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Today, friends, we're busting cannabis myths.

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We have deeply held beliefs around cannabis, but are they true?

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Does the science back up those claims?

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Find out with me which myths are true and which ones are not, with special guest and cannabis expert, chris Fontes.

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Welcome to Bite Me.

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The show about edibles where I help you take control of your high life.

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I'm your host and certified Gange Marge, and I love helping cooks make safe and effective edibles at home.

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I'm so glad you're here and thank you for joining me today.

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Welcome back, friends.

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Thank you for joining me today. I'm really excited about this episode because the guest that I have with me today knows his shit.

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So if you're joining me for the first time, I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you're a longtime listener, welcome back.

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Thanks once again for joining me, and I think you're going to learn something in this episode as well, no matter what your level of cannabis knowledge is, because I certainly did, and I'm really excited to introduce to you Chris Fontes, the founder and CEO of High Spirits Beverages.

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He's a dynamic individual with a rich history of innovation and leadership in the cannabis industry and beyond.

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The perfect guest to help bust some of those cannabis myths that we all carry.

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So, without further ado, please enjoy this fascinating conversation with Chris as we bust some cannabis myths.

1:37

All right, everyone. Today, I am joined by Chris and he's going to be busting some cannabis myths for us, some of these commonly held beliefs that I think it's time they just need to die, I think.

1:50

Anyway, before we get started, chris, could you take a minute and just introduce yourself to the listeners of Bite Me?

1:57

Absolutely, and thanks for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here.

2:00

Thank you.

2:01

My name is Chris. I'm the founder and CEO of High Spirits Beverages, as well as Trojan Horse Cannabis.

2:05

We were the first company to use Delta 9 from hemp in an intentional way to create products and market those products as D9 products, and the brand Trojan Horse was the initial brand to do that, and it's evolved into a beverage brand called High Spirits, which is currently exploding.

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For those of you that aren't familiar with THC beverages, you should get familiar.

2:24

It's a fantastic option for consumption and on top of that, I'm involved in multiple trade associations.

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I'm the co-chair of policy at Cannabis Beverage Association, hemp Beverage Alliance, national Industrial Hemp Council, and I'm also on the board of directors for Colorado Hemp Association.

2:41

So you know a thing or two about cannabis. It sounds like.

2:44

I know a couple things, yeah.

2:45

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the beverages too, because I've been talking about those for a while on my show.

2:50

I just feel like they're an often overlooked way to consume cannabis in the edible space and they're definitely growing in popularity.

2:57

I love them, and in the States you also have a lot more options than we have here in Canada, which is lucky for you.

3:04

Yeah, absolutely.

3:06

And again, before we get into it once again, would you be willing to talk a little bit about your own cannabis journey?

3:13

Yeah, certainly. So. I started using cannabis initially when I was about 14, which is too young but also not incredibly uncommon, especially in the days when it wasn't legal anywhere and I was sort of peer pressured into it, like I think a lot of young freshmen in high school probably were, and I enjoyed it, but it didn't click for me, probably for about another year.

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I had another opportunity to try it when I was closer to 15, maybe 14 and a half, and that time it stuck.

3:45

I was like, oh yeah, this is the thing I'm doing now. So naturally, like you do when you're a consumer in the 90s in Southern California, where there's more options to good bud than most other places in the country, you consume a lot and you start, we'll say, participating in the legacy market, and I did that up until I was 21.

4:06

When I was 21, I had my first born son and remember, folks, this hasn't always been legal and I didn't want to lose my kid over something silly like cannabis which cannabis isn't silly, but my kid's more important.

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So I quit consumption altogether and I stayed cannabis free.

4:28

It wasn't in my life early in a tangible way for about 15, maybe 16 years, and in this time I had developed all kinds of other health issues and health concerns and things like that, and one of those was insomnia.

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I was taking Ambien every night just to sleep for about a decade and it wasn't always Ambien, it was other medications as well, just to try to knock me out.

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And at some point I was buying things off Amazon randomly at like 2am that I don't remember buying and just doing weird stuff and I'm like how long before I decided to go for a drive on Ambien or something really dangerous.

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So I said there's got to be another option and I ended up traveling to Vegas and bought some chocolates while I was out there and was reacquainted with my passion for cannabis and then said, yep, this is what I'm doing.

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Instead I'm getting off the Ambien and all the other.

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I was on a lot of painkillers from my back and stuff like that kind of ditched all that in favor of cannabis.

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And around this time as well, probably about a year after I started re-consuming, I was a software engineer at the time and I had an opportunity to build some software for a new company and, lo and behold, through the process of evolution I ended up being the founder and CEO of that company and launched that, and that was Hemp Exchange.

5:50

So that dove me into the hemp side of the space really early on in 2018 and been evolving with the industry ever since.

6:00

That's amazing. That's quite the story, and it does remind me a little bit of my own, because I started.

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I think the first time I tried cannabis I was about 14 as well, and my friend and I snuck out of my house to smoke a joint.

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I did not get high to this day.

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I mean it could have been a regular that we bought. I have no idea, but where I was in the early nineties, all you could get really at the time was hash.

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So once I tried that, then you know that's what I was into and there was really good hash going around at the time.

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And then I had my first daughter at the age of 20.

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And my relationship with cannabis has ebbed and flowed over the years, because I quit after getting pregnant, of course.

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And yeah, here I am today.

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But it sounds like you have tons of experience with cannabis and the fact that you were able to overcome, you know, the usage of ambient and other addictive painkillers with cannabis is quite remarkable, and I love hearing those types of stories because it just shows you can manage those aspects of your life with something a lot less harmful than a pharmaceutical and there's always a place for pharmaceuticals, I totally see that.

7:08

But if you can make something like cannabis work for you, then why not try it out, because it's so much better for you.

7:14

Absolutely. I'm a big general believer in Eastern and Western medicine sort of coming together.

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It's what's actually effective and what actually works right.

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Right.

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And Western medicine is beneficial for a lot of very unique things.

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If I get strep throat I want an antibiotic like hand-painting, but that doesn't mean that every drug that's produced under this framework is necessarily good for you and I think it's.

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You know, american consumers really consumers nationally or worldwide need to kind of understand a little bit better about what they're putting in their body and what it does, and I think that we've all been sort of trained to just sort of follow the guidelines of what we're taught is good for you, and I think we're realizing now that.

7:54

I won't say that there's intentional misleading there though there is but more or less people have just gotten lazy, right, right.

8:03

People don't read their nutrition labels, they don't think about what they're cooking, what they're making, what they're ingesting.

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They just assume if it's on the shelf it's safe.

8:11

Right, and yeah, sometimes it's easy to overlook the list of side effects with those pills and potions that you're getting from your doctor, and the side effects, as we know, from cannabis are well, there is no list of side effects.

8:22

They're pretty minimal. So, yeah, yeah, so why don't we get into busting some of these cannabis myths?

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Because I think that's a good place to start.

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Now, of course, a lot of these have to do with edibles, because that's what I'm passionate about, but and that's what the listeners of the show are passionate about as well.

8:39

So the first thing I wanted to ask about and because I used to see that I used to work in a dispensary and I saw this all the time edibles that were labeled sativa or indica.

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Can you talk about that? Because consumers would often come in and ask oh, I'm looking for the sativa edibles because they keep me up, or the indica edibles will help me sleep.

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Yeah, placebo is a hell of a thing, isn't it? So this requires a little bit of back story knowledge before I can really get into the myth here.

9:10

So this concept of sativa or an indica or some sort of hybrid the concept itself is fairly faulty and you know botanists and scientists in the cannabis space.

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Now they've reclassified the different species and subspecies of cannabis and the different groupings and those terms aren't really accurate and it turns out they never really were.

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Now, that said, those terms survived decades and decades and decades of bro science and I think we'll find I'll use the term bro science a lot in this podcast probably because, in absence of the ability to do proper scientific studies, thanks to being a controlled substance planetarily, it was left to the underground legacy market to figure out the science and, frankly, really not qualified to be scientists.

10:04

They're growers, they're businessmen, entrepreneurs, businesswomen.

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They're not scientists, and so a lot of the things they came out with or stuck onto or taught weren't really accurate.

10:14

And this is one of those things where your dealer would tell you, or even your grower would tell you, this is sativa, this is an indica, et cetera, but those classifications don't really hold true scientifically speaking.

10:25

So how does this impact the consumer.

10:28

Well, the consumer has heard the story and it's continually perpetuated to this day through marketing efforts from different cannabis companies that sativa makes you tired or sorry, energetic and up and ready to go and indica makes you tired.

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People say indica means indica right, and that's also not true.

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We thought it was because of the particular cannabinoid, terpene and flavonoid profiles of short, bushy plants, which we would call an indica Typically because they shared those genes, all had some similar genetics based on where they were, how they grew, et cetera.

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And sativas long and lengthy, thin leaves, lots of space and warmer climates kind of developed a similar cannabinoid profile to each other and similar terpene profiles to some extent and had those kind of uplifting effects.

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So there was some correlation early on to these designations.

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However, there was no causation and there still is no causation.

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So to that end, these terms are kind of irrelevant.

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However, since they're so prominent amongst the market, cannabis companies are using it as a marketing tool to try to help the consumer understand what they may feel if they take this product.

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And the way they do this is, quite literally, someone will smoke a joint of a new batch and they'll say well, I put me in the couch put it down as an indica.

11:45

Oh man, that made me ampy. I put it down as a sativa and that's it.

11:48

That's how they determine the classification of the product.

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Now, there's a couple of problems with this one.

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Placebos are hell of a thing, right? If you think it's going to create a certain sort of impact to you, it probably will.

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And on top of that, cannabis in general, the cannabinoids, really sort of act as an ex-exponentiator of your current mood.

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If you take an edible and no one tells you if it's sativa or indica and you are, it's like 11 o'clock and you're all pumped for a hike.

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And you take an edible and go for a hike, you're going to say, man, that was definitely a sativa, that had me pumped.

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I could give you that same edible at 11 PM when you're already a little tired and it's going to knock you out.

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And you're like, man, that indica put me in my bed last night.

12:28

I was totally zonked and it could be the exact same product and you would probably not realize that.

12:33

So this is common across all cannabis consumption.

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But edibles particularly with the point of this show which I'm building up to, is extremely interesting because what steers the effects of a cannabis experience is a combination of your primary cannabinoids, your minor cannabinoids, your terpenes, which are a primary driver, and other things that we're learning now.

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There's certain esters and volatiles in cannabis that we think now are having some impact on that additionally.

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Well, when you make an edible, almost always you're using distillate, and when you make distillate, the terpenes get burned off in the process, and in fact, a lot of the miners do too these days.

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So you end up with a primarily THC-only edible which has no steering effects.

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It's not going to make you excited, or it's not going to make you tired, or it's not going to make you focused.

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They just don't do that.

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You can have minor cannabinoids introduced, like, let's say, thcv, for example, or CBN, for example, and then you could sort of steer, but that's not really sativa or indica either.

13:40

It's just a different cannabinoid having a different effect on your body, and so there really is no such thing as sativa, hybrid or indica when it comes to edibles, especially because the steering effects don't exist.

13:53

Now you could have a live resin edible which would probably still retain a good amount of terpenes, but even if they're there, when you ingest it into your stomach, the terpenes get filtered out by your liver.

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So even if they exist in the edible, they're not making it to your bloodstream.

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There's a couple of heavy ones that might make a little bit of it, like mersine for example, but a good portion of them, the whole majority of them, will not even get to your bloodstream.

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So even if it's in the edible, it doesn't make a huge difference at the end of the day.

14:19

For the experience so basically, what you're saying then is most of the edibles that you're going to find in dispensaries that are labeled sativa or indica.

14:26

It's a total misnomer, and I saw that all the time too, but it's kind of frustrating because I guess manufacturers and LPs and people involved in the industry know that consumers understand cannabis in that binary of sativa and indica, and does that mean they're just not taking the time to sort of educate consumers.

14:49

Yeah, and I can kind of explain why as a brand owner.

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There's this term out there when you're in consumer packaged goods, that the market's always right.

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Even if they're not right, they're going to put their dollars where their dollars want to go, whether they believe the truth or understand the truth or not, and you can try to educate them.

15:07

But something that's really intrinsic with bro science is it's deeply ingrained.

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Why? Because the culture has baked these bro science concepts into it and so it's like sort of a core piece of that religion, if you will, of cannabis consumption, and so it's sort of like a golden calf.

15:26

It's not supposed to be messed with and people are really entrenched on it.

15:29

They think it's true because they're a buddy that grew for 30 years and the Green Triangle in California told them and they know everything there is to know and it's just really hard to reeducate consumers.

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So what happens is you spend all this money towards reeducation and then the consumers just buy a different product because it doesn't say sativa or indica on it and then you go out of business, and so it's sort of this problem where the education needs to be there, but it's sort of a catch 22.

15:54

And you can't get the education out if you don't have the dollars to do it.

15:57

And you don't have the dollars to do it unless you market a product that the consumer buys.

16:00

But this long entrenched incorrect data is moving buying habits.

16:05

So I used to. When I first got into space, I was kind of frustrated at companies that did this.

16:10

But now I understand, having several years in the space, that even if they don't want to do it, it's really tricky to navigate your way out of it and still run a successful business.

16:20

Right. So it's sort of a problem that perpetuates itself almost because, like you said, you could, you could educate a consumer, but then at the end of the day, they're like, well, I just want.

16:28

I just want that sativa edible because that's what I believe is best for me.

16:32

Or the person that you talked about coming in and having a buddy that grew for 30 years and I want the highest THC stuff.

16:40

You got in the store, like I saw that kind of thing all the time and it didn't matter what you said to them, because they would think you were the idiot the way around, and so that that's a pretty great explanation as to why companies sort of keep moving in that direction.

16:54

I'm glad you brought that up because it does help people understand why this is the way it is, and I guess it's just one of those things that's going to take probably a long time to rectify.

17:03

But that's why we have to do things like this, have conversations like this.

17:07

Absolutely, and podcasts like yours were so important for the consumer because it's really the only way they're getting this education.

17:13

Right, right Now. You already touched on terpenes, so I hope we can dig into that a little bit, because you mentioned that there's this idea that most edibles have zero terpenes and you kind of touched on that and said some do have some terpenes, but by the time we digest it they're not going to really they're not going to pass through digestive systems.

17:34

So let's talk about that for a minute.

17:36

Yeah. So you know we've been thinking with some scientific research to back this up, although we're still learning, so there's room for some alteration of what we know now.

17:45

But what we suspect now is terpenes do a good portion of the steering right.

17:49

Thc would maybe be the throttle in your vehicle and terpenes are the steering wheel to some extent.

17:55

Now it's way more complicated than that, but loosely for this point of this conversation, take that into consideration.

18:01

So those terpenes are semi-volatile right, which means it doesn't take much heat for them to turn into a gas and disappear.

18:10

And when you're extracting and distilling product, the reason you're distilling your extract from cannabis is because usually it's extracted with ethanol in any mass producers.

18:21

So this is the same with vanilla extract and a lot of other herbal extracts.

18:25

Ethanol is very common. In fact, if you think about what a tincture is, tincture is traditionally alcohol that is extracted some sort of herb.

18:32

So in cannabis we use ethanol you know food grade ethanol but we don't want that in the end product, right?

18:39

You don't want to be selling gummies with ethanol in it.

18:42

So you have to get rid of the ethanol. And the way you do that is just like a whiskey.

18:45

Still You're distilling it. Or, like you would distill water, so you get it up to a certain temperature so the ethanol burns off.

18:51

Well, in that process it's taking other things with it that have a similar point, at which the temperature converts the solid into a gas, and so you lose some of those miners, you lose almost all the terpenes, if not all the terpenes, and distillate and flavonoids, a lot of the you know those, those volatiles, especially like the esters and things of that nature.

19:12

They're all gone, and so it's. It really boils down to you're really getting your primary cannabinoids into an oil and that's about it, and that's typically what we make edibles out from, because it's the most cost effective way to do that.

19:26

Now you could do a live resin or like a bubble hash or a rosin or something else to maintain some of those terpenes to put into edibles.

19:35

But again, if you're trying to run a business, you're paying a lot of extra money for an oil that has some compounds in it that ultimately aren't going to make any difference in the end users experience, and so it's typically not done.

19:46

Now, that said, we actually do sell live resin edibles and we do so not so much for the terpenes but for the other miners and the acidic version right With that heat during distillation.

19:58

Cbd converts to CBD, thca converts to Delta 9.

20:02

So you have these, these acidic carboxyl groups that are attached to the molecules that come off when heat is applied and so distillates, all will say, can not convert it in the way that, like Delta 8, is a conversion, but it's.

20:15

It's through heat. It's losing its carboxyl groups here, getting that version of the product, which means you don't get any of the potential benefits of having those acidic compounds in your product.

20:27

So we make a live resin gummy intentionally to maintain some of those acidic carboxyl groups in the product, because it gives you a more holistic cannabinoid profile from the plant and it's overall a better experience.

20:38

But I don't believe the terpenes are doing anything for our consumers with our live resin edibles.

20:45

Right. So if you want those terpenes, you should be combusting or vaporizing versus ingesting.

20:51

Now, how would that?

20:52

differ for someone who's making the retables at home and they've done their decarb and they infuse it into a fat.

20:57

Then they make a pot brownie.

21:00

Yeah, great question. So I haven't actually seen any testing to qualify what I'm about to say, but I suspect a lot of those terpenes are going to be lost in that, in that process as well.

21:09

I think decarbing is probably going to lose a good portion of the terpenes.

21:12

I mean, a good test would be to decarb your flour and then smoke it and see if it feels different than before.

21:20

You did that. I guess actually, it should be the same.

21:24

Well, I don't know. You've really posed a good question here that I don't think I have a solid answer for.

21:29

I would suspect, though, that the terpenes are lost during, at minimum, the cooking process.

21:34

Right, I tend to feel the same way. I've had a few chefs tell me the same thing.

21:37

Because the decarb process and then again you're cooking them at temps to make your fat, and then of course you're also baking it or cooking it to something as well.

21:47

So I think there are methods to sort of preserve those or terpenes when you're cooking at home, but then you lose out on the potency.

21:56

So there's always a trade off in a lot of those scenarios.

21:58

So it doesn't really matter which way you go, You're not really consuming edibles for the terpene profile.

22:04

You got to save that for your other methods of consumption.

22:07

That's right.

22:08

Yeah, now CBD does it cancel out THC?

22:14

That was one of the myths that I've seen.

22:17

Yes. So when we first launched our company, the product that we've launched with to sort of kick off the hemp-thrived D9 space in the USA, was a 10 to 1 ratio.

22:28

Actually, our first one was a 15 to 1 ratio product, so 15 part CBD to one part THC, which means you had 10 milligrams THC to 150 milligrams of CBD.

22:39

And we really hit a wall that we didn't expect we were going to hit when we first launched, with people going well, that much CBD, you'll never feel it.

22:45

You can take 1,000 milligrams, you'd never feel the THC.

22:48

Let's just ludicrous. This is not true at all.

22:52

Now it's true that CBD does have an effect with THC and it does mellow some of the sharper edges of the symptoms you would experience while being impaired by or having a psychoactivity from Delta 9 THC.

23:07

And so there's a benefit there and it does change the effects a little bit, modulates them more accurately, but it doesn't negate, and that's the big difference.

23:16

And so for people that are high-tolerance consumers, that high-frequency, high-tolerance consumers, they push back on CBD because they're trying to get that sharpness back that they've lost because they consume too much.

23:29

And essentially, when you consume too much, all of your receptors down regulate, which means they start minimizing the amount of receptor sites you have, because it's like whoa, we're getting too much of this, we're going to slow down and turn a bunch of these receptor sites off so we can't get that much anymore because we're getting inundated, which makes it harder to experience the effects you're after, and so they want that sharpness because that's what they're trying to get.

23:51

In reality, if you start your journey with a good amount of CBD in your product and you don't over-consume, you're less likely to down-regulate in that way and you're more likely to be able to experience what you're trying to achieve every time, instead of getting to a point where now you eat an edible just to feel kind of normal, but you never really get high anymore.

24:14

So I'm not sure if that answers the original question at this point, because I kind of rabbit-chirled a little bit.

24:20

No, it does, because you're basically suggesting that CBD doesn't cancel out the THC.

24:25

And if you consume an edible that has 15 times the THC, but that THC is at 1,000 milligrams and, depending on your tolerance level, you're still going to get really, really high.

24:35

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

24:38

It's not going to cancel out.

24:39

Which leads me to my next question, which is a lot of the times you hear that if you get too high, you can take CBD to sort of bring you back down.

24:47

Can you talk about that, Because I have heard many times that that's actually a myth as well.

24:54

So it's a myth that it'll bring you down. But what CBD does is it helps modulate the experience, and specifically with a Delta 9 high, what it does is it calms down the paranoia.

25:05

It calms down your tachycardia or your racing heart.

25:08

It calms down sort of that we'll say impending doom, where you want to just kind of crawl up into a corner and you're afraid you're stuck like that for the rest of your life and you think you might be dying.

25:18

It calms down the negative side effects, but it doesn't make you less high.

25:22

It just makes the bad part of being too high not as bad.

25:26

So it's more tolerable. You can write it out easier, but there are some problems with this.

25:33

Still, right, if you eat an edible of CBD, it's going to be an hour and a half before it kicks in.

25:37

Well, by that time some of your THC is probably starting to mellow out, potentially depending on when you took it and when you got too high, and so it's hard to tell.

25:46

Is it the CBD that's making me feel better or is it just time, or is it just time Right?

25:52

If I just been high long enough and it's starting to wear off a little bit.

25:54

But I do believe that if you can get it into your system fast enough, it will start to have those mitigating effects against the negative side effects and therefore you will feel better, even though it's not bringing you down per se.

26:06

So, like you said, it'll make being too high a little more tolerable, so you can get through it without having to call 911, essentially, which is always a good thing.

26:14

Yes, right, yeah.

26:16

And you know I don't fault anyone when they feel like they need to call 911.

26:20

Like, if you feel like you need to call 911, call 911.

26:23

But the reality is, if it's because you're high, they don't do anything for you, they'll bring you some water and they'll take your blood pressure and they'll be like yeah, turns out, you're high, just hang out in this hospital bed that thousand dollars.

26:35

Later you'll go home because suddenly you'll be sober and be like why am I here?

26:38

Right yeah. Now as far as CBD goes, though, to bring down your high, I mean, are there, are there some people that that might not work for, just because of their unique biology?

26:49

Oh, I think so. I think something that's a big misnomer is that THC always makes people feel X.

26:54

This terpene always makes people feel Y.

26:57

It's so variable, and here's a great example.

27:00

We're talking about those high tolerance, high frequency consumers and they're wanting to chase that sharpness, and a lot of them feel like the CBD doles it out for them.

27:07

I also know people that are high tolerance, high frequency users that when they introduce CBD with their THC they get too high, they get obliterated, they're like I can't do that anymore.

27:20

In fact when we started making our edibles we were a friend of mine from high school actually had started his own cannabis gummy company and I said hey, man, are you willing to take a shot and make these edibles for the first time in history that are like this?

27:32

And he said yeah, let's do it. Well, they're a small batch company and the pots that they make there they make a special type of gummy that's very particular.

27:42

You have to mess with it a lot during the process.

27:45

It's not a set it and forget it process. Because of that, they use an open pot when they're boiling their gummy material.

27:51

As you can imagine, when you pour distillate into a hot open pot, some of it evaporates into the air and you inhale it and just like you're doing dabs all day.

27:59

Him and his entire team were basically used to rip in dabs most of the day while doing their job because that's how they had to function.

28:07

This was early enough that respirators weren't being used and some common sense PPE wasn't being used.

28:12

So all him and his entire team were massively tolerant.

28:15

They were inhaling distillate all day long.

28:18

For the last several years we brought him our distillate that was 15-part CD to one-part THC and had him cook it.

28:24

He said everyone got so high that they had to shut down the office.

28:27

Everyone had to just go home for the day and call Ubers to get home because they're too high to drive.

28:33

You said, for now on we have to do your stuff after hours, when everyone else goes home, because everyone in the building gets too high.

28:39

That's wild.

28:41

Right. So some people the CBD will make their experience not a sharp and for other people it's going to intensify it.

28:48

All that to say, yeah, people react to these compounds differently and while you could safely say like 80 percent of people will probably fall in this range of effects, there's always that 10 percent on either side.

28:59

That's going to go wildly extreme. The other direction Right.

29:02

So if you're using it as a method to bring yourself down, you've gotten too high.

29:05

At least know how it affects you before you do that.

29:08

Yeah, it'll make things worse.

29:10

Yeah, you don't want that Now, as far as edibles go, edibles the same as inhaling cannabis.

29:16

Let's talk about that myth for a minute.

29:19

No, they are completely different. In fact, again, the plant really makes.

29:24

The two primary cannabinoids we'll talk about is THCA and CBDA.

29:28

When you're buying your flower from your dispensary or from your plug or out of your home grow.

29:34

You pull your flower out of, it's going to be predominantly THCA and or CBDA.

29:39

This is the acidic form. That, again, if you were to consume straight THCA, it has no effects because it doesn't bind to your receptors in that manner.

29:47

What happens is when you spark that joint and that flame hits the flower and it turns into smoke, that combustion converts the THCA to Delta 9 THC.

29:57

It converts CBDA into CBD.

30:00

Well, you inhale that. It goes into your lungs through a perfusion in your lungs or gas exchange, just like with oxygen.

30:07

It gets right into your blood immediately. In your blood there is Delta 9 and that is the compound that is binding to your receptors.

30:14

When you consume the edible we already talked about how the decarboxylation process doesn't happen with your lighter, like it doesn't join.

30:21

It happens when it's being distilled, typically, and then it's cooked.

30:24

Even if you're making edibles at home, it's cooked.

30:26

That's going to be decarbed. You're going to be eating Delta 9.

30:29

However, your liver does not put Delta 9 in your bloodstream.

30:35

You have an enzyme in your liver that actually processes this cannabis oil and in that processing, delta 9 converts to 11-hydroxy, delta 9 THC.

30:44

What happens is 11-hydroxy is the compound that gets in your bloodstream, not Delta 9 by itself.

30:52

It really is an actual different compound and people can have wildly different experiences.

30:58

My wife, for example. She can hit the vape cart.

31:01

She can hit live resin high THCA vape cart five, six, seven times and feel pretty good.

31:05

Two milligrams of ingestibles is her limit before she starts having panic attacks.

31:10

She's tried to increase that and she can't, for whatever her reason.

31:14

Her body is super sensitive to 11-hydroxy Delta 9 THC.

31:18

There's a caveat here that I want to add because it's really interesting.

31:21

This is true for all edibles and all inhalables, except for beverage.

31:26

Beverage is an exclusion from this rule.

31:31

The reason is, in order to get the oil to homogenize into a water base, you have to emulsify it In this process of emulsification to get your liquid suspension with the THC into the water, you don't want all the THC sitting on the bottom and you drink the first half and feel nothing and then all of a sudden you get it all in the bottom, especially thinking of big barrel.

31:50

When you're making thousands of cans of something, every can needs to be the same exact milligrams.

31:54

To do that you need really good suspension or homogenization through everything.

32:01

In this process, the particles of THC, which are really resonance, really sticky and bind together in these big clumps.

32:07

They get broken apart and then encapsulated into something that will stick to the water.

32:11

Because those molecules are so much smaller, they typically come in nanoparticle size, which is sub-100 nanometers.

32:19

They're small enough to skip phase one metabolization.

32:23

What that means is to get it into a water.

32:26

You need to essentially make the molecule small enough that it no longer gets metabolized through the liver.

32:31

Therefore, you get an ingested delta-9 that stays delta-9 and hits your blood like delta-9.

32:38

That's very interesting, because my next question was talking about drinks are more like an inhalation high.

32:44

Is that the idea then?

32:46

That's exactly correct, because you're getting that delta-9 through ingestion but it's going right to your bloodstream instead of being converted.

32:53

It's going to feel much more like an inhalation high Again, my wife being an example of someone that has extreme reactions to 11-hydroxy delta-9 THC.

33:01

She can drink beverages and have a great time.

33:05

Her tolerance is a little higher. She can do about five milligrams in beverages.

33:10

I was just going to ask if she can drink a little bit more than the two, because two milligrams is, in the world of addibles, like extremely low, although I've met people who have one milligram tolerances as well, but then again, with addibles I've met people who could consume 600 and still operate.

33:27

I don't understand, I think there's more people out there that have that incredibly low tolerance than we realize.

33:32

I think we didn't realize it before, because who was making one milligram addibles in 1998?

33:37

You didn't know how many milligrams was in it.

33:41

The only way you had any idea was you ate one and said it feels strong, it feels weak.

33:46

But the people doing this are high-tolerance, high-frequency consumers and they're giving it to their high-tolerance, high-frequency friends.

33:53

Someone's like I want to try and you give them a quarter of a cookie and they have a horrible experience.

33:58

Well, was it two milligrams or was it 30 milligrams?

34:00

Nobody really knows those low-tolerance consumers.

34:04

I think in the past they had said I want to try, that have a horrible experience because it's way too much for them.

34:10

They're like I'm never doing it again. But now that we're quantifying the milligrams in products, we have an opportunity to allow people with a really low tolerance to eat low milligram products so they can still have that good experience without getting burned the first time they try it.

34:25

Right, yeah, that's very true. And thank goodness for the legal market because of that, because even now, like if somebody gives me, gifts me an edible and they haven't tested it in any way and they have no idea what the potency is, I won't eat it Because I kind of know the range where I'm at.

34:40

But if it's a homemade edible and they're like, well, I don't know, I thought it was strong, Then I'm basically eating that edible on a hope and a prayer.

34:48

Well, because it could be 100 milligrams, it could be five, and you know, one end of that spectrum I won't feel anything.

34:56

In the other end of the spectrum I'm having that panic attack.

34:59

So you know it's pretty risky, but when you have legal market edibles, a lot of the times I'll direct people that if they have access to it that way, first so they can start at that one milligram edible and work their way up, and then, when they have some confidence, if they're making their own at home, then they have at least a benchmark of what their tolerance is and how to sort of figure out how to make edibles in that range, and then they can also gift them to other people and be like you know, I've calculated this to be about this much, and when you gift them and you can give somebody that idea, it's so much safer than just being like you're trying to let me know what you think and then chaos ensues.

35:37

Yeah, now, as far as we'll switch gears a little bit here, there's the myth that hemp is the male plant and marijuana is the female plant.

35:50

Yeah, this is just the bull face lie. I'm not really sure where this originally came from, but I think there's there's general confusion around the terms cannabis, hemp and marijuana, especially in the US, where we have a very robust hemp program that is making products that are virtually the same, if not exactly the same as the marijuana program.

36:09

So the terminology here is really muddied for most of the consumers.

36:14

And back in the day, again going to that bro science, this is what was taught for some reason.

36:20

I don't know if Matt, I doubt like real growers believe this per se, but I think consumers holistically did, and the reality is this couldn't be further from the truth.

36:30

Hemp is a made up term.

36:32

It is in the US. It is a legal term.

36:35

Previously to it being a legal term in Western civilizations.

36:41

Before we called it marijuana, it was often referred to as hemp.

36:45

Why? Because for thousands and thousands, if not millions, of years we've been using the hemp varietals as a species to make rope, twine, textiles, all sorts of things.

36:56

And in fact it's really interesting in during World War Two in the US, while cannabis was already completely illegal and you couldn't grow it, we realized that we were running short of hemp supplies and we couldn't get imports because we're in the middle of the war.

37:12

So the US actually said, hey, temporarily, not only is this not illegal, but we're going to pay you if you grow hemp.

37:21

And they had this whole hemp for victory reel that they would play at movie theaters to encourage farmers to jump in and start growing hemp again.

37:30

But hemp is cannabis, marijuana is cannabis, it's all cannabis and, just like canines, there's a wide variety of, will say, phenotypes and genotypes within that species.

37:42

So when you think of retaining some cannabinoids out of your plant.

37:47

Those are typically going to be the shorter, bushier fat plants with the big fat colas of buds on them that are technically a flower and you were going to either smoke those or extract those to get the can.

38:00

We're maximizing cannabinoids right. That's a type one chemo type of cannabis high THC, little to no CBD.

38:07

Type two is a balance of THC to CBD.

38:10

Type three is high CBD, low THC and those are all those bushier, christmas tree looking plants.

38:17

But then you have type four chemo types.

38:19

Type four chemo types are predominantly grown for either fiber or grain and they look drastically different.

38:25

They don't look like Christmas trees, they will almost look more like bamboo.

38:28

You go right up next to each other, thinking 14 feet tall.

38:32

They don't extend sideways very much. Most of flowering is the very, very top instead of all up and down the stock.

38:38

And we use those for different things hemp seed for feed and for human consumption, for food it's really good.

38:44

And omega threes and proteins it's actually. Hemp is kind of a wonder food actually.

38:48

And we use them for fiber, we use them for animal bedding, we use it for bio plastics.

38:53

We can do lots with those varietals or those chemo types of plant or or subspecies of cannabis.

39:02

However, again, hemp is just a made up word to try to define that stuff right.

39:07

And in the US we've muddied it because we've made an arbitrary distinction that hemp is below 0.3% THC.

39:13

It's an arbitrary number and it has nothing to do with the science of the plant.

39:17

It's just a legal term. Marijuana has been considered the drug type, what you get cannabinoids from.

39:22

But again, it's muddy because in the US we're not growing a ton for fiber and textiles, we're growing for cannabinoids.

39:29

So the whole thing is a giant misnomer and I'll also share that.

39:34

When you're getting flowers out of your plant, that is a female plant, right?

39:38

So it doesn't matter if it's hemp or it's marijuana or even if it's a type 4 fiber.

39:44

If there's flowers on top, that is a female plant, because the flower is the female reproductive organ that's out there to try to catch the pollen from the male plants.

39:55

Right, so hemp-derived anything is still from a female plant, it's just the morphology of the plant is distinctly different because it's being grown more for the seed or the fiber or that kind of thing.

40:07

Well, here in the States anyway, when we use hemp-derived products, the plants look indistinguishable from a marijuana plant.

40:13

It looks, smells, it's identical.

40:16

It's that short, stocky Christmas tree with the big fat buds, because that's where you get the most of the cannabinoids from.

40:21

Now, that doesn't mean that you can't get cannabinoids from those other varietals.

40:25

But no one in the States right now in a big way that I'm aware of is growing large grain or fiber crops and then trying to pull cannabinoids out of them Because you can grow these stockier plants with way more cannabinoids.

40:36

Now that's a. We could talk about a percentage of yield by acre for different chemo types.

40:41

It's a different topic, but hemp here in the US anyway looks exactly like marijuana in the US.

40:47

You can't tell the difference, Right? That's very interesting.

40:51

And it is. It is so muddy because I see, even in Canada people would come into the dispensary.

40:55

Sadly, a lot of them were older folk who had seen something on the internet and they're like I want more of this.

41:00

And they'd show me a little bottle. And it would be a little bottle of like hemp oil that you could buy at the grocery store and take, you know, sprinkle on your salad or whatever.

41:11

But they had paid obscene amounts of money for it, which was like obviously some company was out there marketing to these people and they thought that it was the same thing, but sadly it wasn't.

41:21

So I'm glad we talked about that. Now can we talk about the term marijuana itself being a racist term?

41:28

Yeah, so this has also been academically proven to be false.

41:34

Now that doesn't mean that it wasn't used in racist tonalities, especially in the US during the original prohibition.

41:38

Henry Anslinger, which really pushed anti-marijuana rhetoric in the States first, before Nixon did by several decades, he was heavily racist and he said some really horrible things that I don't even generally like repeating, but you can Google them and find them and they're quite shocking.

41:56

I mean things like they're just absolutely absurd to say in.

42:02

You know, as a human, and because of that, because of the racist tendencies of Anslinger and those policies, and then further by the racist tendencies of, like, the Nixon administration when the controlled substance act came out, there's this concept that marijuana is an inherently racist term and the reality is it's not.

42:19

Racists use the term marijuana as a racist term.

42:23

Racists use the accurate term at the time for the plant to talk about the plant and stigmatize it and make it bad.

42:30

But the term itself was not created by these people.

42:33

It was inherited by these people because that's what it was being referred to by the consumers of the product generally.

42:40

So it's not inherently racist. In fact, if you go back and the trichome Institute has a wonderful blog post about this and one of the members there is extremely intelligent and does a lot of deep diving research and he was able to go back and put together this whole story from a bunch of different researchers and there's other professors at universities that have done this and he pulled reports from them that show that marijuana is actually a very positive term.

43:07

And when Spanish settlers landed in Latin America and they instilled Catholicism is through force amongst these people, they did not like cannabis use and they basically banned it from the indigenous folks in Latin America and the Latin Americans, as part of their religious ceremonies, were using cannabis and they didn't want to stop using it.

43:29

So they figured out they had to hide it and they had to kind of sort of do it underground, which feels very like we haven't progressed very far since the Spanish invaded Latin America.

43:37

But so they came up with this term, you know marijuana, which sounded like Mary, kind of sounded Catholic, so they could talk about it with each other and it wouldn't really raise a red flag immediately with their overlords, if you will, and they could do it in private and it was almost the term of rebellion, like marijuana was almost a rebellious flag, like a don't tread on me.

43:59

We're going to keep using this, whether you like it or not, and we're going to do it under your nose, we're not going to know about it, and I think that we should reclaim that term as that anti prohibition, anti, government overreach, anti telling us what to do, because that's how it started.

44:15

And this concept that if you use it, your racist, blows me away and it's unfortunate because it's extremely prevalent.

44:21

I think it's going to take I don't know if we can reverse reverse course now, it's so prevalent amongst the hive mind, but I'm hoping we can because really it's a great term and it has a lot of historical value.

44:30

I mean, it was in the, the pharmacopia in Mexico, you know, decades and not centuries ago, like a century ago and it's really unfortunate that we decided it's racist and now no one can use it.

44:43

Now I still use it regularly and the way I use these terms is interesting.

44:48

So, especially in the US, because of our policies here, in our laws, if I'm talking about the plant, the product, what it does to you or any general terms about it, I just say cannabis, because that's what it is.

44:59

When I'm talking about the legal framework in which your business or product operates in, that's where these terms are required because they're actually legal definitions in our country.

45:09

So marijuana is a legal term and hemp is a legal term, and so people have often said in our country, well, there's cannabis and hemp.

45:16

Nope, both are cannabis. There's marijuana and hemp, both are legal terms.

45:20

All are cannabis, and so I continue to use it, but I use it sparingly and only when I'm talking about the legal framework that it resides in.

45:30

That's fascinating. I did not know that I've been.

45:33

I've been one of those people that have been moving towards the use of cannabis instead of marijuana.

45:38

But what I'll do is also try and track down that article you mentioned from the Trichome Institute, because I think that's really interesting and the evolution of language is always fascinating, especially when you talk about people trying to hide their use but make it sound sort of Catholic.

45:55

That's pretty interesting stuff.

45:58

Also, the myth holding in smoke longer increases the high.

46:04

Yeah, that's also false. In fact they have done some studies on this.

46:08

And if you want to increase your high, the suggestion now is to breathe it into your lungs, but stop short so you still have lung capacity, and then take a deep breath in of just fresh air.

46:20

Because what that's doing is you're getting the smoke in the lungs and then when you're breathing in fresh air, it's sort of forcing all of that smoke in those compounds through your lung system, whereas if you just hold it think about it Imagine blowing smoke into a balloon and just holding it there.

46:38

Not much is being forced against the walls of the balloon.

46:40

The majority of it is sitting in the inside of the balloon, just sort of swirling around, doing its own thing, not touching anything.

46:45

Right, when you're holding it, that's all you're doing.

46:49

And then you're just holding it in the lungs called lungs that are just holding smoke and not doing much.

46:53

But if you get enough smoke in where there's enough to coat the lining of your lungs, if you will, and then you take a deep breath right after it, it's already been pushed into your lungs and what's done is done.

47:02

So holding it doesn't help anymore.

47:05

So take some inhalation, remove the joint, take a big deep breath and then blow out immediately and you're going to maximize your cannabinoid intake through that method, versus holding your smoke.

47:16

And you're using like a vaporizer as well.

47:18

Absolutely. Yeah, this is general chemistry or physiology concepts or probably more physics concepts I'm not really a scientist A physics concept to apply here and not really unique to the inhalant.

47:29

That's pretty interesting then. So that's like a little hack if you want to sort of maximize the use of your cannabis when you're smoking or vaporizing and you actually want to get that little extra high.

47:39

Yeah, and this stuff is expensive. Right, if you could get there with two hits of giant ribs and holding it, or one hit, that's a quarter of the size that you inhale quickly and you get to the same spot.

47:49

You just forexed your supply.

47:52

Right and which everybody's interested in because of this economy right now.

47:56

So yeah, that's great, yeah.

47:59

Now. The last question I have for you today is cannabis stays in your system for 30 days, is true or not?

48:06

It's complex, it can be true. The general rule of thumb is cannabis stays in your system for about 30 days.

48:14

However, there's a lot of variables and uniqueness to you as a person that can drastically change this One.

48:20

How often and how much do you consume? You could consume every day, but you could consume such a small amount that you don't have enough metabolites for the drug test to pick up the positive, because, at the end of the day, we're not pulling out your blood.

48:35

Generally speaking, for mostly these tests, they're mostly urine tests.

48:38

There are blood test. Those do exist, but generally speaking, they're pulling it out of your urine and, just like testing anything, there's a limit of detection.

48:46

How low or how sensitive is our equipment to pick up how many parts per million of this compound?

48:51

Well, you could have some present, but it's so low that it's not enough to trigger a dirty on a drug test.

48:57

Conversely, you could be such a high tolerance consumer and smoke so much that you could be being dirty for 90 days afterward easily, and a complication here is that the cannabinoids reside and are stored in your fat cells.

49:14

So another thing that's complicated is if you start dropping a bunch of weight and you haven't consumed in a while you might actually start peeing metabolites again.

49:20

So it's complex.

49:23

Generally speaking, I say it's about 30 days for most people, but again, that's most people, not all people and if your job depends on it, I would do some significant testing on your own to know how long it stays in your system, based on your tolerance, your frequency and your body chemistry, and so you know what you're dealing with.

49:42

If you need to be clean for some reason, and would this apply also to addables, if you're an addables consumer, primarily?

49:49

Absolutely.

49:49

It's all the same. Yep, okay, all right.

49:52

Well, that answers that, and that's a really good to know if you're unfortunate enough to be somebody who has to deal with some kind of drug testing for employment purposes or whatever the case might be.

50:00

But yeah, the more you know, knowledge is power, as we like to say.

50:04

Absolutely, and I would never encourage anyone to perform any sort of fraud or anything.

50:08

But I will say that synthetic pee, for whatever other reason you may have, is easily available and you can order it online and it works every time.

50:17

Right, yeah, I'm going to say thank you, chris, for joining us today and answering these questions, because a lot of these I'm sure there's people listening who are like, going to be like.

50:25

You know what this is going to make my life better.

50:28

I'm knowing these things, so I appreciate it.

50:32

Of course, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for giving me a chance to speak with you and your audience.

50:37

Well, friends, I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation with Chris, but after hearing this episode, are there any cannabis myths that you've now changed your mind on?

50:46

If any, let me know what you think. You can always hit me up by email, the podcast hotline, dm me on Instagram and let me know what you think.

50:54

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51:02

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51:09

And, of course, you know it's not a myth.

51:12

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51:14

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51:23

I'm your host, marge.