right. Yeah, we see similar. But it's also important to remember that when we're talking 15% in an extract, it's a bunch of different terpenes, whereas these pure compounds at 15%, that's quite a different dose.

2:46:21SpeakerRight. And when I was talking 15%, I was talking about a suite of terpenes in a natural dry set.

2:46:32BubblemanOh, there's Josh for the first time. You've just been a picture for me, Josh. Now I actually see you sitting in your backyard on your patio.

2:46:40SpeakerNo, I'm in my kitchen, but close.

2:46:42BubblemanOh, we're right on. That's awesome that your kitchen looks like a backyard.

2:46:49SpeakerAnd if I may kind of bring something up, I wanted to kind of mention the whole kind of, because earlier on we were talking about how the 11-hydroxy effect and how ingesting, there's these different Thanks for joining us.

2:47:27SpeakerThank you for joining us.

2:47:49SpeakerI will question how much specifically has to do with framing and with the other part is how much it has to do with the dose, whether it's 5 milligrams of THC or 10 milligrams and whether or not the perceived difference might be coming from that. But then getting into the idea of this new emerging area of research in cannabimimetics, You know, I wonder like how, you know, kind of blending and if you're making a food product that you're going to be ingesting, you know, what happens if you are adding higher myrcene kind of from, you know, mango extracts or what have you to compensate and add back in, adding back into the terpenes versus, you know, kind of, yeah, the, you know, assuming that you're going to be getting some added myrcene from this decarboxylated oil, which isn't the case.

2:48:35Etienne FontanHmm.

2:48:38Etienne FontanInteresting.

2:48:41SpeakerYeah, I just want to kind of get some thoughts on that if anybody had any.

2:48:46BubblemanWhere's the thoughts, people? We've got all these thinking minds in the room. You're right.

2:48:51SpeakerThe sesquiterpenes are concentrated where a lot of monoterpenes get lost in a lot of extract processes, for sure. We see the same thing.

2:48:58MrI know my friend, Mel Frank, who is sensitive, has lung issues from smoking tobacco. He's since stopped. But he has been imploring the company he works with, Slippin, to remove the terpenes that they were putting in because he was feeling like it was bothering him. So he's been kind of, you know, recommending that they rethink the way that they concentrate, you know, because they were looking at ways to thin up their pens, of course, and, you know, obviously adding these terpenes in thins up the shatter or the concentrate, the extract.

2:49:31MrI hate saying concentrate, the extract. And But it's not without peril, you know. So we've brought it up on Hash Church before that we think people should, you know, be a little cautious before they're doing, you know, inhaling any of it. I mean, I just posted the safety sheet, or I'm going to post the safety sheet up in Hash Church, and they're all very differently rated. I mean, and it doesn't look like they didn't discuss them.

2:49:54MrIt looks like they just used current data on all of them, and they all are handled very differently.

2:49:59SpeakerYeah, and a lot of terpenes can be allergens, too. That's something people should be aware of. I found that one pretty nasty.

2:50:13SpeakerYeah.

2:50:20MrSo allergens, they can actually, they can bother people. So if somebody grabs the wrong vapor pen and it has a high concentration of some over-the-counter terpene that might not interact with them well, they might have a bad experience and then relate it to cannabinoids.

2:50:35ChrisBut would they not have the same bad experience if they experienced that terpene in cannabis like itself?

2:50:41MrWell, in muted doses, it would be the difference between hearing a tuba in an orchestra and hearing a kid sitting there blowing his tuba all alone next door to you when you're trying to work. It was a very different experience.

2:50:54SpeakerIn cannabis, what is it, 2%, 3%?

2:50:59ChrisIn my formulations, none of the flavors go over, none of the terpenes go over like 4%.

2:51:07SpeakerThat's higher than cannabis.

2:51:11ChrisBut less, but like half is like, if we're saying 10% in other concentrates, you know, our, like I said, ours, you know, at like 4% at most, depending on the, you know, the impact of that blend. You know, it's still half as much as you would get in, say, a 10% extract.

2:51:34SpeakerI know with a dry sift that's 15% terpenes, it can also be in the low 80s of THC.

2:51:47BubblemanYeah, it was definitely the strongest thing I've ever smoked, the first time I ever smoked your dry sift. It almost was like being in an earthquake. It was like... What the fuck? I'm telling you, that is some serious medicine. If you can grow that proper shit in a greenhouse, the right cultivar that you bred that's extracted by you, I'll tell you, the rest of the world definitely needs to experience that.

2:52:20SpeakerHey Chris, let me ask a question. So when you guys are doing your distillation, you know, it's always interesting to think that, again, you could do some type of Fractional distillation to actually separate out some of the minor cannabinoids, but when you rip off that early fraction that's very, very thin, it's not THC. It might have a little bit of THC in there. There's probably some degraded sesquiterps in there, but man, the odor of that first fraction is just, it's almost, I don't even use the word pungent for it because it's got such a distasteful flavor to it.

2:52:59ChrisSo you know what we call it, Mark? We call it the stink nasty.

2:53:02SpeakerDude, I tried to figure out that shit by NMR. I ran it through an HPLC. I could not figure out what the bad tasting molecule is. So what is that bad tasting molecule?

2:53:16ChrisIt's got to be. So like if you've ever looked at the chemistry of the beer, of skunked beer, I'm positive, like 90% positive, something analogous to that.

2:53:33SpeakerSo it's a volatile component, obviously, and obviously it's a degradation product because I don't smell that in the cannabis or the extract that we put in there. So obviously it's being made in the distillation pot itself, right? I wonder if you could either add a little acid or a base or something to the pot To neutralize that reaction manifold because whatever it is, that thing fucking stinks and I would love to know what molecule that is.

2:54:06SpeakerI bet you it's hat or sheen.

2:54:15ChrisBut I think it's out there. My guess is that it's got to be something with fucking... Sulfur in it, and it's got to have some, you know, I read some papers on, I can't remember what the compound was in beer that it skunked, but I believed it was like a degradin product from some terpene or sesquiterpene or something like that, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was an analogous version.

2:54:40SpeakerYeah, the compound that I think makes beer skunky or one of the compounds that leads to skunkiness in beer is muscarinic acid. Muscarinic acid is a very well-known compound. There's actually muscarinic acid receptors in the human body. But, man, if we could figure out what that molecule is and how to chemically intervene, you're going to get a much better yield in your distillations.

2:55:05ChrisCertainly, I think it requires like a sniffer or something. The first step would be probably getting like a GC olfactory set up because you're not going to be able to... I think that at the range you'd see it, you wouldn't even see it on a GC. You'd smell it before you saw it on an FID, I'd think.

2:55:27SpeakerYeah, whatever it is, it stinks to high hell. I went on a tour... Yesterday, a giant vineyard in Napa, and I won't say which vineyard it was, but it was a big one, world known, and they use French oak in their process, and it was interesting because they were talking about the agriculture of it, and they said, we're 90%, this farm is 90% sustainable, Sonoma's 100% sustainable, and I was like, oh, you know...

2:56:02SpeakerYou know, what do you guys do for different conditions as far as farming? Like, what makes it not sustainable? I mean, it's kind of strange. But they were, in their process, when we kind of got deep on this little tour, it was interesting because they spray elemental sulfur on their grapes. And she's like, yeah, you don't want to be out there when they spray the sulfur because when you touch it, you get it in your eyes and this and that.

2:56:26SpeakerAnd I was thinking, okay, and she's like, it's biodegradable, and then they plant mustard in between the crops early on to make sure that there's nitrogen in the soil, and there's different ways that they do this. So when we got to the big barrels in which they're soaked, they use dry ice for four days. So they fill these huge, huge, huge, like two, maybe 5,000 liter barrels.

2:56:49SpeakerThey fill it with dry ice, and then they put the grapes in there, sometimes with It's stem and stalk and sometimes not, just the grapes and maybe some of the leaves. And it sits on that for four days. And then they have 10 days of letting it ferment. And so I was like, oh, do you wash those grapes before you put them in there? And they're like, no.

2:57:12SpeakerI'm like, well, okay, well, what about the sodium that was sprayed on the grapes? And I go, it all comes out because it's alcohol. So, because the acidity eats the sugar, the yeast, and the acidity turns into alcohol. So, I do know that in the brewing process, you know, they are spraying sulfur on their plants, and then they just kind of brew it together. I mean, I don't know if the alcohol, I thought it was kind of strange, you know.

2:57:42SpeakerMost wines have sulfide contents because of this. You can get organic wines that don't have any sulfides. Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting thing you bring up, though, because, you know, in a farmer's integrated pest and mold management arsenal, you know, there's OMRI-listed versions of liquid sulfur that are available, you know, that will ultimately be on the list of all the approved kind of compounds that people will be able to use to spray cannabis, as opposed to things like Eagle 20 or Avid, Forbid Fluoramide, all these other things.

2:58:18SpeakerBut You know, for sure, it's kind of known within a lot of the extract community that you can usually tell if sulfur was sprayed later on in the flower cycle because it comes out and anything you spray ultimately in some way or another degrades the ultimate quality of the end flower and or extract. But it's interesting to get into the idea of how much different pesticides or fungicides, bio compounds are having an effect And then concentrating and presenting a potential risk, not fully known yet, but ultimately, you know, degrading in some way or capacity.

2:58:58SpeakerI think the big difference... Sulfites from wine does not come from using sulfur as a fungicide on grapes. Sulfites in wine comes from using SO2 as a preservative. It's a gaseous preservative in wines, okay? Just to make that distinction. That's right. And we've got to consider, too, that you don't have it.

2:59:22ChrisWe've got to consider too that when we're looking at hash and wine, although comparable, the temperatures involved in both the production and the consumption of wine are very low. So things like sulfur and different oxidation states are not going to have the same flavor impact that you would in a smoked or a high heat distilled or purged process or whatever. You know, again, it's going back to this reoccurring theme where, like, we need to, you know, come up with the right rules as the people who know, like, what the common important factors are here.

3:00:00ChrisOtherwise, it becomes just kind of like a, well, we'll compare it to this or that. And, I mean, like, it's just, I think it's important that we start establishing these things as what's important. Not to get on the side, but.

3:00:18BubblemanAbsolutely. I'm just enjoying listening to the conversation. The first time I ever discovered sulfur being sprayed, and it was obviously for powdery mildew, was back in the 90s when I first started my water hash company, Bubble Bags Fresh Headies. And I was making some stuff, and it was coming out great, and You know, I knew some great growers. Breeders Steve was one of them that gave me some beautiful material that produced this incredible quality resin that led me to be more interested in isolating glandular trichome heads to pure 99.9% head ratios.

3:00:52BubblemanAnd eventually what happened was someone gave me material that I guess had been sprayed with sulfur. Yeah. For burners too far into flour or even in flour, and listen, I'll tell you, it was 20 grams of the most beautiful, just blonde, full melt Renee hash, and I'll never forget hocking it off of my deck. I actually lived two doors down when I did this. I hocked it right off my deck into the forest because it was so bad.

3:01:20BubblemanThe concentration was incredible, and no matter if you made oil, no matter if you did dry sifting or if you did wet washing, The sulfur was always present in the concentrate, which just led me to believe that it was somehow breaching the head, because once it got on there, it would not let go all the way through to any concentrate that we tried to make. It was a ruined material for inhaling anyway.

3:01:48SpeakerI don't know about for vegetative, but for flowering, sulfurs are no-no. I'll tell you. This brings up a really interesting kind of point I'd love to bring up to the group, and Josh can definitely speak on some of the interesting trends that we've seen, but we have a pretty robust pesticide analysis, testing for 12 of the most common compounds that people use on treating and preventing things like spider mites and bot mites, russet mites, aphids, whiteflies, all the things, as well as Michael Buten, Eagle 20, By far one of the most common compounds we see, which is the common fungicide used, and then certain plant growth regulators.

3:02:32SpeakerBut there's this perceived canary in the coal mine topic that we're kind of identifying right now, and how common people are. Because no matter what somebody's doing, whether you're doing extract or you're making products that are infused, you are some way or another downstream from a farm. And so if that farm used systemic translaminar-based pesticides or fungicides, you know, we're seeing a pretty high rate of detection, not only in the flower, but in the extracts.

3:03:04SpeakerAnd, you know, whatever is on the flower is going to concentrate in the extract. But then further we're seeing this, like, you know, one of the more interesting parts of this story is how common we're identifying in the extraction process this space of, We've got a lot of cross-contamination that's happening from lack of best practices that an extract maker has in their process to sterilize their machine or do dry runs with iso or ethanol on their machines in between runs because if you're doing contract extraction and you do it for five farms and all of them are organic except for this one farm that sprayed Eagle 20 like week four of flower, if you run that dude's material first but you don't subsequently clean the machine out afterwards, The following batches, you know, we're seeing a really high level of cross-contamination happening.

3:03:55SpeakerAnd this goes across distillation, this goes across CO2, and this goes across butane closed-loop systems. Hey, Alex, what level are you looking at, if I can ask? What level?

3:04:07SpeakerSo Josh might be able to more speak specifically on the topic. Yeah, that varies by test. Right now, we just have a screen. Our pesticide test, to be honest, is... Much, much more basic than we'll have under regulation. So for most analytes, we're hitting 100 parts per billion. But it'll be possibly lower than that when we have regulation. And we only test for the 12 pesticides. And so, yeah, medical butanol, I mean, we'll see.

3:04:43SpeakerLast October, I think we had 50% of the pesticide samples we tested. Um, had some, some levels of, you know, one of the 12 pesticides we test for, um, and, uh, um, you know, it, it, during the, during the winter it gets better because you have indoor crop, you don't have as much microbutanol, but, um, there's really high levels of this stuff and, and, and, um, we're going to have much more sensitive kind of regulations than actually what our, our, our test picks up.

3:05:08SpeakerSo, um, it, it, it's huge that the entire industry is going to basically have to learn how to regrow, um, marijuana because, Everyone's using this stuff, and that's kind of the dirty little secret of cannabis. Josh, though, don't you think that if they start looking at, so you're looking at basically 100 part per billion level and maybe even the next order magnitude lower. I mean, don't you start to worry that, I mean, it's kind of like taking a lint brush to a New York City sidewalk.

3:05:38SpeakerYou're going to find everything in there, man. If I may, I think there's a bit of a misspoke there. So it looks like 100 part per billion is the limit that's going to be imposed on California state level, as well as if you look at Oregon regs of what they approve for limits on the individual analytes, and Washington just adopted. It's around the 100 part per billion level.

3:06:03SpeakerThe test we currently have, if we're identifying one of these 12 analytes, we're picking it up depending on the analyte, Between tens to hundreds apart per million. And so we're seeing it, if it's there, it's there in pretty high amounts relative to what's going to be regulated on the state level. And so what I think is really important to recognize with that is, you know, it's like a lot of people have built into their best practices cultivation, you know, spraying Eagle 20 right before they flip their lights or same thing with Forbid or whatever.

3:06:40SpeakerAnd then thinking that because it's allowed on strawberries or grapes, it's justifiable for use on cannabis, but due to the fact that these compounds aren't approved for any combusted crops, nor will ever be. There's this whole story of Eagle 20 combusting into hydrogen cyanide. So I think a really important thing to recognize is none of these compounds that are currently deployed So ubiquitously in cultivation are going to ever be approved.

3:07:11SpeakerYou know, there's going to be some nicotine ones that get passed through the EPA eventually to kind of be approved for use in cannabis. But, you know, it's pretty generally recognized that something like Eagle 20 will never be. And so for us to be picking it up, you know, in the tens of part per million range for that compound, you know, if it's there, it's there substantially.

3:07:33SpeakerAnd so So my question is, everybody's like, well, how far back can I use it? Can I dip my clones in it? I think when the state regs put it at 100 part per billion total, I think there's going to be pretty massive realization quickly on where clones are coming from that are dirty because if a nursery used any of these compounds to dip their plants in, it's probably going to be seen in the part per billion amount You know, whenever it's tested, the end flower, especially whenever you're considering different conditions, like was the plant grown outdoor under the sun with UVA, UVB, UVC?

3:08:14MrCan I ask an obvious question? Can I ask an obvious question? Alex, you know, with so many of these plants in public domain and being, you know, traded at clubs, you know, by patients, you know, and just so, you know, purchased and then recloned and resold, Are all of our genetics contaminated at this point?

3:08:37SpeakerWell, I mean, people will oftentimes be like, oh, I used it on the mother plant, or there will be a collective we work with that identifies this farmer that had three or four samples fail for a compound, and then when they go kind of call out the farmer, the dude will be like, oh, I didn't use it in veg, I sprayed it on a mother plant that they took clones off of.

3:08:59SpeakerBut, you know, I mean, honestly, we have to call bullshit on that because, you know, if we're picking it up on the, you know, because ultimately when we're picking a pesticide platform because of the limitations on the market, you know, on what we can ask for, you know, from the community for a sample, you know, we're limited by the sample size we take and the instrument capabilities we have.

3:09:20SpeakerAnd so with the sample size, you know, for extracts we're getting half a gram. We're getting like one and a half gram for flour, you know. And not only that, it's cherry picked by the grower. But in either case, if we're seeing it at tens of parts per million, it wasn't sprayed on the plant that was cloned off of. It was sprayed towards the end of veg.

3:09:44SpeakerBut it's one of these things. These compounds aren't going to be able to be used. I think the real thing is with the regulation of cannabis, which is going to be so much more strict than agricultural regulation on farming, It's going to really narrow down who are the badass growers and who aren't because it's really hard to grow herb on any level, especially one of 100 lights or 250 plants full sun outdoor.

3:10:07SpeakerYou know, it's a hard thing to do as a farmer to do it organically.

3:10:11MrCan I point something out? It depends on where you put the farm. And, you know, a lot of why Canada had such an advantage over pumping beef and bud into America here for a while is, you know, it's freaking cold up there. You don't have the hazards like we do in the desert in Southern California, like spider mites naturally occurring in your hikes and you bringing them home on your plants.

3:10:31MrYeah. And it's a lot different up there when you're pulling in ice cold air. So it depends geographically where you're pulling this.

3:10:39SpeakerYou're putting an image of Canada that's not exactly true. Most of the bugs are from B.C. and it's not actually that cold in a lot of places.

3:10:46MrBut you know, I grew up in Rhode Island, it's a lot different of a weather patent than it is in San Diego, LA. Come on, and be real, this is where I moved.

3:10:54SpeakerI mean, we're talking about gardening practices, really, and the problems are like powdery mildew and spider mites, right? And that's what most people spray these chemicals for. But dare I say this, geographically... Can I just finish what I'm saying? Of course. In cultural practices, there are little tricks that you can use to not get powdery mildew, and everybody was always implementing biological controls like, you know, Neothelius phyllacis or these different predator mites, and just on a constant introduction into their veg zones, you wouldn't have problems with spider mites popping up.

3:11:30SpeakerThat's also what makes a real farmer a real farmer though. It's like to understand how to use rotational bio-fungicides, bio-insecticides, compost teas, horticultural oils, predatory mites and insects. I have such hope for our industry because everybody's so scared about this impending doom of corporate In Flux and Takeover, it's like... I mean, look, it's going to be a learning curve like it was for people to go from basements to greenhouses, right?

3:12:01SpeakerLike, you know, Harborside just got that license down in Chular in the Salinas Valley, and that's like the world championships of farming down there. They grow all the lettuce and all the strawberries for, like, all of North America down there. And there's a huge disease pressure from bugs and molds and all that kind of stuff. So the bugs that you're going to have to fight going to farm down there are going to be like real, you know, pesticide resistant bugs.

3:12:29SpeakerSo part of like, you know, biological controls are going to be the way to go. Absolutely. Yeah. And I don't know. I think they'll also come down in prices. More people start using them. Even here in Canada, you go to the grocery store, you've got a problem, they want to sell you a chemical underneath the counter that they're not allowed to have, rather than push you onto the biological control, which they can sell you every two weeks.

3:12:50SpeakerYou know what I mean? I don't know. It's bad gardening practices that people have learned in Prohibition and trying to take shortcuts. Eagle 20 works. Microbutanol works against battery mildew. That's why people use it. You spray on the plant and for eight weeks you pretty much don't get anything. Yeah, I'd just like to add, though, that mycobutanyl is an azole fungicide, and it belongs to a class of really a dozen different products.

3:13:17SpeakerMycobutanyl is the one that, yes, when it thermally heats up, it's going to be prone to deliver hydrogen cyanide. There are many other azole fungicides that can be used that don't have that susceptibility. Michael Butanil and Eagle 20 is just one of them. There's a whole bunch of other azole products. Most of those azoles have very, very low mammalian toxicity and very low oral toxicity. They're the kinds of fungicides that are used to control yeast infections, athlete's foot, you know, like myconazole.

3:13:53SpeakerSo these things don't have a very, they're not very toxic. The problem is there's two problems. Again, the companies that make these active ingredients and that register them for use on crop production chemicals for food products have to register them with the Environmental Protection Agency with a whole tranche of safety and environmental data that just doesn't exist for cannabis. And the other big distinction is all produce, almost without exception, is washed.

3:14:25SpeakerCannabis is not washed. And so, yeah, anything that sticks to the trichome is going to be there. So, you know, I just think that the industry needs to realize that all of these fungicides, insecticides that are used for food crops, none of them have been tested for efficacy or for safety on use of cannabis. And so it's a real gray area for the industry. I think it's interesting what industry's gray area.

3:14:52SpeakerI was going to say, what's your guys' thoughts on washing cannabis? I know farmers that... Wash their plants, especially if they're not going to smoke them, if they're just going to wash them, cure them.

3:15:01ChrisWho's to say that the solubility of any of those compounds are going to be soluble in water? I mean, like, you're going to be stuck in a situation where you're going to, like, find ways to get rid of pesticides that are on a, like, you're going to just degrade the quality of the plant material at that point, I think.

3:15:18SpeakerWell, not even for that, but for powdery mildew, I think maybe you're saying. I know Jorge was recommending people do that for a while. Yeah, that's what I've heard, and I know I have a A friend who's in like Hawaii or something and they were talking about washing the plants before they cured them and smoked them and they just was traditionally just dunking the plants. I think a lot of that is also a bad agricultural practice.

3:15:41SpeakerLike if you're growing a variety that's suitable to your environment, you don't like cushion a greenhouse pretty much. But if you spray Eagle 20 and the Eagle 20 is now permeated into the cure... I'm trying to not talk about spraying Eagle 20. I'm trying to talk about other gardening practices, like even horticultural grade hydrogen peroxide or stuff like Green Cure, which is potassium bicarbonate, right? These things that actually fry the spores, powdery mildew spores.

3:16:12SpeakerSo if you're on top of your cultivation, you can actually be working on this stuff preventatively, right? Just making the point that most of those things, even if you did, Tony, even if you did wash the plant, because it's already sort of stuck into the trichome and stuck into the cuticle, I don't even think that washing the plant would remove something like Eagle 20 from the resin.

3:16:39SpeakerI don't think so.

3:16:40ChrisNo.

3:16:41SpeakerBecause they're not very much... I recommend that people use it, you know what I mean? That's really, like Alec is saying, it's not the way it's going to go. Josh, you've been trying to jump in on something for a little bit. Well, no, I think that's just the interesting experiment is kind of since we had this weird federal ban, we don't have any direction on pesticides. And like you're saying, the biodynamic solutions are going to be the only ones that really anyone's going to be able to make a case for.

3:17:06SpeakerNone of these states are going to take... Well, what's going to help everybody is they will develop resistant varieties. Resistant to mildew, resistant to mites. I've got varieties which never get mildew. I've got other varieties which seldom get mites or not very severely. So in the future, this will be the way. Yeah. Well, it's again, it's like we have varieties that are both, but the ones that are mite resistant typically aren't the ones that are PM resistant.

3:17:34SpeakerSo, it's again, it's choosing the right cultivar for your environment. And unfortunately, the market is dictated by what the palate wants, right? So, you kind of have to grow some things that people want.

3:17:45ChrisAnd OG can work more with those bees. Frankly, I think more usage of different pests, I mean, somewhat in jest, but more usage of predatory pests. I've talked to a number of people who on a large scale had a lot of success with that. I'm not that big of a grower, but it just seems like sort of a no-brainer to build sustainable sort of environments that obviously would require...

3:18:12ChrisDifferent animals in the case of obviously insects.

3:18:15SpeakerThe thing is they're not cheap. So people, when you start talking to them, people about using predators, it's like, wow, that's a lot of money. And it's like, look, you're going to lose a lot of money from having chemical damage. And then you're going to have to spray with chemicals anyway to treat them when you get them. It's better to just be preventative about it and start using them from the beginning.

3:18:33SpeakerIt's more expensive and it's more work to use predators. It's the only logical way to do it.

3:18:42MrWe were using them at Positronics indoors in Amsterdam 20 years ago because it was a completely biological or organic, for lack of translation, exactly what we did. And there's definitely challenges when you introduce these things into an otherwise clean environment. You know, but we had traffic coming in of growers, so we were just getting an invasion of problems every day as, you know, customers walked in the stores and walked around the plants, which were all out in the open.

3:19:14SpeakerYeah. And in so many ways, I think this really, yeah, this kind of highlights a lot of this big point, you know, I was trying to attempt at hitting, and it's that, you know, it's like early prevention, you know, it's like a preventative maintenance plan, you know, is it like that quote, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? You know, and so to employ an IPM strategy, it's a methodical approach towards preventing it from early on because whenever you have a plant that's a clone, you can dip it in Azomax, Azodactrin, some type of organic OMRI oil and get full plant coverage, you know, and kind of take care of the plant every, you know, on a weekly spray basis to where by the time the plants are shrubs, you know, you've gotten, Seven cycles of full plant coverage with an organic oil or a compost tea or a biofungicide like Actinovate or Serenade and what have you.

3:20:11SpeakerBut having this cyclical, methodical approach towards taking care of it preventatively from the time plants are young, Put you in a position where you have vigorous, healthy plants at the end of veg that you don't need to spray anything on. But getting to the whole kind of idea of choosing cultivars and all this other stuff in the market demands, whenever you recognize a strain like OG Kush and how popular and ubiquitous it is in the California palette, especially in Southern California, and you recognize how many people are growing it in these huge open warehouses or whatever, what have you, oftentimes It's the environmental factors that are bringing about powdery mildew or whatever.

3:20:52SpeakerSo it's like somebody not having the right level of dehumidification or the right level of AC in their indoor environment is going to kind of help exacerbate the spread of any of these plant pathogens or pests. And then whenever people don't have these preventative programs in, they're limited by their environment, so they have to resort to these... Adam bombs to drop in their room, which so many times put anybody that's ever going to smoke the flower at the end, you know, at some type of risk that they just somehow justify because it's okay, it's used on apple or it's, you know, grapes or whatever.

3:21:30SpeakerBut, you know, when you get into the environment part, and just to wrap up my point, it's like, you know, all these pesticides that are regulated by the EPA, you know, for use on, you know, all these different crops like grapes and such, You know, they're also studied and permitted because the UV spectrum from the sun is the major thing breaking down those pesticides. You know, and so my, you know, thought is like, okay, the OG Kush grower in the warehouses that are running, you know, year old HPS bulbs, or any type of bulb for that matter, most indoor lighting has no UV spectrum.

3:22:06SpeakerAnd so it's like, how much is that exacerbating onto the residual effect that these combos might be having, you know?

3:22:12BubblemanAnd then I guess there's the idea of people who are growing with a full sort of living soil and creating this fungal throughout the entire plant that's a beneficial, that builds a stronger plant, that helps fight bugs and pests and diseases. What about the potential failing of a microbial test because you have these positive microbials versus the negative ones? I guess that's going to open up a whole bunch of education on the subject as well.

3:22:42SpeakerYeah, Alex, maybe you and Josh can tell us a little bit about the testing procedure for the Emerald Cup. There was some talk back then about the microbials testing and what failed and what passed. Can you just give us a breakdown on that? Yeah, Josh actually just gave a really awesome presentation at Harvard Medical School for CanMed kind of on a lot of trends. So please, Josh, go ahead.

3:23:07SpeakerWell, Michael, I don't know. We didn't really set micro limits for the Emerald Cup, you know, high and fast. So we just filed basically the HPA limits. So it's nothing we set. And, you know, 12% of the Emerald Cup crop, and that's an outdoor crop, Would have failed for one of the AHPA guidelines. So the micro issue wasn't a big deal, but then we saw a ton of microbutanol.

3:23:37SpeakerSo you take microbutanol out of the equation and what happens? But yeah, micro, the AHPA guidelines, which is what everyone seems to be following, at least in the crops we see, don't seem to be Two restrictive, but still you got 12% of your crop failing, but then you have remediation steps, you know, so.

3:23:57ChrisWhat percentage of the crop of that whole, like, set of samples that you ran were free of both microbutanil and failed microbiological? Like, how many would have passed both of the...

3:24:18SpeakerNot exactly sure. I don't think we have the numbers or the, you know, we didn't have the kind of... I'd have to move that up. Give me a second. But something to recognize, though, is like, you know, getting to the root of that question, it's like, again, it's like best practices. It's like if you're spraying an aerobic compost tea with millions of aerobic microbes that you often have no idea what those microbes even are because you may have brewed some shitty tea with biofilm on your side with an air stone...

3:24:47SpeakerYou know, it's like, if you're spraying that on week six flowering plants, obviously it's going to fail and be way over limit for whatever limits are going to be imposed. I think it's important to recognize that, you know, you could make a very strong argument that a lot of these aerobic microbes could be even considered beneficial, you know, and probiotic to, you know, like the types that we put into our bodies, you know, and probiotics are being seen You know, through kind of some of this kind of a mimetic stuff to have endocannabinoid stimulating effects when ingested, but the compost tea microbes, if they're being used later on in flower, again, they didn't have the proper IPM program to take care of it when they're early.

3:25:27SpeakerBecause I think, you know, again, it gets to the point, whether you're, if you're spraying elemental sulfur, even if it's organic, but you're doing it late in the flower because you fucked off the veg and didn't take care of the plant preventatively to get to that point, Then you fail just like the person that's going to spray Eagle 20 on week six farm plants. And so it's like, sure, you can, in a harm reduction standpoint, you can use certain things over others that might be less harmful.

3:25:53SpeakerLike, you know, whenever I first grew plants,

3:25:58SpeakerUnder kind of Tim Blake at the Emerald Company with Area 101, he's one of my biggest mentors in the cannabis movement. He taught me how to be an organic farmer outdoor about 10, 12 years ago or so. But there was late rain and we ended up dipping a substantial amount of the crop into like trash cans that were full of sodium bicarbonate and water. I mean, yeah, that was an option to kind of get rid of some of the powdery mildew that was appearing on the flowers.

3:26:29SpeakerBut if we tested that for a microbiology test, that would have failed every panel that we do now at the lab. And so is it, I mean, yeah, it's just whatever, I think the point again is whatever you do, if you spray anything, whether it's organic or synthetic, you know, chemical EPA regulated, in or later into flour, You know, no matter what, you're going to somehow degrade the end quality.

3:26:55SpeakerAnd are there things that you can use up to the day of harvest? Yes. And some are better than others. But, you know, a lot of this information is still just yet to be determined. And all of it shows, you know, on the cultivation end, some level of systemic failure because there wasn't the proper preventatives in place to kind of take care of the issue before it became one.

3:27:15SpeakerWere the microbiological failures due to actually ID'd microbiological diseases, or were they maybe okay because they were, like you said, beneficial maybe, but they were present, so they failed?

3:27:35SpeakerI think this is why microbiotesting should be more specific towards certain organizms as well. Exactly.

3:27:43MrYeah.

3:27:44SpeakerSo are you guys studying, well, Aspergillus is a known fungi that causes lung infections from cannabis. There are case studies about that, but no state requires that test yet. It's just totals often, which aren't so clear. Are you guys using the... Sorry, sorry, Alec. Just wondering if you guys are using the medicinal genomics testing for that stuff now, or you're still using the 3M plates? We're still using 3M, and that's all that...

3:28:12SpeakerSorry, go ahead, Josh, I apologize. Well, I was just going to say we, you know, with pathogen detection, we don't use such gnomics kits, but we use, you know, similar technology. But we do PCI for pathogen detection because it's better and it's quicker, but then we, you know, we use... You know, standard, yeah, just PG film for the rest of the assays. And that's the thing, too, is, you know, you can design a really high-tech test that, you know, PCR and factor out all the beneficials and do speciation, but that gets really expensive.

3:28:47SpeakerAnd it also slows the process down. And really, I think you have, I don't think you have as big of a micro-issue At least in the state of California, with the samples we test, it's going to differ regionally, but we don't have as much of an issue with microbiological contamination as we do with other things. So you can try and design these tests, and you can build costs into it, and I guess it's counterproductive from what I'm saying, but also at the same time, I just don't think it's going to be a major problem with the crop growing in California.

3:29:24SpeakerI think that's what's going to be advantageous about coming to California to grow marijuana. When do you think people will be able to test their living plants for virus infection?

3:29:41SpeakerWhen will they be able to? Yeah, you guys can do that probably. Test their living plant for viral infections. Yeah, you can do that. It's done in a lot of industries. It's done in the grape industry. We don't do that at our lab. It's definitely possible. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely viruses that affect cannabis. There's several out there. Also, on the micro-testing topic, you know, so although, yes, there can be a case made that there are more appropriate or specific assays that can be developed to...

3:30:17SpeakerYou know, point out and identify specifically the concerning microbes that should be looked for. You know, the ones that are like being carried in by white flies. You know, white flies are a vector for a specific aspergillus species that produce mycotoxins. So it's like, so, you know, so there are, with enough lobbying, I think, on the community's end and the laboratory's end, there can be the, Thank you so much for joining us today.

3:30:45SpeakerWe're going to talk a little bit more about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today.

3:31:12SpeakerYou know, having a ceiling limit of all these different microbes. And so it's like, are those levels too, are they overall too strict? You know, I think our data shows otherwise. I think, you know, it's very, it's not, you know, as long as, you know, there are best practices. I mean, if you have, if you're trimming, you know, if you're harvesting and trimming without gloves and you have, you know, 20 farm hands all putting their fingers and hands all over all the buds, You know, there's so much more of the kind of failures that we see kind of that can come from post-harvest handling, cross-contamination type stuff, especially with certain microbes like Pseudomonas.

3:31:51SpeakerAnd so if anything, you know, I think it's important for the community to recognize that there are going to be microbe tests, there are going to be levels put, and as long as you kind of take care of the problems, you know, just like pest prevention, It's like this whole IPM approach that is something that's so deep to organic farming and kind of like, you know, regenerative kind of biodynamic type programs.

3:32:16SpeakerBut it's a really educated approach towards taking care of the problem early on, which I think ultimately will separate and differentiate the men and the women from the boys and the girls. I've been to a lot of big build-outs. You see these huge $5 million epic build-outs of an indoor facility in Colorado, but all the weed sucks. And it's all being recalled now. And if you just see how many...

3:32:45SpeakerYou know, all these product recalls and limited liability lawsuits and, you know, all this stuff is just starting to happen, you know, and it was in absence of certain regulations that Colorado had in place, but now are kind of growing to be these huge issues that potentially can destroy an entire brand and everything you've worked so hard to create. So I think there's so much importance to, like, you know, getting back to that local, farm-fresh, you know, community-based agricultural model.

3:33:12SpeakerYou know, because with it, you know, it's like you're having an idea where the farm is that you're getting your sourcing from because ultimately it's going to help speak on behalf of your product and your brand or potentially like put it, you know, possibility of being recalled.

3:33:27BubblemanInstead of farm to table, we would call it farm to bowl.

3:33:33SpeakerOh, dude, vote with your, I couldn't agree with that more, man. Like, whenever people fully know, too, you, so many people are going to Whole Foods, Whole Paychecks, and spending all their money on all this organic produce, and if people hadn't any idea how common some of these, like, concerning EPA regulated pesticides that are on all the conventionally grown strawberries and grapes and stuff that people are buying, people would be outraged.

3:33:55SpeakerAnd so, you know, yeah, vote with your bowl, and, you know, farm to bowl, you know, that's something very real, and I think I think the cannabis regulated market is going to strengthen, if anything, the greater food agricultural movement of Farm Fresh. Right.

3:34:09MrAnd to point out though, don't you guys think that success starts small in a lot of cases? A lot of these people in Colorado are inexperienced. They've got funding, but they don't have a whole lot of time in the garden with their fingers in the dirt. They don't know what's going to happen. They can afford a lot of lights, but they don't foresee one little bug coming in and ruining their world.

3:34:30SpeakerRight. 100%, man, and that's, and again, you know, how many people though in like the Emerald Triangle, which I feel like, you know, in all over California, all over the West Coast, you know, including Canada, it's like, I mean, to be able to, I mean, there's so many OG old school people growing on this level, don't even know what Eagle 20 is for so long, and generations like that, so I feel like that's a built-in level of resilience that the local small and medium scale farmers have in their program, and being able to...

3:34:58MrI think California has a ton of practical experience doing this. This is why it's been a mecca, if you will, of cannabis genetics and people coming to it for decades now. You see people trying to replicate it, and it looks easy on the outside, but it's a lot harder in practical application to do what you see a lot of these farmers doing in these hills and these greenhouses, especially when you start setting up and you start having real problems.

3:35:26MrYou know, suddenly they're in panic mode. And, you know, where you've had gardeners up here in the hills of Humboldt and Mendocino and other places fail many times before they learned how to get into that groove. You know, startup companies can't afford to do that. They've got to kind of... And the climate. And the climate. They're screwed.

3:35:47SpeakerAnd the climate. There's a reason, you know, most of the produce grown in America is grown in California. We have a great climate for it. And I guess that was my point, too, is that on fresh cannabis, you know, at least with the guidelines that kind of everyone's floating around right now, you know, I don't see this as a huge issue, but it is a perishable crop.

3:36:06SpeakerSo where we do see problems is in storage. And it also... Another thing to consider with the micro issue is food products. Food products, you know, you have a lot of mandatory testing. If I'm going to make a processed food product, as soon as you put a little THC in it, there's relatively no oversight. And that's our biggest concern, at least for me, is we have this wholly almost unregulated edibles market.

3:36:35SpeakerAnd it's not necessarily cannabis safety, it's a food safety issue because the FDA won't touch it. And so that's another kind of issue that I think the cannabis industry is really going to have to face probably sooner rather than later. Because that's what's going to give us a black eye. I think cannabis has been A relatively safe product. And yes, there are certain pathogens that can pop up.

3:36:58SpeakerAnd we do see E. coli once in a while, but not an alarming amount. But a lot of these food products are really, really scary. And that's something that I think we could end up shooting ourselves in the foot as an industry if we don't really take a look at that and solve it before there is some sort of issue. If the growers at the Emerald Triangle use BT, Bacteria Thuringiensis, will that cause a fail?

3:37:27SpeakerOn that level, Rob, so very interestingly, I work closely with this group that you're familiar with in Davenport, one of the OG groups that have been leading the movement in California, and here in Santa Cruz, part of the Pioneers Prop 215. They, essentially, we saw a very interesting trend. You know, they had a new garden manager a couple years back, and he, dipel is BT. It's, you know, backless thermogenesis, however you pronounce it.

3:38:05SpeakerBut they were using BT on this rotational level, you know, thinking everything was good. But they just had it part of the process to spray up to week four or five of flower. And what was really interesting is we saw about 60 to 70% that year of their entire crop in coastal Davenport kind of essentially kind of be identified for way above level microbe counts for not just aerobic bacteria, but it was for yeast and mold, for coliforms, you know, there's just a ton of stuff and it created this really high level of overall crop quote failure, but wouldn't necessarily be a failure.

3:38:45SpeakerYou know, compared to like tobacco standards, compared to food standards, you know, for aerobic bacteria. But anyway, my point is, so it was like this, it was a nightmare type situation where so much of the entire crop had to be dedicated that year to going and making into extracts. And it was what it was, but, you know, after kind of doing the due diligence and back tracing what was happening, you know, identified, you know, the biofund or bioinsecticide used kind of later on into flour and You know, that was, you know, the huge point.

3:39:16SpeakerSo, you know, kind of it was recommended in the subsequent years to not spray that compound late into flower. And so just like all the other sprays, they were all stopped. You know, there's no more foliar application. You can, you know, you can root drench BT or compost teas and everything like that all to the day of flower, or I'm sorry, to the day of harvest. But you don't spray it on plant.

3:39:40SpeakerAnd so the next years, and just to pin this point, the next years, yeah, they were less than 5% overall crop failure from kind of above limit microbe levels. And they're again in coastal Davenport, which is kind of humidity, all this stuff. And so is the BT or BS application issue a big one? Yes, if you're using it improperly. If it's not used properly and it's kind of all stopped as the plants are transitioning into flower, then you're golden.

3:40:10SpeakerYeah, well that's kind of what's happening right now is all the growers don't, or like they're not real growers that learned agriculture in a greenhouse. You know, they're people that learned to grow in a grow room and they picked up all these bad techniques. Bacteria and viruses... Bacteria and viruses need water to grow, right, to reproduce. So even when you're spraying, you're increasing the humidity on the flowers and you're actually giving bacteria more ability to live, you know.

3:40:38SpeakerSo that's just bad agricultural practices. And I think it's even more kind of, you can divide it up a little finer than that too. Like, you know, your bacterias are I usually pretty relatively, like compared, the only kind of real comparison we have is tobacco. Compared to tobacco, the aerobic plate count load, which is your bacteria, is much lower than, say, tobacco. So if we're trying to, you know, I guess set some sort of comparison, that's not as much of an issue, but cannabis is much, much, stays much wetter than tobacco.

3:41:18SpeakerTobacco is dried out, you know, much, much, much farther than tobacco. Cannabis. And so yeast and mold are, I think, a little bit bigger of an issue with cannabis. So those counts we see much higher in comparison to, like, tobacco. And that's the thing here is we've got some guidelines out there, but I don't think we've really done anywhere that I've seen in the world where we've done a really good, I guess, justification for these limits that we're setting.

3:41:44SpeakerWe're just kind of trying to pull things from different places. And so... Go ahead. Could you speak on the tobacco micro topic? Well, that's what I'm saying. You know, with tobacco, you know, your aerobic plate count loads are, like, an order of magnitude higher than cannabis in average. But then with, like I said, yeast and mold, they're much, much lower. Tobacco has almost no yeast and mold on it.

3:42:09SpeakerSo cannabis has kind of a huge load compared to tobacco. And so what are the long-term effects of that? Who knows at this point, I guess.

3:42:20SpeakerHey, I wanted to ask you one thing also about your presentation at Canomed, which was awesome, by the way. You mentioned something about a negative correlation with terpenylene in the varieties of the cup. Was I correct? Oh, what? You're talking about the correlation of certain terpenes and their presence at the Emerald Cup? Well, yeah. So, yeah, in the Emerald Cup, and that's why I'm kind of sharing this data, it was actually...

3:42:46SpeakerGreat for us to kind of do them all, and obviously they're public, so you can kind of compare the areas, and it's a really good kind of, I guess, cross-section of the California outdoor market. And, you know, you look at, and it's kind of always something I feel like the laboratories kind of did a disservice to the industry when they, you know, when we started doing cannabinoid testing is it became this kind of bigger is better thing.

3:43:09SpeakerAnd a lot of these interesting strains with unique terpene profiles because they tested 12, 13, 14%, they just kind of went away. And so looking at the Emerald Cup data, you see that if you compare the top 20 strains that were, and the other thing with the Emerald Cup is that they get really good judges And they have a really good kind of judging process, and they get kind of experts in the industry, and you get the top 20 samples compared to kind of the overall set, and there's no difference in total overall cannabinoids.

3:43:49SpeakerThe cannabinoid content wasn't at all a determiner of how high they were going to score. But if you look at the chirping content, and I guess it kind of just makes sense, chirping The top 20 had over standard deviation away from the meat for the whole set, meaning the terpene content of the top 20 was way higher than the overall population.

3:44:14SpeakerI think the cannabis industry is going to start coming back the other way, but overall, if you're breeding plants or you're selecting plants other than someone looking at a test score and just picking out the highest number, Actual people just smoking it, blind testing, they don't care if it has high cannabinoids. I was taking another puff, but it's just terpenes. It's 100% terpene. Right. But so, I thought that you showed in your presentation that a correlation of a whole series of terpenes and what was found more common in the samples and what wasn't as common.

3:44:50SpeakerNo? Yeah, I have that data. I didn't present that there. You brought it in front of me. I can pull it up. It's a little early in the morning for me. I noticed this thing around the world in different markets where there actually seems to be a regional preference for certain flavors. And there are terpenolene dominant. That is an interesting thing if you want just to speak on terpenolene.

3:45:17SpeakerIt is a unique terpene. When you test

3:45:21SpeakerTest 100 strains, 90 of them will have almost no terpenylene, and then all of a sudden certain strains are just terpenylene dominant. And most of the other kind of like major terpenes are always there, but just not in this high amount. So, you know, if you kind of graph out some of these other major, limonene, myrcene, kind of beta-caryophyllene, pinene, the ones that kind of, you know, the major terpenes, you know, they're always kind of there.

3:45:48SpeakerYou know, if they're there a lot or they're there a little, they're Major ones are there, but terpenylene is kind of just unique terpene from at least the ones we look at. We look at 30 some, 34 I think now. And so, you know, and there's a bunch more, but I mean, there's not so much time in a chromatographic run, I guess. But yeah, so terpenylene is the one terpene that I found that just behaves that way.

3:46:11SpeakerAnd if you kind of graph them over, it just behaves differently. Why that is, I don't know, but. Yeah, it's either there in huge amounts or class of strains. But did any of these winning samples have that terpenylene in them? Well, a lot of the winners, Josh, if I'm not mistaken, it seems like a lot of myrcene was kind of the favorite this year, right? Yeah, the top three were myrcene-dominant strains.

3:46:38SpeakerThere was one or two in the top 20. There was one or two terpenylene-dominant strains. A lot of myrcene. But, yeah, a lot of Myrcene Dominants, which we're just curious, you know, it's kind of counterintuitive, and maybe just people are overly too good. How much is Myrcene Dominant? Because, I mean, even the OGs, a lot of the times under certain cultivation conditions, and you can see from Mark's presentation, that a lot of the OGs become Myrcene Dominant, but, you know, under other cultivations, they're either Beta-Caryophyllene Dominant or Laminate Dominant.

3:47:05SpeakerSo, there is that interplay, and that could just be the cultivation environment, you know, that's pushing some of the Myrcene up in those varieties. It would be really cool to be able to see all the turt breakdowns of each variety. I don't know if that's posted somewhere or not. There's a lot of the data for the Emerald Cup winners you can find on the Emerald Cup website.

3:47:30SpeakerI'm not too sure how deep their pages go on the individual dominant terpenes in each strain, but we can definitely help kind of get that, you know, if you're interested, kind of check it out, some of the data. I'm sure the Hatch Churchers would be interested in seeing that. The other thing I want to give you guys a prop for is your website. You've got that really cool database that people can come in and put in the names of varieties and search based on tests that have terpene results or only cannabinoid results or Certain dispensaries or whatever.

3:48:00SpeakerAnd that's really a cool little tool to play with for people that are... The cool thing is, since we test for so many kind of retail outlets, you know, obviously, you know, our client's data is the data, but, you know, the majority of our clients choose to make the results public. And that's kind of cool. Yeah, then the information can be out there for anyone to kind of take a look at.

3:48:19SpeakerAnd, yeah, it's good that it kind of speaks to kind of the openness of... All data is private, though, unless... That's cool. But the majority of the tests we do, the people choose to make it public, and so it's cool. I mean, anyone can go look it up. We have it, you know, and a lot of the other labs do the exact same thing. People really need to learn about what varieties are.

3:48:43SpeakerI mean, this is part of the name game confusion that happens is OG Kush becomes a popular name, and then all of a sudden you're on the East Coast and somebody's got a myrcene pining strain that's calling it OG, right? Even up here in Canada in the legal market, there's a company called Tilray, and They're part of Privateer Holdings, which is this big money play made up of Bay Area folks and some other people.

3:49:06SpeakerThey're pushing their OG, which is a pining-dominant variety. They're also pushing their Jack Carreras and stuff as pining-dominant varieties, and pining is not in any way in Jack. Those are all terpenylene specifically dominant. Yeah, but terpenylene smells piney, so people, like, confuse it. You know, they make these assumptions. But again, that comes to the quality of the analytics also, because it's like, there's such a, so much of Privateer and Leafly's build-out of all their conceptual understanding of terpenes and strains have unfortunately kind of came from a flawed data set, you know, and so they're now as a brand, but... Yeah, well, and that's the thing, and now they're so invested in it that they're trying to, like...

3:49:50SpeakerYou know, they keep telling the stories that back up the claims, but, you know, you guys have seen all the data, too. Confirmation. Yeah, well, when you look at real varieties, you know what I mean? When you see something that you know is an OG, you know that it's, like, dominant and you're sitting here offering a lemonade, right? And you see this whole other class, like, the ones that won the Emerald Cup this year were...

3:50:13SpeakerLike the, was it Black Lime Reserve, like those types of strains, and those are in the myrcene pining class, you know. And so you see kind of, and you see some, you know, Mean Genes Genetics, who kind of won, like he, you know, that myrcene pining dominant, which won it, also kind of had I want to say a couple more that shared a similar profile in the top ten as well.

3:50:35SpeakerSee, one thing that I think is really funny about the Bay Area is I think that that Myrcene Pinene is the flavor fingerprint of the Bay Area, just like OG is SoCal. It was for a long time. The Perps and the Blue Dream, you know, were all hugely popular in that area. But now you see Cookies. You know, Caryophylline, Limonene, you know, you see those ones like super popularized now in the Bay as well with all the Sherberts and Gelatos and all that stuff, you know.

3:51:06SpeakerBut I just think it's funny that that Myrcene Pinene keeps coming back in the Bay Area cups and I wonder if it's, again, part of that local preference, that local taste that people seem to get, you know, because people like what they like. They like what they're used to and in Spain it's critical. Anything that has the word critical in it is like synonymous with Gosh, it's a different variety, you know, but that's what the popular thing is in Spain.

3:51:33SpeakerIt's just different in different countries. In Austria, it's chronic, I think. So, anyway, it's just a funny little thing. Yeah, and that's what's really interesting, because I'm excited to see kind of cups take a more advanced approach towards judging and creating... categories and what you know because you've always seen like the best indica or the best hybrid or best sativa but then you'll see an OG entered in every class in these cups you know and that's like kind of like you know if if if hopefully the cups are these cultural events to help you know purvey such deep awareness about cannabis science through to the you know broad cultural you know discourse you know we hopefully can have as labs impact on these cups to help them you know broaden their You know, understanding of how to maybe structure some of these contests to tease out like, you know, novel, awesome, unique, you know, really well-grown things, but not necessarily having, you know, a microclimate palette choice bias the overall data set, you know?

3:52:44SpeakerYeah, Mark, Bubble Man and I were kicking about an idea about that last week. We'll see what happens. We can maybe do one somewhere. Cool. I'd love to wrap up the Emerald Cup with that because we have a deep family of ours and I have a lot of influence in helping to push forward the competition and such. Yeah, the Emerald Cup's great. I mean, anybody that hasn't been and that can go, definitely go.

3:53:07SpeakerIt's a fantastic time.

3:53:09MrI'm sure Tim will do the show again with us. We could have you guys both on at the same time. It's... It is my favorite event. And Tim had a good time with us talking about Adult Use of Marijuana Act a couple weeks back. So it would be a good fit if you're up for it.

3:53:28SpeakerWonderful. Yeah, that would be super awesome. It's really great to have you guys here sharing your knowledge and perspective. Thanks for coming.

3:53:35BubblemanYeah, I was just going to say the exact same thing. It's been a real nice episode today, obviously, with Irvin Rosenfeld starting it off and talking to us for an hour. He had some incredible stories. Thank you again for that, Todd, for inviting him in and setting that up. And obviously, thanks to everyone from the labs, Justin from Excelsior Analytical and Josh and Alec from SC Labs.

3:54:02BubblemanThank you Skunk Man Sam and Chimera, Mark Scaldone, and as always everyone that has been but is gone, Chris Barone from The Clear, Tony Verzura, anyone else that I'm forgetting. Thank you guys for making Hash Church what it is, a really cool amount of, you know, a four hour block of time where we can get together and share and talk and discuss. And just see where the conversation leads us to and hopefully it leads us to a little bit more learning and a little bit more education for those watching.

3:54:35BubblemanWe've got 700 people still with us and I want to thank all of you as well for watching and we will see you next week. Tony and I will be at the Lyft Conference in Toronto doing Hash Church from there and I hope to have all of you back again real soon. Once again, really thank you guys for sharing your time at It's appreciated not just by me, but by a whole lot of people.

3:54:57BubblemanSo thank you.

3:55:03BubblemanPerfect, Sam. Way to end it with the bong rip. Peace out, everyone.