I talk with Alvarro Torres from Colombia about a better way to do medical cannabis, we also continue our exploration of recreational cannabis on Cultivar Corner with The Green Organic Dutchman – Sugar Bush for an organic treat. Apparently there is an abundance of home grown weed being given away – clearly I’m not running in the proper circles. All of that and more on Episode 98.
I talk with Alvaro Torres from Colombia about a better way to do medical cannabis, we also continue our exploration of recreational cannabis on Cultivar Corner with The Green Organic Dutchman – Sugar Bush for an organic treat. Apparently there is an abundance of home grown weed being given away – clearly I’m not running in the proper circles. All of that and more on Episode 98.
More Homegrown than you can give away
The Green Organic Dutchman Sugar Bush
From the studio high above the clouds of the Okanagan Valley. This is the Cannabis Potcast. Exploring the world of Canadian cannabis culture. One toke at a time. Here's your host and bud tender, Gary Johnston. Welcome back once more to the Cannabis Potcast.
If this is your first time, well, let me give you an exceptionally warm welcome. I hope you're interested in information about cannabis, because I suspect that's what we're going to be focusing on for the next 30, 40 minutes or so.
Let me remind you that this program is intended only for those 19 or older in your jurisdiction and is intended purely for entertainment purposes. You should always consume your cannabis responsibly.
And this episode will we talk with Alvaro Torres from Colombia. And he tells us about a whole lot better way to do medical cannabis. That's a really interesting interview. I think you're going to enjoy that. We also continue our exploration of recreational cannabis on Cultivar Corner, the Green Organic Dutchman, Sugar Bush, an organic treat coming up.
Apparently there is an abundance of home grown weed being given away. Clearly not running in the proper circles. All of that and more on Episode 98 of the Cannabis Potcast.
And so, as always, I have prepared myself appropriately for another episode of the Cannabis Potcast, What am I Smoking Today in preparation. This is actually a a combination. I created my own cultivar. I put together some highly Dutch. Amsterdam Sativa to put a little of that together with some table top purple punch and created my own. So that's what my inspiration for today is.
And the other thing I've started doing, and this is probably, I don't know, the third or fourth episode where this has happened, I need something to drink while I'm doing the podcast, right? So it seems only appropriate that perhaps I choose a cannabis beverage, even though if you've listened to the podcast at all, you know that edibles have not had a tradition of having a great effect on me. Unfortunately, that seems to apply to the drinks as well with the smaller cannabinoids, I hope. I was hoping they would have a better impact for me in terms of getting a buzz.
They don't, however, a beverage I have been enjoying in preparation of each episode, as I say for the last few times, has been from Keef, Keef Classics and is their Bubba Kush classic Soda. And I like a good root beer. And this. Hmm. That's a really good root beer. That was ten milligrams of THC. So in theory, it should also give me a bit of a buzz. In theory. In reality, it really hasn't. But it is. A really good root beer.
My wife often jokes that there is cheaper root beer out there, you know. But that's that's not the point. I really enjoy the taste of it. And I'm hoping that at some point it is going to give me a buzz, just maybe with the collective approach of it.
So before we dive into the stories today, a little bit of potpourri. Did you realize in the introduction I said that this is episode 98? Well, that means that we're two episodes away from episode 100. Back on December 1st of 2018, which was when the first episode of the Cannabis Potcast aired or was published. I had no idea how long it was going to go, how many episodes they were going to be in, and how how big the the audience was going to grow. I have to say, thank you so much for being here.
I'm really happy that you are here along for the ride. The growth has been probably more than I had hoped for. Fantastic. Let's hope it continues. I'm hoping it grows bigger and bigger. But okay. Now see, I just had a cannabis moment because I forgot the point that I was going to make in relation to back whenI first started the Cannabis Potcast. It's going to come back to me. I know it is. And part of the purpose, as I said, part of the purpose of this podcast is for entertainment purposes. And I've now presented an opportunity for you to be entertained by the fact that I've had a cannabis moment and forgot the train of thought where I was heading down. I'm still on track. I'm not going to give it up. What was I talking about?
And that's the beauty of being able to review what you've recorded, because as it turns out, no, I didn't forget the point.I didn't fall off the track. There was really no other point that I was trying to make. I was just referencing the fact that I had started the Cannabis Potcast over three years ago, December 1st, 2018, and had no idea how large it was going to be, whether there was going to be six of you or whetherthere was going to be a few hundred of you. Who knew? But I'm so glad we're here. And what I'm looking for is if you have any ideas, anything you'd like to hear on episode 100? Maybe there's a story that you think that I should cover or talk about.
Maybe there's an interview or something that happened in the last 97 episodes that you'd like to hear again. All of that is possible. Send your suggestions to info at Cannabis Potcast dot com. Or of course you can contact me on Instagram or Twitter at Cannabis Potcast on Facebook.
Remember, it's Weed podcast. They just have to be different. I'm looking forward to your suggestions as we get ready to celebrate 100 episodes.
From the studio high above the clouds of the Okanagan Valley. This is the Cannabis Potcast.
One of the things we've talked about a lot regarding the Canadian cannabis world is the cannabis excise tax fact about whether or not it should be there because it's killing small producers and apparently is not doing much good for the large producers either.
This is a story from MJ Biz Daily Tor.com written by Matt Lamers. Canadian Cannabis Excise Debt Soars. Unpaid federal excise duty is piling up in Canada's cannabis industry, with excise debt more than tripling the $52.4 million as of March 2022, up sharply from 16 million owed in March 2021.
That's against. At least 20% of all federally regulated companies owe the Federal Revenue Agency money. The latest sign that excise duty burdens are weighing on already struggling cannabis producers, industry officials say. They cite falling marijuana prices and fierce competition as among the factors making it difficult for producers to pay their excise duties, which are levied on a variety of cannabis products and to pay them in a timely manner. The cannabis industry is making a choice whether to pay its taxes or to keep the lights on. Dan Sutton, CEO of British Columbia based cannabis producer Tantalus Labs, told mjbizdaily.
Canada's excise duty imposed on producers. Dried cannabis is either a dollar per gram or 10% of the value of the gram, whichever is greater. Different excise rules apply to various cannabis derivatives and other products such as edibles. MJ Biz Daily asked the Canada Canada Revenue Agency for the amount of cannabis excise duty in arrears for each of the past four fiscal years. The number of cannabis companies with overdue bills and a breakdown of that data by province. In total, 254 individual cannabis businesses racked up $73 million in excise debt from March 2019 through March 2022.
However, of that total, roughly 52.4 million remains outstanding. As of March 31st, approximately 96% of the outstanding debt was from assessments in the past year. The vast majority of outstanding amounts that enter the collections program are resolved within one year, the CRC said in response to MJ Bill's daily queries.
Industry sources say the overdue taxes stem from a number of factors combining to weaken the financial footing of many businesses, including severe price compression. Over the past two years has limited many companies ability to pay bills on time.
Heavy competition as the number of federal cannabis licenses went from 342 in April 2020 to 634 in 2021 and 856 as of last week, a heavy tax burden that doesn't discriminate between large and small companies. The CMA calls those debts undisputed, meaning none of the businesses lodged an appeal with the federal tax agency.
The number of cannabis producers with overdue excise tax duty has skyrocketed as production licenses issued by the Federal Government surged 150% over the past two years and more companies suffered financial setbacks. So it seems that the excise tax is not only problematic in its application, it appears to be a little problematic in getting its payments made.
I get many requests for interviews on the Cannabis Potcast and every time I get a request I put a distinct focus on that. Would this be of interest to the markets, which is, from my perspective, primarily interested in the Canadian legal cannabis market since legalization occurred?
And if it doesn't quite meet that criteria, I'll send a message back and say, Listen, I love to have the conversation. When you're in the Canadian market, give me a contact back and we'll carry on from there. And one recent request that I resisted for a while was from Britney, who's a publicist with the Rose Group.
And I have to congratulate Britney on her persistence. She kept at it, and she persisted and presented the fact that she thought there was a lot of interest in the Canadian market. In the message presented by Alvaro Torres, the founder and CEO of an organization called Kiron.
So let me give you the background on Kiron. Kiron Lifesciences Corporation, a leading integrated international medical cannabis company with core operations in Latin America and Europe, leveraging medical health clinics and proprietary telemedicine platforms. Kyron combines a patient oriented approach physician education programs, scientific expertize, and high quality product portfolio to drive prescriptions and brand loyalty with patients worldwide
. And now I'm going to have a conversation with the founder and CEO of Kiron, Alvaro Torres. We pick up the conversation just after I've welcomed him to the Cannabis Potcast. Good evening, Gary. Thank you so much for having me.
Absolutely. So tell us your story. How did you become interested in the story behind Kyron and what got you started in considering cannabis for medical use? I'm going to I'm going to try to make it as short as I can.
But I mean, I'm an engineer by trade. I went to school in the United States to study industrial engineering. And all my life I've been doing engineering work. But, you know, about five years ago, the Colombian government, where I'm from, Colombia, legalized medical cannabis.
And I felt this is something that could really disrupt the traditional pharmaceutical industry. And why not give me a chance to come up with something that can actually change the quality of life of patients at one point in our lives?
Gary We will all be patients of things that are related to cannabis. So that's why I founded the company and I named the company Geidam because that was the center that taught Hercules medicine in all Greek mythology. And I wanted to do something that is going to improve the quality of life of people.
That was five years ago. Yes. And today we are the top selling brand in Colombia, in Latin America, the top selling brand, the U.K. And that is very exciting journey that we have ahead of us. And it's very happy that we were able to think about building that type of company five years ago.
So give me a sense of what that means overall. What kind of infrastructure have you built in the last five years that have allowed you to accomplish that? Well, when we talk about medical cannabis outside of North America, we're talking about that very medical industry.
And you're talking about how do we convince doctors and physicians about changing the last hundred years of education, if at all? And so what we did is we're going to do this through our own clinic network so we can build the data, the evidence show the evidence to doctors and start convincing doctors, insurance companies and the government
. To get medical cannabis as important as we've done with objects and things like that when it comes to pain management. So that's that's really how we started three, almost four, three, three, four years ago. It's how do we own the demand?
How do we show doctors that this is a real medication, that this is not a fight or a trend, that this is really going to happen over the next hundred years and that luckily we've been able to do that.
And of course not luckily, but thankfully, because we have a very, you know, a good approach of how do we how do we convince doctors to be able to prescribe it? Yeah, it probably wasn't luck. Probably a good plan, an execution, perhaps.
Certainly. Look, we could have used a lot more luck, but the last three years, yeah, we could all use a little more luck. And you're absolutely right. We're all going to face that point where we have a condition that medical cannabis will assist.
I've reached that point myself. So let's bring the patients into the perspective. Alvaro, how is Kiron helping patients access their medical cannabis? Well, you know, when they founded the company, I wrote seven different principles of why, why, how we would want to run their company.
The number one is that we are here to improve the quality of life of patients. That's my number one principle for the company. And quality of life means a variety of things. But it's not only for the family, but for the patients homes, for the family, for the caretaker.
We are all going to be patients at one point in our lives, all of us. Why would we would why would we be subjected to taking the same medication that we all know is going to destroy our lives and destroy our health when we can have a natural medication that can be even cheaper, but also give us
a better health perspective in the future. And that's really what I figured out when we founded the company. Why don't we think about something like that? And that's what medical cannabis is all about. These are real medications. This is not a fad.
This is not trend. These are going to continue to happen in the rest of our lives. And thankfully, we've been able to convince patients and doctors because we are able to build a lot of data around the efficacy and efficiency of cannabis.
And this is what driving more doctors to say, hey, you know what, I don't want to prescribe more morphine patches, attempt to stop cannabis. And this is something that's really exciting because that's the future of medicine. Yeah, very, very cool.
So with the medical cannabis access and the recreational markets, we've got an I assume a very you're looking to go globally and to go into other markets. So how do you see the confluence of those two markets? And and I guess, what do we do to protect the medical in regards to the expanding recreational market?
Well, we have to think more about the world in a bit of a different view outside of North America. Gary, this is a very medical centric world. In Europe and Latin America. Adult use is not really what's driving the market right now.
What's driving is real medical cannabis and medical conversations. But we need to have years ago we said, okay, one thing with the company knows how to do is that we know how to prescribe and to convince doctors using Real-World Evidence.
So why do we take this and take it to Europe so we can convince European doctors that this is a real alternative? But then two years ago, people were saying, well, what does a Latin American company out of Colombia with my heavy accent got to do with in Europe?
But today, the first quarter of this year, we sell more cannabis medical cannabis in Europe than we sell in Latin America. It's crazy. And that's not because we are really good at the production and the low cost cultivation of our product.
It's just we're really, really, really good at building evidence so we can get doctors to be more comfortable about prescribing cannabis in the end outside of North America, which is a more discolored recreational type of industry in Europe.
This is really about how do we get doctors comfortable about prescribing cannabis? I mean, doctors in the end believe in two types of evidence, right? One is face one face to face, three, phase four, OxyContin type of evidence.
We are we already know how that led us, what the cost of that is. The other one is real world evidence. Like if you see a patient feeling better, that's a really good indicator of how cannabis can be.
And the more that we are able to drive that type of evidence, the more we can convince doctors in English, in German, including Spanish and Portuguese, to prescribe cannabis. And I think the one thing that we've been able to do is that we've been able to take all this evidence translated into different languages and show people that
cannabis is for real. And the more real world evidence we can produce, the more doctors in the UK are prescribing. This is why we are now one of the top selling UK cannabis brands, medical cannabis brands right now.
And because we are able to convince doctors that this is not a hoax, that is for real. And it's funny that it has to happen from Latin America, but sometimes the world moves in different ways.
Yes, the universe does work in very mysterious ways. What you made me realize overall is a recreational cannabis market user here in Canada with the perspective we have of legalization. That's, what, three and a half years old. I am totally ignorant of the size of the medical cannabis market worldwide.
And what are we talking about here overall? How how big is the market that we're talking about? Well, if you think about Latin America alone, right? I mean, Latin America, Latin America, we've been always a region where everybody associates us with with cannabis.
Right. And with drugs. But the reality is that we've been producing drugs for you guys to consume it, not for our own benefit or we have a little more hair in my hair if I just take the majority.
But we are not a region that is known for its own internal consumption. But there's 750 million people, Latin America, there's 85 million people with conditions that can be applicable to medical cannabis. Europe, the 650 million people. And of course, they take a lot more cannabis, but it's a more pharmaceutical industry as well.
And they the way that the regulations work, everybody wants to focus on how does cannabis help people from a medical perspective rather than just getting high, you know, no pun intended. So what we think about markets that are very medical focused.
I'm not like you in North America, but everybody's expecting to see results. Evidence, good quality of product. And that makes it a little bit more difficult for North American companies to come in, which I think is the greatest opportunity because, you know, we don't have to compete against 150 companies like you have to do in Canada.
We are in a market that's poised to be owned by ten or 15 companies. If that if you are able to own that conversation, you're going to be one of those leaders. Okay. So are you familiar with the Canadian market and how it's built?
I am. I am. Because, you know, I started this company five years ago, well, almost six years since I started the idea of the company and been kind of a long time. I know other Canadian companies. And, you know, it gives us also a glimpse of what the future could be or also what it could not be
. And then that is the problem, isn't it? Because the way I understand it, I'm a recent medical recipient of my medical document. And I think the surprising thing for me was it's way more expensive on the medical market than it is on the recreational market, and it's not necessarily any better quality and the process you have to
go through to do that. It just seems it's gotten way worse since we have legalized cannabis. What do you think we should be doing? What can Kiron show us as a better way to do it? Well, I think the number one thing is that and I hope I'm not offending anybody, but in reality, you can.
The cannabis marketing in America, cannabis marketing kind of started with the. The premise that cannabis is not the first line alternative to improving the quality of life. So what about if you're taking opiates and then you're having surgeries and if that doesn't work, then take cannabis.
That is a completely whole wrong approach to taking cannabis. And I suffered that because I sent other doctors to Canada to be trained. And then you we kick them back and everybody is telling me, well, I was going to we're not going to stop government guarantees because, you know, first you got to copy it.
Since when does an opiate drug that's addictive is going to be better than something that's not? And I realized about a year and a half ago that, wow, this is why the cannabis industry now growing, because we've been training every doctor in the world, has been trained on the Canadian approach to this.
This is not the first line alternative. And in reality, what the actual answer to that is that, hey, you know what? Medical cannabis is just as good, if not better or worse. It's just this is a first line alternative as well.
And the one thing that we've been able to do in our in our market, which you feel is growing, is that we've been able to collect the evidence to show doctors, hey. Why does a Beijing have to take 1000 batches of blueberry morphine?
Versus taking three milligrams per milliliter of THC a month. And that has made the company grow so much because doctors start to see this evidence and you realize that one thing that is wrong with this industry is that we've let our fears regarding cannabis to rule the way that doctors should be prescribing.
And I'm very open about that. And of course, it doesn't make a lot of friends, but. We see the results. We are taking people of opiate into cannabis. We have been able we've been able to get the government of Colombia to cover medical cannabis as a insured medication.
It makes no sense that a patient should be hooked on morphine, buprenorphine, pregabalin. Because doctors are still afraid of prescribing guarantees, because we've been educating them that, hey, you know what, this is their third line item. This is not a third line, that this is as good or better as what you've been thinking that.
No. You should use to kill your patients. And I think that's the main reason why this industry, in medical sense, has taken so much time to really build up. And if you compare that with the fact that the Canadian government introduce recreational adult use so fast.
You'd destroy the entire medical cannabis industry because why should I take all this time? If I can just go to the corner and get another, you know, ten milligrams of THC for free or much cheaper in the corner instead of getting out of this process than to get medication.
What we did in Colombia and what Kiron did in Colombia is that we convince the government to cover it. Hey, you know what? This is good for people's health. This is much less expensive than taking buprenorphine. So cover it, make it free.
It makes no sense that patients are taking, like, hourly morphine and bootleg morphine for free. Where cabbies you have to pay out of pocket the moment you make all of that equation the same people will always choose cannabis.
And it's going to be much better for the health and for the expense of the patient and the health system. So I know said a lot. But my point is that the problem is we cannot be afraid of something that has been working for the last 8000 years.
Now we're afraid of it because if 80 years ago somebody said they was wrong. I think that's a challenge. That is a challenge. And it's also a really interesting perspective that I haven't heard expressed before. Really glad we're having this conversation now.
They're all you've you've really sparked some interest in me. So the way I see it, then, it really is about education. It is. Education is the way out of this then. Give us some sense of of how we can bring that education to our world.
It is about education, and it takes time to build the evidence to have that education. But I'll give you an example. When when I started this company five years ago, we started selling only two years ago, only out of all the doctors.
We had a hundred units being sold in a month. Today, it's almost 10,000 units a month because doctors are seeing their real results. And if you're able to gather all that data and show it back to them every week, every month, every two weeks, people, doctors don't understand, first of all, that all of these important medications make
no sense at all, that we are just building and trying to make everybody more addicted to something that's not going to work in pain. Pain this terrible be chronic pain does not go away. You and I know it.
Everybody knows it's not something you can cure. Chronic pain does not get cured, but it doesn't mean that you have to get hooked on something that's going to damage your life. And more importantly, the caretakers like you talk about chronic pain patients.
It's not just about what they experience, but what everybody else in their family life experiences. But you have to be able to gather the data, show the data, understand it, and be able to talk to doctors and say, hey, you know what?
There may be other alternatives, but the problem with cannabis is that the opiate industry has been 100 years of hundreds of billions of dollars of investments to show and I quote, phase one plays to phase three. Phase four, where cannabis where it was used when Cleopatra was empress of Egypt know that and now we have to truly
work some on mice. It makes very little sense. But in both real world evidence you can produce on this, there are more doctors that believe, you know what, this is not a hoax. These are going to happen. And this is why I keep saying all the pre-Colombian, Peru, Mexico in the UK, Germany, this is not something that's
going to go away in the next couple of months. Cannabis is a real disruptor. To sleep disorders, to chronic pain, to neurological conditions. Because it works and more. There's not many companies like us doing this work, but we can show this evidence and we can show these data.
And more and more doctors will get online because nobody wants to have a data. Patients. No, no, of course they don't. And. Are you planning to move into the Canadian market? Well, you know, the one thing that I think this company has learn how to do better than most.
Is that we know how to convince doctors because we have no evidence behind it. So really outside the United States, any market, we can do that. I mean, we've seen almost 25,000 patients in Colombia alone and UK market now is our biggest market right now.
And is that because we are good at exporting product because we actually don't export any product that do UK, we export know how which is how do you combine how do you convince a patient, a doctor to prescribe cannabis and then you figure out the way backwards?
So yes, any market that like Denmark, we could do a lot of good work there because we know how to show the evidence to doctors. So yeah, I mean, I think what people think about export and they think about exporting goods.
I think about it as exporting knowhow. It took us a long time to do it, but. Thankfully, we had time. So now I love it. Well, it certainly seems like the direction that you are heading is the one that we should be going over.
I mean, listening to you speak, it is clearly evident to me that the major problem with our Canadian market is, as you have expressed, they came into it with the wrong attitude, thinking marijuana was a substitute for something else, when in fact it should have been the first.
Yeah. You know, I would love to see you guys coming into our country to perhaps see what we can do as Canadians to improve the education. Let me give you another example. So right now, when you're looking for your medical document here in Canada, many people will go through what's called a nurse practitioner.
That nurse practitioner will have a 5 to 10 minute conversation. And then on that, they will base what their cannabis prescription will be. And because many Canadian doctors still don't want to consider it, we don't think about it as a regular prescription.
What can we do to change that? Well, I think the number one thing that we need to change in Canada is the same thing with the Columbia. It took us two years to convince the government to cover medical cannabis as an approved medication for free.
And unless that happens in Canada, that medical, medical cannabis is not going to be an important industry because if it takes you. 3 minutes more to go to your doctor than going to the college. Just getting a THC gummy.
That's not going to really build an industry. I think the one thing that we need to do in Canada is to start showing evidence and show them the pharmaco economic benefits of cannabis. Two years ago, when they started hearing when we started business here, the one question we always had is, can Colombians afford it?
Right. And they said, like, then it doesn't matter if they can afford it for the first year. What matters is how much savings and how much health benefits we can produce. And after doing all this for two years, we can show, hey, we can save the government of Colombia.
In that case, 40% of your annual cost for treating pain with a much better health benefit for the patient. So the real key to Canada market is really to be able to go to the insurance companies and to the the big corporations saying you're wasting your money.
And I think if that's the conversation, that's where north American medical cannabis can become a real force because. As much as everybody would like to get some THC in their system, there's nothing better than getting it for free. But to get it for free, you need to have a whole system that works for it.
And so I think the opportunity for the to Canadian market is really to show the evidence. Have Canada's clinics, have the data, and they can say, look, where you with your money as a system, as overall to particularly Canada, which, you know, you have an overall health system like in Colombia.
Spend your money on morphine patches or pregabalin shots when you can just prescribe cannabis and reduce your expenditure by 30, 40%. Well, it has been a fascinating story, Alvaro. Thank you so much for sharing it. And we'll leave it there.
Your story, Kiron, has really intrigued me and I hope we can bring some of your intelligent approach to the Canadian market. Do you have any final word? Well, no. You know, I think I think the world is going to be heading to the medical cannabis conversation.
It's really all about evidence and data and brand loyalty. And in the end, brands are build because you're able to have repeat customers the more repeat customers you have. That's what builds a brand. But outside of Canada, North America, Europe and Latin America are going to be the next big markets for whoever is able to own that
demand is going to be the key a market leader. And that's what we've been aiming to do since we started company. Well, congratulations on what you've accomplished so far overall. Thanks for being on the Cannabis Potcast. Thank you, Gary.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time.
THC CBD terpene profiles, what's in me. Oh, please explain to me Cultivar Corner
On Cultivar Corner today we are doing some organic. The Green Organic Dutchman is fact is what we're doing.
Lovely little glass jar, kind of a green tint to it, but really an interesting design because I don't know if you can see. You can see there is a bit of an angle on the glass. So when you lay that down on your table like I'm doing here, imagine my hand is a table.
It kind of tilts nicely so you can reaching there very easily and pull out the beautiful buds. So that's a very interesting change or variant on the glass jars. More importantly, what's insider glass jar? This is some pretty sweet looking wheat.
Beautiful, beautiful flowers. Took a picture of that, as you'll see when I post that right beside me. Here are lots of lots of beauty in these flowers. Let me get to the details for organic sugar bush. So this is certified organically grown in living soil.
This Tricom covered high THC sativa gets its sugar bush name from the maple tree forest in Quebec. That is the source of maple sirup that's used to nurture the soil it grows in. Oh, that's pretty cool. Now I understand why it's called sugar bush.
The end result, the strain that is full bodied, full of aroma, bringing with it a fruity, skunky scent that is reminiscent of ripe melon and passion fruit. Well, let's examine that. There's a bit of fruitiness in there. And yet I'm not getting any skunk.
All these cannabis companies talking about skunk, and I'm just not seeing that skunk or feeling that skunk like like we used to get. The strain has bright green leaves, tiny peach pistols and buds that are soft and sticky to the touch.
Well, see, we always challenge those when they say that things are sticky. Put that down. And. Okay. There's a bit of stick. Pick that up. How far can you give it up before you see it? No, I dropped it on the floor.
I'll pick it up later. Don't worry about it. Cannabis never goes to waste in the studio, but a bit of stick to not really, really sticky like some of the stuff we've had. I think we've already only had maybe two or three strains that have been truly sticky where I get old stomping on my finger like that
and it would hang there for a while. So challenge them on that. Perhaps not as sticky as we would think it is. The generic parents of this one are ice queen and blue heron. You're dominant terpenes and 2.9% terpenes is what we have in the package.
Doesn't see that on the label. No. Does it? No, it doesn't. Yes, it does. Terpenss actually on this guy at 3.3%. Beta-myrcene Limonene and Farnesene, which is different than what it shows on the web, on the web, it says.
Beta-myrcene Trans-Caryophellene Limonene linalool in little blue in the jar, it says Beta-myrcene Limonene and Farnesene and now Farnese, I often find, has some of those fruity notes. So that could be where the Fruitiness is coming from.
It is certified, organically grown, no synthetic fertilizers, grown in living soil, full spectrum, sun grown, purified rainwater, natural pest control, hand-selected and trimmed. It was a very beautiful flower when I opened up this jar. So we know the details.
We know it's organic. We know it has some delicious taste, some delightful aromas. And I suspect it's time we now gave it a try. I've got my vaporizer ready. I've got my joint ready here. This time to try it.
TGod. The green organic Dutchman. Organic sugar bush. Smooth spoke very smooth. I'm not picking up a lot of flavor notes of the joint. And of course, as I get started, my vaporizer turns off. All right. The vaporizer is ready now.
Let's have a taste of organic sugar. Bush from Tgod. Oh, there they are. Hmm. Oh, yeah. You pick up so much of the flavor off the vaporizer. So there are some fruity notes there. Mm hmm. Just delicious. Just absolutely delicious.
Hmm. Now this is a sativa. We've done an awful lot of interviews on Cult of Our Corner, and it's kind of an indication of where the market is because there is a predominant amount of indica or what we call indica leaning flower.
And that becoming a bigger of a debate as well. There's there's more challenge to the terms sativa, indica and hybrid when we all know that it's really the trappings inside of that particular weed you're smoking that are going to give you the buzz that you're looking for.
So we're trying to get away from calling things sativa hybrid in indica. But when people come into the store, they as perceptible hybrid and indica. So it's hard to completely get away from. And I'm recording this cult of our corner on an off week when I do not have the podcast to produce.
So on these particular days, I'm looking for just a really nice buzz. Got some stuff going on. Probably going to go golfing later this afternoon. Hmm. Oh. Just. Hey, so good with vaporizer. And here comes the happy eyes.
Hmm hmm hmm. Hmm hmm. Hmm hmm. I love it when they are on. But apparently I haven't been giving enough attention to my joint hits going out on me. So we'll fire it back up again. And as I say, the euphoria is starting to overtake me.
I'm getting some happy eyes, getting a little bit of rush. This is going to be a fun Saturday. So there's more and more organic options out there. I haven't. I check back to make sure. We have not done Tigard before on the cannabis potcast.
So this is the first at the Green Organic Dutchman in some of their weed. Now, do they actually get you the THC on this one? It didn't. So the THC is sitting at 25.7. And in these days, that's becoming kind of like a norm.
I still can't believe how fast and how high the THC values continue to rise. Oh. This is a really nice high. Really nice buzz right now. Definitely got the happiness. That euphoria is just kicking in. Isn't euphoria such a nice feeling?
It just sets a beautiful mood to the day. And let me say one more time, I just love being stopped. I truly do. And I truly enjoy sharing it with you, too, because this is a lot of fun sharing a new weave and seeing what the experience is for and hoping you'll be able to duplicate.
Well, the end result of this one, I think is we've got another winner, Teague on the Green Organic Dutchman, their really cool little green glass jars of some pretty weed inside of that, some beautiful aromas, some beautiful flavors, and definitely some wonderful kick to God.
Thank you for organic sugar bush. From the cannabis infused studio in the Clouds. This is the Cannabis Potcast and the Keef classics. Baba Kush Classic Soda still not producing much of an effect from a THC, but boy, it still sure is good root beer.
And now let's go to a story from our friends at the Okanagan XCOM. And I found this one interesting because apparently it means that I'm, I have the wrong circle of friends or my circle isn't big enough or whatever it is.
This is a story, again, as I say, published by the Okanagan Z, but it's written by Don Plant and he's a local reporter, used to be in one of the local newspapers, I believe, The Daily Courier. Here's an interesting story.
Every so often I get an offer that was unfathomable five years ago. Friends who grow their own weed have so much surplus, they want to share it for free. The four plant limit for household may sound puny, but these guys have way more cannabis tucked away than they can give away.
One of them showed me eight mason jars filled with Bud, all but one of them containing wheat. He grew in his garden last summer. He brought part of a stash to a ski week gathering with friends from Nelson.
I show up with a mason jar on my pot. Another shows up with a bunch of cookies and bags of pot for each of us. The third guy shows up with this stuff. He laughs. We're all friends trying to get rid of this shit.
We couldn't give it away. Another client, a friend has harvested more than £4 of product from his garden since home grown was legalized in 2018. Tom, not his real name smokes, makes edibles and coincidentally hands out one liter mason jars stuffed with quality weed to any friend who will have it.
He's barely dented the supply he stores in his large sealed containers. Tom, over here. He even though that's not your real name, Tom. Tom also gets free weed from others when his old boss sold his Colonna house last fall.
He harvested everything he grew before moving to the coast. And before he left, he brought me a mason jar full of bud with a label on it. What it was. He'd go to someone's house. He used to bring a bottle of wine.
Now you bring a jar weed? Tom says. I'm over 60 and stop smoking cannabis. Years ago. But this apparent bounty of Bhang got me thinking. If every Canadian household can grow up to four plants at a time, isn't there a glut of supply?
How can cannabis retail stores survive when they compete not only with the black market in illegal shops, but hobby growers who consume less than they produce. Last year, 11% of Canadians who obtain dried weed in the previous month got it for free.
According to the 2021 Canadian Cannabis Survey of 10,000 respondents, 8% grew their own or had it grown for them? In the Okanagan, the proportion of home growers is likely higher when you account for the public acreage of farmland, countless gardens and longer growing season.
Sara Ballantine Think so. As owner of a Spirit Leaf store in Vernon, she knows many users are storing a lot of grown. They're always trying to drop it off or give me samples, she says. I do think it's part of that older demographic that's been used to growing all these years.
But the new generation of cannabis consumers are coming directly to the store. A lot of them live in apartments or they're renting, so there's no way they're able to grow it. For Okanagan, retailers making a profit remains a challenge.
60 legal retail cannabis outlets, four of them public B.C. stores now operate from Armstrong to a sewer use with dozens more operating illegally. Valentine agrees the market is saturated. Still, she doesn't view hobby growers as competition. Her staff cater to them by selling seeds and giving advice.
They sell clones if they could, but distribution problems make it impossible, she says. Even so, Ballantine cautions, home grown can be unsafe. One benefit of buying store bought product is it's regulated by Health Canada, which irradiate a portion to kill bugs and bacteria and to prevent mauling.
There's no such protection for home grown, she says. If there's even a touch, a mold in the jar, the whole jar is done. If you ran some testing on some of these products, I'm sure you'd find either mold or powdery mildew.
Customers tell Ballantine about their bad experiences after they consume unregulated edibles baked at home. THC levels tend to fluctuate when cooks infuse homegrown flour with butter, she says. While store bought edibles are safer because the dosages is consistent, she's bullish about the higher quality of legal product she sells.
Nowadays, it's just so good that a lot of our customers wouldn't even waste their time doing a homegrown, she says. Those are the customers we want in our store. My friends likely won't be among them. One lived two blocks from a colonial retail outlet, which he's visited once while hunting for trimming scissors.
The other last entered a cannabis shop in May to buy a couple of joints and some edibles. For me, it doesn't really matter whether they're in business or not because I'm always going to have mine, Tom says. I've got way more than enough.
Well, there's two really interesting perspectives for you. I find myself smack dab in the middle of those two perspectives. I appreciate it from the retail perspective. Also appreciate it from the homegrown perspective in that I do a home grow and.
I'm not sure I agree entirely with Sarah Ballantine on her perspective for where that market is and whether or not we should be interested in those who were doing the home grow. I guess clearly they're they're not coming into the store.
There's not much we can do about that. So interesting story. Don Plante, thank you for that. Is there too much home grown that you can't even give it away? Again. I must have the wrong set of friends. Once more.
Thank you so much for being here. I'm so glad you're along for the ride. If you like what you hear and you feel like supporting the Cannabis Potcast, you can go to buy me a coffee dot com slash cannabis potcast. You'll find all kinds of options there.
If you ever have a comment on anything you hear on the Cannabis Potcast or suggestions for interviews or topics, send a note to info @ Cannabis Potcast dot com. That wraps it up for episode 98 of the Cannabis Potcast.
From the cannabis infused studio high above the Okanagan Valley. This was the cannabis potcast.