Kirk, Alan, Trevor, and Richard

Episode Transcript

Trevor: Kirk. 

Kirk: Yup.

Trevor: We're back. 

Kirk: Hello. How are? You, you were telling me you were waiting for a tow truck the other day. 

Trevor: OK. the story still isn’t  over. So my son. We'll start with the good news. My son is OK, his car is OK, but his car, as we speak is still currently in a ditch and I'm waiting for a tow truck to be dispatched from a town 2 hours away for reasons I don't quite understand. But anyway, yeah, we spent sometime reading a really good cannabis book, which is going to be in future episode called the Cannabis Cancer Connection while sitting in a truck, waiting, waiting for a tow truck that turned out wasn't coming. Anyway details. Manitoba winter.

Kirk:, Icy roads, icy roads, you guys such a ditch. 

Trevor: He hit the ditch.  He went, came back from Winnipeg for the long weekend and went for a little drive down some gravel roads which,  turned out to be way icier than he thought, and he just gently slid into the hitch. 

Kirk: Gently slide into … it's not like we haven't done that in our youth. 

Trevor: No, no. But maybe maybe smarter. I don't know. He said well, just tow me out, Dad. Well, A, I just, I'm gonna, guaranteed, I'm going to rip something off of his car and B. I don’t have a winch on my truck. There's like 0 traction. There's no way I was going to be, anyway, long and short of it, we'll wait for a professional to remove him properly from the ditch and hopefully not rip anything off of his vehicle. 

Kirk: Well, I'm glad he's OK.  We have pretty much a local episode today. Where we we have a local LP just starting up in Dauphin and they're into extractions. Do you want to give a little bit of a intro? 

Trevor: Sure. So most of the speaker is going to be Richard Spatola. He is a fascinating dude who, just because you know, everything has to start with an interesting story. You know, I got a sudden phone call at the pharmacy one day from a very excited person on the other end of the line. Like, I wasn't at first sure what he was excited about because, you know, usually people phoned me at the pharmacy because something has gone wrong. And it's something I have to fix, but no, no, this was, this was someone who really wanted to talk to me about cannabis stuff. And I've talked to Alan Campbell. You know, Alan Campbell, right. And and just keep going. Who are you? What are you talking about. Anyway? The who are you? What are you talking about? Turned out to be Richards Spatola. And we ended up at a local restaurant, Mr. Mikes, and had a nice meal and chatted with him a bit to sort of hear his story and what he's all about. And what he's doing, so, do we want to sort of have that lead into the first part of our conversation? 

Kirk: Sure. Yeah. We're so we're sitting Mr. Mikes and I bring out my phone and say. Well, let's start this interview because you truly are an interesting dude. And so, yeah, let's listen to our conversation sitting in Mr. Mikes. 

Richard:  So my name is Ono Henry Richard Spatola. The reason I go by Richard is back when I was a kid, you couldn't be Italian in Toronto. So I got to experience a whole bunch of different sides of TO some good, some bad. So, met Chris Fedorovich geez five or six years ago. We started talking on the phone for a mutual friend of ours, Ann Barnes. Ann Barnes was the first federal license issued under the brand Peace Naturals. So, huge facility just up outside of Wasaga Beach ON. So Chris and I got talking and he informed me about what he was doing with harvesting. To me it was it really interesting. I love the fact that he was converting cannabinoids into powders. He knew that I was an extractor. I knew that he was a grower. We kind of fit together really well. So one thing led to another. I was looking for LP's in Ontario to partner up and or purchase. So little did I know even a distressed LP in Ontario is somewhere between 15 and 20 million dollars.. Needless to say at my age. I wasn't about to jump into that one and there was other varying factors that what led me to leave Ontario. Anyway. October, we come to Dauphin. Chris and I have been talking for several months about coming out here came out. We went and looked at the facility, Al Campbell's place. OrganiaCan as it’s named and realized, yeah, I could make this work. But, you know, we've got to turn it into the proper LP. So we found some funding and off we went. There's LN2, there's CO2 extraction equipment in there. There's my solventless equipment in there. So two separate labs, two different ways of looking at the extraction methods. Again, as I've reiterated to you, I'm not a fan of recreational, although I have nothing against Rec. For me it's all about medical. Where do you want to go?  I can talk for hours. Tell me which way you wanna go? 

Kirk: I guess I guess. Let's describe what business are you you've moved into Dauphin. 

Richard: I have moved into Dauphin Yeah. Tracy Yuri is looking after me. So she found me a place to live that’s furnished. All my furniture is in 2 Sea-cans in Collingwood ON so I have the clothes on my back, and that's about it. 

Kirk: OK. So what is your business. Let's describe your business. 

Richard: So my business is extracting solventless formulations for the medical industry in cannabis. 

Kirk: So are you making, are you making Shatter. Or are you making… 

Richard: No shatter. You need, it require the utilization of ethanol, to make shatter. So I make, I can't even say I make tinctures. I make oil, I make infused oils. 

Kirk: OK, you're using cannabis oil as your base or what are you using? 

Richard: I'm using MCT as my carrier and I'm infusing it with different cannabinoids and different formulations of cannabinoids. 

Kirk: OK, right on and you've been doing this since October? 

Richard: Here since October, I've been doing this for the last I don't know, 15 years. And I've been in the cannabis industry for about 27 years 

Kirk: as a grower.  

Richard: As a grower, as an extractor, yes, as an advocate

Kirk: OK, so you were saying you're using hemp and marijuana components, 

Richard: correct? 

Kirk: So you can you give us an insight to the different cannabinoid derivatives you're getting? 

Richard: Yeah. So I find with Chris's harvest and the harvest is an LN2 Harvest, primarily you end up with CBGa and then you can convert that to CBG and his product is actually very high in CBD because that's what it's grown for. And when we send it out for testing, his product always comes back 10, 11, 12% and then when we I extract it, I get it up to the 30%.

Kirk: You're squeezing 30%. 

Richard: Yes, out of the CBD, amazing. 

Kirk: out of a plant,  Wow. 

Richard: Yeah. Remember, Chris is doing the hard part right? He's using the LN2, he's growing, he's harvesting with LN2. So in essence, he's already compounded it... 

Kirk: Can you explain LN2

Richard: liquid nitrogen

Kirk:  Right. OK. 

Richard. In the field he's cutting off the heads of the cannabis and freezing it. It goes into a bath and then from the bath it goes into a sieve and then it's shaken and then you got this powder. 

Trevor: OK, so that's because Kirk likes to talk about this so as soon as you sort of cut down whether it's hemp cannabis, it doesn't matter it starts to degrade.

Richard: degrades absolutely

Kirk: And this and this isn't trade. This isn't a trade secret. 

Richard: Not yet, it's not. But we're the only ones doing it. No, no, because people like Praxair know what we're doing. They've been wanting to buy ourselves for a while. 

Kirk: Well, that's right. Is that coming from Hempsense as well? Are they involved with this. 

Richard: Hemp sense is not involved in. 

Kirk: Not involved.. 

Richard: This is Fedorovich farms. 

Kirk: So you guys are extracting the hemp heads, you're freezing them, getting them and then shaking the powder and then you take that powder? 

Richard: I do a solventless extraction and I utilize time, temperature, pressure in the vessel that I have 

Kirk: So and then you on the other side, you have the marijuana process going the same way, are you so is it also frozen? Coming to you is powder?

Richard: No, it's coming to me as cannabis. 

Kirk: As flower 

Richard: correct? 

Kirk: OK. Are you getting the whole plant? Are you doing the whole plant? 

Richard: Everything for me is whole plant. Full spectrum. I don't believe in isolations. I don't believe in trying to separate things. I strongly believe in the entourage affect. I've noticed when you remove the ethanol. So when you remove the hydrocarbon from the chain that you have with the molecules in cannabis, when you remove that hydrocarbon, our uptake under conventional extraction is about two to 4%. Remove the hydrocarbon the uptake is somewhere around 20%. So I don't need 30% THC, 10%. I'll put you on your ass. 

Kirk: Right. OK. 

Richard: Yeah. So that's the great part about our body recognizes when there's ethanol involved, it recognizes it as a poison, so it tries to protect us. So therefore your uptake is minimal. When you remove that hydrocarbon, the uptake is up in the 20s because there's no toxicity and that's the whole ideology behind what we're doing is remove the toxicity. I want to help, I want to help Sixty 70, 80 year olds. There's no sense blasting an 80 year old with a toxic product, especially if they're fighting something like a cancer, right? Because they're already getting toxicity from what they're fighting. 

Kirk: So your plan, so you got the formulation you've got, you've got your solvent not your solvent sorry? 

Richard: solventless. 

Kirk: Solventless, but you've got your oil. So what do you do with that oil. What kind of products will come out of the other doors. 

Richard: OK, so if I wanted to convert that oil into something other than the oil, but I recommend the oil because it's easier to formulate. Easier to dose. Dosage becomes the issue here. But anyway, you can make gummies. You can make gum. I've been known to make strips. Remember the little roller strips? Well, we infuse them back when I was with Instidales and it hit the market strong and hard. Hard to control a sheet of mylar that's 2 1/2 feet by 4 feet. But I'm going to take that equipment, bring it back here and I'm going to perfect it. I mean, I thought the strips were wonderful, but it was all THC, right? We were all playing around back in the day, so I wanted to do 1:1 or I want to do straight CBD, CBDa, CBG.  On a strip. You can do. You can do vapes. You can do all kinds of shit like this this will lends Itself to anything you want to do. Like it's smokable. If you want to, I mean, if you if you vape. Fill your fill your vape cartridge with that oil.. It's amazing. And it doesn't burn the pot. It doesn't burn the coil. And you know why it doesn't burn the coil. No ethanol. Yeah, that's what happened burn alcohol?

Trevor: It burns hot

Richard:  It degrades, right? 

Kirk: So you're. you're an LP now. You're a licensed producer in Manitoba? 

Richard: Yes. Organacan is the license, yes. And ABC or Alterna Botanical Compounds is the JV the Joint Venture. 

Kirk: How Far away are you from having something on a shelf? 

Richard: Yeah, we're ready go.

Kirk: When do you think you'll be able to sell it from your door? You think that there's a farmgate coming to Manitoba. 

Richard: I believe there is. the people that I've spoken to and I've spoken to consultants, so you know, I'm getting various opinions. They tell me, end of the year. So we've geared up, we sent in our application to amend our LP and we'll see what happens. 

Kirk: Cool. So you're essentially one of the newest LP's in Manitoba. 

Richard: Yes we are. 

Kirk: Very cool.  

Trevor: So yeah, give us some, Kirk is a nurse, I'm a Pharmacist called Case Studies but tell us about a couple of people who take your stuff and it helped this because of that. 

Richard: OK, just right off the hop I just wanted to let you guys know the canine formula with advanced aging dogs is absolutely fabulous, I had a 20-year-old Shitzu and his vet controlled him from the age of 16 on. On his vet in Ontario, Wayne Cole, he and I worked together to get the right formulations for his size. I mean, Camino was 22 lbs, but brother, it extended his life by four years so and again other dogs,  Al Campbell's dog Sonny, he will started going on it and within four days there was a big change in him, right? Little tail wagging walking around being happy you can really see it in the canine formulations. Humans, obviously the mandate is pain control, but depending on the formulation, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression and we all know Trevor, you of all people would know this right. Anxiety when not check becomes depression, depression when not check becomes suicide.  And unfortunately, a lot of doctors that once they classified you as chronic, it's like that's the end. Now I can’t help you, and I don't think that's right. I mean, I was diagnosed as chronic, right. Really now what do I do? Well take Dilaudid. Well, you know. Couple that with Percocet. Couple that with what's that other one Oxycodone, like holy shit man, I'd go to the pharmacy, come back in the small shopping bag. Like this time, my pharmacist would say to me. Ono, no, that's gonna kill you, right. Like you gotta do something different. And he was right. 

Kirk: So OK, so Richard invites us to the LP now. Basically Alan Campbell, I know Alan because he's a  beekeeper? Right? South of Town was a huge apiary. Used to have thousands of hives which are now up in British Columbia and he has opened up his building. To to become hemp cannabis extraction plant. So that's what we walk into. All right, so you own the building that, that, that, this, this facility involved. So introduce yourself and tell me your story. 

Alan: Yeah, that's correct. I'm Alan Campbell. I do own the place. We used to operate it as a different business 

Kirk: It use to be a bee farm

Alan: Yes it use to be a Bee farm . Yeah. Yeah. And we've moved to bees out west they're doing a different job. So we're looking at moving this forward with Richard. 

Kirk: OK, so how long is the has it been a facility for hemp. 

Alan: Three years now. 

Kirk: OK. And now it started going a little faster. 

Alan: Now we're starting to speed things up. 

Kirk: OK. And what is your vision of this place? What is it you hope to see happen? 

Alan: I would really like to see this the driver for solventless, and I think that is the key to the whole Kingdom really with cannabis I guess. 

Trevor: Yeah, so now I could be having this wrong, but I'm going to give you my two cents of how I think stuff works in there and I've been doing some reading. We've been talking to Richard a few times and so I'll see if I've got it right. And if I don't, I'm sure Richard will tell us and we'll add in some corrections. So the first key part of their thing is, when the flower, the head, the bud gets cut off the hemp plant, it is first flash frozen with liquid nitrogen and for those of you who didn't play with liquid nitrogen in the high school, university, that's like - 196° C. So if you've ever seen the famous experiment, you take a rose, you dunk in liquid nitrogen. Put it on the table. You can hit it with a hammer and it shatters. So that is what the whole head is being dropped into. So that hopefully preserves everything in the trichome before, because as Kirk has mentioned, in our previous hemp episodes, things start to degrade as they, as they compost. Like almost immediately. So this sort of preserves everything. Right there as it is. And then from there they can get, use the basically flash frozen heads to get the trichomes out. The little light bulb shaped crystalline things that have all the good stuff. All the cannabinoids, all the terpenoids, all the flavonoids are all in these little trichomes and that forms this Kief. This powder that we talked about a couple times during the tour. So you have this powder, this Kief, these liquid nitrogen extracted trichomes and now you want to do something with it. So the traditional thing is to use a solvent to get what you want out of there. So, the example I'm going to use is, if you took a bunch of salt and a bunch of sand and mixed it together and you want to get just the salt out. You put in a solvent. Water. It'll dissolve the salt. You sev it. You separate it. You filter it.  You get the sand on one side and the water on the other and then you evaporate off the water. And what you're left with, the salt. You've now separated the salt from the sand. That's what a solvent does. In organic stuff too.  A common one, and one that has been used in Richard's facility is CO2, so if you remember CO2 at room temperature is a gas.  You can't use that as a solvent. If you cool it down to -79 C, it turns into a solvent. Dry ice. You can't use that as a solvent but if you have some fancy machines. You take it to 31° C and 73 atmospheres, so 73 times the pressure we're all sitting around in right now. You turn into this super-critical fluid, this really dense fluid that can go through the organic stuff and pull out what you want? So let's say you want to pull out CBD. It could pull that out and then you just let it go back to room temperature and the CO2 goes away. So that should be very clean. But Richard, as we'll talk about in a bit, says you need to use some ethanol somewhere in that process and you never really get the ethanol back out. And Richard talks about how that's not good, but we'll get further to that. So that's CO2 extraction. Richard doesn't like CO2 extraction, and he'll talk about why. So Richard is doing solventless extraction. So he's taking or so we're back to this, Kief. These trichomes and he's putting it in another machine that like he says all he controls is: time, temperature and pressure. And I could have this really wrong, but the way I'm picturing it is he's adjusting the pressure and the temperature to sort, because cannabinoids are semi-liquid semi-solid so I think he's changing it so he can get sort of a say a liquid CBD and remove that and he's changing again to get like a liquid CBG and removing that. I'm not 100% certain. Honestly at that point he loses me a few times. And if we have it wrong, we can be corrected. Or maybe it's a super secret process that I didn't quite understand. So that's sort of how I understood what was going on in there. 

Kirk: OK, it was. It was like a great big science laboratory. We were walking through basically three different rooms. The sound's not great quality, but yeah, I'd like to pull a couple quotes out that Richard was explaining things a little bit more in involved for us. OK, so you said Trevor that Richard doesn't like solvent extractions. He likes solventless. So this is how he explained it to us about why he likes to solventless extraction. 

Richard:  Why Solvents? So number 1, I mean, ethanol, to our systems is seen as a poison, right? So what happens when you and I drink too much vodka? We end up with a hangover. Why do we end up with a hangover because it's poison to us, so our system on uptake, because everything is about uptake, right? It's about how much of that cannabinoid can I update. Conventionally, when a product is made with ethanol, your uptake is maximum 4%. When you take the Hydrocarbon out of the issue, your uptake can be as much as 25 to 30%. So you need very, very little to get an effect when it's solventless. So our body doesn't see it as a poison. It sees it, it sees it as something that's water based that our body wants. They want water, right. So This is why the whole apparatus of solventless extraction becomes critical when you're looking at it from the medical point of view. 

Kirk: So we're standing in front of what I thought was a big pressure cooker, and he explains about how he decarbed the Kief. And then it goes into this apparatus. So, let's hear how he explains how he uses negative pressure to extract the cannabinoids he wants. 

Richard: In a nutshell. The PCL. the controller. That's the vessel. These are the filtration columns. And we use that oven right at the moment for decarboxylation. So you took that you take that kief you decarboxylate it the oven goes in the oven decarb we decarb specifically time and temperature for different cannabinoids we that we want to capture. So it's then loaded through that funnel right there. It's a pressure cooker. I mean, I can change pressures. So it'll allow me to go down to 20 inches of negative pressure. I don't go positive pressure. All I want is negative pressure because negative pressure affects temperature. The lower the pressure, the less temperature I have to use to get the cannabinoid to shift.  Time, temperature, pressure. That's all I've got to work with by affecting time, temperature and pressure within the vessel, I can collect different cannabinoids. I can force the powder to convert to different cannabinoids and I want a to harvest. 

Kirk: Now what  I found the most fun I had in the days when we stumbled upon the hash in the fridge, yes. 

Trevor: We didn't quite know what we were looking at 

Kirk: No, we kind of, I mean it’s funny to listen to it now. It sounds like just a couple of idiots. We're opening fridge and this great big bag of sand, which actually turns out to be something else. So, this made me laugh. So let's listen to us learn about the product of harvest. 

Kirk: Alright, so we're in the lab, I guess and we're opening up a big fridge, what have we got? 

Richard: So this is LN2 harvested trichomes.  LN2 liquid nitrogen is the bath that this trichome has gone through, then goes through a series of sieves, then through a drying oven and into a finished product. 

Kirk: OK. So we're looking at a garbage bag, a large garbage bag of sand. It looks like sand, do you want to open that up Trevor. 

Trevor: I'm opening that up. It’s really fine brown sugar or 

Richard: Flour. 

Trevor: Flour yeah, like, sort of a. 

Kirk: So what I'm looking at is. 

Trevor: Yeah, it smells fantastic. 

Kirk: So that's CBD and that is that is that is a hemp product that was harvested in the field, the flowers were cut off. 

Richard: The heads were cut off

Kirk: immediately Frozen.

Richard:  correct nitrogen bath. 

Kirk: And then and then bashed and battered and made into this. 

Richard: It goes through, what do you call that thing? 

Alan: Like Trommel

Richard: Thank you. That's exactly like a Trommel. 

Kirk: OK. So it's a sandwich bag. 

Richard: Take it decarboxylate it and smoke it.

Kirk: But it's CBD. OK, so how many plants would that represent? 

Richard: That? Maybe one 

Kirk: 1 plant so it's a Glad Sandwich bag.

Trevor: Slip lok sandwich bag, the size of Trevor’s hand.  

Kirk: And that's is a CBD. So this is CBD. 

Richard: dominant. So CBD and all the other cannabinoids that sit with it. So there'd be some CBG there'd be CBDa, obviously, there's CBN and a modicum of THC, you know. But it would be under 0.05. 

Kirk: It looks like hash? That's what it. Is just looks like hash. Yeah, yeah, that's what it is. 

Richard: Well ya, well we call it, Kief. 

Kirk: There we go. That’s what we are looking for

Trevor: We've got, we've got CBD kief in our hands and it got that way because of getting really, really cold through liquid nitrogen. 

Kirk: Very cool. And so where does that take us now in the process. 

Richard: So that becomes, in essence, is something that Chris and I have been working on for six years now. We figured this is the future of cannabis harvesting and processing. 

Kirk: OK. And this is a patent thing, right? This is a patented process

Richard: Well, I've spoken with people. They're working on the IP of it, so yeah. And would it be patented? We think it will. The only problem is anytime you deal with cannabinoids, apparently they tell you you can't have patents on it.  

Kirk:  Interesting this process so it's a process like. 

Richard: that's the process. This is trichomes. Cannabis you can't write a what a call it.

Kirk:  So this is kief and that bag, that big garbage bag is also kief. 

Richard: It’s all kief.

Kirk: So from this what do you do with it 

Trevor: So, like we promised, Richard is a fascinating dude. And although our sound wasn't fantastic on the tour, I hope you got sort of a sense of, and now it also wasn't just us wandering through a facility. This was a very secure facility. The was, you know locked doors everywhere and we couldn't go anywhere without Richard and they weren't really in production, they are testing sort of, so this isn't a fully functional, fully licensed place yet. So really it wasn't just two idiots wandering through a facility. We did have handlers and minders and locked doors everywhere, so we're not trying to get them in trouble. 

Kirk: no, no, it was. I found it really interesting. And Dauphin now has a grower in town doing boutique growing and especially designed building for cannabis. We now have an extractor in town. We have a podcast in Dauphin. We have three stores in Dauphin. We're pretty much a cannabis town. Maybe there's cannabis tourism coming to Dauphin soon. 

Trevor: Everybody should come and come and you know, listen to the podcast. Come check out the three stores and who knows, maybe if they'll things loosen up a bit, they'll be allowed to do tours of the boutique grow opp and the cannabis extraction facility. 

Kirk: Yeah, and. And we also have a young lady that's making hemp jewelry. Tamara, who is a known, she's known in the community and she's making hemp jewelry. So I figured I'd give her a little opportunity to, promote her little business. And so let's listen to Tamara talk about hemp jewelry. 

Trevor: Here's Tamara. 

Tamara: Hi, my name is Tamara and my business name is Jewelry by Tam. I make Hemp type of material because it's durable and pretty and it lasts longer and I use some square knots in the to make the fabric like to make the material and recycle jewelry and beads to make it look like a piece of jewelry. 

Kirk: Cool. So you make bracelets. 

Tamara: Key chains and necklaces. 

Kirk: OK, out of hemp into macrame I guess. Yeah, very. And where do you sell them? 

Tamara: Craft sales on my Facebook page called Jewelry by Tam. Hempjewelry_21 on Instagram. Friends, family, people who want to buy one because they're. I do prices 5 dollars $10.00 for necklaces. Key chains 5. 

Kirk: OK. Very cool.  As always Trevor, all this stuff will be on our web page. I've got pictures of the plant that we've been allowed to post, so some of the equipment we saw, we will be put on the web page. I have a link to Tamara’s little business on the web page. I've been doing a lot of work on our web page. If you go to our homepage. Clinics.  On social media, people have asked for our poster. So I've updated our poster with the QR code on the bottom of it. People can go to our homepage and download our poster. You can put it in your clinic, so if you are a practitioner of cannabis, you can put our poster in there if you are selling cannabis at a rec shop or in the states. If you're selling medical cannabis out of your shop. If you want your clients and customers and patients to get the best information about cannabis and a podcast, it's Reefer Medness - The Podcast.  I am the registered nurse. I'm Kirk Nyquist. I'm the registered nurse. 

Trevor: I'm Trevor Shewfield. I'm the pharmacist. 

Kirk: And you can find us at Reefermed.ca, a very dynamic little web page. And also there's blogs on there. And there's new blogs coming and yeah, ReeferMed.ca. Yeah, you should. You should check us out. We're pretty much in the center of the continent. 

Trevor: Pretty, pretty much. You mentioned that one before. 

Kirk: Hey. Hey. You should check us out. 

Trevor: Alright, see everybody later.