Dec. 3, 2015 - Art Bell
02:21:31
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| 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. | ||
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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, 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. | ||
| 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 P.O.T. | ||
| tonight with, you know, a lady who is running probably, you know, one of the biggest P.O.T. | ||
| stores. | ||
| That could 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. | ||
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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 Syed Farouk communicated with individuals who were under FBI scrutiny, In connection with the 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're 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 Vandiver. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
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Come explore in the night with us. | |
| Take a walk on the wild side of midnight. | ||
| From the kingdom of nigh, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell. | ||
| Please call the show at 1952-225-5278. | ||
| That's 1952. Call Art. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Here comes Sally Vandiver, 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. | ||
| Beautiful place, actually. | ||
| Sally Vanderveer, hi. | ||
| Hello, Art. | ||
| Thanks for having me on the show tonight. | ||
| I'm so happy to have you. | ||
| I mean, a few years ago, you'd have had to use a voice changer to talk here. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| And I really appreciate that you're a trailblazer. | ||
| As far as covering this subject on the radio with such a wide platform, I really appreciate the opportunity. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You remember those early radio days, do you? | ||
| Oh, I've been a fan for a long time, as have many members of my family, at least a few years back. | ||
| I only have a million questions. | ||
| You know, I guess everybody was, I want to go back in history a little bit, to the time when Colorado voted marijuana in. | ||
| That was how long ago now? | ||
| Well, that was Amendment 69. | ||
| We started being able to sell legally in 2009. | ||
| So, we've got a pretty good track record to go on already, in a lot of ways, right? | ||
| Yeah, we've got a lot of space between here and there. | ||
| Can you tell me how you and I guess your brothers, you climbed that corporate ladder pretty quickly, huh? | ||
| Or family ladder in this case. | ||
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Yeah, a lot of hard work for it to be related to someone in my family. | |
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| 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 growth stores. | ||
| Can I interrupt this long enough to say that I'm in Nevada and Nevada is now in that exact condition. | ||
| In other words, we've passed medical marijuana. | ||
| There is the ability for people to grow it for that purpose and that's being allocated now. | ||
| So it's underway here, not as far as you've gone in Colorado though. | ||
| You made the jump from that to Is it fair to say it's full legalization? | ||
| Yes, it depends on where you live in the state of Colorado. | ||
| So it's legal in Colorado whether or not you can sell or grow is up to the city that you live in, city or town. | ||
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I see. | |
| But it is legal to possess in Colorado. | ||
| Okay, so a lot of the sort of regulations that were there for medical marijuana kind of stuck around for the full monty, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| How do you feel about getting into the business of marijuana? | ||
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Any reservations? | |
| Yeah, when my brothers started I was helpful. | ||
| I worked with them on a business plan and I helped them get some things set up early on, but I wasn't ready to jump into those waters yet. | ||
| I had a career. | ||
| I had younger children. | ||
| It was very scary to me. | ||
| Both of my brothers are entrepreneurial by nature, very much risk takers and I'm more risk averse. | ||
| They're the pedal on the brake. | ||
| So when the risk became less, you got more interested? | ||
| That's probably part of it. | ||
| They needed me. | ||
| They asked me to join. | ||
| They needed my skill set. | ||
| Oh, I get it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Yeah, I was excited to be a part of it. | ||
| It was still before recreational legalization, so we were still medical only. | ||
| There was a lot to be done and they needed to get some more people in there to help them move forward. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Was it worthy of being in? | ||
| In other words, did you make money? | ||
| We did make money. | ||
| It has always been a profitable business. | ||
| 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 in a store. | ||
| So you grow many different kinds of marijuana? | ||
| the costs that go along with starting any business we encountered. | ||
| We were one of the first to open and very quickly got a great following because we grew | ||
| amazing product. | ||
| That was nice for us to have early success. | ||
| So you grow many different kinds of marijuana? | ||
| We grow up to 70 different strains at a time. | ||
| We have a 40,000 square foot cultivation and so that allows us to cultivate a lot of different strains and that's important because different medical patients need different types of strains of marijuana. | ||
| So the more that we can provide, the better medicine that we're providing for our customers and patients. | ||
| Or just pot to smoke in Colorado I guess, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| People have their preferences just as they do with wine. | ||
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Sure. | |
| They know what they want and they're looking for that and they'll seek that out and if you have it then they're a loyal customer. | ||
| Can they sniff it like a good wine or taste it like a good wine taster and go, ah, 85 Boulder, great. | ||
| Art, you'd be surprised. | ||
| There's a new term for that and we call them canasaurs. | ||
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It's one of my favorite words. | |
| It's a really good word, canasaurs. | ||
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Oh, that's great. | |
| And they can look at a bud and pretty much very accurately tell you what the strain is. | ||
| And there are hundreds and hundreds of strains of marijuana and to be able to look at it and at least get really close to the genetics on that. | ||
| It's very impressive to me. | ||
| But in addition, people can smell, especially medical patients, they don't necessarily know the name of the strain they want, but they smell it and something happens and they say, yes, this is what I want. | ||
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This will work for me. | |
| Oh, isn't that fascinating? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| So, how many of them are, I mean, who's the best at it? | ||
| Do you have somebody who can actually virtually identify almost every strain? | ||
| No, my brother Pete and I would say I employ 70 people and they're all passionate about marijuana and I would say probably at least 50% of them have that ability as well. | ||
| So they're consumed by Marijuana and I'm not saying they consume all the time, but they're consumed or passionate about the plant. | ||
| I get it. | ||
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What it can do. | |
| And so I'm very impressed. | ||
| I am not at that level at all. | ||
| I can tell the difference between certain strains and sativa and indica. | ||
| But aside from that, you put a butt in front of me and I have no idea what it might be. | ||
| It would be fun to talk to somebody who could actually do that and test them out and see if they could really do it. | ||
| It's kind of a game we play at the shop. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| And if somebody comes up with an entirely new strain, I suppose you'd stump them at least temporarily. | ||
| Temporarily, but they could probably say, well, it's a cross between a Blue Dream and a Purple Urkel or something like that. | ||
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They would get close. | |
| OK. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's get into it. | ||
| How safe is marijuana? | ||
| And by the way, when I put this on my Facebook page earlier, I got some really, really interesting comments. | ||
| And I'll dig a couple out for you here in a moment. | ||
| But I do want to know, and everybody wants to know, it's a very important question. | ||
| How safe is marijuana? | ||
| 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. | ||
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So that gives you an idea, right? | |
| 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. | ||
| So, that brings me to something else. | ||
| So, great amounts of it are safe, is the answer. | ||
| Across the board. | ||
| You just don't die from 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? | ||
| Well, about 9% of people who use it can become addicted to it. | ||
| Again, that's lower than any other drug. | ||
| There can be a toxic buildup, so if you are a long-time smoker and a heavy smoker, it can build up in your system and you can get ill. | ||
| You know, you can lose your memory, right? | ||
| So if you smoke and have a normal day, you may not remember what you did that day. | ||
| You can be paranoid depending on your strain or how you react. | ||
| That's one I was going to ask you about, the paranoid part. | ||
| There are those people who seem to become paranoid usually about the first or second time they've tried marijuana very early on. | ||
| And they get paranoid and now what I would say is I've seen these people and they also exhibit some of the same paranoia but not as apparent when they don't smoke. | ||
| Right a lot of times depending on the strain you ingest it may exacerbate some of your normal behaviors right so yeah and paranoia would probably be the most prevalent of that. | ||
| Okay, on the positive side, let's jump back and forth. | ||
| Many make arguments that it increases creativity, it increases concentration on a single task, it really helps with focusing for some people. | ||
| That's the way it affects them. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It somehow triggers whatever it is in their brain to let them focus on one task at a time. | ||
| A lot of people with ADHD have used it to success. | ||
| Some people don't have good success with it, but I hear that a lot. | ||
| It cures insomnia in some people. | ||
| Again, let me just preface everything I say by every person Reacts to marijuana differently, but in general, you know, it helps with insomnia chronic pain There's studies that show that it inhibits cancer cell growth It's a wonderful. | ||
| Yeah, a wonderful anti-inflammatory it decreases seizures. | ||
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We all know those stories Decreases anxiety it's wonderful for patients with PTSD Really you say there is one study that says something about a benefit toward cancer really? | |
| There are several studies. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now let's educate people about what is a Schedule I drug. | ||
| So a Schedule I drug is a federal determination of the safety or usefulness of a drug. So to be a schedule one | ||
| drug, you're saying it has a high degree of high potential for abuse and there's no medical | ||
| benefit. So we know that marijuana is not a schedule one drug at all. So other schedule one drugs | ||
| would include heroin and LSD. That's insane. | ||
| Insane, on the face of it, right? | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| And rational people recognize and know that. | ||
| But it takes a lot to remove a drug from Schedule 1. | ||
| So until marijuana is removed from Schedule 1, we'll be up against all of the major obstacles. | ||
| Primarily would be, in my opinion, lack of medical research. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So what would it take? | ||
| For the federal government to become rational and look at marijuana again and say, obviously, it's not Schedule 1. | ||
| Our dads were wrong. | ||
| Our grandfathers were wrong. | ||
| It's not Schedule 1 and so we're going to change it to whatever. | ||
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What would it take? | |
| To de-schedule it or to change the schedule, I really think it should be de-scheduled. | ||
| It would require an act of Congress. | ||
| There would have to be a lot of coordination in Washington and the President would need to be involved. | ||
| So it's not an easy feat. | ||
| Yeah, let me think. | ||
| A lot of coordination in Washington. | ||
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That'd be easy. | |
| It happens all the time! | ||
| Yeah, all the time. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sometimes even when the government is closed. | ||
| 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 a 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 as 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. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Would you care to name what you think the next states will be? | ||
| Probably, you're not wild about the idea at all because it's competition, actually. | ||
| But there will be other states that will do as Colorado has done, and Washington, I guess. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Who comes next, do you think? | ||
| Well, there's a lot of work going on in Maryland now. | ||
| I think you probably know that. | ||
| Washington, D.C. | ||
| did pass. | ||
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Hawaii's coming up. | |
| A lot of, well, we just saw what happened in 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 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. | ||
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Wow. | |
| So, that's pretty exciting. | ||
| Yeah, they have a new medical program. | ||
| You know, some of the issues that other states are dealing with are the state gets to determine which diagnosis 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. | ||
| But even the medical studies that would be needed to get this done can't be done. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So there's a lot of catch-22s in our industry. | ||
| By the way, one of the comments on Facebook was, crime is down, meaning in Colorado, but Doritos consumption has skyrocketed. | ||
| Well, there is. | ||
| Yeah, it does increase appetite. | ||
| Beneficial side effects, I suppose, if you need to gain weight. | ||
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That's right. | |
| Soon there will be a skinny marijuana strain, I'm sure. | ||
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Maybe. | |
| And I'm sure your guys will learn how to smell it immediately. | ||
| It's 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 twenty years ago it seems to | ||
| me well | ||
| it should be mad max times ten thereby now the | ||
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taking from today into tomorrow This is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell. | |
| To call the show, dial 1-952-CALL-ART. | ||
| That's 1-952-225-5278. | ||
| Yes, you might say we help with the transition from today until tomorrow. | ||
| Sally Vanderveer 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 90 9.9% legal. | ||
| You can smoke it. | ||
| And we'll get to why I gave that 99 point whatever percent. | ||
| 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 going? | ||
| Well, Art, I can tell you that the sky has not fallen. | ||
| I promise. | ||
| In fact, it's going so well in Colorado. | ||
| Tourism for the last two years has been increasing and it's probably the highest we've seen ever. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing and not only that, but 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 our way up to the mountains. | ||
| They tell me that. | ||
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Nice plug. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| I appreciate a well done plug. | ||
| That was subtle. | ||
| We're right here by the airport, folks. | ||
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Very well done. | |
| Well, what I will say also is that the black market and the drug dealers have lost a lot of money in the last couple of years. | ||
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All these poor, poor guys. | |
| It's a very good question, actually. | ||
| How have they greeted this, from their point of view, horrible change? | ||
| 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. | ||
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Alright. | |
| Regardless of what the taxes are. | ||
| Well, here's a good competitive question for you then. | ||
| You said there still is a small black market there? | ||
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Oh yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay, so how do your prices compare? | ||
| Well, they're higher than the black market. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
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Okay. | |
| Really, yeah. | ||
| And there's a heavy tax burden associated with purchasing recreational marijuana in Colorado. | ||
| At my store, it's 21.15% tax on anything you purchase. | ||
| That money goes to good use and that's another thing that's helping Colorado. | ||
| That money is going towards schools, toward infrastructure. | ||
| The first $40 million a year collected in excise tax goes toward that. | ||
| The remainder of the money goes to enforcement and education, drug education, so that's fantastic. | ||
| The black market is selling to people they shouldn't be selling it to. | ||
| They're selling to children, right? | ||
| They're selling it to people who don't want to pay the extra 20%. | ||
| My prices are higher, but my marijuana is grown organically without pesticides, without anything else. | ||
| You can spray a lot of stuff on homegrown marijuana to make it grow faster and bigger. | ||
| And you might not want to smoke that. | ||
| So there's a lot of safety that's involved in a higher price. | ||
| It makes sense to me. | ||
| Possession charges have gone down, obviously. | ||
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Way down. | |
| But there's been about a 40% reduction in drug arrests. | ||
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Really? | |
| 40%? | ||
| Reduction in drug arrests, yeah. | ||
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have gone down obviously. Well way down. | |
| Way down, right? But there's been about a 40% reduction in drug arrests. | ||
| Really? 40%? | ||
| Reduction in drug arrests, yeah. | ||
| Holy smokes. | ||
| 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, you've got your ear to the ground for sure. | ||
| So, how are the police in Colorado accepting or not accepting all of this? | ||
| How do they feel about it, do you know? | ||
| I do know. | ||
| And again, it's anecdotal. | ||
| We serve as a best practices training ground for the Denver Police Department. | ||
| They come through my facility, tours of about 20 police officers, maybe every month or every other month, and they're shown what it should look like. | ||
| So if you go into cultivation, it should look like this. | ||
| It looks like any other business. | ||
| And there's still a lot of guys and women that just don't like marijuana. | ||
| It just causes more problems for them as police officers. | ||
| But I will say the vast majority of them will pull me aside and say, I would much rather deal with someone who is high than someone who is drunk. | ||
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Oh, yes. | |
| And they're seeing the differences. | ||
| I mean, there's a decrease in violent crime. | ||
| There's a decrease in burglaries. | ||
| There's a decrease in property crime. | ||
| So people who get stoned, Don't go out and commit crimes, right? | ||
| They sit on their couch and they laugh and they talk, but they don't get in their car and get a gun and shoot someone. | ||
| Well, there's people that drive while under the influence of pot. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Generally, they're the ones going so slow you're going, come on, damn it. | ||
| Still not recommended. | ||
| We don't want anyone driving while high or intoxicated, but I understand what you're saying. | ||
| You're less likely to get in a high-speed chase, that's for sure. | ||
| Well, 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. | ||
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Exactly. | |
| Yeah, that's not happening with POT, or if it is, at no greater rate, I would think, or slightly greater rate than the general POP. | ||
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Exactly. | |
| So, there's an awful lot to talk about here, and if a state is considering legalization, they can what? | ||
| They can expect more tax revenue? | ||
| How sizable, really, is it tax-wise for Colorado? | ||
| I mean, are you really Building new schools? | ||
| Are you really, you know, over the next decade or so, how much money? | ||
| I don't know, over the next decade. | ||
| This year, though, the state of Colorado is on pace to collect $125 million in tax revenue. | ||
| That's a lot of tax dollars getting into the system and going toward potholes, or whatever they put it toward. | ||
|
unidentified
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There are so many puns in this industry. | |
| You cannot get out of a sentence without having a pun. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
|
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No, that's fine. | |
| I read something when I was preparing for this. | ||
| Once marijuana is legal nationally, it could generate $8.7 billion in federal and state tax revenue. | ||
|
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|
That's a lot of money. | |
| About 20 years ago, they did an article saying that, well, maybe it was about the same. | ||
| I think it was about $500 million in tax revenue. | ||
| That was in the New York Times about 20 years ago. | ||
| So they obviously way underestimated. | ||
| Of course, those were dollars then, not dollars now. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| So from that point of view, it's good. | ||
| It builds schools. | ||
|
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It builds tunnels. | |
| We created 10,000 new jobs in Colorado. | ||
| 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 to pick you up at the airport, and you get to 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, and several more to come, I'm sure. | ||
| Every day we see something new. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It sounds pretty good so far. | ||
| Any downside? | ||
|
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Let's see, I guess I'm biased, but no. | |
| I know there are, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Really. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| Is it because as a teenager whatever you can't have you want? | ||
| I'm sure there's some of that. | ||
| Are we taking the appeal away from marijuana if your parents are smoking it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's another good point. | ||
| We have more education here in Colorado. | ||
| Mom and dad do that stuff. | ||
| It's not cool. | ||
|
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That's not cool anymore. | |
| I'm sure there are negative effects. | ||
| I want to be fair. | ||
| If I think of those, I will certainly bring it up. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I heard it called the Great Back Pain Epidemic of 2013. | ||
| That's great. | ||
|
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The Great Back Pain Epidemic. | |
| How did the doctors handle it? | ||
|
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Did they reasonably give out a prescription? | |
| Some doctors do. | ||
| Again, there are some opportunistic doctors who can sign people up and get their $90 or | ||
| $100 or whatever it is in 20 minutes. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But I will say that regulations are tightening on physicians in Colorado now. | ||
| They have to have a certain percentage of their patient population that is not prescribed marijuana. | ||
| These are all things that are being legislated. | ||
| Oh, but what does it matter in Colorado anymore? | ||
| Because it's fully legal now. | ||
| It's fully legal, but if you have a medical card, then you do not have to pay the recreational taxes. | ||
| So you would pay the same amount that you pay to go 7-Eleven or wherever it is. | ||
| There's a significant cost. | ||
| Well, no wonder they want to tighten up. | ||
| Well, yeah, and you can purchase more with a medical card. | ||
| You can purchase up to two ounces a day instead of one ounce. | ||
| I can't imagine somebody smoking an ounce a day. | ||
| Is that what you're saying the limit is? | ||
| Well, the limit, if you're a Colorado resident and you're purchasing from a recreational store, you can purchase up to an ounce. | ||
| If you're a medical customer, you can purchase up to two ounces. | ||
| In some cases, they have extended plant counts where you can purchase up to a pound or two | ||
| pounds. | ||
| We don't allow that at our store. | ||
| Holy mackerel! | ||
| I can't imagine anybody smoking an ounce, much less some of the numbers you talked about. | ||
| Holy moly! | ||
| Right. | ||
| A lot of people who buy an ounce will turn that into butter, like a can of butter, and they'll bake edibles with that. | ||
| There's a lot of other uses for it. | ||
| And then if you're truly sick, right, you don't want to go to the store every day to get your ace or your gram or whatever it might be. | ||
| So it's like going to a liquor store and you buy Ten bottles of wine so you don't have to go back every week and get another bottle. | ||
| Okay, so now the big question. | ||
| You have people that come from adjacent and other states, probably most of the states actually, and they come to Colorado. | ||
| When they come as a visitor, what can they get or not get? | ||
| If you are out of state and over the age of 21, you can purchase up to a quarter ounce Every visit. | ||
| So a quarter ounce is all you get if you're out of state. | ||
| But again, that's plenty, as you pointed out. | ||
| So this was done how? | ||
| By the time of the distance to the drive to the border? | ||
| In other words, maybe you can do the quarter ounce before he hits such and such a state. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not sure where they came up with that. | |
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All interesting. | ||
| We're learning, learning, learning here. | ||
| And now, of course, I do want to ask about crime. | ||
| You know, that was one of the great bugaboos way back when. | ||
| Crime would go up. | ||
| Rape would go up. | ||
| Pillage. | ||
| Mayhem. | ||
| General Mad Max stuff. | ||
| So, from that point of view, is crime up? | ||
| Down? | ||
| Obviously, the arrest for marijuana would be down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But how about the rest of crime? | ||
| Any change? | ||
| There is a change. | ||
| I don't know if it's statistically significant, but let me do this caveat. | ||
| If these statistics went in the wrong direction, even .001%, the finger would be pointed at marijuana. | ||
|
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I bet. | |
| The fact that, what? | ||
| I said I bet. | ||
| It's true, 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. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So why do you think Crime has gone down. | ||
| That must be a nervous issue for you because, I mean, really crime could go up or down no matter what, right? | ||
|
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So, you know, eventually it will probably go up. | |
| We can't take credit for it. | ||
| No, I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But you must worry that it will go up because then you would have to take blame. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, I don't know if it is related to marijuana at all. | ||
| If it's related to, you know, the tides. | ||
| I don't know what it's related to. | ||
| You know, speculating. | ||
| If people are substituting marijuana for alcohol, then perhaps some of these issues could be going in the right direction. | ||
|
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That's fair. | |
| That's as fair as I can get on that. | ||
| So, here's an argument people make. | ||
| Okay, I will concede, they will say, marijuana is far less harmful in society than is alcohol. | ||
| But that doesn't justify widely bringing another altering substance into legality. | ||
| When they make that argument, what say you? | ||
| I say that marijuana has been here and has been used And will continue to be used regardless of if it's legal or illegal. | ||
| So this isn't something that we have created. | ||
| Marijuana has always been around. | ||
| You probably know people that have smoked marijuana, even though it's illegal. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Everyone has. | ||
| These people are just now able to purchase legally, taking that money away from the black market and providing tax dollars for wherever they live. | ||
| This is not a new phenomenon. | ||
| Marijuana has been around I wanted to note that you came from the pharmaceutical industry. | ||
| and Chinese pharmacopoeias and things like that. | ||
|
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I did. | |
| So this is not something we invented. | ||
| This is something we're making legal and allowing customers to purchase safely. | ||
| I wanted to note that you came from the pharmaceutical industry. | ||
|
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I did. | |
| Now there is a transition for you from over-the-counter, or I guess not so much over-the-counter, | ||
| by-prescription drugs to marijuana. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Do you have any reminiscent type things to say about the pharmaceutical industry versus the one you're in now? | ||
| I used to think that being in the pharmaceutical industry that I was in the most highly regulated industry in America, but I was wrong. | ||
|
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Marijuana is the most regulated industry in America. | |
| So I had a good training ground as far as following procedures and regulations, but | ||
| we get a new rule thrown at us about every five minutes. | ||
|
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So there's that. | |
| There's a huge concern in the marijuana industry to treat patients, to help people, to make | ||
| them feel better. | ||
| And what we do that pharmaceutical companies can't always do is do this without a lot of | ||
| side effects. Right? So let's talk about opiates. | ||
| Have you seen that commercial? | ||
| Let's indeed talk about opiates. | ||
| We're coming up on a break. | ||
| So, let's see, what do I want to say? | ||
| 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 Vannevar 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. | ||
|
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You're raging into the night with Midnight in the Desert. | |
| To be part of the show, please call 1952-CALL-ART. | ||
| That's 1952-225-5278. | ||
| So, Sally Vanderveer is here. | ||
| And, uh, if you missed the first hour of the show, don't miss it, uh, if they've mixed up the hours, because it's too important. | ||
| We're talking about marijuana. | ||
| Sally Vanderveer is the president of Medicine Man in Colorado, where marijuana's 99.9% illegal. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 puddles, and I know a lot of people are, 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. | ||
|
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True? | |
| Yes, that's true. | ||
| I see it every day in my store. | ||
| And it's really sad, you know, opiate use, overuse is An epidemic. | ||
|
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Yes it is. | |
| You know 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%. | ||
| 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, that's something. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I really do want to ask about whether it really does. | ||
| You know I think it's controversial about whether it reduces pain or not. | ||
| Certainly it has applications in cancer patients but in terms of just reducing pain like | ||
| back pain for example or | ||
| knee pain arthritis pain whatever does it or doesn't it help? 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 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. | ||
|
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I couldn't work. | |
| I couldn't function. | ||
| I have arthritis. | ||
| I have brain cancer. | ||
|
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I have back pain. | |
| The story is always the same. | ||
| I was taking 23 medications. | ||
| I was taking 4 medications. | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They point you toward the truth. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
|
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And I believe it. | |
| And there are more and more studies. | ||
| Colorado just gave a few million dollars to different universities here in Colorado to start studying observationally, you know, the effects on sleep and other types of issues. | ||
| But we don't have the data to support What about cancer? | ||
| That's a big one, I think. | ||
| I have a friend now who has cancer, Sally, and this person is using marijuana and claims it greatly alleviates nausea because of chemo. | ||
| That's one of the biggest effects that marijuana or cannabis can have for a cancer patient. | ||
| It can stimulate appetite. | ||
| I mentioned earlier there are studies that show that some amounts of THC are stopping aggressive cancer tumors. | ||
| But in general, most of our cancer patients do use it for nausea and for pain associated with, you know, I think just the chemotherapy. | ||
| Another reason I think that states are beginning to vote marijuana legal is Dr. Sanjay Gupta. | ||
| Do you have any comments on Sanjay? | ||
| I do. | ||
| He visited our facility and we were part of the reason he changed his mind. | ||
| So that was a big win for the marijuana industry when Dr. Gupta said I was wrong, right? | ||
| Yes, oh boy did he ever. | ||
| My goodness, it was the darndest thing. | ||
| I was there watching live The day he did that and I almost fell on the floor. | ||
| You and me both. | ||
| I was so happy because when he toured our facility he wasn't sharing his opinion he was just gathering information and he spent a lot of time when he was making weed and weed 2 and weed 3 and he's a smart guy. | ||
|
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Oh yes. | |
| He knows what he's talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yes. | |
| He knew, he stated that in some medical cases marijuana is the only thing that works. | ||
| He said it's safer than prescription drugs. | ||
| I think he highlighted something called Charlotte's Web, right? | ||
| 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 Dravets. | ||
| 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 all the evidence sometimes reasonable and intelligent people need. | ||
| It was amazing and those who didn't see Dr. Gupta and how this worked, it was just astounding. | ||
| So it absolutely works for that and people need to keep in mind, remember we're talking to a very broad audience here Sally, this is a plant that is given to you exactly as it comes out of the ground. | ||
| In other words, you're getting the buds, unmolested without any bad stuff if you buy them this way | ||
| anyway, sprayed on them and it's just plant coming out of the ground, right? | ||
| It's a very natural medicine, so yes, it's not processed in any way. | ||
| 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 would be clamoring to make as much use as they could of all the potential benefits of the plant. | ||
| I know that these oils you talk about are for cancer patients. | ||
| These oils are really critical, more than the smoking or whatever with marijuana. | ||
| The oils that are concocted for various types of cancer are pretty amazing, huh? | ||
| 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 or 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 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 a lot in Western medicine, I would say. | ||
| Most of it is synthetic. | ||
| No, but derived from. | ||
| In other words, well, the poppy, for example. | ||
| Oh, like an opiate from the poppy. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, I've been saying, look, pot is 99.9% legal in Colorado, and the reason I Maybe it's 100% actually, in Colorado. | ||
| However, because it's still against federal law, you can't bank, can you? | ||
| Because the banks, I guess, will not deal with you? | ||
| 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 Wow, now this is a big change Sally, because I didn't know there were any banks. | ||
| that I'm not embezzling, I'm not doing anything illegal. So we have to prove | ||
|
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that we are reputable. Wow, now this is a big change Sally, because I didn't know | |
| there were any banks. I mean most banks are FDIC insured, right? Right, and my | ||
| bank is, and it's at risk of losing its charter because it is working, it's | ||
| cooperating with me. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Oh no, I believe that. | ||
| And look, you've proven your compliance. | ||
| I know you're compliant. | ||
| The question is, why is he in trouble? | ||
| Now, even though you're able to prove you're compliant in every Colorado legislated way, he's still in trouble. | ||
| Why is he in trouble? | ||
| He could be in trouble. | ||
| If something goes wrong, he can lose his charter. | ||
| He can lose his FDIC insurance. | ||
| So, he's putting his neck on the line. | ||
| 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 a limb for us. | ||
| So again, if marijuana is removed from Schedule 1, we won't have this issue, because as it stands, we are conducting an illegal activity under federal law. | ||
| So, before you met this banker, this brave banker, what was going on? | ||
| You've got a big family. | ||
| Were all the pillows getting like thicker and thicker and thicker every night? | ||
| Lots of mattresses, yeah, exactly. | ||
|
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Well, you can imagine, it's a safety risk, right? | |
| People know we're a pot shop, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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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. | ||
|
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It is. | |
| I have to pay my taxes. | ||
| It's so funny that, you know, 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. | ||
| So that's when I get really upset about that. | ||
| Right, and you know, without being able to deposit it, You know, robbers just love all cash businesses. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| So, you've got to have all kinds of security, right? | ||
| We do. | ||
| A lot of it is mandated by the state, which I completely agree with. | ||
| We have a camera in every nook and cranny. | ||
| You can see 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. | ||
| So in-office romances are really low. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Something I don't have to worry about here. | ||
| Oh, what a business. | ||
| There's one positive spin to that, isn't there? | ||
|
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Well, that's all you think of. | |
| Nobody likes to be watched 24 hours a day, that's for sure, but I understand why. | ||
| It says here there's a patent on medical marijuana. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| It is true, and guess who holds that patent? | ||
|
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|
Dr. Gupta? | |
| I wish. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No, I don't know who. | ||
| The United States government. | ||
| The same government that says that this is, this is, there's no medical benefit holds the patent. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| The federal government actually filed for and got a patent on marijuana probably when? | ||
| I can't remember when it was. | ||
| I think it was maybe in the 70s. | ||
|
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In the 70s, really? | |
| Maybe in the 30s. | ||
| I can't remember, but it is true. | ||
|
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A patent. | |
| In that patent, wouldn't they have to describe the properties and effects of it to get the patent? | ||
| Yes, and they are, and I should have pulled that so I could share it with you, but the patent states the medicinal benefits for, I think it... Wait, wait, wait, it says there are medicinal benefits? | ||
|
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|
It does, it does. | |
| Okay, so the U.S. | ||
| government has a patent on marijuana and in it they claim medicinal benefits, but in the Schedule 1 deal there are no medicinal benefits. | ||
|
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How could that be? | |
| Um, your guess is as good as mine. | ||
| Well, no, there's a lot. | ||
| You know, it has to do with fear and racism and yellow journalism and, you know, corrupt legislators. | ||
| That's what it has to do with. | ||
| That's the real story about why marijuana is illegal. | ||
| Not because it's some danger to society. | ||
| It's because it served the purposes of people in Washington or people who had paper companies, right? | ||
| So William Hurst. | ||
| People who are afraid of Mexicans coming and taking their women and killing everybody. | ||
| There's a long history and it's quite fascinating of why marijuana is illegal. | ||
| Here's what I've always thought and I continue to think this. | ||
| Now you can tell me I'm right or wrong. | ||
| But it's what I think. | ||
| The alcohol industry in America is gigantic. | ||
| Can you quote offhand how big a business alcohol is in America every year? | ||
| I wish I could, but I cannot. | ||
|
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I know that our tax revenue has exceeded alcohol this year, but... It's gigantic anyway, right? | |
| Huge, yeah. | ||
| So, I think that The alcohol lobby has squished y'all. | ||
| I think that's what's happened. | ||
| I think they were probably originally responsible for the legislation making it Schedule 1 really bad, bad, bad. | ||
| And over the years they have tried to swat down, I bet you, with money that went to people who lobby to get it squashed. | ||
| Would you think that's fair? | ||
| Yes, and they continue to do so. | ||
| 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, to become legal. | ||
| So you're right. | ||
| Originally, back in the 30s, it was DuPont Chemicals, it was William Hurst, those types of people. | ||
| And now it's alcohol, it's pharmaceuticals. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Can you tell me what that is, by the way? | ||
| I mean, is R.J. | ||
| Reynolds, for example, um, toying around with the idea of... | ||
| Getting into pot business? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That'd be scary. | |
| Yeah, or the Philip Morris's. | ||
| I'm sure that marijuana is on their radar. | ||
| I'm sure right now there is a marijuana division or at least someone responsible at Philip Morris 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How about that thought? | |
| Think of how much more quickly that will 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| By the way, those of you who have not seen Sally's picture, on my website, you should | ||
| go to Artbell.com, she stands with a great marijuana leaf in her hand, like a bride might | ||
| with a rose or something. | ||
| And behind her, endlessly, is how much pot growing? | ||
| Well, we grow about 7,000 pounds a year. | ||
| So the picture that I took was in our veg room. | ||
| So that's the vegetative room where the lights are on all day and it simulates springtime. | ||
| So those are kind of the baby plants that are growing large enough to transport into a flowering room where they will start to grow. | ||
| You know, I almost thought you said bedroom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh no. | |
| Remember the cameras? | ||
| No bedroom. | ||
| Yeah, gotcha. | ||
| Oh my. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think that my listeners are going to have a lot of questions to ask and I would like | ||
| them to be able to do so. | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and get started. | ||
| I would only ask folks that they would be Not rude. | ||
| If you have a dissenting opinion, feel free to give it. | ||
| So we're about to get to that, and I'm going to give out the numbers for that in a moment. | ||
| How many things do you think marijuana, medically that is to say, Sally, actually helps? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Truthfully? | |
| Truthfully, a lot. | ||
| I have a list in front of me of common uses and there's probably 40 indications on this. | ||
| And I really think we haven't even discovered how much more cannabis can help people. | ||
| How much of it, Sally, is anecdotal and how much of it is scientific? | ||
| Most of it is anecdotal because we are not allowed to study it. | ||
| We don't have the means to study it. | ||
| Just like with a lot of drugs you have to work on anecdotal. | ||
| When I was in the pharmaceutical industry I worked on the 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. | ||
| We just don't have that last step. | ||
| We don't have that last step in place. | ||
| I wonder what it is that acts on inflammation. | ||
| That's very interesting because inflammation is, I can tell you for somebody with a bad back, the chief cause of why you're hurting so much. | ||
| Yeah, inflammation is the underlying cause of so many diseases. | ||
| A lot of it has to do with the endocannabinoid system, which was named for the cannabis plant. | ||
| A lot of rheumatologists know the endocannabinoid system. | ||
| It's just a way of maintaining homeostasis in your body. | ||
| Builds the bridge between your body and your mind and for some reason the endocannabinoid system has a direct effect on inflammation and THC attaches to those receptors and whether you smoke it or ingest it overwhelms the endocannabinoid system and improves for the most part improves inflammation. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's big. | ||
| That's really big. | ||
| So, you know, that would indicate that there is pain relief. | ||
| If you cut down inflammation, then in the long term, it definitely cuts down on pain. | ||
| But believe me, when something in your back reaches out and touches a nerve, it's hard to describe the kind of pain that produces. | ||
| I'm a patient. | ||
| CBD, which is a non-psychoactive component of the cannabis plant. | ||
| I play tennis. | ||
| My knees are old. | ||
| My elbow is old. | ||
| When I take CBD regularly, I don't have those aches and pains associated with the low-grade arthritis that I have. | ||
| I am a case study. | ||
| I'm a case study of one, and that's all I need to convince myself that it works. | ||
| And again, there's no psychoactivity. | ||
| I don't get high from it, but it works for me. | ||
| Um, so I have yet to hear, and you know, obviously I'm on your side, so it may be that I'm missing something. | ||
| I'm sure the callers will come along and figure out what it is I missed that's on the negative side that we haven't brought out. | ||
| To me, it seems like it should be legal across America, and Colorado is going to show, I think, America I'm thrilled to be a part of this. | ||
| We're all pioneers in this great new American industry. | ||
| What other time in your history, unless you were in the tech boom, can you say that you're getting to do this? | ||
| I'm with you all the way. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So, stand by. | ||
| You've got a nice long break. | ||
| Sally Vanderveer 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-CALL-ART. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 MITD51. | ||
| 5-5 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Art Bell. | |
| Now, here's Art. | ||
| Hey there. | ||
| Glad to be with you tonight. | ||
| This is a very important conversation. | ||
| Sally Vanderveer is here. | ||
| ...is president of Medicine Man, one of the largest, most successful marijuana cultivation dispensaries in Colorado, where it's 99.9% legal. | ||
| And, of course, that little tiny percentage I left out was because of the feds. | ||
| She runs it with her family. | ||
| It's an amazing time to be alive in America to see this happen, for me. | ||
| Anyway, I did want to say something and get a reaction to it. | ||
| My parents, and I don't think I've ever said this before, my parents were in the Marines. | ||
| My dad was a retired Marine colonel. | ||
| My mom was a retired, by virtue of me, she got pregnant with me, retired drill instructor. | ||
| That's right, a D.I. | ||
| at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. | ||
| And so, as you can imagine, both my parents were strong-minded, strict disciplinarians and drinkers. | ||
| Both my parents were pretty regular drinkers and pretty regular fighters. | ||
| That's what alcohol does. | ||
| I don't drink. | ||
| In fact, they called my parents the Battling Bells. | ||
| So I learned early on to hate. | ||
| Actually, I hate alcohol. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| A few summers, a hot summer day, I may grab a beer. | ||
| If I have two beers a year, that's a lot of alcohol for me. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I just don't drink. | ||
| And it's because of my childhood and, you know, what I went through with mom and dad. | ||
| That effect is minus for the most part or zero as far as I can see with marijuana. | ||
| What do you think, Sally? | ||
| Well, I think you're right. | ||
| As a parent, I would never want to be intoxicated in any way. | ||
| Anything that would take away from being present with my children, being available for them, being able to react if I needed to. | ||
| So I would certainly not advocate for getting high with your kids in the room. | ||
| But certainly compared to alcohol, it's a much safer bet. | ||
| Something about alcohol that puts them in a fighting mood, Sally. | ||
| Yeah, I see it all the time. | ||
| One of our stores is next to a bar and the only trouble we ever have is when the bar | ||
| closes and they spill out and they wreak havoc around my store. | ||
| That's the biggest threat to us. | ||
| If alcohol went away and we were left with marijuana, I think it would be a little bit | ||
| more peaceful world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do too. | |
| Alright, full disclosure. | ||
| So there you are, folks. | ||
| I hate alcohol. | ||
| I have a bias. | ||
| I think that the substance should be legal. | ||
| I've thought it for, I guess, all my life. | ||
| Anne said it, as I mentioned earlier, 20 years ago. | ||
| And I've taken the heat for it ever since. | ||
| So I thought this show tonight was really, really, really important. | ||
| And now we're going to go to all of you. | ||
| Let us begin on Skype with Fran. | ||
| Hi, Fran. | ||
| You're on with Sally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Sally. | |
| Hi, Anne. | ||
| Hi, Fran. | ||
| It's good to talk to you, Sally. | ||
| You're just wonderful. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Oh, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For you specifically, I'm a long time cannabis user. | |
| I'll be honest about it. | ||
| I'm an old hippie, but it worked so well for muscle spasms applied topically. | ||
| I make my own cannabis infused oil. | ||
| And I apply it on the muscle spasm in my back and they're gone. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Okay, pause please. | ||
| Sally, are there many people that do that and apply something like this topically on your skin? | ||
| Absolutely, it's one of our best-selling products. | ||
| There's THC, there's other things in it, arnica, peppermint, juniper, but it penetrates the skin and does help. | ||
| I use it for my knees when I'm in the middle of tennis season. | ||
| I feel immediate relief from this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow, okay. | |
| Okay, that's a new one for me. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Chronic anxiety, depression, insomnia, and severe pain. | |
| I've lived my life in pain. | ||
| Wouldn't take opiates, I hate them. | ||
| Okay, the big word, the big D word that you mentioned, depression, that's worthy of a big question for Sally. | ||
| So, Sally, does marijuana help depression? | ||
| It helps some people with depression. | ||
| It depends on what type of depression and again everyone reacts differently but that's probably one of the, aside from pain, probably the second most way that people use marijuana is to manage anxiety and depression and I'm told that it's very effective. | ||
| Okay, we categorized, I'm trying to be fair here, we categorized so many good points of marijuana, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So there hasn't been a link to a higher incidence of lung cancer with patients who smoke marijuana. | ||
| But again, the studies have not been done. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Alright, let's go to the phones. | ||
| You're on with Sally. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing, Sally? | |
| How are you doing, Art? | ||
| I've got a few things I wanted to pass by you. | ||
| It's really good for high blood pressure and 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 strain? | ||
| White Widow, I think it is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It 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 30's 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 this sulfuric acid formula for changing that How do you think they got it all the way to level one though? | ||
| than hemp which is the low grade plant of marijuana from back then. | ||
| That's why it was criminalized because of money. | ||
| Because Hearst wanted his money and DuPont wanted his money and Enslinger wanted his | ||
| money. | ||
| How do you think they got it all the way to level one though? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean that's a very high bar. | |
| Enslinger was the drug czar at the time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Go ahead, sir. | ||
| Well, 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 on to 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
|
Yeah, once it was created as a class one, there's no going back, as you know. | |
| Well, it'll take a congressional act, apparently, to send it back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One more question. | |
| Sally? | ||
| Yes? | ||
| What year Mustang do you have? | ||
| I wish I had a 67 Mustang. | ||
| I always wanted one, and I wanted it to be Candy Apple Red. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go for it. | |
| And I'm trying to get my growers to name a strain, Mustang Sally, but nobody will. | ||
| Don't you think that would sell? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sure it would. | |
| How big a business, is it fair to ask you how big a business what you're doing is, Sally? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm very transparent. | |
| This year, out of our two stores, we'll do about $18 million. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Holy moly. | |
| All right, Don Skype. | ||
| Mike, you're on the air with Sally Vanderveer. | ||
| I'm sorry, Sally. | ||
| Sounds like you fell across the room to us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was just going over to the kitchen to turn the oven off, and then you came through. | |
| Sorry about that. | ||
| So, hey, Art. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| Well, sir. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Sally, hi. | |
| Good to hear you on the show today. | ||
| 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 gotta 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 in cigarettes for years. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you think we'd see them doing exactly the same thing to this beautiful plant of ours? | ||
| Oh, what a good question! | ||
|
unidentified
|
You said the addiction rate was what? | |
| With marijuana? | ||
|
unidentified
|
About nine percent. | |
| About nine percent. | ||
| Alright, so if they began putting additional chemicals in, as Mike suggested, They could drive that way up, couldn't they? | ||
| They could, and I really hope that doesn't happen. | ||
| Their pockets are so deep, and they have a really long, 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, you know, 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? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Well, and then you'll see laws relaxing related to marijuana, right? | ||
| And what can go into marijuana. | ||
| Right now, I can't even use, I mean, I can use lemon oil, neem oil to control my pests and to control mildew. | ||
| I can use nothing. | ||
| Again, the Catch-22, I can only use those products which are allowed to be sprayed or used on marijuana. | ||
| Remarkable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The EPA, right? | |
| Gotcha. | ||
| Mike, anything else? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I just wanted to add, hey, we are the small business now, and we need to be looked at. | |
| This whole industry needs to be watched with a microscope. | ||
| Well, that's happening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course, right now, they're going to not allow you to do anything to it. | |
| They can't. | ||
| It's during the testing period, but then, you know, they get their hands on it. | ||
| It's just so scary what they will do and what they will be able to do with their hands. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I honestly, thank you Mike, but I honestly think that if they made it more addictive, they'd be in gigantic trouble. | ||
| Just lots of trouble. | ||
| And again, marijuana natively is not all that addictive. | ||
| I guess there are people who can become addicted to anything under that category. | ||
| I'm sure ham radio, my hobby, would be 75 to 80 percent addictive. | ||
| But I agree with what Mike's saying 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 the scene. | ||
| Yeah, I don't feel a lot of love from Lucky Strikes. | ||
| All right, let's see here. | ||
| Let's go to the phone. | ||
| You're on the air in Vancouver, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, that's correct. | |
| It's Jeremy in Vancouver. | ||
| Hi, guys. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I apologize if this has been covered already. | ||
| I'm actually curious if you've If you've been 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 like the kind of model that they're trying to use, but I would imagine that the people that are developing these policies will 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 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. | ||
| Alright, so Sally, actually let's turn it into a general question, but first | ||
| anything from Canada? Any consultations or requests for from you? | ||
| No one in the government. | ||
| We do have, we've been contacted by cultivators or growers who want to look at our processes and move those possibly into Canada, but I don't have any government contacts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| Fair enough. | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| Alright, thank you. | ||
| I would imagine other states that are getting close certainly contact you, don't they? | ||
| I said a little bit about this before. | ||
| We have another company and we work with licensing and helping other businesses in other states who want to get into medical marijuana. | ||
| We teach them our processes. | ||
| We essentially give them a turnkey operation for SOPs and how to grow marijuana. | ||
| And, you know, in Colorado it was very grassroots. | ||
| There were just a lot of people growing, and those growers then became business people. | ||
| And now we're seeing the reverse, where business people don't know how to grow, so we need to teach them how to grow responsibly in these states. | ||
| Is it because it's an all-cash business that is a burden? | ||
| I really do get that. | ||
| Is that one of the toughest parts of what you do right now, the fact that it's a cash deal all the way around? | ||
| Incredibly tough. | ||
| And imagine being a new business wanting to get into the marijuana industry. | ||
| You can't get a loan. | ||
| You need to buy a $2 million building to house your cultivation facility, and you have to come up with cash. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| There's very few people in this industry who can get a loan. | ||
| We've been very creative. | ||
| We have our own investor network, so we have qualified investors who are willing to come into this space. | ||
| We had to do a loan a couple years back to finish out a cultivation and we had to pay our investors eighteen percent. | ||
| Okay, I'm dominating you and I can't do that. | ||
| All the lines are full and everything. | ||
| Frank, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thank you for taking my call. | |
| 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 classifications of drugs. | ||
| Well, preaching to the choir here. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And the hardest part for me to swallow about marijuana being on Schedule 1 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. | ||
| We need to rethink our strategy. | ||
| Well, that's for sure. | ||
| Sally, how many people in jail in the U.S. | ||
| now for pot? | ||
| Any idea? | ||
| No idea, 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. | ||
| It's socioeconomic. | ||
| It touches on all levels of society. | ||
| The wrongs. | ||
| Whatever it is, it's a big, big number. | ||
| And it costs a lot of money to keep people in jail. | ||
| It is extremely expensive. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We are at this short break. | ||
| So Sally, hold on. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| This is Midnight in the Desert. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come along with us. | |
| From the Kingdom of Nigh in the High Desert, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell. | ||
| Please ring Art's bell at 1952-225-5278. | ||
| That's 1952. | ||
| Call Art. | ||
| Ah, I hate it when he stutters. | ||
| That's 1952. | ||
| Call Art. | ||
| That's one nine five two call art. Ah, I hate it when he stutters. | ||
| That's one nine five two call art | ||
| The other numbers that I'm using if you want to jump in this way | ||
| The Roswell entrance point at area code five seven five two zero eight seven seven eight seven | ||
| That's a number you can call in Roswell that will ring here. | ||
| And then, of course, our first-time caller line, Area Code 775-285-5800. | ||
| Skype, MITD 5-1 in North America, MITD 5-5 outside the country. | ||
| Sally Van De Veer is here. | ||
| MITD 5.1 in North America, MITD 5.5 outside the country. | ||
| Sally Van De Veer is here. | ||
| We're talking marijuana where it's legal, there in Colorado. | ||
| And it's been a very, very, very interesting discussion. | ||
| And here we go right back to it, Sally, because a lot of people have a lot of questions. | ||
| Austin is next. | ||
| Austin? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Art! | |
| How's it going, man? | ||
| Very well, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just want to say mad Roswells and a big shout-out to Bell Gap. | |
| And a quick question for Sally. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Um, I've had a few experiences with marijuana in my time. | ||
| I'm about 21 years old. | ||
| I've smoked it a few times. | ||
| And I don't know if this is normal, but usually when, when I do marijuana, I'm sexually active. | ||
| Is that a normal response to marijuana or is that kind of unique? | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| I'll take it off the air. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Actually, I'm going to redo your question for you. | ||
| Uh, Sally, does marijuana enhance the sexual experience? | ||
| It can. | ||
| So, in some people, it does. | ||
| It may make them more amorous. | ||
| And in other people, and I guess depending on the strain that you smoke, it may just make you not interested at all. | ||
| So, depending on what you're looking for, it can be a good experience or a bad experience. | ||
| For a lot of people, marijuana enhances the sexual experience. | ||
| But also others, and really we didn't talk about this, but I mean listening to music as an example, Oh my gosh, yeah, I hear that all the time, that it takes it to a whole other level, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| My sister works with me as well. | ||
| She's a budtender, and a budtender is what we call a person who serves the customers like a bartender or a barista, and she has specific strains that she can recommend to people depending on what concert they're going to. | ||
| No kidding? | ||
| She's one of those cannoisseurs, so she can say, oh, you're going to a Phish concert? | ||
| Yes, you have to have G6. | ||
| Alright, let's talk a little bit about this. | ||
| 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... and then there's sort of an upper Let's see, how can I put this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| All those? | ||
| Yeah, so there's two types of marijuana. There's a sativa which is more of a | ||
| head high cerebral that's the one that's going to make you clean your | ||
| house and makes music sound great and might make you anxious might make | ||
| you paranoid and there's an indica and that'll make you sleepy that's | ||
| really great for pain and then there's a spectrum between sativa and indica and those are called hybrid and | ||
| for the most part every strain that we grow now is is a hybrid so you can have a sativa dominant hybrid | ||
| of varying proportions so it could be maybe you know 80 percent sativa 20 | ||
| percent indica and depending on where that strain falls in the spectrum | ||
| between sativa and hybrid is how you're going to feel your effect | ||
| there's other things that come into play like different components cbc | ||
| cb cbd cbga there's all of those different components i was talking | ||
| about that that are in different percentage percentages in each plant or each strain | ||
| There really is a lot to know about marijuana, isn't there? | ||
| Yeah, and the great thing is, is for what we know, there's probably a hundred times more that we don't know that is just going to, you know, unravel and blow everyone's mind eventually. | ||
| My guest two, Jay, you're on with Sally Vanderveer. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good evening. | |
| Good evening. | ||
| I know, it's good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll skip over all the praise and what not, but I'm sure glad to hear you again. | |
| Anyway, Sally, on the capitalization issue, I'm curious how well you were capitalized going in when you started up. | ||
| We were undercapitalized. | ||
| 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 they we started with about six hundred thousand 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. | ||
| I was going to ask how mom stood up there as the, you know, 200,000, 300,000... | ||
| At some point, mom says, listen kids. | ||
| My mom's the sweetest lady. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's like, OK, how much more do you need? | |
| It's one of those kind of things. | ||
| Blind faith in her children, which has paid off for her, so that's a good thing. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| What a mom, that's what I would say. | ||
| OK, you're on the air, I think in Bloomington somewhere or another. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, yes, I love listening to the show. | |
| I have a few questions for Sally that I have come up with while I'm working. | ||
| Okay, go ahead. | ||
| You're in Bloomington, Illinois, probably, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| All right, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so Sally, I think, I'm pretty sure she said that she was in the pharmaceutical business before The marijuana business. | |
| That's correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So, um, I'm also in the pharmaceutical business and deal with a lot of pharmaceuticals, uh, every night. | ||
| Uh, I'm very young. | ||
| Uh, I get to learn as I work about, you know, the different effects of narcos and the other drugs. | ||
| And one of them that I had come across was a drug called Uh, dronabinol. | ||
| Sally, do you know anything about this drug? | ||
| Is that the synthetic marijuana? | ||
| Um, it's man-made cannabis, so that's more for appetite, helping to, uh, increase appetite. | ||
| I think that's what you're talking about, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hopefully it's not this stuff that's driving people nuts, uh, that they're selling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's spice. | |
| That's awful. | ||
| Yeah, that's something, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so there... | ||
| Illinois is, I do not believe, well, actually I take it back. | ||
| About a month ago, Illinois has made it legal for medicinal uses for marijuana. | ||
| And they had just started opening dispensaries around. | ||
| And I was wondering why this drug Dernabinol is never brought up when they talk about medicinal marijuana. | ||
| You know, No, I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're different drugs, right? | |
| Different drugs. | ||
| Right, Sally? | ||
| is man-made, right? So it's a synthetic marijuana. So while I don't know anything about its effectiveness, | ||
| it's still a schedule and drug. I don't know why the state isn't bringing that up or why it's not | ||
| being prescribed. My guess is that, you know, insurance companies aren't covering that. | ||
| I don't know why it's not more widely used. Okay, all right. | ||
| It does bring up another subject, Sally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| uh... what the deal 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. | ||
| And you respond to that how? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yep, not sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| To me, it's kind of like saying milk is a gateway food. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would agree, but I'm sure there are many people who don't. | |
| No, many. | ||
| And since I wasn't sure we'd hear from them, I thought I'd bring it up myself. | ||
| Alright, Silverdale, Washington, I think you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 old cameras on all the tops of the trees that have been chopped off and everything. | ||
| And the neighbor 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 the criminal history in the first place. | ||
| Now, wait a minute. | ||
| Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. | ||
| You're in Washington, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, so pot growing, wait a minute, wait a minute, pot growing is legal in Washington, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is, and ever since he put that in, he used to be a landscaper, and ever since he put in the facility at his old home, it's turned into kind of like a, I mean, a bizarre thing, you know, the neighbors have to call the police all the time because he's shooting guns off over there. | |
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have no idea. | |
| Why would they shoot guns? | ||
| Why shoot guns? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's very well. | |
| He's got problems anyway, but I just was wondering... You're telling me he's legally growing marijuana in Washington? | ||
| Yeah, legally. | ||
| And he's shooting guns off on his property? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah, all the time, and we've got problems anyway in the past, but they gave him a license, and we can't figure out, nobody wants to go over there, so all the neighbors now are figuring out why in the world Does he do this fortress thing? | |
| And the police have said, we don't know what's going on because we know he's got to grow over there. | ||
| It's legal. | ||
| And so we don't bother him. | ||
| Nobody bothers him. | ||
| But it's like a fortress. | ||
| And we're like, what in the world is he trying to protect over there? | ||
| Nobody wants that. | ||
| odd to me. 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 doesn't, doesn't, doesn't, that wouldn't happen in Colorado, I'll tell you that. | ||
| Sally, so you and your brothers aren't firing off long rifles on the property a lot, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are not. | |
| We do not do that regularly. | ||
| Your license would be gone so quickly. | ||
| My license could go for the simplest of reasons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's no way I would shoot off a firearm. | |
| I understand. | ||
| It did sound a little sketchy to me. | ||
| It did sound a little sketchy, but it may well be that he's illegal. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That gives us all a bad name. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| DeLand, Florida, is that right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Art. | |
| Hi, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, this is Edie. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| This is Edie from DeLand, Florida. | ||
| I just love you. | ||
| Thank you for coming back on the air. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great show. | |
| Great show. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I have a question. | ||
| I don't think anybody's brought up industrial uses for marijuana. | ||
| If Sally knows anything about those, like biodiesel, paper, fibers. | ||
| The hemp, right? | ||
| And they've got a whole other battle in the United States. | ||
| Hemp used to be a required crop in the 1600s. | ||
| You had to grow it. | ||
| It was traded. | ||
| It was currency. | ||
| Hemp was currency. | ||
| But again, all of the lobby pushed hemp aside when the paper people came in. | ||
| Hemp right now, I think, could be a huge industry. | ||
| A lot of uses for hemp. | ||
| It's a very easy crop to grow. | ||
| It can be harvested and used economically. | ||
| So I really am supporting the hemp growers and the hemp lobby at this point. | ||
| But they are fighting the same fight we are. | ||
| Right now the crop will be destroyed if the hemp tests higher than 0.3% THC. | ||
| So you can grow acres and acres of hemp and cross your fingers that you don't pass You don't reach that tolerance, and if you do, you have to destroy everything. | ||
| It's just a random number assigned to hemp. | ||
| So, I think that'll be another great American industry. | ||
| What a world! | ||
| Alright, Sean, you're on the air with Sally Hunt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, I have a question. | |
| Now that Colorado has... Can I ask you a question first? | ||
| Are you on the speakerphone, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am, I'm sorry. | |
| Okay, please get off the speakerphone and go to the phone itself for us, if you would. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I wonder if there'll be less people vaccinating babies now. | ||
| Vaccinating babies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay, you're back on the speakerphone again. | ||
| Please don't do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry, it's just not working out for me. | |
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Why would you say, are there Now that there's a lot more marijuana smokers, there'll be a lot more hippies and a lot less vaccinated babies. | ||
| I can debate 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Really. | ||
| And when you walk into my store, you see more gray hair than you do non-gray hair. | ||
| Not always, but you know, there's a strong subculture, but there's soccer moms, doctors, lawyers, police officers, you know, 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 it 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. | ||
| I like that comment. | ||
| I don't know about hive mind. | ||
| I think that, well, I guess in a sense, in a kind of a sense about the way you feel about something, but hive mind sounds bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, you're on the air. | |
| Hi, thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I'm doing great. | |
| How are you? | ||
| No, I said where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I'm sorry. | |
| I'm in Apple Valley, California. | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Okay, so I have a question for you, Sally. | ||
| I have sickle cell anemia, which means I'm in pain most of the time, if not every day. | ||
| But I'm also religious, so I don't smoke, and I've never used an illegal drug, and I don't drink. | ||
| But I've been growing more curious about the benefits, medicinally, of marijuana. | ||
| So, I'm ignorant on the subject. | ||
| What other ways can you take it other than smoking it or putting it in a brownie that would benefit someone in chronic pain without getting high? | ||
| Without getting high? | ||
| Without getting high, that's difficult to avoid that piece of it because the active component, the majority of the active component in cannabis is psychoactive. | ||
| For pain the CBD which is a 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 that would 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| So you think whatever benefit you might get from it would be offset by God's punishment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I just am very much Like being in control of myself and my mind and where my mind is. | ||
| So the idea of getting high, I guess you could say it sounds frightening because I've never been high and there's a certain measure of control that is lost, I would think. | ||
| You know, that's a fair comment. | ||
| Sally, how do you respond to that? | ||
| I would say that's very fair. | ||
| I don't have religious reasons, but I'm a control freak. | ||
| That's why I don't use THC regularly. | ||
| I don't smoke marijuana regularly because I've got a lot of work to do. | ||
| I'm a control freak, but it's still an amazing drug. | ||
| I just want to back up a little. | ||
| You could get some relief from just taking the CBD. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You wouldn't have to necessarily have THC. | ||
| It would be worth experimenting to see if any of your pain went away, because it does have a strong anti-inflammatory effect, to just try the CBD oil. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Anyway, is this a debate that we should have in America, Sally? | ||
| And by debate, I mean, should we debate alcohol use versus marijuana? | ||
| Is that worthy to have? | ||
| In other words, we know how damaging alcohol is. | ||
| We know what it does to everything. | ||
| To the number of people in jail, the drunk driving arrests, the people killed. | ||
| We know about alcohol. | ||
| So, is that a debate there should be, or what? | ||
| Well, for me, it's part of a debate because people can relate to alcohol. | ||
| People understand alcohol and when you can relate marijuana in terms of alcohol it's safer. | ||
| It's not toxic to your liver. | ||
| You won't have a hangover. | ||
| All of those things. | ||
| People start thinking about it. | ||
| I like to say it's customary for me if I'm going to a dinner party to bring as a hostess gift a bottle of wine. | ||
| Where does that come from? | ||
| If you drink too much alcohol, you can die. | ||
| Why can't I bring a couple joints? | ||
| It's just a matter of changing the mindset. | ||
| And by comparing marijuana to alcohol, it opens up people's minds a little bit because they're attaching it to something that they understand. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Again, Art, that's such a hard question because it depends on if you're smoking a sativa or an indica. | ||
| So if you're smoking a sativa, You're suddenly going to be firing on all cylinders. | ||
| Your brain is going to get active. | ||
| You're going to be creative, possibly. | ||
| You're going to start thinking thoughts that you may suddenly think that you're Albert Einstein. | ||
| Oh my gosh, I have so many things to think about. | ||
| If I'm smoking an indica, then I'll say, wow, I'm tired or I'm so relaxed right now. | ||
| I feel so good. | ||
| So it just depends on what type of marijuana you're smoking. | ||
| But if you're smoking it, the results are fairly instant. | ||
| So you're not, as opposed to edibles where there's a two hour delay in effect, you can | ||
| feel it pretty quickly and your high doesn't last forever. | ||
| So it goes away fairly quickly too. | ||
| So you have a very easy way to determine how high you are. | ||
| So typically for somebody who just takes a puff or two, how long does that high last | ||
| would you say? | ||
| I know everything varies. | ||
| Everyone metabolizes it differently, but I would say one to two puffs maybe lasts you an hour, half an hour, depending on your tolerance. | ||
| And then when you're not high any longer, everybody knows about alcohol, right? | ||
| You either get sick and throw up and hug the bowl or you get a really bad headache and don't like light noise near you. | ||
| What happens as the marijuana goes away? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're not high anymore. | |
| That's it. | ||
| You may get a little dry mouth, right? | ||
| People experience dry mouth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi Art, I love you. | |
| Sally, the question I have is related to Monsanto. | ||
| it just fades away. | ||
| Fades away. | ||
| Yeah, I get it, alright. | ||
| Let's see, where do we go? | ||
| Back to New Jersey, you're on the air with Sally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi Art, I love you. | |
| 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 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 glyphosate is with the GMO and what Monsanto... Alright, well you're off into a whole other thing there, Sterling, and you're obviously not happy with Monsanto. | ||
| Have at it. | ||
| But to say that they're going to take over the marijuana growing and then it's going to be killing people is just outrageous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sally? | |
| Well, I think it's related to GMOs and that type of pushback from that. | ||
| I don't think there's a place for GMOs in marijuana. | ||
| There's a lot of genetics that can be done without entering into that realm. | ||
| So, I don't know what the future is. | ||
| It was kind of on another agenda there. | ||
| Let's go to, well, let's see. | ||
| How about Oklahoma? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes, my name is JD and Tulsa, Oklahoma. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I'm full-blood Native American, and I have two questions about all this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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 investors. Would we be better off as a silent partner or | ||
| growing our own as our own private industry? And as I've seen as a Santa Cruz in | ||
| South Dakota are opening their own marijuana resort. So that's a tough question. 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, you know, what we can do to basically help our people to help the United States because we don't look at marijuana as a bad thing. | ||
| We look at it as like peyote. | ||
| I'm not totally clear on what you're asking. | ||
| You're saying because you're on a reservation you can grow marijuana legally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that correct? | |
| The United States government gave every Native American tribe the right to grow marijuana and sell it, but we're kind of looking like Do we want to sell it? | ||
| Do we want to grow it? | ||
| I've got you. | ||
| All right, listen. | ||
| Hold on, sir. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| And Sally, hold on. | ||
| These are really good questions, and I'm interested in a good answer if there can be one. | ||
| Sally VanVier is my guest. | ||
| We're talking marijuana. | ||
| Stay right where you are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
our water program, huh? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to be a little bit more serious. | ||
| The night in the desert doesn't scream calls. | ||
| We trust you. | ||
| But remember, the NSA... Well, you know. | ||
| To call the show, please dial 1-952-225-5278. | ||
| That's 1-952-CALL-ART. | ||
| Once a night, that makes me feel much better. | ||
| Sally Van De Veer is my guest. | ||
| She is president of Medicine Man, one of the largest and most successful marijuana cultivation dispensaries in Colorado. | ||
| Where it's legal. | ||
| 99.9% anyway. | ||
| The Feds have their fingers here and there, of course, but 99.9% legal. | ||
| What do you think, Sally, how long will it be before the rest of the country decides enough is enough and it's legal across America? | ||
| Wow, that's a big question, isn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| My hope? | ||
| is two years, but that's probably wishful thinking on my part. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd say so. | |
| Yeah, maybe five years. | ||
| Okay, that's better. | ||
| Alright, 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, caller? | ||
|
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 is supposed to open New Year's Eve 2016. | ||
| Marijuana resort. | ||
| It's a heck of an interesting question. | ||
| How would you think they would best proceed, Sally? | ||
| Well, I see it's a unique opportunity, right? | ||
| The tribal sovereignty laws means that reservation affairs are reservation affairs. | ||
| So, from a business perspective, certainly, you know, the Santee Sioux have a great idea. | ||
| They'll have economic benefits of probably about two million dollars a month. | ||
| And they can, I read that they're using that to improve tribal treatment centers. | ||
| It's nice to know that in states where marijuana is not legal for people who truly need it as medicine that it would be an alternative for them. | ||
| But it's nice to know that in states where marijuana is not legal, for people who truly | ||
| need it as medicine, that it would be an alternative for them. | ||
| So I'm all about getting the medicine to the people. | ||
| And if that is one way to do it, certainly there will be those engaging in just getting | ||
| high and that's their prerogative as well. | ||
| But having medicine be available, I think, is important. | ||
| So, if this is one way around it, possibility. | ||
| Well, I see his problem. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I mean, they can grow it, but selling it, it's got to be used on the reservation. | ||
| Once they're off, it seems to me, you know, here's some sirens behind you, and that'd be that. | ||
| Right, I mean it's scary. | ||
| There's a huge potential for diversion in that case because they wouldn't be regulated as tightly as we are. | ||
| I'm assuming they wouldn't be regulated. | ||
| Hopefully the Tribal Council would put in effect their own regulations so that they wouldn't get shut down. | ||
| I know a lot of people, specifically in Wisconsin, do not want this to happen. | ||
| The government does not want this to happen. | ||
| So I think there's a lot of battles ahead. | ||
| I'm not sophisticated enough in the ways of tribal I'm glad you're enjoying it, but you're kind of in and out, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
it will be like you said are a slippery slope. Well you know they want to increase their | |
| economic prospects but I'm not clear on how they do that and it's a tough problem. Michael you're on the air, hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you doing? Fine. | |
| I thought I would met you. I think this is a great topic. I'm glad you're enjoying it but you're kind of in and out | ||
| Michael you know I don't know if it's your audio or what. I want to | ||
|
unidentified
|
talk about cannabinoid receptors. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How they're not used by any... I'm getting echo. | |
| Yeah, there's something wrong with this connection, Michael. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| What you can try doing, once you get on Skype, there is an echo server. | ||
| It's called an echo server. | ||
| So you can Just click on that and talk into it, and it will play back your audio to you. | ||
| So, if you're trying to test and get your audio right, use the Skype Echo server, and when you've got it right, call back. | ||
| Marysville something or another. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi, is this me? | ||
| Well, only you know that for sure, but it sounds a lot like you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi Art. | |
| Oh, I almost asked how you're doing. | ||
| I know they don't like that. | ||
| Hey, I'd like to say I'm in California. | ||
| And marijuana is legal here for medicinal purposes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, but you can go down to Sacramento or Chico or wherever you want, basically, and pay $50 and get a script for absolutely nothing. | ||
| You don't have to have any kind of pre-existing condition or anything like that. | ||
| You can just get a script for nothing. | ||
| So it might as well be legal here. | ||
| Well, they're working toward that. | ||
| California has been the true Wild West for a long time and I think that you'll see tighter regulations and more availability to those who need it and hopefully moving on toward recreational use as well so you can kind of cut out that the Dr. Mill $50 piece of it that sort of goes against what we in the industry would like to portray ourselves. | ||
| You know it's funny 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, it's been legal there for a long time, but the regulatory environment wasn't strict enough to move it forward as we have in Colorado. | ||
| Let's go to Pomona. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mark? | |
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If you test positive, they cut you off of both. | ||
| One more question for you, Art. | ||
| Have you tried it for your back pain? | ||
| Oh, yeah, sure. | ||
| I've tried marijuana. | ||
| I'm 70 years old. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I went my whole life without trying marijuana. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does it help your back pain? | |
| You know what? | ||
| I've actually only found one thing that helps my back pain, and I've got them as an advertiser, and it's that LED affair that You wanted an answer, that's it? | ||
| That's because you're not smoking the right strain. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, what should I be smoking? | |
| I don't know that. | ||
| That's a question for my can of sewer, my bud tenders. | ||
| But it depends on the type of pain you have. | ||
| Come to Colorado and we will make that determination for you. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Sounds like a good reason for a trip, actually. | ||
| So you really think that that pain can be assisted by pot? | ||
| I hear that every day from people in my store. | ||
| Again, it may not work for you, but I hear it all the time. | ||
| Herniated discs, you know, post-surgical issues, just general back pain. | ||
| Depending on the strain, typically a heavy indica will help that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, somebody had to ask, of course. | ||
| Wilmington, North Carolina. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Doctor in tobacco country, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a question for the guest. | |
| Yes, go right ahead. | ||
| She mentioned you had to be 21 to buy in our store, and I was wondering what she thought about the age limit in Colorado, and what she thought about teenagers smoking marijuana. | ||
| I know you're both parents, and it might be something like we have to do more research on it, but I just wanted to know her thoughts on that. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| Right, and what studies they have done, it's always been about the developing brain, right? | ||
| It's about the developing brain. | ||
| So I would say after the age of 24, if you're a male, 21, if you're a female, that that would be a good choice for medication. | ||
| And I would prefer that my children smoke marijuana rather than drinking alcohol any day. | ||
| Of course, as a parent, I don't want them to use anything, right? | ||
| Let's establish that. | ||
| But if you said, hey, Sally, they're going to do this or this, it would be a no brainer for me to say, oh, yeah, here's marijuana. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please do that. | |
| Okay, so you really have thought out, Sally, how you're going to address this with your children, who know the business you're in, after all. | ||
| We talk about it all the time, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| It's been a great opportunity for my children and their friends. | ||
| 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, Mm-hmm. | ||
| And, oh gee, I didn't go wild. | ||
| I didn't rob anybody. | ||
| I didn't, uh, 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. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| Those leaps may be made if you're not having conversations with your children about drugs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| About the different types of drugs. | ||
| It comes down to responsible parenting and making sure your children are informed. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| My 18-year-old son is so curious about everything. | ||
| I spend all day worrying that he's going to try whatever the drug of the week is. | ||
| I have to trust that I taught him well and informed him. | ||
| Hi, I have three quick questions for you. | ||
| This is Joe in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Well, the truth is a powerful thing. | ||
| So if you tell your children the truth, they'll figure out eventually that you're giving them | ||
| good guidance. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I have three quick questions for you. | ||
| This is Joe in Pennsylvania. | ||
| I have possibly an inner ear problem that's causing distortion in everything I hear, including | ||
| my own voice. | ||
| Well, since you mentioned it, sir, you're actually a little distorted. | ||
| Your audio. | ||
| Well, that's this phone. | ||
| I can't do anything about that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's not you. | ||
| It's the phone. | ||
| It would never want to help in that, and I have a little bit of tinnitus with all that. | ||
| Well, that's awful. | ||
| My father suffers from that. | ||
| He has Meniere's disease, which is an inner ear issue. | ||
| There's good news with cannabis and that. | ||
| Do you suffer from intense vertigo or nausea? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, not at all. | |
| I've been tested for Meniere's disease. | ||
| I don't have that. | ||
| This was because of an ad with feedback from a loud PA speaker. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There were other problems before that, but this made it worse. | ||
| Well, that's awful. I'm sorry. And I don't know. | ||
| That's a very specific disorder that I have not come across. | ||
| I will tell you that the Internet is rich with information on marijuana's uses in, you know, you name it. | ||
| Marijuana and blank. | ||
| And you'll find some stories on that. | ||
| I wish I could tell you more. | ||
| If it's related to inflammation, I would say most definitely it would be worth a try. | ||
| But again, I'm sorry. | ||
| I don't know much about that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Very quickly, Dino, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, this is Dino here in Roselle, Illinois. | |
| You hear me all right? | ||
| I hear you fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, actually, you 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... If I had children, I would tell them right off the bat, marijuana is a drug, but compared to the heroin and all the stuff out there... Yeah, tell the truth, for God's sake. | |
| Tell your kids the truth. | ||
| That's the best chance you've got. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's done nothing but a disservice to everybody. | |
| Basically, ever since the prohibition of the 30s with the jazz, that's where it all came from. | ||
| you know, the gas and all that. That's where it all came from. So, the other thing is, | ||
| you know, it's not a very productive drug and all that, but, excuse me, I'm a little | ||
| nervous here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's not a productive drug. | ||
| Well, it can be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It depends on what you smoke. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| In other words, you can use it for a variety of productive reasons, I think. | ||
| Some people consider it to be something that increases creativity. | ||
| That's no small matter. | ||
| We had the Grateful Dead come through our facility last week. | ||
| Oh, no kidding! | ||
| No kidding, 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. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| Simple as that. | ||
| Hello, in Provo, Utah. | ||
| We're running out of time, but go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hey, is this me? | |
| That's you! | ||
| Alright, hey, it's Sally. | ||
| I just got a question for you. | ||
| Kind of a comparison a bit between the legalities of, I guess, marijuana versus cigarettes. | ||
| Like, why are cigarettes legal, which they have numerous amounts of death each year, versus marijuana has Well, marijuana will irritate your lungs in sufficient quantities, sir. | ||
| No question about that. | ||
| We're coming to the end of the show. | ||
| But, Sally, if you want to address that? | ||
| 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 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 Vandiver, 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. | ||
| So, you've done a wonderful job. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Art, for the opportunity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been a treat. | |
| All right. | ||
| Take care. | ||
| Sally Vanderveer. | ||
| 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 deserts. |
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