Compassion Is a Verb: Wade Laughter Tribute

0:16BubblemanOh, well, look at that. We're live. And I had no idea. But here we are. Let me just shut this down and I'll shut this down. Let's make sure we can hear me. Yes, we can hear me. I just heard me scream through the screen. So everyone, please welcome to Hash Church Season 11, Episode 48. The Compassion episode. This is an episode that Wade Laughter, our dearly departed friend and mentor, wanted to do when we were all planning our shows, when Stephen was doing sports medicine and Caleb was doing the show on music and sayings in music, cannabis sayings.

1:01BubblemanDr. Mark pulled together the aromatic volatile compound with abstract and Wade had wanted to do this episode on compassion. And so today, That's what we're going to do. First, I want to begin by shouting out our sponsors. So we're going to do that as we do here on Hash Church. Yeah. So shout out to the Press Club, trusted by top hash makers from around the world since 2016.

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3:59BubblemanSo welcome, everyone. And I just wanted to welcome everyone to this very special episode of Hash Church, an episode rooted in heart, humanity, and the belief that cannabis culture is at its best when guided by compassion. Today, we're going to lean into the simple yet powerful truth that compassion is a verb, an action we choose, a practice we embody, and a responsibility we carry forward in our community.

4:25BubblemanFew people represent that ethos more fully than our dear friend Wade Laughter. Wade has long been a light in the cannabis world, not because he has sought attention, but because he has offered himself in service through decades of advocacy, education, and tireless patient support. Wade has really shown us all what it truly means to lead with empathy. Many of you know Wade from his thoughtful, grounded contributions to Hash Church, whether sharing insights on cultivations, genetics, terpene expressions, or patient needs, Wade brings humility, intelligence, and deep spiritual calm that elevates every conversation.

5:01BubblemanHe reminds us that cannabis is not simply an industry, it is a lifetime, a lifeline for many, a medicine that deserves respect, and a culture that must remain anchored in care. Wade's devotion extends far beyond our Sunday sessions. As one of the founders of the Caladrius Network, he has worked to bring healing, dignity, and support to catastrophically ill children and their families. Some of the most vulnerable members of our community, his compassion there is not a concept, it is a verb.

5:31BubblemanIt is hands-on, heart-led, and deeply human work that has changed lives. So today, as we explore the meaning of compassion within the cannabis culture, It's history, it's present, and it's future. We do so in honor of Wade Laughter. His life and actions remind us that the true legacy at this point is not in products, profits, or trends, but it's in the people we uplift and the love we bring forward.

6:00BubblemanThis episode is dedicated to Wade, our teacher, our brother, and our reminder that compassion is something that we do. Let's begin. Little bit of a heartstring, Monica. Got you on the heartstrings. I'm crying myself, so let's cry together. It was beautiful. We can remember Wade with tears. That's okay. Welcome to Dr. Ethan Russo. Welcome to Mike K for showing up. Yeah, this is a special one, guys.

6:32BubblemanI've been wanting to do this. Oh, for quite some time, really, since Wade first mentioned it to me, and that's got to be, it's got to be a year plus, maybe two years plus when we started mentioning that we wanted to do these episodes. Like I mentioned earlier, Stephen Philpott Jr. did the one on sports medicine. Caleb did the one on music. Mark promoted the one for volatile organic compounds.

7:00BubblemanAnd Wade, of course, was, I want to do one on compassion, a compassion episode. And I thought, what a beautiful, like, of course you want to do one on compassion. And so I apologize for taking so long to do it. Sorry I waited so long, Wade, but this one's for you, brother. And yeah, we're going to get through this. We're going to push through with some stories.

7:22BubblemanWe're going to discuss what compassion means to each and every one of us. We have a long day today with a lot of great folks that will be coming in. We've got, I see Wendy and Colton Turner, some of our patient stories from Years past, I see Etienne Fontaine. I see Myrtle Clark from South Africa is going to be coming in. It's going to be a powerful show.

7:45BubblemanKeep the tissues close because we're going to need them. We're going to feed those seeds with our tears today. And I'm personally looking forward to it. It's going to be beautiful. Wow. Colton is a man. What happened there?

8:06BubblemanSo good to see you, Colton and Wendy. Wow. It has been too long, guys. It's good to see you. How you doing? It's amazing to see you, dude. Like, I'm very happy to see you. It's been a long journey. I got a thing today from my Facebook group saying that Hash Church is celebrating its 10-year anniversary on Facebook. So we started it about a year later. We are about 11 years old, but 10 years, a decade of doing this all together.

8:38BubblemanAnd you and your mom have certainly been a huge inspiration to the Hash Church audience. I initially had invited so many people and activists and, you know, people like ATN and Debbie Goldsberry and Steve D'Angelo and Hillary Black and just all these wonderful people. And I thought, I need to have some patient stories as well. And I thought, who's the greatest patient story ever? Well, I'd rather be illegally alive than legally dead, Colton Turner.

9:07BubblemanSo welcome.

9:10Etienne FontanNice mustache, by the way.

9:12BubblemanThank you. Awesome. Awesome that you have the opportunity to grow that mustache.

9:21SpeakerYes. That's right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Putting a little CBD balm in it every now and then.

9:28BubblemanBeautiful. No, it's really nice to see you. We've got a beautiful group of people. We got Dr. Ethan Russo in the house, Etienne and Mike. We got Myrtle coming in from South Africa. And we have Monica. Wade's partner, dear Monica, who has shared Wade with us for so many years on Hash Church and just helped facilitate, you know, his end of life to be as full of love and as positive as it possibly can be.

9:55BubblemanAnd so it's really, really nice to have you here with us, Monica. Don't feel that you have to, you know, If you have something to say, we're here to hear it. If you want to sit and listen, we're here to do that as well. If you just want to cry with us, we'll do that with you as well because my goodness, Wade is a man worth crying about.

10:17BubblemanAnd today is, uh, is, uh, is about compassion and compassion is a verb. You know, initially I thought, what a beautiful quote. I looked a little deeper and I saw where that quote came from originally, which was, uh, I always mess up his name, but Thicc, Thicc Pon Mot. Someone fixed that. I'm destroying it.

10:37SpeakerThicc Non Hot?

10:38BubblemanThicc Non Hot. Yeah. He was, he was one of the original people that said compassion is a verb. And I thought, of course, Wade has that in common with him. So I'm really excited for today's show. We've got a bunch of really wonderful people in. The Dragonfly is going to show up. We've got Forrest, who's going to show up. We've got, I invited Philip McMillan, who started the Compassion Club in Nelson, BC.

11:07BubblemanI invited Hilary Black, who started the BC Compassion Club. I invited Ted Smith, who's still working in Compassion in Victoria and helping extremely vulnerable people. And yeah, I'm hoping that we're all just gonna have a really lovely, You know kind of conversation and really I guess we're going to talk about compassion and what it means to us. I can tell you that you know I got into cannabis as someone who definitely had passion I'm not sure initially how much compassion I had, but I had a passion.

11:42BubblemanI loved the feeling of, you know, unapologetically, much like Skunk Man Sam, I loved getting high. I loved it. It was the thing that drove me. I'll be honest. It wasn't initially patience. It wasn't initially hemp. It wasn't initially any of those things. Those were the things I was led to through my passion. It really wasn't until I met Hillary Black, Who just popped into the room, funny enough.

12:08BubblemanWow, ears burning much? It wasn't until I met my dear friend, Hillary Black, when I'd come out here and I've told the story a few times. We were kind of the Manitoba, you know, we were kind of the hillbillies, right? We're coming from the prairies. These West Coasters were so cool. And they were just like, we were just like, let's go to Mark Emery's store. And that's where Hillary was.

12:28BubblemanMy God, I think she was 16 years old when I First met her, maybe 15, really young. Yeah, the whole crew there was very, I guess they were just very busy and very focused. And Hillary always had attention to us. Even back then, before she was really offering that compassion to the people she decided to shine her light on, she was willing to shine it on a bunch of hillbillies with some finger hash from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

12:56BubblemanAnd that meant a lot to us.

12:57SpeakerActually, I just thought you guys were cute, that's all.

12:59BubblemanWell, whatever it was, let me tell you, thank you for that because it meant the world. And it really was kind of a big fire, you know, underneath us to come when we'd come back from visiting you guys, we'd go back and be like, okay, We can't do what they're doing. Like, we got to figure out something else. And that really led us down this whole hemp pathway, doing the whole hemp thing in Manitoba.

13:24BubblemanIt was a little bit of a different pathway. It was very much industry and ministers and all of this sort of stuff. But when I finally came out to BC to move in 96, that was when Hillary was kind of getting into her flow. 97, I guess you would say you started thinking about this a little bit stronger. Am I getting those years right, Hillary? Is it kind of a 97?

13:50BubblemanYou're muted. So you're muted.

13:58SpeakerThe bike delivery service out of Hemp BC started in 95. And the nonprofit actually got registered in 97. But by 96, we were in that awful stinky place next to the chicken rendering plant. And then out of the back of Brad's Hemp Store on the drive. And then we moved into the location In at 14th and commercial in 96, right before David Suzuki and the nature of things was coming.

14:35SpeakerAnd we had like a month to like build a place where we could get filmed by the nature of things. So it really started in 95.

14:42BubblemanWow. Well, 96 was the year I moved to BC. That was when I kind of remember in that year, year and a bit, you were legitimately the only person I knew in BC. I remember you being like, hey, should I move to like Bel Air and move in with Todd McCormick into this mansion? Or should I stay in Canada and do something? And I'm just like, look, I'm...

15:03BubblemanI'm just going to be honest. I'm completely selfish and I want you to stay here for me. So please don't go to Bel Air and move into that mansion, which, of course, thank God you didn't, because that's the very mansion that Rene Beaujet was hunted down for a very long time just for watering plants. They wanted to give her a 10-year mandatory minimum. Todd did five years on Terminal Island for that grow.

15:27BubblemanAnd Hillary... Thank God you decided to start the BC Compassion Club. And that's really when the name came into play. That would have been 96, 97 when you started with the name play?

15:40SpeakerYeah.

15:41BubblemanYeah, incredible. So that's kind of my journey into compassion. Hillary opened that door for me. I felt like I walked through that door a changed person. It completely changed. I had this super hustle. I had this real like, I got to stack paper. I got to make money. I got to flip pounds. I got to. And Hillary just was like, put the brakes on that to the point where I was no longer, I would only lose money when I dealt with the club.

16:11BubblemanIt was like a weird thing where I was like, you can't make money off the club. Like that is fucked. Especially with at the time who she was choosing to sell cannabis to as a medicine were really like a very unique group of people and it was a very um it was an honor And a blessing and an incredibly intense. And when I say incredibly intense, I did not get this intensity nearly as much as people like Hillary and Jill and Marcel and some of the people that worked at the club.

16:47BubblemanBut the amount of people that were passing away Because of how sick they were and the homelessness and the mental illness and the drug addiction, it was just such a stack of unbelievably difficult obstacles that any one of them would be the hardest obstacle in your life to overcome. And it was just quite something in those early days. And I really, when Wade would say compassion is a verb, Well, Hillary certainly took that to heart because she was not sitting back watching things happen.

17:20BubblemanShe was literally manifesting them, creating them with this incredible team of people. Like you just had this great ability, Hillary, to pull people. I just wanted to make you proud of me. I was just like, I got to do good by Hillary. Like I just, you know, it's still like she's doing this angelic work. That no one else is doing. And I guess there was a pretty strong guilt involved.

17:43BubblemanLike, okay, so I'm flipping pounds to make profits so I can go on trips and buy stupid shit. And Hillary, who's like grew up in West Vancouver, you know, nice family with a nice home. And like, obviously some affluence is now like just moving to East Vancouver to live like a pauper. I had no idea you were going to do that for as long as you did, which also spoke volumes.

18:09BubblemanI would try and set up deals with Hillary on the side. I'd be like, listen, I've got this guy. He, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like I or she'd introduce me to a friend and I'd end up doing a bunch of business with this guy and be like, oh, here, Hill, here's your part. And she would never accept a penny. She said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

18:24BubblemanThat would absolutely poison the integrity of what I'm trying to do. I cannot take profit. She's totally broke, like beyond broke, not living at like what I would consider like the means that she should be living at, especially for the work she was doing. She was like right down to the bottom living in, you know, in difficulty, never taking a paycheck and almost like this. I'm sure it became like, you know, this kind of like intense guilt of taking anything.

19:00BubblemanWell, look at the end of Schindler's List when he's like, oh, this ring would have been a Jew. This watch would have been too Jew. Like he's talking about the people he could have saved. Well, Hillary was living that. One thousand percent. And it completely inspired me. And, you know, I have to give you the credit, Hillary. I'm not sure I would have done the work that I did in regards to the philanthropy that you pulled out of me.

19:24BubblemanSo I just want to say to you in front of all these people. Thank you.

19:29SpeakerWe're going to start Hash Church with me in tears if you keep going like that, Mark.

19:37BubblemanMonica started in tears. We're all good. We all have to be in tears by the end of the day. So please feel free.

19:44SpeakerThis is the old, old sign. The like the very first hand painted sign. It's got some like East Van graffiti on it. You've got some photographs of me from the early days standing in front of that sign with my fuck you fuck off face.

19:59BubblemanYes. Yes. Looking like you're 14 years old.

20:05BubblemanVery young.

20:07Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThank you, Hillary. Thank you. Love you. Love you, everyone on the panel, Monica. Thank you.

20:13SpeakerI can tell you that it started for me on Grateful Dead Tour. Like I did grow up in kind of an affluent community and I was taking a year off of high school to decide if I was going into law or medicine because that's what the choice was in my community. That's what my friends were doing was either you become lawyers or you become doctors. So I took a year off and I ran away on Grateful Dead Tour.

20:34SpeakerAnd that was when I learned about Hemp for Fuel, Hemp for Fiber, Hemp for Fun, Hemp Can Save the Planet. And I came back to Vancouver and these two crazy guys, I have a bit of a cold, so you have to bear with me.

20:52SpeakerMark Emery and who's the amazing guy who drowned in a lake, who started Hemp BC with Mark Emery?

20:59BubblemanIan Hunter.

20:59SpeakerAnd Ian Hunter. Yeah, Mark and Ian had started Hempy C and I just started showing up there every day and cleaning because the place was absolutely filthy and dusty and like run like kind of a bachelor pad and eventually kind of made them hire me because that's where I wanted to be. And at that time in the mid 90s, the health crisis that was facing really North America was the HIV and hepatitis C epidemic.

21:28SpeakerAnd there were loads and loads of people coming to the store A lot of them were gay men living with HIV, but also we're in the community that is still 30 years later, the epicenter of substance use issues and homelessness and poverty, real over-representation of indigenous communities in that population of people. And today it's the overdose epidemic. And in those days it was HIV and hepatitis C and the HIV meds were as likely to kill you as the disease was.

22:01SpeakerAnd there's just a lot of people coming to the store looking for information about medical cannabis and looking for access to weed. And so I started reading any books I could get my hands on. There weren't that many of them, like Lester Grinspoon's book. There were a couple of books that had been published. And there is this woman who kept calling the store, asking her questions about medical cannabis and really, really wanting to access some weed.

22:28SpeakerAnd we just would talk on the phone and I would answer her questions. And one day I went over to her apartment and I remember what I was wearing. I remember I had this like super hippie patchwork skirt on that I had gotten on tour. And she buzzed me into her apartment. And she was like pretty much bedridden from her arthritis. Like she had very, very, very serious.

22:53SpeakerNow I know rheumatoid arthritis. And I climbed up on her bed. And that's why I remember the patchwork skirt. And we rolled a joint and we talked about it and we spoke to join together. And I will like never, ever, ever forget watching her like, Oh, Hmm. And like when I've told that story before it's like I felt like there were like chunks of cement falling off of her as she like oh like felt it for the first time was kind of able to move and she Kind of hobbled into her kitchen and made two cups of tea and brought the tea back to where we were sitting and then started crying and then started raging because she hadn't been able to carry two cups of tea in like months and she got so mad.

23:46SpeakerMind you, she was like also high for the first time in her life and was like just having a lot of feelings and she just got so mad that she had been lied to about this plant. And I had this feeling of like something landing in my lap, which is why I remember the patchwork skirt. And I was like, oh, there's this wall that is prohibition. And there's this plant on one side and there's this ocean of people that are suffering on the other side.

24:17SpeakerAnd I'm going to kick the shit out of that wall until it starts coming down. And that was where I've got a bike. And a pager and a pamphlet. And I had a buddy who helped me and we really started just running a delivery service out of the hemp store. And that was kind of where it, where it began. And that, that ended, was that, then did it end up in Dan's after that?

24:41SpeakerThat was the same time we were buying, oh, you mean in that office building?

24:46BubblemanYeah.

24:47SpeakerNo, after the bike delivery service, that was when I learned about Todd McCormick, who was in jail at that time, started writing him letters. We had like a letter prison romance and I had never met the guy. He got out of jail, moved to Amsterdam. I used to, there was no email back then. God, this is crazy. We used to talk on the phone for hours and I was just racking up Mark Emery's phone bill at Hemp BC.

25:17SpeakerAnd he convinced me to give up my awesome job managing hemp BC and move to Amsterdam with him. And so I did. And I moved to Amsterdam. I thought I was like meeting the love of my life. And I met him in the airport for the first time in person. Like I'd never actually met the guy and didn't turn out to be the love of my life, but was a really important time.

25:39SpeakerLike that was when I met Etienne. And that was when like we were spending a lot of time at Positronix with Rob Clark, Michael Rich, Dave Watson, like all the people that became kind of my teachers. And I learned a lot about what it was to work and live in a place that felt like cannabis, that there wasn't prohibition. And I ended up working at Positronix, working on their medical program.

26:08SpeakerAnd then Proposition 215 passed in California. That was when I moved to California with Todd, lived in the castle. And Mark, what you remember is me saying, should I come home? Because you and I were already friends by then, right? The hempy sea time had happened before I moved to California. And we were on the phone and I was like, I have a feeling like I should come home and do this at home.

26:31SpeakerAnd you were like, yeah, girl, get your ass home. And then the raid happened there a week later. And then we started building the Compassion Club. It was a week. It was a week's difference. And my life would have gone in a totally different direction.

26:43BubblemanNot only your life, a lot of people's lives. When you think of the amount of people that the Compassion Club touched over the years here in British Columbia, I mean, my goodness, thousands of people.

26:55Etienne FontanHillary, I almost missed it by a week because remember, I went there on vacation. I went home to pack to come back. And it happened when I went home to pack is when he got busted. Because my secretary called me from Ecolution saying, hey, you got a friend in Bel Air? I was like, yeah, I do. It's like, is he in a mansion? I was like, yes, he is.

27:14Etienne FontanLike, oh, he's on the news. Oh, shit.

27:19BubblemanYeah.

27:20SpeakerThat's wild. It's wild that we both missed that bust by one week.

27:26BubblemanYeah, the two of you, like, wow, that's two pretty wild people to miss that bus. That is fate.

27:33SpeakerWell, it's angels. Like, you know, we're in Hash Church and I guess the Hash angels were watching out for us. You know, like, I had felt in that moment on that woman's bed with my patchwork skirt, it wasn't just like something landed on my lap that was like my mission. I also felt like I got claimed, actually. That kind of like the spirit of ganja was like, Oh, you think you're gonna like go to law school or become a doctor or have children or any of these other things?

28:01SpeakerNo, no, no. You work for me now and you have a job to do on this planet around this plant.

28:08Etienne FontanIncredible.

28:09SpeakerI think she, I think she asked for a lot, but she also gave a lot. And in that, in that particular moment protected me.

28:17BubblemanWell, I look back at that time and think, you know, a lot of things going on in the world, but I was just glad to be a small part of it, to be able to witness it unfolding and just all the amazing work. And yeah, it's quite something. You definitely put to work the quote that compassion is a verb. And that is the truth.

28:41SpeakerNobody wanted to sell me weed because I was such a heat score because I was really public about what I was doing. And the Growers and the distributors were terrified of me. At that time, one of the only people that I was getting weed from on a regular basis was, well, I'm not going to say his name. I think he might have even passed by now, but dark black hair, super sketchy.

29:03SpeakerYou know who I'm talking about, Mark. Sold a lot of other kinds of drugs. And there was often a gun visible in his apartment when I went to get my ounces in the morning. And that was really when you stepped up and became like our shopper. And you would like run around and go find high quality, clean, organic, delicious. You would beat people back on their prices and was like the main source of all of the quality herb for a long time.

29:37SpeakerAnd actually it wasn't until you got busted and we went to court and it was the very first court case where we had to defend a distributor and really that or a grower. And really that court case became The cornerstone of all of the case law that built towards all of the constitutional challenges and all of the legal pathway that became a regulated framework in Canada. And I will never, ever, ever forget with Judge Parody when that ruling came down.

30:09SpeakerIt was the first time we had John Conroy, of course, is our amazing lawyer. And it was the first time that we had to like Go with our very organized binders with all the numbered tabs and talk about like our process for how we made sure that it was all medical, how we dealt with the physicians. Hang on, I'm just going to shut my door.

30:29Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWhat was the judge's name?

30:32SpeakerJudge Paradis.

30:33BubblemanYeah, French for paradise. Paradis.

30:36SpeakerAnd if you want to read that ruling, it's on John Conroy's website. He has really amazing, it has an amazing... Library, but that I'll never forget sitting on the edge of that chair, holding hands with some of the patients who had testified for the first time, who ended up testifying a lot in the future. And he talked about. The Compassion Club, he talked about the patients. And he said, the Compassion Club is akin to a local neighborhood pharmacy.

31:09SpeakerAnd the medicine isn't going to fall out of the sky like manna from heaven. It has to come from somewhere. And he also said, and the times they are changing. And not only did you get a discharge, but they gave us the money back. You never, ever get the bank back from Crown. Like, I think we had like six or eight grand or something that got seized.

31:33SpeakerAnd that was a really pivotal cornerstone. And then, you know, in terms of the amazing people on this particular screen, I can't remember who it was who brought Ethan to the club. I don't know if it was you. It was somebody who knew Dr. Rousseau, who Do you remember who first brought you to the club, Ethan? Gee, I don't. But, you know, it was seeing you and Riel.

32:05SpeakerWe had met previously at a conference in Portland, Oregon. I remember distinctly because when we met, you kissed me full on the lips. Oh! Very memorable. I was really just in it for all the cute guys. Well, thanks. But that was a long time ago.

32:30BubblemanListen, Dr. Russo, when I asked Hillary who else we should invite, you were the first name that came up. She said he was always so supportive. So I was like, well, of course, of course we're going to have Dr. Ethan Russo come on. He's a great friend of church. You've always been a supporter of Hillary and all the things that she's done. And yeah, you were the first name that she mentioned when I asked her about doing a show on compassion.

32:56BubblemanSo good for you for all the work that you've done. Your name still comes up when compassion is mentioned and there's something to be said about that.

33:04SpeakerWell, Ethan and Lester, bless his heart. They used to take my phone calls when I knew that I was taking in a patient and I was in way over my head when I was way way over my head like complicated pediatric cases people with multiple diagnoses on a lot of different medications when I was really concerned that I might be like making a mistake or but yeah they used to take my calls and that's like pretty out of scope of practice to talk to like Some sketchy woman selling weed to people who are living with chronic conditions and advise them around strains, how to dose, contraindications to watch out for, things to tell their doctors.

33:59SpeakerAnd I feel like the conversations with Ethan and Lester really helped me to keep everybody safe.

34:09BubblemanYeah. Well, you will never forget certain things about that court case. I will never forget when you stuck your tongue out at the prosecuting attorney while you were on the stand. That was unbelievable. You gave him the full

34:30SpeakerWhat a brat.

34:31BubblemanIt was awesome. I, you know, that's just, it's part of our history. I'm sure we all remember it a little bit differently, but yeah, it's, it sent me in a whole different dimension, you know, world doing bubble bags and fresh headies and sort of starting that and being that sort of hash guy, kind of trying to refine, you Where I could be of service because being of service to you in the club fed my soul so much that it was just great.

35:04BubblemanEvery time I did it, I was like, okay, I lost 1200 bucks on that deal, but like, awesome. You know, like, this is like, we're supporting the club. I remember you turned me on to that guy, Gordon Barnholden years ago, who was like a masseuse guy. And I remember being on his table. I was spending all this money on massages and acupuncture for myself. And I remember being on his table thinking, what if I paid this guy to just go to the BC Compassion Club and do like massages for the patients?

35:33BubblemanDo you remember that back in the day? Vaguely. Yeah, that was like...

35:39SpeakerSo we had the wellness center built then. And so you sent him to come and practice in one of the treatments?

35:45BubblemanYeah, this was one of the first times anyone came to do things for the... This was before the wellness center really fully existed to be what it would become. And yeah, I was just laying on his table in North Vancouver and you turning me on to him that I was like, I'm just going to pay for him to go to the club for a full day and just like give massages to people and...

36:05BubblemanYeah, it was just, you always were pulling good things out of me like that. I always was thinking in a way. I guess in the in the quote, right? Compassion is a verb. It's not just something you think about. You don't just put a sign up and hold it. You like do something, make some motion, make some movement, like be a part of it. And yeah, you allowed a lot of people to be a part of the club in that sense that you weren't afraid for people to help.

36:33BubblemanAnd I think that's a that's a that's a huge. Huge part of why the club was so successful because you didn't run it like a dictatorship. You ran it like, you know, hey, listen, it's like a co-op. We're all a part of this. You really always wanted to hear from the patients. And yeah, that's kind of one of the most important things to listen to the patients.

36:54SpeakerI miss it, actually. Like, I feel like now, 30 years later, after, you know, the Canadian industry has gone through so many transitions and the global industry is in the state that it's in it's got some awesome pockets and um you know i've spent a bunch of time post my big run in the corporate world really like working on what's next for me and i find that in like in the hustle and in my work now i'm kind of like searching for that Thank you so much for joining us.

37:51BubblemanTo make it in and have a visit with us.

38:09BubblemanAnd Wendy's story. Wendy is just such an awesome mom. Mind-blowing the way you opened up to cannabis. And I'll never forget asking you so long ago, because you're just such an apple pie, middle American, just perfect mom. And I remember asking you, what do you think about all these... You know, these alternative people and these hippies, you know, like breeding and being with cannabis. And you just had the most honest answer.

38:34BubblemanI'll never forget. You were like, I thank them from the bottom of my heart. Thank them for holding on to the strains and keeping those cultivars alive for Colton to be able to come along and use them. Do you remember saying that to me?

38:48SpeakerI say it still.

38:49BubblemanThat is amazing.

38:51SpeakerI say it still. People ask me all the time, you know, what... About our cannabis journey. And I am always so thankful for people like you guys. Because without you and what you've done, he wouldn't be here.

39:11BubblemanYeah, that is very true. Did she freeze up on us? I think she froze for a sec.

39:17Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineShe broke the internet with her love and compassion.

39:20BubblemanDude, that is exactly what happened. They'll be back. They'll be back. Colton has an incredible story for those of you that don't know it. Oh, you back? There you are. I think so. You froze up for a second.

39:39SpeakerYeah. But I was saying that if it wasn't for people like you guys, you know, it's... We wouldn't have him. There wouldn't have been this journey at all. So listening to your stories is so inspiring and so humbling because everything that you guys have been through put us in the position that we are in now. I can turn off.

40:17BubblemanWell, we're happy to have done that work, Wendy. You guys came along and believe it or not, you know, you stepped right into place. I know it was difficult moving away from your family in Illinois and moving to Colorado and not having that support system and, you know, that whole, just the youth of Colton and the experience in the lake and just the whole crazy story of how it all came to be and, you know, I still, you know, there's very few key things I remember.

40:50BubblemanOne of them is the David Suzuki episode where a crash from the BC Compassion Club is smoking the big fat joint and he's got advanced MS and he's just moving around like crazy and he smokes this joint and he slowly, he slowly comes to and now he's had a day. I can talk now. Prior to that, he's like... He cannot say a word. We can't put glass near his mouth.

41:16BubblemanIt was one of the most powerful things I had experienced in cannabis as a medicine. Colton's illegally alive and over legally dead was... As powerful him holding up like at such a young age, the vulnerability to hold up a photo of your colon. I mean, holy shit, dude, like props to you. I know that you moved a lot of you move the needle with that whole experience and the way you embraced it, Wendy, and was, you know, like, I'm not gonna be quiet about this.

41:50BubblemanI'm gonna be like, as loud about this and in your face as possible. Was definitely important and it definitely fits into compassion is a verb, obviously. Impossible not to have for your son, for the child that you birthed into this world. I can only imagine, you know, really, I can't actually imagine what you went through from that whole start right up till now. I would love to hear a little bit of the continuation.

42:20BubblemanYou know, we haven't had you guys on for quite a while. Obviously, Colton is looking incredibly healthy. I'm sure you've probably had a few lapses here and there, but overall life is good.

42:32SpeakerLife is good. This was a journey that we found compassion in, but it really started with desperation. Desperation for something that may possibly provide some kind of relief. Because we had been through three years of the pharmaceutical route and anything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong. So when we finally turned to cannabis, we thought that, you know, maybe it'll provide, you know, some comfort, you know, because, you know, we had basically signed off on any chance of me having a life past the age of 15.

43:12SpeakerBut when we started using cannabis, we... We found a lot more than what we were looking for. We found remission. We found a community that had, you know, such compassion. And, you know, we just, we found a new opportunity for life. And, you know, it's just, it's just been incredible. You know, it's just one of those things where It's, you know, we're just incredibly thankful. You know, there's no amount of, you know, there's no amount of words in the dictionary that could possibly describe, you know, the enlightenment that, you know, we went through when it came to using cannabis as a medicine.

44:05SpeakerAnd, you know, we didn't want to be quiet about it because we had to do a complete 180 on our stance. You know, we were the just say no family. We kicked family members out of our lives because they were potheads and we didn't want anything to do with it. So we had to turn around and, you know, of course, you know, I posted my guts on the internet because that's one way to get people's attention.

44:30SpeakerAnd because of that, more people have been able to find relief. And that's what it's about, sharing these stories so then people have more information going in than what the people before them did. And that's why we're so grateful to people like you guys, because you guys have been in the trenches since the beginning. You guys are the ones that have been keeping this plant alive and, you know, for years.

45:02SpeakerAnd then when we finally came in, when we first started using cannabis for me, even then, you know, there was only so much, you know, information, but because we've been, everybody has been, you know, cultivating this, you know, it's been growing and growing and we're learning more and more about what this plant is capable of. And it's because, you know, communities like yours has been keeping it alive.

45:32SpeakerAnd it's truly been incredible. I mean, we're just incredibly grateful. It's been 10 years now. 11. Yeah, 11 years. 11 years since I started using cannabis for my crisis.

45:45BubblemanDude, that's how old Hash Church is.

45:47SpeakerYeah.

45:50BubblemanThat is crazy.

45:51SpeakerIt's really crazy. It seems like so long. But in the real big scheme of things, I mean, you and Hillary were talking about, you know, 1996. You know, it was, it's been longer than that. You know, it's been since Way before time. For whatever reason, we are the people that have to carry on this journey. And we have to carry on the information and the truth. And that's really, really difficult to do considering we're up against such politics in the whole situation.

46:31SpeakerAnd trying to fight politics and trying to fight lies. When people don't know the truth about something and they want to believe the lies, it's been really difficult for our family.

46:49BubblemanEspecially when those truths kept your son alive. I can imagine that those lies come in a little bit more personal.

46:56SpeakerOh, yeah.

46:58BubblemanYou know, especially now too, after 10 years, you guys have really become quite a voice of authority. You know, I'll be honest, anytime someone hits me up with Crohn's questions, I'm like, do you know Colton Turner? Have you heard about the Turners? Have you consumed any of the Turner's social media and education? Because they have firsthand experience with it. I mean, I think it was Colton who first told me about how THCV really messed with him the first time he tried it.

47:28BubblemanAnd it finally made me put my kind of guard down that like, There is a situation that's not good for patients when it comes to cannabis, and that's definitely wasting syndrome or Crohn's disease consuming THCV. The last thing you want to do is suppress your appetite.

47:46SpeakerWhen it comes to a plant like cannabis that can do everything, your illness and what you need isn't necessarily everything. Um, you know, because it's a plant that in some strains, you know, can give you the munchies and can help you gain weight. And then there are some strains that, you know, with that are high in THCV that kind of, you know, uh, bring that appetite back a little bit.

48:09SpeakerSo then you, you don't, you lose weight, um, for each, you know, individually, each Thank you so much for joining us.

48:40SpeakerWho will try cannabis and end up using either the wrong strain or the wrong intake method and won't go through the trial and error like a lot of other patients do and will get discouraged so, so quickly. And it's heartbreaking. There needs to be way more research on individual strains and genetics. And we're not there yet. And I don't understand why. Because there should be medicines out there at these compassionate clubs like you guys have up in BC that has specific...

49:21SpeakerAnd I'm like, why? I, it just boggles my mind because I can't send a patient to when, when somebody reaches out to us, um, to the dispensary and get something specific for that disease. And then in the, in the States, it's even worse because, um, They're constantly chasing that high. So you go in and find a strain that is really, really great for your disease. And then next week it's gone because they're geneticizing another strain that is higher in THC and does different things for different other things.

50:09SpeakerAnd now we're like stuck with, okay, we're doing this all over again. I'm trying to find strains that help for one specific thing.

50:19BubblemanYeah, it's difficult. You know, here in Canada, I think what happened was that we started so strong with the club, with the BC Compassion Club and all the work that Hillary did. And, you know, initially the companies were like, OK, we're going to have a medical process. There was already kind of licensing where you could get licensed to grow your own. But it was like, OK, we're going to start to try and create this access for medical patients.

50:44BubblemanAnd, you know, aside from Hillary, a lot of the people, I mean, Ted was another one and Philippe, and there were a few, but there was a lot of people who really just was like, sweet, I can use patience to protect my weed selling. And it wasn't as much about access as much about protecting and how I know this is the truth. Is because the minute recreational came to play in 2017 in Canada on the massive amount of the companies who were taking care of patients and doing medical, they just, if not folded, they just stopped putting energy into producing products for patients.

51:20BubblemanAnd now it became about recreational. Well, people were like, well, who cares? It's recreational. It's still access. Well, yeah, but it's access with people that are that they'd be breaking the law. If they told you CBN is good for sleep, you know, it's like THC can reduce inflammation. It's like you're breaking the law in Canada if you tell them about the medical aspects of the product. So you can sell it recreationally, but you can't tell them about what it's good for.

51:48BubblemanSo it's this weird sort of situation, this disconnect.

51:53SpeakerThe States is the same way. You go into a recreational store and or even a medical store and you're like, okay, I have Crohn's disease. What's good for me? And they're like, well, we can't talk to you about that. And But this, you know, you have these 21 year old bud tenders that are awesome. We love, we love every one of them. And we think we're thankful for them.

52:20SpeakerTheir hearts in the right place. Their hearts are in the right place. But they're saying, you know, but this has, you know, 37% THC and it's great for sleep and, you know, and you can get really high on it. And we're like, but that's not what we need. We need medicine. And I think that recreational is great, but we actually ended up in Illinois fighting against the recreational bill because it was going to stop access for patients.

52:50SpeakerAnd then we ended up losing. The recreational bill went through, which is great in a sense. But then we had to stand at the dispensary for four hours waiting for Colton's Medicine because The recreational community was bombarding the dispensary and we couldn't get medicine. Got to the door, all out of weed.

53:16BubblemanOh my God. Oh my God. Please go ahead.

53:24BubblemanYou got this, Monica. We're all behind you.

53:28SpeakerI say this online every once in a while. And sometimes I'm really into being an agitator. But right now, you know, trying to be quiet. But this touches on a really key trouble, in my opinion, for the entire industry. And I have to say, I blame the industry. I mean, we have legislators who are so poorly educated. I think everybody understands the lack of education. And then of course prohibition is the politicization of cannabis.

54:02SpeakerSo there's that. But the industry spends money on lobbyists who educate the legislators. And they are just not showing any compassion, I have to say. And also, I get really pissed about the industry in this way, because if it weren't for the medical applications, we wouldn't have an industry at all. I mean, Prop 215 was named the compassion industry.

54:34SpeakerI don't know who has access to lobbyists in the industry, but we just saw the governor veto something that the entire legislature in California passed that was a very helpful and very inexpensive measure for the compassion part of the industry. And it was bullshit. Even the governor's office gave some bullshit explanation about how it was Uh, too costly or some thing and big uproar everything. And, uh, here's how I land on that.

55:12SpeakerLobbyists have access to the cannabis control department and Their messaging is what defines what they decide to do in the power structure in California. The governor does what the lobbyists tell him to do. So why isn't the industry spending money on lobbyists working to create more space for the compassion part of this? Why is that not happening? I think because they're the the industry has so much money that people like we lobby all the time as much as we possibly can.

55:49SpeakerAnd.

55:53SpeakerFor the patients, for patient rights. But because we, we are just two people that have a small voice in this whole situation. And, you know, an amazing story, but a small voice and no money. Like we go to DC on our own. Nobody's paying for us to go anywhere. Nobody has once paid for us to do anything in this industry ever. And the industry is paying these lobbyists to make sure that the industry wins.

56:31SpeakerNot the patients. I mean, not the patients at all. They could care less about the struggle that Colton Turner has been through and everything that he did for the United States while recreational medicine was coming through, fighting for everything that he did. You know, the story about the... Candy Bar. You know, we went to we went to testify against a bill that that said that he he doesn't need to know what's in his medicine.

57:10SpeakerThey wanted to remove testing for certain medical products. And, you know, for, for a patient like me who needs to know every single thing, I mean, I'm allergic to fructose. That's natural in fruit. I need to know if they're putting that in my candy bar, I need to know.

57:31SpeakerAnd we were like, why are you doing this? And the industry was against us. They wanted recreational tested, but not medical. I'm like, how can you do that? And I just don't understand it. And I mean, I guess I do. It's just because it's money. Yeah. The people who make the most money off of this industry make the most money from it being in the gray area that it is and preventing it from being the industry that it could be.

57:59BubblemanWell said, Colton.

58:01SpeakerAs long as it stays in this little bubble and they can just churn out as much money as they can while it's still in this bubble, as long as they make sure that it doesn't pop, they're going to do it.

58:14BubblemanIt seems like it has to go beyond greed. It really seems demonic. Like it seems demonic. It seems like it's not an accident. It's on purpose. It's like, no, no, no. We enjoy, like we feed off of suffering and pain and anguish like a heroin addict feeds off heroin. Like if something like that doesn't exist, I just don't understand. How can it just be about money? It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

58:44BubblemanI've always felt that there's some darker energy behind cannabis and keeping it like you mentioned in this little box and not allowing it to open up and allowing it to sort of Thank you for joining us.

59:14BubblemanAnd I also can't wrap my head around it at all. I thought, you know, okay, well, maybe all these people that are just want money. We'll see that. Well, there's value in cannabis, whether you're growing it for fiber or a seed grain for, for protein, whether you're growing it as a medicine, there's all sorts of industry to be had from it. And obviously it's a multi multi-billion dollar industry.

59:38BubblemanIt's more, it's something different. It's like, I always said it changes the way you think. It legitimately changes the way you think. It softens you from the inside out. It allows you to be more empathetic and more compassionate towards others. I know that it certainly worked like that for me. I kind of came from a Thank you for watching.

1:00:15Bubblemanthere's this energy that i felt from day one with cannabis and it's it's that there's something very very dark that has been keeping cannabis you know as as low down as it can possibly keep it and and it's really people like all of yourselves who are on this panel Who have been fighting that battle. It's truly like a battle between good and evil. You know, if I can kind of cut it down to such simplicity.

1:00:43BubblemanAnd I think that's why we were always, always so touched by Wade's words, because they just came from the most obviously good place. It was as good of a place as words could come from. And I know this is gonna make you cry, Monica, But we need to hear from Wade. And so I'm going to put a little bit of one of his one of his last things that he said on Hash Church.

1:01:10BubblemanIt's just a few minutes. And it's about compassion being a verb.

1:01:14SpeakerI've really been thinking about what is compassion?

1:01:26SpeakerAnd I think compassion is a verb. It's an action word. One can feel empathy for another person's situation.

1:01:41SpeakerAnd that's a beautiful thing. That's how we grow our hearts. That's how we grow our understanding of who we are and where we are in the world. But compassion comes into play When you do something about the suffering of another person.

1:02:08SpeakerYeah, compassion is a very.

1:02:12BubblemanAlways touching to hear Wade's voice. It just touches my soul in the deepest, deepest region. And I wanted him to be a part of this show. Obviously, this is his show. It was his idea, his concept. But I wanted to be able to share little clips. And I want to welcome, well, geez, Forrest and Debbie popped into the room. But I also want to welcome Ed. And Ed is a friend of church and Ed has donated his time to find these clips of Wade and Skunk Man Sam since their passing.

1:02:50BubblemanAnd he has spent countless hours going through Hash Church, decade of Hash Church to find these little clips so that we can play them for you guys here on church. So thank you, Ed. And if you want to say a few words, man, this is your first time on Hash Church. We appreciate you.

1:03:11BubblemanI don't know if you can hear me or not. Can you hear me, Ed? There you are. Hello?

1:03:15EdYeah, I can hear you. My computer was just, you know, tech issues. But just want to say hi to everybody. Much love. I've been here since before the first episode of Hash Church. I'm a little nervous. I'm a little emotional. You guys are actually talking back to me now when I talk to the screen. So this is really cool, surreal. So yeah, I just want to say that you all pretty much have helped me with my careers and my guiding light Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:03:44EdWe're so happy to be here.

1:03:47BubblemanWe're so happy to be here. We're so happy to be here.

1:04:01BubblemanThanks to you trimming and clipping that. So we appreciate you. And yeah, just thanks for coming on and being a part of this. And also I wanted to welcome Valerie, who just popped in as well. I know you're busy with family today, Val, but we're really glad that you came to share a little bit of time with us.

1:04:22BubblemanMuch love.

1:04:23ValerieMuch love.

1:04:26BubblemanYou had your hand up, Etienne.

1:04:29Etienne FontanYeah, I wanted to respond respectfully to Monica's frustration and request. As far as I'm aware, there are no lobbyists in California anymore. The multi-state operators, some have pulled and went away. They're not spending money to continue to give what Debbie and them started, which was compassionate giving. We had to go to Sacramento this year and lobby ourselves, give testimony again, and actually get what was SB 35 is now AB 2555 because, you know, people like myself and others went out and showed out and testified and made sure that we got what we got, made phone calls, and I want to give major credit to California Normal.

1:05:26Etienne FontanThey're a main organizer here and they're celebrating 50 years. So I want to give a shout out to Dale Gerringer and Ellen Komp and everybody there. They've been doing the dog-legged work in educating us activists. But for California, you have to directly contact the Department of Cannabis Control, was what it's known as now. You know, it's really frustrating to have to continue to lobby, but that's the reality is that we're not happy with this child that we raised, right?

1:06:00Etienne FontanSo... We have to go back to school and work on, you know, the teachers in class. And we just saw the head of the DCC in California resign or step down. And she even says the governor has to get his act together. So. Thank you for watching.

1:06:42Etienne FontanWe're outnumbered by the alcohol industry. We just saw the whiskey industry write a near million dollar check to Mitch McConnell, which of course got hemp flipped. So I'm not sure what lobbying necessarily would have done in the absence of having that type of money to throw around. So, but I also want to shout out because I also work at the international level and Hillary was saying she longs for that feeling.

1:07:11Etienne FontanWell, let me tell you, Michael Krawitz and Myrtle Clark have taken me under their wing at the international level. And the work that we're doing at the UN, as you know, they changed medical cannabis in 2020, got it removed from the most dangerous drug category. So major thanks to them and that team. And of course, we're working on the goal right now toward 2030 to remove it from the most dangerous drug category for adult use so that no one else will be executed for cannabis in the world.

1:07:42Etienne FontanWe're working at that level, but we need more help and support and we're doing our best. But Kevin Sabetz right now doing a victory lap. He's right now in the media right now challenging us. And we'll be at the UN challenging him directly again because he's loving all this prohibition going on. And as the sole voice against it, this is why we're here and have to speak up and why I'm very happy to be standing on many shoulders of many giants who are on here today.

1:08:13Etienne FontanSo we have to keep up the work as much as we want to check out. We still have to plug in and make things happen. Love you all. Appreciate you all and humbled to be here with so many beautiful souls.

1:08:27BubblemanThank you, Etienne. Appreciate that. You mentioned Myrtle. I'd love to hear from Myrtle a little bit of what's going on down there. I know you were just visiting with them not too long ago. It's nice to see you, Myrtle, even though I kind of can't, but I think you're going to turn your camera on soon. There you are. Welcome.

1:08:47SpeakerHey, hello, everybody.

1:08:51SpeakerHi from Johannesburg, South Africa, and we have no power. So sorry, I had to keep my camera off. Oh, wow. ATN will know that we have some power issues here in South Africa, but it's fine. I'm running everything on the batteries and whatnot. What an honor it is to be here with all of these beautiful people and to share Send greetings from South Africa where, you know, it's almost a case of sort of same shit, different day.

1:09:28SpeakerI think when we were when we were fighting against prohibition, there was

1:09:36SpeakerThere was a certain cohesion and there was a certain community vibe that kept us all together because it was really the big bad thing of the police and full 100% prohibition here in South Africa. And now that we have personal and private use and cultivation within private spaces as a constitutional right, it's created a huge, big Gray area. And I'm very proud that South Africa was the first country in the world to recognize home grow and privacy first, you know.

1:10:29SpeakerBut at the same time, I really, really hear you as far as the as the patients are concerned. So when we went to court in 2017, we really argued across four different, four platforms. Responsible adult uses, you know, the umbrella platform. And then underneath that, traditional, cultural, and religious use, this being Africa. And, and underneath that industrial uses and underneath that uses for health. And we've been using cannabis for 700 years.

1:11:08SpeakerSo we have this whole, the whole dynamic with medicine is Super complicated by traditional and cultural use of the plant. And the fact that we've got 300,000 traditional users, sorry, traditional healers who are recognized within sort of primary medicine, but they are still not recognized to dispense cannabis that they've been doing under the guidance of their ancestors for 700 years. So our medicine thing is also a bit complicated.

1:11:45SpeakerI mean, earlier this year, when we were all in Vienna at the UN, South Africa's Minister of Health decided to ban all edibles. And of course, all the pot shops in South Africa, which have sprung up since the privacy ruling, went into a state of panic. And eventually after a week, the minister had to retract that because there was such an outcry. It was all cannabis foods.

1:12:14SpeakerSo that included hemp flower and hemp seeds and blah, blah, blah. So he was speaking out of turn, so they had to reverse that. So it really is quite a mess, and it really is a challenge speaking to government. But my primary concern goes right back to the beginning, and that is the police. And as Etienne will tell you, you know, if we can just stop the police arresting people, Then we will make great strides in South Africa, because I think if we can convince the police that stigma is an issue,

1:13:00SpeakerIf the police say it's okay, they will stop arresting people. Then I think it'll get down to grassroots and then they will also stop arresting the traditional healers and the members of the Rastafari Church and rural farmers and all of that. So all of our four platforms is very sort of intertwined and it's very complicated and dispersed, you know. That's why it's really, really nice to be here because I feel like I have a heart connection with you guys.

1:13:36SpeakerWhen you sit in a government meeting for three hours, it's really difficult to have any sort of heart connection. And here I've got like 100% heart connection. So I really appreciate that. And thank you so much for the invitation. It's been really interesting.

1:13:55BubblemanThank you for being here, Myrtle. We appreciate you. It was lovely to meet you in Spain, I guess, after you were in Austria with Etienne and the crew. And hopefully one day I can make it out to South Africa and see what's going on over there. Definitely want to come back and ask you some questions. It sounds like Forrest only has about 20 more minutes. And so I really wanted to hear from him.

1:14:19BubblemanHe was working very closely with Wade over the years and also has a very Personal story, much like Wendy and Colton with his son Silas who suffered with a very harsh form of epilepsy and Forrest once again as well. It's crazy how many of these angelic people have to stand up because it's happening to them in their family. I just don't understand why Why you guys aren't recognized the way you should be by medicine and doctors like open arms.

1:14:53BubblemanOh my God, we need to hear what you have to say. Please share your experience with us so we can share it with others. But I'd love to hear from you, Forrest. As always, it's a pleasure to have you on with us today.

1:15:07SpeakerYeah, I appreciate it. It's great to be here. And sorry, Myrtle, to come in. I have to work today. That's, you know, it really ties into a lot of stuff that everyone's talking about, right? Why isn't there more efficacy in the compassion advocates? Why isn't there more money? You know, it comes down to just longevity, the ability to survive time and money. You know, it's really, really difficult.

1:15:34SpeakerAnd, um, That's why little bits of action add up. You know, if people out there don't have the time, but have small amounts of money to donate to people who are doing this, that's really what it comes down to. We put our money where we want to see change happen. We put our money where our mouth is in these things. That those advocates who are doing the work, you know, it's about sustainability.

1:16:02SpeakerAnd, you know, when I got into this work, when we were doing hash churches, gosh, Marcus, it's been, you know, eight, nine, 10 years now. Yeah, I remember seeing Colton's story as we were in the news down here. And, you know, there were these people who were sharing their experience and I don't have a lot of time. I think I'd love, you know, I want a whole episode on Valerie.

1:16:25SpeakerI want a whole episode on Ethan. I want a whole episode on Colton. You have a panel here who has amazing experience that can really benefit people that, you know, me, it's just a person, a fan who loves these people want to hear. But it made me decide, like, okay, what do we need to focus on in my short little moment here? And for people who don't know me real quickly, I came, and you're going to hear some similarities with Wendy and Colton's story.

1:16:54SpeakerI came to this out of desperation. My son Silas, it was mentioned, was one of those kids with a rare seizure disorder. He had a condition that was diagnosed as, you know, Dravet at one point, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. They really never put a finger on exactly what it was. Excuse me, but he was having, you know, 2,500 seizures a month.

1:17:18SpeakerAt nine years old, they told us he would never live to see, you know, 11 because the body just couldn't maintain that. And they quickly went through every medication that they had, heavy barbiturates, different sorts of, you know, Bill Meyers, Ed.D. : opioids and other sort of seizure medications I watched his body change you see the swelling from steroids I mean we've all seen that with people who are chronically ill and then nothing did anything it just made it worse, and you know, there was my.

1:17:50SpeakerBill Meyers, Ed.D. : spark right.

1:17:55SpeakerAnd back then, you know, this was pre the CNN episode, which people who we later came to know, Paige and Charlotte with Charlotte's Web. This was, you know, before that. But these talks had been happening in these communities about Dr. Mishulam's work out of Israel, Dr. Russo's work, and maybe there's a chance, right? And that's where a lot of these families came from. As parents, because at this point it was literal life or death and what harm can happen.

1:18:31SpeakerThe harm is already happening. The harm from the medications are on is already apparent. The liver damage from the medications they're giving is equal to the damage of the seizures that they're getting at a certain point. And that desperation Mark Benthien, M.D. : kind of take away some of the hesitation that might prevent some of the opportunities for growth and experimentation as we're learning about these so long story short.

1:18:57SpeakerMark Benthien, M.D. : that's what led me into really starting to do my homework and. Mark Benthien, M.D. : I can second the fact that. As a parent, I started emailing Dr. Russo and he had no idea who I was and probably doesn't even remember because he responds to everybody and started responding. Got to know him better later when I hassled him for an interview at a conference in Arcata and got him in the back room where I got to ask all my questions as if it was a podcast and just harass doctors as we started to educate ourselves.

1:19:33SpeakerAnd then realized I couldn't do anything that I needed to do to try to save my son legally. And started taking in huge poster boards of my son's picture to county supervisors meetings here locally, where they were banning all outdoor cultivation at the time. And this is where I met Wade. This was in 20, gosh, 15 or 2016. And that action, that desperation took us on that journey.

1:20:03SpeakerAnd Wade and I spent, I know Monica could attest to this hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting at a kitchen table hashing out this idea of what is right, what is wrong, what can we do? Wade helped me connect with local growers and his connections paired perfectly with my spark and compassion and What I've been told later is a really good ability to kind of articulate the moral hypocrisy of, at the time, this false moral high ground that the anti-cannabis prohibitions were taking.

1:20:43SpeakerThere was a really demonization of anyone who uses cannabis as a drug addict and worthless, and this moral high ground argument that really didn't stand on Two feet in my situation, and I saw an opportunity to break that argument down. And if the reason for prohibition was safety and children, I felt I had a rare opportunity to challenge that argument with my child and his safety. And I did what Colton did and others did.

1:21:20SpeakerI decided if you're going to justify with morality children's suffering, and not just suffering, but suffering to death, slowly dying, seizing to death, or slowly dying, breaking down their internal organs to death, then you have to watch. I'm not going to watch it by myself. And we started putting out the videos of my son's seizures. I started making montages of the sheriff's rhetoric alongside my son's seizing.

1:21:54SpeakerAnd I started doing what I'm doing now at meetings and county board meetings and at the state and local level and with our senators and with our state congressmen. And I challenged them to articulate their moral position in a way that All of that was justifiable.

1:22:17SpeakerAnd those sort of things started making a difference. And I recommend people to do that to this day because, again, we don't have a lot of time. But to this day, I still don't get any of our medicine through local dispensaries. We're not there. We have a recreational industry, but we've only scratched the surface on The medical side of it. And through that activity, we started realizing we're getting news, right?

1:22:45SpeakerColton, I'm sure, has experienced this. You get the news starting to follow you and then people start to reach out and they want help. And they're like, okay, well, how do we help all these other people? And this is where Wade and I really didn't bat an eye. We're like, okay, how can we get more? Andrew Berman, And start to develop ways we can help other parents whose kids are also struggling with this.

1:23:05SpeakerBecause if it's not clear, you know, my son started to respond positively to some of these strengths, but it was a very long process to get to that point. So we started a grassroots organization called the Colladrius Network and Before I know it, with Wade's charm and my, you know, ringing the bells, you know, up on a soapbox, I had a garage full of, you know, 250 pounds of donated cannabis and flour.

1:23:34SpeakerWe just started processing. And You know, that's action, right? I mean, I came from it from desperation. Wade came from it as he saw an opportunity and wanted to help. But at a certain point, you know, it was the same with me. You know, I wasn't just focused on my son. Wade and I had that in common, and that's why we became such good friends, I think, in doing some of these things.

1:23:57SpeakerAnd that's a long story, but I do want to point out a couple things while I have the time that I think are really important for people who are trying to get better, that You learn through dealing with terminal and catastrophic illness with cannabis. And it's, I hear it relatively universally with people who have been successful. And I think that it's overlooked a lot. And I'm going to, I keep pointing you out and apologize, but I'm going to do it again because I heard it in their conversation.

1:24:27SpeakerI heard it as they talked about the need for experimentation, the need for specific strains for specific conditions. And The harm that can happen is people don't understand that you can't just go to a dispensary, try something that says CBD in it, and think that you've tried cannabis. And what happened was with the Gladrius Network, I learned really, really quickly that giving somebody a tincture does not do much good.

1:24:58SpeakerWith the kids that we were dealing with with rare epilepsy, with certain sorts of conditions, we were trying to not just look at, hey, are we sleepy or awake? We're trying to upregulate and downregulate very specific receptors in the brain. We're trying to impact things, hoping that this is the type of seizure that's caused by this endocannabinoid regulatory system. We're trying to discover if it is and then get it to regulate in a way that This led really quickly to me discovering and Wade discovering, which is why we ended up harping more on education later, that

1:25:45SpeakerTrying something is fine, but it's more understanding the process of what you're doing so that you can work towards discovering what your body needs. That is the people who I've seen continue to be successful. And that's what we needed in our system to get people not only access, But the understanding that this is not a narcotic, this is not a pharmaceutical on off switch. And the people who I've seen be successful tend to say the same thing because they discovered that on their own, that there is very specific needs.

1:26:20SpeakerIt's very unique to the condition and what is triggering that condition and the ability to find that miracle here. I believe if it's an endocannabinoid issue, It's out there for everybody, but the process takes... Thank you so much for joining us.

1:27:04Speakerof trial and error taking notes what cannabinoids are responding positive to which ones are responding to negative negatively what is the dose what's his body weight how many milligrams per kilogram are we taking have we where have we adjusted it in that threshold taking the epidiolex research applying that to what we're seeing here and going at it trial in air in breeding these strains isolating these compounds and Formulating a very specific medication for my son.

1:27:37SpeakerSeven years it took. And happy to say, four years ago, when I finally got access to some very, very clean organic CBD isolate to supplement the levels he needed for his height and weight, along with the other compounds that we had developed for years, because he does not respond to CBD by itself. He went from 2,500 seizures to zero. And in the last four years, he's had one seizure.

1:28:06SpeakerAnd all of his doctors look at us like we've done something amazing, you know, that they just don't understand. And now they talk to us and we talk to them. But the importance that I just wanted to share in my one little minute is one, man, I love all the work that you're doing. And anybody who hears this know that, you know, It is a process. It is a process for progress on the legal side.

1:28:35SpeakerIt is a process in your health. These things, when we're wondering why they're not happening, all of them from discovering what the body needs to getting politicians to change laws is extremely difficult. And extremely time consuming. And that's where I just wanted to reiterate when we're talking about compassion is a verb. This system, this progress we want to see needs support from everybody. And the smallest level that you can support from a $5 donation to a reputable organization to a little bit of time volunteering locally somewhere who needs it, those things add up.

1:29:18SpeakerAnd I think when you listen to people who've done things like what Valerie's done, what Colton's done, what ATN's done, you know, everybody on this list, sorry, won't name you all, Hillary, Ethan, everybody, it can be overwhelming. I mean, that's an amazing story. How do we, how do we, you know, do that? I can't do that. We don't have the time for that. And I just, that's not how it's done.

1:29:42SpeakerIt's done with everybody doing a very little bit at a time. And then the people, All of those people who we see who are lucky enough to have the ability to advocate the focus, the education, the resources. We put that little bit of time into supporting those people so that they can do it. Because I feel passionately about this because this is what I want to be doing.

1:30:04SpeakerBut, you know, I've been here less and less over the years. Because the reality is reality. I still have to pay the rent. I still have a son who needs full-time medical care and will for the rest of his life. I got to make sure he's not homeless. Those things add up into challenges. So my message is, you know, I love all of you and anybody who hears this before I go know that those little things that you do to support the people who are working towards the goals that you want to see in the world, they do make a difference.

1:30:34SpeakerAnd, uh, We could do it right now. Anybody hearing this can find somewhere to support and support those folks because we haven't even started. Medical is still just scratching the surface. We're still talking about tired or hungry or sativa or indica. And it's so much more complicated than that. And it's the benefits that I still have seen with my own eyes that I know will come from when we really understand the fine details of how to apply this plant.

1:31:03SpeakerWe haven't even scratched the surface. And there's a lot of desperate people who don't know that we exist kind of counting on us to continue to move it forward. So thank you for letting me rant, Marcus, before I had to go. I love you guys very much.

1:31:18BubblemanDude, I appreciate you so much. You'll never know how much I appreciate you for us. I love listening to you talk and I love hearing your story. It's authentic as authentic gets. And when you were speaking, it really reminded me that You're right. Like people got to do more. They got to kind of get involved a little more, whether it's donating some time, kicking down some cash, finding the right people to support.

1:31:43BubblemanAnd what you're doing, you know, with Silas and learning all these definitely core, like this is, this is once again, cannabis teaching us how to take care of ourselves because guess what? You can do this without having a rare form of epilepsy. You can do this without dying of stage four cancer. You can do this, and I don't know why we don't scream this from the mountaintops more often, cannabis is a preventative medicine.

1:32:11BubblemanThis is for everyone. What Forrest is doing with Silas, everyone should understand. They should learn their own bodies. They should understand what their bodies need, what their bodies don't need. They spend decades doing it for their plants. Oh, my plant needs some of this and it's got a little bit of a deficiency here. It's like do it with your body. You're not getting any younger. You don't have to wait until something happens.

1:32:34BubblemanTo me, I use cannabis on the daily, A, because I love to get high. That's no joke. But on the side note, I also like the aspect of preventativeness. I do consume cannabis orally through, you know, Thank you for watching.

1:33:10BubblemanAnd you can take the information. I've said it before. Cannabis is going to teach us so many things. Yes, it's overregulated, but the way we regulate cannabis and the way we look at the seriousness of it as a medicine for people like Colton and Silas, who cannot have some pesticide or herbicide or fungicide or some other thing present in their sensitive immune systems. That it makes sense to have that regulation where we're going to make sure that everything is on point because this is an actual medicine.

1:33:40BubblemanI love the idea of taking those aspects that we're putting into cannabis and putting a little bit of that into food and water and air. Thank you so much, Forrest, for sharing your time with us.

1:34:12BubblemanWe'll have to have you again sooner than later because it's always such a pleasure to hear from you. And give Silas a hug from the whole Hash Church congregation.

1:34:20SpeakerAbsolutely. No, be in touch. I'll be on again soon. And yeah, definitely I'll have Silas come in and say hello because he would absolutely love that.

1:34:31BubblemanDude, and shout out to your like low-key like... Thank you for watching.

1:34:51SpeakerThe tour that I was on, you know.

1:34:53BubblemanDude, listen, we're going to have you, we're going to, we're going to have you on another show and we're going to invite that Courtney Pollack guy, the guy that did all the tie dyeing for the Grateful Dead in the seventies. I think you and him would be a banging episode. We'll talk tie dye.

1:35:11Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineI think we should get girl Carolyn Garcia in on that phone or that show as well.

1:35:16BubblemanAbsolutely. Absolutely.

1:35:19Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAll right. Love you, Forrest.

1:35:22SpeakerBye, Forrest. Hey, listen, I know Forrest is signing out, but I just have to point out that Forrest made this great shirt. It's a tie-dye shirt with a cartoon picture of Wade on the front. I don't know if you have that photo. I love that shirt. Yeah, I wore it to his service, man. I needed to go through something. Art is healing, right? Before his service, I've just been working so hard and I was like, I'm just going to set something that's going to take a couple of days.

1:35:50ValerieThank you, Marcus. Bye. Thank you guys. I'm out of here. Much love. Thank you for showing up. Much love. Thanks for creating this forum. Sorry to interrupt, Forrest. Thanks for creating this forum for us all to get together. You're an angel and love you all. We'll do it again soon.

1:36:09Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineI love you, Valerie. You're amazing and special. You make the world a better place. We appreciate you.

1:36:15ValerieAren't we a great puddle of people? I mean, you know, it's so lovely to be part just of, you know.

1:36:22Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineIt's lovely to be one puddle in the throes.

1:36:25ValerieYeah, right? Big draw. Big drop.

1:36:28SpeakerShould I just make one where we can share?

1:36:29ValerieSure. Big hug.

1:36:31SpeakerCiao. I love you guys.

1:36:32ValerieLove you. I love that. There it is. That's so good.

1:36:41BubblemanThat is amazing, dude. That is amazing, actually.

1:36:45SpeakerYeah, that was a lot of fun. That was a lot of fun. Where do we get those? Yeah. I know, it's crazy. We'll do a fundraiser for us. We'll do a fundraiser with this shirt. Yeah, maybe we could. We might be able to do the sublimination.

1:37:02Collin PalmerPrint type things maybe?

1:37:04SpeakerYeah, exactly. Yeah, but we'll talk about it off here. But yeah, love you guys. Monica, so great to see you. You'll hear from me soon.

1:37:13BubblemanI think that's such a good idea. I know about a thousand people that would buy that shirt.

1:37:19SpeakerYeah, let's do it. We can make that happen. We can make that happen and we can find a good cause to tie the sails to. For sure. Yeah, awesome.

1:37:30Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineWe can help with that with some good organic cotton too to go for it to go on. You know, that would be nice. A good affordable organic cotton for it to go on would be super good. I have those that hooked with in Peru for the Pima cotton. Yeah. Yeah. Peruvian Pima cotton.

1:37:46BubblemanIt's all coming together. Compassion is a verb.

1:37:51Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineIt is. And on the compassionate note. We have John here, Green Bodie, and Eugene, and he's done amazing amounts of work with compassion and different things with Buddhism and organic cannabis growing in genetics for years. Yeah, so this is John welcoming John to the Tash Church to give love and Monica, love to Wade and Monica and the community.

1:38:22BubblemanHell yeah, welcome, dude. How y'all doing? So, you know, I was nervous this morning. I don't get super nervous. And I was like nervous. And then I'm like, I'm like, as if Wade would be like, yeah, be nervous. Like, it better be perfect or I'm going to judge you harshly. It's like, oh, yeah, that's not who he was. So I was just judging myself, as we often do, through our own eyes.

1:38:49BubblemanI don't think we like I think people are so in their own heads that they're really not thinking about you as much as you might think they are. I really think that. I really do think that. I think that we think for other people. And I think we do that when we're not in service of others. I think when you're in service of others, this energy, this sort of petty narcissistic energy of thinking of oneself all the time, it just dissipates.

1:39:20BubblemanAnd it's like a beautiful... Thank you so much for joining us.

1:39:49BubblemanAnd so like lately in the last couple of months, what I've done is I've gone around my neighborhood and I've done yard work for elderly people who can no longer do the yard work, right? It's like, man, I live in a mountainous, crazy area. And it's like, if you don't take care of your garden, you don't take care of the trees and stuff. It just overgrows massively blackberries and all of this sort of stuff.

1:40:10BubblemanSo I've, I've found great joy in helping people and then also in not accepting anything in return for myself because I'm quite... Like, I'm pretty sure that it'll corrupt the integrity of what I'm trying to do in the first place. So I've allowed the people who want to give me something back to give that to someone else, right? So it's like the one woman I helped recently, I spent, I must have spent 20 hours on her property pulling out blackberries and ivy and trimming her trees and leaf blowing.

1:40:43BubblemanAnd I took everything out of her property and brought it to my house so she didn't even have to deal with the green waste bags. And there was probably about 50 of them. And in the end, she was so moved by me helping her. She's a single mom. She wasn't actually an elderly woman, but she was a single mom with three kids who's working full time. I ended up finding out she's a homeopathic doctor and that she has this incredible practice where she goes through this 90 minute interview and then offers all these super cool healing techniques.

1:41:13BubblemanAnd so my wife went and did that. And it's just, There's something really powerful about being in service of others, even if you don't think you have the time to do it. It doesn't always have to be cannabis related by any means, but I'll tell you, it's sure a good feeling to put a smile on someone else's face. It's worth spending your time doing it. I can promise.

1:41:38BubblemanI can promise. Hey, welcome to Debbie. Debbie Goldsberry. It's been a while since we've seen you, girl. How are you doing?

1:41:46SpeakerHey, okay, I'm fine, fine. I'm in grad school, you know, I'm about to finish my master's of public administration degree, so.

1:41:54BubblemanListen, I follow you on Facebook. I feel like I'm a part of your life.

1:41:57SpeakerThank you, because without that support, I don't know if I'd be getting through this experience. It's so hard. Holy crap. Yeah, but thanks for inviting me on. Yeah, of course. Dang, I was getting so upset there for a minute. I was shaking, you know, just between the elders who were losing and just the way that things have panned out for the industry being so freaking weird. Yeah, so I'm glad to get a chance to talk.

1:42:19SpeakerI'm not going to take much time, but I'll say a couple of things. I got started back in 1986, so it just occurs to me, holy crap, now I'm about to be on my 40th anniversary of being in the cannabis industry. That is just crazy, crazy. And, you know, we got involved at the height of the drug war when things were so sketchy and so dangerous. And a lot of us here on this that are here today have gone through so much together that we had to support each other emotionally, physically, get each other out of jail, provide court support.

1:42:52SpeakerWe were walking into trials. We didn't know if they're going to lock us up in federal prison after. And right now people don't, that knowledge is going out of people's understanding of what happened with the war on drugs. People really don't understand that people like us who maybe seem normal or walking around the streets, we went through hell to legalize cannabis. And like me and ATN, I can't even imagine that stuff.

1:43:15SpeakerWe went through ATN between the DEA showing up at our doors repeatedly for, you know, getting sucked up in the Ed Rosenthal trial and that courtroom full of marshals about to take us all to jail at the same time. And Just some crazy stuff that people don't realize was happening. And that kind of, that kind of upsets me. So in my, what I've been thinking lately is about trying to put more knowledge on what happened.

1:43:39SpeakerThey call it the informal years, you know, when we had to actually make a, make a world where people were open to the idea of cannabis being legalized and we had to put our bodies on the front line like that and and i think it would be good if we all started like i'm thinking about doing this podcast i'm calling unbox me because i've got so many boxes of stuff sitting around my house bubble man i can't imagine how much you got sitting around your place right Oh my God.

1:44:05SpeakerLet's open up those boxes on camera and tell the stories before it's too late. I can't even remember half that stuff, but I know if I open up that box and start going through it, I'm going to be able to tell the stories. So yes, let's unbox that stuff and let's tell the stories. I have so many of those boxes. So you'll probably see that soon. But the reason I decided to get my master's degree is because I'm really not into competitive retail at the at the base level that this whole cannabis industry has gone to.

1:44:38SpeakerI mean, it is just bad. Look, I'm happy if I could walk into a dispensary. I walked in and got five dollars tax included an eighth the other day. I was like, OK, I support that. That was a really good eight that could afford it. I loved it. I'll go back and do it again. But at the same time, we were we thought we were starting a cultural movement.

1:44:56SpeakerNot a bottom of the barrel retail movement, you know, where people just want to know how much, what's the cheapest and what's the highest THC quota. And that's all we're doing when we, when we think about cannabis. So I don't know, I really want to get back on the cultural side of things. I went to get the master's degree because I figured two ways that I could really influence what happens next.

1:45:20SpeakerEither as a regulator, you know, I'd love to run the Department of Cannabis Control. I think I can do that job, you know, and that we infuse culture through the movement rather than just commerce. You know, this is about much more than that. And I'd also love to be a college professor because universities all across the U.S. and world are now starting these little cannabis departments and they need people like us going in there and educating these young up and comers about what the industry is really about, helping each other Compassion, history, government going out of control and people like us having to step up and put ourselves in front of the tanks and the, you know, the industrial war complex and put our bodies on the line to make something better.

1:46:04SpeakerPeople need to know about that and they need to still embrace that culture. And like, listen to what my kid told me on Thanksgiving. I was waxing on, oh yeah, I used to fight the power. She's like, dude, you used to sell t-shirts on the Grateful Dead parking lot. Oh my God, is that what it's come down to? It was a little bit more intense than that.

1:46:24SpeakerYou know what I mean? These Gen X and millennials or Gen Y and millennials. But I was in here thinking like, Did we mess up for the next generation? Are they missing the cultural revolution? And then I started to think, no, actually, they're not drinking alcohol. They're not smoking cigarettes. They're super interested in psychedelics. We've done a good job bringing up the next generation. You know, let's now keep the cultural revolution going.

1:46:56SpeakerLet's get out of this cannabis as a consumer product, you know, and let's figure out what's next. So so that's what I'm excited about. So let's see what else I want to say. Oh, one thing I also want to get into is ornamental hemp. Why is nobody doing that yet? Like. You can go out and you can get a bundle of roses, but stick a giant stock of ornamental hemp in there with some buds.

1:47:18SpeakerAnd I'm going to buy that thing and put it on my table, you know, like get me that for for the holidays. I don't need roses. I need like a bundle of hemp flowers that I, you know, how about a little hemp bonsai that I can put in my window and just grow? So so I've also been thinking a lot about ornamental hemp. So if anybody has any ideas or wants to get into that, I would love, I could see myself on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley with my little ornamental hemp flower stand, you know, or at the farmer's market where I'm like, you know, just selling bundles of hemp to people.

1:47:50SpeakerIt's totally legal. So yeah, I'm pretty excited about those kinds of ideas. What can we do that's still creative and fun and interesting and next level? That's not about like how cheap can we make cannabis at the highest, at the lowest price and the highest THC. That's just, that's just not what I'm into and that's not what I got involved for. So really curious about what's next.

1:48:12SpeakerI do intend to one day have my own little shop though. I mean, I want to just, Retire. They're used to this place in Berkeley, Smokey Joe's Cafe, ETN. I don't know if you remember that place. Our buddy Ned used to own it. It was pre-legalization. The most fun in the industry was pre-2018, I'll tell you. Before we legalized it, it was so much fun. But Ned used to have a little vegan restaurant and he would just quietly sell weed at the counter.

1:48:38SpeakerPerfect. That's what I want to do when I retire, get a little weed restaurant where I can just sit there and smoke weed, sell weed, sell vegan food and my friends will just come in. That sounds great. So bring back cannabis culture, figure out what it looks like in the new millennial. And, and yeah, let's do this thing. Let's get out of the race to the bottom.

1:48:58SpeakerAnd let's just figure out what what it takes to get high again. So that's kind of where I'm at. Awesome. Letting me be here.

1:49:06BubblemanI loved all of that. And I would definitely vote you in for the head of the cannabis department in California. That would be amazing. I also think your idea about ornamental hemp plants, like cannabis houseplants, cannabis bonsais. I'm a huge, huge proponent and fan of that in a big way for sure.

1:49:27SpeakerAnd thank you for your help back in the day, Debbie. Back in the day, you were like one of the few people that I could count on that had some years of experience ahead of what I was doing. And like Ethan, you're one of the people that I could call for troubleshooting and support and help. And I really appreciate, I appreciate it. It's so cool to see you.

1:49:50SpeakerCongratulations on slugging it out through the academic track. One more semester. Can't wait to be done. Good for you. I've done almost all my papers on cannabis. Believe me, in my little cohort, they're almost, oh, another paper or another speech on cannabis. Yeah, what about it? So, yeah.

1:50:09BubblemanI think it was, it had to be around 98 when you came out here with Amber and Hillary brought you up to my house in Lions Bay. And that house is, Is two doors over in that direction. I'm two doors over from that house. I have pictures of you guys at that house. A small world.

1:50:30SpeakerThat was good times. We were on the road back then, you know, because there was no real internet back in the day and the libraries had scrubbed all the info about cannabis out of them. You couldn't go to your university library and be like, tell me the truth about marijuana. So we just had to go on the road. You know, we did, we went to, I think we did a thousand events back in the day, just traveling from state to state and city to city, and I guess country to country, you know, to try and get the word out to people who could just keep on doing it themselves.

1:50:55SpeakerSo, oh, one thing about ornamental hemp I wanted to say, There's this weird little loophole in the law that a clone, you know, as long as it's less than 3% THC, it's hemp. I mean, you know, a Bubble Berry clone, a Jack Carrere clone, any of our clones, those are all, all those clones are hemp. I could literally set up a booth on Telegraph Avenue with a little clone shop and just be like, these are ornamental hemp.

1:51:21SpeakerClones for you to take home to your house to grow ornamentally. And, you know, I probably have a flyer that says, like, if you flower it, it's going to get buds. It's not going to be ornamental hemp anymore. Not my problem. I'm just selling ornamental hemp.

1:51:35Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineDoesn't didn't that the new law change even affect seed sales? Because, OK, you can clarify this. But and just one sec. But I did that. It's synthetic. If it can go.

1:51:46SpeakerDo something over. No, that hasn't that that language hasn't been introduced yet. It's mainly on consumable, you know, whatever delta derivatives and stuff that are basically coming from CBG and they're transforming. So that's their main focus. None of that. None of the language has been part of this bill. It was part of the one previous that they were trying to introduce that whole hemp crush bill, you know.

1:52:09SpeakerThat didn't get put into this bill that just got signed. It was just on the intoxicating hemp alkaloids. Ornamental hemp stands on the corners of Mendocino County. You know, we could just put up our little clone stands at farmers markets with our little bonsai plants and our little ornamental Christmas tree, hemp Christmas trees. And, you know, as long as it doesn't test over 3%, we're good to go.

1:52:35SpeakerYou know, Debbie, I did a wedding. That had hemp as a little boutonniere. Yes. We're getting there. We're getting there. I know. I tried to get it together. There's not that many hemp growers in California. There's only like 25, 26 licensed hemp growers in the state. So I got in touch with the Department of Agriculture in my city. I was like, I want to do it in the county.

1:52:59SpeakerI want to do ornamental hemp plants. They're like, that sounds great. The guy was so psyched about it. Put me in touch with the Small Business Administration that gave me a mentor to create a business plan to make ornamental hemp plants. The flower plants, I couldn't even believe it, you know, the new world we live in. Then I started calling hemp farmers and I was trying to get it together for this year to do ornamental hemp wreaths because the hemp farmer that I reached out to had done that the year before.

1:53:26SpeakerHe just couldn't keep up because he's a hemp farmer. He's not into making ornamental wreaths. But there is an industry there and, you know, why can't we be the next 1-800 flowers, 1-800 hemp flowers, you know, franchising across the U.S.? Anyway, these are just some of the ideas that I have in mind for just doing fun things with marijuana now that I don't want to, like I said, race to the bottom anymore in retail.

1:53:52BubblemanYeah, that racing to the bottom in retail is tough. It's especially tough in... In Canada, where they don't allow deli style, everything is sealed. You can't see anything. You know, when Hillary had the club, it was like jars of weed and smell this one. And oh, wow. And that whole deli style, like to me, even if you don't, you know, back in those earlier days, I felt like there was a lot to do with that gut feeling of like someone smelling a cultivar and liking it.

1:54:26BubblemanI thought, I wonder if that goes deeper than just, oh, I like that smell.

1:54:30Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThat still exists here in Eugene at Moss Crossing. Yeah, all the organic spots. Yeah, there's just full sweet jars, beautiful stores. It feels organic and nice in there.

1:54:43SpeakerI mean, even in Washington, it's like super sterile. Yeah, no, I mean, that was like the beauty. When I had my dispensary up in Portland before I sold it, like, I think to this date, we're still only the only one that's been fully third-party certified organic. And so... It having that style and us being able to curate it and, you know, But like the thing is a lot of these dispensaries, they're not doing that.

1:55:08SpeakerYou know, they just have it at whatever temp, throw it out there. Everyone's like big jars are smelling it, fucking shaking it all around. And like, you know, it's like, they're like, they don't care for it. Right.

1:55:18Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineSo there's that problem at least in that kind of style, but still it's the best style, you know, if you, well, that's when you're selling it more as a number of THC rather than an actual experience. Exactly. Smelling it, seeing it. Well, you know, anyone that like,

1:55:31SpeakerWhen they fucking good jar organic herb, when they bust a jar of, it's like that thing that happens. It's medicinal. Yeah. You can't get that from, you know, like when you're THC hunting, really, in my opinion, you know, a lot of the higher stuff that's testing in the upper twenties, low thirties or something, you know, that's just, that's not the flower I choose. I, you know, personally, I like OGs and sours and haze hybrids and shit like that.

1:55:54SpeakerAnd that usually doesn't hit that mark. It's usually 20 to 25 and it's pretty standard, but And then the Terps are, you know, so it's like, well, we have Ethan Russo right here.

1:56:03Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineI mean, we talked about like the entourage effect being such an important aspect of the medicine. So you really can't judge a flower on THC content and say that's going to be the best medicine.

1:56:18SpeakerWell, especially we know when things are grown conventionally, they're the range of flavonoids and terpenes and more volatile terpenes really aren't there. You know, it might have a nice smell, but the complexity is, it's missing, you know, so that range that the soil brings and the microbes bring and all the organic set brings, I think is something that you, I mean, that diversity you just can't find with convention.

1:56:43SpeakerAnd conventional cultivation, in my opinion, you know, that's just my opinion. But like, and so to be able to hear, like be able to project that kind of style, because Oregon, you know, it's Oregon, that's sort of the most critical kind of stuck up, you know, people there is, I think, especially Eugene vibe. I'm, you know, I grew cam a little bit here in Eugene, like, for like a year 99.

1:57:04SpeakerAnd You know, also, I grew organic. And when I bring the chemweed out to fucking snoggrass party or something like that, like that, it didn't work with with the hippies. You know what I mean? No one is even going to like even touch it. And they could tell. And everyone knew. And, you know, it's like even without telling. So it's very, very strong here, that vibe. And And that culture is, I mean, it's real.

1:57:27SpeakerBecause we believed in herbalism and compassion. Compassion is the main set. So like if bodhicitta is our main intention, meaning that altruistic mind that's going to choose others over self continuously in the most altruistic fashion, why would you be, if I eat organic, Thank you so much for joining us.

1:58:12SpeakerThank you for joining us.

1:58:27SpeakerWe have here so much. And I think that that is being like crossed into cannabis to such a degree because people are choosing profit money over over the truth. And that's obvious now because like you go to a dispensary in California, you go to a dispensary in New York, you can't find good organic herb. It's really rare, you know. And if you do, it's really known, like even in Vegas, our friend Steve, you know, like Green Life is the best brand in Vegas.

1:58:53SpeakerYou know why? Because he's organic, like the only organic brand really probably there. And he knows what he's doing. And he does it in a boutique fashion. And he does it with the highest level of intention to really help, to help with unify with the plant, help others. And I think that essence, if... People like everyone here in this, you know, form right now can bring that and does bring it.

1:59:16SpeakerEveryone here has devoted their life, lifetimes maybe to this plant too, you know, like.

1:59:21Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineYeah, we've already devoted future lifetimes to it.

1:59:23SpeakerI sold my soul to this plant, you know, so like, you know, like a lot of us have these experiences. Mine was on like 10 hits of acid. I had to grow organic. I wasn't making it through the night, you know, like kind of vibe. If I didn't commit to growing organic and stewarding for this plant, In a way that I did, I wasn't making it that night, you know, like it was not I wasn't making it through the night.

1:59:43SpeakerBut when I did. You know, the evidence was clear because all my rooms that were dying, rooters not, I was wondering, I was in such a depressed state, didn't know why the fuck was going on. But once I made that commitment to the plant and organics, the next day shit started changing. And, you know, I've never read any books on growing except The Secret Life of Plants.

2:00:03SpeakerIt's the only book I've read of cultivation or growing. And everything else has just been mere like wisdom perspective of my gut, of soil, of nature. And trying to mimic that in a container, you know, so and knowing that the reference and what the plant will offer us in its mere like perspective, it'll give back to us in either it being, you know, from us seeing every time we raise our voice or speak like shit or have a bad intention or have a bad mindset or even be impatient anyway.

2:00:34SpeakerAnd then we get self-critical on ourself because we get too high and then we're like, fuck, we're not going to do that again because that's self-centered. You know, and the plant... The plant's a good reflection. No better plant. You know, that's why people get wasted all the time, get drunk all the time. They can't smoke weed really that much because they get all anxious and they don't... Yeah, because they don't vibe.

2:00:52SpeakerIt's like, yeah, obviously, but... Either way, I really thank you guys. I have to get going. I got to get ready for Vegas. I have some stuff I'm doing down there next week and speaking on some panels. If you guys are all there, I hope to see you. Marcus, if there's a way we can link, I'd love to. Thank you for everything you guys are doing. And everyone on this panel, I really, it's just fucking an honor.

2:01:12SpeakerLove you, Kel. Really an honor to even see you guys. So thank you all for devoting your lives to this plan. I really appreciate it. One thing, if I could, about what you were saying earlier is, I mean, a minute ago was about those scraggly, weird looking plants. You know, that's how we found CBD. A couple of brave people like Wade and Karen Byers found that they were growing these plants that were unusual.

2:01:39SpeakerThey didn't even know why. They were just kind of vibing that there was something unusual, so they sent it out to testing. And these kind of brown, scraggly, maybe we're going to throw it away type of plants ended up being the CBD plants. So you can't give up on a plant just because it's scraggly. And much thanks to Wade for bringing CBD to our consciousness. Can't judge a book by its cover, you know?

2:01:59Etienne FontanAnd trusting the vibe, right? Trusting the feel, right? They knew that there was something that we didn't know. And, you know, science came around and taught us what it was, which is, you know, again, trust your gut.

2:02:16BubblemanAbsolutely. Big, big important lesson for sure. You know, it is the truth. You just really can't judge a book by its cover, or at least you shouldn't. You should give it a little chance, you know, get into it a little bit, you know, and there's always a value to someone.

2:02:29Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThat's always a metaphor to trust your gut, but it's also like one of the truth, truth metaphors in life. And I mean, you really have to have a healthy gut. In order to think well and properly, you know, to be able to have an intuitive gut, you know what I mean?

2:02:46SpeakerWell, and digest well. And I think that intuition from the soil, our gut relation, and the mirror that the plant will show us, and the vibe and the energy the plant will give us, because, you know, all of us here, I'm sure we can see it, like, we'll see things before they're a thing. We'll see things on ranges of subtlety that Most people can't see, you know, and we can see that it's not a vision that we're seeing it with our eyes more so.

2:03:12SpeakerWe're like the whole bioassays happening and we're registering it and our connection with the plant through, you know, consumption for decades, for For everything, for devotion, for all this kind of thing, I think that what it gives us and that kind of clairvoyance in its relation, it's something quite unique, but that also transfers into all our reality. Once we become aware of the more subtle natures of life and humanity and connection and, you know, the biome we're actually living in, you know, so, and a part of completely inseparable, it's... That's when I said it's fullness.

2:03:52Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineThat's where the wholeness comes in.

2:03:55BubblemanWell, that's why I always say it's a battle between good and evil. And really, what's that battle? It seems to be between cannabis and alcohol. And what kills the biome in your stomach faster than anything?

2:04:10Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineEspecially if it's not organic alcohol. If it's not organic alcohol, it's chemical grains being fermented. I mean, it's... He often overlooked, but who's drinking organic alcohol every single moment of the day?

2:04:25SpeakerI mean, well, a lot of what's crazy is a lot of these really high end bourbons, high end vodka, high end gins. They're all made with salmon safe grains. And so like when you get to that level, the level of quality of their grains they're using has to be at a certain level. Thank you for joining us.

2:04:58SpeakerJust like in everything, if we're making an extract of something, you know, like, I mean, just like fucking make corn syrup, right? You got this GMO glyphosate rich, chemically conventionally grown thing that they make an extract out of. And then that's what they're giving to everybody. You know, it's kind of same thing, glyphosate extract now, you know, so in the same context, if we're doing it, In this pure, organic, intentional, heartfelt way, all that's coming too.

2:05:24SpeakerAnd that kind of same, same. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is power.

2:05:30BubblemanWell, I would just say organic or not, it's ethanol that affects the gut biome. It doesn't matter if it's from chemical or non-chemical. If it's organic alcohol, the ethanol will absolutely destroy the biome in your gut. It's the enemy. And I say that because my cousin just lost her 22-year-old son to renal failure from alcohol abuse.

2:05:54SpeakerIt is incredible. Two years ago, my kid lost his mom too. She died right in front of us. I had to lead him through all these blessings as she's dying from liver and kidney failure and bled to death from ulcers in her esophagus and stomach, like right in front of her 10-year-old son, basically. I had full custody since he was four. But yeah, so alcohol is a...

2:06:13SpeakerAlcohol's a wicked thing, but, you know, more of my expression, what I was saying is, like, in that high-end level, the quality is there. It doesn't matter.

2:06:19Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineIt's still poison, for sure, but the fact is, is it... From the standpoint of something elevating to its highest point, you can see.

2:06:27SpeakerIt's still toxic as fuck, but it still tastes better, you know? My point, but, like, you know...

2:06:33BubblemanI never put it in my mouth, so I wouldn't know, but... You know, Hillary had asked out an hour and a half ago about Dr. Ethan Russo's sort of origin story on what led him to lean into cannabis in his life and in his job. So I kind of wanted to ask that question to you, Dr. Ethan Russo, if you if you can take us down memory lane.

2:06:59SpeakerOK, well, I think people have probably heard this story before, but not everyone. We want to hear it again. We want to hear it again. Tell us, Ethan. Fair enough. Well, I smoked cannabis in college, and unlike some, I inhaled frequently, deeply, and with mellus of forethought. So this is like circa 1970.

2:07:26SpeakerI was aware then that there were medical applications for cannabis, most notably among the co-eds who would tell me that it really helped with their menstrual cramps, among other things. But there was sort of a hiatus. I was getting educated. I was getting indoctrinated in medical school after that, et cetera, et cetera. Fast forward to 1980. When I was a neurology resident at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Seattle, my My attending physician had a sort of smile on his face as he handed me this chart saying that he wanted me to see this patient.

2:08:12SpeakerIt turned out to be a Korean War vet. He had myasthenia gravis, a very serious autoimmune condition that produces weakness so bad that he would have multiple admissions to intensive care a year to be on a ventilator because he didn't have the muscle strength to breathe properly. But that changed when he started mixing cannabis into his pipe tobacco. And he showed me this, and in fact, it was tested in the chart that he hardly ever got hospitalized after this.

2:08:51SpeakerSo I sort of tucked that away, went into practice, and I was aware that my patients with multiple sclerosis were getting great benefit from cannabis. Long about 1990, I was having a crisis of faith in what I was doing because I was giving all these conventional drugs to people with less and less benefit, knew that there had to be a better way. I'm turned back to my childhood interest in medicinal plants.

2:09:24SpeakerBut there was some time before cannabis became the focus. I wanted to treat migraine headaches and look to where the place on the planet that there were the most traditional treatments for migraine. And like so many things that turned out to be the Amazon jungle. So I took some Spanish classes at night once a week for a year and a half and eventually found my way to Peru.

2:09:55SpeakerSo I took a very unconventional sabbatical. Usually people went off to get more training at a medical school. Instead, I went to the University of the Amazon jungle in Peru working with the Machiganga. And on the course of about two and a half months, we documented 500 medicinal plants that they used to advantage, including psychedelics. And yeah, they had stuff that could nail a migraine, nothing flat.

2:10:28SpeakerWhen I came back, it was 1995, and Prop 215 was happening in California. And one of the first people I called Was Rick Doblin at MAPS and he decided that I should join in the efforts to study cannabis through the government. So Donald Abrams was doing this and he managed to get his studies in HIV supported because He ostensibly was looking at the damage that cannabis would do to these people with AIDS, their immune system.

2:11:15SpeakerWell, in studying migraine, I couldn't say, well, we're going to see how cannabis makes migraine worse, because I knew already that it was a very traditional medicine. One of the most frequent reasons that cannabis was prescribed in the 19th century in this country and in Europe. Anyway, during this time I was in a deep dive about cannabis and the endocannabinoid system and realized, hey, This is what I really want to be doing with my life, but I still had a full-time neurology practice while I spent three years fighting the government to get access to cannabis for research.

2:11:59SpeakerAlong the way, I started publishing. That caught the notice of Jeffrey Guy, who started GW Pharmaceuticals with a license from the British Home Office to develop pharmaceutical forms of cannabis. For the next five years, I sort of had three hats as a full-time neurologist, editor of the Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics and an accompanying book program in alternative medicine, and also consulting with GW. Then in 2003, it came on full time and was involved for the next 11 years in the development program for Sativex and Epidiolex, which remain the only two cannabis-based pharmaceuticals.

2:12:52SpeakerEpidiolex, of course, for seizures is a purified CBD extract approved in a variety of countries, including the US and Canada, whereas Sativex is approved for spasticity and MS in 30 countries, not including the US. But along the way, I had the opportunity to be a liaison to many scientists around the world who were getting funding from GW to investigate all the other wonderful ingredients. I should mention that GW started using the genetics from Horta Farm.

2:13:36SpeakerIn the Netherlands. And I knew those guys and benefit greatly from their involvement. And they were growing CBD chemovars back in the early 90s starting. So we were working on CBD along the way. And that brings me fast forward to finally meeting Wade. In 2019, I had a wonderful retreat that was organized by Kelly and Josh high in the mountains in Humboldt County. It took five hours to drive there from Sonoma County.

2:14:21SpeakerBut it was great to understand all the work he had done independently. We'd by this time been working on CBD for years, and here was a guy that was growing it and giving it to people. So that was really wonderful. And just one more reminiscence about Wade. A few months back, we were on some panel together and by that time it was apparent he was very sick, but he said something that really touched me, which he said that he thought of me as sort of a magical person.

2:15:01SpeakerWell, I get a lot of compliments, mostly undeserved, but that one was special because nobody had ever called me magical. So anyway, hats off to Wade. What else?

2:15:23SpeakerGW reached a point where I couldn't do what I needed to do. I couldn't talk to the people I needed to talk to. I couldn't talk to the press. I couldn't publish what I wanted to do. And Epidiolex was not the preparation I wanted. I knew that we needed something much more broad spectrum. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

2:16:03SpeakerThank you for joining us.

2:16:19Speakerspent the next several years in two private companies that didn't attain their promise and finally had to go out on my own which i'm still doing and it's still a slog because the industry is a morass and we're facing all the same obstacles which are overwhelming but Fortunately for me, it's an international issue. And although I still can't do what I need to do in the USA, we have partners in Canada, we have partners in Australia and around the world.

2:16:59SpeakerAnd one way or another, we're still trying.

2:17:06BubblemanWell, we love you for it, Ethan. It's always a pleasure to have you on, share with us. And I really love that Huichol art you have behind you there. That's pre-Spaniards showing up with the beads. That's yarn.

2:17:19SpeakerSure, let me point this out.

2:17:21BubblemanThat is incredible.

2:17:23SpeakerWe've got a six-pointed star there. I think that the Huichols may have been one of the lost tribes.

2:17:30BubblemanI would not be surprised. I have a yarn piece myself. One second, I'll grab it.

2:17:36SpeakerOh, if we're just... Yeah, I remember visiting you in Vancouver and seeing some of your...

2:17:43BubblemanI met a woman years ago who lived with the Weechole people. She lived with them for 30 years at the time I met her. I met her at a psychedelic conference in Whistler. And this was one of the first pieces I got from her. Wow. It's a ceramic mask.

2:18:01SpeakerWow.

2:18:02BubblemanThat's the name of the... Gentlemen who created the mask and then used yarn to inlay it with all of this incredible sort of peyote, you know, that you can see the scorpion on the nose. Just super awesome. And then of course, it would be remiss not to show, you know, after the Spaniards brought the beads, it started looking like this.

2:18:27SpeakerI'm going to grab one of mine.

2:18:30BubblemanYeah, grab it. We're sharing Weechel art on the Compassion episode. Oh my gosh.

2:18:41SpeakerI think that my spirit animal when I was a kid was a Gila monster. So this is one of my favorite pieces.

2:18:50BubblemanReally nice. Geez, should I go get my iguana? No, I will not go get my iguana. But thank you for sharing your story. We always appreciate that. And that was a request from Hillary. So we had to get it on there. I want to welcome Kelly from Dragonfly. She popped into the room, as did Colin, as did Ted Smith, who's literally at his club right now.

2:19:15KellyHi, everybody. I'm so happy to be here. I'm really most excited. Excited to be on here with Monica, you amazing, special, wonderful, light star being of a woman. And I've been wanting to tell you for a long time, you know, one of the reasons why Wade is who he was, everyone, is because of this woman who is sitting here on this panel with us today. And I had a conversation with him one time About her.

2:19:52KellyAnd I said, Wade, you know, I just feel like when I'm around you, I'm able to, you know, go deeper, find the depth, find the depth and everything. And he said, Well, you know, I was always sorta like that. But it was when I met Monica, that things really changed. And she brought tremendous magic to my life. And You were the keeper for him. And I just appreciate you for taking care of him in the end.

2:20:30KellyThere was a lot of time that we were able to glean and learn and gain knowledge from him because you were taking care of him week after week. And it was such an incredible honor to have him on. And he was an incredibly special man. And the path that he walked was one that he, you know, must have made some type of an agreement at some time and just decided that he was going to walk the path come fucking hell or high water, come laws, come cops, come handcuffs, come shutting it down.

2:21:18KellyYou know, he was a man that just continued to follow his path and we were just so honored to know him. So I'm really stoked to be here with everyone today. All of you all have a story that is connected to this plant in a way that brings us all to the depth of our being and maybe the reason why we're even here. So not just even here, but like here.

2:21:45KellySo Thanks, everybody. I love you all so much. I love you for how you show up for the plant. I love you for how you show up for the community. I love you for how you show up for the show constantly. You too, Marcus. Thank you.

2:22:03BubblemanThanks for sharing, Kelly. We love you as well. We do love you as well. It made me just want to grab this big chunk of hash and start rolling it up because compassion is a verb. So I'm doing it.

2:22:19SpeakerYes. I want to tell you as you bring out that giant temple ball you're rolling around about my first date with Wade.

2:22:28BubblemanBeautiful.

2:22:32SpeakerWell, first of all, I'm going to say it took some cajoling on his part to get me to notice him like maybe a year or two. So I won't tell you that part because it's too long. But when we did actually go on our first date was in San Francisco. I was living in North Panhandle, if people know where that is. And we walked down the hill to the Asian Art Museum, which is not down at Civic Center anymore.

2:23:00SpeakerNow it's in the Golden Gate Park. And it was beautiful. And we walked back and We sat down and, you know, okay, well, let's have a smoke, right? We're from, you know, a cannabis community. And he brings out all this beautiful hash, like three or four different little temple balls. And he's like, oh, here, let's roll this and let's play with this. And I'm telling you, you guys, because I was already a hash smoker, boom.

2:23:32SpeakerAll the switches flipped. I really fell in love with him. It took about three days for me to fall in love with him. But it was the hash that helped me know, okay, this guy gets me. You know, you have certain interests that you have to share with somebody that you're going to be close with. And it was the hash that he brought.

2:23:57BubblemanThat's amazing.

2:23:58SpeakerEnd of story.

2:23:59BubblemanI love it. Hash that was the glue to stick you together.

2:24:08BubblemanI love a good piece of hash. I'm not going to lie. Ted, welcome. Ted Smith has been doing the compassion is a verb thing. Pretty consistently for like, I guess like 30 years now, Ted, is this, is this what you've got going on? Oh, he just jumped out of his chair.

2:24:27SpeakerI'm doing a sign up right now. Yeah. January will be 30 years that the club's been operating.

2:24:36BubblemanAmazing. And the best part is he's doing it right now. He was like, dude, I'm working. I got to do the, he's like, I'll try to come in. I'll try to come into chat. That's awesome, dude.

2:24:47SpeakerYeah, like Sunday to Thursday, it's my work schedule. I quite like it. Beautiful.

2:24:53BubblemanWe want to tell the audience a little bit about you and your and your space that you've been rocking for 30 years, because this is the Wade Laughter Compassion is a Verb episode. And I thought Ted should represent.

2:25:06SpeakerWell, thank you. Thanks for including me on this really amazing panel you put together. Yeah, I guess 30 years ago, I Moved to Vancouver and came across this little group called Hempology 101 that was doing education stuff, working kind of out of Hemp BC. And so I really liked the idea, decided to write a book about it, about the plant that is, and then decided to move to Victoria.

2:25:39SpeakerIn September 95, I began doing all this education stuff. And then began meeting patients, hearing about Dennis Perron down in the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club. Met a baker that made cookies and brownies and salves and stuff. And so we started up the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club in January 1996. I was living in a van. I got a pager and a pamphlet and just started hustling. A couple months later, got an apartment, ran out of that for five years.

2:26:15SpeakerGot a store, got raided in the store, got a bunch of acquittals. This was like 2002, 2003. We got raided four times, beat every single charge. Then my bakery got raided in 2009. So we fought that to the Supreme Court of Canada. That was a big one. That used some of your pictures in the infamous sort of cookie trial. We kind of phrased it, but it was much more than that.

2:26:44SpeakerOne unanimous decision at the Supreme Court of Canada that made extracts legal for patients. And then... Dude, hold on that thought for one second.

2:26:54BubblemanThat was so fucking big. That was monstrous what that, the cookie... You know, bust. The bakery bust. That was Owen Smith, correct?

2:27:05SpeakerYeah, yeah, Owen. He's actually not working for me now. He's doing the sign up as we speak.

2:27:10BubblemanThat's amazing, dude. We'll have to say hi to him in a bit. But Owen's case and the Victoria Buyers, this was very important because... The way it played out, the judge didn't want to change like the federal law, although it did quickly get changed. He changed the language of the definition of marijuana in this case. And it was very simple because I think the case that Kirk brought to the judge was that like, listen, right now, everything is like fine.

2:27:40BubblemanYour grandma can go buy weed. It's legal. But if she takes it home and she puts it in a tea bag and she dumps it into a teacup, she's now doing an extraction and she could face 14 years in prison. And the judge was just like, that is just the most absurd thing ever. So we changed the definition of cannabis to be like whatever it says on your license.

2:27:58BubblemanOh, you're allowed to have this much cannabis. Well, cannabis is now defined, at least in British Columbia, where it was like anything is cannabis. It could be seed. It could be resin heads. It could be oil. It could be whatever's from the cannabis plant. So that was a huge, huge thing, especially from my perspective as a hash maker. That you guys brought to a reality through that case.

2:28:23BubblemanSo continue, sorry.

2:28:25SpeakerAll good. Yeah, it was a huge case. It was really the final blow to prohibition. After that, it made no sense to prohibit cannabis given all the benefits and uses. And yeah, so that was a huge decision. Unfortunately, at the time, my love, Gail Quinn, was dying of cancer. And so I actually stepped out of my work for a couple of years right around legalization. And then the buyers club was threatened really by legalization and how it was, you know, Coming into play.

2:29:10SpeakerSo I came back to the club. Since legalization, we've been raided three times. The fines are down to $3.2 million. We have a judicial review that we filed in court. We've also been evicted since that time and have had to move a couple of times. However, now we're in an absolutely gorgeous location in a beautiful neighborhood. And we really, you know, are living and working in an ideal location now.

2:29:43SpeakerBut yeah, we still have a little bit hanging over our heads.

2:29:47BubblemanDude, it's incredible the obstacles that you guys have been through. It's just in any one of them would be enough to just crush a death blow to most people. And you just, you're like Bob and Weave, Bob and Weave. It's like, holy shit, Ted's still going. Unbelievable. And shout out to Gail. Loved Gail. Super awesome woman. And glad you brought her up on this Compassion Club episode.

2:30:12BubblemanI mean, compassion is obviously fairly important. It's the foundation of, you know, I would say, why do you think compassion is essential to the foundation of patient access?

2:30:30SpeakerWell, I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that we've all learned about medical marijuana from a friend. It wasn't the doctor. It wasn't school. It wasn't something we saw on TV. We've all experienced and used cannabis as medicine from someone sharing it and opening up. And back in the day, doing it in a way that was quite risky as well, right?

2:31:00SpeakerJust that act of sharing and of taking a risk, at times of even admitting that you would have cannabis, right? And the smoking of it together. We've built community from the beginning. This medicine is all about, you know, that sharing and caring and helping people in need. You know, that's because a lot of times people are introduced to cannabis as medicine because they were really hurting. And one of their friends was like, hey, man, like, you just got to smoke this joint and you'll feel better.

2:31:37SpeakerRight? So, you know, that's, that's the root. That's the beginning. It wasn't a storefront. It wasn't a big grow off. It was, you know, just people helping each other out. And that has been what has grown into a community of caring and of people, you know, helping each other out because they've first experienced that themselves. And then, you know, they want to share that with others.

2:32:07BubblemanYeah, I guess it's the question now is to ask how can compassion be practiced, not just discussed, because compassion is a verb, in today's evolving cannabis landscape? Because like you said, like they're fining you millions of dollars. Dude, what the fuck? You don't own a yacht and a mansion. Like you've just been like... Selling herb to the good folks on Vancouver Island for 30 years and fighting and going to court and like beating them.

2:32:37BubblemanIt's unbelievable that they're still attacking you.

2:32:43SpeakerIt is and it isn't. You know, the world is run by money. And greed is certainly rampant. That's, you know, what happened in this industry clearly as it became legal. And so, you know, we're not living in a world where compassion rules. Quite the opposite. We're living in a pretty dark world right now where there's, you know, a lot of homeless people. The war on drugs has created such a, A nightmare for our world that we have this completely divided society.

2:33:20SpeakerIt's really hard to fit compassion into what is happening out there. And so it's tough because everybody in the industry needs to put food on the table first and foremost. And to do that, you have to compete. And so it's really hard. I see for a lot of people in this field, whether they're on the legal side or the illegal side, to do much more than just survive right now.

2:33:55SpeakerI don't know how compassion fits in anymore. We're struggling to survive. I hope that we can model ourselves and do something across But we're up against a lot. The world just isn't very compassionate right now.

2:34:17BubblemanNo, I feel like you're not wrong, especially when it comes to like online, social media, all that sort of stuff. I think of that as just the most toxic stuff. But yet when I go out into the world and I talk to people, I feel better about it. I feel like for the most part, and then I talk to a lot of people. I don't like limit myself to people who have belief systems that are identical to mine.

2:34:42BubblemanIn fact, I find I get more value At least in a dialogue, when I speak to someone who has quite a different belief system from the belief system I do, because I'm curious, I'm like, wow, like, how can you think that? Like, there's got to be a reason for it, you know, like, let's discuss this sort of thing. But I think compassion is a frequency. And I think that the current frequency that we're under is Definitely like it needs, it needs to change that it's not the right pathway when patients still don't have access.

2:35:12BubblemanI mean, the biggest company in Canada that was, that wanted to, you know, they were like, if you're going to dispense cannabis as a medicine, that's our job. That was Shoppers Drug Mart. And they like completely spent millions of dollars trying to get into it. Thank you for watching.

2:35:46BubblemanThey got a lot of these sort of mainstream people that had not shifted over to the understanding of what a compassion club even is. To them, the safest place for them to get their medicine is from a pharmacy. And even the pharmacies in Canada basically turned their back on medical cannabis. Once recreational cannabis came into play in 2017, it really upended what I see as compassionate cannabis use.

2:36:15BubblemanOr what people call medical marijuana. I remember Hillary just being like, I hate both those words. Let's just call it something else. Medical marijuana. It's like, ah.

2:36:27KellyYou know, one point that I wanted to bring up is that just simply ingesting the plant helps us become more compassionate. So a point that I'd like to make is there's a lot of swag out there. There's a lot of mids. There's a lot of people who are passing this plant around in a really uncompassionate way. But one thing is for certain is that the plant is still getting out there and more and more people are ingesting it.

2:37:07KellySo that alone is

2:37:11KellyCompassion for all of humanity. And, you know, good or bad, it's still being ingested. And I'm going to take that as positive, given the state of humanity today.

2:37:31BubblemanAnd I will add Debbie's statement earlier when she said that young people are drinking less alcohol. You know, they're more interested in psychedelics and cannabis. And that puts a smile on my face as well.

2:37:45SpeakerI want to chirp in for a second. First of all, I just want to give mad props is not even nearly strong enough language to my dear friend and comrade Ted. My Compassion Club did not survive the transitions that yours has. You know, my club shut down a couple of years ago. The Wellness Center portion of it broke off into a separate nonprofit and continued to provide services until just a couple of months ago.

2:38:15SpeakerThat organization just shut down. I just have such admiration for you and I'm always in your corner if you ever need me, you know that. And Debbie, you're, I mean, not... Kelly, you're talking about compassion for humanity. And I just have to call out, oh, it's maybe the second time that I cry on this on church today, that when my beloved dog was dying, my bestie of the entire world, you and I didn't know each other very well, we'd only met once.

2:38:47SpeakerAnd you really stepped up and you helped me to have the confidence to get him off of gabapentin. And you sent me these jars of Amazing, like mushroom and CBD. And you helped me keep my boy alive and healthy and happy for like six months, maybe nine months. And you were there for me like every single day as I was figuring out like, is he okay? Do I need to put him down?

2:39:14SpeakerLike your compassion goes far, far beyond the human realm. Sorry, it's been years and I still miss that guy. But you stepped up for me. And like the hardest time, like I had a harder time helping that dog pass than I've had helping a lot of humans pass. And you were there for me every single text, every single day, so consistent in the mail. You never, ever, ever let us run out of his meds.

2:39:43SpeakerAnd that was a real game changer. So like you really, really just, you were an angel. You are an angel. And actually the help that you gave me with my beautiful dog Ringo, it's all still right here. So compassion for the animal world also. Thank you.

2:40:04BubblemanI love that his name was Ringo. That's some full circle shit right there.

2:40:12KellyAnd I mean, I have to, you know, say right back to you, Hillary, if we want to actually talk about compassion. You were one of the initial sparks that even put compassion together with cannabis. You were the initial spark that created a lot of people to scatter and fucking do their work and get on it. Because you continue to push forward and you created almost like an archetypal, you know, warrior cannabis woman that comes with intelligence, compassion, forwardness, and fucking getting shit done.

2:41:00KellySo, you know, whatever came to you during Ringo's passing Was everything that you've created in the world and in this community.

2:41:19BubblemanLovely. Nice to recognize people. Nice to recognize the people that have helped you, the people that are still holding the torch.

2:41:31BubblemanIt's not easy. This is like a difficult time for cannabis, but I try to remind people that it is not quite as difficult when they were kicking our doors in, shooting our dogs, taking our kids and putting us in cages. So yes, you know, the fact that they're still attacking Ted for supplying medicine to like sick people is pretty twisted and sick and it goes back. I'm not a super religious person, but I'm like, okay, well, that's just like, if I was a demon, that's probably something that I would do.

2:42:05BubblemanThank you for watching.

2:42:23BubblemanIt's definitely made me think of how Hash Church can be more of a verb for compassion and how we can figure out supporting some of these things because A, that sucks when Wendy said, no one has ever sent me anywhere. I was like, oh no. I feel like, damn, like I felt like in my heart, like I should have sent Wendy and Colton somewhere. Like what the heck am I doing over here?

2:42:47BubblemanYou know? We went. I know.

2:42:51SpeakerAnyway.

2:42:52BubblemanYou went regardless, but it was just like, holy shit, like you weren't already kind of dealing with enough shit with the, say, you know, mortality of your son.

2:43:05SpeakerBut that's just, you know, that's the compassion that we have over this plant and over... about the the health of people you know we we've we've done all this for free we don't care um we just want to save lives you know if if our story can help somebody else's story or somebody else have a story like ours as as successful as what colton has been it's all worth it you know money's not going to change that for us Now, I wish we could have gone more places and money would have helped, but that's not what it's about.

2:43:42SpeakerYou know, this plant saves lives and we have to keep speaking about that. And whether somebody is going to pay me for it or not, I'm still going to do it.

2:43:54BubblemanAbsolutely. It's just such a crazy thing to kind of like not support and keep people from gaining access to because it's life changing. It's one thing when you get turned on to herb and you're just like, this is awesome. This is amazing. I just love the feeling of smoking herb. It's quite something else when it's like the tumor in my head is shrinking. You know, my insides are going from black to pink, the color that they should be.

2:44:20BubblemanThese are profound sort of revelations among cannabis users that it feels karmically correct to have a relationship with this plant. It doesn't feel like it goes against anything. And, you know, in the least, you know, just... Sort of preserving it and carrying it along with you and making it available. One thing I always love to do, which I think is a very easy philanthropy. If you want to figure out a way to give back and you have clones, give those to people.

2:44:52BubblemanLike make cuts of your clones and give them out to people instead of thinking that it's going to reduce your seed sales or whatever, you know, sort of fear and scarcity vibe you might have. Because I get it. We all get that. It's the greatest thing. And I did, funny enough, take a lot of A lot of negative energy when I started giving cuts away, particular cuts that people were like, felt that they owned or that they had dominion over.

2:45:19BubblemanAnd I always thought it was interesting in the cannabis industry, if you want to see someone who's not coming from the right place, Just check out someone who does. I mean, I'm not talking about someone like Sam who breeds a cultivar and it costs him $200,000 and chemists and tests and he's number. I'm just talking about clones that everyone has access to, seeds that someone bought and you can just share those clones.

2:45:44BubblemanThey're open source. They're not someone's hard breeder work. I'm not saying to take them and make seeds and go sell those seeds. I'm saying... Make the cultivars available to people. And I'll never forget having a conversation with my, an old friend of mine who, you know, I said, I think everyone deserves the Congo. And he was on the other side, much like the CEO for Nestle, who thought it was extreme to allow women and children and men to have unlimited access to water, right?

2:46:14BubblemanStraight demon. This guy, my friend who I grew up with says to me, I like to make sure that the person's deserving. And I'm like, well, what if the person's not deserving, but their seven-year-old daughter is? What if that's how it works? What if you have to give it to the undeserving to get it to the deserving? And he just couldn't wrap his fear and scarcity mind around the fact that giving it away is always a better idea.

2:46:39BubblemanAnd not only is it a better idea because you're doing something good and gifting something amazing away, It comes in quite handy when you fuck shit up and lose the cut. It's amazing to call people that you gave the cut to because I gave that Congo cut to 50 different people. Well, I could call them all today and get it back if they still have it growing.

2:47:01BubblemanIt's not a difficult thing to get something that you've given back. So if you don't know how to help the scene and you feel a little unplugged from it but you have access to clones or a mother and you can make clones, Give them away. You'll be surprised. You'll be surprised to see where they land and to how much help they they give the person.

2:47:23KellyAnd, you know, one fact about clones is that in this new legislation in the US on the hemp bill, the the changing of the hemp bill, it was written like people who were very focused on products. And everything is written into that bill except for clones and parts of the plant. So very interesting guys, please check that out. We're always looking for loopholes and here's a loophole, big one.

2:47:55KellySo pretty exciting.

2:47:57SpeakerAnd TC too, right? Tissue culture is not in the thing, but seeds are.

2:48:04KellyYeah, seeds are, tissue culture, cloning. So It's interesting. Cultivation isn't either.

2:48:10Etienne FontanAnd our friends in Europe, you can get clones in Austria. They're legal. They sell them as well as this year. We were we tried to get clones into the United Nations. But even though we had finished products, they had no problem with that. But they would not let our We little plants in and we tried giving them way to world leaders, but they were not interested in taking them, unfortunately.

2:48:34Etienne FontanAnd our little plants found places to grow in the wild there in Vienna. But yes, always give out clones, but... I also want to shout out somebody who's been working at the UN, Michael Krawitz, and the work that you have done since the mid-90s. Basically, yeah, you're my mentor, but you also were integral in getting post-traumatic stress disorder into many states in the United States. So, Michael, you know, love you, appreciate your work alongside you.

2:49:12Etienne FontanBut the world really doesn't know a lot of your work because you're assholes and elbows in it all the time. A lot of people on this panel know you because we've run into you one way, shape or form because you're actually doing the heavy lifting. But, you know, tell us about how you got your strength from broken hips to do such heavy lifting.

2:49:36SpeakerLove you, ATN. Love everybody. This is such a special group. I wrote in the chat a while back, Marcus, kudos to Wade for coming up with such a compelling discussion, you know, with what, six words, you know, whatever, five words, you know, I think compassion is a verb, you know, and Yeah, pretty amazing thought process. I started last night thinking about it. You know, the group that I took to the United Nations back in 1998, we called Veterans for Compassion.

2:50:17SpeakerAnd The notion of the organization was somewhat covert. On its face, it's just another, what's called an NGO, a non-governmental organization. But as people that know the backstory know that I worked my way up from handing out flyers at an info table to thinking about global cannabis issues in a somewhat linear fashion through the cannabis movement and got to meet icons here on this call in that path.

2:50:48SpeakerAnd I was thinking about, like, you know, that name, Veterans for Compassion. The term compassion, I may have drawn on your work, Hillary, and others very seriously in California, Debbie. I really don't know. It's really something I just don't know. That thought process, it was so organic. The first idea was to call the organization Veterans for Cannabis. But I thought, you know, if I go to the UN talking about cannabis with sort of a cannabis banner, I'll just get shut out.

2:51:25SpeakerI had that much already, you know, foreknowledge of what it was going to be like inside before I ever got inside in 1998. But I was right. And I think Veterans for Compassion was much more covert. It allowed us to go in in a way that was so, you know, sort of, You know, in the fabric of things that we got no notice at all. Basically, we were able to work from the inside and sort of recreate the system itself in that 10 years, the first 10 years from 1998 to 2008.

2:51:58SpeakerBut thinking about compassion, like what veterans for compassion, the initial thought was, That veterans were able to really put compassion into play. I mean, what I thought about specifically was in military situations, who lives or who dies is often at the discretion of someone at the very lowest as well as the very highest levels of the military. People that are following what's going on in the United States right now, You know, there's a huge uproar about reminding, you know, troops that following illegal order is a requirement of our Constitution.

2:52:42SpeakerIt is. And that's that should be a mundane statement to any troop. We learned that in basic training and we're reminded of it routinely because of the, you know, routine things that have happened in war over history. That are illegal now and would result in your own prosecution. You are not immune from that based on being part of a huge military industrial complex. And I guess I found that interesting that an individual, sorry, that an individual could have that much authority, life or death authority, At the moment, you know, where the tire meets the road authority in a world affair, I thought, I guess, was compelling.

2:53:35SpeakerAnd it worked, you know. We established a new way to communicate with the United Nations. In 2008, we passed the United Nations resolution with NGOs called the Beyond 2008 Resolution. It's on the library. All of the United Nations Drugs Office for every member state and newbie in the UN system to read on how to communicate with the NGO community and how to handle drugs at the international level.

2:54:06SpeakerAnd we routinely meet with You know, World Health Organization and head heads of all the narcotic bureaus and heads of all the United Nations drugs agencies in Vienna in routine, casual, You know, settings now as a result of that 2008 resolution. And this year we expect to do so again. And bringing it back to Wade, Wade loved this work. I mean, he just really, he loved this work.

2:54:38SpeakerAnd I think he reveled in it. He sort of vicariously traveled the world through our work. And he was able to experience that energy.

2:54:53SpeakerThat I was talking about where the tire meets the road in the world that we live in. And this year coming up in March, hopefully we're going to be able to put together, we're working on a side event inside the UN that's dedicated to Wade and dedicated to his contribution, especially botanically with Harlequin and the work with patients and their experience. I think it's a win-win from our perspective working inside the UN because that's where the conversation is.

2:55:29SpeakerThat's where member states need to understand some of the nuance of how cannabis works as a medicine. And although we don't have a pharmaceutical company working on a Crohn's treatment that can come in, we can bring it in as non-governmental organizations and speak to it without the FDA getting on our ass. And we're going to exercise that power. So anyway, That's kind of the update from the field.

2:55:57SpeakerYeah, I can't really express how much we've missed him. And Wade is still with us in our heart and our work as we go on.

2:56:16Speakerwant to say add something on there, if I could, which is. Just like those troops who were advised not to follow illegal laws when we got involved. It was so scary and the laws were so illegal we just decided not to follow those illegal laws and we were really playing to the jury of our peers like we can't follow these laws because it's unethical. Thank you so much for joining us.

2:56:49Etienne FontanBut it was also, we were advised by all of our lawyers to not keep track of absolutely anything too. And we did because we had to prove in a court of law that at any moment that we were doing everything above board. And that was the only way to prove who we're doing above board. But I'll be damned if every lawyer we talked to was like, fucking stop that shit.

2:57:10SpeakerAnd we were like, yeah, we gotta, gotta.

2:57:13Etienne FontanSo yeah, we kind of, sometimes you gotta go against your lawyer's wishes.

2:57:17SpeakerHey, I'm going to tell a really quick story. Both Michael and Etienne, I want to thank you because I reached out to both of you in the past months. And you helped me. And we pulled off something that was really awesome. And Etienne, when you were recently saying if you want to re-find that sense of purpose that we had decades past, think about what's happening internationally. And something fell into my lap.

2:57:41SpeakerAnd I want to tell you a really awesome story. I met a woman at a conference who's an MP in the Ukraine. Who is partially responsible for shepherding through the regulatory framework in the Ukraine in the backdrop of active war. And I met her at this conference and she was really upset because PTSD is not an included indication. And the numbers of people, both veterans and civilians that are being diagnosed with PTSD in the Ukraine is increasing exponentially, obviously.

2:58:10SpeakerAnd her leadership in the Ukraine government just didn't feel like there was enough evidence. But the Minister of Veterans Affairs and the Minister of Health was open to a discussion. So it took us about a year to find the right people and put the event together. And we haven't talked about it publicly yet. There's a little article coming out next week, but it happened 10 days ago.

2:58:33SpeakerAnd so there was an event in the parliament at the Ukraine with both ministers and all of the leads from Veterans Affairs and the Minister of Health. We were going to send people in person, but then the attacks on Kiev really like scaled up dramatically. So none of the international experts wanted to fly in. I did manage to round up some money to support it. And we put together an event that was a two hour event.

2:58:59SpeakerIt all happened on Zoom. We had an amazing veteran from Canada who was the first to speak about their personal experience and suicide attempts and pharmaceuticals and then what happened when they got on to cannabis. We had Marcel Bond Miller, who's pretty fantastic at speaking about the evidence and the researcher. We had a Canadian clinician. And another clinician from Israel who works with the Defense Department and veterans in the Middle East.

2:59:26SpeakerAnd then a really meaningful discussion period. And I worked very closely with the MP and a woman who leads a patient advocacy group in the Ukraine. And it did feel like old times to me in terms of like putting together Patient voices that get elevated first and creating. And I wasn't there. I didn't need to be there. I was just the organizer. But Olga, the MP, told me that halfway through the presentation, The Minister of Health, who actually has kind of more power over the legislation than the Minister of Veterans Affairs, leaned into ALGA and said, God, it sounds like I need cannabis.

3:00:06SpeakerAnd following that presentation, there is like active conversation and communication happening right now about how to rewrite that legislation. So no guarantees that we're going to see any changes, but ATN, I reached out to you and you said, talk to Michael and Michael, you gave me some really awesome advice, sent me in some good directions and that event happened 10 days ago and hopefully we'll see some change.

3:00:34Etienne FontanThank you. Thank you. Michael was instrumental. We met actually with four different levels of the Ukraine government for their law. So we helped and assist. And this is how you can assist people is, you know, a lot of these laws are cut and paste. So if you share laws in your country and around the world with other legislators, you're really helping them because you're really giving them shortcuts to legislation.

3:00:59Etienne FontanAnd that's also why we're working on some legislation domestically is because they just don't have the brainpower anymore, a lot of these legislators, and they're just trying to keep up with the times. But if you can draft legislation and get it to them and let them take it as their own, you can make amazing things happen. And you know, Hillary, fucking right on, because I was really upset PTSD did not make it.

3:01:25Etienne FontanSo fucking right on, sister. Love you.

3:01:28SpeakerLove you too. We're not there yet, but hopefully we'll see that change. We'll keep pushing.

3:01:32Etienne FontanYou're trying. Okay. And that's sometimes all we can do is try. We may fail. And a lot of us have failed many times, but, you know, failures just eventually leads to success. Right. Didn't Edison say it was those 10,000 failures that allowed me to get that success. So, you know, keep failing out there, but, you know, keep failing forward. I'm failing right now.

3:01:58BubblemanThank you, Tanner. My wife just brought me an exceptional piece of homemade banana bread, and I'll tell you, it tasted as good on the flip side of how bad it felt earlier when I rubbed live hash rosin into my eye. I didn't really tell you guys, but I was crying for about 12 minutes. It was just like this unbelievable, anyone that uses cannabis extract in particular, you just really don't want to get it in your eye.

3:02:28BubblemanYou don't get it in your eye. I forgot. I'm an idiot, but it is what it is. And that banana bread was delicious.

3:02:37Etienne FontanDoes it get your red eye though, doesn't it?

3:02:39BubblemanDude, it feels like getting a ghost pepper in your eye. Like I honestly, I'm just like, please try to avoid that. Anyone that uses extracts knows my pain, but yeah, I, it was right when Debbie was telling her stories and I, I rubbed this into my eye.

3:03:02BubblemanYeah, like little mini razor blades. Cannabis is an incredible medicine, but I don't think it's good for rubbing in your eyes. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna die on that hill. That is not how you reduce ocular pressure. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's how you increase ocular pressure by rubbing. I see ATN has the biggest smile because no one in here has done that more than him.

3:03:27BubblemanNailed it again.

3:03:28SpeakerOnce or twice. Once or twice.

3:03:31Etienne FontanI mean, it beats the scars from, you know, the, you know, the torch. But, you know, not by far. Yeah.

3:03:40SpeakerIncredible.

3:03:41Etienne FontanDon't do that. I guess all cannabis should come with a warning. Do not put an I. Do not attach to eyeball. End of story.

3:03:48SpeakerIf I could, Marcus, I just wanted to say a word or two in response to what you said earlier, Wendy, about lobbying and making your voice heard. It's a conundrum, really. But we found that by having no affiliation, by having no funding, by being individuals and finding our way to the podium, we've had a greater impact than some of the more well-funded efforts that have had multi-pronged Thank you for joining us today.

3:04:46SpeakerWhere, you know, the United States federal government is still clinging to an illegal law. You know, Debbie was talking about an illegal law. Here's a conundrum for you. What do you do when the law itself is lying? Thank you for joining us.

3:05:19SpeakerThank you for joining us.

3:05:40Speakerstarted moving to the next phase of medical cannabis and it's such a split screen it's so dyslexic and it's so you know sort of dysfunctional it's hard to psychotic even it's hard to see through it but strip away the colonial distribution of cannabis one layer takes away canada netherlands sorry if you love those guys uh and uh then you strip away another layer Thank you for watching.

3:06:29SpeakerThat's a whole region where you cannot mess with their genetics. They're protecting their genetics. We need to have regions like that over the globe that were former subjects of colonialism. And that's where our cannabis is going to come from. And this big, huge industry you see is a mirage. It's a daydream on the way across the desert. And believe me, on the other side is totally different.

3:06:57SpeakerSo just wanted to say that.

3:07:03BubblemanThank you, Michael. Always appreciate your words. Always appreciate the kindness in your voice. It's authentic.

3:07:15BubblemanMy wife was just black. Oh, that's actually not my wife. It's my son. I can tell right away because that was like 15 texts in a row. I think he instead of putting a word in, he just puts a letter in and then goes enter and puts the next letter in enter. He's 11. He's doing it on purpose. Much love. So yeah, Monica was overwhelmed. She said she's gonna maybe come back, but she's gonna maybe be listening.

3:07:45BubblemanSo she bounced. She did leave me a paragraph that I wanted to read you guys. In regards to here's what I think Wade would be wanting now. Education is the thing we need most to counteract the legacy of prohibition and now to resist the revived anti-cannabis movement. This is what Wade was just starting to work on when he got sick. Also, it is my belief after reviewing Wade's life, the discovery of Harlequin is what shifted Wade into his life's mission.

3:08:18BubblemanHe finally had a vehicle for being helpful and compassionate. With everyone for any reason. And finally, Wade's way was compassionate communication. He invited the most conservative folks in the country to his garden, and he spent many hours with them being his calm and loving and compassionate self. This resulted not only the end of the ban on cannabis in Nevada County, It also started the commercial cannabis industry in Nevada County, one that even the most conservative representatives celebrate.

3:08:59BubblemanWhy? Because it is grounded in compassion and a recognition that cannabis has medical benefit. So I thought it would be nice to share that from Monica herself in regards to where she thought Wade would be. And I certainly don't think she's wrong about that. It all sounds like authentic truth to me. And that's the battle, right? To make sure that we resist this revived anti-cannabis movement. Definitely don't let that sneak in in any way, shape or form.

3:09:38BubblemanAnd then just, you know, make our voices louder as we constantly do. We just won't shut up, will we? No, no, we will not. You can try, but we are a resistant, consistent, persistent lot. We're not going anywhere, I can tell you.

3:10:03BubblemanYeah, they call us lifers. We are definitely lifers.

3:10:07Etienne FontanI mean, Colton, I mean, it's your life, right? So I mean, how can you not speak about it? Right? Because I mean, you're you're confronted on a daily basis. I mean, so how do you continue to tell your story?

3:10:24SpeakerWell, I mean, it is through education. I mean, when it comes to telling people my story, I like talking to the people that are... I don't like preaching to the converted. I like talking to the people that are either on the fence or don't have an opinion or are against cannabis because it's one of those things where... If all we're doing is convincing the people that are already convinced, then we're not gonna get as far.

3:11:03BubblemanWe need to educate the people that aren't listening.

3:11:11SpeakerAnd that's really hard because a lot of the time, they're very closed off. And when they're closed off, they're not really open to learning about it. Um but there's such lies right and that they've learned you know that have been indoctrinated yeah indoctrinated and they were indoctrinated what's the most common law you get that it makes you a motivational that it's going to uh transition you into harder drugs um when in reality um It's made me more active than I had ever been before cannabis.

3:11:52SpeakerAnd if anything, it's actually taken people off of some of these horrible medications and problems like drug abuse and things like that. It's one of those things where it's doing the opposite of what the fear mongers do. Have said that it's going to do. So what's working for you, Colton? Like, what's your what's your strain? What's your what's your dose? What's what's what did what educate us, please?

3:12:29SpeakerSure. So when I first started, we went through the same trial and error that everyone else had to get to. But slowly we figured out that I need an equal amount of CBD to THC, so I take a one-to-one. Because we've tried like high CBD, low THC, high THC, low CBD ratios. Is that maintenance or is that in the case of a rescue dose? My one to one is for maintenance, but there are times where, you know, you know, say I have a reaction to something that triggers my Crohn's disease.

3:13:11SpeakerWe can up my dose and kind of bring it back down. So not only does it maintain my remission, but it helps It helps put me back in remission whenever I'm flaring up. So I take it in a pill form. So I just take the oil and then put it into pill capsules. And I take about 60 milligrams a day. But I can't take the 60 milligrams all at once because if I take it all at once, it goes straight to my head.

3:13:42SpeakerSo I take 15 milligrams every six hours. So we're keeping my endocannabinoid system saturated while not overloading myself with cannabinoids. So whenever I take my pills, it's every six hours, 15 milligrams of CBD and THC. It's an isolate. It's an isolate. But when it comes to strains, there are certain cannabinoids like THC-B that I have to avoid. And there are certain terpenes too. And there are certain terpenes as well.

3:14:22SpeakerAnd that's kind of a case by case basis, but we have noticed that with a lot of Crohn's patients, they end up going pretty close to that one to one ratio. Every now and then, I will smoke to relieve Thank you so much for joining us today.

3:15:09SpeakerOne thing that I have noticed for certain is that CBD works a lot better when there's at least even a little bit of THC introduced to it. So these cannabinoids are working together. And that's why full spectrum works, especially with the Entourage Effect, because all of these cannabinoids are working together. All of these terpenes are working together.

3:15:38SpeakerFor me, taking it in the pill form works the best for my case person because a lot of my inflammation from my Crohn's disease would happen in my ileum or in my small and large intestine. And taking it pill-wise, once it starts to absorb, it gets absorbed where it actually needs to be. And that's what works best for me. Because when we started, we were just making moonshine pot brownies, I like to call them.

3:16:12SpeakerWe didn't even have the cannabis butter extract or anything like that. My dad and I were literally just grinding up flour and mixing it into our brownie batter. And then I would just eat it that way. High fiber. Yeah, very, very. But you could put it in an oil. And like boil it, boil it out. Like, you know, like regular brownies. I mean, it was just, so he'd put it in this oil and he'd boil it and boil it and boil it.

3:16:43SpeakerAnd then, yeah, he's over there in the hallway going, low simmer, low simmer. He could tell the story better. And it really was Tommy that actually did all this stuff. I get all this crazy stuff. Oh, the mom, the mom. But it was really Tommy that took Colton there to Colorado. But it was just brownies. And to this day, he still won't eat the brownies. He was one of those things where I had to eat a lot of brownies every day.

3:17:18SpeakerAnd at some point, you know, it wasn't even because of, I'm not sick of cannabis, I'm sick of brownies. So it's actually been, you know, It's very rare, like once in a blue moon will I actually eat a brownie. But every time I eat a brownie, I think back to those days where I was in the hotel room packing towels along the door hinges and spraying Febreze everywhere.

3:17:41SpeakerAnd my dad was leaning out the window of the hotel with the crock pot and extension cords sitting on the roof of the hotel pool. And he's leaning out the window, stirring the batter and Because we were doing it during a time where, yes, it was legal in Colorado. Yes, there was medical cannabis in Colorado. But the way that we were doing it, it was definitely, definitely not legal.

3:18:06SpeakerI had not gotten my medical card yet. Crohn's wasn't a qualifying condition in the state of Colorado. But... What's funny is that when I actually got my medical card, we were applying for chronic pain because chronic pain, you know, was a qualifier for a medical card. But when they gave me my medical card, they put specifically for Crohn's disease. Don't know how that got through. Yeah, don't know how that got through, but it did.

3:18:40SpeakerEspecially because we had to, because I was an adolescent, I was 14 at the time. We had to go through two doctor's recommendations because when you're an adolescent, you have to have, and you're applying for a medical card, you have to have two doctor's recommendations. Whereas if you're an adult, you only need one recommendation. So it was, you know, it was the wild west back then. It still kind of is.

3:19:05SpeakerIn some places, it still is. I feel like we've gotten so far, but then we really haven't. In the grand scheme of things, I mean, we're definitely starting to get over that social stigma around it. We're getting a lot better at it, about it. But there's still certain states that are very much in the gray area or just completely in the dark. So, you know, education is really, really important when it comes to, you know, trying to figure out what actually works.

3:19:41SpeakerAnd we we were I was a guinea pig. You know, we had we had

3:19:48SpeakerYou know, when we first were out there, we had a, I had a caregiver that would just put, he put THCV in my medicine just to see what it would do. And didn't tell us. And didn't tell us. And that's how we found out. That's how we found out about THCV is because my, my caregiver was slipping it into my medication and wasn't telling us. So that's, that's how we found out.

3:20:13SpeakerAnd that's why we know now that which was, you know, granted it put in the hospital lesson learned. And we were like, what's going on? What's going on? And then we finally realized what what had happened. But those were lessons that we had to learn as, you know, Parents and a child that was using cannabis with no formal educations and research to listen to. There wasn't anybody around when we were doing this to say, hey, Colton needs this.

3:20:52SpeakerAnd that sucked. A lot of people who were using cannabis for Crohn's disease, at least like, you know, just smoking it just to relieve their symptoms. They were very closeted. No one was talking about it. And not only that, but when I was becoming a patient, the only adolescents that were taking it as a medicine were epilepsy patients and all they were all nonverbal. So none of them could actually as a child Tell us about their experience with it.

3:21:25SpeakerSo I was completely in the dark. You know, we were we were walking through uncharted territory when it came to cannabis. So we anything that, you know, you have to go through when it came to the trial and error, we went through it.

3:21:45BubblemanI mean, that's unbelievable. I didn't realize Buddy put the THCV in there and didn't tell you. That's insane.

3:21:53Collin PalmerYeah. And as a caregiver, was that individual someone that was thinking they were maybe enhancing the medicine for you and giving you a broader spectrum? Was that the thought or did you figure out why it was being intentionally put in? He just wanted to see what it would do.

3:22:12SpeakerIt was just a hype situation. THCV was the next. It was the next big thing. Cannabinoid. And they were just trying to experiment. But this person experimented with a lot of people's lives. Not only did he do the THCV on Colton, but when it comes to seizure patients, he would tell them that it was an 88 to 1 and it wasn't. Or it was a 20 to one and it was an 88 to one.

3:22:41SpeakerAnd some of these kids with these sensitive immune systems and sensitive diseases and neurological diseases, they can't handle that kind of stuff. And when you find something that works, we didn't want to mess with it. And he constantly did. And it was just because he was in that mindset of, I'm going to make money off of this situation. Let's see. Let's just throw everything at him and see what sticks.

3:23:11Collin PalmerSounds unethical, right?

3:23:14SpeakerYeah, we don't speak for that guy anymore.

3:23:17Collin PalmerInteresting.

3:23:18BubblemanHoly shit. That is absolutely and completely shocking. I mean, that speaks volumes right there. Because listen, there are amazing people who have been dispensing this as a medicine for 30 to 40 years now. It's been happening. Thank you so much for joining us.

3:23:59BubblemanYou know, Radium 226 or something. It's like, yes, we don't probably need to regulate quite as hard as we are. But the regulations that we do have, the strict numbers for yeast and mold count, the very strict numbers for heavy metals and pesticides, those are super important regulations. And they shouldn't fall to the wayside because, you know, because the cannabis is overregulated. Oh, we better just like, come on, like, it's just too regulated.

3:24:25BubblemanIt's like, yes, you're right. It is. There's things that we can do to change here in Canada. Those things would be milligram maximums, right? Like we have a 10 milligram per edible maximum. For a while, you could only buy one in a package. Now they'll put like 10 in a package, but in that package is 10 mini packages. So there's still, it's this mentality of like, we need to protect animals.

3:24:49BubblemanThank you so much for joining us.

3:25:19SpeakerAnd the school board did not want Colton to go. Well, we took him out of school. We were like, screw this. We'll just continue to homeschool him. But they didn't want Colton to bring his cannabis to school because it was a danger to the kids. Now, he went to school with a kid that had a broken leg and he was on Vicodin. But he could bring his cannabis to school.

3:25:45SpeakerSo I told the school system, I said, okay, so this kid, we'll call him Todd. Todd can bring his Vicodin and give it to the nurse and the nurse can hold it for him. But Colton can't bring his cannabis and let the nurse hold it for him because you're afraid that some kid is going to come in and get that cannabis and overdose on it when that's not going to happen.

3:26:14SpeakerYou can take the whole bottle of Colton's medicine and go to sleep for a really good sleep. Or you can take the whole bottle of Vicodin from Todd and you're going to die. But that's the mentality that we are dealing with. So I, and then not only that, but when we gave Colton his medicine, like we had to go give him his lunch medicine, we had to take him off campus a thousand feet off.

3:26:48SpeakerAway from the school, to be honest, people think this drug is, when it's just not. It's just such, the lies are just rampant. And that's the stuff that we deal with.

3:27:02BubblemanIt's the foundation, right? Protect the children. That foundation is like, who would argue with that? Of course we need to protect the children. Like, no one's going to argue with that. Of course, let's protect children. But the lie is in that they don't need protecting from it.

3:27:19Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineIf they were protecting the children, you wouldn't have 72 vaccines in the first year of the child's life. I mean, there's a number of things that are alarming about what happens to a child.

3:27:32BubblemanWell, it's true. This is not a lie. When you are a young child, when you're a baby and you're going from breast milk to food, the doctor will be like, oh, give them individual food so we can monitor what's going into their body. You know, make sure you don't just start feeding them all these different things. There's this sort of slow process. But with the vaccines, just like 13, 14, 15 shots at a time in one shot, like, let's just give them that one.

3:27:56BubblemanWe're not sure what it does exactly, but that does speak volumes to the protect the children mentality.

3:28:03SpeakerAnd the side effects with the majority of the medicines that Colton was taking, westernized medicines, were, are insane. And then you look at cannabis and the side effects that, that cannabis has.

3:28:22BubblemanAnd you're like... Domino pizza?

3:28:25SpeakerYeah, exactly. Domino pizza because it doesn't have high fructose in it either. That is hilarious. We have a lot of Domino's pizza in this family. But yeah, Domino's Pizza, which is great for his health.

3:28:43BubblemanSo healthy, so good.

3:28:45SpeakerI mean, well, I mean, come on. It's better than nothing.

3:28:47BubblemanEating is what she means. It's the side effect is getting some hunger and ordering some pizza. Am I remembering this correctly that Colton got to a point where the medication wasn't working? Did they start just throwing the kitchen sink at him at one point in time?

3:29:03SpeakerOh yeah. The very first medication that I was on for my Crohn's disease was a medication called Remicade and it was an infusion based medication. So I would have to drive from my home in Illinois, Southern Illinois, all the way up to Rochester, Minnesota to get this medication. And after two infusions, I had developed medically induced RA and lupus. Any, he ended up getting serum sickness, which he, what that means is he started creating antibodies towards the medication.

3:29:39SpeakerSo everybody's like throwing autism under the bus right now with this whole Tylenol thing and stuff like that. And I'm like, well, Nobody's understanding that some of these medicines that we are giving our kids are creating havoc and we're ignoring it because we ignored it. He had serum sickness and then two infusions later, they finally were like, well, maybe he has serum sickness because we ended up in the freaking hospital because he was in so much pain.

3:30:10SpeakerThere was another medication I was on, Humira, and that wasn't even FDA approved for me. They gave it to me anyway. My lymph nodes swelled up to the size of golf balls. Doctors did some tests. I ended up getting a false positive for tuberculosis.

3:30:28SpeakerYou know, they did surgery, tried to take out the lymph node, ended up taking out my salivary glands by mistake. So now I have constant cotton mouth and that's before the cannabis. So you can imagine that once I started using cannabis, that my mouth turned into the Sahara desert. Found out that the tuberculosis positive was a false positive. Surgery wasn't even necessary to begin with. And their very first thought was, oh, let's give you another medication called Simsia, which was the exact, which is exactly the same as Humira.

3:30:59SpeakerNow I did my research and found out that if I was an adolescent male, was on Remicade or Humira at any given time, that going on Simsia would increase my chances of T cell lymphoma by 66%. Holy shit. And we already had architectural T cells. So we're already going down that path. And T cell lymphoma is fatal. Fatal. And, you know, I'm like, but they just wanted to keep throwing things at him.

3:31:29SpeakerAnd I'm like, enough is enough. I'm done. I'm done. We're not doing this. You know, my grandmother kept saying, take him back to the earth, take him back to the earth. And I kept thinking, grandma, you're nuts. But then finally it hit me one day and I'm like, you know what? Grandma's not so nuts. You know, so we did take him back to the earth, back to cannabis, back, back to the original medicine.

3:31:50SpeakerAnd it worked.

3:31:53BubblemanGeez, I forget how much you guys really had to go through to sort of figure all this out. And you don't really realize that it's like, it's not just like mistakes on the line, it's mortality. You're not in the mentality, Wendy, where you're like, it doesn't matter what we do because I know no matter what my son's living. You're kind of in this like, whoa, this is super intense.

3:32:18BubblemanIn and out of the hospital. When he was at his skinniest, he weighed, what did he weigh when he was at his skinniest? About 70, 80 pounds.

3:32:27SpeakerJesus. 72 is when we started. Well, he was always a small kid, so we never really thought that, His weight was an issue. Yeah, I mean, I'm still scrawny. I mean, I'm right now. I'm like 130 pounds soaking wet. And he eats like crazy. I eat like crazy. You know, tons of fat and protein and things like that. If you look at old pictures of my dad, he would look, he looked exactly like me.

3:32:57SpeakerSo even before the Crohn's disease, we always just thought, oh, he's just a, he's just a scrawny kid. You know, he's just kind of built like that. He's like his dad. But then we realized once he started getting healthy, we'd look back and we were like, oh my gosh. You know, when you're in it, you don't see it. And then you're too close to it. Yeah. And then when we look back and we see how horrible he actually looked and how small he actually was now compared to sick to healthy.

3:33:30SpeakerYou know, healthy was like, oh, wow, healthy, still skinny, but healthy was totally different. And, you know, it's in every mom that you talk to that has a kid that's on cannabis is going to say the same thing. Didn't know. I didn't know how sick they were until I saw them healthy. And, you know, cannabis was was what we needed. And it's just, you know, it's just crazy.

3:34:02SpeakerThe whole thing.

3:34:04Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineA testimony to the medicine too that it's always that it's the last straw that, you know, you're going to try. And the fact that as a last straw with everything already tried that it still rises to help a body overcome something is, it's magical and powerful in itself. And then to think, oh, well, there's even forces against it. And it's still rising to the top and there's still people devoting and finding their way through it and realizing that the only side effect is actually health and wellness.

3:34:43Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnd then especially if you add in the organics and all that and stuff, you realize, oh, wow, we can... Thank you for joining us.

3:35:05Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineAnyway, teach us the long play. You know, teach us the, hey, it's maybe not immediate. You know, what it is is it's rhizomal. It's something that goes into the, you know, the soil or the trees and it resonates for a while. And we have to be patient because sometimes spiritual things and movements just come in cycles and you just have to continue holding the space, you know, but...

3:35:31Josh Dragonfly Earth MedicineConstantly in awe of cannabis, how it continues to open up new realms for us to embody and to bring into our lives and to just make change.

3:35:41SpeakerFor millennium, for millennium. And we don't even, most people don't even realize it. And that's why I love coming on Hash Church. That's why I love Wade. That's why I love everybody on this panel because You guys, for us, you know, you kept it alive. You kept that plant alive when the governments of the world were trying to shut it down. And... You kept fighting. And that was just that that's inspirational for me.

3:36:15SpeakerYou know, and that really gives me the motivation to continue to do this work that we do and continue to tell Colton's story. Because the more we tell Colton's story, the more people we help.

3:36:29Etienne FontanYou chose to fight though. I mean, that's where you stood up, right? Because you found yourself quickly on the end of realizing it's called practicing medicine. And they were practicing for real on your son. Oh yeah, experimenting. As a mother, that had to be, I mean, tell us about that, to witness it, to go through it, to experience it, to then be catalyzed into a profit for cannabis because you saw its effect on your son.

3:37:02Etienne FontanBut initially, you had to just watch science just literally butcher your son.

3:37:08SpeakerYeah. So I remember. So the worst story that I have is the Humira story. I was against giving him Humira from the beginning. And the doctors kept saying, no, this is the next step. This is what we have to do. And I'm like, there's got to be another way. And they're like, no, there's not. So they don't give you much of a chance to Thank you so much for joining us.

3:38:02SpeakerAnd his first shot, his first dose of Humira was in two shots. And they had to teach me how to do it because I had to do it at home, you know, after after all this was said and done. And they give him his first injection shot. And, you know, he's crying because it hurts like crazy. You know, these shots are painful. And then I had to give him the next shot.

3:38:32SpeakerAnd I pushed that shot into his leg. And I'm like, I'm killing my kid. I knew I was. I knew I was killing him. And I'm like, I can't do this. And for the next year, I did it. We cried. It was embarrassing. It was crazy. It was like we had friends that came over every other week to help us hold his leg down so he wouldn't kick us.

3:39:04SpeakerHe was screaming and crying. He couldn't walk afterwards. I knew that this was the wrong thing to do. And I kept doing it because they told me that I had to. And I never want to go through that again. And I never want anybody else to have to go through what I've gone through.

3:39:22SpeakerIt was awful. It was just awful. And I'm done with it. I'm done. I believe in pharmaceutical medications. I think that pharmaceutical medications are important. But we weren't given a choice. We were given, this is what you have to do. And by the end of all of the Humira journey, he's got T cell, architectural T cells and could possibly have lymphoma. And that's the end of it.

3:40:02SpeakerAnd how many kids out there have gone through this that we don't know about? You know, how many kids are on Humira right now that are dealing with T cell lymphoma and their, their death certificate says complications from Crohn's.

3:40:18SpeakerThis is, this is a health crisis. It's just not a, it's just not a cannabis situation. It's a health crisis. It's a healthcare crisis. It's a health crisis. It's, it's an education crisis. It is a money issue.

3:40:34BubblemanIt's just one more way this prohibition agenda seems to take pleasure in extracting pain and anguish and misery from our community. It's so incredibly intense.

3:40:53SpeakerWe're talking about compassion today and that compassion is a verb.

3:41:00SpeakerFrom now on, I'm going to walk into the doctor's office and say, why did you get into medicine for the first and ask them why.

3:41:12SpeakerBut the thing is also is that the reason why they were giving me all of these crazy pharmaceutical medications was the same reason that that caregiver was putting THCV into my medicine. They just wanted to, they want to see what happens. They wanted to see what happens and write it down for the next case and just do that over and over and over again. We were, we're Guinea pigs.

3:41:39SpeakerYou know, we are test subjects to see what these medications do and where to go from there.

3:41:46BubblemanIt's like a horror movie that you get cast into, but you're not really like signing up or auditioning for it. You're just like, hey, like I something's wrong with me. Can you tell me what's wrong with me? And they're like.

3:41:58SpeakerWell, I wonder if there's something magic about the one-to-one CBD. Ethan, do you think like something, you know, it's interesting, Colton, you were saying that THCV, which doesn't act as a CB1 agonist, it acts as an antagonist, which does just the opposite of what THC does. But Ethan, do you think maybe there could be off-label use for Sativex as a treatment for Crohn's just based on what we're hearing here from Colton?

3:42:28BubblemanUnfortunately, Ethan had to bounce. Oh, he's not here. Yeah, he just, he left actually right as Steve popped in.

3:42:36SpeakerBut we would love to see if Sativex could be utilized for Crohn's disease because it is a one-to-one, right? It is a one-to-one, that's right. Yeah, but we can't access it in the States. Yeah, it's not approved in the States, but I believe it's approved in Canada, isn't it?

3:42:57BubblemanI think it might be. I think it might be.

3:43:00SpeakerYeah, because Jazz Pharmaceutical distributes it, I do believe so, yes. Right, right.

3:43:06Etienne FontanSo it'd be interesting if you can get an off-label prescription for Sativex and see if it works for... Oh, and an interesting fact, Kevin Sabet has aligned with Jazz Pharmaceuticals and actually hosted a side event with them at the United Nations last year.

3:43:23SpeakerI can't say, man. Man, we've gone head to head, me and him. I, that, uh, don't even get me started. Hey, if I remember correctly, the story from David, Sam, the skunk man, our friend David, was essentially that it was really simple. Not that the Mendelian genetics to come up with a cannabis plant that mostly expresses itself as CBD and another plant that mostly expresses itself as THC is simple.

3:43:56SpeakerBut if you make an extract of those two and you add them together, You get a one to one combination. So I don't think the one to one was picked by any super huge scientific method other than just really simple. But and that really begs the question, like, is there a magic number? Is there a magic ratio, you know, out there for CBD to THC? Is there something rather magical about one to one?

3:44:22SpeakerI was thinking about that a little while ago. So I really appreciate you asking that, Mark. Well, I would think that anyone with Crohn's could now take advantage of, you know, what you, Wendy, and Colton have discovered, which is that maybe there is something magic to that one-to-one ratio, right?

3:44:41Etienne FontanOr at least it's a starting place, right? Yeah.

3:44:44SpeakerOr even... Even like two different bottles, not just a one-to-one, but you know, maybe, maybe some people need more CBD and less THC. So you're taking it in two different bottles, two different tinctures or whatever. And then maybe, you know, you, you've, You just take CBD. CBD is great no matter how much you take. But maybe you just add in the THC a little at a time and you have a set ratio for yourself.

3:45:18SpeakerSo maybe you're a two to one instead of a one to one or five to one.

3:45:25SpeakerBut we got to figure out which one goes first, the THC or the CBD when it comes to these ratios because everybody says five to one and I'm thinking CBD to THC and they're like, no, THC to CBD. Oh no, it's always an alphabetical order, Wendy. It's always C before T. So if you see a five to one ratio, it's usually CBD. Yeah, so Harlequin, I think, I'm sorry, Monica's not here anymore.

3:45:53SpeakerBut Marcus, do you remember? Harlequin, I think was like three to one. I'd have to look it up. Yeah. Harlequin was actually the first, one of the first strains that we used on Colton. And it worked? Yeah, it worked great. And that's what we put that one in brownies, in the brownies.

3:46:16SpeakerAnd you said something before about terpenes. So what do you know about terpenes and how do the terpenes play?

3:46:22Collin PalmerFive to two, Marcus, on Harlequin.

3:46:24SpeakerOkay. How do the terpenes affect that, Colton? Well, he has insomnia. But I also have fatigue. Yeah. So it's very hard because when you have an illness that takes away your energy, you need to boost that energy. But then when also when you can't sleep, you need something that allows you to be able to help you go to sleep. So you can't have one medication that makes you sleep, but also makes you feel energized.

3:47:02SpeakerIt's very hard to have that A combination together at the same time all the time. So we know this, but there's nothing we can do about it. Other than have a medication during the day and a medication for nighttime. And we don't have access to that. Who wants to make it? We'll buy it.

3:47:25BubblemanIn Illinois?

3:47:27SpeakerIn anywhere. I don't care where. He's the king of illegally alive. I'll go anywhere.

3:47:32BubblemanHe is the king of illegally alive because he'd rather be illegally alive than legally dead. Isn't that right, Colton?

3:47:40SpeakerAbsolutely. And, you know, it's unfortunate that people have to make that choice. I mean, we moved to Colorado because we would, in order to get legal access to it, because we wanted to do things the right way. Would we do things the wrong way if we had no other choice than absolutely? Hell yeah, now. I don't even care. But, you know, the only reason why we, I mean, we moved back to Illinois because it became legal for us to go back.

3:48:15SpeakerBecause, you know, Illinois had a medical program, because I could become a patient for my Crohn's disease in my home state. But the zip code of our counties and our states, these imaginary lines that we have shouldn't be determinant on your health. You become a prisoner of the state that you're in. So that's one reason why I think reciprocity is important in the States because you should be able, if you have a medication and if you have a prescription, that shouldn't limit you to only one place.

3:48:58BubblemanIs it coming back? Is it coming back? Bros. Only one place.

3:49:09SpeakerCan you imagine a one place and you're not allowed to take it anywhere. You're not. Are we there? Can you hear us? Yeah, you just cut out for half a second, but we got you. Okay. But, you know, even if that medication is available in another state, you know, the same medication, you know, it could be a one-to-one in one state versus another. If you're a patient in one state, that doesn't necessarily carry over.

3:49:40SpeakerIf there's good medicine in Missouri, we can't cross the line and go get it without being illegal still. And maybe that medicine isn't in Illinois. So it's just a confusing mess.

3:49:57BubblemanYeah, it sounds like a real nightmare. But you guys are in Illinois now, right?

3:50:01SpeakerYeah.

3:50:01BubblemanYes. Definitely want to introduce you to my partners over there. Redemption Botanicals. We've got a beautiful grow and an amazing grower that used to grow in California. And yeah, I got to stay in touch with you guys more often so I can find out how I can help facilitate things to be easier for you.

3:50:20SpeakerYeah, Redemption is a great name.

3:50:22BubblemanYeah, Redemption Botanicals, exactly. It's always good to hear you guys' story. It's always good to hear... You know, the patient story when you're talking about compassion. Compassion is, it's seemingly almost always about the patient. But it does have another play where it comes into play. And I wanted to introduce Steve D'Angelo who popped into the room a little while ago. From the Harborside fame and many other activities and activisms over the years, including the Last Prisoner Project.

3:50:56BubblemanAnd although Steve can talk about anything he wants to while he's here, he can share with us. I do kind of want to talk a little bit about what role compassion plays. In that last prisoner project, you know, that mentality of helping, you know, people are suffering through the medicine of cannabis, not having access to it. And the whole story that you just heard from the Turners, People are also suffering from people still being locked away from prohibition, some unjustly, some for decades more than they should have been.

3:51:34BubblemanAnd yeah, I just wanted to kind of hear from you, Steve, in regards to that, because I know that's been a dear project to you for quite a while now. You guys were instrumental in helping my dear friend, Rick DeLisi and his father get out of prison. From what I've heard, just the most insane prison sentence that he actually served, which I believe was 32 years.

3:52:00SpeakerYeah, 32 years. He was the longest serving nonviolent prisoner in the United States when he was released. Yeah, really egregious case. And, you know, my own view is that nobody who was locked up for selling cannabis, even if their motivation was primarily financial, was a criminal. None of them deserve to serve a day behind bars. In those days, anybody who was carrying this plant through the darkness of prohibition to people who needed it and everybody who used it, needed it, was a hero, not a criminal.

3:52:38SpeakerSo, you know, my mother taught me that if I saw someone who was suffering or I saw an active injustice and I had the ability to intervene and to alleviate that suffering, to alleviate that injustice, that I had a duty to do it. And and so work with patients at Harborside and my work in the last prisoner project really Floyd out of that, that same idea, right?

3:53:11SpeakerThat, that compassion is taking action to stop or at least alleviate suffering or injustice. So they really, they came from the, from the same root for me. And, you know, we speaking, you know, particularly last prisoner project, as soon as we, Past adult use cannabis legislation in California. In my whole life, I'd been working to legalize cannabis. And then in my home state, we had done it, albeit imperfectly, but we had done it.

3:53:48SpeakerAnd so the next question for me was, okay, what next? Because honestly, I was a little bit unmoored. I'd spent at that point 40 years almost working towards one goal, and that goal was So, you know, what comes next? And for me, there was there was never any question about it that, you know, the next step had to be getting folks out of prison. And, you know, I at the time that Richard got sentenced to his sentence and a lot of folks got those ridiculous sentences around the same time.

3:54:27SpeakerI was very active in the legacy traditional cannabis market. And I think I probably even sold some of the Colombian gold that Richard was bringing in at some point. And so I was tracking those cases and those sentences with a great deal of interest because I could have been tagged with any one of them myself. And when Richard went down, when Black Tuna went down, when all these crazy sentences started happening, I remembered it.

3:55:02SpeakerYou know, I remembered it all this time. I never forgot that those folks were behind bars. And so... That was really the next step. You know, one of the things, one of the taglines that we've used over and over in the last prisoner project is imagine sitting in a jail cell and turning on the TV and seeing news stories about people who are creating intergenerational wealth, doing exactly the same thing that you're sitting in a prison cell for.

3:55:37SpeakerAnd You know, I've been in a few cells, so that was something that I could imagine. And I knew that it would be enraging and spirit crushing and just I couldn't imagine, you know, a worse thing to happen. So I knew that we, you know, we had to take action. And I also knew that we had this vast industry that was growing. And that there were people who did have, at least in those days, did have some money that they could be asked for.

3:56:11SpeakerAnd so there were these two things. We saw an industry that was growing. People were making money. Investment was coming in. And at the same time, we had, you know, our estimate then was 40,000 cannabis prisoners in the United States. I think that that estimate is still, unfortunately, probably pretty good. And I just knew that that was the next step. There wasn't really terribly much thought that needed to go into it.

3:56:43SpeakerAnd we were right about that. The industry did step up to the table and helped LPP grow into one of the most robustly funded cannabis advocacy organizations that exists.

3:57:03BubblemanYeah, it's incredible work, man. It's definitely like, you know, we had Jody on here when she was visiting Mark during his five-year prison sentence over on the east coast of the U.S. there, Virginia, I think it was. I did send Jody at least once or twice, Wendy. I swear to God, I did. But she would tell me about just the, you know, it was obviously she's very young at this point in time.

3:57:29BubblemanShe's 20 something years old. She's, you know, visiting Mark in federal prison. It's scary. And just the story she told of the families and the people involved who are just on their way to visit people who are in jail. Like, The suffering certainly doesn't end with the guy sitting in the cage. It expands outward and vibrates outward in the most destructive way possible. And these are not friendly places to visit.

3:58:00BubblemanThere's pretty intense people working at these places and it's a pretty intense vibe. And just listening to Jody tell those stories of... You know, how bad she felt for young kids visiting parents in prison and just the whole, the whole system is just so savage. It really is.

3:58:19SpeakerNot just, it's not just the, it's not just a person that is actually being incarcerated. It's their wife. It's their mom. It's their dad. It's their kids. It's, it's his mom. You know, it's his dad. It's his brother and sister. Um, Thank you so much for watching.

3:58:55SpeakerFamily and just a whole village of people. Friends. I mean, our story has impacted friends and their lives. And it's not just that one person. And a veteran with PTSD, you know, you think just of the veteran. But they have a wife and kids that are dealing with the PTSD too. So it impacts everyone. And I appreciate Steve and everything that he does with Last Prisoner Project because we need to get those people out just so they can also live a normal life because they shouldn't be incarcerated, but also so their kids can have their dad or their mom back.

3:59:41BubblemanWell, it's important that they're not forgotten. You know, you fight this long battle of just getting cannabis allowed. And it's this huge relief after time. But then you realize, oh, yeah, people are still being like put to death in parts of the world. People are in prison in all of our countries, regardless of what country you're in. I guarantee you have some cannabis prisoners in your country serving time, which Yeah, it doesn't seem to make much sense, especially where companies are now doing it, you know, out in the open, shipping across borders.

4:00:17Etienne FontanThere's humans and they're human. And that's the thing is that, you know, you can write to them. They're in jail. You can actually help them fill up their canteens. You know, there's ways that we can help. I mean, that's one thing that LPP does, right, is it puts activists directly in touch with prisoners. Right, Steve?

4:00:37SpeakerYeah, yeah, we have a number of different grant programs. We have a, you know, a program to get people commissaries. We have a release grant. When cannabis prisoners are released, they get, it was a $5,000 grant. I think that's been reduced somewhat with the number of prisoners that need to be served. And then there's family assistant grants. And yeah, The families are really usually devastated. First, because it's very difficult to see someone that you love going through the kind of misery that long incarceration brings.

4:01:13SpeakerBut also, in most cases, the people who are incarcerated were the breadwinners for their families and often for their communities. And so the economic lifeline that held families together is gone. Uh, and, you know, one of the sad things that we see is that families often break up, um, that, uh, that, that some of the kids go one way, some of the kids go another way, that people have mental health crises that they're dealing with as a result of all the trauma that has, that they've undergone.

4:01:47SpeakerAnd, you know, even things like, um, Being able to buy the kids clothes so that they can go to school. Being able to get needed medical expenses. Being able to attend or pay for somebody's funeral. All of those things can be huge, huge challenges for families that have lost somebody to incarceration. So It radiates out through the families and through the communities. And when you talk to prisoners, just as they've gotten out of prison, one of the things that they'll express to you is regret for all the pain that they caused to their families.

4:02:38SpeakerAnd when folks are fresh out of 10, 20, 30 years in prison, those Environments are designed to make people feel guilty, to make them feel like they're criminals. And a lot of folks that I've counseled when they've got out of prison have had this shame, this sense of shame, this feeling that they had made mistakes that they needed to own up to and that they needed to correct.

4:03:10SpeakerAnd You know, one of the things that I would tell them is that, no, you know, that you didn't make mistakes. You were doing something that was heroic. The people that locked you up were the real criminals, not you. And try to instill, you know, cut through all of that prohibitionist programming. You know, if you want to get your sentence reduced, one of the few ways to do that is to enroll in drug education.

4:03:39SpeakerUh, classes. And as part of those drug education classes, you have to get up and make a confession and talk about how horrible you were and how you didn't think about your family and you didn't think about society and how sorry you are that you did all of these things. And it's over and over and over again that this kind of propaganda is poured into people's souls when they're at their most vulnerable.

4:04:03SpeakerAnd so, um, That was one of the things that I tried to do with as many folks that I could talk to was to really blow away that sense of shame and give them the pride that they should feel for being heroes. How else were people going to get cannabis in those days? Uh, you had to, to break some pretty heavy crimes, especially if you were bringing any significant quantities of cannabis into the country, uh, or moving around the country, which was needed in those days.

4:04:40SpeakerIt was important. It was heroic work. So none of them were ever criminals. Uh, they were always heroes.

4:04:50BubblemanI definitely 1000% agree with that. It's insane to put people in prison for cannabis. It just is absolutely bonkers. It always showed me that there was something really powerful here that they're like, why are they treating it like this? Like, this seems like... Seems pretty extreme. They put my dear mentor and friend Ron Hickey in jail. I think he did six years the first year, first term and five years the second term.

4:05:20BubblemanHe did 11 years, 11 Christmases, as he called it, as he had young daughters that he missed 11 Christmases with. And if you have young children, you know that that's all of them. That's all of the Christmases. That you miss. And he, yeah, they just put him in prison because he was a, you know, a chronic flower lover and was also teaching people how to make it, which also was a big threat back then to them.

4:05:49BubblemanThey really, if you were moving it around, they hated you. But if you are teaching people how to make it, grow it, experience it, then they had a real problem, at least in the Bible Belt where I'm from, in the center of Canada, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Ron served his time at the Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Unbelievable to put people like that who could be doing real good work outside if you just allowed them to continue because Ron did exceptional work.

4:06:17BubblemanHe grew conscious flower and he made sure that it got out to all the corners of his community, which what more can you ask for? I didn't realize that that's kind of what I was doing when I got busted with that Compassion Club case that Hilary Black was in here earlier talking about the first Canadian Compassion Club case with my lawyer John Conroy and not really knowing what to do but kind of going down this pathway of water hash and bubble hash and becoming this character online bubble man and just not really realizing all that time that hey you know what like A lot of my first customers were patients.

4:06:56BubblemanThey weren't actually recreational. And I still to this day have a handwritten letter by a woman. And she was also from Illinois, Wendy. And she was very, very straight and very, very not in the know of where to get cannabis. She wrote me a whole letter saying, first, I went out to the streets of Chicago. to find marijuana and she went and bought like an ounce off some guy and it turned out to be like 16 grams or something like that you know he completely burned her i think she got burned even two or three times before she tried to buy it because she must have looked like the sketchiest person trying to buy weed back then and she bought this weed she ordered a set of bubble bags from me And her father, he was elderly and he was suffering from wasting syndrome.

4:07:44BubblemanAnd she bought the bags, went and bought the weed, followed the instructions, whipped up a little bit of water hash. And she said, I gave him some in his corn cob pipe. This guy was like 87 years old. Like he was not a young man. I gave him some in his corn cob pipe, which to me was just like, it just painted this incredible picture of her father.

4:08:06BubblemanYou know, he's down to like, you know, 90 pounds or something. He's really wasting away. And she says he had a couple of puffs on the bubble hash. And later that night, he ate a whole McCain's cake. And it made me kind of blurt out, like, kind of like laugh from the, you know, from the brainwashed prohibition mentality that I grew up under, right? Oh, ha ha ha, you got the munchies.

4:08:34BubblemanIt made me laugh. And then as I laughed, I caught myself and I was like, Oh shit, like that's super powerful. This was like 1999. I wasn't super, I had my experience with Hillary and the Compassion Club, but I wasn't as knowledgeable about this stuff. I didn't have as many personal experiences and it was just such a profound moment to read this, you know, literally tear stained handwritten letter because it was all waffled.

4:09:01BubblemanLike the paper was all warped and warbled from her tears. She was crying while she was writing this letter and it just really gave me, It gave me a perspective of like, you know what? This is the right thing to do. Whatever this is, this is what I got to keep doing. And yeah, it's been almost 30 years.

4:09:21SpeakerLet's keep going. Same story.

4:09:25SpeakerSo Colton got sick and we didn't know what to do. So we did the pharmaceutical route. And then we had a friend when it was time to go the organic route. We had a friend that we knew was a smoker. And we were like, hey, do you think you can give us some? And we looked online how we looked up Brownie Mary and her recipe. All of these people, you know, we had to do it in Illinois illegally.

4:09:59SpeakerYou know, we were thinking, oh my gosh, we're going to get caught. You know, our neighbors are going to smell this, you know, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, same issue.

4:10:08BubblemanSo Brownie Mary's recipe is what destroyed Colton's love of brownies. Is that what you're saying?

4:10:15ValerieUnfortunately. They weren't.

4:10:19BubblemanYou know what? Are you even in the cannabis community if you don't have a brownie story? Come on now.

4:10:27SpeakerI don't think you are. Well, wait a second, Marcus. You got to tell us non-Canadians. What is a McCain's cake?

4:10:34BubblemanA McCain's cake is just like a chocolate cake with... This woman was from America, by the way. A chocolate cake with, you know, chocolate... On top. Melted chocolate icing on top. It's a very like addictive like one little piece and you'll eat like half the cake. You could crush a McCain's cake, Dr. Mark.

4:10:59SpeakerI'll send you one.

4:11:02BubblemanI'll send you one. Oh my goodness. Going just over four hours here in honor of our dear friend Wade Laughter. Miss you, Wade. I always had such a way with words. I do have more video footage of Wade I'm going to upload thanks to Ed that went on the channel there and extracted that out of 10. You know what? I keep saying Hashtag is 10 years old, but I think it was like 2013.

4:11:31BubblemanOr 2014, 2013, the first episode. So maybe we're a little bit over 10 years at this point in time. Maybe we're a little over 11 years, but I appreciate everyone.

4:11:43SpeakerWhat's that? I think it was 2013 because 2013 was when Colton started doing cannabis illegally.

4:11:53BubblemanAnd that's when we came into your life.

4:11:55SpeakerAnd that's when you guys came into our life. We actually started researching and found a whole bunch of videos and YouTube videos and kind of a black market site that helped us out. It was all adults. And every time I say, well, I have a kid, they're like, well, you're on your own.

4:12:21BubblemanYeah, no doubt. That's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, lady. What?

4:12:26SpeakerYeah, it was 2013.

4:12:27BubblemanI'm trying to get some weed. Do you have any weed? Oh, yeah, I can get you some weed. Yeah, it's for my 14 year old son.

4:12:32SpeakerOh, shit. Oh, my God.

4:12:37BubblemanI must have legitimately given some people some heart attacks in the Midwest where you're from.

4:12:43SpeakerWell, they're all over the place. Greg, Greg Terry. I don't know if you know that name. He has Crohn's disease and he's been using cannabis for a long time.

4:12:52BubblemanFrom the UK?

4:12:54SpeakerYeah.

4:12:55BubblemanYeah, of course. We know. Great. Yeah. Great guy.

4:12:59SpeakerGreat.

4:13:00BubblemanHe's been on Hash Church more than a few times. In fact, I feel like there was a connection there where he may have even linked up with you guys through Hash Church.

4:13:12SpeakerYep, he did. Yeah, I remember when Jason David came to Harborside for the first time, it was late 2010. And he came to us and told us his story about his son, Jaden. And, you know, we were listening to the story. And we're like, well, how old is Jaden? It was five years old at that time. And, you know, we, uh, at that point were, you know, already under considerable heat from the federal government.

4:13:47SpeakerAnd we were like, oh, a five-year-old child. Um, but we knew, uh, that cannabis could help Jayden. And so, you know, we had to swallow hard, but we ultimately provided him with medicine and, and that was right when Weed Wars was filming. And so we filmed Jaden getting his first dose of cannabis and filmed what had happened. And, you know, you saw this child who was shaking uncontrollably, who was crying, who was in misery.

4:14:21SpeakerAnd, you know, 30 minutes after he got these drops of tincture, it was a 19 to 1 ratio. He was laughing and playing like a normal kid. And that was so compelling. We knew that we had to put it on TV. And so this story of Harborside providing cannabis to a five-year-old kid went out on the Discovery Channel. And it was, you know, we had to think hard about it, but not that hard.

4:14:54SpeakerNot that hard. We remember seeing that. Yeah, it was back in the archives, but we remember seeing that. And then our first 420 event in Denver, we met Jason and became fast friends. And he's just amazing. And Jaden is amazing. And then we learned about you, Steve, and Harborside and all the good work that is happening in the cannabis community. And it's just been humbling to see

4:15:28SpeakerThank you so much for joining us today.

4:15:56SpeakerIt's just miraculous. And, and just, we are so thankful for everything that you have done and everything that everybody on this panel has done. Because it's just, like I said, in the beginning of this, this whole episode, he wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you guys, if it wasn't for the prisoners, if it wasn't for the people that decided that they're going to do it anyway, you know, give that five-year-old some, some cannabis and stop his seizures, you know?

4:16:26SpeakerWe wouldn't be here. Well, the plant's been working on this a lot longer than we have. And, you know, I think all of us were called. And, you know, for me, it was a very, very powerful calling. And I never had any doubt, you know, even when I got busted, even when I was sitting in prison cells, I never had any doubt about the good that we were doing.

4:16:53SpeakerAnd You know, in return, we've had these amazing lives full of adventure, full of meaning, full of purpose. You know, I talk to a lot of people who, you know, are still maybe at my age looking for their purpose and looking for their meaning in their lives. And, you know, that wasn't something that we ever had to worry about. And I think it's a, we got, we got as many blessings back as we gave and then some.

4:17:34Etienne FontanYou're muted, Marcus. You're trying to talk, but you're talking, but we cannot hear you.

4:17:39BubblemanOh, no, I'm not trying to talk. I was talking. I was talking for myself, Etienne. I'm just joking, too. Thank you, brother from another mother. We had some great folks on today. Myrtle from South Africa. That was nice to see Myrtle on here and share with us, and Hillary and Dr. Ethan Russo, and Debbie, it was great to hear from Debbie. I haven't really seen her in a long time.

4:18:05BubblemanI always, every time I see Debbie and I see Debbie speak, I remember why I love Debbie so much. She's just like such a cool chick. Always coming at us from, from cool, cool, cool perspectives. Maybe her, her hemp plant, what were they called there? Like poinsettias? What are they? What kind of plant?

4:18:26SpeakerOrnamentals.

4:18:27BubblemanOrnamentals. Thank you. The ornamental hemp plants. I can see it. I'd have one in my house.

4:18:32SpeakerYeah. The Christmas tree that doesn't need ornaments.

4:18:35BubblemanRight. Yeah. The Christmas tree that grows your ornaments. That's right. It's like you just grow those little trichomes.

4:18:42SpeakerSo why don't we just replace Christmas trees with hemp plants, right?

4:18:47Etienne FontanI would love that. No opposition here because then you can harvest and deal with it afterwards. You know what I'm saying? As opposed to a bunch of Christmas trees up for garbage.

4:18:59BubblemanHave you been in contact with Jamaica, Steve, to see how they're doing since Melissa?

4:19:06SpeakerYeah, well, I, um, I embedded for six months, uh, at the, uh, Rastafari indigenous village and, uh, maintained a close relationship with the village ever since. So, yeah, um, I was tracking it before the hurricane hit and, uh, you know, communications were wiped out during, but, uh, yeah, Jamaica has never been hit with anything like this before. And, you know, all the communities, every community in Jamaica is hurting right now.

4:19:38SpeakerThe infrastructure has just been completely destroyed. And folks are still scrambling to get even things like, you know, clean drinking water. The village is located right next to the Montego Valley River. And so what they're doing now is using some of the solar energy that we installed and they've set up a system of pumps and are pumping river water up and running it through some filters that aid agencies brought in and they're becoming a hub for the rest of the community to distribute clean water.

4:20:16SpeakerSo we got a GoFundMe page up for the village. It's over $10,000 now. And yeah, I'm in daily contact and doing all that we can to help. One of the things that we're thinking about doing, I'll just mention it to this crowd, is trying to see if we can get some cannabis experts to come down to Jamaica and help rebuild the Rastafari cannabis system into something that's I even bigger and better and stronger than it has been before.

4:20:56SpeakerSo if anybody's interested in that, drop me a line and let's all go down to Jamaica and do what we can to help these communities that have given so much to me. You know, when we grew up and we were just beginning to get into cannabis and getting into the movement, we didn't have any elders really. And we didn't have any kind of sense of validation for what we were doing until we discovered reggae music and Rastafari.

4:21:32SpeakerAnd that said to us that there was this pre-existing tradition, a tradition that had a spiritual orientation to cannabis and had developed a whole way of life centered around the plant. And that was just You know, profoundly motivating for us. And I'll just say a shout out to some folks who aren't here to shout out for themselves. And that's the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, which was a crew of white Rostas who were coming into Jamaica and smuggling massive amounts of cannabis back to the United States and then returning that money back into the Rastafari community in Jamaica.

4:22:16SpeakerThey all got Busted in a big, big way by the feds and did a ridiculous amount of time behind it. But shout out to them and all the unseen, unacknowledged warriors of cannabis.

4:22:33Etienne FontanAbsolutely. Steve, Mike just came from a... Michael Krauts, you want to talk about your experience there in the Caribbean there after meeting with our friends in St. Martin? Because they could maybe help Jamaica.

4:22:52SpeakerYeah, man. Everything hits you once. Good to see you, Steve. It's amazing, you know, when you put your head down... And you do this work, the paths that you cross, the lines that seem to intersect in the universe are quite beautiful, really. Oh, man, look at that. Beautiful, beautiful. But yeah, I just came back from St. Vincent, where they held a meeting. Jamaica was represented. The government of Jamaica was there.

4:23:25SpeakerObviously before the storm, but it was a rather intense meeting, six different governments working on cannabis throughout the Caribbean region. And I had a lot of takeaways from those meetings, but we've been actually working with Carl Olson, you know, one of the sort of the last remaining threads of the Catholic church world that you can reach into the cannabis, you know, movement here in the United States.

4:23:52SpeakerAnd yeah, the dotted lines are all around me. I don't even know how to begin to describe it. But at the very least, we should be coordinating and comparing notes.

4:24:07SpeakerYeah, for sure. Let's do that. Well, I know how to get you.

4:24:12BubblemanI want to shout out my Jamaican friends and family out there as well. And Rashad Nelson from Cloud9, who's been doing a lot of work in the Negril area. Him and his wife Sativa moved to Jamaica about eight or nine years ago. And he's kind of a go-to guy for just always having really kind herb. And he had a little GoFundMe. He raised just a couple of grand to get a generator going.

4:24:35BubblemanAnd now that generator's working at his spot where I guess people are able to come in and charge up their phones. Just really simple things. Like Steve's not joking. Like Jamaica got devastated. This hurricane, this thing was so brutal. It was ripping the bark off of trees that it wasn't ripping right out of the ground. So really super duper intense. Category five, like no bueno. So shout out to all the Jamaican friends.

4:25:04BubblemanI got to... Definitely take Steve up on that and maybe go down there and help do some building. Volunteer is good. Be in service. If you can, be in service. It's important. Lots of people are in need of said services these days. So I think... Yeah, I think we've been going for four hours and 20 minutes. What a perfect time to end Hash Church.

4:25:29SpeakerPerfect.

4:25:31BubblemanI want to, yeah, let's have a little puff there, Etienne. I want to just finish with obviously thanking Puffco and the Press Club and Bubble Bags for sponsoring the show. As always, you guys are just awesome and have been amazing to deal with. As we close, as we come to a close of this special Compassion episode, I want to take a moment to reflect on the voices we heard today, voices that come from decades of service, sacrifice, and really deep humanity.

4:26:03BubblemanEvery story shared, every insight offered is a reminder that compassion is not something we talk about once and then leave behind. It's a practice, a commitment, a way of showing up for one another in a world that often forgets what care truly looks like. The compassion movement wasn't built on corporations or policies or marketing. It was built on people, people who gave their time, their hearts, their homes, sometimes their freedom, so that others could live with less pain and more dignity.

4:26:35BubblemanToday's conversation reminds us that the soul of this culture still lives in those who carry that flame forward, the caregivers, the educators, the activists, the patients, and the families who continue to believe that caring for each other is the highest expression of what this plant has to offer. So as we leave today, let's take with us the understanding that compassion is not a memory. It's a responsibility.

4:27:00BubblemanAnd it's on all of us to make sure it remains at the foundation of who we are and what we do. I want to thank all of our guests. Thank you to our community. And thank you to everyone out there keeping compassion alive in action, not just in word. This is Hash Church. Take care of one another. We'll see you next time, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.

4:27:23BubblemanThanks for being here. Much love to all of you.