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The Original Terpestival™ and Terpene Crown™

By Dr. Michelle Sexton

The First Original Terpestival™ and Terpene Crown™ was held in Seattle on July 23rd to a sell-out crowd, who came to celebrate the aroma and properties of the terpenes. Dr. Ethan Russo, an internationally recognized Cannabis historian, Board-certified neurologist, psychopharmacology researcher and Medical Director for Phytecs from Vashon Island, was the keynote speaker. Dr. Russo detailed the terpenoid class of compounds in cannabis and reported some of what is known about biological activity of these compounds. The Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP) reached a milestone in this successful fund-raising event. CASP collects and produces information about cannabis policy and markets in the context of state-level experiments in democracy directly affected by Legal Cannabis laws, rules, and regulations.

The event kicked off with a VIP party and food-truck event along with with sponsor booths for festival-goers to peruse. CASP also hosted the “Aroma Bar”, a place to tickle and train the nose in recognizing different terpenes common to Cannabis and other aromatic plants such as Hops, Rosemary, Sweet Orange and Black Pepper. Following Dr. Russo’s address, there was a panel focused on discussion of various methods of extraction, genetics and genetic diversity and medical aspects of the whole plant. Panel members were Reverend Jeff Church, The Ganjier, Kevin Jodrey, and Dr. Michelle Sexton, Executive Medical Research Director at CASP.

The Terpene Crown was publicized to offer 6 awards in each category for flower and solventless concentrates (CO2 extraction was accepted). Terepene analysis was performed by The Werc Shop, (using GC/FID) as an in-kind donation to CASP for the event. The Werc Shop quantified 15 terpenoids and results were reported as a percent of total weight of the sample. Winners were selected by a Judging Panel, which was blinded to the entrants, as were the laboratory and individual Judges that provided the “subjective” information on the entries. The winners were selected based on a weighted average of the subjective results and the quantitative data. The aggregate results along, with the winners in each category, are in the graphs below for Flower, Extracts and Total Terpenes for Flower and Extracts. The graphs contain the name of the entrant as well as the varietal name of the winner.

In an inadvertent misunderstanding on the day of the awards ceremony, we mistakenly “disqualified” two entries in the Extracts category. Our deep regrets to Reverend Jeff Church of Thinc Pure, whose entry of a Sour Diesel CO2 extract is obviously in a mystical and alchemically distinguished category, of its’ own. It was a clear outlier, as the terpenoid content of the 15 terpenoids measured was 38.4%. This extract was also an outlier for limonene content measuring 4% limonene. The second entry, an “anonymous” extract, was also disqualified from the standard categories but then awarded the second place “Outlier Award” for total tcontent of the 15 terpenoids quantified at 22.4% and β-myrcene content of 6.6%.

The basic hypothesis in the design of the analysis and survey was that particular ratios of terpenoids or high/low levels of individual terpenoids might correlate with the felt experience reported by the judges. However, in comparing the quantitative data to the judges’ subjective experience, there was no correlation between what the judges rated as the “Most sedating” or “Most Stimulating” entries and myrcene content, myrcene:pinene ratio, pinene content and pinene/myrcene ratio. In contrast, there was a robust correlation between pinene content and “piney” taste by the judges, and a loose correlation between limonene content and “lemony” taste.

Judge’s Award for the “Most stimulating” was for Cascadia Kush flower, grown by Hesperides’ Kevin Kelly, and Canna Tsu raw CO2 extract by Mike West of Green Lion Farms. Cascadia Kush ranked second out of the 19 flower entries for total pinene content (α + β Pinene). Pinene has been reported to act as an inhibitor for the break-down of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, which may explain the cognitive and physically stimulating effects that some users report with strains high in pinene. Canna Tsu extract had a relatively low level of pinene and pinene: myrcene ratio compared to other extracts.

The Judge’s award for “Most Sedating” was a sweep by Shawn DeNae of Washington Bud Company for Harlequin flower and “Entourage” oil, using an apparently a novel CO2 extraction protocol by Eden Labs.

These results support the idea that the “entourage” effect, attributed to terpenoids, on the cannabinoid experience is not amenable to simplistic or reductionist science (Surprised? We are not!). It is possible that our “sample size” of judges was not large enough to lead to significant conclusions. Nevertheless, it seems clear that while analytical results may say: “this one is really high in pinene” (for instance), the judges’ ability to perceive this was variable, as expected. In agreement with most published scientific data, the terpene content (based on the 15 compounds analyzed) was as expected in flower, < typically 3% from indoor-grown flower, and with an average of 1.4%. The contribution of the terpenoids to the whole plant experience may be “unquantifiable” from the user perspective, and yet this class of compounds is an critical element to both the medicinal and experiential effects. While we at CASP were celebrating the aroma/terpenes of cannabis, on the same day, medical cannabis in Washington State became confined to “closed containers” in retail outlets. In these outlets, medical and adult users alike will no longer be able to select their desired products by following their noses! This is such a strange and unreasonable policy, and we hope to be able to continue influence such public policy at CASP by providing the science and research on which such policies can be refined.

There were many who worked tirelessly to birth this CASP fundraiser, including our two event coordinators, Wendy Maguire of WLM and Co LLC, and Lara Kaminski. Former CASP Board member Joy Beckerman went well beyond the call of duty and brought her unrivaled expertise in event-planning and complete oversight. We are extremely grateful to all of our sponsors. At the Diterpene level: Eden Labs, ThincPure, the CPC, The Wercshop; at the Sesquiterpene Level: Northwest Cannabis Classic; Cannacon, DB3 Inc, Terpinator, Northwest Leaf, the CCSE and Wonderland; at the Monoterpene Level: Seniors MMJ Network, Cannabis Basics, TDCANN and Assoc., Blue Crow Organics, Garden Extracts, True North, Bud Nation Seattle, NW Patient Resource Center, Gleam law and Washington Bud Co; and the in-kind donations from Lyon’s Cases, Dockside, GES and The Herbalist.

We graciously acknowledge the NORML women’s Alliance, the Ganjier, and the CASP Board Members who put many hours of work in behind the scenes. Our deepest gratitude for all who participated, donated, bought tickets, entered the contest, and helped to promote the event in social networks. We are greatly touched by the support for what we are doing at CASP and for our ongoing research. We hope that this is the beginning of a trend for engaging the community in helping to perpetuate the work that we are so passionate about: collecting and producing information. If you did not get to support CASP by attending or participating in the event, we invite you to donate to our ongoing work, please visit our website!

Mission, Audiences, Standpoint

INTRODUCTION
by Steve Hyde
Research Associate and Communications Director

For Ethnography into the Human Cannabis Relationship is a collaboration between filmmaker Steve Hyde and social scientist Dominic Corva Ph.D. Ethnographic interviews differ from other kinds of interviews because an ethnographic approach seeks to shine a light on the ways that individual experiences often reflect collective ones.

The human geography story we develop here is a structural story. It’s a geographic tale about the emergence of CBD genetics in the American West. This episode of For Ethnography into the Human Cannabis Relationship is based on an hour-long interview with Christopher Larson, a grower who is a producing member of the TeaHouse Collective known for its emphasis on CBD rich genetics. As an agriculturalist, he is dedicated to growing only organic, sustainable sun-grown cannabis. His creative partnership with Lawrence Ringo produced Lost Coast Botanicals, which, as the website suggests, is source for “CBD and Sustainably Grown Medicinals”

Here we present a story that offers a glimpse into the lives of cannabis growers in Northern California. It’s a glimpse into the lives of people who grow plants collectively to produce medicine, distribute it and gather observational data concerning its efficacy for patients. The discoveries made by experimental cannabis growers have great significance for medicine and science. These creative growers make new discoveries all the time – They reach out to lab scientists for mentorship and guidance in science practices and they experiment in a variety of ways that often produce astonishing results. And the results of the experimentation has been a wide range of useful new treatments for a variety of medical conditions.

This story is about the growers who recognized they had discovered something unique in cannabidiol (CBD). The plants were smaller and didn’t produce as much and the cannabis culture didn’t cultivate it because CBD flowers developed a reputation as something that doesn’t get anybody “high”. This group of growers realized they were growing something different. Maybe it’s in the plants terpenes – they wondered. Lab results of plant material suggested yes, that cannabidiol-rich cannabis does appear to have more myrcene and linalool. Maybe cannabidiol has something to do with that? That question brings us to July, 2015.

Dedicated to the memory of Lawrence Ringo. (featured in the photograph below)

Summary

This video and its transcription were developed for the purposes of higher eduction. This work is a source of primary data. Typos, mistakes and video recording errors exist. Please contact the Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy to report errors or for a free copy of the video and transcript.

Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP) is a not-for-profit research think tank dedicated to learning lessons for legal landscapes and studying the human-cannabis relationship.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=134&v=TVZwT3U43aQ

For Ethnography into the Human Cannabis Relationship
Dominic Corva PhD Interviews Christopher Larson from Lost Coast Botanicals and the Tea House Collective in Humboldt County California.

Interview by Dominic Corva PhD
Video by Steve Hyde

*** Please be advised there are text transcription errors present in this text. (07.18.2015) The dashed line indicates untranscribed speech “_____”. Square brackets [ . . .] indicate subjective translation. ***

AUDIO START (TRT 60 Minutes)

Dr. Corva: So, obviously, Christopher you’ve seen me talk to lots of people, I’ve talked to you already, but for this one, I just want to make sure I remind us about it because sometimes I’ll forget – that the structural story that we want to get at – is the emergence of CBD genetics in United States, in California in particular. And the ethnographic way to get at it is to talk to the people who were in the middle of it and who were, you know, connected to it and it’s less about, okay, this happened then, but more about this is how my life developed in conjunction with it. So, there’s aspects to it that are helpful such as, you know, trying to remember dates as specifically as possible, you know, but general timeframes of the year, let’s just say that the unit is year, if possible, but this also of course besides the CBD genetics getting here, I’d also like to hear the story of how you met Ringo and how that partnership started and to get at that story and through the lens of the social relationships that made it happen.

Christopher: Yeah, that was really my introduction to Lawrence. It was through Cath, you know, his partner, Cath Hart. Cath did festivals for years, you know, music festivals and that’s what we did too. I mean as well with our ____ and our import things and our tools and so forth at music festivals. So, we knew Cath really well, you know, always neighbors and always good energy – a great artist who did beautiful work, I really liked the work a lot and she would talk about her partner, you know, but I thought was that just a business partner? or was that a romantic partner or something? I didn’t really know, you know. And then it turned out to be Lawrence, _____ and so I think it was at the Emerald Cup, one of the Emerald cups in 2009 I guess it was.

Dr. Corva: So, in Laytonville?

Christopher: It must have been yeah because that was ____ at the Mateel or it might have been actually ____ one of the Hempfest at Mateel in 2009, I think that’s what it actually was when Lawrence had started selling his seed and he hadn’t been doing that that long and the thing was it was Cath that really got him into the whole idea of… oh, you need to organize your product to make ____ because she had great experience in doing shows too, I mean selling to the public essentially and he wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise. He did just, you know, he had an idea and he wanted to be a rock star that was his big thing. He was a hell of musician and so he had a sense of showmanship and being in public, he was comfortable with that, but the rest not a clue. So, I mean they were getting their first little packets of seeds together and so forth and in his first wave of offering to the public. I mean we had all traded seeds with each other for years, you know, and the deal was you’d sell seeds if you had something good and you had a good name for it. [Price was] a buck to three bucks for seeds. That was the going rate for a long time and [for three] it was like people would raise eyebrows a little bit, but if [the seeds] were really good, you know, that was okay. The next step of course was sexed plants, you know, and that was_____ price would vary if you had a nice, healthy sexed plant, you know, that was what was going on, there wasn’t a lot of cloning at that point, you know.

Dr. Corva: Even in 2009?

Christopher: There was cloning going on, but no, not in our neighborhood, you know. People were still doing a good job of stabilizing seed, you know, and so that was what you looked for, you know, there was a hardiness to it and there was a lot of stuff. It was very much associated with indoor – the clones were. So to do that, you know. So anyway, here’s Lawrence and he’s, you know, very much associated with outdoor and growing in the sun and so forth, but he had been buying fancy seeds from Holland and then working that into his breeding program and being bound ____ the seed he was getting from Holland because he felt like they were misrepresenting. you know [he thought] it was all crap. that [the seed] wasn’t what it was supposed to be and so forth and so on, which was the case. I mean it was all over the map and he had the seeds, so great, you know. I wasn’t really ____ He didn’t offer any strains of CBD at that point, but he had identified CBD at that point. It was actually the Sour Tsunami, yeah, Swiss Gold came later into the thing and so he had identified the Sour Tsunami, which was great. He could ____ and he picked up some clones of Cannatonic and Harlequin both. And then he began to breed some seed on it, but that wasn’t what he was supposed to have there. He was supposed to have these other things, Granny Derkel we called it, it was Purple Urkle, you know, the big purples that were so popular, there was a range of them that… what’s his name, cashed in on. It was the Grand Daddy Purple. And this was Lawrence’s little cross. Well, it was great except it turned out it was really high… full of CBD quite high, I mean, you know…

Dr. Corva: The Purple Urkle was?

Christopher: Well, the seed. I was buying seed for them and I grew the seed out and I was expecting to have this really nice stable, you know, ____ product and it turned out to be pretty high in CBD, it _____ with very high CBD and then I got intrigued about the whole thing like, well, how much [CBD] is really in there and there weren’t any labs available at that point. There was Samantha Miller down in Santa Rosa so that was great because there was some way to [test] what was going on. In the meantime, that was the year the same seed she had done that study that showed up in O’Shaughnessy’s comparing seven different phenotypes types out of the ____ based on the Sour Tsunami cross with this and that and [published] a nice chart and so – here was Lawrence – on the one hand how to pack and market and sit there at the table and do things and on the other hand how to actually quantify his seed breeding program, you know, and it was just the beginning [when we] came together and we were just about to form Tea House at that point. So, anyway, [that is how we] developed an interest in breeding because I had been doing [seed] stabilizing.

Dr. Corva: Quick question, so the Purple Urkle was crossed to Sour Tsunami that was then…?

Christopher: Nobody knows whether it was crossed or not. It was all serendipitous. [Pollen was blowing] all over the place, but that was the primary CBD donor probably at that point and any cross to bunch of AC/DC with the Sour Tsunami pollen that he was able to get. That [was the great feat]that he did – was to create male pollen – high CBD so that he could add that to the available clones, you know that was the deal and then also Bill Courtney took an interest and he brought us up a bunch of the Cannatonic clones from Spain that were seeds that he cracked and there was a whole range and it was great, he handed them out there, he handed out a bunch to HPRC – basically and here in Arcata and I got some from them, Aaron had to move his scene, he was freaked out, he gave a bunch of mismarked Cannatonics. Now, the neat story about that is what we call C6 now was marked C6 when I got that from strain from Aaron and it was a 1:1 strain, which is really nice desirable strain quite high overall and I call it C6 because that is what I knew it as, but then I heard down from the workshop, you know, Mark said, no, no, it’s not C6, it must be C18 or C16, you know, it probably was at one time, but unfortunately we kind of notoriously got to call C6 and I feel kind of directly responsible, but that’s what we knew and there was a lot of mixed up stuff, but anyway we started breeding after that and began to, you know, get to understand what we had and you know – section it off and be careful and there were always these little things that we have, but you know we still got mixed up, serendipitous kind of you know cross-pollination that nobody was expecting like Granny Urkle that sort of thing, you know, but out of that so I just — we developed more and more relationship anyway around the breeding and then around the extraction because at that point the next step was okay, how do you quantify, how do you get into some measurable amount and Lawrence was doing ethanol extraction at that time and so it was great he had, it was like rice cooker just basically, which were really set too hot and so the earlier ones were 120 degrees, which is just a little too hot to really control it, but that’s what we had to work with and then it was like, oh, bring it down to 115 degrees is a little slower, but it’s a lot more, you know, safe and then even 110 it will work and so gradually refining that process.

Dr. Corva: What’s not safe about it in higher temperatures?

Christopher: It tends to scorch, it will scorch on the bottom and before you know it, right at the end it will finish, you know, you’ve got a black melted mess, you know, decarboxylated – so that was interesting and so around these various things, you know, we didn’t really, then we began to get real scientific equipment and some basic to organic chemistry practice and understand it, that was pretty cool, but that was quite a bit later so that’s where I knew Lawrence from. It was let’s go in the kitchen and make stuff and that was pretty cool and out of that the thing was, of course, then we had to learn what is CBD, what can it do, you know, what are its properties, you know.

Dr. Corva: Let me ask you real quick and remember that as a book mark – what can it do and so forth, but did you have a little more experience than him at extracting or did you guys both kind of like?

Christopher: We started from the same point of view. I moved down to doing the CO2 and kind of encouraged that. He was still very much into the growing aspect.

Dr. Corva: There seemed to be a partnership.

Christopher: He wanted to be that, yeah, but that’s why it worked so well. I mean we had different areas you could bring together and it just worked really great, you know, and you know he didn’t have moral aversion to BHO but it was clear that this was not, he couldn’t do this in a healthy way and there was such out of, everybody is being so careless and so just greedy and lying basically about, oh, we’ve got completely clean BHO, you know, and really lying about so many things, you know, that was the whole industry, you know, and just a tissue of lies, you know, and that would make him indignant — I loved that about him, he would get indignant about the bull shit, you know, and we had that in common, you know, we kind of wanted to rangle toward what’s really true here, you know, what is really true, you know, and I mean if it wasn’t really pointed out, he would exaggerate things, but once he came to see and what was true, he accepted truth and hold to that, you know, what I mean, it’s like if nobody said anything different, then he didn’t know any better then it’s wonderful – it cure cancer and everything – but once it was cleared and that was not necessarily the case, yeah, he’d endorse that and that was good. So, basically, he was just a really kind of sweet and honorable person, you know, and he was so sweet underneath all the desire to be a rock star and desire for ego gratification and all that stuff, you know, sweet guy, you know, and he had had exposed all the usual crap that all of us get, you know, and got those imprints and he was trying to get over it, you know, and trying to get over being a male chauvinist pig, you know, essentially, (laughs) but he recognizing that he had to do that and willing to make the changes, you know. It was all to brief. And then when he got cancer, it was like we really just couldn’t believe it. We both just looked at each other like what the hell, you know what I mean, and that was his reaction and really before he could start, you know, applying everything possible to treat it, he was dead you know. It took four months from the time that he was diagnosed. We were in LA, actually made a trip down to the workshop, bringing CBD material down there to not well, we would bring some tests stuff to Mark but we were also, another story, but…

Dr. Corva: Yeah. So, that would have been right after the Emerald Cup actually that he was diagnosed, right?

Christopher: It was pretty much after the Emerald Cup. We did that. We recorded a radio show with Kerry Reynolds and that was aired while we here in LA and we listened to it down there because we couldn’t be in the studio that Sunday to do it and he was coughing, he had this horrible hack, it’s like, stay away from me, sharing a room…made me sick, you know. He’s like I don’t know what’s the matter; man I think I got the flu. Well, then a week later, so that’s how I can date it because whatever that date was that show aired that’s when we figured this up and a week later he got an oncologist and said you had to come to see me and two weeks later he was diagnosed with serious lung cancer, stage four – metastasized all through his back, it was really bad.

Dr. Corva: I did visit him in Rico when he was doing the outpatient thing and I did – shortly before he passed – do an exit interview, but that was back at his place with Cath.

Christopher: At least he got to go home at the end run, yeah, so yeah I was there as a hospice volunteer with him and the day before he died and it was coming really fast, that was just…. yeah, he was so bewildered by it, you know, he never got over being so bewildered by it.

Dr. Corva: Yeah, no kidding, yeah. Well, I mean, it’s such a compressed amount of time, I mean for all of us I think in the last six years – no matter what age we started at has been totally, you know, everything has changed, so much has changed.

Christopher: So much did change. It was right at the beginning of the whole idea of quantified medicine and what is in there and what’s going on and at that point it was still, the big race was to see how we can get the THC and that — not that that’s totally blamable, but it’s clear that you know even in the, well, the next thing we liked told Cath was look at this stuff, it won the Emerald Cup where they actually have judges that judge, okay, and it’s different than not, you know, other things and so this is not the high ones, it’s not the high THCs that are appealing ones there. And that’s not the case in the community, I mean for the most part the things that people love and want to come back for but they’re not always like that, but then that was just about pre-dab so that’s all turned into another thing.

Dr. Corva: So much has changed. So, in terms of your education and knowledge about CBD, at what point did you get your first quantified test?

Christopher: That would have been – I mean – in 2010 from Halent Labs as well as mine of course actually went through Halent Lab there and then through an account that Lawrence had. And then also through Samantha, I think I’ve got some ones from Samantha.

Dr. Corva: So, Ringo basically had…had been getting other tests, I’m trying to figure out like, you know, the awareness of CBD, it was there, it was out, the project CBD I think had already been going on a couple of years at that point.

Christopher: Yeah. I think Martin started, yeah, probably just officially started project CBD I think in maybe 2010.

Dr. Corva: So, 2010 and might not happened yet. There seemed to remember like O’Shaugnessey’s was looking at it.

Christopher: Yeah – O’Shaugnessey’s was looking at it.

Dr. Corva: And that would have been obviously like why Martin would know to start project CBD, but I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of actually like being aware of CBD and trying to brief before you’re actually even getting tests that indicate that you got it.

Christopher: Well, I didn’t really come to it that way. So, I’m saying, well, I guess it basically I did because I had this material that seemed to be really different, you know, what’s the deal, it’s really tasty. It actually turned out to be quite high linalool and myrcene. It was myrcene high and they found this in the Sour Tsunami and it did give this very gratifying feeling, from the neck you could get this physical effect as though your neck was kind of, and shoulders were beginning to just relax and soften, that was the effect it had for me – and I did want to know what was the deal with it so I found it to be really interesting, but you know it’s a hard thing to quantify. I mean, once we understood that was a big component of it, that I was really interested – and then we could begin to compare, you know, what it was like these different ones, but there was nothing about just saying this is a plant and I recognize it before I was told what it was. I didn’t really know what it was. I knew it didn’t get you high the same way. So that much was clear.

Dr. Corva: It strikes me that, you know, the effects that you’re observing saying this plant is different, although of course like the CBD part of it is very important, but also as you mentioned terpenes is that like those effects are coming from not just obviously the CBD, but the entourage effect and so…like.

Christopher: So, some of those plants tend to have those profiles in them, you know, until we’ve seen them in the CBD in particular, I don’t know of any CBD plants that are disassociated from that particular list of terpenes, they may be around, but I don’t grow them, you know, I mean I don’t have those. I haven’t seen them. Even the crosses with, you know, the big leaf Swiss Gold in a step, which we thought we were on to a whole another kind of thing, we called it Indica, you know, it seems like it was like an Indica(y) kind of plant, but it had actually had those same terpenes in it. So, it wasn’t that different.

Dr. Corva: Where did the Swiss Gold come from? Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

Christopher: The Swiss Gold, that was a bought seed that he had ordered from such place, I presume it was Dutch I mean that’s where all the seed companies were that he worked with and then the other was by way of Canada, you know, there’s bunch of Canadian bunch –Mark Emery is who I ordered stuff from. But Mark never marketed anything as CBD – at least that I was aware of – when he started that, so I am pretty sure that’s where it came from.

Dr. Corva: So, were they marketed as CBD?

Christopher: No, that just turned up. That was the serendipitous discovery and then what was the other one, oh, there was one that was called Oracle that was supposed to be something that it wasn’t and that got to be kind of goofy, Dr. Frankel got all excited about the Oracle, but it was just kind of a feeble AC/DC, which essentially is Cannatonic, so much of it just came out of that first 18 seeds of Cannatonic, but you know the thing is everybody had these memories of the old Oaxacan and the old Michoacan that had the sort of the same feeling to it, you know, that we had not seen in years and years and so there’s no way to go back and know it was high CBD or you know, was that a possibility? But that was the sense, I got. The familiarity went back to something, you know, I mean we all had that experience like, I had this before, but not in years, you know.

Dr. Corva: So, let me back up a moment, 18 Cannatonic seeds, there’s a very precise number; there’s a particular story behind that that I haven’t heard.

Christopher: Oh, you probably have…

Dr. Corva: Maybe, I mean I know from like from Spain, like I know from Spain Cannatonic came. I didn’t…

Christopher: There’s a lab in Berkeley, was one of the earliest genetic, you know, Cannatonic profile labs that Michelle Sexton was associated with. She was actually present when these were done, when these…

Dr. Corva: Right, I remember that. She has told me about that.

Christopher: Yeah, and that’s the place and everything stemmed out of those and then that’s where, that is where, you know, Bill Courtney got his starts from that he got…

Dr. Corva: Is that where the AC/DC line comes from is Bill Courtney?

Christopher: Yeah. Well, I say from theaw seeds.

Dr. Corva: From the seeds, but the Cannatonic seeds Bill Courtney got.

Christopher: I mean physically that’s where I got it from.

Dr. Corva: Right.

Christopher: Now, the backstory about spain and so forth – I don’t really know the details of all of that…that’s where it came from.

Dr. Corva: So, help me out a little bit with AC/DC obviously, you know, most people think of that as distinct from Cannatonic.

Christopher: Well, it appears different, but there’s a whole, like I said, there’s a whole range of these plants that were all part of the same batch as far as I know that expressed themselves differently, and AC/DC is really interesting because it’s got these round stems, it doesn’t have any flat sides on its stem, you know, it’s round, a lot of cannabis has a kind of squared stem or you know corrugated or you know variable, but this is just like a whip and all the little ones and then all the main ones that are tremendously fragile when it’s little and it just breaks if you look at it, but it has some support, it’s fine and then when it dries it’s just super strong. So, that must be some relationship to the hemp plant because you know because hemp has very strong fibers, it was bred for its fibers and certainly it has been that quality but it’s not big, it doesn’t produce a lot.

Dr. Corva: I mean everything you say obviously inspires more thoughts, but this is very interesting because, you know, as I understand with breeding, you know, like one of the things you select for is vigor, and so if you’re selected for vigor, if you don’t know anything else about like AC/DC plant basically like I would assume that that particular type of phenotype would be like first way out the door.

Christopher: Right, if that’s….but see, that’s also to a very high THC content, you know, a lot of the crankier plants are not the ones you choose to grow, they’re not really much fun, oh Jesus, that’s stupid, I mean good lord, you know, and I mean people they’re working on it and they’re more vigorous and better types that nonetheless it would be your first choice from that point of view, from growers point of view, but then so what’s been pointed out is things that are really high out there on the THC spectrum or the CBD spectrum or any other cannabinoid you want to identify are typically going to be a little bizarre in terms of growing patterns. They’re not necessarily most vigorous plants because they’re kind of atypical, you know, anyway and that’s you do see that, you know. So, that was always the tradeoff, the highest numbers what Samantha has taught Lawrence and I learned from Lawrence is the levels stay pretty much the same, the ratios do, but if you just go what we learned from actually growing though is that if you go for the highest number, you won’t necessarily get the best plants, you know, the highest ratio, I should say, okay. And then overall cannabinoids is a big deal too, like you can get these very high ratios, but not very much in the first place. So, take – or select several for a slightly lower ratio and get a much higher overall amount – to me is more desirable but, well, it depends, you know, there’s so many things you’re looking for and I should say, you know, I am basically a self-defense breeder, I stabilized – we keep seed growing forever and we got it really nicely adapted to the coast out there, Train Wreck, you know, that we’re quite happy with you know – seven generations and then we had a big from Douglas – from Doug Fir. For years we’ve had an Afghani – we bred that and bred that, but then we finally lost it, you know, it was just one year we didn’t make seed and that’s the way it is but I was never, you know, I am not, I was never, you know, it was pretty basic, it was not difficult. I never thought it was hard and so it didn’t seem hard, you know, but I realized now we’re pretty fortunate you can take it seriously and breed like crazy and still have trouble getting good results so…

Dr. Corva: Right. In your context, your breeding is being done outdoor, then it’s once a year.

Christopher: That’s right, you know, take forever, you know, six or seven years to get and that was the great acceleration that Lawrence pulled off, but we’re just hitting that too. I mean it wasn’t like it’s been going for a while. Well, you do an indoor crop and then keep going you know so you get it up to two and even three, you know, have one, have two, and have three per year, you know.

Dr. Corva: I mean this is a very good example of like, you know, not being simplistic about like being pro-sun-grown is that, especially for breeding, you know, indoor has an important place.

Christopher: It does, absolutely and we all agreed with that, you know, I mean there is certainly a place for it. It’s not something you just want to ignore. In a larger sense, it’s kind of got the like, any kind of real sense. It was only because it was illegal and needed to be hidden and grown in basements and stuff that that it started, you know, everybody leaned that way. I think that’s got to be pretty thoroughly acknowledged at some point, you know, it doesn’t necessarily produce better material, – the arguments you hear are hilarious.
“I’ll never have anything but indoor” well that’s fine, you know, whatever, with heavy metals and all.

Dr. Corva: Yeah, one of many, many, many urban myths or popular myths about cannabis need to dispelled obviously. So, back to CBD track, I had asked you to sort of bookmark that thought about the effects…and so forth.

Christopher: Well, then, just because we started the cooperative, we made it available for people that was the whole point.

Dr. Corva: Could you talk about it, for obviously I know about it, but…?

Christopher: Yeah. We’ve been a part of a cooperative that was supposed to be basically a farmer to consumer tea house, yeah, collective and that was other people had started that and it was pretty local, sort of by watershed, there were like four watersheds involved essentially and that was the idea to send it down to Berkley to Bay area and distribute it and people would be able to get nice, clean, well grown cannabis, but everybody was just storing in their favorite strain so I think at one point we had 45 different strains or something and it wasn’t really 45 because people were just kind of calling things this and that and that was okay, but I really wanted to see, so that the first year I was going for tea house was the same year I came up with some of the CBD material so I started putting CBD separately and realized that there were people at that point even really trying to find CBD and they were able to. So, that was great so I kind of took it on to be the CBD coordinator essentially and we try to, so I got some clones going from Lawrence and we handed those out to our cooperative, you know, as well as everybody’s seed growing wherever they wanted and again there wasn’t too much clone growing but we could be on the same page and there was some seed growing, we had some seed projects going. I think we had maybe six or seven people signed up to do some seed growing material out of what we knew to be high CBD seed from Lawrence. He was a member at that point, though he kind of closed the membership so a couple of years of that and then we did, we began to develop fair amount of IFC-6 at that point, 1:1, and I had some high 4:1 Cannatonic and then AC/DC and that was the highest at that time, highest CBD that we had and so most of the — there was no effort at really identifying this at the time, you know, it was just kind of word of mouth, but it was going through the TS collective and I just got more and more interested and the patients that were using it were actually finding these great responses to it for really serious medical conditions and three quarters of our people had, oh, I got a back ache, I got a script, wink wink and hey by the way can I get some extra pounds, you know, wait a minute, it was don’t ask, don’t’ tell, anyway. So, when TS Collective floundered because of difficulty of oversight with nobody was in – Distribution ended…it was complicated and we were kind of undercapitalized and stuff anyway and nobody quite knew how to approach this stuff and so by then I just started a new cooperative and by that point I had asked… Lost Coast Botanicals started – and that was Lawrence and me and Cath and then a couple of other people, _____0:32:48 and his partner and with the intention of only growing CBD material and then let’s see where this will go and then got huge, began to get real data, you know, about what was working for people and what wasn’t, it was fascinating because sometimes people would inadvertently get THC material, you know, it didn’t work, that wasn’t helping them. In fact, it was making them really distressed, you know, for these specific people, you know, that had been getting results and suddenly weren’t, okay, really, that’s information, you know, go back to it, fine. Other people couldn’t really tolerate CBD. They found it to be really, oh Samantha can’t take it, she and her partner they only used it for a couple of times, but still you know as they say, it feels like a coke high, you know, like coming down from a coke high they say. something but I guess, you know…

Dr. Corva: I know, right! (laughter) As a point of reference!

Christopher: Yeah, anyway. It’s wiry for them and that’s fine, you know, but absolutely having effects, you know, so really interesting and beyond whatever placebo effects may have and I am in favor of placebo effects. If you can create an effect, great, you know, and a lot of the pharmaceutical drugs actually operate on that…

Dr. Corva: I mean, that’s the effect or the placebo effect is that there is actually an effect.

Christopher: And that’s right, and the reason there is what is because you actually got your own system to respond and kick into doing what you’re supposed to do and then the — you’re cannabinoid system – you’re endocannabinoid system is an amazing thing and barely begun to investigate that and then with addictions and as an antidote to addiction that’s really an interesting aspect and then as an antidote to the other things that they give for dementia, those things and we have actually seen real effects and so as the caregivers, the nurses and home caregivers and everybody so this has actually been witnessed, you know, and the neatest thing about dementia patients is they’re like epileptic patients, the response is really vivid. They’re not there to, you know, oh, maybe I feel like, I don’t know whatever, you just see are they doing better or not, you know.

Dr. Corva: It’s pretty obvious, but there’s a bunch of patients that are being helped, right.

Christopher: Yes, the subjective step was really hard, you know, but you almost take out that whole placebo possibility when you see just direct results, you know, so.

Dr. Corva: I do want to talk to you more about like how you were able to get patients’ feedback; I mean obviously getting it up to dispensary doesn’t mean that patients are going to be tell you how effective you are.

Christopher: No. Well, that’s the difference of our cooperative basically is there is a lot of interaction.

Dr. Corva: Yeah. This is what I want to have you do a little bit more is talk about the Lost Coast Botanical model as it was, the difficulties with it as it developed as well, and also exactly the patient situation.

Christopher: Sure. Well, the real difficulty is that we can’t get the county to give us a business license and a brick and mortar dispensary, although the thing that’s about to change and that’s set us up for a whole complicated view because then we essentially have to be a delivery service and so forth and so on and do that in whatever way we can manage. So, that part has been complicated, but on the other hand we’ve been available by phone and we have tried very hard to develop relationships with practitioners so that they have a source for patients that they want to encourage to use CBD, which has been really hard to do and a quantified source. So, we went into this from an extractive point of view, we’re not looking at selling flowers so we wanted to be able to sell milligrams of CBD and THC in known values. So, just having that available was a big deal.

Dr. Corva: So, can you talk about the economic model whereby that was possible? You’re the extractor and dispenser and how is the product.

Christopher: Well, the way that that has been feasible is that we are a cooperative and not for profit mutual benefit cooperative like REI – so we don’t make a profit as a business. We don’t need to make a profit. If we were making a profit, we have to return it to the producing members, which is fine.

Dr. Corva: Producing members, that’s what I’m trying to get at.

Christopher: Okay, we have two tiers of membership. There are producing members and there are patient members and sometimes they’re the same because we encourage people to grow their own medicine and what we do is provide a number of phenotypes, six to seven different varieties at this point. I mean the first we had hundreds — well, not hundreds, we had about 24 and that’s just way too many and it got really complicated, but the point is we had enough people on the same page that we’d have a note there of small producers some only grow 6 plants – some people grow up 20 to 30. You know, the average really was around 12. We can count it all on the same strain, but that was enough if you have enough people doing it to make significant amounts, okay. Then, we would buy that material from our members at a set price and that…

Dr. Corva: But they knew about when they got the clones.

Christopher: They did know about, yeah, and we’re still holding that price at this point. It could change in response to the market changes, but it’s been really good. It’s really competitive. I mean I don’t mind saying what it is …

Dr. Corva: That’s not necessary information.

Christopher: Yeah, but the point is it’s at a price point where everybody was quite happy with it. It was better than they were actually receiving for high THC material that had to be manicured and graded. You know, we tested for being microbiologically clean and no pesticides and no, you know, that’s essentially what it is, but beyond that, all it has to be is all the trichome bearing parts of the plant. So, no stem essentially, but you know little flowers, you just strip it, it’s very easy to handle, you know, and cure it for…

Dr. Corva: It’s a lot less labor and it’s a lot less expense to actually produce.

Christopher: It is, although it turns out there’s something, you have to keep these batches separate from everything else. You think that would be easy, but hippies are hippies – it’s complicated but, you know, on the whole, everybody has been quite happy with that model, you know, and we’re moving towards full certification, but it’s been difficult to find who is going to do the certification and get it – so we’ve been self-monitored for way too long _____ certification who we decided to go with…

Dr. Corva: This is a huge part of the models, the actual sort of economic partner where like it’s sun grown and pesticide free.

Christopher: Well, that what always our model.

Dr. Corva: That is what patients should be getting.

Christopher: Yeah, exactly. And then beyond that we used to do ethanol extraction and CO2 extraction, but at this point we’re pretty much doing CO2 extraction. CO2 as compared to other extraction methods is the instruments themselves are expensive, but the operating costs aren’t too bad, CO2 is not expensive and we recycle, you know, we have a closed loop so it’s not like we’re just blowing it off, you know, and that but it kind of capture everything and concentrated really hard like BHO can or other solvents, petrochemical solvents, but it doesn’t leave any residue so all things considered it’s the cleanest thing we can come up with and we get pretty good yield. I mean we’ve been working on it. We can get, you know, about between 60 to as much as 85 grams return per pound, you know, which is good.

Dr. Corva: It’s about 12%, 14%, 12% to 14%.

Christopher: We hit the 14 to 17%. We have gone as high as 17.

Dr. Corva: Yeah, it’s excellent.

Christopher: Yeah, it’s not that we started it.

Dr. Corva: 10-12 is kind of a cut rate like baseline.

Christopher: I know, we started it between 10 to 12 and after getting more skilled with our equipment, we can now bring it in pretty close so we can count 14-15, you know, and that’s adequate, that’s fine, that’s a good enough against our price point, you know, for ____ so anyway but we’re just being for purely extractive material it really is, and then a limited number of, you know, phenotypes that we’re growing, it works pretty well, it’s a good model. So, as that becomes available, we have more and more people reaching out to us to get the material. The other thing is we’ve provided the material for a lot of people who are much better known than we are for product, you know, but it’s our product in those CBD elixirs, you know, so that’s fine, we’re happy to contribute to that. I just want to see more out there.

Dr. Corva: Yeah. Can you say some of the folks that might be carrying the product?

Christopher: Well, right at the moment, I don’t know if I’m supposed to, but I…

Dr. Corva: If you don’t know, don’t worry about it.

Christopher: It’s varied over time and you know a lot of people have taken the same model we’re doing and applied it and now they’re producing their own material. I can say _____0:43:14 because they wouldn’t have any problem with that _____ to say but, beyond that yeah, for the CBD material.

Dr. Corva: And so the primary way then that folks are, the patients take their medicine is through the vape pen is that correct?

Christopher: No, not really. I mean the vape pen is great. It’s a great way to get a quick infusion that will also dissipate pretty quickly too, but you can reach for it in the middle of the night, you can take it as needed. Yeah, it’s a great way to do it, but I would say only maybe a quarter of our serious patients really on a vape pen – we do capsules; we do 5 mg increments so you can titrate up or down. A big deal is not to get too much for a lot of people. And we do a tincture that’s 4 to 5 sprays equals 1 ml and then there are 5 mg per milliliter or 10 mg per milliliter. We do different…

Dr. Corva: Is that a decarboxylated tincture?

Christopher: It is, yeah, it has to be, decarboxylated, but that’s the nice thing about the vape pen, I mean it’s less fussy, but we do suppositories, tinctures and capsules and the capsules are just in coconut oil, which is you can’t let it go overheated, it’s a little fussy, we like to be able to put it in gel caps, but the machinery for that is really expensive and be lot more stable that way.

Dr. Corva: What about transdermal patches?

Christopher: We haven’t done that. People do, you know, it’s a possibility. You know, it absolutely is an option. We do a lot of topical stuff and to get a kind of transdermal effect. We did some experimentation with…but the problem is the carrier carries stuff in, so _____, but it carries everything along with it and it’s a really touchy kind of thing to use and so it really wasn’t comfortable offering that to patients. So, we’ll offer advice on how to do that for yourself if you want, but it’s a little touchy. It’s a great carrier though, but it will carry everything and you can have it carry stuff you don’t want.

Dr. Corva: Right, that’s the tricky part, right.

Christopher: I am really happy where we got to. Not transdermal, but I mean we did so much heavy lifting just to get to this point and way more than we really should have, you know, to stay viable, but because of this we worked really directly with patients. I mean we craft what patients ask for, I mean we make ratios specifically for what people feel they need or what their physicians tell them they need and so that’s been a big deal and because we’re accessible and because we go over great lengths to provide what people need we have a lot of data because people have really shared their stuff with us and we also work with the Society of Cannabis Clinicians – you know, those guys are really great and there is a module that they produce now that I think anybody that’s selling the stuff in dispensaries or purporting to offer medical cannabis ought to have taken that course at the very least, you know, really. I mean it should be mandatory, I mean to have some basic working information and it’s pretty good course, I mean really is, there’s a lot of big holes in it because real information is still not there – it’s scarce, but it’s got everything currently available pretty much on cancers, on PTSD, on epilepsy, dosage information, pediatric work, autism, not enough autism stuff, but some and the autism carries over to dementia because it seems like the same response is going on. There is a kind of spectrum of autism is now well, it’s been called an endocannabinoid deficiency syndrome because it’s been so linked to that response autoimmune response.

Dr. Corva: Yeah, Dr. Ethan Russo is doing research about that.

Christopher: Yeah, exactly, he’s got some new research that he is about to publish about that. Have you heard anything about that?

Dr. Corva: Not about his forthcoming necessarily, but he did give a talk actually just last month in Tacoma, it was an endocannabinoid deficiency talk so I assume that’s from the work he’s probably about to publish.

Christopher: Yeah, that and then the terpene stuff because he’s going to do that at the ICC thing and Halifax that so big deal.

Dr. Corva: Yeah, Michelle Sexton is going to be there too.

Christopher: Yeah, great. I wish I could be there….If I had the credentials….

Dr. Corva: Yeah, we’ll – we would give you some credentials, for sure…. In terms of like the data that you’re gathering, I’d like to just ask, you know…. One of the primary arguments against, you know, medical cannabis is the lack of research, which of course is totally man-made. (laughter)

Christopher: That’s why we do this on run I mean if it wasn’t illegal we wouldn’t have to do it this way. It would be obvious that will be fine, but it’s not obvious and yet people are suffering. So, we’re going to go ahead and do what we can, you know, until they absolutely tell us we can’t, you know, and they haven’t really told us that, you know, so..

Dr. Corva: What are the most promising areas for you given that you’ve seen — that you’ve lived this data.

Christopher: Yeah, palliative care in dementia. Those are the areas that I really want to concentrate on because I see that as the biggest potential for very clear and consistent results, yeah.

Dr. Corva: For the reasons we got into before. What’s it like working with older people who may be haven’t consumed cannabis before?

Christopher: It’s pretty great because there is nothing wrong with feeling good and once people get over that and acknowledge it, there are wonderful results, you know. It’s really astonishing how many people say, “God, I always thought this stuff was the demons thing – the devils dandruff – it’s terrible, it’s awful you know, oh God… but really it’s the only thing that helps me and thank you so much”… and I mean it’s like that over and over, you know, so what’s wrong with that, you know. I don’t see why… I don’t understand how it got that way… (laughter) But there it is…

Dr. Corva: It’s a long story, right?

Christopher: Yeah, it is as we know, but then the other really interesting thing is what has been kind of just submerged and left out of traditional cannabis using cultures that used to be really common knowledge and have now been suppressed out this whole deal, you know, like ayurvedic stuff that we’re talking about. How much of that was once well known and is now just kind of submerged under this notion that it must be bad, you know, so….

Dr. Corva: So, a scientific agenda can take cues from you know essentially lost knowledge.

Christopher: I think so.

Dr. Corva: That’s a rediscovery effort could be one way to go about it. What worries me is that, you know, the public discourse about creating more scientific knowledge as if it never existed before and doesn’t exist now and the effort to essentially bring in to the framework of modernity you know, essentially cannabis as a medicine, and modernity’s main problem seems to be its total rejection that anything came before it that was valid at all.

Christopher: Right. That’s too bad, you know, eventually, begrudgingly you have to admit that there were, hints that it must have been useful, you know, they usually tout out aspirin and a few other things as an example, but you know yeah that’s just unfortunate. The part that I find unfortunate is that there is a spiritual aspect to it that it really can’t address and that spiritual aspect is something that benefits our whole lives, not just our health. You know, our health is one manifestation of our physical, of our spiritual condition, you know, and sciences can’t bear that out, you know…

Dr. Corva: Yeah, they don’t have the tools to deal with that.

Christopher: They really don’t and it’s okay, you know, but it still is unfortunate.

Dr. Corva: It’s possible that, you know, radical psychologies somehow, the stuff in that direction.

Christopher: Well, it is because of the whole influence of the state of mindfulness and neuroplasticity in general, which is intimately linked to the endocannabinoid system is kind of now bringing into new possibilities that are quantifiable in some way that they can begin to go oh, well, there is a tangible something that we can look at, you know, but a lot of it is not going to remain, you can see the effects, but you can’t see how it’s generated and therefore it doesn’t exist, you know, and that sucks, you know, it’s so unfortunate that that’s the case.

Dr. Corva: Yeah. It comes from a misunderstanding of science itself. I think that the public somehow because of education system, because of commodification of knowledge, thinks about science as the decider of like everything that anything that can’t be verified by the scientific method is therefore not real and the whole point of scientific method actually is to deal with the unknown. If you don’t acknowledge that you can’t explain some things, then you can’t do science.

Christopher: Well, it’s also based on this model that everything is fixed and that you get the same reproducible results every time if conditions are same but conditions are never the same. The thing is everything does in fact change on an amazing level and until that’s acknowledged this moment is this moment, next moment will be that moment and the same things may not hold true and even in science you see this crazy bell curve deal where they can’t get reproducible thing with the same supposed conditions, but…

Dr. Corva: So, what is the acceptable range of variability? I think is also what the more sophisticated model.

Christopher: I know. It reaches out like that.

Dr. Corva: Is it start with a simple model and then like you introduce variables, but the thing is that like well, like the papers themselves they’re usually pretty good about acknowledging the limits of findings and what else needs to be done, the media around it never does like these are the results and like everybody this is your new truth now run with it … It’s very frustrating.

Christopher: I guess what I am trying to lead up to though is that there is I don’t see cannabis itself as being in itself, by itself this great panacea, I think there’s other factors that have to come into play with our, the way we see ourselves and our relationship to where we are.

Dr. Corva: And so this is a cultural thing that as cannabis enters the spheres of legitimacy, let’s say whether or not their legality is an issue. As as it does so, it becomes fetishized, it’s all about just cannabis and they’re for like, okay, we’re just going to…whereas like, you know, part of cannabis culture, if we can use that term, historically comes from a place of actually understanding how it’s part of a greater ecology or set of ecologies, essentially. And this, you know, I guess might be one reason why I have an interest in somehow carving out some space for an approach to cannabis that isn’t fetishizing it, but at the same time, you know, like – it’s difficult to know how do you balance that with actually sort of, you know, putting it aside and making it completely irrelevant and actually putting it in the greater context…

Christopher: But the culture itself, I mean is so in danger of being exploited for its you know – money gain and so forth capitalistic virtues – that’s a real problem too, it’s a real danger and – I mean I am not at all comfortable with a lot of the cannabis industry and the whole damn thing and you know the whole spin around it, it’s really unfortunate that it’s stuck in this corner and I’d like to see it broaden out into a whole other dialogue. Anything can be abused, I mean anything can be abused and cannabis is absolutely no exception and just to say, oh, whoopee – here we go and legalize it and things like that. I don’t like to see that either. I don’t like to that happen with booze and I don’t like to see it with flowers, you know. I mean if it was just flowers, that would probably be fine, but it’s not, you know.

Dr. Corva: And that’s, you know, the concentrate industry, it just happens approximately same period of time…

Christopher: Exactly and I mean – I was contributing to that just completely because, you know, these very things that we do can be used in all kinds of different ways, but the idea is – the smallest effective dose. That is what we are looking for here you know, and that it really should be true of almost any medicine and it turns out it almost can start operating like a homeopathic level, it’s not huge amounts necessarily with great results amazingly enough, you know. And in fact you get better results when you get a smaller amount than you’re doing a bigger amount, you know, in a lot of cases, but it’s not totally clear to me by any means. I wish it was, but it’s not, you know, how that works. So, you know, that’s my take of it.

AUDIO END

Video Produced by

Steve Hyde

Video produced for

Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy
6701 Greenwood Ave N. Seattle WA. 98103 (2015)

References:
Lost Coast Botanicals tribute to Lawrence Ringo

O’Shaugnessey’s

 

This post is reproduced in its entirety from the Umpqua Cannabis Association Facebook Page

[Editor’s note: Longtime Oregon community organizer John Sajo consistently produces well-reasoned analyses of Oregon issues, especially as they relate to the impact of legal cannabis on medical cannabis policy. We are grateful to amplify his voice, which gets significant play in Oregon but deserves a wider audience.]

by John Sajo, Umpqua Cannabis Association

The Senate Committee on Implementing Measure 91 just voted to pass SB 964 which is a major rewrite of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act. On the one hand this bill would require every patient to report to the Oregon Health Authority every month exactly how many marijuana plants and how much marijuana they have on hand. Oregonians who agree to grow marijuana for a sick friend would have to do the same reporting and would also be subject to inspection by the health department. The idea behind all this new government intrusion into patients’ lives is to “regulate” medical marijuana and lessen the diversion of medical marijuana to the black market. Oregon Legislators are probably trying way too hard to honor the Cole Memo, which outlines the conditions for the federal authorities to defer to the state on matters of marijuana enforcement. The U.S. Congress voted last December to defund Justice Department enforcement of medical marijuana in states where it is legal, further complicating that federal/state conflict.

But on the other hand, Section 70 of SB 964 allows local governments to prohibit medical marijuana dispensaries and processing sites within their jurisdiction. Counties can’t prohibit marijuana because Oregon voters legalized marijuana last November. Every household will be able to grow four plants. But in some counties patients won’t be able to buy medical marijuana. If these patients need vape pens or edibles so they don’t have to smoke, they will be out of luck. Banning dispensaries means qualified patients have to drive to the nearest county without a ban just so their anti-marijuana neighbors don’t have to ever see the marijuana store. Sounds like bigotry to me. Prohibition always stimulates the black market so counties that ban dispensaries will be promoting their local black markets.

Another problem with allowing county bans is the revenue the state will lose. Taxes and license fees will not be collected where stores and processing are prohibited. If a significant number of counties, particularly big ones, opt to ban, the state could lose tens of millions of dollars in marijuana revenue. Those counties, mostly poor rural counties, will also lose their share of the revenue.

Local bans on marijuana commerce are just plain wrong. Dispensaries serve the public that wants them and have minimal impact on the people that don’t. Dispensaries will not exist anywhere unless there are enough patients that benefit from shopping there. Making it harder for patients to get their medicine should not be tolerated. The law clearly allows local governments to impose all sorts of reasonable regulation to control where and how marijuana businesses operate. Oregon now has hundreds and they are not causing problems.

Allowing local governments to continue prohibition by banning dispensaries undercuts the voter mandate to legalize marijuana. It will undermine implementation of the law. The legislature should reject this bad idea.

This bill may be a wake up call to Oregon voters who legalized marijuana. We may not be able to implement that choice unless we also defeat the local officials who choose to undermine the law.

 

Photo of John Sajo at the 2014 International Cannabis Business Association in Portland

From The Jamaica Observer, Clovis Toon, April 19, 2015

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

Every day I find new assemblages for approaching the human-cannabis relationship. This cartoon is lifted from the Facebook group “The Coffee Model – Sensible Cannabis De-ILLegalization.” It’s an example of what we mean when we say discourses of cannabis legalization differentiate previously coherent notions of what it means to be legal, and what it can or should mean to be legal. In this case, our incipient class divides in the post-legal landscape enunciate a post-colonial problem, continuous with histories of imperialism, race and class in Jamaica.

Who gets to profit from “legal” cannabis, is the question. Privateer Holdings’ partnership with the Bob Marley family to create a global brand doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Laws have to be changed, and how they are changed will determine who gets to profit from ending the prohibition approach to cannabis regulation.

Profiting from prohibition’s end is different from benefitting from prohibition’s end, to be sure, and that’s the crux of the class warfare question. The singular common ground — prohibition’s end — is being broken up into a thousand loosely connected islands of relative policy liberalization, but we are still in general operating in the context of a Global Drug War.

Washington — and Colorado, and anywhere else concentrated financial capital is beginning to be able to infiltrate without fear of State intervention — provides the Privateers of the world footholds from which to leverage their financial power on behalf of ending absolute and punitive prohibition.

That’s positive. But instead of opening up possibilities for democratic human-cannabis relationships — the right to home grow, for example — the centralizing forces of financial capital may force those relationships into soulless, commodifiable choices brought to you by whoever has the most money to shape conditions for legalization.

That’s negative. But it’s also how the rest of our economy works: consumer rights to choose what brands they want to buy, rather than how humans want to relate to a plant, are the shield behind which transnational corporate financial interests advance the interests of a profoundly undemocratic economy.

Ending the drug war, it seems, has a price. This is the beginning of a conversation about that price, and whether there’s any room for non-financial value to speak. There’s lots of common ground to work on, but it’s time to stop pretending that the end of the drug war is the end of the conversation.

 

Photo by unknown, from February 2014 talk at the University of Arizona Department of Geography

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

Lately I’ve had occasion to consider what a cannabis curriculum might look like. Although the occasion requires more “thinking like a trade school” than thinking like a popular educator, I want to start a series of posts dedicated to the consideration of the latter.

While have had the opportunity both at the University of Washington and at Sarah Lawrence College to develop elements of a curricular cannabis literature, events have conspired to significantly broaden the scope of such consideration.  What should people read to gain a foundational understanding of the place of cannabis in society?

This kind of question is belongs to a population of questions that make up what Western educators call the liberal arts tradition. That tradition nominally stands for the development of the human capacity to answer questions by situating the human condition in an historical (and geographical) contexts. The literatures that populate those contexts are, again nominally, subject to peer-informed debate and evolution. Academic institutions have distinct sets of literatures that constitute a “core curriculum” for their educational subjects. These vary across time and space, but not that much: Sociology 101 courses always are going to involve Max Weber, for example. Econ 101, in the U.S., Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In the U.K. Karl Marx would be paired with Smith and Ricardo.

I’m not trying to do that for Cannabis Studies (just invented that, I think). Rather, I want to think in terms of 1. information credibility 2. information that develops critical thinking not just content upload and 3. information communicability. Let’s mis-appropriate Deleuze and Guattari here to play with the relationship between major and minor. I want a Minor Literature for Cannabis, as opposed to a literature in demand as or in service of Authority, which would be a Major Literature.

Number 1 is easy for me to deal with methodologically, as I get the luxury of deciding unilaterally, at first, which authors or texts are most credible, according to my standards. I will need to work on those standards but let’s try a few out in no particular order, brainstorm-fashion:

…

Credibility: Authors (the Peer Review question) and Texts

Do I know this person/text and have I seen them work/successfully used them to work

Do people I trust (eg., Dr. Sunil Aggarwal) know this person/text and have they seen them work/successfully used them to work

Credibility: Texts

Publication context — who by, with what explicit political agenda?

Theoretical influences — how are the arguments framed and with help from what prior literatures/conversation?

Methodological transparency (my favorite, you see me try to do on the web site with varying degrees of success)

Credibility and Critical Thinking 

Evidence quality is a relative concern: I’m much more interested in transparency with respect to evidence quality. All evidence is suspect, for the critical thinker. All hypotheses are subject to falsification, including popular hypotheses that have settled into the fabulous garment of Received Wisdom.

To falsify a hypothesis takes methodological rigor but this happens in a Political Context, so some Social Problems are more resistant to professional inquiry than others. This is especially true for cannabis.

In fact, because of this a Minor Cannabis Literature has to constantly deal with Drug War Politics, in an historical and recurring fashion.

Therefore, some candidates for Minor Cannabis Literature don’t deal with cannabis explicitly, at all. Eg.: Michel Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended, or Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.

The Proper Subjects of a Minor Cannabis Literature are relations of power in society through which human-cannabis relationships are defined, produced and managed.

Communicability

Do they have a clear focus/thesis statement/statement of purpose?

Are they accessible — that is, can different publics understand that they are being spoken to for a reason that matters to them?

…

I need to get on with my day. Next up will be a consideration of specific Minor cannabis Literature candidates in future posts, informed by the criteria of this brainstorm.

For now, if you are interested, you could start here. Explanation and link to actual document below the image.

It’s my publication “Requiem for a CAMP,” published a few years ago now in the International Journal of Drug Policy, a journal that apparently ranks 5th out of 34 possible “substance abuse” journals according to Elsevier’s advertising widget. How does it rank with Policy journals? I have no idea, but probably not very high because it’s a journal that labors on the radical edges of drug policy. And by “radical edge” I mean tends to produce content that is highly critical of the drug war, by publishing literatures that share an interest in harm reduction — political, economic, cultural, biophysical, and other kinds of societal harm.

Feel free to email me recommendations of texts for consideration. I also welcome any efforts to write about your recommendations, and if they match the mission of this post and its criteria I would be happy to publish them.

 

 

 

 

 

https://youtu.be/YAHgnRh1Cm0

Video by Steve Hyde

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

It was my pleasure last week to host a conversation with Christian Hageseth, Colorado “Green Man” entrepreneur, and Bruce Barcott, Guggenheim-awardee nonfiction author out of Whidbey Island, Washington State, at Seattle Town Hall. CASP videographer Steve Hyde filmed the event and we are happy to host the footage of the event on our web site.

I chose to conduct the event as a meta-conversation with the authors, occasioned by key similarities and differences in what they each chose to write about. They are two very different books united by a common effort to demystify what we talk about when we talk about cannabis legalization. I have no interest in passing judgement on either book on how they fail or succeed as books. Both books grapple with broad historical context, both are inaccurate in different degrees from my perspective as a specialist, but in general neither are seriously wrong. Hageseth’s account is strongest when it represents what happened in Colorado, whereas Barcott’s narrative — as one might expect from a professional nonfiction writer — is strong everywhere, so when he gets it wrong occasionally it stands out a bit more.

That said, I want to focus on how they constitute “popular historical geographies” of the cannabis present from standpoints unique to each author. Both are mass-market media events for which each author is doing a book tour, and both seek — sometimes more implicitly than explicitly — to nuance the national popular discussion about cannabis legalization. This is clearly not the case, for example, in the process of choosing book titles. It’s all about keywords, Barcott told me, and so unfortunately both of these book feature “Weed” as the preferred nomenclature for cannabis.

That’s how I want to define “popular” here, but those of you who understand the concept and practice of “popular education” should also think about it that way — each book struggles in the face of a public that can’t handle the truth about cannabis or its criminalization. What both authors have to say about how we got here and what the consequences have been for our society is absolutely true, but if accepted as such by the public would require a totally different justice system to address the crimes against humanity committed by most of our elected officials for the last 40 years. Barcott for example highlights the closure of the Federal Cannabis Investigative New Drug Program to all new applicants in the early 1990s as it became swamped with HIV/AIDS applicants into the program. Robert Randle’s glaucoma was acceptable as a condition requiring exceptional legal space, but HIV/AIDS bore so much stigma that the entire program had to be closed to new applicants rather than allow access to life-saving cannabis for HIV/AIDS patients.

That was a genocidal policy decision. To understand how that happened as a society, we would have to accept that our government is capable of genocidal social policy, with impunity. We might have to re-think our faith in democracy, the presumed wisdom of our leaders, and the nature of our health care system. In this way, these two books offer degrees of radical popular education.

Both books are very attentive to what we called in graduate school “positionality” (or “standpoint”). The author’s autobiographies are a constant presence in the books, establishing a mode of relative objectivity with the subject of their inquiries. The authors are embedded in the historical geographies that they map out, and the evolution of their own consciousness with respect to their own self-consciousness at large is an important part of the story. In this way, both books move us way out of the binary discursive rut common in media accounts: pro-cannabis legalization or anti-cannabis legalization. This is absolutely vital. That said, both deal seriously with cannabis which, like everything else but statistically less so than say peanuts, is not always good for everybody. This was especially clear in Hageseth’s discussion of edibles and Barcott’s discussion of cannabis use in populations with predisposition towards mental health issues.

Hageseth seems to have always had a positive relationship with cannabis and cannabis consumption, and is clearly much more of an “insider” to cannabis culture even as he discovers (and participates in) the reconstruction of cannabis as part of the formal economy. The initiation of the latter is occasioned by a Social Event in this country: the financial crisis ruined Hageseth’s financial situation, as it did so many other Americans. Like so many other Americans, however, his positive prior relationship with cannabis allowed him to consider and evaluate potential social harm and social risk in a forward-thinking manner. This is how he found himself able to participate in and profit from Colorado’s experiment with medical cannabis regulation. It’s helpful to remember, of course, that Colorado’s medical cannabis regulations — however loosey-goosey they are in practice — meant that their experiment in legalization was allowed to move forward while Washington’s stagnated and fell into dysfunction.

Barcott’s journey involves much more conscious self-evolution as he struggles with accepting the legitimacy of cannabis first as a medical cannabis consumer, then as an I 502 voter, and then as an observer of some of the early growing pains. That evolution is worked out especially through how he communicates with his children about the subject of his book project. One of the most successful drug war-positive discourses in this country is the one that asks, What about the children? Barcott addresses this personal struggle throughout the book, and offers nuanced ways not only to discuss cannabis issues with children but plenty of evidence that the drug war has been waged relentlessly against children and other vulnerable populations — that legalization makes our children safer.

That message, of course, returns us to our organizational philosophy at CASP. If cannabis policy is only thought about as cannabis, the public has been raised to understand and participate in a very limited conversation, in which cannabis is a threat to society because it is a threat to children. If cannabis policy is instead thought about in terms of social policy, we have to come to terms with the social construction of that threat, and how (some people’s) children are mobilized as human shields against a healthy social policy in which everyone’s children –everyone’s lives, everyone’s health, everyone’s dignity — matter.

It is simply not in the best interest of society to remain addicted to the drug war.  These two books are profoundly successful at making this point. I thank the authors for the conversation and Seattle Town Hall for putting on the event.

 

 

 

 

 

Infographic obtained through Spokane City Council WSLCB public records request. Many thanks to Blaine Stum for sharing it with us.

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

Two weeks ago, the WSLCB released a massive raw Biotrack data dump to CASP and many other individuals and organizations that have been trying to track the emergence of Washington’s legal cannabis landscape. To my knowledge we are all — even private information organizations — still attempting to organize the data into coherent parts. In the mean time, CASP has been receiving requests for updates to publicly available information from the WSLCB “Frequently Requested Lists” site. This post is an effort to provide the best information we have right now, in response to rising public interest on the one hand and pending raw data processing on the other.

The infographic above is the only known document of its kind, possibly representing a document that will in fact be released on a weekly basis from the WSLCB to the public at large. While the licensing numbers are of particular interest and continuous with previously known data, I want to draw the reader’s attention to flower harvest and useable marijuana produced in this fiscal year.

According to the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges,  the state fiscal year is defined as follows: “State Fiscal Year = A 12-month period used for budget and accounting purposes. The state fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30 of the following year, and is named for the calendar year in which it ends (e.g., July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014 is state Fiscal Year 2014).”

Thus, the fiscal year to which this document refers runs from July 1, 2014 through June 30, 2015. This time period encompasses virtually all of the possible Washington State cannabis harvests and sales so far. Therefore, the numbers in this worksheet, if they are accurate, represent the best picture of the Washington State legal cannabis landscape to date. There are three items of particular interest.

1. The numbers represented here render all of the previous calculations done on this site and others obsolete, in terms of accuracy. According to this infographic, only 15,865 lbs of usable cannabis, which I am interpreting here as salable flower, has been harvested to date, meaning that the fall 2014 harvest flower glut could not possibly have been the product of a 30,000 lb outdoor harvest. Instead, it would seem the exaggerated volume from harvest reflects total cannabis produced (including raw material for extracts).

2. We are producing approximately 688 lbs usable flower /month, if we take this “April 6” update to represent March’s “MTD” rather than the six days of April. This seems like a reasonable conjecture, but can’t be taken as gospel at this point. That number should be taken as the current indoor capacity of the I 502 system, since we assume zero outdoor or greenhouse production this time of year (even though it’s possible and in fact likely that there are some hybrid greenhouses out there that have continued to produce through the winter).

3. The ratio of buds to raw material produced per plant was initially assumed to be 1:1 per WSLCB statements. But from these numbers we see that ratio is 43,002 lbs raw material to 15,865 lbs buds, or approximately 3:1 raw material to buds. This supports CASP’s insistence that processing for extraction (as opposed to making pre-rolls) is the name of the game and if your producer/processor license’s business plan ignores this basic fact then you aren’t maximizing your chance for success in what will be an increasingly competitive market.

We will go much further into the data when we figure out how to extract it from the files provided to us through our public information requests. I want to tip my hat to the WSLCB, which has had to deal with what appears to be a truly messy Biotrack reporting system, for deciding to go ahead and let the rest of us have a crack at it.

 

 

 

 

Map by Dr. Richard Morrill, Emeritus Professor of Geography, University of Washington

Database architecture by Steve Hyde

by Dr. Dominic Corva, Executive Director

As the Washington State Legislature prepares to shut down medical marijuana access points by July 2016, it is helpful to begin to think about how many more I502 retail access points with medical cannabis endorsements will have to open to ensure the same level of geographic access Washington medical cannabis patients currently enjoy. Although available data is difficult to come by, this post is a first attempt at clarifying this picture for the public and policymakers.

The map above represents county-level shares of approved (not necessarily currently open) I 502 retail points and DOR-identified registered, tax-paying medical cannabis businesses. There are many problems with this data. I 502 approved retail points are growing in number at a rate of approximately 3-4 a week: the rate of openings is unknown. On the medical side, we are not sure how many of the 450+ medical marijuana businesses registered with the Department of Revenue (DOR) are retail access points (brick and mortar or delivery) and how many might be taxpaying producer or processor businesses.  The largest medical cannabis producer/processor-only business in the state, SODO-based New Leaf Enterprises (DAMA products), converted to I 502 status last month, so this number is also in motion.

“Patient access” is significant policy concern in the state of Washington, and the subject of much debate. Critics of the medical marijuana system, including I 502 business interests that have bulldozed the state’s longtime medical cannabis policy approaches in this legislative session for competitive rather than ethical reasons, have used the Seattle Times editorial board and anonymous “Staff” ( see here, here, and here, for starters) repeatedly over the last year to question the basic validity of the medical cannabis patient category. Medical marijuana advocacy organizations such as Americans for Safe Access [CASP’s fiscal sponsor is the federal 501(c)(3) sister organization, Americans for Safe Access Foundation – ed.] have spent a great deal of time and money pushing back against “cannabiz” strategies during this legislative session but with almost nothing to show for it.

So the question of access has been successfully framed as a question of the fundamental validity of cannabis as medicine, with zero efforts by anyone to collect real data on either patients or access. This post is agnostic on the question of “how many patients are real patients” because there is simply no data either on what constitutes authentic medical need, on the one hand, and what percentage of existing medical access point consumption is “valid.” Instead, we posit that absent real data about patients, we can instead provide real data about geographic access for however many existing and potential “real patients” are out there in the State.

Our ethical grounding point is the observation that if a single “authentic” patient loses access of any sort — geographical or socioeconomic — then bulldozing the medical cannabis landscape so that I 502 industry can gain competitive advantage is bad social policy. Medical cannabis policy originating from voter will through the 1998 initiative has had zero complaints from patients, wherever they are in the state, and instead has been accused of social harm by everyone but patients and doctors. Instead, accusations of social harm have demonstrably come from I 502 business interests that have lined the pockets of state lobbyists and legislators who have no knowledge of cannabis as herbal medicine; how cannabis products have evolved considerably from flower through the state’s medical cannabis system; and how this has been facilitated by the lack of punitive regulation introduced this legislative session.

As a result, the above landscape tells us something about ease of geographic access to (some kinds of) cannabis via the I 502 system for adult users, at the county level. The good news appears to be that in some rural counties, I 502 retail access points appear to provide access to cannabis for the first time (keep in mind our medical n only includes DOR-registered, taxpaying businesses). This is indicated by mostly blue circles.

But where the state’s population is concentrated, up and down the I-5 corridor and in Spokane to the East, and in some rural counties, patients will demonstrably lose access to retail medicine absent several changes over the next year and change.

First, I 502 stores are forbidden by law to include medical or therapeutic information through customer service or product packaging. This is substantially different from medical access points, most of whom provide some, admittedly sometimes accurate, information about therapeutic aspects of different varietals and “strains.” The paucity of accurate information in both systems is a significant policy concern, but it is not addressed by shutting down the system that actually provides some useful information, and legislating “medical endorsements” for some unknown number of I 502 retail points, some unknown number of which may be existing dispensaries that applied for but did not win favorable retail lottery placements in March 2014. In order for the state to provide as much geographical access for patients as is currently available according to DOR data, it will need to ensure that each of those circles represents the same number of medically-endorsed I 502 retail stores — some 430 across the state by July 2016.

Second, although cannabis testing standards and best laboratory practices in general are extremely problematic, the I 502 system has clearly exacerbated tendencies to reward labs that produce higher THC results. THC percentages are up 5-10% over previous ranges for medical markets. It’s quite clear that the I 502 system equates commercial “recreational” value with THC levels, reversing trends in medical markets to favor whole plant characteristics: varieties of cannabinoids especially CBD; and terpenes that may have as much or more therapeutic value than cannabinoid ratios. This is partially the result of stringent “security theater” regulations in I 502 that (a) keep the consumer from evaluating the product they are buying by smell and (b) severely limit visibility by requiring pre-packaging. Cannabinoid listing and “strain” name are pretty much the only things the I 502 consumer have to go on when it comes to purchasing flower. In order for the state to provide as much geographical access to diversity of flower terpenes and cannabinoids, as as is currently available according to DOR data, it will have to relax those packaging rules and police lab practices and standards set forth in the American Herbal Pharmacopeia that are currently being flouted widely in the interest of capturing lab market share. Recent statements by WSLCB indicate that they are aware of the problem and are taking promising steps.

There are many, many more problems with patient access that will be exacerbated by proposed changes to I 502 and medical cannabis policy, but this particular post is agnostic on these. Instead, it uses real data (with transparent limitations) to provide evidence that Washington state cannabis policy changes proposed in the legislature are bad social-geographic policy. The interests of Washington citizens — “society” at the state level — are poorly served by limiting geographic access to herbal medicine for patients, however many of them there are.