Sally Vander Veer, president of Colorado’s Medicine Man, details her family’s 2007 medical marijuana start and 2014 recreational legalization under Amendment 69, cultivating 70 strains in a 40,000 sq ft facility with "canniseurs" like brother Pete. She argues marijuana is 114x safer than alcohol, citing no lethal dose, but notes federal Schedule I classification stifles research despite the government’s own patent on its medicinal benefits. Colorado’s legalization reduced drug arrests by 40% and crime rates, though banking remains a hurdle due to federal restrictions. Vander Veer blames marijuana’s illegality on corporate lobbying—from DuPont and Hearst in the 1930s to today’s alcohol, pharmaceutical, and tobacco industries—highlighting its ancient history and potential as a safer alternative to alcohol and tobacco. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's 25 time zones.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
I am Mark Bell.
It's going to be a very, very interesting show, I think, this night.
20 years ago, I, on the old, old show, I actually said marijuana should be legalized in the United States.
And I got about 10,000 emails telling me, oh, no, crime will go absolutely skyrocket.
The people are going to go crazy.
And it went on and on, you know, and lots of other reasons and other people who had other interests.
So we're going to do a show on pot tonight with a lady who is running probably one of the biggest pot stores.
That's not going to be a good name for it, is it?
In the country, in Colorado, where it is absolutely 100%, well, 99.9% legal.
The rules of this program are simple.
Use bad language.
I push a button, it disappears, and then so do you.
And one call per show.
That's all.
One call per show.
So following up here, a U.S. official says the FBI was treating the mass shooting in California as a potential act of terror, but had reached no conclusions as yet.
The official was briefed on the investigation, but wasn't authorized to discuss it by name, spoke on condition of anonymity.
He did say that Sayyed Farouk communicated with individuals who were under FBI scrutiny in connection with a terrorism investigation.
Now, the Brits began bombing in Syria, adding to the soup.
And they hit some oil fields.
It's going to cost ISIS some money, no question about that.
So the British are now in there with bombers.
I don't know how many countries that is, but it's a bunch.
Oh, and ISIS now says they are going to hit Britain next.
That was because of the vote in Britain to hit ISIS with airstrikes, which succeeded by a pretty good margin.
So it shall begin.
Coming up in a moment, Sally Vandeveer.
She is president of Medicine Man, a much better name for a store, right?
Not a pot store, Medicine Man.
One of the largest and most successful marijuana cultivation dispensaries in Colorado.
And she, along with nine of her family members, including Andy Williams, CEO, Pete Williams, COO, are passionate about growing high-quality marijuana in a consistent, compliant, and cost-efficient way.
Before joining her brothers in the marijuana business, Sally had a rather successful career in the pharmaceutical industry.
You'll be interested to know.
She lives in Colorado with her husband and two teenage children.
So just sounds like sort of an average person, right?
Well, you'll find out in a moment.
This is midnight in the desert.
Come explore in the night with us.
unidentified
Don't bother us.
Now you'll let you gain the error again.
Take a walk on the wild side of midnight from the Kingdom of Nigh.
And just so you know, if you just tuned in, she is the president of something called Medicine Man, which happens to be one of the largest and most successful marijuana cultivation dispensaries in Colorado.
So, as I mentioned at the top of the show, I called for the legalization of marijuana 20 years ago and got sandblasted for it, but I've maintained it through all the years.
And so it is a big pleasure for me to be able to put on the air somebody growing marijuana in freedom in Colorado.
Does it hurt to be related to someone in my family?
No, it does.
No, but we started, my brother Peter has always grown marijuana in one form or another, but then started doing it legally in Colorado in about 2007 when you were able to grow as a caregiver for other patients.
So there was a pretty loose system in place where you could get paperwork from the state and become a grower or a caregiver for patients and grow a certain number of plants per patient.
And he was running a successful tile business at the time and did this as his passion and spent every spare moment going to grow stores.
Okay, if I can understand, again, I'm stopping you and I'm sorry, but when you were in the business of medical marijuana, how were the profits in that?
We went in the black probably in the first three to six months, which is pretty amazing considering it's a big financial burden to start a cultivation and a store and all the things, all the costs that go along with starting any business we encountered.
So we were one of the first to open and very quickly got a great following because we grew amazing product.
Well, let's start out by saying marijuana is a substance that alters your body in some way, right?
So anytime we are in that state, we can't say that it's 100% safe.
But what I can say about marijuana is that there is no lethal dose that has ever been established for marijuana.
So it's not to say that you might not feel good if you ingest too much.
You might not feel well for a while.
But you're not going to die as a result of ingesting marijuana.
So there's not a lot of other substances we can say that about, including sugar, caffeine, salt, you know, all of these things.
In fact, I read one thing that said the lethal dose would be if you smoked in one sitting 800 joints and the cause of death would be carbon monoxide poisoning.
So that gives you an idea.
So when we're up against people who say marijuana is horrible, it's a very, very safe drug.
And in fact, study after study finds that it's less harmful than alcohol.
In fact, one study said it was 114 times less deadly than alcohol.
And we're all very comfortable with alcohol.
So I like to make that analogy so people can kind of change their mindset a little bit.
Well, if we begin talking about alcohol and marijuana, alcohol is going to lose horribly in every category of people hurt, of people dead, of people, you name it, alcoholics, every single category, the booze is going to lose.
The booze is going to lose.
Yeah, so that brings me to something else.
So great amounts of it are safe is the answer across the board.
You just don't document it.
I guess before I leave that, I should ask, well, any other effects that you would name that would be on the negative side?
So the difficulty when discussing studies with marijuana is that because it's a Schedule I drug, we are not allowed to study it as we would any other drug, right?
So there are a lot of hoops that have to be jumped through, and typically the studies are focused on the harmful effects of marijuana.
But it takes a lot to remove a drug from Schedule I. So until marijuana is removed from Schedule I, we'll be up against all of the major obstacles.
Primarily would be, in my opinion, lack of medical research because, for instance, universities can't study marijuana because if they have any federal funding, that may go away because the feds may say, oh, you're studying marijuana.
We're going to take away your federal funding.
Therefore, they don't want to touch it.
I'm called every day by people around the country at major universities who have questions, but they can't dip their toe in the water yet because they're afraid to lose whatever it is.
All right, so what would it take for the federal government to become rational and look at marijuana again and say, obviously, it's not Schedule I. Our dads were wrong.
Our grandfathers were wrong.
It's not Schedule I, and so we're going to change it to whatever.
So it's going to take an act of Congress, literally.
I mean, you joke about those things, but in this case, it would take such an act of Congress.
Do you think, just as sort of a question, maybe you're not into polls, I don't know, but do you think there is enough sentiment in Congress to rethink this?
Sentiment in Congress is swinging in our direction.
So over the last five years especially, we've seen bipartisan support for marijuana for whatever reason, be it the tax revenue that's generated or that they're just rational people who understand that cannabis is not a threat to society.
So and 68% of the American public are in favor of legalization of some form.
So I think politicians who may be resistant to marijuana will have to change their minds if they're listening to their constituents.
So yes, the pendulum is swinging in our direction, but we still have a long way to go.
Well, there's a lot of work going on in Maryland now.
I think you probably know that.
Washington, D.C. did pass.
Hawaii is coming up.
A lot of, well, we just saw what happened at Ohio.
They failed because they had a ridiculous proposition for their people.
But I think, I'm trying to think of other states.
I mean, really every state, almost every state is looking into this issue.
We're seeing, I'm trying to think of other states that we have another company that goes into other states and teaches them how to grow in the same manner that we do.
So we're pretty active.
Illinois just launched this last week.
So that's pretty exciting.
Yeah, they have a new medical program.
Some of the issues that other states are dealing with are the state gets to determine which diagnoses are allowed to get a marijuana card so that they can purchase.
So that's very limited depending on the state.
So we're hoping to expand the indications for the use of marijuana in those states.
And I'm sure your guys will learn how to smell that immediately.
So interesting, the whole thing.
What I want to talk to you about, you know, we're coming up on a break, but it's an obvious thing to talk about.
Now, we've got some years under our belt in Colorado with pot completely legal.
So, you know, the old story is that people will go berserk.
There'll be mayhem.
There'll be rapes.
There'll be plundering.
There'll be increased crime rates and all kinds of things people say and fight against this with.
So obviously, I'm going to be asking you how it's going in Colorado.
In other words, has crime gone up or down?
Are people suddenly laying around during the time when they're supposed to be in the office, off in the corner, high and in a stupor, unable to function in any way because they've smoked so many joints in a state where it's free to do that?
Think that question over, and we'll be back after the break.
In other words, how is it, several years now, of legal pot in Colorado, if any of those terrible things were going to happen that those people talked about 20 years ago, it seems to me, well, it should be mad max times 10 there by now.
unidentified
The End
Taking you from today into tomorrow, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
Yes, you might say we help with the transition from today until tomorrow.
Sally Vandevere is my guest, and she is the president of Medicine Man.
It is one of the most successful marijuana cultivation dispensaries in Colorado, where it is 99.9% legal.
You can smoke it.
And we'll get to why I gave that 99.whatever percent in a minute.
Look, there are people from every single state in the country listening right now, and a lot of them are curious about how this experiment in Colorado has gone.
And so I think the most important thing you could tell people tonight is how's it gone?
And not only that, you can imagine the number of jobs and the amount of money that's bringing to Colorado if they have a choice to go to Colorado or Utah to ski.
A lot of people are coming to Colorado, and I know this because they stop at my shop because we're close to the airport on their way up to the mountains.
I don't know since I don't know any drug dealers or anyone on the black market, and they have not ever threatened me, my family, or anyone that I know.
But a lot of their business is going in the legal direction.
I mean, I'm not naive, and I know that there will always be a black market, but certainly having access to legal marijuana when given the choice to buy it legally or on a street corner, most rational people will purchase it regardless of what the taxes are.
Well, and if you think about overcrowded prisons, overcrowded court system, we're really alleviating a lot of that here in Colorado so that we can really focus on important issues.
Well, it it has the opposite effect of alcohol in that you don't suddenly become the new dictator of America, able to go 90 miles an hour if you feel like it, and slam through intersections because you're drunk and kill people.
I read something when I was preparing for this that once marijuana is legal nationally, it could generate $8.7 billion in federal and state tax revenue.
The unemployment rate here is at the lowest it's ever been or in a long, long time.
So there's a lot of new jobs being created, not just in the industry itself, not just for touching the plant or selling the plant, but ancillary industries, you know, restaurants, tourism.
There's all kinds of great, really smart people that are doing, you know, get a 420 limo, right?
So you get a limo, pick you up to the airport, and you get smoke in the limo, and they drive you around, and they do fun things, and they'll take you up to the mountains.
It's 420 friendly in their car.
So a lot of great business, and several more to come, I'm sure.
And I'm sure you'll have callers that say, well, what about this and what about that?
And that's just because I don't think in those terms.
But downside for Colorado, no, I mean, the eyes of the nation are on us, so we've got a lot to prove, and we've got to do it well.
You know, people would say now teenagers have more access to it when, in fact, less teenagers in Colorado are smoking pot now than they did five years ago.
When Colorado was a medical marijuana state, how much of an increase would you guess there was in people suddenly going to the doctor and developing a condition that called for, certainly in their opinion, if not the doctor's, a prescription for marijuana?
Again, there are some opportunist doctors, opportunistic doctors who, you know, can sign people up and get their $90, $100 or whatever it is in 20 minutes.
But the fact that violent crime has gone down, burglaries have gone down, property crime, all of the indicators are going in the right direction as far as crime is concerned.
We can't take responsibility for that.
But you can't blame us either that it went in the wrong direction.
I want to say that the cops that I've talked to lately, and I've talked to a few, say that the number of people hooked on opiates, hooked on painkillers, is beyond what you would believe.
If I told you the number, you wouldn't believe virtually the whole town is on some kind of painkiller or another.
It's really, really, really widespread.
But the truth.
That's the truth.
Now, hold on.
Sally Vannevere is here, president of Medicine Man, one of the biggest Marijuana cultivation dispensaries in Colorado, where it's 99.9% legal.
We'll talk more and then we'll give you a chance to ask a question.
unidentified
You're raging into the night with Midnight in the Desert.
To be part of the show, please call 1-952-Call Art.
And if you missed the first hour of the show, don't miss it if they've mixed up the hours, because it's too important.
We're talking about marijuana.
Sally Vandevere is the president of Medicine Man in Colorado, where marijuana is 99.9% legal, along with her brothers.
It's a big business.
It's a successful business.
And it's near the airport.
And we're about to dive back into this.
So you need to hear this whole show.
It's a very, very important program, and it will help you understand perhaps how you should feel about doing the same thing in your state.
If you're sick of the potholes, and I know a lot of people are, so, so, So welcome back, Sally.
It's great to have you back.
So what would you like to say about POT versus opioids versus painkillers?
We've got so many people on painkillers here, and it is said that POT relieves pain, and some people who regularly take painkillers actually stop and go to POT.
And you talked about that earlier, and it's really scary to see what's happening.
The coolest study on this was published in JAMA, Internal Medicine, and that, well, first, overdose deaths have tripled.
Overdose deaths from opiates have tripled since 1991.
In states where medical marijuana is legal, there is a reduction in opiate deaths, overdose deaths, by 25%.
So I think that's very significant.
When you're talking about 16,000 Americans dying yearly, if you can see a 25% reduction in that in states where marijuana is legal, it's huge.
So there are new studies and protocols that help people who are addicted to opiates either substitute marijuana or use it as adjunct therapy as they're decreasing their dose of opiates.
It helps with withdrawal symptoms and can hopefully manage pain, but certainly can bring down the dosage level of the opiates.
Well, it depends on the patient, but I can tell you, we see about 750 people a day.
We have a couple stores, 750 people a day.
If I stand on my medical store, in my medical store, and someone will recognize me and they come and tell me a story, it happens every day.
They'll be in tears.
They'll tell me about I couldn't get up.
I couldn't work.
I couldn't function.
I have arthritis.
I have brain cancer.
I have back pain.
The story is always the same.
I was taking 23 medications.
I was taking four medications.
Whatever it is.
Marijuana has allowed me to function.
Marijuana has taken away my pain or lessened my pain so that I can now play with my grandchildren, work, you know, all these important things.
So while we don't have a lot of scientific evidence for the reasons we discussed earlier, the overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence has convinced me.
I used to be a skeptic.
I used to think there's no way.
People just use it to get stoned.
And if you talk to enough people every day, they tell you the truth.
Colorado just gave a few million dollars to different universities here in Colorado to start studying observationally the effects on sleep and other types of issues.
But we don't have the data to support what we hear every day in our stores.
Yeah, Charlotte's Web, the Stanley Brothers down in Colorado Springs.
They have a beautiful combination, mostly CBD, which is a different part, one of the components of the cannabis plant, which targets the intractable epilepsy or drvets.
And, you know, if he got to meet Charlotte, he got to spend time with Charlotte.
You see a kid that's seizing every five minutes, and then you see a child who is functioning on a swing or riding her bike, again, that's the evidence.
That's all the evidence sometimes reasonable and intelligent people need.
I'll say that there are oils that are made through extraction procedures.
So sometimes it can be processed, but again, there are very high standards in Colorado on how that can be done or how that is done.
But for the most part, it's just a very natural and very organic plant.
One of the best things I've ever heard, Don Abrams, he's the chief of oncology at San Francisco General Hospital.
And he said if cannabis were discovered in the Amazon rainforest today, people will be clamoring to make as much use as they could of all the potential benefits of the plant.
They are, and they have the same properties as if you were to smoke it.
But a lot of times what can happen is that we can pull out certain chemical components of cannabis.
So depending on who you talk to, what study you read, there's anywhere from 66 to 85 different components of cannabis.
What we all know is THC, right?
That's a psychoactive part of it.
But there are other, many, other players in this plant that all work together with an entourage effect to enhance, each component enhances the other component.
I wonder, Sally, how many drugs, I'm talking about all drugs now in the U.S., that people use are originally derived from one way or the other, some kind of plant?
Not in its true form, as you would see with cannabis, but certainly a lot of medicine is derived from what they see, you know, the benefits of a plant.
So I would agree that there are probably several, but not many as pure as what you're going to get from marijuana.
Yeah, that's one of the biggest obstacles that we have in marijuana is that because marijuana is illegal under U.S. law, the banks have to comply with the federal regulations, right?
They're governed by the feds.
So it's possible for banks to accept our cash.
And I actually have a great relationship with a family bank in Colorado, but they have to take so many additional steps to make sure that I'm a compliant operator and that I'm not diverting my funds, that I'm not embezzling, I'm not doing anything illegal.
So we have to prove that we are reputable to the people.
The president of that bank is a trailblazer like you, and he said, this is ridiculous.
What do I need to do to be compliant?
How do I do this?
And he had to hire, I don't know, three or four additional staff members to handle the marijuana accounts themselves because there's so much paperwork that we have to deliver to them weekly, monthly.
And this is the reason why banking is such an issue for the marijuana industry because there are very few banks who will go out on the limb for us.
So again, if marijuana is removed from Schedule I, we won't have this issue because as it stands, we are conducting an illegal activity under federal law.
They know we make a lot of money, and they know that we have to leave it in the safe.
Not so anymore.
But for a while, and throughout our history, we've been on an all-cash basis, which means I pay everything in cash.
I pay my electric bill in cash.
I pay my employees in cash.
Taxes are taken out, all of those other things, everything's done the right way, but they walk out every other, whatever day we get paid with a pocket full of cash.
And that's a safety risk for them.
It is.
I have to pay my taxes.
It's so funny that no one can bank me.
The only person who can really accept my money without any recourse or issue is the federal government or the state government.
They can take my money anytime they want and put it in their bank without fear of having any repercussions.
But there are some contractors that won't take my cash or my check.
Some people won't do business with me because they're afraid that if they deposit my check or my cash, that they could lose their account.
And it happens all the time.
I lost my personal account.
I had a bank here in Colorado.
I've been banking with them for 20 years.
And they dropped me because my check came from a marijuana company.
And that's not only happening to me, it's happening to my employees.
It's happening to people who are working hard, you know, making a living wage, and now they don't have a bank account because their money that they've paid taxes on comes from a marijuana company.
A lot of it's mandated by the state, which I completely agree with.
We have a camera in every nook and cranny.
You can see every probably every square inch of my facility, 40,000 square foot facility, at any time with cameras, with redundancy backup of videotape.
We have a third-party company that does armed security for us.
I can't remember the statistic, and I can't verify it, but the amount that the pharmaceutical lobby is throwing at the anti-marijuana campaign is staggering.
So there are a lot of people who have a very strong interest in not allowing marijuana to come to America or to become legal.
So you're right.
Originally, back in the 30s, it was DuPont Chemicals, it was William Hearst, those types of people.
And now it's alcohol, it's pharmaceuticals.
And tobacco is kind of out of it for now.
I think they're kind of sniffing around marijuana as a potential business.
But yeah, there's a lot of money out there that they don't want to see us succeed.
I'm sure right now there is a marijuana division or at least someone responsible at Phillip Morris or our journal for looking and keeping their eye on the marijuana industry.
When they come in, I don't know.
It'll probably be after marijuana is legal in America, but they will be the first people to jump in.
Well, if they decide they want to be in the marijuana business, and it would be a gigantic business, they would throw all that lobbying money behind getting the law changed.
Think of how much more quickly that'll happen for them than it will for, you know, there's a lot of people who have spent a lot of time grassroots getting us where we are, and they've done an amazing job on a shoestring budget.
So I can't even imagine how quickly this would move based on all of the evidence and evidence to support the use of marijuana.
So while it might be a little scary to have all that big money in the space, big corporations in the space, certainly we could move our agenda forward more quickly.
Well, most of it is anecdotal because we are not allowed to study it.
We don't have the means to study.
So, you know, just like with a lot of drugs, you have to work on anecdotal.
When I was in the pharmaceutical industry, I worked on a drug that was used for epilepsy.
And then suddenly all these doctors started telling us, well, gosh, my patients don't want to drink alcohol anymore and their inflammation is going away.
So then we were able to collect that anecdotal evidence, and then the company was able to study that.
You've earned a break, and we've got a long break coming up.
So what we're going to do is take calls after the break, and I'm going to give them my little talk right now about how to call, okay?
So stand by.
You've got a nice long break.
Sally Vandeveer is her name, president of Medicine Man in Colorado, big-time medical dispensary and dispensary of, for whatever, even fun of marijuana.
So if you want to call us, here comes the talk.
Sorry about that.
My public number is Area Code 952-225-5278.
I know it's going to be a busy night.
That equates to Area Code 952-CALLART.
Couldn't be easier than that, right?
Then we have our Roswell port of entry at Area Code 575-208-7787.
That's 575-208-7787.
The first time caller line is Area Code 775-285-5800.
Once again, area code 775-285-5800.
If you're on Skype, come get us at MITD51 in North America, America and Canada, and MITD55 in the rest of the world.
This is a very unique opportunity for you to speak to somebody who for years now has been in the marijuana business.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Yeah.
I'm easy.
I'm easy light morning.
Coming to you at the speed of light in the darkness.
We categorize, I'm trying to be fair here, we categorize so many good points of marijuana that, and we did cover the possibility of somebody getting a little paranoid, I guess.
Beyond that, what else is negative?
How is it on your lungs, for example, compared to tobacco use?
Well, certainly it's not good for you to smoke, although there are studies that show improvement in lung cancer patients who smoke marijuana.
I can't, there probably would be a handful of physicians who would prescribe smoking marijuana for that, but it can trigger or irritate the lungs when you smoke it.
And it can cause breathing problems similar to what you see with tobacco use.
So cough, phlegm, those types of things.
But so there hasn't been a link to a higher incidence of lung cancer with patients who smoke marijuana.
And, well, glaucoma is used for lowering the pressure in the eye.
It dilates your blood vessels and creates a better flow through your system.
For people with Parkinson's disease, I believe, what is that string, White Widow, I think it is, really improves Parkinson's disease really a lot.
You can make a lot of different edibles and stuff from it and oils.
It was criminalized back in the 30s because of William Randall Hearst and DuPont, because Hearst had thousands of acres of timber that he wanted to use for printing his papers.
And DuPont had the sulfuric acid formula for changing that timber into paper.
So they wanted to get rid of the hemp, which is the low-grade plant of marijuana from back then.
And that's why it was criminalized because of money.
Because Hearst wanted his money and DuPont wanted his money and Anslinger wanted his money.
And he was very ambitious, and so he was made the head of the Bureau of Narcotics, and he saw that as a great career opportunity.
But he knew that cocaine and opiates wouldn't be enough to help build his agency, so he latched onto marijuana and started to work on making it illegal at the federal level.
So it was really a play for improving his career, and he did a very good job of doing that.
unidentified
Once it was created as a class one, there's no going back, as you know.
I'd like to touch a little bit about big tobacco, if I could.
It's pretty well known.
I mean, these days, I guess they're losing, they've got to be losing money with people due to vaping and all the over-the-counter smoking cessations that are out there.
And it just seems natural for them to jump into this arena now.
And I'm thinking, you know, now it's pretty much open and in the air that everybody knows they've been putting all sorts of chemicals into cigarettes for years.
Their pockets are so deep, and they have a really long history with dealing with the heavy government regulation, and they have relationships, and they have lobbyists.
And I feel that once they jump in, the market will change, or the plant, or what is delivered to customers may change.
And that's really scary to me because our goal is to keep it pure and truly the medicine that it is.
So if they do it, there'll probably be a congressional hearing where the CEO of each company has to go and get questioned, did you add anything to make marijuana more addictive?
And even if it's not the addictive substances, having larger corporations come in to grow this plant, even in a 40,000 square foot facility, our plants are grown with a lot of love and care.
And I think that goes by the wayside when you bring a large corporation into this scene.
I'm actually curious if you've been sort of paying attention to the situation in Canada, because our recently elected prime minister, one of his actual platform promises was to basically make it federally legal for recreational use.
There hasn't been any word on the kind of model that they're kind of used, but I would imagine that the people that are developing these policies would be looking to places like Colorado and Washington for advice and things like that.
And I was wondering if Sally had happened to have been in contact or she knew anybody who had been in contact with any members of the Canadian government that have been looking into this, because obviously this is an issue that I've always had a great deal of interest in.
And it's a complete 180-degree turn from the previous Canadian government, who was actually going really backwards as far as they were increasing the penalties for the most minor amounts and things like that.
You know, I'd like to make the comment that there's only one class of drugs that is physically addictive.
And the government is doing the public a great disservice through the miscategorization of drugs because opioids or narcotics are physically addicting.
Marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, all the other drugs are not physically addictive, maybe emotionally, but not physically.
But the public is led to believe through the scheduling of drugs that marijuana, for example, is equivalent to heroin.
And they're not.
They're two totally different classification of drugs.
And the hardest part for me to swallow about marijuana being on Schedule I is that part of the criteria is that there is no currently accepted medical use.
And even Sanjay Gupta said that he surveyed physicians in the United States.
76% of physicians would prescribe marijuana.
So that tells me physicians know that it's useful.
There is an accepted medical use.
We just can't study it.
We just can't prove it.
unidentified
Right, right.
You know, the drug war is the longest war in the history of the United States and the most expensive.
And at some point, we have to say to ourselves, we're doing something wrong.
But I do know that it's disproportionately, the jails are disproportionately filled with African American or minority people who have been convicted of marijuana possession crimes.
These different strains, 81, I think you mentioned, do they really apply that differently?
In other words, is one just great for music in general and another great for sex in general or great for...
Along with the high, you kind of get a little up, like you had a good cup of coffee or something, and then versus a little bit down or sleepy marijuana.
Yeah, and the great thing is, is for what we know, there's probably 100 times more that we don't know that is just going to unravel and blow everyone's mind eventually.
So my brothers had this business plan, and they went to my mother, and they said, all we need is $150,000.
That's all we need.
So they got that, and then a couple months in, they said, oh, crap.
And that's just like really when you start any business, right?
Take what you think you're going to need and multiply it by two or three or four.
So at the end, to get off the ground, I think we started with about $600,000.
And then we self-funded, for the most part, all of our expansion until very late in 2013 when we needed to expand to fulfill the requirements that were coming with recreational marijuana.
So we did one round of investing through the ArcView Network, which is an investor network specifically for the marijuana industry.
The detractors, you know, they're not here on the phone Yet.
But one major argument will be it's a slippery slope.
In other words, it's a gateway drug, that's the big phrase, I believe, which will then, before you know it, have people doing cocaine and heroin and God knows what else.
Well, unfortunately, we're linked to being a great gateway drug because people who have addictive personalities tend to be addicted or try, you know, they have risky behavior.
So they may start with marijuana and move on.
I don't think that marijuana is a gateway drug.
It's really difficult to defend that because, again, not a lot of studies to do that.
But when addicts tell their histories, a lot of the stories begin with marijuana.
But is it the chicken before the egg, right?
There's a strong correlation between marijuana and other drug use.
But is that an addictive personality or is it a correlation to the drug?
It's not determined.
So my guess would be no.
I know plenty of people who only smoke marijuana.
I don't know what the percentages are, but I would say that people who engage in risky behaviors would probably start with marijuana.
Yeah, I want to ask something about, I have a grower in Washington near me, and his place has just become, it's sort of like in a rural neighborhood setting, and it's become like a war zone over there with barbed wire fence rolled everywhere and chopped down trees and cameras on all the tops of the trees that have been chopped off and everything.
And the neighbors, and I wondered what is that all about?
Is he trying to guard the plants?
What's he doing over there?
Because he's already got such criminal history in the first place.
If he is, in fact, a licensed cultivator, I can say that the cameras and the barbed wire are probably his attempt to comply with whatever the state safety regulations are.
They sound remedial.
I'm concerned that he may not be a licensed grower because typically that wouldn't be allowed in a residential or even semi-populated rural area like that.
So there may be a medical enforcement division phone number that you could call to find out what's going on.
It just wouldn't happen in Colorado, I'll tell you that.
If you come into my store and look at the demographics of the people, if you look at the demographics of people who purchase in my store, you would it looks like Middle America.
I see 50% of people who use marijuana are over the age of 50.
And when you walk into my store, you see more gray hair than you do non-gray hair.
Not always.
But there's a strong subculture, but there's soccer moms, there's doctors, lawyers, police officers, people that come in to get their medicine or to get their marijuana to relax with.
So there is no stereotype anymore of a marijuana smoker.
unidentified
Okay.
I say the tongue-in-cheek anyway.
I count myself part of the hippie community, and I'm glad to see it legalized.
But seriously, I think this is our red pill.
Just how many people smoke.
And then they get like-minded as far as being kind to one another and so forth.
So I think it connects us somewhere else, and it gives us all that hive mind.
Without getting high, that's difficult to avoid that piece of it because the active component, most, the majority of the active component in cannabis is psychoactive.
For pain, the CBD, which is the cannabidiol, is not psychoactive, and that does work with pain.
But again, there has to be, not has to be, but it's better with a little bit of THC to sort of activate or to make you feel the best that you can.
So there are pills you can take, right?
So there's oil that you can ingest so you wouldn't have to smoke it or eat it, but you still might feel high.
You can function.
You can achieve a functional high, but you would still be high.
Maybe this will seem like a silly question, Sally, but a lot of people in the audience have never smoked marijuana.
If you were to describe the way it works, the high that you get from marijuana or the effect that you get from marijuana from the moment you smoke, how would you describe what you feel?
Sally, the question I have is related to Monsanto.
Monsanto is growing marijuana with glyphosate in South America.
And they're interested in obviously infiltrating the American market.
So when you're doing your biodiversity, you know, you're doing biodiversity where you are now with the kinds of products you have, that's going to be overtaken by this corporation eventually.
And the other thing about it is it's going to kill people in multiple ways.
Now, in the sense that it's going to make more disease, just like glycophate is with the GMO and what Monsanto is.
I'm just curious about, well, how will the Native American tribes, since we are allowed to grow this on our reservations and land, since Oklahoma is considered a reservation, will that in effect impact the marijuana industry as silent partners?
You know, because I belong to a small tribe, less than 10,000 members, and we have a little bit of money in relation to vestiges.
Would we be better off as a silent partner or growing our own, as our own private industry?
And as I've seen as Sanity Sioux in South Dakota or opening your own marijuana resort?
So we're really torn on this because we see that it's benefiting so many people, but at the same time, we don't want to catch the bad rap just because we're innovators or, you know, want to be silent partners.
We're looking at what we can do to basically help our people to help the United States because we don't look as marijuana as a bad thing.
I've still got this caller on, and I am curious about this.
It's very curious.
I mean, he's on a reservation, right?
So I guess the laws are a little different.
They can grow it, but what to do with it, right, Color?
unidentified
Yes, sir.
I'm just curious, what do you think Native American tribes, how and will they affect the industry since we are able to grow it, according to the United States government?
And how do you see the industry changing as tribes becoming silent partners or investors or even as the Santee Sioux tribe who has opened their own marijuana resort that's supposed to open New Year's Eve 2016?
You would have thought California being the recreational kind of place that, well, it's thought to be, if not in reality, they would have legalized it first there before, for example, Colorado.
Yeah, so here in California, like the previous caller was saying, it's legal, but the doctors here, the pain management doctors, have a hard time prescribing you pain medicine and allowing you to do marijuana at the same time.
I'm curious if in Colorado, if the doctors there are having an issue with that as well, or if they allow you to be on both pain medicine and marijuana.
In my case, I would prefer to minimize my use of opiates with marijuana, but it's not possible here.
I think that unless you have a condition that cannot be treated with any other form of medication, that you should not smoke marijuana until you're probably 21 if you're a female and maybe 24 if you're a male.
And there's some evidence to support that is true.
I don't want my children smoking marijuana until their brains are completely formed.
And it can, perhaps, again, it's not proven, but I would not want to risk my child's brain on that.
That said, there are several patients.
In fact, you can purchase marijuana with a medical card at the age of 18 in Colorado, but you have to go to a special medical marijuana store who has a lot, yeah, there's a lot more privacy issues in place, and we don't offer that at my store because it's a very small percentage of the population, and it requires a lot of restrictions and regulations for your facility.
And what a great opportunity for me to have these conversations with my teenagers over the last five years, right?
They're one's 15, one's 18.
So for as long as they have been interested in drugs and these types of things, we've had these conversations at the dinner table.
And what I love is that when their friends come over, they're dying to talk to me because they don't have a lot of adults who will talk to them about marijuana.
You know what always has bothered me, Sally, and still bothers me now, we were talking about gateway drugs and that kind of thing earlier.
I always thought that illegal as it was and still is in most of the nation, it's a gateway drug, marijuana is, in the sense that if a young person, relatively young person, tries marijuana and figures out that it's not the horrible devil drug that the government portrayed it to be,
and, oh, gee, I didn't go wild, I didn't rob anybody, I didn't whatever, you know, I did not commit mayhem, once they decided that it was a lie, then it's a gateway drug in the sense that, well, if they lied to me here, then probably they're lying about, you know, all the harder drugs, cocaine, heroin, whatever.
Well, actually, you actually more or less hit it right on the nose when you said the most detrimental thing that has come out of the whole disinformation of marijuana is basically not.
Well, if I had children, I would tell them right off the bat.
Marijuana is a drug, but compared to the heroin and all this stuff.
And they've come through before, and Mickey Hart is a good friend.
And not only Mickey, but other famous musicians have told me that they are at their most creative and that they tend to write songs when they are smoking or consuming marijuana.
Well, it has a lot to do with the history and the scare tactics associated with marijuana.
So we've all been convinced over the last 80 years that marijuana is bad and dangerous and it's going to lead to reefer madness.
Everyone's going to kill each other.
Tobacco has had a lot of money and a lot of time to engage the American public, and it has become an accepted part, although not, you know, no one wants to be a smoker, but it's become an accepted part of American culture.
So we're working to do the same for marijuana, and certainly it does not have as many detrimental effects as smoking cigarettes.
So a strong lobby and a lot of time can do a lot for a product.
Sally Van Devere, you've been an exceptional guest, and I would hope that they would use this program around the country to educate people about marijuana and how it's going in Colorado where it's legal.
It's the best tool that could be spread around to educate people.
And I mean that, if you know somebody who is involved in this and you just want a good general educational thing on marijuana to send them, I would say this program would be high, high, high, no pun intended, on the list from the high desert.