Episode Transcript

Video Transcripts

Trevor: Kirk we are back

Kirk: Hey, Trevor. How's it going? Long time no see. Happy Canada Day!

Trevor: Happy Canada Day, we're recording this on Canada Day because we have time off, we're gonna record a couple of things on Canada day. Whenever you hear this in the future, Canada still exists and it's not the 51st State.

Kirk: So far, elbows up.

Trevor: We have a lovely young researcher from Florida putting the old people on drugs.

Kirk: Old people. No, no, no. I found this story in NORML. I get NORML push to me and I found the story in NORML. It's a study. Cannabis use associated with reduced anxiety, improved sleep quality in older adults. This is very timely. In the last several months, we have been finding stories about older people using cannabis. And one of the statistics that I find interesting that NORML quoted, and this goes back to November 21st, 2024, a NORML push One out of Four older adults have used cannabis in the past year. That's a Canadian statistic. An estimated 25% of older adults between the ages of 55 and 65 acknowledge having consumed cannabis in the past year. This is according to data from the Journal of Drug Issues. So this study that Madison did is very timely.

Trevor: It is. And on the lighter side, I don't know, it just keeps smacking me in the face. You know, remember the whole don't trust anybody over 30. I am disconcerted that 55 is now elderly. I just I'm not going to give away my age. But you know, that is making me more and more nervous. But anyway, I know and and yes, we have just for people we talked on the podcast away from podcast, older people, not surprisingly, have more medical conditions. And so not surprisingly are interested in using cannabis for those medical conditions and again sort of one of the triads we talked about often but we'll talk about again so sleep anxiety so also sleep anxiety depression will roll them together and pain are sort of the big three things that many people are interested in seeing if cannabis will make better for them.

Kirk: Yeah, so this is the title of her paper. Now the paper was actually written in 2022 as part of her master's program and it's called The Daily Impact of Medical Cannabis on Anxiety, Sleep Quality, and Older Adults. This is from the Department of Psychology from the University of Central Florida. She is now a PhD student. She'll explain that in the interview. Basically what happened is one of her mentors, one of her advisors found some funding. And they went out to study medical cannabis use in older adults. And it's funny that you talk about 55. Well, I'm of an age where, well, Paul McCartney asked the question, will you still love me? Will you still need me? And the answer is yes, apparently the answer is yes.

Trevor: 64! 64! You're officially old in that song.

Kirk: Well, I was going to let people figure that out themselves. But yes, the answer is yes. So, so this study this study that she's done here, it kind of matches E83. When we caught up with another student who wrote a paper called our Cardiovascular Effects Worth the High. He was also a student, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. So this is another student that wrote a paper that we captured. I find it very interesting papers anything you want to talk about before we get into it?

Trevor: well you mentioned something interesting before we start recording that I think is offhand, but I think it's interesting to mention this team is not, we'll say they're not, Cannabis experts is not exactly what I'm looking for, but these they're not going heavy duty into the how all the receptors are triggered by this that and the other thing and this terpene and that and that's not just not just okay but good and we'll talk about that more on the way out.

Kirk: Yeah, that's a very good point. As I talked to Madison, Madison Maynard, I got the impression that her team, they're not cannabis-centric researchers, but they did stumble on this question. Older adults are using cannabis and how does that affect their psychology? So yeah, but in their study, they discovered that people actually do get benefits from cannabis. So once again, cannabis surfaces as a positive thing opposed to a negative thing. So let's get into it and let's listen to Madison and talk about her paper. So let start by introducing yourself.

Madison Maynard: Okay, so my name is Madison Maynard. I'm a fifth year clinical psych PhD student at the university at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. So four years of undergrad, fifth year means I have, I'm about to start my fifth year enrolled in the PhD program. So the PhD Program that we have here runs for about six years on average. My question's about medical cannabis use in older adults.

Kirk: Perfect. So this leads us right into this article. So this, where does this article come into play in your studies?

Madison Maynard: Yes. So this article was actually based on my master's thesis, and it was part of a broader project done by myself and my two advisors. So I'm co-mentored by two faculty members at UCF, Dr. Rob Dvorak and Dr. Daniel Paulson. And one of them focused in the past mainly on health risk behaviors and substance use, that's Rob. And then Daniel's research has been mostly on of Gero psychology and Cognitive Assessment. And so together the three of us have kind of started diving into this world of medical cannabis use among older adults, which that research is sort of evolving and we kind of wanted to get involved. So here we are.

Kirk: The department in which you're doing is doing your dissertation. Which department? Education or?

Madison Maynard: Clinical Psychology.

Kirk: Okay, clinical psychology. And is there other people doing research on cannabis as well within the department?

Madison Maynard: Um, a little bit. Yes. Most of that is with, um, undergraduate students though. So we're kind of the people who do the medical cannabis use and specifically focused on older populations.

Kirk: Okay, fantastic. So let's explain the research that you did then. You found participants and you sent them questionnaires and asked them stuff. Can you explain how it all happened, the methodology, and I guess how you found your sample too.

Madison Maynard: So we did the study in 2022. And I'll kind of start at the beginning to explain the whole process. So Dr. Dvorak was the PI on the data collection. He received grant funding from the Consortium for Medical Marijuana Clinical Outcomes Research to broadly investigate medical cannabis use among older adults at the daily level. So not so much cross-sectional, just like one time point and like longitudinal over a long period of time, but we looked at during a period of two weeks for these participants, how do your symptoms change like every day? So the primary aims of the overall grant were to investigate symptom trajectories throughout the day, both before and after medical cannabis use and how these symptom trajectories might lead to the development of substance use disorder symptoms and what role cannabis use motives might play in all of this, right? So either I'm using medical cannabis for my pain or I'm use it for my PTSD, like for example, a couple of examples.

Kirk: So how did you find them?

Madison Maynard: So we recruited participants from social media so we just put advertisements on i think it was Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and said "hey are you above 55 and do you use medical cannabis you could qualify for a study where you could earn up to $100."

Kirk: Cool. Okay, so these are all people that were experienced cannabis users as medicinal cannabis users and then you wanted to find out how it affects their sleep, how it effects their moods.

Madison Maynard:  So sort of all of it. So the broader research program looked at nausea and pain, some more of those somatic symptoms, as well as mood, PTSD, depression, anxiety symptoms. The paper that we're talking about today is a little bit zoomed in on all of that. And this one investigated how cannabis use in the moment affected their subsequent pain, depression anxiety and sleep quality.

Kirk: Okay, so how did you evaluate that? You must have given them an objective tool that then they answer.

Madison Maynard: Yeah, so we gave them some validated measures of both anxiety and depression in the moment. So kind of each anxiety and oppression were composed of three different subscales and they're all on like Likert rating scales. So actually this one was scale of like zero to 10 for a lot of them, I think like how intense are you feeling these symptoms? Either I'm feeling down, depressed, blue, and then I'm Feeling anxious, nervous, those kind of things. We use the 10-point pain scale as well, the visual analog scale. So rate your pain on a scale from one to 10. And then sleep quality was a little more complicated. So one of the really well-validated measures for self-reported sleep quality that's been used a lot throughout psychology is called the PSQI. And that asks about sleep over the past month. So we adapted that to ask people about their sleep quality the previous night. And so it calculates both how much time they spend in bed versus time they were actually asleep, and how subjectively they feel that their sleep quality was basically.

Kirk: Okay, so you have them, I said it was two weeks, you said, you analyzed them every day for two weeks. Experienced cannabis users. So you gave them a questionnaire before they went to bed.

Madison Maynard: So, we used a protocol called ecological momentary assessment. And so what we did is once we enrolled participants, they were signed up on our texting system. It's called the Insight platform. And they would receive just text messages to their phone with a little link to a survey about six times a day. So it was in semi random intervals. So it could the first one could come between like 8am and 930am, but it'll be kind of random within that. So they would get that survey. They would ask first the question, have you used any medical cannabis since the last prompt? They were asked, what did you use? They were asked about intoxication, and then they were asked to rate all of these symptoms at that moment, like how much are you feeling this thing right now? And then every morning they got that one additional question, which was about sleep quality. So the questions were pretty much the same. Some of them would differ, obviously, if they endorsed medical cannabis use, then we'd ask a little more detail about what did use. Um, but they would rate the same symptoms and it was the time window that they got surveys was from like 8 a.m. Local time to I think it was 9 pm or so. So more like every two hours. So we had 106 participants in total, yes, across the U.S. Yeah. Um, we did limit it to people who were in states in which either, because medical cannabis is still illegal at the, or yeah, at the federal level in the U S.

Kirk: Right.

Madison Maynard: We committed it to states that either have recreational legality or somebody would have to prove like, yeah, I have my medical cannabis card just to avoid like getting people potentially in trouble asking them to report things that they're technically aren't legally using.

Kirk: Yeah, that's a good question. So how difficult is it to do ethically approved academic study on cannabis in Florida? And like, is it a difficult process, especially if you're going nationwide?

Madison Maynard: Yeah. So I think it depends. Obviously, we run everything through our institutional review board, so they're the overseers that check and make sure that we're following research ethics. I believe a lot of the problems with studying medical cannabis in the US involve doing things that are more along the lines of randomized controlled trials, where you would be administering cannabis to your participants. That would probably be a lot trickier to get approved. Than one that runs the way that we do it, which is where we make sure they're using according to their local laws, and we kind of maximize this ecological validity. So we can't administer cannabis and that kind of thing, but we can ask, what are you already using? And really kind of maximized how much that would generalize to people's day-to-day lives. What are you actually doing rather than us just giving a set amount of product to on.

Kirk: Right on. I want to get into the results, obviously, because it's the results that I think are meaningful. But I just want to set up the visual. So you've got your participants, you've got your ethical study, you created your tools. Explain to me what you mean by subjective intoxication. That terminology is used in your literature. So what does that mean, subjective intoxications?

Madison Maynard: So this was a fun question because when we were enrolling participants, we'd meet with them on Zoom like you and I are doing now. And we'd get their informed consent for the study and we'd point this question out to them. And most people kind of giggled a little bit. And I think that's fair because the question is just simply, how high are you right now on a scale of one to 10? And we gave some little qualitative markers for that. So like a zero is not high at all. And then it goes up to 10, which is the highest I've ever been. So that subjective intoxication piece just gets at that. How intoxicated do you feel? What are the extent of the psychoactive effects you're having of cannabis use right now?

Kirk: That was a good, no good answer.

Madison Maynard: I was going to say I could talk a little bit about why we picked that because I know that's a little of an unusual choice.

Kirk: No, please. Yeah, explain that. Yeah. Why did you choose that terminology?

Madison Maynard: Yeah. So we picked subjective intoxication as opposed to asking people, because we did ask questions about what product are you using? What's the concentration of THC and CBD? What route of administration did you use? What we found was that there was a whole lot of variance in that. So people were using vastly different types of products, different routes of administration. We tried to kind of make this into one cohesive variable that made some sense and could be compared across individuals. But one of the problems we had is that the way we collected that data and the way people were reporting it, they could kind of just enter whatever they wanted. And we got a whole lot of people saying, I don't really know what I'm using, or just kind of not being able to exactly pin down. But the one thing that was pretty consistent across everybody is we asked that subjective intoxication and it was just that scale of zero to 10. Kind of no matter what they were using, everybody had some rating for that.

Kirk: Okay, so was that part of those six tools that you sent daily? That if they said the... Okay, and obviously to sharpen the tool that well, you must have sent out other preliminary questions before you did your actual study.

Madison Maynard: So we did have a screener survey at first, basically, which anybody who saw ads could fill that out. If they confirm that they're using legally and all that, then they were able to finish the rest of the survey. And we really only recruited the people who like for enrollment in phase two, which was our daily protocol, people who were using at least three times a week, people who are over 55 and were endorsing like a qualifying medical condition, which varies widely in the U.S. by state. But we do have another paper coming out soon, hopefully, using some of that screener data with that broader range of people endorsing a broader range of symptoms and products and everything. But the product types and all the information about exactly what people are using, we haven't really made sense of what to do with that data and might kind of be just taking this as a learning experience for next time we do another study because this was our first one. Maybe some better ways to measure that in the future.

Kirk: If you ever come up with an answer, I think that will be it because that's that's one of the biggest difficulties with cannabis is medicine is the varietals, how they help people eat it use it. So saying self intoxication is interesting. However, I want to challenge that because if someone's using medicine, cannabis is medicine, the goal is not always intoxication.

Madison Maynard: And I agree with you. You're right.

Kirk: So did you come out of your study? Were you able to Again, we'll get to the research of it because I'm very curious to talk about what the results were. But were you able to separate those people that did have identified self-intoxicated and those that didn't and how the cannabis worked for them?

Madison Maynard: So again, because it was all kind of on this scale from zero to 10, the only thing we looked at in this study was subjective intoxication. So the people who were endorsing zero, essentially in our interpretation of data were kind of like less cannabis use. But I totally hear what you're saying. And I agree that this is like a thing that we should be looking at. If people are just using CBD, for example, and they're not getting intoxicated at all, how's that affecting their symptoms. So that was one of the things that we acknowledge as one of the biggest limitations of this paper is it's really only looking at cannabis to the extent that it's providing intoxicating effects. I did find one other study that's done that in the past from a research group at the University of New Mexico, I believe. The main author was Sarah Stiff. And so they had used this before too, and they found some interesting results, which was that subjective intoxication does seem to be predicting symptom relief. Kind of over and above that of like the THC, the CBD, whatever it is. So it's one hypothesis that maybe it's the intoxication piece that is providing some symptom relief, but it's kind of a question that is still left unanswered, still need some more investigation.

Kirk: Oh gosh, yes, you answer that question, you'll be on to something. The current study demonstrates momentary levels of improvement in anxiety and depression after cannabis use. So let's get into your results.

Madison Maynard: So in this study, we found that at the daily level, when somebody uses cannabis, and particularly when somebody experiences subjective intoxication, they during that day, then experience relief in pain. So reductions in pain, reductions in depression, reductions and anxiety. Intoxication did not actually predict sleep quality, which we thought was strange. Independently, the cannabis use didn't seem to be affecting sleep at all. But what we found was that when we kind of put the anxiety variable in the middle of that pathway, so we said, well, hang on, if they were getting relief from anxiety after their cannabis use, then did they sleep better? And the answer was yes. So we found that sleep improved only to the extent that cannabis was improving their anxiety symptoms.

Kirk: How does this apply clinically? Because I will share with you right now, one of the things I'm challenged with in Canada were nationally legal for medical and now recreational, but there is a trend. Medical cannabis, I'm starting to rumor that the government's going to get out of the medical cannabis industry because they've got recreational cannabis everywhere, but we're finding more and more seniors are going to rec shops to buy their cannabis. So what, how do you apply your study into that kind of clinical environment? What would you recommend for clinical practitioners to know about this study.

Madison Maynard: That's a great question. So I don't want to make any broad conclusions saying that our study is the end all be all. This is what medical cannabis does for you.

Kirk: But you do say, you do see in your study, this is a unique study, right? That this note, this was the first of its kind, so.

Madison Maynard: So this is the first one to look at an older population. And I will say that it's limited by the fact that the sample was majority white and female. So generalizability, we just wanna keep that in mind. It was the first to look at momentary changes among older adults. And in the sample it was 55 plus in their symptoms of these things after medical cannabis. So my interpretation of this is that in the moment, older adults are probably experiencing medical cannabis as a positive and helpful thing for the symptoms they're coming in with. The thing that we would then caution clinically though, we can't really draw any conclusions about long-term reliance on cannabis use, problems related to use, becoming more dependent maybe. So from a mental health perspective, we do want to caution that it's improving symptoms in the moment. We want practitioners to know, maybe they're getting that momentary reinforcement. Over time though, we do wanna make sure we're monitoring for development of more anxiety symptoms, worse anxiety or depressive disorders, because we can't make any conclusions about that from this study.

Kirk: Okay. When you were getting your sample group, was there questions about how long those individuals were using cannabis? So do you have people that just started it last week? Do you have people that have been on it 20 years?

Madison Maynard: I know we didn't include that one in this analysis, and I don't remember the exact... I don't think we had any requirements for that. Sorry, this, again, this was done in 2022, so I'm thinking back to my recruitment interviews. I believe these were all established users though. We didn't have anybody who was like just starting.

Kirk: All right. So this is a study you did several years ago. I mean, I just found it. So it's just published though, wasn't it? So-.

Madison Maynard: Yes.

Kirk: Okay. So where have you taken your career since this paper? Cause this is, there's some rich stuff in this paper. There's some important stuff in here. So where've you taken you studies from here?

Madison Maynard: Yeah. So my advisors and I are currently in the process of finalizing a couple of papers from this study. We've got another one that's been published in a psychiatry research out of this study, and we have used some of these to apply for some more grant funding to kind of do a similar analysis again, but now we're looking more towards a couple of different things. So one, how do our preexisting neurocognitive symptoms, because we know the rates of cognitive change as we get older increase. So how might pre-existing cognitive problems predict how effective medical cannabis is in helping us with our anxiety, depression, those kind of things? And then if people are experiencing more cannabis use problems or Cannabis disorder symptoms, as we would call them in the psychology world, how can we help kind of mitigate some of those potential problems people might run into. Basically, promoting safe use among people who are using cannabis for medical reasons.

Kirk: And this sample that you have for this paper, are you still following that group, that cohort?

Madison Maynard: We are not, no. So they've been, they enrolled for their two weeks and then got their payment and we kind of finished there.

Kirk: Okay. So, but you don't have access to them. You could not call them up and then do a comparative, see if they're still using cannabis as medicine.

Madison Maynard: So that would be something that would probably have to run through the IRB first. It's not impossible because the information is somewhere locked in some data.

Kirk: Data Banks.

Madison Maynard: Thank you. So it wouldn't be impossible to contact them again, but we haven't planned to do anything like that so far.

Kirk: You say the present study demonstrates that intoxication correlates with psychiatric symptoms release. So you explained that to me earlier. So people who were feeling more self-intoxicated had more symptoms. That makes sense. Is there any question I didn't ask you about this research? Is there anything you want the audience to know about your research?

Madison Maynard: I think we really covered all the main points I wanted to get to, but I guess the only cautionary thing which I've kind of been getting at here is we do want to just know that even though we're having these momentary reliefs and symptoms, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're saying medical cannabis is the cure for all of these things. And I guess, the other thing we didn't really talk about is how expectancies might play a role in all of this. So

Kirk: So go on and explain that further then.

Madison Maynard: So if people are anticipating that cannabis is going to relieve these symptoms, it's sort of like the placebo effect. Maybe they will report some relief because they think it's going to help. So we can't rule that out either.

Kirk: I found the paper interesting and I think it's a timely paper even though it was written three years ago. It's very timely right now because in Canada, in Canada the elderly population 55 plus they are fast forming the biggest demographic in the sense of interested in cannabis as medicine. So that's and I just written a blog piece on just this so when I found your paper I went I want to talk to her. So thank you for this. I guess.

Trevor: So Kirk, before I went in, I didn't mean to offend Madison or anyone on our team by saying they're not cannabis experts, but we are, especially me, have been talking to people lately who are really into the, you know, how the CB1 receptor is affected by this and, you know, and which terpene and bioflavonoid did that? Like, you the nuts and bolts, nitty gritty, pharmacology of the whole plant, which is, I'm not saying it's not, I think it's very interesting, but sometimes, especially me, I have to take a step back and go, but how does that affect the person? And the much more interesting question here is, regardless of what receptor was hit, how does this affect the person, how does it affect the older person that they talk to on Zoom? And what did you think about what they found?

Kirk: Yeah, this is a qualitative study, right? This is a weaker study. It's not a strong scientific study, it's a psych study. It's about person's reactions to using cannabis. 106 participants, They have over, what, 4,000 data points. Uh there's some good information in this and it really talks about the person's feelings and essentially what they're feeling here and these are experienced cannabis users these are people that got a hundred dollars for for their two-week input they were sent a Likert scale how do you feel now i got a real kick out of the whole concept of a subjective intoxication

Trevor: And she did, I thought she explained that well, I had no idea what a subjective intoxication was, so that was, in my mind it was because the thing I use once in a while in my practice is the visual analog scale for pain, like zero I feel no pain at all, ten it's the worst pain ever, so this was, I think it was zero, I am not high at all to ten, holy crap, I've never been so high, so I had no idea such a thing existed, so, that was neat.

Kirk: And I did challenge her on it because presumably a lot of people we talk to when using medical cannabis, you're not the goal is not to get high. The goal is to use the titrate, the THC CBD, this the cannabinoids you're using to titrate it to effect. Right. So, but, but again, how do you measure that? I mean, we've got we've done Strainprint early in our early in podcast, we were supported by Strainprint. Which was a piece of software on your phone that you measured your feeling of cannabis. And they were able to take all that data and quantify it into real information. So that's what they've done. People have subjectively offered information and talking about the pain scale, I think people have heard me talk about back in the eighties, they were trying to push the pain scale as a vital sign. Right? Because in the 80s everyone was told nobody should live with pain, everyone should get their painkillers, no doctor was to prevent, was to deny anybody their analgesics, and that's before we knew all the research that has come out with the pharmaceutical companies and how maybe some of their research was tainted. However, the pain scale only works if it's used over several times. When, when, when as a clinician, when I apply the pain scale, the first, the first time I apply it, that is kind of meaningless because if I come up to someone and say, tell me what your pain is, one out of 10, they can say it's eight, I document eight, that number is meaningless until I ask them the question again. Right? So now the next time I ask them, you know, 20 minutes later after I've done a therapeutic effect, I'm looking for a therapeutic effect, tell me what your pain is now. If I get a pain score of four, then I know that whatever therapeutics I've provided, there has been a positive effect, right? So this is how this has been used. So they're asking them questions. How was the pain before you took the med? How was your anxiety before you the cannabis, how is it afterwards? And if you get enough of that information, you get some solid data and that's what they've got. They put that information together and they've come up with the fact that cannabis... Short term.

Trevor: Yeah, no, and yes, it was good. It was good, and again, just you don't, again, because maybe because I'm a pharmacist, maybe just because of the way my brain works, I always wanna know the why or the biochemical reason for, and... In this, we don't really look at that and that's fine. You know, again, maybe I'm just telling myself a story but it's fine that we didn't explore any of the, exactly what they were, like you mentioned, how did we know exactly what type of cannabis we were taking? Well, we really didn't. How do we know how much THC versus CBD versus CBG? Well, didn't really. But the answer was, if they took cannabis, they got some improvement or at least some results, which is, which is good to know.

Kirk: Well, and that's sort of the difference between the pharmacist and the nurse. I mean, you're looking for hard numbers. You're looking for quantitative quantitative scientific studies that have, you know, that have you know what am I looking for random random.

Trevor: Uh, random control trial,.

Kirk: All of that kind of stuff, right? Where this is humanities. This is qualitative. This is, this is the kind of research I was doing when I was in graduate school. I was during more qualitative, uh, analysts, but I, but being, being the anal retentive guy I am. I also blended some hard numbers into my, my thesis as well, which I went to kind of overboard on, but think that's the difference between you and I and nursing and pharmacy. You're looking for hardcore numbers. Uh because you know this is a medication as a nurse i'm more about how people feel and in this in these studies people feel cannabis is working for them so as a scientist as a pharmacist you might say well that could be the placebo effect and you know you're right it could be sometimes the placebo effect is okay.

Trevor: Back to Madison's studying. So anything else we need to cover? I thought she did a good job explaining it well to us. Anything else you think we need to wrap up with?

Kirk: No, I think that's good. It was very much a timely, it was very timely, I thought, for where we have been in this passion project of ours. We seem to be really, in the last little while, we've been pushed a lot of stories about elderly people. And when I went and did the road stories, I really went to find out about elderly people and people stopping us in the streets. Yep. Older adults are using cannabis more and more. Our podcast is trying to find answers for them. So, listeners, let your older adults know that we have a good episode on cannabis seems to work for people who want to help for pain and help with their anxieties and help with their sleep.

Trevor: And my last blurb, and this is actually the Kirk thing, so I don't know how I got it, I think this is yet another reason why Health Canada, if this is what they're planning on doing, should not merge all medical stuff into the rec market. You know, there should be a separate medical stream for people because if, especially elderly, because that is who I deal with every day. They have, just on average, they have more medical conditions, they're on more medications, there's more going on. The corner pot shop as brilliant as the bud tenders are, that's not the place for them. There should be a medical stream. So don't get rid of the medical stream and this is the part, let's spin this a little positive. Studies like this show it might be really helpful for them if you keep some medical cannabis available for the elderly.

Kirk: Imagine that cannabis helps medicinally. Imagine that. You know what, I've been thinking about this a lot and I guess we're trying to wean out, but I've thinking about this a lot. How could the government make the medical program better accessibility? So, you know, when you think about going back to one of our first podcasts when I went down to when I went down to Arizona, not Arizona, yeah, I went to Arizona. And went to Colorado and their model is that medical cannabis and recreational cannabis is in the same store, you know. So I think if the government wants to get rid of the medical cannabis stream online, fantastic, but don't get rid of the medical cannabis. Stream completely. Allow rec stores to adjust, allow pharmacists to adjust. Maybe there's a pharmacist that works in a rec store on the medical side, but don't get rid of medical cannabis. Don't ignore it. People use it. And the government should know that. And we've written about this in our blog pages. So it's there. So yeah. Yeah. There you go. I'm Kirk Nyquist. I'm the Registered Nurse.

Trevor: I'm Trevor Shewfield, and on this case, I completely agree with Kirks rant. You can find us on ReeferMed.ca, at Reefer Medness on most of them, their socials, and just look up Reefer Medness on whatever podcast app you're on and give us a review and tell everyone we're wonderful. That is a great place, great way for people to find us.

Kirk: Yeah, and on our webpage, I will have the study links and I'll have the NORML links. Madison doesn't know and I think you hear it in the podcast. I don't know if she's going to be able to get us permission to access the paper, but I will I will have the abstract link so people can read the abstract. And if there are clinicians out there that want access to the paper. They'll be able to get it through that way. So we'll have all the research available on our web page. So thanks, Trevor. This was another good one.

Trevor: This was another good one. Talk to everyone later.