Episode Transcript

Trevor: Kirk. We're back. 

Kirk: Hello, Trevor, how are you, man? 

Trevor: As you can see, by the scruff of the side of my face. I've had some time off this week to sure of, hanging out at the lake and try to convince my dog who, he forgets he's old. He's, you know, pushing ten years old and does sleep a lot of the time. But, you know, when we are out at the lake, he's obviously a puppy again and wants to jump over sandbags because they're an obstacle course and find dead frogs and eat them and then gets really annoyed when I kick them away from him anyway. So yeah. And we have a fun interview. 

Kirk: I thought this was great. We interviewed Dr. Guppy back in S2E7, when we did Expo Exposed. He's a true Manitoban this man. 

Trevor: He is. I don't know if it's like every other Manitoban who gets famous, but he, he, he went away and came back and got some education and is back here, we think, doing some cool stuff in the cannabis space. 

Kirk: Well, you know, we talk about cannabis and normalizing it and getting people to realize how cannabis is truly a remarkable plant and not just the drug-of-choice, but he's a man that you definitely want on your side. And, you know, a Ph.D. in biochemistry, medical genetics. He's got a couple of post-doctorate fellowships in international from international centers. Extensive experience. 

Trevor: Austria I believe. 

Kirk: Yeah it talks about that. He's got extensive experience in biochemistry, medical genetics, drug research, development and analytical biochemistry. So, he's been studying disease, drugs, drug manufacturing processes in Canada, Europe. I mean, the guy's got extensive knowledge in the in the medical field and he's focusing his world on cannabis. This is the kind of professional the cannabis industry needs. And when I talk about cannabis industry, I'm talking about the medical cannabis industry. Right? Yeah. This is the kind of this is the kind of brain power cannabis needs. So I'm so happy that we got to interview him again. And, you know, you've been excited about this interview for so long. I'm just going to let you run with it, man. You've got your you know. 

Trevor: Yes, yes. A big grin on my face. And we talked about lots of things and I'll talk about some of them afterwards. But and I know it comes a little late. Sorry, I had so many things to try to ask him. But one of the big things and get a little bit towards the end of the interview to listen for, is a nanoemulsions. Nanoemulsion, really small emulsions, as part of, as a Cannabis 2.0 thing and he'll  get into what Cannabis 2.0 means.  Nanoemulsions I think are going to be, I hope, really important for especially the medical side of things, because we've heard complaints frankly, from medical patients that cannabis oil tastes bad. Now, cannabis oil, there's lots of different ways to get cannabis into you. But, cannabis oil, oral oil is a common way to get cannabis into a patient because it's so easy to change the dose, especially when you're starting out.  Well, you take a little bit. That didn't work. Take a little bit more. Take a little bit more of this too much, take a little bit less, you know, rather than try to split a capsule or something in half. Uh, oil, oral oil is very easy to adjust the dose. To titrate the dose. But there are at least a significant portion of people who really don't like the taste. And something that anybody who's had an edible have experience with is, oral cannabis takes a while to kick in, you know.  And it's a while can vary, you know, 1 to 2 hours, which is, you know, less of an issue than you would think in the medical community because, you know, you're usually dosing, so you have the effect all day long anyway. So, you know, the long acting is nice but you know, an hourish to kick in if let's say you're taking for pain is a long time. Nanoparticles, nanoemulsions, nanoemulsion powders, might really be an important thing I think, for for the medical community or at least another nice tool in the toolbox. Anyway, listen for that and we'll come back at the end and have a have another chat about some of the stuff we talked about. 

Kirk: Sure. Let's hear him. 

Trevor: Welcome back, Dr. Guppy, and tell the audience a little bit about how you got into the cannabis space. 

Dr. Guppy: Sure. Great. Thanks. Thanks for having me much. Appreciate it. Good to talk to you again. Um, yeah, I really the journey into cannabis for me started quite some time ago. I'd say 2006, you could say, would be the start of my journey into cannabis, especially as cannabis as medicine. Really, I had an aunt to mine that was diagnosed with Parkinson's and she had a pretty bad Parkinsonian tremor. And really what we found is that the only thing that would give her any kind of relief was essentially cannabis. So needless to say, I was a believer in medical cannabis for probably longer than that. But really seeing is believing when it comes to that. And it was quite dramatic the therapeutic benefit that she had received by consuming cannabis. Her tremor essentially was still and she was able to function a more normal life than previous. So needless to say, that started kind of my research and my foray into the medical cannabis world; trying to look at all the publications that were that were available then. Unfortunately, back then, pre-legalization, most of the publications speak to the so-called harms of cannabis. And so, they treated cannabis as that the dirty devil's lettuce. But the nice thing is that now post legalization, you're seeing a lot more research being performed and highlighting the true medical benefits of cannabis. So, I was going through my PhD at the time and really wanted to pursue cannabis as a career post legalization. 

Trevor: And your PhD was in. 

Dr. Guppy: Biochemistry and medical genetics. Okay. So, I was working as a post-doc in Austria. I was working in protein engineering, so something completely unrelated to cannabis, but nevertheless drug related so to speak. 

Trevor: Right.

Dr. Guppy: And then legalization of cannabis came and I thought now was my opportunity to come back to Canada and get into the industry. So that's what I did. And here I am now. 

Trevor: And when we first talked to you, I believe you were just talking about testing as in like genetic testing of plants. So how did we go from there to BioScision Pharma, which seemed to be a much bigger deal? 

Dr. Guppy: Definitely, yeah. For sure. No, it's been quite a windy road. Let's say when I first came back, I tried to get in with some of the bigger cannabis producers at the time. I guess they're preoccupied with getting commercialized. So, I decided, hey, I'm going to start my own company. So, I started my own company called Synthase Genetics. This was a biotech company that used the power of genetic analysis to help out cultivators. So, some examples could be male female sex determination. If I am a cannabis cultivator and I'm using regular seeds, 50% of those seeds are males, 50% females. And we all know that it's the females that really count.  And so, it would be much more cost effective if we could identify the male plants at the seedling stage or even using a sample from cotyledon leaves to analyze and determine if they're either males or females and cull all those male plants. Before you have to phenotype them two months down the road, after you've spent all this time, money, labor taking care of a vegetative plant before you can essentially sex it. 

Trevor: That's very cool. No, not being a grower. I'm sure that some growers laughing at me right now, but I had no idea you could determine the sex of the plant that early. 

Dr. Guppy: Yeah, absolutely. Even five days post germination. So, it's an it's a very robust test. It's very, very easy to determine. So that's really what got me into kind of starting my own company. There was a few other genetic tests that we were performing as well that were kind of more marker assisted selective breeding. So, if you wanted to say use some data to guide you through your breeding strategies, we could provide that to you. Then that led me to, to essentially make more contacts in the industry. And I, I stumbled across BioScision Pharma in Winnipeg near my hometown and started talking with the Exes that were running it at the time. And they brought me on board. And as they say, the rest is history. 

Trevor: Very cool. No, we call them My Cannabis Stories. We always like a good My Cannabis Story. So. So now we're up to BioScision Pharma. Now flipping through the Website, I see sort of a couple streams. We have Cannabis 2.0 products and Analytic Testing. So, for those who don't know what's a Cannabis 2.0 product, what does that mean? 

Dr. Guppy: Great. So, for us, Cannabis 2.0 means anything that's not smokable flower. Cannabis 1.0 is smokable flower. So, you know, your loose buds, your milled flower, your pre-rolls, things like that. Anything smokable for us. Cannabis 2.0 is anything that's not smokable. So concentrates, vapes, topicals, nanoemulsified powders, beverage mixes, any all of the kind of different flavor formats of cannabis that aren't necessarily smokable, let's say. And that's really where my kind of skill sets came in. Coming from the drug Research and Development world. I was able to apply some of the, let's say, pharmaceutical strategies that are employed in mainstream pharmaceuticals to cannabis. And that's what I'm doing. They're at BioScision on the production side of things. It is crafting some of these Cannabis 2.0 products. And we could, we could talk a little bit about that as well. 

Trevor: Yeah, I do want to get to those honestly, especially the nanoemulsified powders. I'll try not to geek out too much as a pharmacist, but we love emulsions and little particles and stuff. But let's talk let's touch on before I forget. The Analytics Testing like what I'm flipping through again the page, it's not it's not a small number of tests you're doing. You know, it's not just potency. We have Terrapins, we have metals, we have. How about you sort of give us an overview of what kind of testing you guys do? 

Dr. Guppy: Absolutely. So, my position here at BioScision is also head of laboratories. We have a analytical chemistry laboratory here called BioScision Labs. BioScisionLabs.com is a very convenient way to access that site and also to submit a sample and see our pricing. We do testing for any legal producer across Canada, including ACMPR growers. So, if you're interested in getting any of your cannabis tested, shameless plug, certainly and go visit bioscision.com and all the information to submit a sample is there. So, what do we do? We analyze cannabis to essentially provide a certificate of analysis or COA to anyone cultivating cannabis, a legal producer. And that COA has all the tests that are mandated by Health Canada that must be performed and must pass all those tests before they're allowed to sell that cannabis into the public retail market. Okay, so what do we do? It's essentially certifying that this cannabis here is fit for human consumption. So, some of the tests that we do is we do pesticide analysis. So, we test for 96 unauthorized pesticides that that could be present. And we can't have any of them present for the cannabis to pass. We test for heavy metals, so we test for arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead. Again, there are limits to all of those metals that that can be can or cannot be present in, in cannabis. 

Trevor: Yeah. And what we've learned along the way, just random things from different growers we're learning is that the plant, the cannabis plant, the hemp plant is very good at basically getting heavy metals out of the soil and you could actually use this type of plant. They have used cousins of this plant to clean up toxic dumps, which is a good thing. But if you're trying to grow it for human consumption, it's a propensity of the plant that's not so good for us that if there are any heavy metals, the cannabis plant seems to soak it up real good. 

Dr. Guppy: Absolutely. Yeah. Cannabis is an excellent bio-remediator, certainly. And it's not unheard of that exactly as you said that the plant cannabis in say a field contaminated with arsenic or something like that, that it will draw it up quite readily. So, and the interesting the interesting aspect as well as if there are any residual metals found in some of the bottled nutrients that a lot of cultivators are using, that those metals will also get sucked up into the plant and is detectable into that into the flower as well. Metals is is an interesting thing. I mean arsenic is virtually everywhere. So, there is a limit to too much arsenic and. And we do that analysis to ensure that the limits are always far below. But arsenic seems to be fairly prevalent in almost everything humans consume, including cannabis. Yeah. And in terms of the other tests that we employ, we do microbiology. So, we look at a couple of different flavor formats of microbiology tests. We look at total aerobic count, we look at total yeast and mold levels. We look at bio tolerant gram-negative bacteria. And then we have a whole slew of objectionable organisms that we look for as well, depending on what type of cannabis product is being sent to us, whether it's a product that's for a topical or an edible or a inhalable, and those all have different standards associated with them. And we have to test for different organisms based on what that cannabis product is being used for. 

Trevor: Okay, now we've heard of like Aflatoxins and other we'll call them mold slash fungi being a problem. But so different microbes, like you said, some aerobic microbes and others are they always a problem, sometimes a problem, something Health Canada is looking at? I'm just happily surprised, I guess, that you're looking for more than just a couple of fungi. 

Dr. Guppy: Absolutely. Yeah, I know. It's a very comprehensive test. The one thing I will absolutely applaud is, is the level of testing in the industry and the limits in the industry. You know, like I said, we also test ACMPR growers and, you know, and those types of products that come in often have pesticide contaminants, often have metal issues, often have microbiology issues. So, you know, if there's if there's another kind of feather in the cap for legalization, it's that we've completely cleaned the sources of of cannabis in this country. And no longer are, you know, legal cannabis consumers consuming things that they shouldn't be like pesticides, metals and microbes. So, it's a certainly it's a safeguard in the industry that is is definitely well recognized by it, by myself and my colleagues. So it's some of the some of the microbes that we test for. So things like E. coli, staph aureus, pseudomonas, Candida and a whole slew of other objectables depending on how it's used for. 

Trevor: Okay. And I promise I will go out to more interesting things. But this is interesting to me is as a pharmacist, staphaureus is famous for skin infections what it does other things too. But so, does that mean that if I'm producing a topical I'm particularly worried about a staph aureus is there or is that something we worry about in everything? 

Dr. Guppy: Nope, absolutely. That's one of the microbes that is more and more specific to topical products, because exactly as you said, it's the ability to produce essentially skin lesions or skin infections. And for something like Candida albicans, that's a yeast infection. So that, for example, if you are producing some sort of. 

Trevor: Suppository.

Dr. Guppy: Yeah, exactly. Vaginal suppository, you would want to test that to make sure that it was free any kind of any kind of Candida. So, we're not creating any yeast infections, things like that. So very similar to the pharmacy world, depending on what product you are producing, will depend on which pharmacopeia limit standard that you are essentially quoting. And that is the limit that we used to test for in BioScision labs. 

Trevor: That is all very fascinating. All right. Because I may or may not aboard some of the audience. Let's talk about good stuff. Let's talk about some of the products you're producing as someone who grew up in Manitoba and has been up and down it very often. When I used to live in Pinawa, Manitoba I really like the name of the brands of Highway 59 Cannabis so good on good on the branding on that and the fact you have one called Cow Tip.  Oh, Gimli Glider that's even cooler. So, I'm looking at Gimli Glider for those who don't know Gimli, it was a literal plane that ran out of gas because they couldn't do the conversion from Metric to Imperial. And they brought on no fuel, landed at an old airstrip in Gimli. So, it was a real thing. But so, I'm looking at the Gimli Glider vape cart and you've got a whole bunch more listed on there than I would have expected. I've got all the different Terpenes on there. Yeah. So how about tell us a little bit about things like your vape carts and how. Yeah, tell me a little bit about those. 

Dr. Guppy: Absolutely, without a doubt. So we are the home of Highway 59. That is our flagship brand that we produce out of here, out of BioScision Pharma. And we produce two different, let's say, styles of vapes. We produce three SKUs that are formulated with cannabis distillate and botanically derived Terpenes. 

Trevor: Okay, so. So not from the cannabis. 

Dr. Guppy: Exactly. Exactly. And then the other style is vapes that are formulated with Terpenes that are from cannabis, 100% derived from cannabis. And those are our live Terpene Cartridges. So just to take you through some of our SKUs on the botanical Terpene side, we have a Cow Tipper. It's very much a kind of a more of a Humelene dominant myrcene dominant profile. If you go on to Bioscisionpharma.com and you click under the products tab, you can see a Terpene wheel that lists the Terpenes and the proportions of each Terpenes that are found in each of our products. So Cow Tipper, yeah, very much a balance between more myrcene, humelene and also Caryophyllene, whereas Melon Head is a lot more Terpinolene dominant. That's more of a kind of a, I guess you could say spicier, more of a cleaner smell, almost like a like a clean, almost like a cleaning solution, for lack of a better term. But it's my favorite. I love that. Terpinolene that's my favorite Terpene of all. And then we also have Gimli Glider, which is very much more of a balanced cart between Myrcene and Terpinolene. It's incredibly smooth in terms of in terms of the overall taste profile and overall effect. We also have a distillate dispenser. That's where we take Terpenes and distillate. And we put inside a little pen almost. And when you click that pen it squeezes out a little bit of distillate about the size of half a grain of rice, and it comes out of a metal tip. You can put it on a E-nail. You can put it on top of some flower. You can smoke it directly in a pipe. It's very versatile. It's activated too, fully decarboxylated. It could be used for edible purposes as well. Super versatile. And the best is no mess because it's in a it's in a distillate dispenser that basically takes the messiness out of distillate. 

Trevor: That sounds tremendously cool. And at various cannabis events we've been at, there's always the guy is there producing fantastic looking glassware for smoking dabs of various types. I assume it could be used on one of those fancy glassware dabs as well. 

Dr. Guppy: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. E-nail or any kind of any kind of torch driven dab rig. Absolutely. Totally. Totally doable. 

Trevor: Okay. So, tell me about the live Terpene carts. So this is we've all cannabis we're not no botanical Terpenes. What's the what's the idea behind those. 

Dr. Guppy: Exactly. So I've always been a proponent of using everything from the cannabis plant as possible. And this is really what we've done here with our live Terpene carts. We have five SKUs that use 100% cannabis derived live Terpenes. So how does that work? We take cannabis plants, various strains. We have O.G. Kush. We have Maui Wowie. We have Lauren's and we have a mango Kush. And we take those plants and we use we extract the turbines when the plants are immediately cut down. It's about a three-hour window from the time that the plants are cut down to the time that the Terpenes are extracted and concentrated. 

Trevor: So, I've got I would ask because we've talked about that length of time. So does that mean you are actually growing plants too or how do you get them that fast?

Dr. Guppy: Material is sourced from third party cultivators and then the Terpenes are extracted from that material essentially. Then what happens is that that that full spectrum, full profile Terpenes are then infused into our cannabis distillate and then basically filled into our cartridge, our vape devices. The nice thing about using live Terpenes directly from cannabis is it very, very faithfully reproduces the cannabis taste and smell and arguably the effect as well. It's a much more complex Terpene profile. If you go on the Web. Bioscision.com under Products. You can see that there is really 15, 16, 17, 18 different Terpenes that are listed. For the live Terps and really only about seven, eight or nine listed for the botanical Terps. The other thing that we can capture by using fresh plants is we can capture different flavonoids as well. So again, another component and arguably another drug class in the cannabis world that can be used to again, faithfully reproduce a cannabis vape. And that's really what we're going for here. Incredibly popular products and really extremely high potency as well. Just we're really proud of them. And this these products are being sold all over Canada right now. 

Trevor: Very cool. Okay. Before I run out of time because they don't have you forever. Nanoemulsified powder and beverage mixtures. So emulsions in pharmacy world anyway, we either have we have what is different types. There's oil and water; water and oil. But basically, you're taking two liquids that don't mix very well together, adding something to them like a surfactant to get them to mix. So, you know, literally people say oil and water doesn't mix. Well. Cannabinoids are all oil, so they don't mix really well with water. So you have to do something, two of them and a Nanoemulsion of mean we get the particle in, they're really, really small. So hopefully they stay. They're not in solution, but they'll stay mixed together potentially indefinitely. So tell us a little bit about your Nanoemulsified powders and beverage mixtures. 

Dr. Guppy: Absolutely. Yeah, you nailed it. So, we have two SKUs that are going to be hitting the market late summer. We actually just finished manufacturing a couple of pallets just yesterday. So we're very pleased to be to be offering these two new SKUs into the market. One of them is a lemon CBD beverage mix. So if you imagine a little sachet, almost like a pack of sugar that you would see in a restaurant, it's about the same size. You crack it open, it's a powder. You pour it into any water or any aqueous drink, and you mix it up and you have a lemonade flavored drink that now has 20 milligrams of CBD. That particular pack is there's three drink mixes per pack and each pack is 20 milligrams. Then you have the other one is a lime THC mixer that's two packages of five mg THC and again, same idea, two sachets, mix it in water and you've got it completely infused beverage on the go. I'll talk a little bit behind the Nanoemulsion technology behind the two drinks. A very, very interesting again, what we did is we took some trickery from the pharmaceutical world and we brought it into the cannabis world, which, in my opinion, cannabis is pharmacy. Cannabis is pharmaceuticals at the end of the day, so why not treat them as such? So just like you had said. Yes, absolutely Trevor.  Oil and water doesnot mix. So that's one of the problems with traditional edibles is that it's basically timed to onset. So if I eat a oil or a traditional edible, a brownie, I'm going to eat it. And if I have a slow metabolism or depending on the meal that I ate that day, or depending what time of day it is, you know, perhaps I'm going to start feeling that an hour or an hour and a half, 2 hours later. 

Trevor: Right? Right. We've talked a lot about edibles. In fact, we had one little episode where we made some gummies and yes, that that that's an ad in medical cannabis world where we are giving people oils. That's exactly what we tell them is this is going to take an hour or two to kick it, but with nanoparticles. 

Dr. Guppy: Exactly. So that's the problem that we look to solve because really, if you need to feel the effects of that medicine, do you really want to wait 2 hours before you feel the medicine kick in essentially. So, what we did is we've created an oil in water nanoemulsion and this really solves that time to onset problem.  How does it solve it? So you'll consume this beverage and really you'll start to feel the cannabis effect in roughly 20 minutes to 30 minutes. So, these are pharmacokinetics or timed onset effects that are more aligned to, say, alcohol consumption. So it's much more of a predictable experience and it really prevents that ill fated re dosing too soon kind of thing. And then you're just getting green out. So how do we achieve that? We take cannabis distillate. We take high potency cannabis distillate. Exactly as you said, we mix it with emulsifiers. And then what we do is we sonicate it and produce a very, very small nanoemulsion. We have incredibly small emulsion particles, and that really lends to that decrease time to onset and really gets that down to about 20 minutes to half an hour from the time you consume it to this time, you start feeling the effects. So, we take it a step further. So, the oil in water nanoemulsion is a liquid, but we want it into a powder. So, we actually mix it with other excipients like sugars, and we spray dry it down into a powder. So, it's kind of a little bit of a Russian nesting doll effect where you have your THC oil as the core of the particle. You have your emulsifier that is encapsulating the THC oil. And then you have your sugar that's encapsulating the emulsion droplet and that's sprayed dried down into a powder. And then that is our API or our active pharmaceutical ingredient. That API is then mixed with things like sugar, Stavia, citric acid, natural flavorings, bitter blockers, and that's essentially mixed into that sachet. And that's how you have yourself a very fast acting, very efficient and quite tasty cannabis beverage mix. 

Trevor: That is fantastic. It's super cool. I'm always glad when pharmacy stuff ends and ends up in the real world and other people can see how cool things like pharmaceutical compounding was. And I will ask since I'm scared of running out of time. So, the mixtures because I haven't seen that in my local cannabis shop yet. When do we think that would be something that people would be able to walk down to their local store and buy? 

Dr. Guppy: You'll be able to do that at the end of August or early September. Absolutely. We're waiting actually on a packaging machine here at Highway 59. As soon as that packaging machine arrives, we're going to be packaging more than enough to supply our local market. We always are Manitoba first year. We're all Manitobans that work here and so that that's when you can expect to see those. 

Trevor: Cool. So, by the time people listen to this, depending on when you're listening, you might be able to wander down and get that like today. That's great. Now there's so much more that BioScision does, but in case, how about was there anything else you really wished I'd asked or thought I'd ask or wanted the audience to hear about before we let you go? 

Dr. Guppy: No, just no. That was great. I really appreciate the time and I really like connecting with like-minded cannabis forward people and scientists and pharmacists like yourself. So again, thank you so much for having me again. Anyone that's interested in checking out our products, feel free to look at the website bioscisionpharma.com. Anyone looking to submit a sample for potency testing or for any other testing? Feel free to go to bioscisionlabs.com and those are two sites where we can be reached. Lots of information there as well.

Trevor: So I last a little bit while just sort of thought of this earlier things like that, the nanoparticles, etc.. Are you guys looking into the we'll call it the medical end of this at all because, you know, a medical patient really might because like you have no idea how many complaints I hear about how bad cannabis oil tastes. Have you guys looked into getting the paperwork done, which I assume was a mountain of it, to be like a Licensed Producer, that a a physician could send you a medical document and patients get it that way? Or is that not in your plan at the moment? 

Dr. Guppy: No, absolutely. So we do have a federal medical sales license, so we are able to support the medical community. That is absolutely something that is is on our radar. We've got a couple of different products that are coming out as well that aren't necessarily drink mixes, but rather just a neutral powder. So just a very neutral THC powder that can be mixed into any water-based beverage. You can virtually infuse any beverage that you'd like and you can still take you can still reap the benefits of that nanoemulsion effect, which gets that that time to onset around the 20-minute mark. So that will be available in, 5 mg doses, 10 milligram doses. And for CBD, we're going to have that available in 20 milligram doses and 40 milligram doses as well. 

Trevor: That is unbelievably good news. All right. All right. I've used up a lot of your time on a Friday afternoon. I really appreciate that. Thank you very much, Dr. Guppy. And hopefully it won't be two or three years till we talk to you next time. This has been great. Thank you for your time. 

Dr. Guppy: You're very welcome. My pleasure. Looking forward to catching up with you in in probably a few months-time, because, like I say, there's a lot of very interesting things going on here. I'll leave one little teaser. 

Trevor: Absolutely.

Dr. Guppy: We are having we just received our Butane Hash Oil Extraction skid and we're setting that up. So what you're going to see in the near, near future from Highway 59 is concentrates like Shatter, Diamonds, Diamonds and Terp sauce and live resin coming very, very soon. So we're very excited about that. So again, maybe in a few months-time we can reconnect and we can go over those years as well. 

Kirk: So. So my, my pharmacist friend who love science, you are over the edge on this nano stuff. So go for it, man. Explain it. Like get it down to layman's terms. It's all with sprays and. 

Trevor: Sure. So again, everybody at some point of their life has done something like try to mix up a salad dressing where they've had, you know, an oil and a vinegar and they shook it together. And it normally it starts in two phases and you shake it enough and you get one phase where you get sort of little goblets of oil in the vinegar. That's an emulsion. But you also notice if you set that on the table for a while, it separates. Well, we don't want emulsions in pharmacy world to separate, so we put something else in there, like it's called a surfactant. It's a type of soap that sort of keeps the oil and water mixed or not dissolved, but still mixed. And the nano part is we get it really, really small. And you heard him throw out the word like sonification that's using sound waves to mix stuff. You can use it for other things. A million years ago, I had a summer job where I was cleaning off parts of a chainsaw with a sonic cleaner, so it was basically acetone. But in this cleaning bath it vibrated back and forth with sound waves and clean the chainsaw parts anyway. So if you use sound waves, you can get, it's like a way of mixing something really, really fast. And you can get these particles really, really small. And the best part about getting something really, really small into this nanoparticle size is it should stay in suspension indefinitely. You know, not a couple of hours, a couple of days. It might, you know, a couple of months to couple of years. So that's very cool. But then they went the next step. So if you can imagine all these tiny little droplets of oil sitting inside water, well, if you take away the water, you should end up if you do it carefully. And you know, there's a bunch of technical tricks to do this. If you do it carefully, you should now have just little droplets of oil. And then if you do one more step and you sort of cover these little droplets of oil with sugar, you should now have a tiny, tiny, tiny droplet of oil with the surfactant surrounded by sugar that can sit in a package. And now you have now you have a powder that if you dissolve, when you reintroduce water later, you pour it into your cup of tea or a cup of lemonade or whatever and stir it back up. You've sort of recreated the nano emulsion whenever you want it to. So that's all cool. And, you know, back when I used to do compounding, he used lots of words that we used to use. He was using things like stevia, which is a type of sweetener, non-caloric doesn't increase your blood sugar sweetener. Naturally to life. So everybody likes that. Bitter blockers, yeah, we have to make up our own bitter blocker and that's just sort of a bunch of flavors you put in to sort of cover up the, the bitterness of a whatever and in this case a cannabinoid. And yeah, it's really cool. And yes, I'm unabashedly excited about nano emulsions. 

Kirk: I think it's fantastic. It's a little sachet and you sprinkle it into a glass of water and 10 minutes later, you've got a you got a body sensation from cannabis. I mean, I think as a medical from a medical cannabis perspective, the work they're doing is amazing. I'm going to their Web page. There's two Web pages for his businesses, the BioScision Labs and BioScision pharma. 

Trevor: Yeah. So he said for them to say it properly because I was practicing take the word biology and precision and match them together. So BioScision. 

Kirk: BioScision.  Well, I mean, we had an episode back when Season Two, Episode Seven with Expo, that's when we met him. But we had Episode 68 What's In Your Weed when we talked about the KeyBox. So yes, part of that part of their business, that's the same thing. And like, you know, I hang out with hang out with a few old cannabis culture guys have been growing their own and making their own medicine for a long time. And I talk to them about, you know, getting their weed analyzed. You know, you should really get it analyzed and check it out. It's too expensive. I've been growing my crop forever. I know my weed, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, I get it, I get it, I get it. And I'm not going to I'm not going to criticize people that are practicing their own, you know, plant medicine. But as medical professionals, I can't help but say, you know, what's in your weed dude. And what I mean by that is it he was talking about Dr. Guppy: was talking about, you know, looking for heavy metals and stuff. Well, you know, I'm thinking a lot of medical growers that I know I they don't analyze their weed. And I'm wondering why they would analyze it for pesticides. So I'm thinking they must do a lot of work with commercial growers as well. 

Trevor: Well, yes. And like they said, they'll basically any licensed producer like be an AMCPR, home grower or bigger they'll do all the testing. The parts that I just that things I hadn't thought of on heavy metals you know I'm not you know growing in contaminated soil. Well what something they have found is some of the bottles of nutrients that people poured on their soil to grow faster. Well, those bottles actually had some heavy metal stuff in them that eventually got it into plant. I wouldn't have thought of that. You know, maybe again, you growers out there know better and you know, then some of the microbiology that I hadn't thought of, you know, if you're making a topical, you don't a lot of staphaureus in there so you know create an infected wound. If you're making a suppository, you don't want candida albicans, basically yeast, to create a yeast infection. Just you know, from the takeaway I took well this is you know Health Canada gets a lot of flak and maybe rightfully so. But in Canada, we have a really good system right now for making sure the weed that gets to the consumer, both recreational and medicinal, is as safe as we can make it. There's a whole bunch of tests that have to be done. 

Kirk: Yeah. And I wonder, you know, one of the questions I was wondering about commercial growers, do they have to test all their weed. Like every crop they do. Is it tested? Because it's it must get pretty expensive after a while. I mean, you're looking in Health Canada compliant panel. Thousand dollars, you know. Yeah. And they're required I mean, they're required to give a substantial amount of weed. What do they require here? They require 40 grams of weed to do that. So, I'm wondering, is it every crop. Like how often does commercial, like we know Delta9 grows in Sea-Can. Right. So, I imagine every Sea-Can has to be. But because it because I know that they're growing, they're growing hydroponically right there in coconut. So, so they would have all the same nutrients going to the plant. So, they must, they must test a whole Sea-can. 

Trevor: Short answer is neither of us know there must be a sampling schedule. But you know, we either have to ask a commercial grower or Health Canada for, you know, is, you know, one sample per plant, one sample per month, one sample per year. I have no idea. But okay, I'm assuming a lot here, but I'm assuming there's sort of some kind of regular sampling schedule. 

Kirk: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I imagine that for the Recreational.  Medicinal guys, I don't know how many Medicinal guys, who grow their own are checking their weed. I don't think a lot of ah again I don't I mean it's tough to ask the companies because they're going to tell us that they got, you know, lots of customers. But I wonder how many are doing it. I also like their other business, like Highway 59. You had some fun with that, the Gimli Glider you were talking about that. 

Trevor: Thank you for reminding me. Gimli Glider. All right. So for those of you not from Manitoba. 39 years ago, so July 23rd of 83, there was an actual Air Canada plane. So big. Picture, big plane, jet, lots of people on it. And there was a miscommunication between people doing math and imperial and metric about how much gas went on to the plane or aviation fuel and it ran out of gas. But the amazing part was this happened to be in I think it was like a plane, like the style of plane that was flying that that could actually glide. And one of the pilots happened to be in his spare time a glider pilot, which is also because they are there different skill sets. And he happened to be familiar with Gimli. Like Gimli has an old not in commercial use airfield air field. And they glided this jetliner down and everybody was safe. What? That's amazing. And 39 years ago, this year, in July, that that happened. And there is a Vape cart named after him now. 

Kirk: Well, I think Dauphin I think Dauphin has the same sort of runway, like as we were World War Two training ground, right. So, I think our runway is one of the one of the runways also that jets large jets can land on as well. 

Trevor: Yeah. And now people from Gimli can call and complain if I've got this wrong. But I don't think the Gimli airfield has any use on it right now. I could be wrong. And many, many years ago. 

Kirk: Commercial? It's recreational, I think. 

Trevor: Okay. And then. And actually, we should ask our friend Keijo. I think he's flown out of there anyway, unrelated. But many, many years ago, back when I thought I knew how to race windsurfers, we used to have training at Gimli and they put us up in the old barracks at Gimli Air Force Base. Then years after that, there was a few years of something called Sunfest, which was an outdoor rock fest it at Gimli that out at the airfield. So in my past have been at that airfield several times. 

Kirk: I've flown over it many times. I've been to Gimli several times. That's obviously where Dr. Shelley Turner and her team have their clinic is in Gimli. I think this is a very interesting Manitoba business that you interviewed here. I mean, thinking that, you know, a geneticist, a Ph.D. chemistry guy is designing. Yeah. 

Trevor: using genetics. Kirk, you're a budding grower. 

Kirk: Yeah, yeah. 

Trevor: Did did you know, with genetics, you could sex your plants five days old instead of waiting for, you know, literally months. 

Kirk: well he's sexing the seeds right now. 

Trevor: I could have it wrong, but it's not like he was sexing them after they've germinated, but only for, like five days instead of waiting a huge amount of time, which, you know, again, if this was your business, that's a whole lot of time to keep something alive that you aren't going to use. 

Kirk: Yeah. Yeah. And again, how many people are growing with seeds nowadays? I mean, that's one of the biggest issues that the ACMPR growers, where do you get your products from? Where do you get your seeds and your clones from? Right. It's I don't think you can get clones. I don't think you can share clones between growers. There's a lot of stuff that just happens. But I don't think that I don't think the provincial government ever thought of those kind of things. So I think it's a lot of gray area when it comes to sharing genetics and sharing between growers. I know you're allowed to gift I know you're allowed to give 30 grams, but I'm not sure as a as a grower, if you're allowed to gift your cannabis to somebody else. So that's. 

Trevor: Yeah. And I'm not sure on clones and with I'm sure someone can tell us. But now I thought a Mother out of Saskatoon had clones that you may or may not be able to get it. But definitely people have talked to Kylie out of Parkland flower definitely sells seeds. 

Kirk: But yeah, I grew some of Parkland Flower and it was one. It was nice. It was nice stuff. So yeah. Well, Dr. Guppy: was it was a fun interview with Manitoba business, Manitoba grad, very Manitoba story. 

Trevor: And like I said, I'm really pretty excited in the medical end about these nano emulsions being used in the medicinal end.  You know. It's a common pharmacy problem in general. You know if the medicine tastes bad, people don't take it. So, you know, if we can improve that, fantastic. 

Kirk: I think I think it's wonderful from a medical cannabis perspective. I think I think what he's got going here and you know, what they've done is they're extracting all the Terpenes. So I'm wondering when you're using their vapes. Yeah, I guess the entourage effect must be there because they've got they've got. 

Trevor: They have the two different styles. They have the one where they add in botanical or non cannabis Terpenoids add them back in. And then they had the other one where they are. I wrote this down, they have a three-hour window to get from plant to extraction to make sure they can get all the Terpenes out. That's pretty quick.

Kirk: That sounds very similar to the to hemp. Right. One of the biggest problems with what we learned from Lyle out there and Gilbert Plains, what we learned from him is that the biggest problem with getting the CBD and the products out of hemp plants, is that getting it off the field quickly. And that that was one of the big lessons that the American growers when America was a couple of years ago they went to legalization of hemp. There was acres and acres and acres of hemp. And the problem was the problem was harvesting. You got to get that stuff into the processor before it started composting. Yeah, it was like cutting your grass in your yard. If you don't rake it up, it will compost very quickly. Right. So, yeah. Cannabis, wonderful weed. 

Trevor: All right. That was another good one. I am Trevor: Shewfelt. I'm the pharmacist. 

Kirk: And I'm Kirk: Nyquist the registered nurse. And we are Reefer Medness - The Podcast. People again get to our web page. All of this stuff is transcribed. All the research is there. You can you can search it from a thousand different ways. Our Web page is designed to be searched. We've got over 90 episodes up. Yeah. Take a look at the Web page. Also, people, could you please go to your platform and give us a rating and let people know that out there we're still working on word-of-mouth. We've got steady growth in this podcast. Every month we get more and more people listening and it's all word-of-mouth. So help us out. Get a friend listening, tell a friend, they'll tell a friend. 

Trevor: And so on and so on. 

Kirk:  So I feel like I need to shampoo my hair. 

Trevor: I don't have any left.