Program Notes
Guest speaker: Mona Zhang
http://wordonthetree.com/Date this lecture was recorded: 2017
Mona Zhang writes an important newsletter about cannabis, where she gives us an update on news around the weed world and what she saw in the smoking scenes of Beijing, London & New York. You may sign up for her excellent newsletter at http://wordonthetree.com/
Ascended Minds Podcast
(interview with Lorenzo)
Previous Episode
545 - Current Research and Future Trends of Psychedelics, Stanford 2_3_91
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 551 - Women in Cannabis - score: 0.74294
- 674 - Cannabis Science & Business - score: 0.73229
- 218 - The Truth About Cannabis - score: 0.71756
- 026 - BD and Bluebird Botanicals - score: 0.71083
- 124 - Trialogue_ Cannabis - score: 0.70958
- 512 - California’s Prop 64 is a TRAP - score: 0.70339
- 405 - Marijuana At Your Corner Store - score: 0.70331
- 507 - Certified Natural Cannabis - score: 0.69476
- 658 - Legal Questions and Answers - score: 0.69411
- 555 - Drug Policy - score: 0.67132
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:32 ►
And before I forget to mention it, recently I just did an interview for the Ascended Minds podcast,
00:00:39 ►
which you can find at www.ascendedminds.net.
00:00:45 ►
And this is a new podcast series that you may want to check out,
00:00:51 ►
and I’ll put a link to it in today’s program notes. Now, today we are going to get to hear more about my favorite plant, cannabis. And the information comes from Mona Zhang,
00:00:57 ►
who has a website and a newsletter that, well, right now they’re at the top of my list.
00:01:03 ►
In fact, I only signed up for her newsletter yesterday, and, well, right now they’re at the top of my list. In fact, I only signed up for her newsletter yesterday,
00:01:06 ►
and, well, today’s email brought the first installment.
00:01:09 ►
And I have to say that even though I try to keep up with news about this important plant,
00:01:15 ►
Mona’s newsletter this morning has already shed some new light on this topic for me.
00:01:19 ►
But rather than you listening to me go on about Mona’s wonderful contribution to our community,
00:01:24 ►
I’m just going to step out of the way now and turn things over to Lex Pelger.
00:01:34 ►
For today’s take on the cannabis world, we turn to Mona Zhang, who writes the Word on the Tree newsletter.
00:01:40 ►
Of all the cannabis updates out there, Mona’s newsletter is my very favorite.
00:01:46 ►
Today she will be sharing about her views of drugs from Beijing to London to New York,
00:01:50 ►
and then sketching what she sees in the cannabis world right now.
00:01:55 ►
If you have any interest in this old devil’s weed, I’d recommend signing up for Mona’s Word on the Tree newsletter.
00:02:01 ►
Here she is with more.
00:02:03 ►
I’m very pleased to have Mona Jung here. She is the curator of the
00:02:08 ►
very excellent Word on the Tree newsletter about cannabis updates, and she’s here to tell us a
00:02:14 ►
little bit about what she’s been seeing out there in the wild. Hi, Mona. Hi, Alex. Thanks for having
00:02:19 ►
me. No problem. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, and thanks for taking the time to pull
00:02:24 ►
together this newsletter every day. Whenever I see it come in and I see the amount of entries and the amount of stuff going on, it amazes me not only what’s happening with weed in this country, but how much you get to see of it and put it all in one nice handy package.
00:02:39 ►
Thank you. That’s really my goal with the newsletter is to just to give anyone who’s interested in cannabis sort of a daily everything you need to know about it um and so before we get into um the mechanics
00:02:52 ►
the newsletter what about your journey with marijuana how did it start for you that this
00:02:57 ►
plant became such an important topic in your life um well i first smoked weed when i was maybe 16 or 17 and i wasn’t you know i wasn’t a
00:03:10 ►
daily consumer at that point it was just something that i did occasionally on the weekends
00:03:15 ►
and um for part of i did part of my high school in china and there was no drinking age there so
00:03:23 ►
it was very common for international
00:03:25 ►
school students in high school and sometimes even middle school to go out to bars and clubs.
00:03:30 ►
That was not like a strange thing. So, you know, I was used to going out and drinking and sometimes
00:03:38 ►
smoking weed and sometimes doing other drugs. And that continued into my freshman year of college,
00:03:46 ►
which I did in London. And, you know, the drinking age in London is 18. So I didn’t have a problem
00:03:52 ►
getting into bars and clubs and doing things. And so I moved to New York when I was 20 years old,
00:04:00 ►
I was six months shy of my 21st birthday. And having been used to like being able to go out
00:04:07 ►
and do things, it was kind of a shock to me that all of a sudden I couldn’t even go to a concert,
00:04:13 ►
you know, like I covered music for a time for my school paper. And I would have a press pass and I
00:04:19 ►
would be on the guest list to go cover a concert and they wouldn’t let me in because of the drinking age.
00:04:31 ►
And I feel like it was really at that time that cannabis became a much bigger part of my life because I just kind of gave up on trying to go out and decided like, you know what,
00:04:37 ►
this isn’t worth it. I’d rather just stay home and smoke weed. Um, so I, that was really like,
00:04:48 ►
Um, so I, that was really like, at that point, I became a daily cannabis consumer.
00:04:56 ►
I found that it really helped me in a lot of ways because as you know, you know, alcohol is,
00:05:01 ►
has a lot more harms associated with it and, you know, causes really bad hangovers.
00:05:07 ►
And, and it helped me like using cannabis as a reward really helped me get a lot of work done in school too, because I’m not the kind of person who can smoke
00:05:12 ►
weed and write. I’m not the kind of person who smokes weed and does work. I’m the kind of consumer
00:05:17 ►
who is motivated. Like I want to smoke weed. So I want to get my work done so that I can reward myself with a joint, you know.
00:05:26 ►
So I use it a lot in school to motivate me to get homework done.
00:05:31 ►
And and also just use it more as a recreational substance on the weekends instead of going out and drinking.
00:05:40 ►
And once I became 21 and I was able to go out and drink, I realized that I really preferred cannabis.
00:05:47 ►
And so that’s really kind of how it started.
00:05:51 ►
And yeah, like it became something I cared a lot about once I learned more about it.
00:05:58 ►
And once I learned about the history of prohibition and the social justice issues surrounding the plant.
00:06:06 ►
That makes sense. And to talk about the motivation of how it differently affects people
00:06:12 ►
is really interesting, since I’m sure you get to see a lot of that. What was it like
00:06:17 ►
to see the motivations behind weed smoking and drug taking in China versus England versus the United States.
00:06:28 ►
Yeah, it was weird because I was, you know, when you’re in high school in Beijing, and I don’t know
00:06:34 ►
how much this has changed. It’s been a while. But I would, you know, I would go out to bars,
00:06:40 ►
and my friends’ parents would be there and they would buy us drinks, you know, or sometimes we
00:06:46 ►
would go out and we would see our high school teachers out at a bar or a club and you would
00:06:50 ►
chat with your, you know, high school teacher. Like it was totally a normalized thing. Not that
00:06:56 ►
people didn’t abuse alcohol. I mean, there was still plenty of binge drinking happening.
00:07:02 ►
And drug use too, I think is a bigger thing in China than people think,
00:07:08 ►
because there are very strict drug laws in the country. But at least when I lived there,
00:07:13 ►
there were a lot of really cool there, you know, there was a rave scene, there was,
00:07:18 ►
you know, a lot of harder drugs available. I think that they really cracked down before the Olympics and,
00:07:27 ►
and that whole scene probably has changed a lot since I moved away. But I mean, I still know
00:07:36 ►
plenty of people who expats who live in China who consume illicit drugs and that culture is still alive and well there.
00:07:47 ►
And in the UK too, in Europe in general, I feel like they’re, you know, going out,
00:07:55 ►
depending on the places, it can be a more drug driven party versus an alcohol driven party. You know, I find that,
00:08:06 ►
you know, this is generalizing, but I find that the places that I went to in London and in Europe
00:08:15 ►
in general, if it wasn’t more of a drug fueled party, people tend to be nicer. People tend to
00:08:23 ►
be less aggressive. People tend to say, excuse me,
00:08:26 ►
when they’re trying to get through the dance floor. Whereas in the States, I found that it
00:08:33 ►
is a lot more alcohol driven and there’s a lot more aggression and there’s a lot more pushing
00:08:37 ►
to get through the dance floor. And there’s a lot of drink spilling. And it’s just,
00:08:43 ►
I don’t know, it’s kind of weird to see how like depending on the prevalent drug of a gathering, how that influences people and influences the whole atmosphere of the party.
00:08:57 ►
Yeah, it’s true.
00:08:58 ►
It kind of makes the biggest sci-fi thing I’d like to see is Google Gadget Google gadget pop-up where it puts your favorite drug next to your head or
00:09:07 ►
favorite drugs.
00:09:08 ►
And then at the party you can find your people and you can finally realize why
00:09:12 ►
when you’re on acid,
00:09:13 ►
you just can’t seem to make good conversation with this person on meth.
00:09:17 ►
Something’s not working with this little pop-up.
00:09:19 ►
You can find out why.
00:09:21 ►
Yeah,
00:09:21 ►
absolutely.
00:09:22 ►
Huh?
00:09:23 ►
So an aggressive difference that that makes sense so did that
00:09:26 ►
um how what was it like seeing that and then starting to cover the weed
00:09:31 ►
world more and more and compare and contrast those different ways of imbibing
00:09:35 ►
um well definitely the weed world is pretty chill i would. I mean, the cannabis related events that I’ve been to,
00:09:49 ►
that where people are consuming, even if there is alcohol, I feel that people end up drinking
00:09:55 ►
less alcohol. And it is very, you know, it’s, it’s very nice. And it’s, it’s not so aggressive.
00:10:05 ►
And so I really like that whole world, you know?
00:10:09 ►
And how did you end up coming up with this idea
00:10:14 ►
to do this exhaustive daily cannabis newsletter, Word on the Tree?
00:10:19 ►
Well, it started out as a weekly.
00:10:21 ►
I started it in 2015, and at the time, there wasn’t really
00:10:25 ►
anything like it. Now there’s tons of cannabis newsletters out there. I really like Tom Angel’s
00:10:30 ►
marijuana moment as well. At the time, I just felt that as a consumer, this was something that I
00:10:36 ►
wanted. And I’m an avid email newsletter subscriber. I prefer to get my news through newsletters because I see the value
00:10:48 ►
in having a sort of like, you know, an editorial curation that you don’t necessarily get through
00:10:56 ►
social media. And I really, I wanted that for cannabis news. So I was really inspired by some other general email newsletters
00:11:05 ►
like Quartz’s Daily Brief and Vox Sentences. And I kind of wanted to make a cannabis focused
00:11:11 ►
version of that. So it started out as a weekly and then it turned into a daily. And yeah,
00:11:20 ►
I’m just trying to highlight the best journalism and the best information that’s out there about cannabis in a timely way, but also really with a focus on criminal justice issues, because I feel that that’s the most important issue when it comes to this movement.
00:11:35 ►
Amen.
00:11:37 ►
What were the first issues that started to become clear to you as you started paying attention so much to the news?
00:11:44 ►
What trends were some of the first to emerge as you looked at the whole picture?
00:11:51 ►
Well, first of all, just the amount of cannabis news there is.
00:11:55 ►
You know, I started it as a weekly and really quickly I realized that it was very hard to distill a week’s worth of cannabis news into
00:12:06 ►
like one newsletter, which is one of the reasons why I made it a daily because there’s just I mean,
00:12:13 ►
you see how much stuff there is, there’s so much in every single, every single day that it’s just,
00:12:20 ►
yeah, there’s, there’s just a lot going on. Um, and the other thing is that, you know, again,
00:12:28 ►
I always come back to this as just, I feel that the mainstream media doesn’t pay enough attention.
00:12:35 ►
I mean, there’s a lot of great mainstream coverage about cannabis, but I feel that,
00:12:41 ►
you know, those reporters and those editors aren’t necessarily experts on cannabis and don’t necessarily understand the important issues.
00:12:53 ►
And also, because they don’t have expertise on the subject, they can’t really be critical of their sources.
00:13:08 ►
a lot of, you know, even if it’s just an article about like dabbing as a trend, they might interview someone who makes rosin. And this person is like, yeah, like dabbing is all the rage. Rosin is the
00:13:15 ►
best. And it’s like, okay, you know, if you’re not an expert, then you’re not going to be able
00:13:21 ►
to think critically and be like, okay, maybe rosin isn’t the best. Maybe this guy is like, you know,
00:13:28 ►
obviously he’s biased because he’s a rosin maker, nothing against rosin,
00:13:31 ►
but maybe I should go interview, you know, someone who makes BHO.
00:13:36 ►
And can you, can you explain this, what dabbing is for people?
00:13:40 ►
Cause a lot of people East of Mississippi have never heard of it.
00:13:43 ►
And some of the breakdowns of types of concentrates there are now.
00:13:48 ►
Okay, so concentrates are basically hash.
00:13:53 ►
It’s a concentrated form of cannabis.
00:13:57 ►
And I would liken it to kind of, you know, there’s solvent extractions and non-solvent extractions.
00:14:06 ►
you know, there’s solvent extractions and non-solvent extractions. So solvent extractions use something like, for example, butane is very common to extract the oils in trichomes from the
00:14:15 ►
plant. And trichomes is where all the good stuff is, is where the THC is, where all the cannabinoids
00:14:20 ►
are. And that process is kind of similar to how people extract, say, essential oils for perfume or for, you know, aromatherapy. It’s kind of a similar process and they use similar solvents are unhealthy, which I don’t necessarily agree with. But there
00:14:50 ►
are non-solvent methods of extraction. So rosin, for example, is one of those. And you can make
00:14:57 ►
rosin at home with a hair straightener. It’s basically like you take a cannabis bud, put it in between parchment paper and you squeeze.
00:15:07 ►
You use the hair straightener to squeeze the oil out of it.
00:15:11 ►
And, you know, there are industrial versions of that.
00:15:16 ►
There are resin presses and you can put a lot more in a resin press than you can put in a hair straightener.
00:15:24 ►
But, you know, people people are scared of concentrates,
00:15:28 ►
I think. I think the news make them out to seem scary and it’s like super potent and therefore
00:15:35 ►
somehow more dangerous. But really, I think it’s also just an issue of titration, you know,
00:15:47 ►
uh, an issue of titration, you know, like I take very baby dabs. I don’t get too high from them.
00:15:55 ►
It really isn’t that, you know, I feel that a super baby dab is like the equivalent of smoking like a quarter of a joint or something. Yeah. You can take a huge dab and get too high, but
00:15:59 ►
that’s like, you know, as an individual, you have a responsibility to not do that.
00:16:07 ►
Yeah, amen.
00:16:09 ►
I think it’s the most important part about this whole dabbing craze.
00:16:13 ►
Remember that, you know, this stuff is very old.
00:16:15 ►
When people talk about rosin, it’s like, well, yeah, the Arabs and the Hindus have been doing this method for a thousand years.
00:16:23 ►
It’s brand new in one sense, you know,
00:16:25 ►
because the dabbers are just finding out about it,
00:16:27 ►
but concentrates are very old.
00:16:29 ►
And the best analogy I’ve heard from some older people in the community
00:16:33 ►
is that dabbing in concentrates is like whiskey is to alcohol.
00:16:41 ►
Or any of the liquors, any of the distilled spirits.
00:16:43 ►
This is concentrated weed, and that if you want to use small amounts,
00:16:48 ►
it can be very genteel, like you’re talking about.
00:16:52 ►
But if you want to screw yourself up very badly and be irresponsible,
00:16:56 ►
it’s much easier to do that with liquor than it is with beer.
00:16:59 ►
And it’s a little bit like the dabbing is now.
00:17:01 ►
Now you have high school kids in California just dabbing five grams at a time
00:17:05 ►
to show off how much they can dab.
00:17:08 ►
That’s not going to be a good thing.
00:17:09 ►
And I, personally, I get a lot of flack
00:17:11 ►
because I say that there’s dangers
00:17:12 ►
that will be coming from dabbing
00:17:13 ►
because it’s going to expand
00:17:15 ►
all the moderate harms that we know
00:17:18 ►
can occur from heavy levels of cannabis.
00:17:20 ►
Now people who really want to harm themselves
00:17:22 ►
with any drug, like including cannabis,
00:17:24 ►
with cannabis they can now do it a little bit more.
00:17:27 ►
You’re not going to die, but dabbing five grams a day for 10 years straight probably isn’t great for a number of body systems.
00:17:34 ►
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that analogy.
00:17:36 ►
And I think it’s also important to recognize that some medical patients need huge doses of cannabis and they need a lot of cannabinoids and that’s one way that
00:17:46 ►
they can get that without necessarily consuming such large quantities of plant product you know
00:17:52 ►
people are worried about the health effects of dabbing but others will argue that you know you’re
00:17:59 ►
you’re inhaling a smaller amount of plant material which ends up being healthier in the long run.
00:18:07 ►
Yeah. Amen. I think for a grandma out West with severe back pain, small amounts of dabs are such
00:18:16 ►
a safer way to do it than a bunch of joint hits. And especially what I see the most is for veterans with PTSD, a lot of those people who served are smoking
00:18:27 ►
incredible amounts of pot, amounts that would absolutely knock me out and have knocked me out.
00:18:33 ►
But that’s what it takes for their brains to calm down to normalcy. And it really speaks to the
00:18:38 ►
level of, you don’t know what level of drug is good for anyone. Some people can take huge amounts
00:18:42 ►
of morphine and it barely touches their pain. And for others, it will completely screw up their life. I think it’s the same thing
00:18:47 ►
for dabbing. You can’t know if that’s what level of use is right for somebody else when I see how
00:18:53 ►
much these guys take in. Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. Yeah, it’s complicated stuff.
00:19:00 ►
Now I want to get your, now I want to get the fun part of your bird’s eye view of of
00:19:05 ►
knowing so much about the weed world um so what’s the first question be what’s your general take
00:19:10 ►
on what’s happening at the federal level right now with cannabis i know it’s a lot but what stands
00:19:15 ►
out to you um i am not optimistic about this administration and I feel that in general, the industry is a little too optimistic.
00:19:29 ►
There’s a lot of arguments that, well, the federal government doesn’t have the resources to crack
00:19:36 ►
down. Yeah, I agree with that. They don’t necessarily have the resources to like
00:19:42 ►
raid every dispensary that’s out there in legal states. Um, another
00:19:47 ►
argument is that, uh, you know, this is bringing in too much tax revenue. Like the industry is too
00:19:54 ►
big to jail. As some people will say, the industry is $7 billion. That is like the profits of one
00:20:03 ►
pharma company in one year.
00:20:07 ►
Like in the grand scheme of things, it’s really not that big.
00:20:17 ►
And also similar to that is the argument that it’s bringing in too much tax revenue for states that have legalized it.
00:20:26 ►
And yes, it’s a big source of tax revenue, but states have multibillion dollar budgets and cannabis tax revenue is in the hundreds of millions, you know, and, and so also on the macro level, it’s not that much if you look
00:20:32 ►
at an entire state’s budget. I think that while the federal government does not necessarily have
00:20:40 ►
the resources to do a widespread crackdown on the industry, I think there are a lot of ways
00:20:48 ►
that they could really hurt the industry. So I was at the Vegas Cannabis Summit this last week,
00:20:56 ►
and there was a panel on law and banking and investment, I think. But one of the panelists, Christina Bucola,
00:21:12 ►
who is a good friend of mine as well, she argued that the government will be able to go after cannabis businesses for maybe labor violations or, you know, tax violations. Like they don’t have to
00:21:19 ►
use the CSA to shut down these businesses. Another example of that is Stash Logics. You know,
00:21:27 ►
Stash Logics is a company out of Colorado that makes these carrying cases for cannabis that you
00:21:33 ►
can lock, which the purpose of which is to keep cannabis out of the hands of children, you know,
00:21:39 ►
like something that a responsible consumer would use. Their products got seized by the CPB
00:21:46 ►
and it had a devastating impact on the company. The CEO had to lay off all of his staff, you know,
00:21:53 ►
and this is a product that isn’t outwardly used for pot. The case itself looks like something you
00:22:00 ►
might put your lunch in, you know, and there’s no like pot leaves in the logo.
00:22:05 ►
The CEO was baffled.
00:22:07 ►
He was like, I thought with all the bongs and like bowls that are coming in, I thought
00:22:12 ►
I’d be fine.
00:22:12 ►
But, you know, there are other ways that I mean, this is as innocuous of an ancillary
00:22:18 ►
product as you can get not plant touching or anything, but they were still able to just
00:22:24 ►
destroy the company.
00:22:25 ►
So there are a lot of ways that the federal government can crack down that are not necessarily
00:22:31 ►
directly related to the CSA or directly using the CSA. And I think that we’re going to see…
00:22:39 ►
CSA? Can you just let people know what that is? The Controlled Substances Act, which is the…
00:22:48 ►
So marijuana is a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act,
00:22:53 ►
which, by definition, it has no medical use and high potential for abuse,
00:22:59 ►
along with heroin and various psychedelics.
00:23:05 ►
So, yeah, I’m not optimistic about the federal government.
00:23:10 ►
And I really hope that people don’t become complacent and think like,
00:23:16 ►
oh, well, the federal government doesn’t have the resources to crack down.
00:23:20 ►
At the end of the day, you know, it’s still federally illegal.
00:23:23 ►
And I think they could still do a lot of damage to the industry. And I think they could set the movement back, you know, by a long time.
00:23:43 ►
it’s so much fun for cops to go and bust pothead growers.
00:23:45 ►
And there’s plenty of cops to do that.
00:23:50 ►
Operation Delta 9 under Reagan, A4,
00:23:53 ►
they only arrested like 150 growers,
00:23:56 ►
but they dropped boots on all 50 states and put a quarter million plants in the incinerator.
00:23:59 ►
And there’s no reason that can’t happen again.
00:24:02 ►
And you’re right.
00:24:03 ►
And you don’t need to burn
00:24:05 ►
plants you send a letter to a dispensary uh owner’s landlord and that’s all it takes the
00:24:11 ►
the owner of the property says i like this dispensary i’m not going to lose my building
00:24:15 ►
over it and get rid of them that you know no access to banking like you said there’s so many
00:24:20 ►
better tools uh with taxes and labor laws and things like that. When people say this is done and solved, it shows no knowledge of history.
00:24:30 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:24:31 ►
Yeah.
00:24:32 ►
And, yeah, I just think that it’s a little scary to see so many op-eds
00:24:38 ►
arguing that have a more, like, optimistic view.
00:24:43 ►
And it’s like it seems to me that people in the industry who
00:24:47 ►
have been in the industry for a long time, who have suffered from the irrationality of federal
00:24:54 ►
enforcement, those people seem to be a lot more pessimistic than the newcomers to the industry
00:25:00 ►
who are like, this thing is huge and it’s going to keep getting bigger. And it’s like, well, no, you don’t really understand that the federal government has been
00:25:09 ►
and will continue to be very irrational about this.
00:25:14 ►
So that sets the federal level.
00:25:17 ►
One thing I love about your newsletter is how much you cover the states as well.
00:25:21 ►
And you get such a cool vision of all these different states
00:25:24 ►
doing all these
00:25:25 ►
very progressive things and very fucked up things. And it’s just all over the place what the states
00:25:29 ►
are doing. So my first question would be, if you were a medical patient with a severe condition,
00:25:35 ►
what state would you like most to be in if cannabis was your medicine?
00:25:41 ►
Um, this is a hard question to answer because they’re the states as you said are so different
00:25:47 ►
from each other um i think california is really attractive for medical patients just because of
00:25:55 ►
the wide variety of products that are available because it was a gray market for so long there’s
00:26:01 ►
there’s just like any different products you can choose from not to
00:26:06 ►
mention the fact that you know in my opinion northern california probably grows the best
00:26:11 ►
weed in the world you know um wow however and you’ve judged a number of cannabis cups and such
00:26:17 ►
right yes and you say northern california all right yeah that’s good because every place i’ve
00:26:22 ►
ever been says they have the best weed so it’s good to hear it from an independent observer in a city that has shitty weed.
00:26:29 ►
You know, you’re not going to see New York City is winning.
00:26:31 ►
And in fact, did I just hear one of those ice cream trucks in the background?
00:26:37 ►
Yeah, you might have.
00:26:38 ►
Makes me miss the rotten apple for sure.
00:26:43 ►
Yeah. So the best weed is northern california in your
00:26:46 ►
opinion that’s good yeah i will say though for medical patients you know like the california
00:26:53 ►
regulations they’re draft regulations and they haven’t been like implemented yet so i don’t know
00:26:57 ►
how that’s going to play out in the future but oregon is known for having the most stringent testing regulations.
00:27:19 ►
So there were there was I think a few months ago, anything that could be really harmful to someone who’s sick.
00:27:37 ►
So Oregon, known for their testing regulations.
00:27:41 ►
And I think Colorado, too, has some pretty good testing regulations in place.
00:27:47 ►
California, you know, the stringent testing regulations is always something that’s going
00:27:53 ►
to get industry pushback. So we’ll see how the regulations play out in California. But that’s
00:27:58 ►
definitely something to keep in mind if you’re a medical patient. That makes sense. Testing does seem to be one of the hardest things for politicians to grapple with.
00:28:08 ►
If you’re growing your own,
00:28:10 ►
you probably shouldn’t have to test.
00:28:11 ►
If you’re selling recreational,
00:28:12 ►
maybe you test a little bit.
00:28:13 ►
But if you’re selling medical,
00:28:15 ►
and the scary part about testing
00:28:17 ►
seems to be that it’s one thing to test
00:28:20 ►
for mold and fungal contamination,
00:28:24 ►
but to test for the heavy metals and the pesticides,
00:28:27 ►
you need a huge array of tests. And I don’t think it’s quite possible to test for everything
00:28:32 ►
people could be using. And it’s one of the dirty secrets. It’s more about trusting your grower
00:28:38 ►
than it is trusting tests that, you know, by their nature are incomplete.
00:28:42 ►
Right. Yeah. It’s definitely impossible to test for all the pesticides. And, and the other problem is that we just don’t have the science on it because
00:28:50 ►
there hasn’t been a lot of studies on a lot of these pesticides and, and what happens when you
00:28:58 ►
burn them or inhale them. I mean, a lot of these pesticides are safer food, but like,
00:29:04 ►
you know, smoking is a completely different thing.
00:29:08 ►
To continue on the state run in the smoking, what about if you were a hardcore recreational dabber or oiler, as they’re called?
00:29:16 ►
Where would you want to be? What state would be your favorite?
00:29:21 ►
Probably California, again.
00:29:24 ►
It does feel like this epicenter yeah in terms of quality it really
00:29:28 ►
feels like the epicenter and i went i went to uh an extraction lab in california the last time
00:29:37 ►
in northern california the last time i was there for a cup and um and the people who are working at the lab, like someone I was with at the time,
00:29:49 ►
he was like praising them for how great their oil was like, Hey, like, this is so like,
00:29:55 ►
these constitutes are so good. And, um, the extraction person was like, look, it’s,
00:30:02 ►
it’s really not about me. It’s about how good the
00:30:06 ►
source material is. Like we start out using really good flour. And if you just like do everything
00:30:12 ►
right, like it really isn’t me. It’s the source material that’s really good. And that’s why
00:30:17 ►
the oil is really good. So I think, you know, California having the best flour,
00:30:22 ►
it’s definitely not good from a business perspective. Like if
00:30:26 ►
you’re an extractor, the regulations are kind of a nightmare. But I think for the consumer,
00:30:33 ►
it’s probably the best place to be. All right, cool. And this one I’ve been most curious about.
00:30:41 ►
So as a journalist covering the weed world ad nauseum,
00:30:46 ►
which state would you go to where it’s the most fucked up regulations
00:30:51 ►
and laws and political shenanigans going on,
00:30:53 ►
where you just want to sit back as a weed journalist
00:30:56 ►
with a bag of popcorn and watch it all happen?
00:31:01 ►
I think I have to answer California again on this.
00:31:10 ►
Um, I think I have to answer California again on this. It’s really like, I’m not a lawyer or a legal expert. But the lawyers that I’ve talked to about the regulations in California all have the
00:31:16 ►
same reaction, which is, oh, my God, this is really fucked up. You know, and it’s just i mean the whole issue of it producing so much cannabis and like travel
00:31:28 ►
like most of it gets trafficked out of state and now it’s trying to make the gray market into a
00:31:35 ►
legal market and then there’s their state regulations and then there’s you know city
00:31:41 ►
level regulations and it’s just i mean it’s a total like crazy situation over there.
00:31:49 ►
California again, huh? Yeah. Oh man. Um, another part that you, that you cover,
00:31:57 ►
um, that interesting. What about the, any, are there any tech products lately with new ways of
00:32:02 ►
smoking or, or things in, things uh ancillary products for
00:32:06 ►
patients or for recreational users that have caught your eye um well the vaping world is
00:32:14 ►
really interesting um i think that and i hear this from i’m i’m not like a huge dabber
00:32:22 ►
my boyfriend is a huge dabber and like boyfriend is a huge dabber. And like, you know,
00:32:26 ►
a lot of his friends are like the daily dabbers. And it sounds like to me that there can be a lot
00:32:36 ►
of innovation with with things like emails, because a lot of the dabbing connoisseurs that I know,
00:32:45 ►
they’re still using torches.
00:32:47 ►
And because like e-nails are like super expensive and don’t work that well
00:32:52 ►
and the temperature isn’t really precise and that sort of thing.
00:32:56 ►
So I feel –
00:32:57 ►
Can you explain the difference of the heating systems,
00:33:00 ►
the e-nails versus the torches versus the other stuff?
00:33:03 ►
Yeah.
00:33:03 ►
So, you know, so for dabbing, you need a rig.
00:33:08 ►
And on the rig is like a nail.
00:33:10 ►
And this can be made out of titanium or quartz.
00:33:14 ►
And so people will use a blowtorch to heat up a nail.
00:33:19 ►
And then, you know, usually you heat it up to very hot and then like let it cool down depending on how hot you want your dab.
00:33:28 ►
And then put the concentrate on the nail and inhale similarly like how you would take a hit from a bong.
00:33:36 ►
And then an e-nail is something that you plug into a wall and it heats up the nail without you having to use a blowtorch.
00:33:47 ►
So, yeah, those are the main things that are out there. And of course there, then there are vape pens, which you,
00:33:53 ►
you know, there’s like, there’s so many different kinds of vape pens, but, you know, Puffco, I know
00:33:58 ►
had one product that really sought to replicate the experience of dabbing from a rig.
00:34:06 ►
Like it had the concentrate,
00:34:08 ►
you have the concentrate on like a thing and it doesn’t touch any of the
00:34:13 ►
heating elements. So yeah, there’s,
00:34:17 ►
there’s a lot of innovation I think going on in that area.
00:34:21 ►
But I don’t think anyone has really done that great of a job of solving that issue.
00:34:28 ►
It’s a tough one. Yeah. So the last question I wanted to ask was, if there are any articles
00:34:37 ►
that you’re working on now, or any pieces you got to see through writing this newsletter lately,
00:34:42 ►
that have just cracked you up, or just made you happy that you get to cover this crazy cannabis world? Yeah, one article that I published recently,
00:34:54 ►
I co-published it with Freedom Leaf, and it’s on wordonthetree.com, is an article about a campaign in New York to legalize cannabis through the Constitutional
00:35:08 ►
Convention. So, I mean, one of the reasons why legalization has kind of lagged on the East Coast
00:35:14 ►
is that there are fewer avenues for direct democracy. You know, on the West Coast, it was
00:35:20 ►
all voter driven. There hasn’t yet been a state that has legalized recreational marijuana through the legislature.
00:35:28 ►
So, you know, like in New York, we don’t we don’t have an avenue to have that kind of voter driven ballot initiative.
00:35:37 ►
But there is this thing called the Constitutional Convention.
00:35:47 ►
Convention. And every year, basically, voters can vote to have, I mean, not every year, sorry,
00:35:53 ►
every 20 years, voters can decide whether they want to convene a Constitutional Convention. And if they decide to convene a Constitutional Convention, then all these issues are up for
00:36:02 ►
debate, because basically, it’s a chance to rewrite the Constitution.
00:36:06 ►
So there is a campaign to legalize, that is like pro-con-con, as it’s also known, to legalize marijuana through it.
00:36:16 ►
And it was really fun for me as a journalist to cover this story because it really turned into a much bigger story
00:36:26 ►
than I was anticipating. And I don’t know if you’ve experienced this as a writer, but like,
00:36:33 ►
you know, you start looking into something and then all these other things come up and you’re
00:36:37 ►
like, whoa, what’s going on? I have to look at all these other issues, you know? And one of the
00:36:42 ►
issues with that story was that the leader of the campaign,
00:36:46 ►
the guy who started the PAC, he was previously convicted of fraud and larceny and his role
00:36:54 ►
with two other PACs he started during the 2000 election. And so it was, it just like, you know,
00:37:01 ►
I started writing the story like, oh, I’m going to cover this like campaign about weed legalization.
00:37:06 ►
And then it turned into like this whole other thing about like campaign finance law.
00:37:11 ►
And I tried not to get too much into that in the piece, but it it was a really fun story for me to dig into.
00:37:18 ►
And I’m really interested in in New York, you know, because I think that if and when we have federal legalization or, you know,
00:37:25 ►
even state level legalization in New York, it’s going to be really huge.
00:37:30 ►
Well, I just want to say thank you so much for sharing today this eagle eye view of the
00:37:35 ►
cannabis world. Thanks for having me, Lex. It was fun talking.
00:37:39 ►
Cool. Always a pleasure. So the newsletter is A Word on the Tree. I believe it’s the best
00:37:44 ►
cannabis newsletter
00:37:45 ►
out there. And Mona, thank you so much for taking the time to talk. Thanks for having me.