Cannabis Wise Guys on the DEA Schedule III hearings

0:00BubblemanOh, look, we're live. All right. Welcome, everybody. Welcome, everybody. Sunday, July 19th, 9 a.m. PST. It's actually 8.58. Started a little bit earlier today. Oh, I can hear myself, but barely. Let's make sure we can hear me. Let's make sure we can hear me. I cannot hear me right now. So I'm just going to do a quick audio check. Make sure we're all properly done here. Huh.

0:34BubblemanGive me a couple seconds here, guys, because I need to figure out my audio. Okay, well, that's working. Test, test. Okay, I'll turn that up a little bit. Test, test. There we go. All right, let's do it up. You guys can hear me okay? Make sure, make sure we got everything going. Just want to make sure we're all properly done here. Yes. Okay. Do it. Ah, good.

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5:03BubblemanI missed it myself, but I'm sure it was awesome and amazing. And we're going to kind of cover a bunch of that today. And for those of you that don't know, Max runs a website called Cannabis Wise Guys, not a website. Well, it is a website actually, but I saw it as an Instagram account first. Then I went and checked out the website and that's how I kind of created the description.

5:23BubblemanThank you so much for joining us today.

5:48BubblemanGood to see you. Good morning, guys. Thank you. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I like the background as well. And I love the fact that you're living in a van with your dog, dude. That looks like epic. And I'm very close to Whistler. So maybe one day you come and spend some time up in Whistler with your van and your dog. Absolutely. I love it in BC.

6:08SpeakerIt's gorgeous out there. And where are you at right now? I'm in New Jersey for the complete opposite. Wow. You're way over there. I would have never guessed actually. Yeah. It's uh, I'm from the East coast born and raised Jersey and Philly area. And then, um, Florida for college. And then right after that, I hit the road. I drove through Canada. Actually, I drove right through Whistler on my way to Alaska, which was my first time I landed in the cannabis industry.

6:36SpeakerWow, that's incredible.

6:38BubblemanWell, first of all, I want to welcome Caleb and Etienne, who I know are super stoked to hear this. I know we have Michael Krawitz, who's going to be coming in in a little bit as well. Farmer Tom did send me another woman's number. He was like, oh, oh, if you're talking about this, you got to have this woman on. And I'm definitely going to try and get in touch with her and have her on eventually.

6:57BubblemanWhat I didn't want to do was stack the panel too much because I really want to hear a lot of what you have to say because you're the person who has been in there taking these notes. So maybe a quick little introduction to Hash Church in regards to kind of, you know, how you ended up in cannabis, driving through Whistler, going to Alaska and sort of where it's taken you and really where you've landed today.

7:21SpeakerYeah. Yeah. So I guess rewinding all the way, I used to be a photographer. This is one of my pictures behind me. And that led to shooting for my dispensary out in Alaska when I was up there. And that kind of spiraled out of control because I was like, all right, this cannabis photography thing is going to be what I'm passionate about. I don't want to shoot weddings.

7:41SpeakerSo I took my Jeep. I was living in a four-door Jeep Wrangler at the time. I'm traveling around in that. Drove down to L.A. and I was like, if I'm going to do cannabis photography, this is where I have to be in 2018. So I went down there and got to see so much. I got to see a lot of grows, behind the scenes things that most people don't get eyes on.

7:59SpeakerAnd then eventually one of my clients up in Trinity County told me they were like, hey, you can come work with the plants if you want. And I was more interested. I wanted to learn more and get hands on. So around COVID, I pulled up my ambulance to the farm and started working out there and eventually became the general manager of the spot out in Trinity. We had probably 13,000 flowering plants.

8:22SpeakerAnd across six mixed light greenhouses and cocoa pots. The facility made sense back in the illegal days during Prop 215 and things like that. It was in the woods. It was two hours from civilization. That made sense. For a commercial facility, not so much. We were two hours from Home Depot. So that turned into kind of repairing that facility. And then Cannabis Wise Guys was formed kind of at the end of that facility's life.

8:50SpeakerIt just was not financially viable for that place to operate. And then I ended up back on the East Coast for some family reasons. And the East Coast is where it's all moving right now. That's where like the bleeding edge of the policy is.

9:03BubblemanSo yeah, absolutely. So the cannabis, I got pulled right back in. The cannabis photography, I've been doing that for a while myself. And I remember I started doing it when prohibition was still in full effect. And so there was this real kind of like nobody can get busted after I leave the grow from photographing it. And there was this real sort of like and it never happened.

9:26BubblemanThank God. I always I also felt the same responsibility when it came to selling bubble bags online. We did that for I mean, we've been doing it for almost 30 years. But in the early days when it was highly illegal, we just felt like, you know, we really needed to protect our list, the people that we were sending products to. We were like, maybe we shouldn't put this on a computer.

9:46BubblemanMaybe we should like leave this in hard copy files. Maybe we shouldn't have these hard copy files. Like we just didn't know, you know, like in my opinion back then, and thank God they didn't figure it out. It's just amazing that, and I guess they probably did to a degree and the police have done these things in the past, you know, where they're like, oh, you want a cell phone and then you show up and actually they have a warrant for your arrest.

10:09BubblemanAnd it's a whole group of people who think they want cell phones. I'm, you know, a lot of people when I started bubble bags were convinced I was, you know, a DEA agent or working. Oh, you're a fed.

10:18SpeakerYou're out here trying to get people who are making.

10:20BubblemanYeah, I must be a. I must be a fad. I'm trying to convince people to do like manufacturing or whatever. And I was like, you know, it was it's it was a thing for a couple of years. And I remember my my mentor, Dave Watson, my dear friend, Skunk Man Sam, was just like, oh, man, if they're calling you the DEA, you've you know, you finally made it like you're because because he had already been being called the DEA for like for like 15 years or something.

10:46BubblemanTravel and doing all kinds of stuff. Dude, just absolutely insane. And if you don't know much about Skunk Man Sam, Skunk Man Sam had a DEA export license, you know, back, back, back in the day. I don't know if it was late 80s, early 90s, but it was something he needed to do for his pharmaceutical company in Amsterdam, Horta Farm, which was, you know, he knew he needed to be able to send his, the cannabis that he was growing to a lab in Japan, to a lab in Mississippi, to, you know, these, these

11:16BubblemanAnd so Sam, back in the day, was like, well, I'll just get one. And then everyone else was like, oh, you're obviously a DEA agent. And it's like, well, you know, now we're going through this again. You've got the DEA saying, hey, everyone's got to apply for this license. And then you've got everyone in the industry going, are you fucking crazy? This is it. This is how they're going to get us.

11:41BubblemanLike,

11:41SpeakerI read that form. That form is scary.

11:44BubblemanRight? Yeah, of course. But it's also why Sam got to do things way before so many other people because he wasn't afraid to fill out the form. Yep. And so, you know, we're obviously we're going to have a whole long conversation about this today. And I'm very excited to hear what you have to say. We've had conversations about this. But it's mostly kind of been about our opinions on whether we think that this could play out to be a good thing for a group of people or if it's going to end up being a bad thing for a group of people.

12:13BubblemanAnd of course, you know, once again, it's the cannabis industry. So 99% of people are going to lead to it's the DEA. It has to be a bad thing. I wish Sam was here so he could kind of throw his two cents in and say, look, I'm the least DEA person you could possibly know. The guy was a total cannabis warrior, but he had a very deep understanding in his intelligence that without this license, He wasn't going to be able to do what he wanted to do.

12:39BubblemanAnd so he pushed through, he got the license, he protected the license. And because of it for years, you know, people propagated rumors that he was working with the DEA. And I guess in a sense, like, well, yeah, he had a D, anyone who has a DEA export license could be, you know, you could say they work with the DEA, but the way they were saying it was not that at all.

13:00BubblemanIt was like, this guy's an undercover fed. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us.

13:26BubblemanDude, I am super excited for you to fucking give us a little presentation. I don't know what you have prepared. I don't know if you're kind of going over. You've gone to this for 10 days. Am I correct?

13:37SpeakerIt was, so it was a total of 11 days. I missed the first few. So I think I was there seven, six or seven out of the 11 days. Holy shit. And it was, it was something else. And, and speaking of Skunk Man Sam and that, like thinking of, and this is the part that a lot of people miss with these hearings. They'll see my videos. They're like, oh, the government's all on the reef of madness.

13:59SpeakerThe DEA was the ones who were saying that they want cannabis reform. In their very specific version of it was just Schedule 3, but they were the ones who are currently the proponent of it, which is an interesting conversation to be having when all of the witnesses against cannabis are the ones that are being called against the government.

14:19BubblemanRight. Yeah, that is interesting. You know, a similar thing happened here in Canada, and the way we see it was We just forced their hand. Our DEA is Health Canada. They're kind of our FDA, DEA. You know, you get your licensing through Health Canada. They're very connected to the RIRS, which is the CRA, the Canada Revenue Agency. And so these groups are all very, very intertwined and interconnected.

14:44BubblemanAnd so same thing in Canada. Oh, we're getting legal licenses. Legal licensing is coming to Canada. Federal legalization, you know, the Queen is going to dissent. Like it was... It was wild shit. You know, stuff that's never happened in my life kind of thing. Like the queen is getting involved in this. I'm like, what is going on right now? Oh, yeah, we live in a Commonwealth country.

15:03BubblemanThe queen's got a sign. The queen of fucking England signed off on federal cannabis regulations. So. Everyone in their dog that was a prohibition person in Canada, or, you know, an activist person, but that's what I really mean, not a prohibition person, an anti-prohibition person. All of us were like, that license is a trap. This is terrifying. Whatever you do, don't get that license. And I got to tell you, that was the worst advice.

15:32BubblemanBecause what really happened, which we didn't understand was, When you end prohibition, okay, and you turn it into something else, no matter what it is, schedule fucking 18, schedule three, you know, sort of legal, state legal, not legal. If you just take cannabis out of prohibition, Suddenly, you don't get in trouble for it the same way you used to. So a perfect example is here in Canada, we had federal companies operating full rooms without licensing, which is as illegal as it gets.

16:05SpeakerYou are literally growing- They were doing that before it went adult use in Canada?

16:10BubblemanOh, yeah. Yeah, we had medical licensing that came in. And when medical licensing came in, Max, it was this massive protector for everyone in Canada who, A, wanted to protect themselves from their cannabis use. Nobody wanted to get in trouble from their cannabis use. And of course, a ton of people were selling cannabis, you know, God bless them, in the black market and gray market. And they didn't want to stop either.

16:33BubblemanAnd they thought if they got this license... That it would it would impede them. Well, in fact, that license was like a golden shield for people that continued to sell black market cannabis, but they just grew it in a protected way. The minute that happened in Canada, and I think people have a hard time understanding this, the funding is gone for the police. There is now no more funding for the police to to to hunt cannabis.

16:57BubblemanAnd I really want people to understand the funding is everything it's not like the police are sitting there you know you know talking to one another going we got to do this and we got to do that it's like no there's people above them that say you got to do this and those very people above them are now telling them you got to be the proponent for cannabis legalization for schedule three and now i when i say that i don't know if that's going to be good or bad that's why i'm very you know i try to be optimistic because The way it played out in Canada, the way everyone thought it was going to play out, which I see being very similar with this DEA thing, was that people were terrified about it.

17:31BubblemanThey thought it was bad news all the way to the bank. And in Canada, I can't say that it turned out like perfect by any means, but it turned out way better than prohibition. Like it is way better than prohibition. The access that people in Canada... I think that's the thing.

17:47SpeakerNo, the way better than prohibition. It's... It's we're arguing what the illegal world is and the things that come with the illicit market where we have all of these agents, we have these scientists that are on the stand. Oh, we bust drug dealers with guns and it's the most associated drug with violent crime. It's like, well, yeah, if that's the way you look at it, it's going to check those boxes.

18:13SpeakerExactly, exactly.

18:15BubblemanYeah, so also welcome to Michael Krawitz and Dr. Mark Sheldon, who just popped into the room, our resident chemist. Yeah, we got Max in here today. Max has been going to the DEA hearings. I feel I haven't heard Max's, you know, I watched some of it and I was getting really into it. But at that point, I'm like, I want to invite this guy on Hash Church and I don't want to watch anymore because I really want to hear what he has to say for the first time, you know, with us in the group.

18:44BubblemanSo I don't exactly know if he's promoting this as a full biased, if he's leaning either way. I just know that he's got some great information. It's going to create a wonderful discussion. And I think it's time to rock and roll. Max, if you want to start walking us through a how the fuck did you decide to just go to the DEA schedule three hearings? Like, how do you even hear about that?

19:06BubblemanAnd how did you find out that you could go? Because also when that happened, I heard the rumor that it was closed and nobody could go.

19:15SpeakerI heard that rumor too. So that's where I started out was with that rumor, which was like, oh, I can't go to this thing. I'm in Jersey and I have my van and I have a client in DC. So getting down to DC is not a crazy thing for me. And that's where the DEA headquarters is. It's just outside of the city. So I had somebody in like an advocacy chat.

19:32SpeakerThey messaged, they were like, hey, I've been at the DEA hearings and I wasn't able to get in on this day because I didn't show up. Like they blocked it off at a time that the judge didn't say. So they made a new rule. And I was like, wait a second, you were there? I was like, I don't care about the part that you weren't able to get in.

19:48SpeakerI was like, wait a second, you're there. That means I can be there. So I was like, hey, like, give me give me the details. And I got the information and it was it was open to the public, but it was so It was explained so weirdly and like, oh, you have to get in line by seven o'clock in the morning. And if there's room, we'll let you in.

20:09SpeakerI think that led to a lot of like the hesitation for people or like the lack of need for people to get out there. But also, I mean, it was three weeks in the middle of July. Like that's a rough window. It's a long window for anyone to get out to the entire thing of that, let alone a few days. So yeah, I was, after the first week, I had already reported on it.

20:29SpeakerAnd just really the framing that I saw at first was the lawyers, the DEA said they were like, this is not about regulation. This is not about legalization. This is about regulation. And they were talking in favor of cannabis. And schedule three being their goal. But the thing that I found interesting is that their witnesses were arguing that it was less harmful than alcohol and opiates, which we know to be the truth.

20:59SpeakerBut like, well, you're making a really interesting argument because Congress specifically crossed out or they took out alcohol from the Controlled Substances Act when they wrote it. It was specifically put into the Tax Act. Which means that there's a place for things that are not as bad as alcohol to potentially be in that zone. So it's like, all right, that got me interested. And then I drove down that Sunday night, like drove down through a storm in the middle of the night, parked in front of DEA headquarters at midnight, walked my dog around the property, and I was there at 7 a.m. in line.

21:31BubblemanJesus, I wonder how many times those plates got ran.

21:34SpeakerWoo! They saw me for a couple days. They eventually knew who I was. But it's funny because once I figured out that they realized who I was, because this was Thursday now, I'd been there for four days, and... DHS rolls up on me. I'm taking a nap in the van. My girlfriend's sitting at the table where I'm sitting right now working on something. And like, knock, knock, knock, hard knock.

21:55SpeakerI'm like, uh-oh. And he knocks on my back door. I'm like, uh-oh. I just throw on some clothes, pop out. And yeah, it was DHS was out there. They were like, hey, you know where you are, right? I was like, yeah, it's the DEA headquarters. I've been inside all week. And he's like, oh, well, they called about a suspicious vehicle. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I get that.

22:15SpeakerMy van, ambulance converted to a camper van. So it's like a painted like a dark blue. It could be look a little sketchy, I would say. The DHS guy was super chill. He realized that I was not anything to him. I definitely smelled like weed. He asked if he could run his dog around the van. And I was like, well, what's your dog looking for? And he's like, bombs.

22:36SpeakerLike, yeah, whatever. I don't care. And I knew I was safe because I was parked in Virginia on the street, which is Virginia. So the feds had no, they couldn't have, I mean, they can do whatever they want, but I would have been within my rights to have weed in Virginia in that parking spot.

22:53BubblemanSo you had an interaction with DHS over weed at the DEA hearing. It wasn't over weed.

22:59SpeakerIt was over, is my van a bomb?

23:03BubblemanOh my God. Well, it was over them like wanting to do it. They just were like, let's go talk to this guy.

23:07SpeakerBut the first thing I did was like I threw on a shirt and the shirt has a big, it's not this shirt, but it has like a big pot leaf on this chest. I'm like, and I have my girlfriend. I'm like, hey, throw me a jacket. Once I realized, I thought it was just local police and I realized it was the feds. I was like, hold on, let me just like.

23:20BubblemanWe just want to run our dog over here. What are you looking for? Just bombs. All I have is bomb ass weed.

23:29SpeakerIt was definitely fascinating, that's for sure. And then the next day, all the security guards were like, yo, so that's your van outside? Like, I need one of those.

23:38BubblemanWow. Yeah. Very glad that it's legal in Virginia is right. All right. So you end up at these meetings. You find out you can go, but you can't go. You end up getting in. And now you're just like, your mission is to take notes and just sort of bring this to the community. Wow.

24:00SpeakerNo phones, no computers, no recording devices, handwritten everything for eight hours. And I don't know that I have ever written that much maybe in my life because I used a computer in school. So I don't know that I've ever handwritten that much. So what do you think? And now I'm going back through some of this stuff.

24:19BubblemanLike, what does it even say? I don't even know what I wrote down. Oh my God. Eight hours a day. It's unreal that they wouldn't like, what is the mentality behind? We can't like do any recording at all.

24:32SpeakerI can't speak to that, but I do know that the judge's order just came out and he said that the transcript is going to be made available to the public. There was no date on when, but he did say that the transcript will be made available. So I'm excited for that to happen. I can confirm some of the things that I wrote down. I really confirmed the things that I have written down that I'm like, what does this even mean?

24:55SpeakerLike, go find it in the transcript. But one of the things I'm really excited about the transcript The transcript is being able to and hopefully being able to see the exhibits as well that line up with the transcript. Because if we can see the exhibits, we can then see all of the studies that they're quoting and see exactly what it is that they're where they're coming from when they're saying these these scientific numbers and these data and these studies.

25:16SpeakerBecause I think that's really where it lies is because you can we could all six of us could read the same study and there could be at least two or three different conclusions from it. And that becomes tricky when you have somebody who's spent the past 50 years of their life studying something. And now they're like, hey, this is really scary and dangerous. And there's zero accepted medical use for it because that's what I've studied for the past 50 years because I've been afraid of it.

25:44BubblemanYeah, exactly. It's not easy to bring out change. But I will tell you that these organizations are willing to change when you defund them. When you take away hundreds of billions or hundreds of millions or millions, whatever it is, I mean, I don't know how much the DEA used to get, but they used to come up to Canada and bring helicopters and then fill those helicopters up with gas and then bust our weed plants outdoors.

26:08BubblemanLike this is how serious.

26:10SpeakerSo you guys in Canada, I guess because the DEA went all over the world.

26:14BubblemanDude, we have a DEA office here in Vancouver. We have a DEA office here in Vancouver that like I'll drive by and see like, you know, Guys that just look normal. And it's like, yeah, those are DEA agents. And then sometimes there's just like customs agents standing out in front of their CSBA, like full, you know, United States customs officers in full regalia, like,

26:35SpeakerI'm like, where the fuck is the border, dude?

26:36BubblemanYou are in downtown Vancouver right now. It was DEA agents that came and got Mark Emery and Craig Williams and Greg Williams and Michelle. These, the BC3, as they were called, it was the DEA and Bella Clavas who were- You gotta watch out for the DEA outside of the US. Well, sovereignty laws. Canada has pretty strong sovereignty laws. And it was like people were like, whoa, like, I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to be like you can't be the police in a different country where you're not from.

27:08BubblemanBut, you know, Canada and the US, you know, we used to have a very good relationship. Apparently now our dirty fires are ruining your skies.

27:16SpeakerYeah, you guys are sending all that that smoke. If you guys would put out these joints, we might be OK.

27:21BubblemanI know. We're so sorry about that. We do apologize. We're trying. We're trying our best up here. Fucking burning.

27:28SpeakerI know that it's absolutely worse for you guys. I've been I've been way close. I mean, being up in Trinity, that's there's that stuff is all the woods out there have been on the fires. It's been it's the whole West Coast. It's rough.

27:42BubblemanYeah, it definitely is. In fact, I woke up today and one of my neighbor's houses was on fire and burning down to the ground, which is very rare in my village. Are you good? I'm good. She's a she was, you know, like a block over or whatever. But she's a single mom with with like three kids. And yeah, her house was just fucking burning down today. And it was like, holy shit, like this is I think there's been two fires in the 30 years that I've lived in this village.

28:09BubblemanThere's only five hundred and eighty nine houses. So it's not a huge community. We're just a little we're just sort of nestled next to the Pacific Ocean. So we're we're tucked in. But yeah, back to the DEA hearings, man. I'd love to hear sort of your breakdown on your first day and kind of like, you know, maybe your realization that you were like, holy shit, I think I'm going to have to write all of this for the next eight hours because there must have been a point where you figured that out.

28:39SpeakerI knew what I was getting myself into, but I didn't necessarily, I thought I was going to go down for a couple of days. And then I went down, I sat in the room and then I made a video about it and I realized I was like, oh no, I am not here for the next couple of days. I am here till the end. So it definitely, and getting towards the end, I think on the last day, I was almost not able to continue to write.

29:06SpeakerBut let's see what we got. So first day I went in and you go through DEA security. It's just regular security checkpoint, but you're not allowed throughout the building by yourself, like at all. You need an escort with you at all times. And if you accidentally like wander off to the bathroom or you're going to the elevator and you thought your escort was with you and they weren't, you've got like three DEA agents are like, hey, are you good?

29:29SpeakerGuys, please leave me alone. I'm just here to take notes.

29:36SpeakerAnd the first thing I noticed when I walked in, there's these golden plaques on the tables on the other side, like in the court side. And it says reserved for the designated parties against descheduling or rescheduling. So it was, I already knew that going in, it was just going to be the opponents, but it was kind of like humorous to see that being like the first words I read in there was like, oh, they got a nice little gold reserve plaque for those against.

30:04SpeakerBut Overall, the witnesses were...

30:12SpeakerIt's tricky because a lot of the experience that some of the, especially the scientists and doctors have is with single molecule THC. And that is what they are talking about a lot of the time. So you have Marinol and Draminol, and some people are talking about IV THC and how that causes hallucinations and bad side effects and things like that. So at a certain point... Did they tell us where we could get that?

30:41BubblemanWhere can we get that liquid THC? Is that something that's...

30:44SpeakerI'm just joking. Yeah, I don't know about that one. I guess you'd have to go to a scientific experiment for that because when they're talking about that, they're not talking about cannabis as 99.9% of the world knows it or consumes it or interacts with it. Like that's not... We're talking about different things when we're talking about those side effects. Someone said IV not in my dispensary. But actually, one of the craziest things I heard in there, there was a doctor showing us slides of different things that were available in dispensaries.

31:19SpeakerAnd I don't know if you guys ever have seen like the dablicators or even like an RSO syringe. She said, this is clearly a syringe for injecting.

31:30Etienne FontanOh my God. And I was just like...

31:37SpeakerShe also, this same woman also showed pictures of babies with bongs.

31:40Etienne FontanFor people who are watching, it's an applicator because it's an oil and it can come through at a very small stream. That's why syringes are used. Nobody's injecting that shit. That part. So go on.

31:51SpeakerWhat did you say? What were you about to say, Max? This woman also showed multiple pictures of babies with bongs. Um... And babies with bongs with bongs.

32:02BubblemanYeah, like, oh, my God, that's the new church T-shirt.

32:06SpeakerOh, so it was I thought I saw the pictures. I was like, oh, that's an interesting thing to put in your in your slides. And then the government was very restrictive with the questions that they asked on cross-examination. There were some witnesses that they didn't cross-examine at all. Because they have a very specific case they need to prove. Does it have an accepted medical benefit and does it have not a high likelihood for abuse?

32:31SpeakerThey just need to prove that it does not fit in schedule one. And they asked her, so they get up for cross. He gets to the slide of the baby. Ma'am, is this your baby? Do you know whose baby this is? No. Where did you get this picture? I got it online. Have you heard of AI? Yes. Is it possible this picture isn't real? Yes. Why did you show these pictures to the court?

32:58SpeakerShe said, I needed to show that this is happening. These things are happening and you need to know that. And then I Googled it because I wanted to do it. Anyone who's listening, I welcome you to, if you Google baby with a bong, you will see the picture that she pulled up. The first picture that comes up is probably going to be the one with the blurred face.

33:17SpeakerShe didn't use the one with the blurred face. She used the one with the full face. But if you, I then searched baby with a pipe and because she said this would have never happened two decades ago. Nobody would have, she was like implying nobody would have ever done this with like cigarettes. And I Google baby with a pipe and it's just like pages of pages of black and white photos of babies with pipes and babies with beers and babies with cigarettes.

33:45BubblemanThat is so fucking bizarre, dude.

33:50BubblemanI have never in all my years of cannabis, I will be honest, I have never searched for babies with bongs or babies with pipes, but I think we're all on a list now that we did that. Like what?

34:03Dr Mark ScialdoneCan I ask what I would assume is an obvious question? What in the fuck does this have to do with rescheduling of cannabis?

34:14BubblemanWell, clearly this is happening out there, Mark. But babies are getting a hold of bongs and they're ripping fucking, you know, ripping bowls.

34:22Etienne FontanIt's a big problem with our dispensaries, man. We have to kick them out all the time. They're crawling in. People are bringing their strollers and leaving them right outside.

34:32BubblemanI mean, it's a real problem, guys.

34:34Etienne FontanBack to Dr. Mark. What in the fuck?

34:37BubblemanFuck, does this have to do?

34:40Dr Mark ScialdoneTime out. Is this a medical doctor? Isn't there more relevant discussion? This is a medical doctor.

34:45SpeakerThis is an emergency room doctor in Colorado.

34:47BubblemanSo like an MD, like a... Yes. Kevin's a bed boy. Holy shit, that's crazy. Okay, so let's... Okay, so she's putting pictures of babies with bongs and... And the person who's cross-examining her is this... Who is this? This is the DEA. And they're kind of like, they're not like, we've seen a lot of this. They're like, what the fuck are you, what is this?

35:16SpeakerOh yeah, they were just like, they basically walked her all the way to like, do you know if this picture is real? And the answer was no.

35:24BubblemanAnd why did you show this inflammatory picture to the court? Wow, which is literally kind of the equivalent of what the DEA has been doing for decades about cannabis. Isn't that funny?

35:34Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd there's 20 minutes of our life that will never get back.

35:36BubblemanThis is your brain on drugs, as somebody said at the Adam Dunn podcast. You know what? The only value of that, because I would say also, Dr. Mark, that of course that's a waste of time, but to see the DEA walk her back and make her ask her if the picture's real and stuff is like... That is the polar opposite of what I would think the DEA would do.

35:56BubblemanI would think the DEA would be like, yeah, we know these pictures. We yeah, we see this all the time. This is a major problem in America. I can't imagine them. That sounds like bizarro land where they're flipped on the other side and they're saying, is this photo even real? It's like, well, I don't know. You guys shared it for years.

36:15Etienne FontanBabies pulling tubes are a big problem. You know, they could slip and fall and drown in the bong, you know, or break the glass and cut themselves.

36:23Dr Mark ScialdoneThank you for watching.

36:36BubblemanDoes it undermine the credibility of the entire process? What was your opinion on it, Max, when it was happening? Because you were there.

36:43SpeakerSo I am just sitting there dumbfounded. There were one or two times where I had to cover my face to not have an actual noticeable reaction in the courtroom. And I think that was one of them. But her bigger picture that she was trying to show is, and I think that... Let's see. No, I don't have it written down here. She was trying to show that it's being normalized.

37:12SpeakerShe's trying to show that it's being normalized and that her kids are seeing parents use it and parents are giving it to kids. And that the youth access goes up when legalization or rescheduling or more access happens. And that's the part of that that I find the most interesting is because on the policy side of things, when I'm talking, when I'm like showing people evidence as to like why legalization in your state is good for your state, one of the things that studies show Is that children report that it's harder to get cannabis when it becomes legal because there's less people selling it on the street.

37:54SpeakerSo all of the studies that I have seen and I've looked for the ones that don't show what I want them to show as well. It's when legalization happens, it's harder for children. Children report it's harder for them to get access to cannabis.

38:05BubblemanThey have no plug. They had the plugs, the plugs, all the plugs went out of business. The plugs got licenses.

38:13SpeakerAnd the bigger part of that. Dude, dude, dude, wait a second.

38:18Dr Mark ScialdoneYou're from Jersey, man. You're a wise guy. Come on now. There's been a black market and it's been huge for years. I don't know what you're saying. There's no plugs. There's plugs all over the place, man.

38:30SpeakerOh, there's plugs all over, but there's less access.

38:32BubblemanNot ones that kids have access to, Dr. Mark, I think is the key. Like there might be plugs selling tons of shit in the black market, but are they actively selling to 14 year old kids?

38:43Etienne FontanWell, baby bongs, you know, the whole baby bongs, you got to keep them small. Yeah. Yeah.

38:48SpeakerBut Max, honestly, the porn selling all tons of stuff.

38:52Etienne FontanWas there a laugh or reaction in the room when they actually said or showed the baby in the bongs? Was there any reaction in the room at all?

39:01SpeakerEveryone did a really good job of keeping their composure. I would like, I'd like to look around every once in a while, but everyone did a really good job of keeping composure. But it was, that's an interesting point that you have, Marcus, with the, the, the plug would have all the other drugs because Durban, it's okay.

39:18SpeakerA lot of the things that they were talking about is access to other drugs and drug busts where there's other drugs involved. And the part that they miss from the whole entire equation is that a lot of these things that they're afraid of go away when we have regulation. Like you're not going to have somebody selling weed and other drugs because they're just going to go to the dispensary.

39:43SpeakerAnd the criminal element is largely removed when legalization happens.

39:51BubblemanYeah, well, we definitely saw that in Canada. There's no denying it because prohibition funds these different groups. And if you take it away from them, it's like, well, you've just taken away their ability. You know, you've got people in Canada originally that were like, oh, we're now all these mom and pops. They don't. You know, they don't have that ability to make their money with the weed anymore.

40:12BubblemanAnd that is absolutely true. Like mom and pops took a hit when cannabis legalization happened in Canada. There's no fucking doubt. In fact, mom and pops took a hit before legalization in Canada because dispensaries, compassion clubs in particular, had a major effect on mom and pop dealers who just had their 20 or 30 people that they sold weed to. And now all of a sudden those people were like, It, you know, everyone and their dog got a medical license in Canada because that's how you protected yourself.

40:40BubblemanAnd then it was like, well, should I go to this? Should I go to my plug who has one and a half different types or should I go down to the Compassion Club that has 43 different types of flour on the menu right now and 17 different hashes? Suddenly the ability to get You know, different flavors was like of a higher value than going to the plug.

41:02BubblemanAnd so that was the initial group that sort of was like, you know, compassion clubs weren't trying to put out mom and pop dealers. They were just trying to make cannabis more accessible for sick and dying people, at least here in Canada. That's how it happened. It was the most vulnerable people. Well. That shifted within years. And then it was like the healthy people were like, well, I want to get, you know, be able to go to the Compassion Club and get, get flour too.

41:24BubblemanThey have all the good flour. And it was very hard to compete. Any legal company would have a very hard time to compete to have like 40 different skews of flour on the menu. It just, it's, it's suddenly, you know, not really possible. So we did see that a little bit here in Canada in the sense that Like here in Canada, when I was selling herb in the black market, like 30 plus years ago, I had to interact with organized criminals.

41:54BubblemanNow I'd come to BC and I'd try my best not to, but it was very difficult. There were more organized motorcycle gangs. There was Vietnamese gangs. There was Indo gangs. Here on the West Coast, we have... All sorts of different gangs. And the more you're trying to sell herb in the black market, the more you're kind of in their corridor. So if you're looking for herb or you're selling herb, you're going to have interactions with these people, whether it's like they want to buy, you know, some hundreds of pounds off you or they want to sell Thank you for joining us.

42:51BubblemanWhen I heard the argument on the legal side of like, oh, well, you know, there's dangerous cannabis in the illegal market. And I was like, that's fucking bullshit, dude. We smoked this weed for 30 plus years. It's not dangerous. Well, now everyone tests and we still have black market events. And we had a black market event recently here called Heady Happenings, which is a similar Legends of Hash or Melting of the Heads type event, really cool little event where everyone gathers.

43:17BubblemanWell, he had a, I don't know, 20 or 30 people joined to have, it's a cup where you're judging the product. Six of the products were sprayed with poisons and failed the testing. And so, you know, that bullshit remark of like, oh, some of the stuff on the black market isn't healthy. Yeah, guess what? If people don't have to not spray, if they are not monitored, they will fucking spray poison because there's a huge percentage of people who don't give a flying fuck Whether you're inhaling burnt poison or not, avid fucking glyphosate, Eagle fucking 20, whatever it is.

43:58BubblemanSo this is fucking crazy to think. Like, I remember being on one side, literally being like, that is the worst argument you could have against black market weed. We smoked it for 30 years. And after that, I was like, I wonder how much poison I smoked over those years that people were just like, and you know, and I've told this story before. I don't necessarily, I've seen a situation where it's not a bad, evil person doing it.

44:23BubblemanSituation I saw in Jamaica where my Jamaican friends would grow these crops and I'd go visit. Sometimes I knew them, sometimes I didn't. And I, every time I was in Jamaica, I would walk around the field. I would go. You know, 20 to 30 feet into the jungle and I would walk in a big circle around the field because these motherfuckers would hide their poison bottles. They wouldn't throw them away.

44:45BubblemanThey'd throw them like 20 feet away in a pile and I'd find them every time and then I'd be like, dude, like, you know, and there were the odd time where You know, I'd get that, we'd make some hash, we'd have a hit and I'd be like, something's fucked up on this hash. Like it was fucked up. And then I'd go do the walk and I'd find the fungicide powder and the whatever.

45:04BubblemanAnd by the way, it's Jamaica. So this shit's illegal in every other country. They send it to Jamaica. Like they send, you know, the tampons that women are dying from anaphylactic shock. Well, let's send those to Jamaica. There is evil in the world. And what evil does is they send these things to Jamaica. Well, now the Jamaican people are using these products on their plants and they're selling it to tourists in there.

45:26BubblemanAnd I can tell you that that shit is fucking poison. So there is an argument to be made for the legal market in the sense of forced regulation. I'm not into regulating shit to the point where we have today. But I've said this before on Hash Church. I love the idea. If cannabis can teach us to regulate poisons out of cannabis, perhaps the water and the air and the food industries could follow suit and maybe keep poisons out of our water and our air and our food.

46:00BubblemanBecause, yeah, it's a pain in the ass. And yeah, it's a nightmare to make 20 kgs of hash and find out it fails pesticides and you have to throw it all away into the ground. But those are the regulations that force the tough decisions that almost no one in their right mind would make if they just could be like, you know what, let's just... Let's just put this 20 kg like it's it's 20 kgs.

46:22BubblemanIt'll bankrupt the company like the company is going to go bankrupt if we don't sell this 20 kgs. We can't just, you know, blast it through radiation or irradiation because it's not microbials. It's not yeast and mold counts. It's fucking pesticides. You know, aside from using hexane and a bunch of other chemicals, you could give it to Mark Sheldon, Dr. Mark, and he could probably do something with it.

46:43BubblemanBut. Holy shit, what a nightmare. So you have companies in this situation that they're gonna lose their product. Well, they're forced, they are forced to test. And unfortunately in our gray market here in Canada, We are not. And in fact, even worse, it's super easy to take someone's test that they've already gotten from High North or any other lab. And you can just run it through ChatGPT and be like, hey, change the name to this, change the numbers to that.

47:13BubblemanAnd it just pops out a fucking COA. And now people are giving those to people. It's like...

47:19SpeakerWe had an agent from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation talking about fraudulent COAs and how they are designed to give legitimacy to products. Of course! So a lot of the disconnect as well because They're talking about COAs and like inflating THC percentages and things like that. They're like a lot of the products we see COAs for, the THC percentage is way higher. And they're talking about stuff that's coming in as hemp and is actually testing at 20 plus percent THC.

47:49BubblemanSo they're like, the COAs are inflated there.

47:51SpeakerBut it's really interesting, like the... The regulation side of it, like, yes, I agree that sometimes we will go too far on the regulation and it makes like we have like metric and things like that. We're weighing every single plant. This is insane. Which, by the way, the DEA, not the DEA, the Humboldt County Sheriff said that metric does not work.

48:14SpeakerI don't know what you guys deal with over in Canada in that regard, but we have tax stamps. We have tax stamps.

48:22BubblemanYeah, so we don't have to weigh every plant. Every plant doesn't have a stamp or a metric tag. It's all about how many plants you can just grow however many you want, but it's about... We're monitoring the final product that comes out and everything has to go into, first you have to have a GTIN, which is a special number for a SKU. And then that GTIN is applied to a province.

48:47BubblemanWe have provinces instead of states and you apply for a province and the province will either accept your GTIN SKU or say no to it. So say you're putting in a live resin pen, a butane pen, a vape pen, And there's already 160 of them on the market. They're probably going to say no, unless you can find some novelty, unless your story connects to the province. So there's a couple of other ways that you really, yeah, they can just say no.

49:14BubblemanSo now you're not selling in that province, that skew. But on the flip side, it's a double edged sword because you get cut hard when they tell you you can't sell. But when you when they tell you you can sell, you just picked up an entire state. Now they're not going to force your product into stores, but the stores now can go into that state or province bought product and they can look at the whole menu and they order from the province what they want.

49:39BubblemanAnd now if nobody orders your product from the province, You know, after three months, the province will hit you up with an RTV, which is called return to vendor. And that is the bank. That's the bankrupter, dude. You've already spent the money. You sold them like 20 kgs of joints. It's, you know, it's $100,000 or whatever. It's all gone. And now three months later, they're like, we can't sell the product.

50:03BubblemanCan't sell it.

50:04SpeakerAnd that is interesting. It's terrifying. That is terrific. That's a very fascinating process because Canada, I really need to study the Canadian market more because Canada is like the closest equivalent to the U.S. and it's fully legal in Canada. It has been for quite some time. I drove through in, what was it, 2018 or 17 that you guys had your first sale? 17 we went legal, October.

50:28SpeakerI drove through in November of 17. I drove back from Alaska. I drove through. I went to a dispensary in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. Sick. That was a very strange experience. It was like very so sterile. The packages are all just like white. There's no labels, no marketing.

50:49BubblemanIt felt like I was going to a pharmacy. Can't see through the windows at that time. So that was medical. Medical existed for a while already, but in 2017, that was recreational that went legal. And that was a big fucking deal in Canada because it was finally like, okay, all the people that are hiding, here's the thing. I, I don't want to blame people for protecting themselves, but unfortunately, it didn't work out in favor of patients.

51:17BubblemanPeople trying to protect themselves with the medical cannabis license, unfortunately at the time, undermined Actual medical cases of cannabis. You had so many people in Canada filling up the application framework where we were just all filling out, trying to get these licenses as fast as possible. Well, it delayed things by 16 or 17 or 18 months because, of course, Health Canada's like the DEA, they're not moving super fast.

51:49BubblemanAnd it really slowed things down. And then the other thing was it allowed an enormous... What I saw the most was... It started as utopian. Oh, you got a license? I can grow for you. Because in Canada, we had something called the DD, the designated or DG, designated grower. So if ATN got a license here, but he was maybe in a wheelchair or he didn't have the ability to grow, he could come to me and say, do you think... Oh, the caregiver program.

52:15BubblemanIt was a caregiver program called designated growers. And what every designated grower did was they grew this license because originally the patients were the first ones to get the licenses. You really had to be an extreme patients to get that license. So the people that hadn't gotten their own license yet, they were like, I'll be your DG. And so they would grow, you know, 25 lights. They'd be like, try to get like a hundred plant license or whatever, a 20 gram license or, you know, a hundred gram license was like 500 plants.

52:41BubblemanYou know, if you got like five grams, you could grow 40 plants. And so they were stacking these licenses up. And then what would happen was the grower who was black market grower for the last 10 or 15 years. He'd grow his black market crop. And then he'd break off some smalls and give like a pound and a half to the patients and then sell the 19 pounds that he grew.

53:01BubblemanThat's no good. And it, dude, it was an endless array of patients being let down. And every grower guy was just had a story. Oh, well, blah, blah, blah. It's like, dude, you sold all that weed. We, I know you did. I, you showed it to me for God's sakes. And it was just this weird situation where it was like, well, I'm the one paying for it all.

53:21BubblemanLike, I don't know. they don't pay for anything i have to pay for this and okay well then you should probably make something for sure but like how about the tops go to your patient yeah don't give them the low yeah and it's not every single person that was doing this but it was such a high number dude it was a very it was sad to see the natural the human nature was to these people over and i just thought like no wonder these people are getting over by the government they're getting over by these so-called activists Who are fucking growing their weed and not even fucking giving them like top buds.

53:57BubblemanThey're giving them swag. And it was a lot of a lot of growers never gave them anything. Like there were patients that I didn't I didn't get anything again this round because he said he got bugs or he said this. And, you know, I know there's trials and tribulations and I don't doubt that they got bugs and they got this and they got that. But. How do you fuck up a grocery bag?

54:16SpeakerNow you have to have your grower prove, oh yeah, we had rust.

54:21BubblemanIt was consistent that the person who was getting the short end of the stick in Canada for the longest time in the early years were patients. They just were. It's interesting. And then suddenly it became legal and then dispensaries. And then it was a business and it was like, well, now it's competition. And now it's like, if you're just going to go rip off patients, guess what?

54:39BubblemanThey're all going to go over to Whistler Medical because Whistler Medical has 18 different fucking tinctures and 17 different cultivars and four different hashes. And it's all reasonable and there's no tax on it. And I think that's where these patients are going to end up going. And, you know, inevitably that's where they, where they did end up going because, you know, you can only get burned for, So many times, especially, listen, getting burned over a three month period where you're waiting and you're like, oh my God, I'm going to get like four pounds or whatever.

55:07BubblemanI'm going to be able to make some tinctures and I'm going to be able to make some hash and I'm going to have some flour. And I say this with a grain of salt. There were some wonderful, wonderful designated growers who grew beautiful flour, who presented said flour. Thank you so much for joining us.

55:36BubblemanYou know, when you're fucking over patients, that's super not cool in any situation that you're doing it. But I do understand people trying to protect themselves from the law with a medical license. Like it made sense at the time. I just didn't think you had to take it further and now grow all this flower. And instead of giving it to your patient, you know, just sell it on the on the grid market.

55:58BubblemanBut. Here we are.

56:00SpeakerIt's uh yeah it's and it's interesting because the patients seem to get left behind in the states as well in the the adult use markets the uh the medical markets really seem to all crash in the patient um The patient enrollment rates all go down because the products, the innovation is not there. So for example, in New Jersey, the medical companies are the medical companies that started and they are the big corporations and they're not innovating in the same manner that these small new businesses are in the adult use market.

56:31SpeakerSo the patients don't get access necessarily to the new innovative products.

56:37BubblemanWell, they do if they choose to pay the tax and not go to the adult use market. And I know a lot of patients that do it in different states. They're just like, it's in Canada. Whistler Medical got sold for $200 million. The owner grabbed his 50 mil and is skiing now for the rest of his life. But the patients, like my mother was a patient, those 17 tinctures went down to like two.

57:01BubblemanYou know, the minute because it's like, well, we're just focused on this over here. It's a hard. This sells better. It sells better. There's more novelty. People are putting more time and energy into it. And I've seen it happen for, you know, that's why honestly, like, you know, guys like Michael and Etienne who are on the call here today are angelic in the sense that. You know, there's tons of people who are willing to virtue signal for patients and make it look like they're so caring and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

57:33BubblemanBut Michael and Etienne are actually that. And I see them becoming more and more rare, more and more like less of what is kind of needed for this vulnerable group. And then they tie it into veterans, which is even like... A larger, more vulnerable group that is, I just, it's why I like to platform them. It's why I like to have them on here and sharing what they're doing.

58:01BubblemanAnd it's why immediately when he heard you were coming on, he was excited. He's like, I got to invite Michael. You know, they do a lot of work over at the UN and with veterans. And so I know they were both eager to come on and hear what you had to say. And they've been fighting this fight for fucking 35, you know, plus years. years my entire lifetime you've been fighting yeah 70 years between the two of them if not more uh which is fucking insane when you think of it so i know they're super excited to get into the conversation with you here as well and they probably have all sorts of questions um if you have anything for you guys yeah please go ahead

58:38SpeakerSo I'm just going to read something that one of these, because I know we have a variety of people with different expertise on the call. I'm just going to read something that one of the witnesses said. He said, modern Western medicine has moved away from 1800s medicine where cure-alls did more harm than good. And then he went on to talk about formaldehyde in milk, which we used to think was a good idea, and borax in meat, which we used to think was a good idea.

59:05SpeakerYeah, so this is a mixed bag, right? There's certainly a lot of bad things that happened, you know, a hundred years ago. There was a book that came out, it was called Nostrums and Quackery, and it listed, it really targeted Thank you so much for joining us.

59:39SpeakerThank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

1:00:09SpeakerThank you for joining us today.

1:00:29SpeakerAnd it lasted like three years after they took the cannabis out. So there's a lot of arguments to be made, you know, on the contrary side of what they're saying. Again, they're cherry picking arguments. And one last little thing I'll say, and Doc, you can help me out here if you want, but a vast number of our very most important things that we use in medicine came from that time period.

1:00:52SpeakerYou know, the use of radiation and therapy, the idea of, you know, I, my brain is not pulling them up, but there's a bunch of, you know, very, very, I mean, aspirin and things, you know, all go back to this time period. And we're very popular then and are, you know, now sort of embedded in a farm. We don't have a pharmacopeia anymore. Now we have a, You know, a physician's desk reference, which is just a proprietary book of, you know, black boxes.

1:01:26SpeakerWe don't get to know what's inside. Back then, we knew what was inside our drugs, and many of those are still being used today.

1:01:37SpeakerI'm trying to think if there's one right off the top of my head that I just can't quite get, but there's a couple of very prominent drugs today that are still being used that were, you know, were come up with in that time period.

1:01:48Etienne FontanWell, on top of that, Max, we had tried to get into the previous hearings and we actually had to go through a constitutional challenge because we did it as a group. So the second time around, we sent Michael in as an individual. And of course, we were one of the denied parties outright. So that's one reason why we were so interested, because Michael's been doing this for 45 years.

1:02:13Etienne FontanI've been doing this for 35 years. So I guess it's closer to 80 years we've been doing this as I'm thinking about it, which is way too long. I knew it was more. Regardless, you know, what you guys, what, you know, we were hoping to, worst case scenario, educate people or put out a series of white papers to educate people about the history because Michael is not only a historian, he has probably the largest collection of cannabis medicines from the turn of the century, from, you know, 1850 on.

1:02:46Etienne FontanHe has stuff from You know, Australia, he has the chew candy, all kinds of different things that, you know, used to be normalized. You know, in the United States, I have the U.S. Cavalry book. They used to have cannabis preparations for the horses for when the horses were ill or having problems. So, you know, it's been such an integral part. So once it was denied, we wanted to give people that historical perspective.

1:03:14Etienne FontanAnd so when this became a closed situation, we were happy. And in fact, Max, we were sharing your videos in between us as we were just trying to get an understanding because there was no real Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:03:46SpeakerThank you. Thank you. And the hearsay and conjecture part is important because there were so few people in the room. There was a doctor, Dr. Madras was one of the SAM witnesses, smart approaches for marijuana. And I go on LinkedIn and there was a post from her, like a screenshot of her on Twitter that says cannabis is not schedule three. Cannabis is not schedule three. Cannabis is not schedule three.

1:04:11SpeakerI'm like, what happened? Why is she crashing out? Well, there was an outlet that reported that she was asked if cannabis fits into schedule three and that she answered yes. Which I was not in the room. I was stuck in the elevator because there was some lawyer who we had to wait for.

1:04:27Etienne FontanMax, you have to understand you were going after Bertha Madras and we know who she is. Michael has dealt with her directly at the UN and had her dismissed.

1:04:36SpeakerShe definitely did not say that.

1:04:39Etienne FontanNo, no, no, she's not going to, but she uses her credentials because she's head of psych at Harvard. So, I mean, that carries a whole lot of gravitas. And as Michael has found at the UN, that name Harvard carries a significant amount of weight. However, I think, Michael, I think this is a good opportunity to tell people what happened with her because she's an interesting character who has abused her power for anti-cannabis.

1:05:05SpeakerYeah, so before I say, I just, the thing I was trying to pull up in my deep memory was a medical drug called Digitalis. And you can look up Digitalis. I believe it's still used under the same name. And it came from that same time period. So, you know, talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. That's what you're doing when you don't, you know, learn and understand our history with drugs.

1:05:25SpeakerBut anyway, yeah. Before we went to the United Nations and changed the treaty and removed cannabis from Schedule IV of the treaty, which paved the way for rescheduling, as you can see, the acting Attorney General cited the treaty specifically in at least a good portion of his order. Before that, we actually had to change the position of the World Health Organization. The treaty was based on the observations and the reports from the World Health Organization.

1:05:57SpeakerFirst of all, the World Health Organization thought it had reviewed cannabis in 1925. We had to prove that was wrong. Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:06:19SpeakerThat didn't exist. So anyway, that was the first big win. And then when I showed up at the so-called expert committee on drug dependence inside the World Health Organization, the little 13-member panel of real actual experts that resolve mountainous, and I do mean mountainous amounts of material to make a recommendation for the UN, which is a binding recommendation that UN could pass it or not pass it, but they can't change it or add to it.

1:06:45SpeakerAnd, you know, this little body, you know, has access to every university on earth. They'll hire everybody and anybody they feel like they need to, to spin this shit off. And they will do, they'll do our work that we did in 30 years in one year and do it better. And they did. And, but, Right in the gate, I walked in there and I sat down and to my left two seats over was Professor Madras.

1:07:08SpeakerAnd I'm like, this is not going to work. Anything we say, any evidence we put forward, she's going to twist in the back room. Her basic thesis is that cannabis is not a medicine because plants can't be medicine. She'll accept every cannabinoid and what it does individually and collectively. But if you put it in a thing that looks like a plant, she'll reject it on purpose. And she won't really say why.

1:07:30SpeakerBut anyway, that's a digress. She was on this committee and I was sure if it went to the back room after we spoke, she would just make us look like idiots. I'm really pretty sure she could. So I said to myself, we have to address her in the hearing. So on the record, within my little five minutes that they gave me for going all the way to Geneva, Switzerland to speak at this panel, I actually fit in a good portion of my time to talking about Professor Madras.

1:07:56SpeakerAnd I was very careful in how I chose my words. I told them that as military veterans, we've been working on rescheduling in the US. We've gone up head to head with the federal government and federal court. And lo and behold, Professor Madras was the only witness that the US government put against us in federal court. Given this relationship, I would ask the committee to look into that relationship between Bertha Madras and the U.S. federal government.

1:08:20SpeakerThis committee is supposed to be experts that act independently of government. They're not supposed to be just an instrument of government, even if they were put there by a government. And much to my surprise and amazement, she actually defended herself on the spot, which I really don't think looked very good. And she was like reading from the transcript of what she had given the judge in the federal case that was supposed to make her look objective.

1:08:41SpeakerIt didn't. And the next time we showed up at the expert committee, she was not on the expert committee anymore. I hope I didn't hurt her career path too much, but if I did. It doesn't seem like it. She's still on the expert committee. She's still getting invited. But not that one. That was a coup of a position to be on the World Health Organization expert committee.

1:09:03SpeakerYeah. So you may have a wealth of knowledge on something that I'm trying to understand further. And I think it would actually be really helpful for those, especially in the U.S. that are listening to understand why we can't just say cannabis is magically, not why necessarily, because obviously Canada did it. Other countries have done it. But like what the U.S. is claiming as to why we can't do it, which is the treaty.

1:09:28SpeakerCould you talk or do you know more about that? I mean, forget educating them, educate me a little bit. That's my specialty. I was the envoy of the cannabis movement back in 1998 to the UN. So I've been working inside the UN since then. What people really need to understand is that the UN and the international drug control treaties are a voluntary thing. There's no treaty police that come and enforce drug control treaty.

1:09:56SpeakerIf there was ever such an egregious act in drug control around the world that it rose to the level of really hurting a lot of people in a lot of other countries, I suppose they could go to the Security Council and make a complaint. But that would be a very separate thing. It wouldn't be per se a treaty obligation or a treaty. Thank you for joining us.

1:10:30SpeakerThat was just two years before our Marijuana Tax Act was found unconstitutional in Timothy Leary's landmark case. And then 1970, we created a Controlled Substances Act. There was another line of that. We created a Controlled Substances Act to implement the drug control treaties we ratified in 1967, was the rest of the title. Most people missed that second half of the title. We literally wrote the Controlled Substances Act to implement our treaty obligations.

1:10:55SpeakerSo as long as the Controlled Substances Act is enforced as written, we have ourselves sort of tied at the hip to the treaty. We could tomorrow change a law at the federal level that just says screw the treaties and screw the UN. That might have geopolitical implications and repercussions. I mean, we're seeing geopolitical repercussions from things that Donald Trump is doing, President Trump is doing right now.

1:11:17SpeakerYou know, it's not a foreign thought that that could be big, but it wouldn't be Thank you for joining us.

1:11:49SpeakerThank you for joining us.

1:12:12SpeakerWell, pay close attention to this as well. We can't just de-schedule cannabis in the United States. We need to address our treaty issues as well because we will still be in the treaty. We will still ratify the treaty and the treaty will still be something that we go to and participate on all the other drugs that are in the treaty. How does that work? What does that look like?

1:12:30SpeakerWhat do we say to the treaty bodies? That's been something we've been focused on for years. But yeah, the one thing that the acting attorney general did wrong was something that we actually advised the Attorney General to do six years ago. But we evolved, and evidently the Attorney General didn't catch up. You cannot just use the treaty to reschedule cannabis as a standalone. You can't do that.

1:12:55SpeakerYou can skip all the HHS and FDA review, but we already did the HHS and FDA review. And at the time, we were looking at President Biden and saying, why are you doing all this extra work? You don't need to do it. But think about what this hearing would look like if there was no FDA and HHS review. The DA would have nothing to talk about. It would just be Bertha Madras and them saying no.

1:13:16SpeakerSo all of a sudden now I see the wisdom of President Biden not listening to our advice. Thank you. Acting Attorney General Blanche would have done well to talk to us before he put out that order because you cannot skip what's not in the CSA. The CSA says you can skip what's in the CSA. In other words, the rules test, whether it has accepted medical value and all that, you can actually skip all that like he did.

1:13:42SpeakerBut what you can't skip is the process of the actual administrative process, the administrative law judge, the comment period, the cooling period, This period, that period, all of that is written into law well above the CSA. And you can only skip the steps in the CSA, not the steps outside the CSA. We've looked at this really hard, and I'll finish with this. We don't think that even though, as I'm saying, there is some good meat to what Kevin Sabet is saying right now in the US Court of Appeals.

1:14:14SpeakerHe may not win standing. That's still an issue. But if he does win standing, I don't think, and this is an internal debate, but I don't think Thank you for watching.

1:14:39SpeakerYou know, all this stuff that he did basically, you know, on the fly because he had treaty, you know, back up. That doesn't work that way. Sorry, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanchett, it doesn't work that way. But I think it's severable. In other words, I think they can stay all that stuff, which would be terrible because a lot of people participated in that expedited DA licensing and all that.

1:14:59SpeakerThat may all get stayed. But I don't see them putting an injunction against the process. I've been talking to ATN. It's like you get in trouble on the way out to the field in the Super Bowl. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:15:37BubblemanYeah, yeah, like Canada, we're a part of the treaty. But what we did was... That was going to be my question. We accepted that legalization was difficult to reconcile with the treaties, and we proceeded anyway. So the three main treaties that we're a part of are the 61 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, And that requires cannabis production, sale, and possession to be limited to medical and scientific purposes.

1:16:02BubblemanSo we're part of that. Then we got the 71 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, which covers other controlled drugs less relevant than cannabis for this conversation.

1:16:12SpeakerBut also, Althaus has THC. Yes. Because it hadn't been discovered yet in 61. They threw it in the 71.

1:16:20BubblemanThat's right. And then there's an 88 one, the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which requires countries to criminalize certain drug related activities subject to their constitutional principles. Well, what we did, we made arguments against the treaties. So our first argument we made was. The protection of public health and safety. It argued that basically prohibition had failed to keep cannabis away from our youth.

1:16:47BubblemanIt had enriched organized crime and made them fucking wealthy. And a regulated legal market would better achieve the treaty's overall objective of protecting health, because that is what the treaty's overall objective is. It's to protect health. Then we argued constitutional domestic authority, which is parliament has the authority to make criminal law in Canada. It appealed parts of the old cannabis prohibition and replaced them with what we call the Cannabis Act.

1:17:17BubblemanAnd that created a regulated system. Third, we made an acceptance of treaty tension. So unlike some countries that try to argue legalization fully complies with the treaties, we openly acknowledged there was a conflict. Canadian officials stated that they remained committed to the broader international drug control system Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:18:11SpeakerI have one more consequence to add, though, with all due respect. Please. Marcus has a perspective of inside Canada looking out. I've got the perspective of the U.N. looking back. And we met the Canadian delegation when these laws were passed and we asked them, you know, what you're going to do here, what you do there. And they made it very clear to us they were going to lead from behind.

1:18:31SpeakerThat's their words. And the consequence of this is that the Canadian delegation, and when I say delegation, I'm talking about the leadership of the Canadian government at the very highest level, which often involves both legislative and executive branches. That leadership has made a decision to just sort of create Canada an island and put Canada on an island. And what has that done is it's sort of isolated Canada from the international medical cannabis markets in a way.

1:19:07SpeakerIsolated? Well, yeah. We grow all their cannabinoids and all their flour. Let me explain. I'll explain. No, you're right. You're not wrong. Over 100,000 kilos just last year. It could be more, but I'll explain. The second part is that because of this lack of international coordination and collaboration and cooperation, the medicinal markets in Canada are cut off from actual legitimate rights that really shouldn't be afforded to any patient.

1:19:48SpeakerThey're essentially being treated as if it's not a medicine. It's still being treated as an experimental drug. Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:20:17SpeakerAnd others are trying to get into the market like Germany and others. But they've actually taken the role as the source material for the world's medical cannabis markets, pharmaceutical markets. But it's failed to be integrated in a way that allows for any markets to access Canada. There's no, you know, you can't have legit like Swazi Gold or Tie Stick or, you know, Jamaican, Gold or Panama Red or I could go on.

1:20:50SpeakerBut anyway, in Canada, you mean a lot of things. So Canada can export, but it can't import.

1:20:55BubblemanThat's right. Yeah. Now, do you know why? Why? Help me out. Because they didn't want to bring billions of dollars of people's investment and infrastructure for Colombia or India to come online and be like, yeah, we got your country. We just got 0.0003% of our acreage and we're going to supply your entire country with cannabis that costs three cents a gram. So they were trying to protect the industry.

1:21:20Bubbleman$200 a pound. Or 50%.

1:21:23SpeakerYou do see how that's an extension of colonial practice, what I would call neo-colonial.

1:21:28BubblemanOh, absolutely. Absolutely.

1:21:29SpeakerIt's to protect.

1:21:30BubblemanBut I will tell you, everyone that has industry here, including all the craft growers, they are so stoked that it exists because they would just... The market share would... Discipate even smaller than it is right now. And it's very small right now. I live for that, dude. I live for the day where Lebanese hash, but not just for Canada. I think why focus on Canada? Canada chose something that any other country, okay, could have chose.

1:21:57BubblemanWe showed that our legalization basically demonstrates that a sovereign country can choose to enact domestic legalized legislation, even when it creates friction with its international treaty obligations.

1:22:09SpeakerYou guys are the proof.

1:22:11BubblemanThat's what Canada showed, right? And the legal consequences. And here's the thing. They didn't, okay, they didn't want to do it. We made them do it. It was people like you, Michael, and Etienne, and myself, and John Conroy, and Hilary Black, and all these incredible activists. They fucking got checkmated in court, dude. The government got checkmated in court, and that's why it played out the way it played out.

1:22:37BubblemanYou know they weren't like, they still to this day, Health Canada still says, we don't really think cannabis has any medical value. And they're the group authenticating that it has medical value. The only reason we can sell it as medicine is because it has medical value. So we do live in this very, you're not wrong about the colonialization and the framework that it's all operating under. And I sit on the fence where I hate that, but I'm also like, holy shit, it's so tough here, dude, in regards to cannabis and making a margin in the legal market.

1:23:14BubblemanAaron Weissman, Ed Sheeran, and many, many more. Aaron Weissman, Ed Sheeran, and many, many more.

1:23:37SpeakerI want to give you sort of the inside perspective from the international side.

1:23:47SpeakerYou know, Canada is a partner of ours. I mean, first of all, to answer your question, we don't, we're not leaning on Canada. Canada is not even on any of my little working group list. Sorry, Canada. But anyway, the thing is, though, that when we're in the UN, Canada is very forthright when asked a question. Like I said, they lead from the back. Well, they meant that.

1:24:10SpeakerThey mean to lead from the back. And the way they do that is every bit of everything you're doing there is being studied and Thank you so much for joining us.

1:24:47SpeakerThey are just wrapping up a study where they had control groups of little villages with no coffee shops and little villages with their coffee shops that they ran. They ran the whole thing to get the numbers. Just to, you know, they already know the result. They've done decriminalization and coffee shops since the 70s, but they did it in a way that is digestible for the international bodies and unrefutable.

1:25:14SpeakerAnd little by little, we're changing and chipping away at the bodies inside the United Nations Drug Control Program. One is the UNODC, UN Office on Drugs and Crime. And once they lock onto something evidence-based, they'll buck all the countries. And for example, they've been bucking any countries that have forced labor, forced camps for drug rehabilitation. you know so-called drug treatment uh in a forced camp they're actually vocally against that if you're a country that's doing that you're going to get flack from this internal organ of the un let me say why that's so important this again is a voluntary thing it's run completely by the governments the commission that runs this uh ongoing year-to-year updates of the treaty is called the commission of narcotic drugs they have 53 countries that are delegated that authority from like the 190 countries that signed the treaty And from year to year, they run the show, and they literally run the show.

1:26:09SpeakerIf there's a different light bulb that's used, it's the member states that decided that, not the administration or the workers, the infrastructure. There's an International Narcotics Control Board that's part of that infrastructure, and there's this UN Office on Drugs and Crime that's part of that infrastructure. And little by little, our activists have turned both of them. They're both working for us now, essentially on these issues.

1:26:36BubblemanWell, like I said, I don't see us isolated as much. I'm looking out and I see how many different medical platforms we're supplying in Canada. Our medical patients in Canada are certainly not hurting for access. They probably have the most access We do accept insurance. It's not universal at this point in time, but there are provincial plans.

1:27:08BubblemanThere are workplace group benefit plans. There are healthcare spending accounts. We have an amazing Veterans Affairs. Our veterans get about $7,000 a year for just cannabis. I think it's like six bucks a gram and they're allowed three grams a day. So 18 bucks. Not quite 7,000, 60 something, which is, I don't know if you guys think that's terrible or if it's better than terrible. I'm talking about taking care of your wish.

1:27:34Etienne FontanWe could have that. Okay, good.

1:27:35BubblemanThat's what I was saying. Well, I never know. Fuck, you know, like maybe there's dudes that need more than three grams because they're doing extracts.

1:27:42SpeakerThere's some changes that they put in works. We were actually given an update from Aurora. I'm sure you know Aurora Cannabis. Yeah. They reached out to us. They work with a lot of veterans, you know, because I guess they're one of the suppliers of a good deal of the cannabis that goes to veterans in that program. Correct me if that's wrong. But anyway, they gave us an update and we took it on Veterans Action Council to look into potentially interviewing some vets from Canada.

1:28:08SpeakerSo if you're a veteran in Canada and you're You know, you've looked at this or you want to look at these proposed changes and see how they might adversely affect you and tell the Veterans Action Council. We'd really appreciate your input. This is something we're planning on talking about this week. You're getting an advanced peek of it on Sunday here. Should get you in touch with Selena Wong.

1:28:27BubblemanHere in Canada, Selena Wong, she's been on here before. Wonderful person. She, her partner's a veteran and he figured out that there are all these benefits in Canada for veterans, but veterans are just literally unable to do the Rubik's Cube that allows them to open the door. They're just not doing these side quests. They're, they're fucking, they're like, no, I'm not doing that. So this guy kind of does it for them.

1:28:52BubblemanAnd you know, what he does first is he gets them their $18 worth of weed or whatever it is, you know, three, three times six, yeah, worth of weed every day. And once that starts, then he's like, he looks at their thing. And he's like, Hey, you know, you also qualify for this, this, this and this. And now all of a sudden, some of these guys are getting 50 $60,000 a year.

1:29:12Bubblemanwhere they never were before and it's like whoa i can maybe think maybe i can heal maybe i can just like relax for a second here uh and so i know a lot of that's happening here in canada as well we also have tax credits by the way and workers compensation also covers medical cannabis uh for certain workplace injuries so we're working on it it's definitely not perfect but the prop the thing is is once they wedge you into this full legal system because you guys know as well as i do that You know, and I'm certain that this schedule three probably has a lot to do with this wedging.

1:29:45BubblemanCannabis is like in its own category right now. They've isolated it. It's like its own, you know, tumor. And now they're like, they want to assimilate it back into this giant thing. And there's so many of these, the things in the giant thing that activists from the cannabis world, Are just not okay with because it's the system that we've had to live outside of and fight for the last, you know, whether it was five or 10 or 30 or 45 fucking years.

1:30:12BubblemanIt is hard to allow that assimilation to happen. And all I can say is it's certainly not perfect here. Taxes are too high. And sometimes it seems like the Health Canada people, you know, from my perspective, and I could be completely wrong, it seems like they were all alcohol people that got jobs in cannabis. Like cannabis came into play and all the people who controlled alcohol in our province on a federal and provincial level.

1:30:38BubblemanThank you so much for watching.

1:31:08BubblemanI'm not a religious person at all, but I know that it takes a demon to try and keep medicine away from a three year old epileptic child who's having 100 seizures a day. And then at that point, it doesn't even have to be that because that's just the worst case scenario of the metaphor. But what about keeping cannabis from a healthy person that could avoid sickness? How is that not as big of a crime as protecting people who are vulnerable and sick and ill?

1:31:38BubblemanI lay it all out. And really Skunk Man Sam leaned me into this. He's like, man, I'm not only fighting for medical, I'm fighting for people's rights to get high because I believe that's as important. And that was a shocking thing to say 30 years ago. Like, you know, but now it gets a little clapped.

1:31:58SpeakerIt's interesting, the fear of the negative outcomes of people that are healthy consuming cannabis is a lot of, I mean, some of you guys know the Madras' pitch that it leads to psychosis and schizophrenia. But there were multiple witnesses that said, I don't have the exact numbers, but they implied that if There was no cannabis. It was like a third, I think, of schizophrenia cases would just cease to exist.

1:32:30SpeakerAnd I was like, that's an interesting take. But the veterans thing, because we're on the veterans thing, I want to ask you guys about this. Because they said in one of their opening statements, this was the states of the opposed states. In their opening statement, they said that one of the government witnesses was not aware of the Veterans Affairs Association or a Veterans Association study saying that cannabis is a contraindication for PTSD.

1:33:07SpeakerThe VA looks at cannabis through an abuse lens. So if they see cannabis use associated statistically with post-traumatic stress, they'll make a negative connotation from that. Just that's their default. In fact, I remember seeing one time in the VA documentation where they said that it was interesting to them that in those who are abusing cannabis, they saw certain reductions in actual

1:33:40SpeakerThank you for joining us.

1:34:03SpeakerWell, before I get to suicide, the psychosis, I try to be objective. I try to look at the evidence and let the evidence take me where it takes me. That's called evidence-based for everybody wants to look it up in Google. Actually, it is a term, evidence-based, not based on evidence. That's Kevin Savette, evidence-based. Look those two up and you'll see a vast difference between the two. But if you follow the evidence, I've yet to see a credible medical evidence to show any The individuals getting full-blown psychosis diagnosis without a family history and without any

1:34:53SpeakerYou know, any other cause, you know, any other potential cause, you know, that the best I've been able to discern from the literature is that there is a problem there. And there are two problems with cannabis, essentially. One is heart conditions and the other is family history of mental illness. And with both of them, you need to take great care. And really, I think it's a very, very important place to seek input from your doctor, which you cannot do under Schedule 1.

1:35:20SpeakerI saw it firsthand. Yeah.

1:35:47SpeakerThat would be a great thing to avoid, right? And I don't think you're going to find advocates that aren't trying to avoid that. When you say that cannabis causes psychosis, causes mental illness, you're not being supported by evidence. But even more, I think you're driving a wedge between us and actually helping those people. And as far as suicide, suicide is just another correlation. There's a high correlation between people that have lack of toilet paper and running naked in the woods, you know?

1:36:14Etienne FontanIt doesn't cause a psychosis as much as, and I think they're being just disingenuous in their use of their language, is that it allows people with multiple personalities to slip more lucidly in between their personalities. So they're saying it's a It's a causing of a psychosis when the psychosis is already there. It's just allowing it to onset has been the problem. I have actually had back when we had onsite consumption at BPG, we would have sometimes people who were on psych meds and especially those that had multiple personality disorders Thank you so much for joining us today.

1:37:26Etienne FontanIsn't well understood. And so they're putting all kinds of predications and saying it causes a psychosis when, in my opinion, the psychosis already exists is just as an easier key for their lock because of how they're biologically built.

1:37:44BubblemanSo this lens that the VA looks through, the abuse lens. First of all, who the fuck are these people? Did these people not go to war? Are they not veterans themselves?

1:37:55SpeakerIt's the psychiatric community. Ah, of course. Enough said. The psychiatric community has a lock on treatment of abuse, right? They're the ones that actually treat drug abuse, drug addiction. That's a proprietary niche. There's a lot of drugs that they sell that only can be prescribed by those doctors. A lot of patients that they see, they can only be seen by those doctors. And I don't want to say that they're just protecting their job, although I clearly can hear that implication in the words I just said.

1:38:26SpeakerBut... They do stand in the way of looking at this in what we would consider a more objective lens. They want to look at it through the National Institutes of Drug Abuse, Clearinghouse of Drug Information, accepted bullet points on cannabis.

1:38:41BubblemanQuestion for you, Michael. Do you think that has to do with the fact that it's Schedule 1? Do you think that it being at Schedule 3 will shift that lens? Absolutely.

1:38:49SpeakerAbsolutely. It won't shift it immediately, but it'll begin to because a lot of this is, you know, I'll give you a perfect example. The National Institutes of Drug Abuse, former director was a guy named Dr. Leshner. And he went on camera one time talking about medical marijuana. And I can even hear it in his voice. It was so impressed so hard on me. But he was talking about the fact that they wouldn't fund studies.

1:39:14SpeakerNow, that sounds like, oh, they won't fund our studies. Fuck that. We'll get funding elsewhere. No, if you don't get the night of funding, you don't get the night of weed. If you don't get the night of weed, you can't do the study. All right, tracking. So he's talking about the funding of these studies. And he says, how can I allocate scarce resources in the National Institutes of Drug Abuse?

1:39:33SpeakerFor a purpose that I know as a matter of law is not true. Marijuana is schedule one and therefore has no accepted medical value. How can I look for medical value and be responsible to my resources when it already says by law that it has no medical value? Talk about a lockbox, man. They had us in that lockbox for a very long time. I never thought about that perspective of like they all have to think that it has no medically accepted use because that's what the law says and they are just listening to what the government must have it right.

1:40:07Etienne FontanAnd the DEA even threatened the VA that if they went the medical marijuana route, they would be dealt with and threatened the doctors. And so that threat has never been rescinded, by the way.

1:40:24Etienne FontanSo that's why you have a lot of that driving of fear and them toting the party line is because they have been read the riot act. And that's where Michael has pointed out recently that, you know, the change that's needed takes about 10 years for each assessment. And recently, I mean, just to do that and accomplish that, just to give you an understanding, Max, I'm a Gulf War veteran.

1:40:47Etienne FontanI have what's called Gulf War syndrome, Gulf War illness. I have nuclear biological chemical exposure due to Being in combat and combat situations in the Gulf War. In the early 90s, I went to the VA and told them about my medical cannabis use. They would stop my appointment right there. They would call security, and I would be removed from security just for mentioning cannabis, just for mentioning it, okay, from four different facilities in the United States, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., So not small VAs by any any sense of the mind you but that was policy back then and I was then labeled a known drug user and told that I was not allowed back.

1:41:37Etienne FontanMichael and others changed the VA law because they heard about situations like mine and it took nearly a decade And they basically have what now is a law called Directive 1315, which allows me to talk to a doctor without losing my benefits or being kicked out. And since then, it took me 32 years, but I finally got my VA benefits a few years ago, thankfully, because we had to change literally the laws within the side of the VA And I knew that I couldn't get it for myself personally by just doing it personally.

1:42:14Etienne FontanWe would have to change the law outright. And I'm thankful to Mike and Al Byrne for them for doing that because that's the type of activism that's been needed and the time that it takes to do something like that that takes years and it takes teams just to make those, you know, connections pre-Internet or early Internet, much less Have those conversations and then change the policy. It takes a long time.

1:42:42SpeakerI've got a story for decades. Go ahead. I just got this story that I think you might appreciate. It touches two stones because it's about the psychosis stuff and mental illness. And it's also an introduction to Kevin Savette, which you've met through Smart, Sam, Marijuana, I always say smart approaches against marijuana. And I'm like, wait, that's not what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, he went to the United Nations.

1:43:15SpeakerWe did a side event honoring Wade Laughter. It was fantastic side event. We brought in experts in the field that worked with Wade and worked with children and have, you know, some real trenches, public health experience in this regard. And they were with us in Vienna, you know, for the week, not just for the side event that we did. And they witnessed Kevin Sabet's side event. And he brought a couple of parents in to talk about the tragic loss of their child, a college age fellow that committed suicide.

1:43:47SpeakerAnd they firmly blame marijuana for this death. They drew a very clear line in their minds between marijuana use and his death. And we took this shit hard, you know, that we were face to face with These parents, and we listen to their story really, really carefully. And Veterans Action Council, we take this shit seriously. So anyway, we talked about it internally, and we were not happy with those parents at all.

1:44:16SpeakerEssentially, what we saw, our experts, their opinion was that this was somebody who had onset of symptoms at an appropriate time. In their mind, to their experience with the onset of symptoms in a family history of mental illness. And instead of the mother and the father embracing their child and helping them seek appropriate treatment, the mother fixated on marijuana and marijuana use and making it about marijuana and driving a wedge between her and him about the marijuana, which he was clearly using in an abusive way.

1:44:51SpeakerAnd the thing is that by her fixating and focusing on marijuana, in our opinion, she drove a wedge not only between herself and her son, but between him and adequate treatment. You remember those psychiatrists, their bread and butter day job is fucking drug abuse. You bring a drug abuser in front of them, throw them down, start saying drug abuse, drug abuse, drug abuse. I think you obscure the actual helpful intent of the psychiatric community to help a loved one dealing with mental illness.

1:45:21SpeakerAnd in our opinion, they did just that. And it seemed to us very clear in the end that he had given up on any chance of reconciling this void in his life. And he capitulated his mother on the marijuana and he quit using, at least, you know, that's what he told her. And I remember her saying something about, you know, if we could just get him to stop using marijuana, we'd get our son back.

1:45:51SpeakerAnd I'm trying to reconcile that with my buddy telling me that once you get into the cycle and you start manifesting these symptoms, your life doesn't go back. You don't get your son back. You have to deal with the new son that you have with a mental illness. And my heart's broken for those people, but I'm disgusted. I'm disgusted with Kevin Sabat for abusing people in that way, to put them out there in that way, to make his political point at their expense.

1:46:18SpeakerAnd someday she's going to learn what she's done. And it's not going to sit well with her. Probably already is somewhere in her subconscious working away at her right now. What we see, what we see the followers of Kevin Savette at the UN, invariably they are talking about, well, I'll give you a hard example. We were outside the Supreme Court for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club case.

1:46:42Speakergoes back aways. And the folks there were shouting, you know, marijuana killed my son, marijuana killed my daughter, etc. Each and every one, we interviewed every single one. I was there with Dale Gerringer. And we interviewed every single one, not a single one died of anything related to marijuana. They died from heroin, they died from alcohol, they died from crack, they died from whatever. But in their mind, cannabis, not milk or alcohol or tobacco, cannabis, cannabis was the link that you could pull out of that chain.

1:47:12SpeakerAnd somehow the whole chain, tethering their child to a life that they don't like would disappear. It's delusional. It's self-serving. It's trying to avoid their own guilt in my mind. There were two of those stories. And actually, I think one of those stories may have been the same story that you talked about. There was one story, the founder of DUID Victim Voices,

1:47:41SpeakerHe said, thank you for that. He said that he was there to talk about drug driving and he said his son was killed by a driver impaired in marijuana. I looked up his bio and his bio says that the drivers were on methamphetamine and heroin and marijuana.

1:48:03BubblemanWell, the marijuana definitely was the problem. I think we can all be honest about this.

1:48:07SpeakerThat's the key detail. What's the other one was? The other one was going to make you sleep. The other one, were you talking about Johnny Stack?

1:48:22SpeakerATN? I'm not sure. No. There was, because I was sent, Johnny Stack was one of the children that was mentioned from, like his mom was called as a witness. And I wasn't there for that day. The narrative fit that story that, you know, he. It was, it was that story. It was, it was, it seemed like it was that story too. Yes. And I know she's presented to the UN with, with Sam.

1:48:55BubblemanAnd what was what was she saying?

1:48:58SpeakerI unfortunately, I was not there for that day. But the notes that I have, the notes that I was given say that he was on antipsychotics and stopped taking them. And then a few weeks later, jumped from a building. So gravity, another tragic marijuana death. And just like you, it's really, I don't want to take away, obviously these are tragic things that have happened. But it's really, are we blaming the correct thing and going on a crusade about something that may be overlooking the actual problems?

1:49:40BubblemanWhich is a disservice to the actual problem. It's more virtue signaling, trying to protect the vulnerable. Oh, they committed, we'll step in. Obviously, it was the marijuana. It's like, man, you know what? That is pretty fucked up to be doing that.

1:49:57Dr Mark ScialdoneWell, and it undermines the credibility of the process itself.

1:50:00BubblemanJust a little bit.

1:50:02Dr Mark ScialdoneRight? Holy shit.

1:50:03Etienne FontanAltogether. I mean, the disingenuousness of... Their inability to cope with reality to a certain resolve is why they blame cannabis. But it's also the shame on the Kevin Sabetz on them for exploiting these people's mental illness and putting them on a pedestal for other people because they know that that isn't the case. He knows that isn't the case, but they're going to use it to manipulate people and As Michael said, majority of what you heard are the same examples we've heard because there are so few that they're trying to hoist them up on their petard like it's something that is, you know, unassailable.

1:50:48Etienne FontanBut as we know, that's now you have to tell us your dog's name. We've been seeing your puppers pup in and out. So you have to at least his name.

1:50:55SpeakerHis name is Durbin. And I think you guys are going to know why.

1:51:02Etienne FontanThey're urban. Yes, yes. That was the first plant I ever grew.

1:51:05BubblemanSkunk Man Sam would approve. Oh, wow. He just appeared and then disappeared. It's super trippy when you got the background on. It's like, that's, that's interesting, because I saw him sideways. And this was my little visitor that just popped in yesterday, just kind of for a little hello. And I got a sort of similar, let me see if I can find. Hold on, we're sharing dogs.

1:51:28Etienne FontanWhat's interesting, Max, is that it checked me if I'm wrong, is nobody really brought up cannabis hyperemesis syndrome deaths.

1:51:35SpeakerThey did. They did bring it up. Let's see. They all brought it up in various forms. Mine's a bear, not a dog. Oh, nice. Yeah, we don't get those in Jersey.

1:51:47BubblemanMy kid's like, Dad, there's a bear in the backyard. I'm like, oh, yeah, look at that. Go ahead. Sorry.

1:51:54SpeakerI just want to look up to see my notes and see who actually was the one who said the most about CHS because they did talk about it.

1:52:06SpeakerAnd... Cats and dogs. They were, yeah, because they were talking about the scrommeting. Scrometing? Scrometing. Have you heard of scrommeting before? Scrometing is all the rage in Vienna. Everybody's like talking about scrommeting. It's screaming, screaming while vomiting. Is that like soaking?

1:52:25Etienne FontanNo, it's screaming while vomiting. Ah! So that's where they're calling it scrommeting.

1:52:31SpeakerKevin Savette puts up witnesses that say they're walking down the halls of the hospital and all you can hear are the wails of the people scrommeting. And dying, scrommeting and dying all the time by the hundreds. Oh yeah, it was people would die from having their esophagus rupture from... From failure to thrive and from I think anorexia is what is what my notes say because I just transcribed this yesterday.

1:53:02SpeakerSo we did a deep dive on that Veterans Action Council for those who are interested with Dr. Ethan Russo. And that's on, I don't remember, Roundtable 101 or something like that. But go on YouTube and pull up that if you want to learn more about the actual truth about cannabis and hyperemesis syndrome, which can be reduced. The incidence of cannabis Thank you for joining us.

1:53:45SpeakerThat we've actually instigated into our cannabis industry. And by over-reliance on THC, you cut yourself off from better weed out there, better weed than the high THC. If you actually grade it based on its characteristics, terpenes and flavonoids, Caleb and everybody else can tell you a lot more about that stuff than I can. But there's more to to weave than THC. If we can get people to not focus on THC so much and not, you know, for those subset of those who are actually abusing cannabis, using cannabis habitually in a way that actually causes some harm.

1:54:19SpeakerIf we can get them to use a little bit lower THC, my, you know, again, my reading of the data, my interpretation of Dr. Russo's work and all. Thank you for joining us.

1:54:46BubblemanThat's fine.

1:54:47Etienne FontanBut one of the things that we found, Max, or at least Dr. Russo and others have found is that the people that actually do suffer from CHS, it seems to be a genetic anomaly in the person. And it seems to also lead to a heart defect. So it's an early indication of a heart defect. However, Dr. Russo does have what's called a metabolomic test because Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome mimics sick little vomiting syndrome so closely that most people get this diagnosed.

1:55:19Etienne FontanAnd now, of course, due to lazy doctoring, most cannabis users either fall under cannabis use disorder or cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. Which we know doctors and nurses are trying to separate that distinction because we're dealing with a lazy diagnosis because of lack of other diagnoses availability, right? We saw cannabis use disorder become an actual combination of two that didn't appear until 2013. Whereas Max, a FOIA request that we did recently found that the, I mean, our own VA was trying to do a study about an alarmist, Research study about why all of a sudden the large onset of cannabis use disorder from 2005 to 2022.

1:56:06Etienne FontanAnd it's kind of like, well, that's kind of flawed considering that you changed the diagnosis language in 2013 and then adopted it again in DSM 10 by the VA in 2015. So you kind of shot yourself in the own foot. And this is something that Michael and I are going to be exposing through a series of articles. You saw already our third article come out this week through Tom Angel's Marijuana Moment on a dental form and how it can get you removed from your health care in the VA, unfortunately.

1:56:37Etienne FontanAnd it has happened to a couple of our veterans. So We're exposing this to the public because what tends to happen in the VA medical system spreads to the regular medical system pretty quickly and easily because we're a unique, isolated culture. But our culture isn't unique. It's, you know, we're still humans.

1:56:57SpeakerAnd this is another area where Kevin Savette does real damage because those lazy doctors are very quick to jump on a conclusion that he's planted in their head. So, you know, we've got a veteran, not a veteran, but a spouse of a veteran in Virginia that brought to our attention a veteran's experience where he went in, he had a really bad flu bug. They asked him if he smoked weed and he said, yeah.

1:57:20SpeakerAnd they immediately diagnosed him with having cannabis hyperemesis. He didn't have any problems with cannabis hyperemesis for those who want a boiled down version of it. If you have terrible, terrible, terrible, like the worst flu ever kind of sickness, vomiting kind of thing, and you only find really respite in a hot shower, That's the only thing that seems to work. A really hot shower knocks out the symptoms.

1:57:43SpeakerIf that's your scenario, then stop smoking weed for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Just try it. You know, because that's all cannabis hyperemesis is. You stop smoking weed, it goes away. But it's like an allergy.

1:57:55BubblemanI'll just design a portable shower, thank you.

1:57:58SpeakerIt's like that tick bite that you can't eat meat afterwards. It's like that. Once you have it forever, you have trouble with weed. Right. And that's the biggest problem. So they were talking about... Sorry, go ahead.

1:58:12Etienne FontanWell, that's the problem that Dr. Russo said is that most people who have these cannabis hyperemesis syndrome are high cannabis users and they want to go back to using cannabis. And the biggest problem is that they can no longer use cannabis and they have a hard time psychologically dealing with that separation. And that's the biggest challenge that he and others have found because they view it as a medicine.

1:58:36Etienne FontanAnd even though they now have a genetic predisposition, They're psychologically built to believe that it's medicine and they can't. That's that's that's a real struggle.

1:58:51SpeakerThat's that's exactly where I was going with that was because they're there. Some of the witnesses were talking about how people died because they were going through CHS symptoms and said, I can't stop. I don't want to stop or something to that nature. And then they ended up going that just like everything ran its course because they weren't able to hold on weight and things like that.

1:59:16Etienne FontanNow realize we only have six confirmed deaths from CHS or that are completely sewn to that. So I'm not surprised that they didn't harp on that, but I'm surprised they didn't harp on it more.

1:59:31SpeakerSo I've got a question, and I think this is an interesting group to talk about it with, and I'll pull up this post that I saw today. Welcome, Colin.

1:59:41BubblemanOkay, nevermind.

1:59:42SpeakerIt was, how's it going? It's just the amount of people, especially with the DEA hearings and things going on that are, Locked in on the opinion, and I have it in my comment section, there is no such thing as harms of cannabis. All cannabis use is okay. All of these things. I don't think that that's true with anything. You could misuse the barbecue sauce that's sitting on my counter right now.

2:00:09SpeakerI don't think that that makes our argument stronger at all. What's relevant is other things that are Schedule 3 and what kind of harm... Exposure or harm potential do they have? That's the only relevant question. And just schedule three is actually some pretty serious drug. Yes. And I think that's actually the most interesting part about the whole DEA hearing is because they had very minimal cross-examination questions there.

2:00:38SpeakerThey were very focused on proving is there the maximum use of harm that belongs in Schedule 1 and no medical accepted use. And that was really all of the questions focused on. And because Schedule 3, yeah, it's the evidence shows that it doesn't necessarily fall in Schedule 1.

2:00:56Dr Mark ScialdoneWhat schedule is tobacco on? None. Yeah, right. Not in the tree. And tobacco use is directly correlated to lung cancer and other cancers, right? So the whole thing is just a farce, just a farce. And it needs to become unthreaded because scientifically it's not based in anything. You guys have talked about this in a couple different ways. You've said, Marcus, you've said this, and ATN, you've said this, but Michael, you said it differently.

2:01:30Dr Mark ScialdoneYou guys said no accepted medical value, and it's interesting. Right? ATN runs a dispensary, right? Marcus is a businessman. Value, right? But Michael said it right, which is how it's written in law, which is no accepted medical use. Use. So let's talk about that for a second. What makes it accepted medical use? So again, there's two FDA approved drugs, Marinol and Epidiolex, whose active ingredients are While they're not, the supply chains aren't derived from the plant themselves.

2:02:09Dr Mark ScialdoneThese things both occur naturally in this plant, right? So how could the plant be called something of no accepted medical use When the FDA, when presented with the data, showed that statistically significant numbers of the population will, this will work for, especially in epidiolex with rare to, you know, To control epileptic seizures and everything. Marinol, it's a little dicey, you know, because yes, do we know that THC can basically do exactly what we're talking about here, the opposite way, which is control nausea, right?

2:02:54Dr Mark ScialdoneWhich is sometimes why THC is administered in terms of Marinol. What Mishulam showed was that below the psychoactive dose, below the psychoactive dose, it's completely efficacious in blocking chemotherapy-associated nausea, right? So does that mean that it's accepted medical use? It happened in a clinic. Thank you so much for joining us.

2:03:45Dr Mark ScialdoneReally a farce, a comedy of errors that just paraded in front of these things with alarmist things like, oh, babies smoking out of bongs and other shit. Well, that's definitely ridiculous. Fentanyl and there's other synthetic shit that's on the streets.

2:04:05SpeakerThey talked about fentanyl in weed.

2:04:07Dr Mark ScialdonePeople are dying from, yeah.

2:04:09BubblemanI want to bring one point up that you said, because I think you're mixing up your terms because accepted medical use Is a legal and regulatory concept. That's what that is. Medical value, okay, that's a primary, that's a scientific question. The substance has medical value if there is a credible scientific evidence that it can be used for treating or preventing disease. So we weren't coming from the value like monetary money.

2:04:37BubblemanI think both Etienne and I were coming more from the scientific question. Right. Does it have medical value? A substance can have value even if it has never been approved as a medicine.

2:04:49Dr Mark ScialdoneThere's value in use, right? If there's an approved use, of course, it's going to have value. Of course, there's going to be companies that are going to step up to the plate that want to participate in providing those products, right? Because there's value in it. But let's just go back to, again, the overall process of approval. And people have been talking about this in the chat. So we'll talk about this, too.

2:05:11Dr Mark ScialdoneSo the US patent that showed that there was neuroprotective properties of cannabinoids. Well, how ironic that that was basically paid for by US tax dollars done at the hospital in Bethesda, right? Which is all funded by US tax dollars and done with THC that they smuggled from From Mishulam's lab, right? In the 70s, where they did all kinds of fundamental work. That's where Marilyn Huistas did her work on the seminal work on the metabolism of THC.

2:05:49Dr Mark ScialdoneSo we know that THC is metabolized into leaven, hydroxy, and carboxy. That was all done at the NIH with that THC that was smuggled.

2:05:58BubblemanThat by eating a brownie.

2:06:01Dr Mark ScialdoneBut the point is, is that like the US Patent and Trade Organization, I think we may have discussed this on Hash Church, the people who give out patents, right, looked at the data and the data was compelling. The data basically said that Thank you so much for joining us.

2:06:46Dr Mark ScialdoneThe United States government, the Department of Health and Human Services claims over neuroprotective properties of cannabinoids and were issued a patent.

2:06:56BubblemanUS patent number 6630507.

2:06:59Dr Mark ScialdoneI did a show with Dr. David Allen on this very patent. Right, back in 2003. So here's the other thing that's crazy about that patent, Marcus, is that... So that came out in the early 2000s, right? So it's now expired because it's 20 years later. Patents have 20 years of life to basically keep it exclusive. So now it's what we call open art. But while that patent was still enforced, it was licensed to a small company in Doylestown, Pennsylvania called Canalife that was looking to develop a Active, neurologically active pharmaceuticals.

2:07:39Dr Mark ScialdoneSo at some point, the government was collecting licensing revenue on their patent on cannabinoids. Well, they were locking up other people, right? I mean, it's the same government, right? But it's like, holy shit. They were freaking licensed their own patent out, which basically showed and proved medical use. Neuroprotective properties can be exploited in pharmaceuticals In all kinds of different drugs and all kinds of so that that that wipes the slate clean.

2:08:15Dr Mark ScialdoneThere is accepted medical use. The U.S. Patent and Trade Organization just said so. Right. Or else they wouldn't have issued him a patent. Right. Well, here's one.

2:08:25SpeakerWhat about the Mississippi lab? Because with the existence of that and the tens of joints. You know what? You know what?

2:08:33Dr Mark ScialdoneSo I talked to Sue Sisley at length about this at CanMed just a couple of weeks ago. And Sue, if you guys don't know who Sue is. Sue's a badass, man. She just, and she's so kind and she's so friendly and she will give you hours of her time. She'll talk to anybody who wants to talk about cannabis and veterans. You could have an hour long conversation with Sue, right, Colin?

2:09:00Dr Mark ScialdoneShe was just awesome. And she had her dog with her, right? Or she had like a... I don't know, like a support animal, right? JD or DJ or whatever he was. So wherever she was, this big white dog was following her around. But so, so Sue was the one who successfully sued The NIDA monopoly out of existence. Yes, the NIDA monopoly out of existence. So her claim was that she wanted to do PTSD studies with veterans with cannabis that was locally produced.

2:09:40Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd that was the cannabis that veterans would actually use. She wanted to, you know, that's a big thing. Thank you for joining us.

2:10:05Dr Mark ScialdoneThat, you know, tin that What's-His-Face used to bring on Ash Church and everything, right? All those joints. All that weed, without exception, was moldy weed. It was all brown schwag weed that was basically gone moldy, right? How did you have that? The Irv Rosenfeld thing. So what she said now...

2:10:25Collin PalmerI also have his personal side piece, which this would be with him, and this would be at home. So his wife was super kind to give this to me. She also gave me authenticity certificate with it, which was super cool of her. So, you know, it's like, to be real, like not much has changed except the CR.

2:10:49Dr Mark ScialdoneThe important thing is that through Sue's work and through Sue's activism now, she could now do PTSD studies with locally grown cannabis. She's working in New Mexico, I believe. And so she's actually has a network of local farms who are producing cannabis for her study.

2:11:09BubblemanAnd so she could- Look us up, dude. My brand's in New Mexico. I got partners that grow in New Mexico.

2:11:15Etienne FontanI'm going to flex on Colin a little bit. Sorry. 1976. This was the first 10 issued. So this is from...

2:11:24Collin PalmerIt sounds like hold my beer.

2:11:27Etienne FontanSorry. 10-7-76. So what Alice said is that initially the plastic thing that Colin was holding up is what they initially gave Bob Randall his weed in. It wasn't until the last hundred joints that they gave him this tin. So it was in those bottles initially that Colin's holding up that he had.

2:11:52BubblemanBut yeah, when she was she still sells stuff online, but just joints full of stock, full of like just the whole plant, the whole plant.

2:12:02Etienne FontanYeah, ground right into power.

2:12:04BubblemanIt's wet.

2:12:06Etienne FontanRolled in the thickest paper. No, no, they dry it. They dried it outside in the sun on black plastic.

2:12:14BubblemanYeah.

2:12:14Etienne FontanThen they grind it up with the seeds and stems and put it into a 55 gallon drum till the last is used up. Then they take it and re-roll it. So all your joints smell like DMT? Well, I tested it and it actually fails moles and mildews.

2:12:30BubblemanOf course it does.

2:12:31Etienne FontanIt's hard.

2:12:32Dr Mark ScialdoneWell, the update, according to Sue, is that it's game over down there. That's right.

2:12:37Etienne FontanWell, they lost their they lost their they lost their license after, I guess, next year is their last and they're not allowing them to move forward. So that's right.

2:12:46Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd now El Soli is El Soli is retired. El Soli is not there.

2:12:50BubblemanAnd I like what you called the farm, Dr. Mark, the scientist. He's like that swag farm.

2:12:55SpeakerSwag farm. Hey, I got something though for you guys. For those that are going down the rabbit hole of the patent, I'll give you a ticket to go a little further down the rabbit hole. The United States federal government under the National Institutes of Mental Health did studies on pure cannabis THC. There's similar packaging to what they're showing you from about 10 years before that. And in that 10-year period, that actually was Schedule 1 just research material.

2:13:25SpeakerAnd the product of that research, as I understand it, this is like my narrative of the story. They first came up on Bob Randall and his attempts to negotiate with the federal government on medical cannabis. In court. And the first thing on their mind was, hey, how can we use this research that we already own to get rid of this issue? And they actually handed off their research to the private sector to create, as I understand it, a drug that wouldn't get you high.

2:13:58SpeakerWhat did they come up with? Pure THC in a pill called Marinol. And I shit you not, that Marinol pill started out schedule one and then was quickly changed to schedule two as it was FDA approved. And then later, based on the merits, was changed to schedule three. So here you've had that disparity ever since, you know, Marinol was rescheduled to schedule three between the plant material with the so-called active ingredient being THC, being...

2:14:26SpeakerSchedule one. Why? Because it has the quote unquote active ingredient THC in it while the quote unquote active ingredient is in a pill called Marinol. And, you know, the cognitive dissonance is so great, but it was eased a little bit by, you know, lengthy conversations with Kevin Savette and others about this. Where it's all about the dosage. It's all about the dosage. So you pay a lot of money for Marinol and you're not likely to take this high doses when you smoke a marijuana cigarette.

2:14:49SpeakerAnd I'll leave you one more little story. I was sitting with Dr. El Soli in a restaurant and he's going on and on about his suppository. And, you know, he doesn't understand why the marijuana movement doesn't like his suppository. And he's talking about, so he's got to be marijuana addicts. He's got to be marijuana addicts because he's talking about the graph. And, you know, the graph of the intake into your bloodstream from a joint goes way up and then it tapers off really fast.

2:15:13SpeakerAnd mine, mine doesn't go that high, but it doesn't taper off. It's better. It'll keep you, you know, in the medical positive effect three hours a day. Why don't they like my suppository? And I didn't have the heart to tell him, you know, doc, We don't like suppositories. I mean, nobody's going to buy your suppositories.

2:15:29BubblemanIt'd be a weird way to session with your friends.

2:15:33Etienne FontanRight? Right. Leave it to the government to finally figure out what to do with cannabis and it's to shove it up your ass.

2:15:40Collin PalmerI'd just turn over to him and be like, listen, man, how do you drink your wine, dog? Probably not that way, huh? Through enema, of course. I hope not. Here's one. Just spin it, you know what I mean? Spin it back to him. Ask him the question.

2:15:54SpeakerGo ahead, Bax. Based on what Mark was saying and what Mike was saying, With them saying, oh, cannabis is not, it doesn't fit with this schedule three because it's of like the plant situation. We had the DEA's own scientist say many times, multiple times, I think it was four or five times on the stand, that cannabis is not a drug. And she's saying this, Like you say that out loud to somebody on Instagram, they're like, oh my God, the DEA said weed is not a drug.

2:16:29SpeakerBut that's not what she's saying. She's saying that the cannabis plant is not THC, which is the drug. Hmm. Well, you know, the drugs approved, not the plant.

2:16:42Collin PalmerCorrect.

2:16:42SpeakerThe drugs approved, not the plant.

2:16:45Collin PalmerIt's really interesting, you know, Just kind of hearing your posts, the notes, you know, I was kind of closely watching you post everything because it's just amazing that you spent the time and energy to go down there. So I just want to give you flowers there, man. Commend every bit of that. You know, it's amazing that you're able to be there. But it was also kind of fascinating how emotionally weighted everything was.

2:17:10Collin PalmerThank you so much for joining us.

2:17:31Collin Palmerinsane to me um super powerful stuff but i also didn't hear the dea push back on any of this you know which was alarming to me and also opened up a lot of questions for me as to what they understand and what they don't understand about how and what cannabis is etc and how it works with the human body because i Because to your point, when you say a statement like that, not only to the internet, but to regulators, they also don't understand what that means, right?

2:18:02Collin PalmerWhat she's talking about is the plant itself makes many chemicals, and it's not just a singular monomolecular substance that comes from a plant. And I think that's to be highlighted, but perhaps also broken down and explained to regulators. Because I think there are major broad strokes from... These so-called experts, and I'm not taking away your PhD and your years of studying and whatnot, but I think perhaps you may have missed, and I'm speaking to all the regulators that I listened to the notes and looked at the transcripts that I could find, you didn't once explain to the regulators that are making the decision The intricacies of what you were talking about, and you made a lot of broad stroke comments that had no definition to them.

2:18:54Collin PalmerAnd I think that was a missed opportunity on the world stage. And I think it also is harmful. So I'll just leave it there.

2:19:04SpeakerI would agree. And it was interesting because it didn't seem like the witnesses. So on my first day when I went in there, I was super stoked because it was Sam's two witnesses. So I was like, okay, let's go. This is going to be the gold stuff. And it said that it seemed like they were all saying much more of those kinds of things, more of the inflammatory things, the emotional pulls, and not necessarily where the science does or does not lie.

2:19:33SpeakerBecause it felt like they were reading this stuff into the record for an appeal. It felt like they were trying. They weren't making a case in the moment that cannabis does not belong in Schedule 3. They were making a case later.

2:19:47Collin PalmerYeah, and it felt like a litmus test. I said this once before and I'll say it again. I feel like this is a litmus test. You're not actually giving us the opportunity to properly explain the vernacular that is cannabinoids and cannabinoid therapy. I find this insulting on a global scale that they allowed this to happen. And those that were involved in this, I think that you should take a step back and really find Thank you.

2:20:16Collin PalmerThank you. Thank you.

2:20:44Collin PalmerThank you for joining us.

2:20:55Collin PalmerWith all the experience that we had in the room, it was as if you didn't have any experience and you relied on Heartstrings of America and played a classical guitar in front of everybody for show. And it just was not really what we needed to hear. And as I heard your notes, Max, it was a lot of infighting over emotionally unregulated individuals that had no business being on the stand.

2:21:24Collin PalmerAnd I just don't feel like we did this subject matter justice. And therefore, I don't believe that it will get passed. That's just my call from listening to it. It's a shame that you those that you had that had the chance in the room to be in the room. I wish I had a chance to be there, admittedly. Perhaps in the future, maybe we can. But It just, you didn't stand on the science and you missed an opportunity to stand on that for the first time in history of the world.

2:21:58Collin PalmerThis isn't the first time that we've had a shot at this either. I think that should be called out. But y'all let us down in a major way for most likely personal reasons that have to do with special interests and that's just sad. So do better and we'll be watching.

2:22:17Etienne FontanWell, good for me. It was called out MMJ, you know, and others for saying that there, you know, you don't even have a product on the market so that you're even coming out and trying to even go about this route or trying to establish that you had a market to begin with is false. So, I mean, that, I mean, that's the DOJ's filing specifically in rebuttal to their situations for people who are watching, which is quite significant.

2:22:46Etienne FontanBut I have to agree, Colin, they missed an opportunity as well as, again, this is where the difference is, is that the DEA law judge is defending the Schedule 3 and listed it. You know, intently. But, you know, what was there to present against? And I find it odd that given and I have to reflect again what Colin is saying here. It's feel it odd that they're finally given their pedestal and they all went up there to a punching bag and took big whiffs and missed outright when they had the opportunity to land with credible science.

2:23:22Etienne FontanBut I think that it only proves that they don't have any credible science to back them up.

2:23:28Collin PalmerWell, it's like, why are you taking funding? Sorry, I just, I just have to say this. Why are you taking funding for your research if you're not going to present the research in the right way? And I'll just, sorry, Max, go ahead. For the funding.

2:23:40SpeakerCorrect. And it's funny because they all say that they're not, they're not, they don't get any funding from this, that, or the other, but then they still do get their studies funded and things like that. So while you may not get direct compensation for this, you're still getting something. But the... Well, they get a job. Yeah, it feeds the ego. That's really what I'm getting at. While you're thinking of that, let me interject something.

2:24:06SpeakerYou know, the process last time when it was under the Biden administration, the DEA was asked to bring in participants based on the law as interested parties in the law. It's a definition in law of those who would be adversely affected by the Schedule 3 placement and support not moving it out of Schedule 1. Those by law are who would be a Interested party as defined by the CSA.

2:24:31SpeakerThe DEA chose not to follow the law last time in several respects. This was one of them. And they just went out and they sort of found, you know, the usual suspects. Here's a handful of people and organizations for and against. And they put up the hearing. What did that result in? Only the people against actually got standing inside that hearing if you paid attention to the details.

2:24:51SpeakerOnly one of them was given partial standing. That was the only one that could actually cross-examine. So now with this process as it was unfolding, our Veterans Action Council was already gearing up Thinking that the one thing, even if they do everything right, they're probably not going to, they're just so hesitant, they're not going to put up witnesses. So given that possible eventuality, Veterans Action Council was already planning a series of articles that would call attention to this great report that the FDA and the HHS did on medical cannabis, talking to tens of thousands of doctors, looking at the patient files of millions of patients.

2:25:26SpeakerAnd that documentation on day one was front and center with this DEA. What happened before the DEA administrator was against us. The DEA administration was on our side, but the DEA administrator herself was actually hanging out with Kevin Savette. And that was why the US Court of Appeals case actually derailed the previous set of hearings. This time, Kevin Sabet has been at arm's length. He doesn't have any relationship with the new administrator.

2:25:50SpeakerThe administrator is actually following the law. And to our amazement, actually put forth proper witnesses representing their position. They are. And this is what's wild. I felt exactly like you did, except I looked at it for quite a while. And I realized Kevin Sabet is hating it more because it used to be like this. It used to be the government was spouting a bunch of bullshit. Thank you.

2:26:10SpeakerThank you.

2:26:27SpeakerNow we've got the government is actually sucked us in. We don't even we're not even there. There's no Kevin Smith doesn't have any other side to argue with anymore. We've disappeared. We're not even there. We're actually part and parcel part of the DEA's presentation. They could actually bring us in as expert witnesses. To my knowledge, they didn't ask any of us, but they did get a doctor.

2:26:46SpeakerThank you for joining us.

2:27:09SpeakerResources and health policy. Yeah, good luck. And we thought about this quite a bit back and forth. We've never done that. Our movement has never done any of that. We have specific gripes about specific things that get wrong. Evidence, we'll try to correct them, but we've never tried to tell them that they don't know their job, that they don't know the law, and that they don't know anything about public health.

2:27:28SpeakerKevin, if you're listening, good luck, buddy. Maybe you'll do better than we did in that circumstance we were in, but I don't think your big funders are going to stick with you very long.

2:27:38Etienne FontanGo ahead, ATN. You had your hand up. Max, let's talk for a second about the change that was discussed because there was a scientific change on why this all came about. The DEA used to have a five-point program on what their scientific availability and use is, and that changed during COVID. And that was... Thank you so much for joining us. We're going to have a very specific part of this discussion that I think we should get into because we talk about it all the time.

2:28:10Etienne FontanMichael Krawitz, go ahead.

2:28:12SpeakerYeah. Yeah. So coincidentally, among all the other things that happened at the same time, like little things like hemp being legalized and a new definition of cannabis coming out as a result, we also had this. The Supreme Court had a ruling called the

2:28:31SpeakerAnd without Chevron, the DEA quickly capitulated and changed the five point test that they could have defended forever under Chevron. Without Chevron, they lost that ability. And I had a conversation with Google the other day where it seemed to have quite a bit of documentation to back up the notion that they knew it, that they actually when they changed the rule from the five point test to the two point test, they knew their five point test was doomed.

2:28:56SpeakerAnd the timing does work out. All the dates worked out. That just happened. The Supreme Court ruling in left field. If you want to look it up, Marcus, the end of Chevron had nothing to do with cannabis, as I know it at all. But here it helped us out in a way like we're halfway down the field. We're never going to make it to the end zone.

2:29:12SpeakerAnd all of a sudden it's like huddle, new rules, move 20 yards. You know, it's like, whoa, wait a minute. So that is a field goal line. Yeah, that is the exact argument that Sam's lawyers made with the DEA witness herself. That's pretty much why they brought her there. So the notes that I have is... Did you, why, why did you, where is it? They're going to try to say that now that Chevron's gone, they can just fight everything, you know, that every, you know, the court would just defer to the agency and the agency would rule.

2:29:50SpeakerNow the court is, you know, if you have enough money, possibly going to hear every single argument that would automatically have been deferred to under these agency rules. Yeah, she said, um... She said that the question, you decided to apply the five factor versus the two factor because you thought it was better, was the question she was asked. And she said, I thought it was more comprehensive.

2:30:15SpeakerShe was asked if the two question test made sense. She said scientifically, no. And that it lacked, it was lacking in some safety and some other things. And...

2:30:31SpeakerYeah, the five-point test, by the way. She made the decision with colleagues. They were really trying to get to the point of like, because marijuana, and she says here, marijuana failed all five factors of the five-factor test. They were basically trying to say exactly that. Like, oh, you didn't like the rule, so you changed the rule, and now it magically fits your new rule. But meanwhile, in Earth 1, in reality, the five-factor test is breaking down what FDA approval means into five chunks and giving it five hurdles.

2:31:00SpeakerEach is one-fifth of FDA approval. And if you're in Schedule 1, guess what? You can't satisfy several of those because to satisfy them, you'd have to be able to study it. To study it, you'd have to have access to it. To have access to it, you'd have to be deemed as having accepted medical use. Hey, you're back in square one again. It was this fantastic Catch-22. But they say you can study it.

2:31:20SpeakerThere were two different people. They do study it, except you have to get back to Dr. Leshner and what the study is for.

2:31:30Etienne FontanOkay, here's what the five criteria were from 1992. So one, the drug's chemistry must be known and reproducible. Two, there must be adequate safety studies. Three, there must be adequate and well-controlled studies proving efficacy. Four, the drug must be accepted by qualified experts. And five, the scientific evidence must be widely available. The new HHS two-part test as of 2023 is one, is there a widespread current experience with medical use in the United States by licensed healthcare practitioners operating under state authorized programs question.

2:32:16Etienne FontanTwo, is there some credible scientific support for at least one of those medical uses? A significant choice in question. So I just wanted everybody to know what that was and what those are.

2:32:31SpeakerAnd when they're fighting, hey, you cherry picked your new questions to fit exactly cannabis. It's like, well, yeah.

2:32:42SpeakerYou gotta love the candor.

2:32:46BubblemanWhat a conversation. This one could go on for a long time. Definitely have to do more parts to this as it like expands and matures as well. There's a lot. And we're going to get the transcripts, so that'll be fun too. Yeah, well, we'll take those transcripts and I'll get James to throw those transcripts right into the Hash Church episode, this episode. And so when people go into hashbible.org to do searches or questions, that transcript will be a part of that, that Oh, that's a better word.

2:33:18BubblemanYeah. Make it more accessible to people. So that's great. So when are those transcripts coming?

2:33:26SpeakerWe don't know when they'll actually get released. There is going to be a period of time where all of the parties have time to make like adjustments to the transcripts and things like that.

2:33:37Etienne FontanIs that what it says? August 17th is the date that the party is to have last submittal. So after August 17th, we would anticipate that that to drop. So I've heard it sometime in like September.

2:33:50SpeakerSo that that tracks. As I understand, there's a little bit of wiggle room in how long the administrative law judge wants to take to do his ruling, how long they want to do to actually think about it. There's like a 30-day window and then a cooling off like 30-day period. So as I understand, it was like almost 60 days of period after the hearing is finally concluded and the ruling is out.

2:34:14SpeakerThat could drive it into like, you know, late September into October. So that's the timeline as I understand it. By the way, Kevin Sabet is in the U.S. Court of Appeals. This whole process is occurring inside the walls of the structure of the DEA by a DEA judge, an administrative law judge. Just remember, within the U.S. laws, the DEA has more power than that administrative law judge.

2:34:38SpeakerThat administrative law judge doesn't actually have the power to tell the DEA what to do. Let's keep that in mind in this whole process. It might be a detail worth knowing. And then the appeals core is where Kevin Sabet, I think Max was very acute pointing out that that's his audience. I think he's talking already through the administrative law judge process to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

2:34:59SpeakerSo we'll see. Again, I think that he does have some merit in some of his arguments. I don't think he has standing. If you don't have standing, you could have all the merit in the world and it doesn't matter at all. And then if he gets past both of those hurdles, we'll see how much of this process he can actually get the court to look at. And again, my opinion, for what it's worth, rather unique in this world.

2:35:22SpeakerEverybody seems to have a different opinion than me on most of these things. But in the end, I'll go with my opinion. Thank you. But I think he's not going to stay the whole thing. I don't think he's going to stop the process. I don't think he's going to overrule the administrative law judges process. You know, ruling. But I think he might trim away all the stuff.

2:35:39SpeakerBefore you get on, Colin, I was talking about all the stuff that the acting attorney general did, like immediately rescheduling medical cannabis using the treaty and, you know, bifurcating it, you know, saying a medical and adult record different and different scheduling rules and this and that. All that stuff was jumping ahead of the process. And really, there's quite a bit of judicial meat there on various things, like not following the Rules and Procedures Act, which you can't be waived.

2:36:07SpeakerThe treaty clause inside the Controlled Substances Act actually waives the whole HHS and the FDA review. They can skip all that shit. They can't skip the judicial review process. And that's, you know, they are doing it. It seems to be unfolding correctly. I don't see the appeals court stopping that. But I could see the appeals court rather quickly coming in and ruling against some of the stuff that the acting attorney general did on the fly that went into effect immediately.

2:36:36SpeakerAnd the ALJ, his recommendation is not binding either. It's just like you said, he can't tell the DEA what to do. He's just making a recommendation based on the evidence presented. Yeah, correct.

2:36:47Etienne FontanThey overruled their own law judge back in 1988.

2:36:51Dr Mark ScialdoneSo what does that tell you? This is all just bullshit, sophistry, and theater. This is all just theater. Nothing is going to happen. Zero is going to happen. Nothing, which is the specialty of our government. Doing absolutely fucking nothing. Yep. That's what's going to happen. This is all just bullshit. It's a waste of our fucking time.

2:37:16Collin PalmerYeah. Well, I don't know if it's a waste of time. I think it's I think it's helpful because it allows us to kind of point out how to look at the playing field a little bit differently is how I'm trying to look at it to find the silver lining here. You know, but I agree with you, Mark. It's Dr. Mark. It's it's. It's a shame. It's kind of it's insulting to everyone, including themselves, you know, which is 800 pound gorilla.

2:37:43Dr Mark ScialdoneThe 800 pound gorilla in the room is what's going to happen in November with this hemp regulation, you know, because unlike unlike previous prohibitions in the past, there wasn't like a 50 some odd billion dollar market that they were trying to snuff out. And these are these are I think it's bigger. Deep pocketed. It is bigger. It probably is bigger, Marcus.

2:38:08BubblemanBut you're not thinking of the international export market that US hemp is currently involved in. There's people exporting hemp out of the US into countries like you wouldn't fucking believe.

2:38:20Dr Mark ScialdoneAnd this is the market that basically is where beverages are playing. And big beverage has got deep pockets. And to them, cannabis nano emulsion is just another freaking ingredient, just like another flavor, just to line up in their current supply chain with their current bottling facilities and their current distribution, their current, you know, I, yeah, that's the real question. What's going to happen? Is that all just going to go away?

2:38:51SpeakerLook at the timing of this. If this drops in October and then they make that decision in November, the timing is rather extraordinary.

2:39:00BubblemanI don't think that it drops. It's like, look at Hollywood and how big it was. This massive, huge infrastructure, billions of dollars, and then some kid invents BitTorrent and he just decimates Hollywood. But that money didn't disappear. It was still in the world. It still had to go somewhere. It just gave people more money to be like, oh, now I'm not spending $15,000 a year on whatever.

2:39:26BubblemanBlockbuster. Yeah, Jean-Claude Van Damme movies or whatever, you know, just like swag.

2:39:32SpeakerThat's like a movie swag.

2:39:34Dr Mark Scialdone20 years ago, we all used to go to Blockbuster to go get some movies, right? Yep, yep. And BitTorrent, like, changed the game.

2:39:41BubblemanI remember. Yeah, LimeWire, all that stuff. LimeWire. That was a big one. BitTorrent was the one they couldn't get rid of, right? Yeah, that was the one that stuck around. Napster, they got those, they busted, yeah, because it's kilobytes from many different people. You're not taking a whole file from one person. So the definition of what pirating was, was you had to get this file from a...

2:40:06BubblemanLike peer to peer. But now you're hooked up to 10,000 people taking bites of all their files and creating the file the way the file got created. It just managed to get around all these. It's all language, which really is kind of what we're talking about here today with the Schedule 3 hearing. Everything is language. Language. I think of the metaphor of the of the story Open Sesame.

2:40:32BubblemanIf you don't know the right words to say, then the mountain does not fucking open. But if you know a simple statement, a simple word, you can move a mountain, literally. And I've seen that in cannabis. I saw that in Germany where they were trying to get the 510 carts and they just kept applying and applying and applying. And one of the lawyers was like, why are we calling it a cart?

2:40:56BubblemanWhy don't we call it a special container? And the minute he did that, it was accepted. And now that was like, okay, how did then Australia is like, well, we want joints, but they won't let us smoke joints. And the guy's like, we'll just call it a paper cone container. And now that's how you can get medical joints in Australia. They come in paper cone containers. That you're supposed to rip open and then like put the weed into your vaporizer because they don't.

2:41:21SpeakerYeah, you weren't allowed to smoke weed in Florida or Pennsylvania either. So they gave it to it all these like weird forms because I guess that was how they pushed the medical thing. But I've got a question. It's on the beverages and bigger companies getting involved in the THC game. Does cannabis fit into Schedule 3?

2:41:44Collin PalmerThat's the, well, that's what I said in the chat. Like the ALJ can also, like we keep talking about, oh, it's schedule three. Well, they can also recommend schedule two. They can recommend anything. They can literally do anything they want.

2:41:56SpeakerWe're not talking about that though. We're just talking about schedule three. So I think we can start from that point of view. Well, I mean, I don't want to misinterpret what you're saying because I think you're interpreting it right. It's just a thing you have to be very careful in saying, right? So they initiated this petition to move it to Schedule 3. But during this petition, they can't on the fly try to do something else.

2:42:19SpeakerThey would have to start a new petition process for Schedule 2 or Schedule 4 or Schedule 5 or whatever. And Veterans Action Council tried to... Explain to them our legal theory, why they could avoid that and actually do Schedule 5 right now. We actually made that argument. And if you ask what, you know, schedule, if you had to put cannabis in a schedule because the CSA is still there, what schedule best fits is Schedule 5.

2:42:44SpeakerIn the States, we use cannabis as an over-the-counter product. You go show your ID or you show your medical card and you just pick your product. You don't have to have your doctor pick your product for you and write a prescription pad prescription. That's an over-the-counter drug. They really don't like that. Schedule, yeah, Schedule 5 affords the ability to do over the counter. We gamed it out, you know, for vets and figured that we can do it both ways.

2:43:07SpeakerWe can do Schedule 3. The way you do Schedule 3 is you have to make the VA hire a compound pharmacist. We intend to make the VA hire a compound pharmacist. The VA is going to have to spend millions and millions of your tax dollars because the DEA only went to Schedule 3. Welcome to the, you know, the charade, right? Dr. Mark. So anyway, schedule five would be more appropriate.

2:43:29SpeakerThe VA could then just give you an allowance like they do for clothing and you just go purchase the cannabis on your own in the store and it would be seamless. They could write through a recommendation. They're going to want to write a prescription. And for those who aren't following the law as closely as I do, Compound pharmacist is one of the ways that you can take unprocessed schedule three material and process it into a prescribable substance without being FDA approved.

2:43:53SpeakerThere are other ways for your homework tonight. See if you can find other ways. No, just kidding. But yeah, this is how we determine it might be the easiest way to do it. And we love compound pharmacists. It's something that they did a hundred years ago. Eli Lilly, Park Davis, all these companies had Merck, had a very high quality extract. And very recently, we found one of the earliest versions of the Lloyd's pharmaceutical extract bottle that actually has the whole story on the back.

2:44:18SpeakerAnd it says, this is not intended for individual use. This is intended for compound pharmacists to turn this into great products for your patient's needs. That's the world that we need to get back to, where these big companies can produce extract to their delight. Marcus will have something to do for the rest of time. We're doing it regardless. The new extracts, they come out of the pipeline.

2:44:41SpeakerAnd, you know, I think we're all happy. But that's going to be after this transition, which is very painful. And we'll see what Kevin Savette is able to get going in the U.S. Court of Appeals.

2:44:51BubblemanYeah, when we're all happy, he's not going to be. Yeah. Yes, yes.

2:44:57SpeakerSo then what is, so I'll read this quote and then I'll ask the question. There's the same witness that showed pictures of babies with bongs. She showed pictures of bowls on a counter. She said, I'll have you note that the one in the middle is Pickle Rick. And she says, now, do I ask a patient to get two nugs and put it into Pickle Rick? I have no idea how to dispense this.

2:45:21SpeakerDoes that compound pharmacist like how if in schedule three like what does like can the VA just say here go get an eighth? The compound pharmacist is going to take the raw material, the plant material, From, you know, the way we figured it, the compound pharmacist already, if a good compound pharmacist already has a DEA license, and they already have a state license to handle narcotics, and they often work with, you know, dangerous drugs.

2:45:45SpeakerAll we have to add to that is a couple more licenses. They have to be licensed as a producer in the state and a distributor in the state. So that they can actually be four license-carrying individual costing $200,000 plus a year each. That's what we have to add on to the staff of every area. And once you have that, you have someone that can take this raw plant material, turn it into some sort of extract, undoubtedly, tincture or extract, and then produce some sort of pill.

2:46:13SpeakerThere's a place where you can go back and look at our history. Because a hundred years ago, they used it a hundred different ways from external use on the corns and bunions on your feet to very, very, very strong stuff for like consumption. They called it, you know, now we call it tuberculosis. Tuberculosis. Yeah. You know, somebody dying of tuberculosis, they gave them heroin and cannabis. Somebody who had a hangnail, they gave this and codeine.

2:46:42SpeakerI wish so.

2:46:43BubblemanCompounding can also like be more simple. It doesn't have to be like, you know, diluting high potency cannabis oil to specific concentrations or combining purified. Squishing rosin. Yeah, or even like literally dude taking like weighing out an eighth and putting it into a jar would be considered compounding. And it's done like that in Germany. They could also be buying the oil and they could have a small thing that just fills carts like a little mini cart filler where they're like, they fill half a gram into the carts that would be considered compounding because I know the German pharmacies are doing this already and people are learning about this.

2:47:24BubblemanSo it's not. As scary of a term as it sounds.

2:47:28Collin PalmerWhat was the doctor's or the person on the stand's name again? What was the woman's name? What was her name?

2:47:36SpeakerUh, talking about the, uh, which one was it?

2:47:39Collin PalmerThe, um, talked about the nog and the, the pickled, pickled, uh, pickle Rick, dude, Dr. Randall. She's talking to Rick and Morty. That's where, you know, we got to pull up the, the highlighter here and, and highlight their name and say, listen, Mr. Expert, this is where your expertise just falls to black. And you may think, you know, understand cannabis, but when you're telling me you don't understand how to administer flour, Thank you for joining us today.

2:48:24Collin PalmerRight. Which then we would talk about bench work with them. And do you understand that there's formulation work that needs to be done if you're going to do this and what that entails and the R&D behind that and the worksheets and the, you know, just the time and money? Because it just really just highlights their lack of knowledge and that they shouldn't actually not be on the stand at all right now.

2:48:49Collin PalmerThey should be in the audience or perhaps in a class educating themselves on what that is.

2:48:56Etienne FontanAnd they should be on a comedy stage.

2:48:59Collin PalmerYeah, well, it's not like I'm trying to insult anyone here. I'm just trying to what I'm trying to highlight here with a big pink and just the biggest, brightest color we can is that your experience, sir or miss, is really not there. And you have to go back to educate yourself on on the right things to be able to speak on this because you're you're really doing the world a disservice, not only yourself, and you're making yourself Thank you for joining us.

2:49:44Collin PalmerI think we can tighten those variances up and I would bet money that we can get it within a 1% variance or less. Tighter protocols than I would say most pharmaceutical drugs have.

2:49:56BubblemanThis is pretty much every country that does this. ends up you know making almost all the same mistakes and doing every state does it yeah it's just and it's also because you're fighting like it's the battle between good and evil it's like these guys they're just fighting it right till the bitter end they're you know they don't want it to be sure we can agree on rules and regs though right like

2:50:24Collin PalmerApparently not.

2:50:25SpeakerSo we had, there was a couple, so there are two different law enforcement officers were speaking. We had an agent from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation come and she was talking about how Thank you for joining us.

2:50:57Speakersaid that he talks to people who have moved from the unlicensed market and into the licensed market and talk about how happy they are to not have to worry about raids and things like that law enforcement and the i think that's the biggest thing that i took away from all of this is everything that they were explaining everything that From the law enforcement talking about the criminal activity and things like that, from the doctors and the ER physicians talking about youth access and things like that.

2:51:27SpeakerA lot of these problems are like they're artifacts of the fact that this is a schedule one drug.

2:51:36Collin PalmerYes. That's that's very true. It's a true statement. And that's the the hardest part is that they're drinking their own Kool-Aid and they're infighting within within constructs that are just broke. They're inherently broken. I mean, it's it's just to mark his point. It's a lot of theatrical things that are happening. To protect a lot of agencies and how money flows to these agencies and things that are much deeper than what we're even preview to.

2:52:08Collin PalmerAnd it's just it's insane because, you know, what we listen to or what more importantly you listen to and then report it back to us. I can't wait to read the rest of the transcripts because it's it's going to be revealing, you know, in a lot of ways.

2:52:23SpeakerIt definitely is.

2:52:26Collin PalmerSo.

2:52:27SpeakerYeah, and then an interesting one on the compound pharmacist you were talking about. We heard from a pharmacist from California, and he was seriously worried about if we were to go schedule three, and we are now mixing cannabis in hospitals and in pharmacy rooms and clean rooms. He talked about how clean his clean rooms have to be. How perfectly perfect everything. And then he went and showed a bunch of slides of recalls and mold and contamination and said that the states are not doing their job in these markets.

2:52:59SpeakerRecalls are not happening correctly. They also mentioned drug-drug interactions not happening at all. Like we don't have any, like you can't go, there's no Rolodex of like with opioids, like how much you got, you can't go like pharmacy shopping So there was a lot of just like, it doesn't fit into their specific pill form of THC, of medicine. It doesn't fit their definition of medicine. Part of my response is the same that I gave to MMJ, which is cry me a river.

2:53:30SpeakerYeah. And then the second part of my response to them is, you know, so what? You know, get with the program, figure it out. I mean, it's not like, you know, we haven't thought of this before. You know, we've got six million patients the FDA talked to. Did you talk to any of those? Maybe those six million patients. Have you read any of the research papers before?

2:53:53SpeakerThat the doctors that feel comfortable recommending the cannabis to those patients have reviewed during higher education. What is it? Continuing medical education credits at their university that they have to take each year because of their medical license. They have studied this shit for what now? What, 20 years? There's been continuing medical education. Ironically, some of the best continuing medical education credits come from down the hall from Bertha Madras's bullshit machine.

2:54:21SpeakerAnd there's a, there's a, so the woman who mentioned the Pickle Rick Bowl, she also said, where is it?

2:54:33SpeakerThe judge asked everybody at the end of their testimony because he asked one of the first witnesses how they define, like, are we talking about the same thing? He's like, does your definition of cannabis meet the Controlled Substances Act version of cannabis sativa L, which is what we're here to talk about. So everyone said, yeah, for the most part, that's what we're here to talk about. She said, um...

2:54:57Speakerthat it doesn't only contain it doesn't only the the definition only contains sativas so she's saying that cannabis sativa l won't meet the definition and we'll need more added to the definition um she said because we're limiting it to sativa products and there's so many hybrids and so many indicas how do we know that you're just growing a sativa I thought that was an interesting take

2:55:48SpeakerI don't know. No one else in the room caught that because no one else in the room had ever grown the plant.

2:55:54Collin PalmerWell, that's the thing I was going to go back to. And you said something earlier and I was like actually thinking of Sam. I was like, man, I wish Sam was here because, you know, he maybe could back this up a little bit as is and maybe Ryan as well. My thought is, you know. If you're really targeting a certain range and certain set of chemicals, and you really want a chemotype, typical phenotype that has these certain chemical properties, you're going to have to learn to Aaron Ward, Program Manager, Program Manager, Program Manager, Program Manager, Program Manager

2:56:41Collin PalmerI think that would be really important for the chemical properties and in how we speak about what we're actually talking about, because I don't I think we're missing these key components and there are things that really do hold up in science and plant science. And I think that's really because if we're going to make an extract, we're going to need to grow something a specific way. You know, if we're after a certain, let's say, chemical set, we're going to look for things that grow and express them.

2:57:11Collin PalmerAnd then we're going to identify them. And perhaps, you know, we can exploit that even further through either genomic selection using marker-based breeding or and or, you know, hand selection, whichever path is right for you. But I think that's a huge, I didn't hear any of this talk. I didn't hear what I consider expert level understanding of what the subject matter is and the medium that we're in.

2:57:41Collin PalmerAnd which downstream, if I'm really going to go there and get real super high level on this stuff is that it all affects what I do as an extractor and as a hash maker. And what those products are from the COA's point of view after I've made those extracts are all based on the phenols and the chemotypical nature of which they are. So that is something that, um, It's like, we're talking about just weed and weed TM is going to do this one thing.

2:58:14Collin PalmerAnd it's like, so black and white to these so-called experts that it's not, you know, and I feel like we're, we need a skunk man, Sam, that has like been there with GW. That's like, look, you know what? I experienced this already. You know what? We made SatavX and, and, You know, these other products and these chemical profiles were created through these particular ways of commercialization. And and the other thing is, before I finish, my thought is like.

2:58:47Collin PalmerWhere are they getting the idea that there isn't a market? There's that's really bizarre to me because they're there. There actually is a market and there's more markets to build off of that. If you allowed medical device designers to actually make delivery devices that are centered around cannabinoid therapies, like you might find yourself in a really interesting spot to the doctor that didn't understand how to partition flower out to a patient to have therapeutic, you know, You know, a therapeutic response, you know.

2:59:16BubblemanSativex did $4 billion in revenue. That's what I'm saying.

2:59:22Collin PalmerSo like, I'm trying to just give it a breath of like, look, it's not like we're walking a path that's like never been walked. There's major evidence here, as well as the hard scientific fact that there is a path here. It's just who's going to put it together.

2:59:40SpeakerI think, well, I think, Cohen, I think you're getting ahead of the process. I think everything you're saying is absolutely going to happen, but there's a block or a step in between, a couple of steps, right? One I'll call the FDA, you know, for short, and the other is the DEA. Are those blocks or gatekeepers? No, no, this is what's happening. Let me give you a little bit of insight from the inside, all right?

3:00:04SpeakerSo first with the FDA. We haven't crossed that bridge yet, but I can tell you what the bridge is going to look like a little bit from our experience not that long ago when hemp was legalized. And the FDA was confronted with this question, how do we handle legal cannabis products that are under a certain amount of THC that satisfy our laws in the United States? And people were suggesting through requests of official nature that the FDA consider it an herbal supplement.

3:00:31SpeakerAnd the FDA rejected that. At first, everybody was like really, really freaking out and angry at the FDA. But then the FDA explained and said they really weren't against the idea. They just looked at what the FDA supplement looked like and it didn't quite fit. They were trying to come up with something. I swear to God, it sounded to me like they were trying to come up with a definition for a medical edible.

3:00:50SpeakerThank you.

3:01:06SpeakerBut yeah, they were, and now they're not going to be. And it's raised all kinds of questions. Like in the DEA application for Schedule III license, you can't even hire someone who had a previous CSA conviction. So what about all these equity people that are actually the reason why we have medical marijuana, because they put their life on the line and got arrested, can't even get a license.

3:01:26SpeakerAnd if they do get a license, can they then talk to the people next door that only have state license and aren't FDA approved? Is that communication going to continue? I mean, all these questions that are really into the nuance of this way before we get to what they're actually and on the what they're actually going to trade, they're right now leaning on the states. And that's going to continue into the near future.

3:01:48SpeakerI said in another call just the other day, I think that paying attention to different states as you know, Thank you so much for joining us.

3:02:11SpeakerYou know, emerging rules and things that are going to have to happen, including what do we do with adult rec that once again was shielded from the feds by nature of standing right next to medical, which they couldn't differentiate. That's the thing about schedule one. Schedule one means the feds can't actually differentiate between medical and non-medical. It all looks the same through those glasses. So that's, you know, glasses that are going to become very clear very soon.

3:02:34SpeakerAnd all of a sudden they're going to delineate one from the other. They already have. And for that, if that wasn't a shot across the bow for everybody who thought Adult Rec was the rainbow, I got news for them. That rainbow has a thorn garden. So we'll see what happens.

3:02:48BubblemanYou know what? As I learned from life, all rainbows have a thorn garden. Probably true. I just like, well, you know what? Like you learn it really hardcore with children because children are like unconditionally. You just take a bullet for them. They're the most amazing people. And then simultaneously, you're like, who? Thank you so much for joining us.

3:03:32BubblemanYou could, dude. I'm telling you. Now, I don't. You gotta love them just the same. Well, you do. You gotta love them. I imagine Kevin's parents might just be chuffing gaggers, embarrassed that he's doing what he's doing right now.

3:03:45SpeakerI don't know the situation. I don't know the man.

3:03:48BubblemanThe Rippin' Baby Bonds. Anything's possible out there. It's just weird how it works. And I, you know, it's well said it's a rainbow with a thorn bush, but so too is life. I think that's why I've broken 17 bones. I found all the thorn bushes. Found them all.

3:04:09Etienne FontanThat was good. What was the most surprising comment of all the things you heard inside there, Max? What made your jaw drop?

3:04:23SpeakerOkay, I think that there were two, but I don't remember the second one offhand. I've got the one that made my jaw drop the most.

3:04:35SpeakerOne of the lawyers during his opening statement was talking about... What would happen if we went schedule three? And he said that would result in two World Trade Center fatalities annually if we did that. You wrote, you did an episode on that, did you not?

3:04:57BubblemanYeah, because I saw that. That's over the top, dude.

3:05:02SpeakerAnd somebody said in the comments, I think, they were like, since when did that become a unit of measurement? Did anybody else react? That's the most unhinged thing.

3:05:12Etienne FontanDid anybody else react?

3:05:13SpeakerNo reaction. I don't think any, I mean, like when we talked about it among ourselves afterwards, but like, I don't think anybody like reacted in the moment. It was just like, or I was just so stunned and had to write it down that I just was so like, I don't know. That one was probably, yeah, that's definitely, there was one other one that was real wild.

3:05:32BubblemanUsing the World Trade Center attacks as a unit of measurement is fucking insane, dude. That's, that's...

3:05:39Collin PalmerI thought the traffic thing was crazy. The, um... Like they started talking about how DUIs are, you know, being drugged under the, whatever the term was, drugged under the influence of driving.

3:05:56Collin PalmerIt just seems so off to... And it's funny because.

3:06:20SpeakerThere was a balance in some of these testimonies because you have the same person who's talking about, the same person who's saying that exact thing about the meth and the heroin and the cannabis and the cannabis being the problem.

3:06:35BubblemanOr that being where you make your crusade.

3:06:36SpeakerBut they're also saying things about how, this is me paraphrasing, but he was talking about how because the blood level and urine level testing is not necessarily, the science isn't fully in on that with what THC presence means versus impairment. He's saying we could be locking up people that are innocent and we could be letting go people that are not. And that is a valid concern. The answer is not necessarily where they draw the answer to from that.

3:07:10Collin PalmerRight, but doesn't that highlight again bringing out the marker? It's like, yo, we need to look at the due process that we go in and look at someone under the influence and we need to develop a process that includes this if that's something we're going to have to do. Then we should develop that. Like every business plan has an end date. So does like every technology, you know, there's an end date to it that has to either evolve or die.

3:07:38Collin PalmerAnd that's kind of where it's at. I think that's something I also want to highlight is like all these people are looking at it as like, You guys just like, you know, you can't figure us out. And it's like, well, no, you have to evolve. Like you have to, FDA, if you're going to have standards that are, have evolved because, you know, call it therapeutics is evolving, then you need to also step up and evolve.

3:08:04Collin PalmerYou know, and I think that's something that isn't being talked about enough here. It's like, well, where's the accountability on both sides? You know, if you're going to have process, that process should evolve gradually. I'm not saying reinvent the wheel here, but yeah, you know, like I think that's fair to say, no?

3:08:23SpeakerAnd, you know, the DEA has to be sitting back and saying, well, what's your argument? I mean, it's illegal to drive under the influence on Schedule 1. It's illegal to drive under the influence on Schedule 3. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, is it easier or harder to come up with those procedures and stuff that Colin was recommending under Schedule 1 or Schedule 3?

3:08:42SpeakerAnd clearly, evidence shows that it's easier to do that shit under Schedule 3. So if they're painting the foundation for an argument that works against their own position. Yes, and that happened quite a bit.

3:08:56Etienne FontanAnd giving us future arguments because once the Schedule 3 is locked in, then the argument has changed forever and now we can discuss Schedule 5 and the other things because that's what we tried to get in to do, Max, was to argue Schedule 5. Outright, because we had to schedule. We were in favor of descheduling outright. However, due to treaty obligations, that's why we can't do that.

3:09:18Etienne FontanAnd I see all the time people posting, well, why doesn't the United States government just, you know, legalize it for fucking Christ's sakes? Well, It all comes back to the treaty, unfortunately, in our obligation. Well, we did it. That's why I'm glad we started there.

3:09:32SpeakerIf we did it, you guys could do it. You have to change the law. You have to actually change the control. ATN is saying there's nothing within the executive branch. This has been a recurrent debate in the movement for the last 30 years. And people would say, oh, the president should just do it. Just do it. But you can't just do it because the Controlled Substances Act says you can't do it.

3:09:54SpeakerAnd why does the Controlled Substances Act say you can't do it? Because it's leaning on the treaty that says you can't do it. That's the only reason you get this recurrent discussion. You have to realize quite easily. They built it into a trap. And that no longer applies. Well, that's why we're working. Yeah.

3:10:12Etienne FontanThat's why we're working with the international team to actually rewrite the treaty is we're hoping for a reevaluation in 2030 and then to actually rewrite the treaty. And I hate to say that it's that far away. However, as Michael said yesterday in a conversation we have at every major change that happened takes about 10 years. It took about that for the VA. It took about 11 years or just about 10 years for the change at the World Health Organization and the UN.

3:10:40Etienne FontanAnd so our Our understanding now and what we're working towards and building coalitions and building strong coalitions around the world is for when that rewriting happens. That we are at the table and that our people are at the table so that we can remove the plants, cannabis, poppy, and coca, because the plants already have exemptions under the treaty and have no right being in there. And so, but by changing it internationally, we bring the U.S. into that change because we have seen that the U.S. is not going to change.

3:11:12Etienne FontanAnd that's why what's so significant, Max, is we watched one of our mentors

3:11:20Etienne FontanJohn Getman was his name. He was a former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Law. He went through a 20 year struggle to try to change rescheduling. And that's in the in the 90s. And that's when they came out and said, hey, sorry, we can't change it due to the treaty. OK. Yep. And because of that. Michael and our team saw that and went and changed that because they saw that they needed to flip that script.

3:11:47Etienne FontanAnd so we've gone above and are continuing to go above the US's head because we're tired of these arguments as well.

3:11:58SpeakerWell, it's just worth a 30 second sort of big background here. When you talk about cannabis, coke and poppy, there's a reason. We're not just being like drug people and we love drugs. We're going to work for coke and poppy, which is actually pretty cool. But that's not what it's about. The treaty was written around these drugs. They actually call them the pillar drugs, like pillars holding up the building.

3:12:17SpeakerThese are the three drugs that they actually set up the entire treaty around. Why is that important? Because we did already all we could do by rescheduling at the international level, just like we're doing all we can do right now to reschedule at the national level, given the constraints. Like I said, Schedule 5 would be our limit nationally. You have to break the limit, but you have to get to the limit also at the same time.

3:12:36SpeakerAnd that's kind of what we're working on here. And the treaty, we were able to pull cannabis out of a special category that it had in. So it just normalized medical cannabis around the world. And that's what we did. That actually removed all that schedule placement in that dangerous category is what underpinned our Schedule 1. It's what gave our Schedule 1 legitimacy. Once we removed that, we removed all legitimacy from Schedule 1.

3:12:58SpeakerIt's just absolutely imminent that it had to be changed. It's just a matter of time. When it would be changed.

3:13:03BubblemanSo if Congress passed a federal law legalizing and regulating adult use cannabis nationwide, you guys would basically could pull a Canada. You could do the same thing you did.

3:13:14SpeakerYou'd create the treaty. That's what's on the table. That's what's being proposed right now in model legislation that's just come out in this last week or so. He just came out with it in the last week.

3:13:24Collin PalmerHey, Max, what was the most comprehensive testimony you saw In the whole entire span.

3:13:35SpeakerEasy answer. Easy, easy answer. Well, I guess I say this in reference to like actually understanding cannabis as the seven of us understand cannabis and everyone listening. The Humboldt County Sheriff. There was a lot of people... It's funny, I actually didn't even realize he was testifying because I just went down there and I was like, okay, I'm here. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen. And I started getting messages from people out in the Emerald Triangle and out in Humboldt.

3:14:07SpeakerAnd they were like, hey, can you like record this or like really make sure to take good notes on when the sheriff comes because it's like it's a big deal that he's going out there. The people were seemingly very upset that he was going to go speak against the cannabis industry. And let me pull up my notebook first.

3:14:24Collin PalmerDo you feel like that's it? Do you feel like he spoke against it or did he just kind of highlight? Because I felt like some of the things you reported on was like... He said the truth. Highlighting things. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

3:14:37SpeakerHe was... Because I say this as somebody who operated out in the Emerald Triangle. I operated in Trinity only for a few years, so I don't have deep ties out there. But everything I've seen, where are we here?

3:14:56SpeakerHe was talking about the negatives of crime. And organized crime and human trafficking and the devastating effect of what happens when a commodity product that used to sell for well over $1,000 now only sells for the $200 it used to cost you to trim that pound. And not great things happen. He told a story about, I had some people in the comments on Instagram tell me a little bit more about it.

3:15:31SpeakerHe told a story about a grower who was like, oh, I'll pay you at the end of the year. All right, I'll pay you after harvest, which is a totally common thing. But what's not totally common is what this guy did, which was instead of paying them, he shot them. And one died and then he hunted the other one through the forest. And eventually they got him at like a Cal Fire Station or something like that.

3:15:53SpeakerBut he told a couple of inflammatory stories about like negative things that go with criminal organizations and the criminalization. And he really wrapped it all up by saying, let me get this quote specifically right, because it was a good quote.

3:16:14SpeakerYeah, it was really interesting because I when I was like, I was like, oh, no, he's going to have some crazy stuff to say. And they're going to really believe him because they were like, oh, would you say that you're the person that knows the most about cannabis legalization? And his answer was yes. So let's see what he's got.

3:16:37SpeakerI just saw this note. He had the most specific, correct definition of a hoop house that I've ever heard in my life.

3:16:48SpeakerHe's probably seen a few. He has definitely seen a few.

3:16:54SpeakerHe was... I can't find the exact quote, but it was... It's just so ironic. It's so ironic. Oh, yes. Yeah, man. I mean, it's just, it's so ironic that this guy is testifying to the DEA who were chartered with the, with the maintaining of prohibition. It's always been air quote illegal. The whole time it was legalized in California, it was still air quote illegal. And he was part of the camp.

3:17:19SpeakerNo pun intended. He was part of the camp.

3:17:22Collin PalmerYep.

3:17:22SpeakerYeah. And, you know, they was part of the camp that actually was enforcing that air quotes, you know, those silly little air quotes fucking had people that hung from fucking helicopters with guns connected to them. Yeah. Yeah. He mentioned that. He said that there's people with PTSD because of that. And then I was also informed that literally during his testimony, they were having choppers buzz legal farms out in the triangle.

3:17:46SpeakerBut he was asked by the judge to define, because he kept saying the word legalization instead of rescheduling and like that. So he was like clarity, hey, what do you mean when you say legalization? And he says legalization to him was like Prop 215 and Prop 64, which was the medical and adult use in California. And he said with Prop 64, we were finally able to have regulation.

3:18:11SpeakerSo even the person who was brought there to talk negatively about the entire thing, to scare the judge into thinking that legal, any version of legal cannabis is going to be a problem, says that legalization is the best thing that happened to him. That's like, that's yeah, yeah, you need an interpreter. Oh, wait, and I've got one more that I've got. This one's the best. This was the best mic drop of anyone.

3:18:39SpeakerIn the entire, the entire thing, the government was very specific with the questions that they asked on cross-examination. They would ask for the person with the bongs and talking about all these children using cannabis. They're asking, is this an example of criminal diversion? Yes. Any example of...

3:19:01Collin PalmerBabies use a bong.

3:19:03SpeakerHey, it's just a picture. It was never used. She says, oh, but it's happening. She says, we need to show these pictures because they're happening. It was crazy.

3:19:12SpeakerBut they asked, I don't know, you guys might be, especially Mike, are you familiar with Dr. D'Souza, the psychiatrist from the Connecticut VA?

3:19:26Etienne FontanYes, that name has come up multiple times in our FOIA request.

3:19:31SpeakerI figured, yeah, I would think that it would come up. And he had, he talked about how,

3:19:38SpeakerThere's no medical abuse and high likelihood for abuse. But one of the things that he said, or he was asked on cross-examination, the government asked, he was like, hey, do you go on news and podcasts and things like that? And he's like, yeah. They're like, oh, he's like, were you on the Yale News podcast? And he said, yeah. He said, did you say that the overwhelming majority of people who use cannabis will have no negative outcomes?

3:20:02Etienne FontanAnd he's like, yeah.

3:20:06SpeakerOops, did I say that out loud? I was like, whoa! For the people who only asked like three or four questions of most of these witnesses, they really came in with like, came in for the jugular on that one.

3:20:20Etienne FontanVery easy. It's awesome. That's a mic drop right there, right?

3:20:26SpeakerThat's half of everything they need to show. The relative abuse potential to other Schedule 3s. And the fact that... Well, and then the thing is, he also said when he was talking about how THC impacts, he said, when asked about the effects of THC on the body, he said altered perception, mood, and typically a reduction in anxiety. So he, the opponent's witness, knocked out both of those things in one shot.

3:20:57SpeakerAnd you know what? I would, my full like sky high takeaway version of the whole thing, like zoom all the way out, is that every single person in that room argued that cannabis does not belong in schedule one. All of the experts for the opposed parties argued very well, I would say, that it doesn't necessarily belong in Schedule 3 because we're really stretching to get it to fit this single molecule compound thing because it's plant.

3:21:30SpeakerSo where does that lead all of their recommendations to actually point? We'll find that we won't find that out. But that was really that that's I think that's my biggest takeaway is that they were all trying to make this argument demonize scary. And when you have the DEA now on the side of like, oh, yeah, our witnesses are saying that there's a medical accepted use and where they're able to pull it out of these other witnesses that are opposed that are saying, oh, yeah, well, oops, I said that there is.

3:22:01SpeakerThis is an interesting time.

3:22:04Etienne FontanYeah, you don't get Pickle Rick often called out in federal hearings, you know.

3:22:08BubblemanDude, and how, yeah, how am I supposed to pack Pickle Rick? It's like, well, you just, you know, right above, right below his eyes there.

3:22:14Etienne FontanThat's your baby bong, right?

3:22:16BubblemanGet the baby to do it.

3:22:18Collin PalmerYou thought about that the night before, which is the funniest part about all this.

3:22:22BubblemanShe's like, I'm going to mention Pickle Rick. Dude, she put that shit together and presented it to her husband the night before. What do you think, sweetie?

3:22:30Etienne FontanHoney, it's a pickle, Rick. You think that's a good enough reference?

3:22:34SpeakerDo you think they're going to go for it? She said that she lives in Colorado and they were close to the fires. And she said that the fires are a really good symbolism because the fire is already here with cannabis use in children. I was just like, that is.

3:22:54BubblemanWhich is crazy because truly that's alcohol and always has been alcohol, right? Like it's like the most accessible, the one that is the, it's always been the same. The one that's the most deadly and dangerous. It's just, it's just right here, everywhere. You can just get it. Oh, kids are drinking. Alcohol wasn't mentioned a single time. Have a sip of my beer, son.

3:23:14SpeakerIt's okay. The best I understand it, when the treaties and these laws in 1961 were being made, you can picture a room with cigar-smoking, big, white men wearing very fancy suits with cufflinks. Drinking liquor and smoking cigars while they said the heinous things that they said about the native peoples and the indigenous peoples and the savage peoples that still are using plant material and crushing it up and eat.

3:23:42SpeakerOh, how savage that is as they puff on their cigar and drink their martini or their scotch.

3:23:50BubblemanYep. Yes, I'm a savage. I'm a savage dabber. I dab savagely. In fact, I think it's time for everyone to take a dab. I think so too, after that discussion. I sure appreciate you coming on Hash Church and sharing this with us, Max. It's really pretty awesome.

3:24:11SpeakerThank you for having me. This has been great. I'm grabbing some hash as well. Where is it at?

3:24:19Etienne FontanI can't thank you enough for sharing your experience with us from being a firsthand person there. I mean, it's really sad. I have a list of like 40 to 50 different cannabis publications. And how many people that were not in the room is rather staggering in that it was you who actually were like, oh, that can happen. And you physically went down there. You're on your own respect level there, Max, is all I'm saying.

3:24:45SpeakerThank you. Thank you. But you know who doesn't respect me is my Puffco that's currently dead. I just caught the three red flashes. I was about to take a dab of some Brookside.

3:24:54BubblemanGo to a lower setting.

3:24:57SpeakerIt won't even turn on. I got to plug it in.

3:24:59Collin PalmerPlug it in.

3:25:00SpeakerIt'll fire up. It lets you run it while it's charging. You're in an old ambulance. You're in an old ambulance. Isn't there an emergency Puffco somewhere? Yeah. Taking a baby volume, you know what I mean? Got it. Oh, yeah.

3:25:15Dr Mark ScialdoneWahoo!

3:25:20Collin PalmerThat's amazing that it was just a bunch of emotional...

3:25:25BubblemanFor the record, I would never pass my mothership to a baby. That motherfucker would break it for sure. That's way too expensive. Yeah, you can't do that.

3:25:33SpeakerI heard an interesting argument that it was strategic to only have opponents because now that the government wants this, they don't need to have proponents. They're just making a bulletproof case for appeal that says we listened to the loudest voices in the room that say this is the scariest thing on earth. And they all did not prove their case. So maybe there was strategy to that. It feels like people got left out.

3:26:04SpeakerBut if the government's argument is trying to prove it, I don't know.

3:26:09BubblemanBut here's the thing. Multi-billion dollar hemp industry, like Dr. Mark suggests, companies like Constellation Brands, who invested $5 billion Canadian dollars in canopy growth for beverages and cannabis, big tobacco, big pharma, The level of export that's already happening to certain country, the level of industry that's being built in. Everyone has to know it's absolutely fucking inevitable that the US gets federally regulated legal cannabis. It is 1000% coming down the...

3:26:45BubblemanI don't think it's going to be 10 years from now. If it is, then that just means they're... They're the ones that probably own the majority of the companies in Canada that are doing the export. They're the ones that are building the labs in Switzerland. They have a position in this. They're not going to be getting caught with their pants down. When it becomes legal to export Californian grown flour, dude.

3:27:11BubblemanI'm sorry, but that's the one. Like, that's the one.

3:27:15SpeakerThat's the part that kills me about the sheriff's testimony is he's talking about like the economic hurt. I'm like, you don't like you just draw the line a little bit further and realize how much humble grown flour in a package like stamped around the world is going to be and how these farms are going to be revitalized.

3:27:36BubblemanThe revitalization is going to be on another level. And we're benefiting in Canada because right now, like tons of the California brands that are down there, big ones that you all know are up here growing their genetics for export. Because they're greasing the pathways. They're up here. They've been growing their flower up here for years already doing export. The ones that are, you know, in tune with making sure they plant the flag of their brand into these different markets.

3:28:06BubblemanAnd it's... Well, here's an interesting one.

3:28:09Etienne FontanIn the United States, St. Ives, I grew up with a malt liquor company. Now they sell joints. They just won a Golden Bear for their iced tea there at the California State Fair.

3:28:20SpeakerOh, they got drinks now.

3:28:21Etienne FontanOh yeah, they're out of alcohol altogether. They exclusively are selling cannabis drinks now.

3:28:27SpeakerWhat's the milligrams on their winning beverage?

3:28:31Etienne FontanCaleb was the judge. Caleb, what was the milligrams?

3:28:34SpeakerI'll look it up. Give me a sec. Like it wasn't a hundred, was it? While you're looking that up, let me say that the list of participants that the DEA put up, it is actually very, very true and very solid to say that if they thought they needed us, they could have had us there. They could have had the very expert testimony that Colin's talking about. They could have done it.

3:28:57SpeakerThat's their failed job. That's their incompetence. That's their failure, whatever. And having incompetence, Thank you so much for joining us.

3:29:29SpeakerI think people would be just as voided if they wanted schedule two instead of schedule one going to go the other way. They were excluded as well. So anyway, I think I get people where they're coming from. But this is one time where they did put up the FDA testimony. They did put up some people on our side. And I think the people against us were, you know, when I first heard of what Professor Madras said, I was like, is she working for us or against us?

3:29:54SpeakerAnd I would say the same thing about the sheriff. You know, you got to interpret it the way the DEA is interpreting it. He didn't do them any favors, Kevin Savetta. I hope they didn't pay him very much to come out from California. I can't imagine how much this, I was talking to a law student and somebody who has experience with some of these ALJ hearings. And we're trying to like think about how much it costs for this three weeks of everything going on in that courtroom.

3:30:20SpeakerAnd it was very expensive.

3:30:21Bubbleman42,716,550. I mean, I guess we can FOIA it. The DEA is no fan of us.

3:30:26SpeakerSo we don't have to piss them off.

3:30:32SpeakerAnd the cost of the Pickle Rick pipe and the bong.

3:30:39BubblemanCrazy. It's so crazy. Well, who knows where it's going?

3:30:42Collin PalmerPickle Rick.

3:30:43BubblemanYou know, got to keep fighting to direct it. And at the same time, kind of realize that at least the way it played out here, We were over the worst of it. But, you know, the people who held on to that seemed to exist in a worst experience. And the people who were like, hey, you're right. Like, they're not really like this has changed. Like, and it does.

3:31:05BubblemanFederal legalization or federal whatever, like when suddenly it shifts it more than you can imagine. And this small shift, once the shift happened here, it was like suddenly the smell of cannabis was no longer a reason for you to be searched in your home or in your car, which was a huge implication on the side of users versus on the side of enforcement. The enforcement people were like literally handcuffed.

3:31:34BubblemanAnd trust me, like I had a friend who got busted in my village. She was growing like four or five hundred plants, had no license, and it was You know, he called me up. He's like, holy shit, dude, what am I going to do? I'm like, well, first of all, dude, you know, you should have a license for cannabis because he's got he's got his father died of a terrible disease and he has the genetic propensity for this disease that just swallows up his spine.

3:31:59BubblemanRight. And he's got all the markers and this, that and the other thing. So he's easily able to get a cannabis license in Canada like like that. He just didn't. But when he got busted and he came to me, I just said, look, go see John Burfellow. John's going to help you get your license and you're not even going to have to get the license. When you go to court, just tell the judge you've applied for the license and you should have done so before.

3:32:21BubblemanAnd the judge immediately threw that shit out of court because that was the shift in Canada. Whereas before there were these funds that just came from Aaron Weissman, Ed Sheeran, and many, many more.

3:32:53BubblemanYou can't imagine like they set up the system very specifically, these hearings, all these things where you're handcuffed and they're kind of not. Because if you end up in court in a fair environment with them, you win. And that's what happened in Canada. Our government, the people who are like basically taking the position of the drug enforcement agency and other prohibitionist mindsets. They did not have a leg to stand on.

3:33:19BubblemanJohn Conroy decimated them. Kirk Toussaint decimated them. They just, John and Kirk are both users. They're both intimately involved in the camp. They live it day to day. They knew the people who were running from the US to hide here, the Rene Boges, et cetera. They were so deeply involved in everything. And on the other side, these were just prosecutors that were hired to be lawyers for the state.

3:33:45BubblemanAnd so they never stood a chance. They were so decimated. And I'll tell you, and I've said it before here in Canada, it was, oh gosh, what is his name now? That's insane that I would forget his name. But he got busted with Ted Smith for a bakery. And this changed the law in Canada for extracts. And how it changed the law is because Canada, Basically, they took the maximum fine in Canada for cannabis from 25 years and they made it 14 years, which was funny because all the activists, when they heard 14 years, they were like, oh, 14 years, that's insane.

3:34:20BubblemanAnd people of us who had been charged criminally were like, no, it's not. The maximum fine is 25 years. That's like 11 less baby steps, right? Like, don't be fucking fighting 14 years when it's currently 25. Like, like, please, like, holy fucking shit. I get that you hate these powers that be, but let's use common sense to take the steps that we need to take within this system.

3:34:43BubblemanAnd so, you know, we did that. We got it down, but it was, oh, I lost my train of thought and I really didn't want to. In regards to our laws. Oh, Owen, Owen Smith. So he was the gentleman that was busted with the bakery. So Kirk is in court. And he's explained to the judge so beautifully, like, listen, my grandma, your grandma, your mom, whoever, they've ordered their medical cannabis.

3:35:07BubblemanIt's totally legal. We're going to talk about some of the things that we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about some of the things that we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about some of the things

3:35:35Bubblemanto all components of marijuana so suddenly your license when it said you could have this much marijuana that would be you could have that much seed that much stem that much oil that much trichome heads that much thca that much terpenes it didn't matter what it was if it came from cannabis you could have that much of it and just by altering the language ever so slight he forced the hand of the federal court systems the supreme court of canada He forced their hand to be like, holy shit, now BC only across Canada has extracts.

3:36:08BubblemanThey're the only ones because they have this court case. So the Canadian government was super quick to create a federal Supreme Court. And of course, the exact same thing happened. It was basically, hey, we got to change the law for all of Canada. And overnight, we went from only being allowed to have flour to being allowed to have everything. It was a fucking beautiful thing. So I got I got to think we need to look.

3:36:34BubblemanListen, first of all, we have righteousness on our side and we have cannabis on our side. We have the frequency of cannabis on our side, which I know all of us, whether we're PhDs or soil specialists or extract, we know there's something there that there's a power to it. And it's probably that power That is the very thing that can shrink tumors and eliminate seizures and just produce these more empathetic ways of thinking versus parasitical ways of thinking back to the demonic and the angelic that I just think we can't lose.

3:37:09BubblemanI just I am optimistic that we can't lose as long as we don't give up. We're on the right side of this. We've always been on the right side of this, even when it really seemed like the wrong side.

3:37:21Etienne FontanWell, your guidance through your frustrations, we've watched and also adjusted. We looked at doing what you did as well, which was you had so many federal, you had so many cases that they finally got enjoined into one case. which is something the united states hasn't really done and so we actually investigated looking at we talked to a constitutional uh lawyer about doing that and we actually had not one but two uh points we could take forward And that constitutional lawyer also let us know that it was going to take about 10 to 12 years, you know, about six lawyers, a few million dollars, and that they felt that there was going to be legislative change within those 12 years.

3:38:07Etienne FontanWell, that was what, about five years ago, Mike, we spoke to her and, you know, got that understanding. So we investigated and looked at that, but of course, we're an all-volunteer group, so we ain't got that kind of money, nor do lawyers have that type of time to donate.

3:38:22SpeakerAnd here we are. Here we are.

3:38:25Etienne FontanAnd through the actions that you did and the other international team, Michael, is why we're here is because that changed in the treaty. And then what happened, Max, is we we we contacted the attorney general and then we spoke to the lead counsel for the Office of National Drug Control Policy and I think it was like October of 2022. And we were like, hey, you need to realize that you are out of compliance.

3:38:51Etienne FontanYou beat us over the head about compliance. Well, now you're outside of compliance. Because when Michael and our team changed it, our State Department basically said, well, they felt the change was not significant enough. And we balked at that. And so that's why we reached out to the attorney general and then spoke to the lead counsel for the ONDCP. And then coincidentally, two weeks later, using two of our talking points, Biden came out talking rescheduling.

3:39:21Etienne FontanSo we're proud to have kind of pushed this in the direction. But if it wasn't for Michael and our international team changing international law, we wouldn't be here. They would still use the same argument against us.

3:39:38SpeakerA little footnote of history is the only reason we went to the White House is because we knew them really well because we worked really well with them in Vienna. And, you know, we had a really working relationship with them. We knew their phone numbers and stuff. And the attorney general at that time was just stonewalling us. We never heard anything back from the AG. We just got so frustrated.

3:39:54SpeakerWe reached out to the White House. So that is funny how these things unfold in the real world.

3:40:01BubblemanI can see your dog just as I said that he fucking disappeared. Yeah. That was our only ad.

3:40:09SpeakerHow do I make this? Let's see. I can make a background. Caleb, you're muted if you're talking.

3:40:15Etienne FontanCaleb, you're muted.

3:40:17Collin PalmerI was highlighting the dogs just like teleporting in and out.

3:40:20Etienne FontanYeah, right? Yeah. Dude, awesome.

3:40:25BubblemanI really appreciate the conversation today, guys. It's been, you know what? It's so funny. There he is. Sometimes we have slower hash churches and I could maybe get away with leaving an hour earlier. Well, today it was a stick and puck hockey at the arena down, you know, half an hour away from my house. And it was at... It was at 12 o'clock. It ends in 10 minutes.

3:40:48BubblemanAnd my son wanted to go so badly. I wanted to go so badly. I was going to be like, maybe ATN or Colin could like be the admins. And I was like, no, I need to listen to this conversation. So I really had to like sacrifice as a Canadian. You can imagine how hard this was. I sacrificed hockey for you guys today. I need you to know that that is really something.

3:41:06BubblemanThat is something. That is something. And also there's nobody watching right now because the World Cup is on. So no, I'm just joking. There's a couple hundred people watching right now.

3:41:17Etienne FontanI think this is probably one of the more, this has been one of the more important hash churches we've had in a little bit because it really is, it's covering a major change because you know what happens in the U.S. really ripples throughout the world and one of the things that we've worked at at the U.N. is I mean our people spent literally 24 years trying to get

3:41:42Etienne FontanJust the word harm reduction added. Okay, 24 years. Think about that. How long does that, just to add two words to a treaty, to an understanding of a discussion. So for then our own government to come out and then right after we finally got that passed, To have then, you know, this current administration, you know, push completely against logic intelligence because also our friendlies who we were talking to in the government have all gone dark since this administration came on hand because, you know, they're ducking the swing of the dragon's tail, so to say.

3:42:19Etienne FontanShit, everyone's fucking fearing for their...

3:42:24BubblemanThere's safety out there in the world. It's a wild one. We just made a bunch of laws here in Canada that if you like write the wrong thing, like if you're pissed off and emotional and you write something about anyone that's like bad, they're gonna come and arrest you at your house like they do in the UK. I think it's called Bill C-22 or 21. It's definitely scary.

3:42:48BubblemanIt just passed in Canada. And yeah, we're just living in this weird kind of bubble where there's everyone's disingenuine. There's no authenticity. It's like whatever you can just tell. It's just like there's no authenticity behind it. It doesn't make the hair on your arm stand up. It like makes the hairs in your brain stand up, which is kind of how I know. Like, listen, I know what's right and what's good.

3:43:18BubblemanI'm not interested in harming people or taking advantage of people. I'm not interested in like getting a one up. I'm not interested in keeping any single group of people down. I don't punch down. I'll say anything for a laugh. I will admit that. But I think humor is fair game. I'm raised by South Park. I think making fun of everyone is absolutely essential. Otherwise, we can't make fun of anyone.

3:43:44BubblemanAnd that's a fuck dude. Like if I couldn't make fun of you guys, I don't know what I would do. I mean, my goodness.

3:43:52Etienne FontanI have a question for Max. Tell it. What's up? So now that you've been there, you kind of went from being an outsider now to having this perspective. And a very deep inside perspective now deeper than most people have an understanding of. And now you have an intimate understanding from, you know, the lack of reactions or dealing with it. So what's next for you? And what's the biggest thing that you plan to take away from this experience?

3:44:23SpeakerThat's a wow. All right. This is a really good question. First, I think not only was sitting in that room very enlightening, and even though these are not the same, these aren't old arguments, I really think that really wrapping, like tying all of your guys' perspectives from the science, from the VA perspective, from the single convention, that is the perspective that like everyone really needs. And so I'm very thankful to actually have been able to get that from you guys.

3:44:58SpeakerWhat's next for me as far as that goes with this new insight? The video stuff was only ever just like, oh, I figured I'd do it just because it was helpful. But now I'm like, I guess I have to pay even further attention and be more on top of all of the hearings and the things that not everyone's going to go to. But personally, I mostly focused on New Jersey right now, working on an omnibus reform package for the industry, the adult use industry in Jersey, and just got finished working, helping out with the Virginia bill down there for their adult use market.

3:45:33SpeakerSo it's... I thought I was going to be doing a lot more hands on plant. Here's how you don't have your facility fall apart. Here's how you build a facility that has enough dry rooms and those kind of things. And it's turned into being more of translating the plant to the people who don't understand the plant and the rooms that have never touched it.

3:45:57BubblemanInteresting. Well, we'll see how I guess. Yeah, I mean, there's so many states operating right now working on these things. It is strange that they don't all really communicate with one another, that they're all independent. They say they do. They say they do, but they can't possibly. They're like, oh, we researched everything that went bad before us.

3:46:14SpeakerWe researched it and we looked at all these states. Then I'm like, what did you do?

3:46:17BubblemanDid you look up all the bad things and write them down? What's your research, you know?

3:46:26SpeakerI am in South Jersey.

3:46:28Etienne FontanOh, yeah. Is it just another metadata study or did you actually do human studies with cannabis? Because all we're seeing is, you know, a lot of metadata studies, which are, you know, aren't real studies in our opinion, and they're slanting them and they can be slanted. However, You want them too. So that's one of the things we're calling for in the VA is for more humans and cannabis research actually being done, especially on real world cannabis, not this, you know, this crappy shit from, you know, Mississippi that fails mildews, molds and mildews and comes in at about 4% THC.

3:47:04Etienne FontanThat's not what I sell at my dispensary for the past 27 years. That's not what I'm going to be selling today. That's not what I'm going to be Selling tomorrow. That's just not something. Now, five or 10 milligram drinks. That's something that the consumer wants and, you know, is interested in. But that's a different, you know, discussion altogether. And I'm keeping an eye on because Michael's also in Virginia.

3:47:26Etienne FontanSo we're keeping an eye on things in Virginia. So we wish you, you know, great success and, you know, your future endeavors. And, you know, we would like to interview you sometime. So I'd like to get your contact out of this in the end, too. Because our work internationally and the team who we have, we have a lot to discuss.

3:47:51SpeakerYeah, I think that's the coolest part about this is like what a time to be alive and also to understand the work that came before me because I just like I had an idea but just like hearing about oh and like the 10 year swings of these things and there being a time where if you were honest about your cannabis use with the VA until very recently you were going to get labeled as a drug abuser and not be able to get treated.

3:48:16SpeakerThat kind of stuff is... I don't think that many people, I know a lot about the inner workings of the cannabis industry, but I did not know that. And that's, these are the little things that need to get changed to get to the final finish line. And then we've got Canada up there in the corner as the goal we can look at, look towards.

3:48:36BubblemanWe've got a few things, right? That's for sure. Did you find out the milligrams on that winning beverage? It was a hundred. It was a hundred. Damn, dude. That's a lot.

3:48:47Etienne FontanIt was an iced tea, like a raspberry iced tea or something like that.

3:48:51SpeakerWas it thick like you want to drink the whole thing, or was it like a liquor like you know you don't want to drink at all?

3:48:57Collin PalmerI wasn't a beverage judge, so I still haven't tried it myself.

3:49:01BubblemanOkay.

3:49:02Collin PalmerI think it's more like a drink in one time, yeah.

3:49:05BubblemanAre you a big 100 meg guy, Caleb, or...

3:49:08SpeakerUm, I mean, no, not at once. Yeah.

3:49:13BubblemanLike I, that would be a very bad experience for me. I did 60 or 70 on a plane not too long ago. And I really didn't like that for at least an hour. I was like, this sucks. Like this just fucking sucks. Like I gotta ride this out for one hour, you know?

3:49:29Etienne FontanYeah, that's where you need a CBD blend. You know, having a blend of tea, it's THC and CBD. Or just do less.

3:49:37BubblemanOr do less, yes, yes, yes. You can always drink more. Or drink half a can. You can't drink less. Yeah, well, this was a gummy I did myself, but I could have easily used half of it.

3:49:46SpeakerYou know, this is a good place to, like, I guess, close out on because one of the, I think it was the pharmacist, Said when now we're talking about like the ambiguity and dosing and we can't dose cannabis, we can't dose all these things. Well, he said he was talking about an 18 milligram dose being I don't remember what it was, but he said 18 milligrams is the dose.

3:50:08SpeakerHe turns to the judge and he says, think of a gummy bear and then a gummy bear with its head cut off. So clearly you do know how to dose this and do the math here if you're able to make that conclusion when five minutes previously he said nobody eats a tenth of a cookie. It was just all.

3:50:29BubblemanYeah, it's ridiculous. Then make it smaller. Make it dosable. This is we can absolutely do this. This is not brain surgery.

3:50:36SpeakerIt's like we can do it.

3:50:37Collin PalmerIt's been done, you know, like only.

3:50:41SpeakerYou can only hypothetically cut a gummy bear. There's no actual cutting a gummy bear. Yeah, but you can just pack it, you know?

3:50:50Dr Mark ScialdoneCut it up all you want. It ain't going to give you lung cancer like smoking cigarettes does, right?

3:50:58BubblemanThat is also the truth. Absolutely. Although, who knows what kills more, sugar or tobacco? I have no idea. I bet your sugar's up there though.

3:51:08Etienne FontanSugar's probably up there considering the diabetes. So is salt, for that matter. All the other diseases. But yeah, when it was around blindness a lot, diabetes was big.

3:51:21BubblemanWhat I have found in my short life is that we seem to die doing everything. I haven't found a single thing humans do that some motherfucker hasn't gone and died doing.

3:51:32SpeakerAnd we tend to allow adults to make decisions that aren't going to immediately kill them. So it's interesting that this is where we draw the line from allowing adults to make adult decisions.

3:51:43BubblemanDude, well, you know, now that the Feelings Act of 2026 is passed worldwide, who knows where we're on our way to. Just want to make sure I don't hurt anyone's feelings. Oh, wait, I think the police are at my door. What did I say wrong?

3:51:59SpeakerThe International Treaty on Political Correctness. Oh, my goodness, dude.

3:52:04BubblemanI grew up with comedians. I thought it was good to just be like, yeah, let's bust everyone's balls. This is hilarious. I do want to thank the Press Club. These fancy folks over here for sponsoring the show as they do on the regular. And I want to thank Puffco for lacing us all up and being a sponsor of Hash Church Now for a couple of years solid.

3:52:28BubblemanAppreciate you guys doing that. We got 10 minutes left of talking here. I really want to thank you, Max, for coming out and spending four hours with us and being early. Yeah, you've been here for four hours hanging out. Your dog hasn't left your side. I was like, dude, I love Max's dog. What's your dog's name? Durbin. For Durbin. Durbin. That's right. Durbin is awesome. Durbin hasn't left your fucking side since you started the podcast.

3:52:51BubblemanHe's clearly he or she is clearly obsessed with you. He's the man. He's crazy.

3:52:56SpeakerHe's 40 years old. He grew up on a pot farm with me. And like, he's insane. He just. Nice.

3:53:03Etienne FontanAre you still parked outside the DEA making them nervous or you've moved on since?

3:53:08SpeakerNo, I'm back in New Jersey now. Not making the DEA nervous at the moment, but I'm sure there's ways that we make them nervous. Here, I can show you guys something fun.

3:53:22SpeakerSo there's a museum downstairs. There's a DEA museum in the DEA headquarters. And we were like, well, we should go. We had downtime. So we went and checked it out. Some interesting stuff, some scary stuff. And we kept joking. We're like, oh, is there a gift shop? Why isn't there a gift shop? And then our last day, we're walking out of the hearing. And we're like, oh, I guess this is it.

3:53:46SpeakerThere's no gift shop. And then we turned to our corner, and there's this super stealthy hidden gift shop in the corner. So I grabbed where I saw these patches. I saw these patches and they were skunk man. Oh, that's awesome. They were actually selling them there. That's the marijuana intelligence unit. And then we have Puff the Magic Dragon here.

3:54:17Etienne FontanOh, that's fantastic. Yeah, Michael collects those as well as our friend Skunk Man Sam had probably the largest collection in the world. I was able to go through it in his home in Amsterdam. He has every patch from around the world and everyone like you have the color version. He'd have the color version. And if it was all in black, if it was all in the OD green or if it was all in the khaki, he had every version.

3:54:44Etienne FontanOh, that's so cool.

3:54:46SpeakerThat makes me feel better because I was like, oh no, like, I mean, I had to give the DEA $10.40.

3:54:53BubblemanSam's had the Grim Reaper. A lot of them. Syringes and the Grim Reaper and just like, holy shit. Sam would have already said, I have those.

3:55:05SpeakerI have that one. Oh, yeah. I visited the museum on its first day. I was like the first person that wasn't depressed to go in and I brought my wheelchair, which was actually a very wise move because they didn't have any chairs or anywhere to sit inside the place. Nowhere to sit. I actually bought, they had a little badge set, like mini badges. And I love that.

3:55:24SpeakerI still got it on my desk, this little set of all the DEA badges going through history.

3:55:28BubblemanWell, speaking of badges, I got to shout out a different Max, Max from Dialed In Gummies. And Dialed In Gummies are all across the US. Awesome guys. They run a podcast as well called Digging In Deeper. And when I did their podcast recently in Colorado, at the end of it, oh, look at that, Dialed In Gummies right there. Caleb's got the Dialed In Gummies. So We're going to be doing a collaboration with these guys with Bubble Man Brand in Colorado, in Massachusetts, and in Illinois, where you'll see my logo on the dialed in gummies.

3:56:02BubblemanThat should be in the next, you know, two or three months or so. But in the meantime, when I did his podcast, which was really an awesome podcast, I thought they were great and professional and asked wonderful questions. At the end of it, he gives you a hat and he's got a little mini iron in his hand and he's got some patches that are out. And this is the patch.

3:56:21BubblemanThank you for watching.

3:56:40BubblemanThat's Skully Vibes. Skully's coming on right away. And I pulled that patch out specifically for him. So I was like, well, then give me that rosin one, dude. So speaking of patches, I thought it was a nice full circle. Very cool that you showed those patches because as Etienne said, Sam had been collecting those for I don't even know how long and Michael as well. So pretty cool.

3:57:01BubblemanI remember when I first saw them was in the early 2000s and I was like, this is kind of weird. Like I didn't know what to make of it. I was like, this is kind of trippy, like kind of the way you were feeling like, oh, I gave money to the DEA. Like, oh, I wonder if people are going to judge me for this. It's like, oh, I bought a DEA badge.

3:57:18BubblemanI got canceled by my community. The Canvas community canceled me because I I spent $4 at the gift shop at the DEA Museum and apparently that's a lot of colonizers.

3:57:31SpeakerThere's also the badge itself, these patches themselves. If you read the policy and the stated objectives and the mission of the organization and then compare it to their patch, there's often a pretty big disparity. I mean, the worst one ever I saw was one that showed like a, Almost looked like one of the two birds, the heckle and jekyll bird behind bars with Rasta colors with a joint in its mouth.

3:57:57SpeakerAnd it just to me struck me as so incredibly racist. And, you know, their paperwork isn't racist, but they weren't really afraid to let their hair down a little bit in their patches in a way that I think that's what I think drove David to a certain extent was this was like an inside view into the deepest psyche of these agents. Besides you know getting their old badges and stuff like that is almost like capturing their flag too.

3:58:21Etienne FontanYeah, Michael and Sam, well, Michael has a collection as well of which someday when he gets his museum, I plan to donate Mike Tan and others. So that's what you can do with your patches in the future is donate them to Cannabis Museum so people can see what these ghoulish people really, you know, it is exactly what Michael said. It's a clear glimpse into their psyche and how they viewed us.

3:58:46Etienne FontanAnd how they treated us and exactly how and the roots of racism goes so deeply and are so deeply intertwined in it that they they whip it out for themselves and, you know, literally joke about it and laugh at us like, you know, we're low hanging fruit. So I hope history is able to shame them in ways that we can't currently do so.

3:59:12SpeakerYou know, it's interesting. I grabbed this. I grabbed the patch back out because the word like the inflammatory word of eradication. But then I realized that they actually used the word cannabis, which I find to be interesting.

3:59:28BubblemanIt is interesting. You'd think that would say marijuana every single time.

3:59:32Etienne FontanYeah. Well, we fought for that. That was a significant change that we we made back in the 90s was to no longer embrace marijuana because of its racism terms. So these are the racists themselves. Correct. And so to see them that we've actually flipped their script to where they're actually using the word cannabis is their script can be flipped.

3:59:59BubblemanThere's a chance.

4:00:01SpeakerHere's one I wasn't going to mention at all, at all, at all, but because we're on literally this topic and the topic of flipping scripts, I had my script flipped recently because I was working with some social justice advocates and it was brought to my attention that Thank you for watching.

4:00:39Etienne FontanYeah, we use the term traditional market as well because that's what it's traditionally been.

4:00:45SpeakerBut they'll call, they'll start to call in adult use markets where medical converts to like the MSO medical converts into an adult use market. They'll call that the traditional market. And that to me, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

4:00:59BubblemanYeah, it's all perspective. I've definitely had people, I've had a black woman say, hey, can you not use the term the black market? And I've had other black friends be like, no, dude, that's the best market. What are you talking about? Like, that's not derogatory at all. It's the fucking way better market than the market you're dealing with over there. So it's all, it's all perspective, right?

4:01:22BubblemanIt's like, I just try to respect each individual person. I grew up in the term, in the terminology. I'll usually go back and forth with gray, but gray, gray doesn't sound like an accurate description. When I say black market in no way, shape or form, do I mean anything that has anything to do with race? It's...

4:01:41SpeakerYes, absolutely.

4:01:42BubblemanYeah, it would be like me saying that I, you know, you can't... Yeah, I don't know. It is something. If someone asks me not to use the term, I absolutely will not use the term. I'm not trying to start arguments or make people feel bad in any way, but... You know, I mentioned it to some other friends that it had happened and they were just like, well, that's ridiculous.

4:02:00SpeakerLike, that is absolutely everyone's going to have their own their own interpretation of it, too. But it's just like it was something that was brought to my attention. I was like, you know, I had never thought of it like that before.

4:02:08BubblemanYeah, it had been brought to my attention some years ago. Actually, it's probably four or five years ago. The first time someone approached me and said, hey, you know, don't use that term. And I was like, oh, shit. You know what? For you, I won't use that term. But. For me, it's a term that I grew up in. And it still has a definition. Yeah, and I'm in Canada where we're all not white.

4:02:29BubblemanWe were all different colors and shapes and sizes, and so we all used the terminology, and none of us felt like it was against anyone in particular. It was just the market that we were trapped in. As Etienne said, the illicit market, the market that is not allowed. Now it's the licensed market. I certainly don't hear anyone calling it the white market. No, I don't hear that.

4:02:56BubblemanDo you know what I mean? So if it's not the white market, then it's not the black market. It's also the free market.

4:03:04SpeakerYeah, yeah, absolutely. That would be nice if we could have that for real.

4:03:08Dr Mark ScialdoneThe legacy market. I like legacy.

4:03:10BubblemanLegacy is nice. It sounds nice.

4:03:13Dr Mark ScialdoneYeah, I think that's the right term. It sounds nice.

4:03:16BubblemanBut you know what? Here's the thing. Good luck changing people's minds from who have lived it for 40 or 50 years.

4:03:24SpeakerAbsolutely.

4:03:26BubblemanYou know, this is the thing. But I appreciate you coming on, Max. Really. This has been amazing.

4:03:31SpeakerI did not realize. I knew we were going long, but I was like, wait, you said four hours. Whoa.

4:03:35BubblemanMy girlfriend's like, are you good? We always... Every once in a while, my wife will just bring me like a glass of water and I'll look at it and be like, I don't think I want to have to get up and piss anytime soon. I think I'll just avoid the water and smash the dabs.

4:03:53SpeakerI get a little bit of water from splash up from my bong. Yeah, keeps me hydrated.

4:03:59BubblemanYeah, I could testify in the U.S. in the hearings if you guys want for how you can get hydrated by smoking bongs. I'm sure Kevin Sabet would have a A heyday with me. I appreciate everyone for showing up and being on the show today. Like I said, thanks to Puffco and the Press Club. Thanks to Bingo Lombardi for holding the chat down and all the people that have been in there all day chatting and listening and enjoying the conversation.

4:04:24BubblemanI think it's important. I think these are important conversations. I think the work that you did there, Max, was very important. And the more we can share it, you can also see Max was on the Adam Dunn show on Friday. If you didn't catch that, you can go check out Max over on Adam's show. And talking about these very similar things, but I'm sure they got into different things.

4:04:44SpeakerCompletely different conversation, which is really cool.

4:04:47BubblemanYeah, so definitely go check out that. We'll put that link in the description here soon. And we'll have you back, Max. We'll definitely have you back and we'll talk about this some more. When you feel there's more to talk about, just reach out and let me know if there's something new the Cannabis Wise guys are up to. Hit me up. And in the meantime, yeah, drive your van to Whistler, bro, for like November, December, and we'll smash powder up there.

4:05:11SpeakerOh, that sounds so good.

4:05:13BubblemanYeah, trust me. It's amazing, dude. Thank you, everyone. May the full melt bless your bowl sooner than later. We will see you next Sunday. Peace, everybody.