Episode Transcript

Audio Transcript

Trevor: Kirk, We're back

Kirk: Hey Trevor, how's it going?

Trevor: Good, so I am slightly less shaved than usual and maybe a little more casual than usual as I am out at the lake. Our cottage within the last couple months just finally got internet connection so I have Wi-Fi at the Lake now and I can do this from here and this is both cool and feels a little weird.

Kirk: Well, you got two lawns to take care of. Did you cut the grass this weekend at the lake?

Trevor: Uh that is probably after this maybe before slightly before after the next nap but. I did uh I did rake up the the beach a little bit and that sort of thing but that does slide me nicely into it uh dog and I went out for a nice long walk already this morning it does smell a little bit smoky out here and we are under yet another smoke warning. Uh Kirk Manitoba seems to be the summer of fires, but we'll go a little bit in the way back machine. Back with one of your many hats in the past, Manitoba, we've evacuated literal tens of thousands of people on and off all summer. You've been involved in such evacuations. A little bit of organized chaos, I imagine.

Kirk: Yeah, I was involved with the evacuation of an Island Lake community called Wasagamach I was working at St. Theresa's Point at the moment. And Wasagamach was being evacuated so they came to a community of gosh, how many people in Wasagamach? I don't know, 1,200 maybe at the time and St. Theresa's Point I think had 2,500. And so, yeah, about 1,300 people stormed onto another community. And stayed at the local high school and we had to create another nursing station at the high school. But now I guess why that's relevant is another community on Island Lake, a community of Garden Hill, which is the largest community. And I think there's close to 4,000 people in Garden Hill now are evacuating to Winnipeg. So I hear in Manitoba, there is absolutely no hotel rooms available because of all the evacuations. Yeah, we're on fire, man. And I guess.

Trevor: Yeah and as a time of this recording like our third biggest city of Thompson is not on evacuation alert but sort of a have your go-bag ready we might tell you know give you a phone call and say hey you've got whatever 12 hours to leave so uh wow crazy time

Kirk: We're not an environmental podcast. We are a cannabis podcast. So climate change, I guess if they grew more cannabis.

Trevor: ... Smoke, smoke, smoke in both of them. True, true.

Kirk: Oh, nice segue. I guess, if we grew more cannabis, we'd have a better environment or hemp. However, let's get into our conversation with a guest that we had in Episode 40, I believe it was. In the podcast, we clarify that. I guess I should look at that, but. . Janna Champagne.

Trevor: Champagne, yep.

Kirk: Um, I think you'll see in the interview that I get a little excited because as she does we start talking and it immediately felt like we were in a cafeteria, bar, whatever. It immediately felt like were sitting across the table each other and just talking and it became like oh my god you just you just, you know in your first introduction you just pretty much answered any question I had because I had very few questions going into this conversation because I really wanted it to be a human interest and catch up with her, you know, I see her on social media, she's busy, but my god, man. I didn't realize.

Trevor: She does everything. We say not all heroes wear capes. I think we should shoot, you know, have a GoFundMe and just buy her a cape because she is truly cannabis superwoman.

Kirk: Well, in the last episode, we were talking about, you know, I brought you a paper, it was more of a qualitative study, it wasn't a lot of science-y stuff. In this interview, I've brought you both science, because we're going to do some science discussions after we come out of the interview, and also a human interest story. So, you know, a couple of things I want to say up front, though, is that I realized I made two mistakes in our conversation with her. One mistake was that Dr. Linda Balneaves, she works at the University of Manitoba, not University of Winnipeg, so I apologize for that. So if you hear that, it's University of Manitoba. And also the other mistake was we don't we don t train internists at the Dauphin hospital.

Trevor: No, they're medical residents, they are future family doctors.

Kirk: So that's another mistake I made. They are family docs. But upfront, I guess, yeah, I went very, I went just upfront before we get into, before we got into the interview, is there anything upfront you wanna talk about?

Trevor: Well and she does get into it but just because I was amazed how I'm going to say that a lot sorry getting redundant but what she's done and how even just since we've talked to her you know when we talked to, her she was a critical care nurse in like a cardiac ward who sort of treated or at least greatly improved on her own Lyme disease and you know she had a daughter who was going through puberty with autism and apparently that is can be really not pretty and she'd managed those with cannabis and things have gone well. Now that, because it was a story we had already that's sort of a story in itself but she goes so much farther just listen for you know that's just That's just the take-off point from the flight.

Kirk: Yeah, actually that's a good segue because we should do a couple definitions up here front so people understand. She talks about how she was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Just very quickly what that is, it's a hereditary disorder of connective tissues. Common features include joint hypermobility, softened and hyper extendable skin, abnormal wound healing and easily bruising. So there's 14 different types of it, but she was diagnosed with Lyme's disease. And we've heard before that Lyme disease is the great imposter, right? Or in... What's the word I'm working on? Imitator.

Trevor: Imitator.

Kirk: That's what I'm looking for. She's been diagnosed I guess the foundation is her Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The other the other one we get into she talks about Stevens Johnson syndrome, which one of her clients she talks a client with that and that's a serious disorder

Trevor: Well, it was a case study, but yeah, it's a truly awful condition.

Kirk: Again, going into what it is, it's a disorder of the skin, mucous membrane, usually a reaction to medication that starts with flu-like symptoms. It follows with painful rashes that spread and blisters, so it's, I mean, as everyone knows, all you have to do is slide in the second base and realize what a raspberry is and how painful, or fall off your bicycle or your motorbike, I guess, fall off a bike and skin your, you know, you get first-degree burns of your skin. This sounds like a disease, I'm not familiar with it, sounds like disease that basically just affects the skin. It must be extremely painful.

Trevor: Yeah and thankfully no one I know or has had it but yeah as mentioned can be fatal and in worse like it's it's like your she's mentioned flesh eating disease which is kind of appropriate because your literal all your skin can come off or goodly chunks of it like it's truly awful and Ehlers-Danlos,  I'm not an expert either but I've run into a patient or two and it's got so many different symptoms. For so many different things but one of the ones that stood out was a young girl who was playing hockey with Ehlers-Danlos and at the beginning of the year they sort of sat the team down, this was you know, eight, nine year old girls and said okay, you know so and so is playing on our team, yep, yep welcome, yep so she's got this disease, where her aorta might detach at some point, and basically she'll be dead before we get her off the ice. Just to, you know, let everyone know ahead of time that this is a possibility. You know, that, yeah. Lots of, you now, should kids with Ehlers-Danlos play contact sports, yada yada, but you know just, yeah, Ehlers-Danlos, many, many different flavors, but yeah, one of the things is that, that connective tissue thing can involve blood vessels, so you know tears in the, the major blood vessel goes here, tears in your  intestines like there's lots lots going on at the Ehlers-Danlos as well.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah. Anyways, let's get into the interview and we'll come out of it because I think there's some sciencey stuff that I look forward to hearing about you speaking about.

Trevor: Oh good, let's see if I cannot trip on my tongue. But in the meantime, listen to . Janna, maybe listen on half speed because she speaks fast and throws a lot of knowledge her way.

Prof. Janna Champagne: My name is Janna Champagne. I am a former cannabis nurse who retired in 2022 in good standing and boycott of unethical policies on the part of my state board of nursing. And at that point, I pivoted and became a board-certified master herbalist. I got my Diplomate in medical cannabinoid science, and I've been serving for five years as a professor of integrative medicine, teaching medical cannabinoid science to future medical students and founder of 501 C3 Autism Safe Haven. Patient consultant. Published author, I write for the American Journal of Endocannabinoid Medicine. I think that's a good summary. Special needs mom, my 23 year old daughter has autism.

Kirk: I think you just did the whole program. Thank you very much. It was nice meeting you. We'll talk again.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.

Kirk: No, we met in episode 40, Trevor Found You, it was back in 2019, we interviewed you. I actually went back Janna and listened to the entire episode just to catch up because you're all over the internet. I see you lots and I forgot I met you five years ago and it was about autism and your own Lyme disease. Why don't we sort of update our listeners to that point? What's happening with your Lyme disease and what is happening with your daughter? Then we'll get into your career because you are everywhere.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yeah, I know and it's I don't like the spotlight, you know, don't Google me it's not reflective of my life. I am a primary caregiver to my 23-year-old daughter with autism still, so I don't live the celebrity life at all, but I feel like this is really important information to be sharing. So that's why I try to step up and share when I'm invited. So thanks for the invitation. So I happened upon the cannabis industry as a nurse who happened to become a patient in 2012 because of Lyme disease, in addition to many other things that have compiled over the years. I've received labels that fell away. And finally in 2021 was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which kind of explained everything throughout my life, all of my symptoms and all of health events. So that's my diagnosis now. And Lyme disease is a predisposition, or you're predisposed to Lyme when you have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome along with Lupus and many of the other labels I had. So that kind of explains it. I was labeled totally and permanently disabled in 2013. Found cannabis thereafter, and it completely transformed my health. I actually seroconverted my Lupus labs, which is unheard of, where you go from positive to negative for autoimmune. In addition to it managing my chronic pain, which was the reason I sought cannabis to begin with was to avoid starting down that opioid death pathway that I've just seen so many patients suffer and could not even bring myself to try opioids for my pain. So that's kind of how it started. And a couple of years later in my own recovery, my daughter with autism entered a puberty crisis and cannabis managed her symptoms beautifully. We didn't have to resort to the awful pharmaceuticals the FDA approved in the U.S. For autism or Risperdon and Abilify, which have horrific side effects. Lots of off-label use of benzodiazepines and anti-epileptics and many other, you know, very sedative and high-risk medications that have side effects that are not only impairing the quality of life, but also potentially life-threatening. So compared to cannabis therapy, which has an unsurpassed safety profile, and as it turns out, per the research, also fills a known deficiency correlated with autism, that just made so much more sense. And so that really spawned a lot of my passion to work in the cannabis industry. And my daughter's story actually published in 2017 on the cover of this sold in Barns and Noble nationwide in the United States. So that was kind of my coming out of the cannabis closet as a nurse. So yeah, that all spawned, you know, my career in the cannabis industry. And I started off as a cultivator. I was initially just growing plants for my daughter and myself to make it more affordable when we were sick. And that spawned into caregiving for patients, which spawned in to one-on-one patient consulting, which spun into realizing I could reach so many more patients if I started educating medical professionals. So I created accredited content for nurses, which is now it's.

Kirk: Okay? You're taking away all my questions. I have a whole list and you've taken a...

Prof. Janna Champagne: Any of that. I'm just trying to give you a good, yeah, or at the beginning here.

Kirk: Fantastic. No, I'm excited for you. This has been a very interesting five years. You and your daughter are still using cannabis. You're both still cannabis patients.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Every day.

Kirk: Okay. And you're adjusting as I guess the symptoms adjust. I met you, you were a Registered Nurse. Now you've since, as you said in the opener, you have since left the profession. It's interesting in the United States you're allowed to go RN retired.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yes.

Kirk: It's not a protected title. We don't have that protected title, once I'm retired I'm no longer a nurse. I of course have my education, I can put the BSN behind my name, but RN is restricted so I can't do that. So I found that interesting. And you are also a Master Herbalist now, so is that where you are practicing?

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yes, I'm practicing as a board certified Master Herbalist, which is a national certification and it gives me a scope to serve patients throughout the United States, where my RN license was more limited on patients. So that really has expanded my scope quite a bit. Yeah, it's been very, very interesting.

Kirk: So that's very cool. Janna.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yes, it has been a very organic process. I just, patient needs led me to doing all of these things. So it wasn't like I had a plan. And it just...

Kirk: This is one led on to the other. I mean, so being a medical cannabis expert, I mean is there a designation in America for a cannabis expert? Like how do you measure expert as a cannabis experts?

Prof. Janna Champagne: Well, you know, I think a lot of people probably call themselves experts and there are doctors that call themselves Endocannabinologists. So that's sort of a term that's thrown around. There is an avenue being built right now for nurses to get a board certification as a cannabis nurse. And that's, we don't even have a timeline on that, but that is something that that they're pursuing.

Kirk: I think I read that a few years ago, this has been in the works for a while, yeah, because when I started thinking about cannabis and going to my college and saying, guess what, I'm going to do a podcast on cannabis, I saw that, I started listening to the board of, so that's still in the work.

Prof. Janna Champagne: That's still in the works and it's I actually wrote an article about that in the American Journal of Endocannabinoid Medicine. That is open source now used to be behind a paywall, but it's open at the moment. So look up endoconabinoidsmedicine.com. I think it is and you can find me as an author and that's one of the articles I published

Kirk: Okay, yeah. I was looking at your Blog Page you've been writing to. You're a professor and where, please remind me, I know you did it in the open, where do you work as a professor?

Prof. Janna Champagne: Actually, I just got a second gig as a professor. So I've been working at John Patrick University for their Integrative Medicine program for about five years. I started that in 2020. And then just this year, I added a position at the Morehouse School of Medicine where I'm teaching clinical application of cannabis therapy to the med students.

Kirk: Okay, this leads me down a different path. Okay, I want to talk about this. I want to talk about endocannabinoid system being taught in medical schools, being taught in. So let's take us down that path. So what can you tell me about that? What is happening in the world, in America? How many schools are teaching it? Is it now, I'm just, you can see how many questions I have. Is it a national requirement for physicians to know the endocannabinoid system. There's my question.

Prof. Janna Champagne: About 2% of schools are teaching the endocannabinoid system as part of their curricula, where logistically it should be in every anatomy and physiology and especially pathophysiology courses. System that maintains systemic homeostasis, meaning it promotes balance throughout the entire body. And when you understand that the cause of every disease is underlying imbalances and it has an unsurpassed safety profile, like this should be our first.

Kirk: Or you're speaking to the converter, completely on your side, where my heads is, so how did you find universities that are doing that? Well done. Or are you the first doing it?

Prof. Janna Champagne: They found me, and I'm not the first. I believe Pacific College in California was one of the first and they had a nursing program that included a Master's degree concentration in Cannabinoid Science. So other universities are starting to pick it up, you know, federally we're working towards rescheduling or de-scheduling of the plant. That's another article I wrote for AJEM. Right. That would actually make it far more accessible to patients right now. You know, we have 50 states and depending on which state you're in and what the laws are, you know, your accessibility really varies and actually in Oregon we're trying to require that all medical professionals here have at least like a three hour course explaining that it's a viable medicine, the stigma doesn't fit and if they aren't feeling competent to serve these patients, they need to refer them to somebody that is. That's kind of the take home message.

Kirk: Exactly. So let's let's, I'm going to narrow my question down. In Oregon, is it a requirement for medical schools, health related schools, to have the endocannabinoid system?

Prof. Janna Champagne: Not yet, working on that as well. I also do legislative advocacy and I've been working with the Oregon State Board of Nursing and trying to get it into nursing curricula in Oregon. Just logically, we are going to interface with cannabis patients in this state where they have had legal access since the 1990s.

Kirk:Yeah.

Prof. Janna Champagne: We just last year finally adopted a scope of practice for nurses serving cannabis patients, which require

Kirk: Hey, I grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, right? Oregon, Victoria, I mean, at one time they wanted us to be our own country. But I remember in the 70s, Oregon was very easy with cannabis. I mean there was, people went to Oregon, no one worried about cannabis in Oregon. But I really want to focus on this. Like Trevor often tells me how he is called into the class of medical internists that work in the family practice program at our local hospital to talk about the endocannabinoid system; talk about cannabis. So you work in a university that does that. I'm so intrigued and you've taken my conversation in a whole different direction. So how many different professions, colleges, students do teach. Just physicians or you teach nurses what other health disciplines are getting your your expertise.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Oh my gosh, I work with a wide variety of students. That's one of the big challenges of being a professor in an integrative medicine program. So pretty much anybody with a bachelor's degree can apply. And so I've taught social workers, pharmacists, licensed marriage counselors, nurses, doctors, pre-med doctors.

Kirk: So it's a three credit university course that you teach, it's a three-credit. See, this is fantastic, man. This, I know, I know that there are people in the University of Winnipeg, Dr. Balneaves, for example, have you talked to Lynda at all? Do you know Lynda Balneaves?

Prof. Janna Champagne: You know, I'm just starting to get connected into Canada and the market up there as and I just last late last year was added as a board member to EduCanNation, which is really, really promoting a lot of the education in cannabis. I want to give them a shout out as well.

Kirk: Hey, we're members, we are involved as well, and that's where I saw you again, was EduCanNation. So yeah, welcome to Canada.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yeah, thank you so much in our countries too. So we're like, you know, we can be the little little neutral safe haven here.

Kirk: Hey, Oregon's always part of Canada. You guys think West Coast is very much Washington State, Oregon, British Columbia there's a tight knit there. But yeah, we'll keep the politics out of it. I just think that's cool that you have a progressive university that they're doing this. I've had so many conversations about the lack of this, that doctors come in and the endocannabinoid systems completely ignored. And the science has been there for 30 years now.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Correct. Yes. Yeah. And I actually just taught a course through cannabis public school. I was either last summer or the summer before timeframes escaping me. But it's a free one CE course where I talk about strategies for approaching naive medical professionals about cannabis and really driving home the truth about the scheduling, how cannabis does not fit there federally. And we proved that in 1988 in a court case. And it's here we are, what, almost 40 years later and it's still there. And helping to break the stigma and also remind them of their ethics, because we are oathed to uphold beneficence, which means we're supposed to be weighing the risk versus benefit of all the options for our patients and helping guide them to the safest and most potentially beneficial option. And the fact that cannabis has an unsurpassed safety profile and the ability to do some of the deep balancing work that most pharmaceuticals cannot touch, most pharma or more intensive interventions are not usually curative. Where cannabis really can promote that balance and just restore health. I mean, I went from 2013 totally and permanently disabled and today I'm working about 65 hours a week. So I would say I'm recovered.

Kirk: You think? Yeah, you think? I mean, and look what you've accomplished. I have often written to nauseam how best practices are held to best practices. Physicians, part of the responsibility is best practices do no further harm. We've interviewed how many people that, you know, cannabis use in dementia. Want to talk about use less harm and get a better bang for your buck, why isn't cannabis a first line drug, you know, for dementia?

Prof. Janna Champagne: Because it competes with pharmaceutical products, period.

Kirk: Okay, once again, we're done. We've finished this conversation. No, of course, it's all about Big Pharma. It's all about the sickness model, right? It's about the crisis. Yeah. Yeah, when I was managing healthcare, yeah, I think that I thought I could herd cats. I decided to get into management and one of my mentors basically said to me, Kirk, the biggest thing about healthcare is that you're managing crisis and if everything is going stable, you have to create the crisis to get the funding. And it's like, why can't we apply a wellness model to the workplace? Why can't just be kinder to each other in the workplace And why can't we provide wellness as our focus? Cannabis to me is, I mean, now I'm going to sound like some sort of green peace out guy, but what I've learned is cannabis is wellness.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yep. Homeostasis is optimal health balance. And that's when it interacts with our body. And really, you know, my perspective, and you'll find this if you look at any of my writings, I use the term harm reduction an awful lot in my titles. And I've written cannabis for autism harm reduction, cannabis for cancer harm reduction and cannabis for opioid harm reduction. And really my plan is to continue picking off just about any kind of chronic illness or chronic condition. And how cannabis is superior as an intervention versus the mainstream model. And you can do it logically, fully cited with all the research to prove it, so.

Kirk: Well, you've contributed to a nursing textbook, which I also own. So so there you're doing it. I am. Wow, I just each one of these little topics could be a conversation.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yeah, it's Medical Cannabis by Carrie Clark. It's a handbook for nurses is the title.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah. So there you are, you know. So you must slowly becoming a center of expertise, right? I mean, your university, if you're doing this, because there are so few doing this. Or are you liaisoning with a network of those doing this?

Prof. Janna Champagne: Not so much anymore.

Kirk: Anymore?

Prof. Janna Champagne: I've kind of gone lone wolf lately. Okay. Here in the States is extremely toxic. There's a lot of bad players. As a result of these bad apples that are ruining the bushel, we're having crackdowns even on CBD hemp in states like California and Texas because the D8 producers are creating these products that are, that look nothing like the flower from the cannabis plant. You know, not the 500 compounds that work in synergy and have this unsurpassed safety profile. They're isolating them and then synthesizing or semi-synthesizing them with really toxic solvents and putting this junk on the market, which really speaks to the lack of regulation in some areas. And unfortunately, some patients are being harmed and so they're cracking down. And it's, you know because of these few bad players, our patient's access is being limited. So it's you know. Beyond that, there's an awful lot of people in the cannabis industry in the US that don't have the medical heart. They're in it for the dollar signs, and not for the patient.

Kirk: This seems to me this is that wall between the recreational cannabis user versus the medical cannabis user.

Prof. Janna Champagne: But there's really no regulation saying this product is medical, this product as recreational. So how do patients know unless we educate them?

Kirk: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see, again, you're just entering Canada. Our history is that a few people challenged our courts, no, challenged our medical profession through the courts that cannabis is medicine, and they won. So, you know, late 90s, early aughts, they won, so medical cannabis has been the bane of our government for decades. You know, young Trudeau came along and legalized rec cannabis, and now all the funding in Canada is not going to medicinal cannabis, it's going to cannabis as a substance of misuse. So if you want to get research into cannabis, you have to have a question that investigates cannabis as potential substance of misuse and also what's happening, you know, we've had medical prohibition for 78 years. We've had legal cannabis for more than 20 years, 25, almost 30 years. In Canada and now they're slowly weaning the whole medical side out. You know, to get medical cannabis and cannabis in Canada, it's online. So people are going to rec stores to get the cannabis. So the government's saying and creating their own crisis. We don't need the medical cannabis industry anymore; or online.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Not true. And actually, I wrote an article about this because we have a similar situation in Oregon where we've had medical since the 90s, recreational since 2014, where anybody 21 or over can grow four plants without any paperwork, with an ID, they can go to a dispensary and purchase whatever they want. So it's very accessible. But the problem is that because the medical patients don't pay taxes on their product. The state is really pushing and has just about destroyed the medical program in favor of the recreational program where they receive a good 25% of the sales. So it's once again, completely profit-driven, not in the best interest of our patients and really it discounts, you know, the fact that our patients do need medical guidance and with pharmaceutical interactions being the primary risk factor of cannabis therapy. Yeah. And we need to be treating him medically and we're not.

Kirk: Interesting, in Canada, it's the reverse. In Canada, our medical cannabis is taxed. Right? So, I mean, and we're fighting to have it not taxed, yet behind the scenes, and I've started the rumor, I'm sorry, it's not me starting it, but I wrote a blog piece, I hear a rumor that, you know, Health Canada wants out. And that's one of the reasons why I think EduCanNation is very important, because I think we're coming up with a new unregulated health professional, and that's going to be the Cannabis Coach.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Wonderful.

Kirk: Well, that's my dream. I mean, if nurses aren't going to learn it, if doctors aren't gonna learn it someone has to, right? So EduCanNation is trying to set up that standard. If we're gonna create Cannabis Coaches, what's the standard? And I like that. So you're gonna be part of that. And I thank your expertise.

Prof. Janna Champagne: I'm on their education board too, so I'm helping to, I haven't had a ton of time, unfortunately, but I believe this fall my time will be opening up and I'll actually be creating content for them, education contents.

Kirk: Good for you. So can you think of another university doing what you're doing?

Prof. Janna Champagne: There's the University of Maryland that has a program specifically for cannabis pharmacists, so it's pretty limited that way. I know that like Bastyr, I believe, has cannabis mentioned as part of their herbal medicine course I've heard for naturopaths, so there's a few, just a handful. It's really not that common and it's wildly popular. You know, especially with the millennials and younger, they don't carry the stigma around cannabis that we see with the boomers and the Gen X generations here. So, you know, they're far more receptive to it and it's just common sense. I mean, a lot of them are even replacing alcohol with cannabis, which I also consider harm reduction. So, there's a lot more acceptance coming, so I believe there's gonna be far more demand for these programs as well moving forward.

Kirk: Well, you must be aware the UN just came out with a recommendation that sugary drinks, alcohol should be taxed. Have you heard that, how the World Health Organization has come up with it? My thought, I was waiting for them to add cannabis and I was thinking that where would you consider cannabis as a harmful substance?

Prof. Janna Champagne: It's only potentially harmful if it's altered by humans.

Kirk: Explain that, please.

Prof. Janna Champagne: There's a case study. Okay, I'll cite a case study. In 2020, we had our first ever death of a patient that was in part attributed to the fact that she took a human-altered form of CBD. So we call it the Maloxicam case study, you can actually look it up. I can send you the link to it. And basically this elderly, lots of factors, perfect storm scenario, not meant to make people fearful, but just to realize that if you're taking pharmaceuticals, you might want to check with a medical professional before you add cannabis to your regimen as a take-home. So she was on maloxicam long-term, she was elderly, so she probably had decreased clearance, so probably higher levels in her serum of that maloxicam. And she had been taking CBD in conjunction, which interacts at the CYP450 pathway. So they can change how one another work through that interaction basically. And she was taking a whole plant CBD, did fine with it, switched to an isolate liposomal CBD that boasted enhanced bioavailability. So totally human altered, made up in a lab, looked nothing like our cannabis flower. And three days later, she began to exhibit known side effects of the maloxicam, a condition called Stephen Johnson syndrome. And about a week later, she died of that side effect of maloxicam. And the theory is that the improved bioavailability of that form of CBD also translated to increased interaction with the pharmaceutical which elicited that response. So that's what happened with the whole plant, cannabis plant. So you can go to the DEA website right now and it says zero deaths ever attributed to cannabis. It was the combination. And more of the maloxicam's fault in my opinion because that was the maloxicam side effect. And not a happy death. I mean, it's basically you can think of like flesh-eating bacteria and dying. It's not fun.

Kirk: So pharmaceutical companies didn't really talk about that much, did they?

Prof. Janna Champagne: Of course not.

Kirk: No, and the DEA, I think the DE A knew it back in the 70s that cannabis was fine. I mean, Richard Nixon knew that cannabis and yeah, he couldn't make money off of it. Big Pharma.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yeah, we have a 1972 NIH study. I actually have a copy of it saved on my hard drive here that the government was trying to demonize cannabis and using THC they actually found that it killed cancer cells without harming the rest of the body and of course they stepped it.

Kirk: Yeah, where did I read? Who was trying to copy, not copyright, but they were trying to trademark it? Where did I...

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yeah, see, that's part of what's driving this reductionist approach to the cannabis flower, because we also have a lot of evidence that the flower in its whole form found, you know, where you're taking that full profile and putting it into a product.

Kirk: Full spectrum.

Prof. Janna Champagne: I don't even like the term full spectrum because it's used very deceptively for reduced products.

Kirk: Okay, carry on. Yeah,.

Prof. Janna Champagne: We have we have products in the US that are CO2 extracted so maybe have a dozen of the 500 compounds found on the whole flower and because it's cannabinoids with some terpenes added they call it full spectrum and it's not

Kirk: Interesting. So, what terminology do you recommend then?

Prof. Janna Champagne: I use Whole plant spectrum.

Kirk: Okay, carry on. I interrupted you. Carry on with that.

Prof. Janna Champagne: No, it's okay. I actually wrote an article on this too, that's at AJEM, on its comprehensive, what's the name of it, comprehensive criteria for assessing therapeutic use of cannabis or therapeutic viability or something like that of cannabis therapy. It's been a few years since I wrote it, but basically it relies on the flow criteria for guiding patients to optimal therapeutic quality cannabis. It is flower-derived because the rest of the plant doesn't have all of the beautiful concentration of the active ingredients that the flower does in the trichomes. You want it tested for purity and potency. That's the only way that you can dose accurately. And as a nurse, I was all about accurate dosing. You want an organic because any toxins that are left in that product, of course, could potentially sabotage the benefits or even make patients sicker. And then the last, the W is whole plant spectrum. Because when you concentrate the flower as nature intended without deliberately removing any of the compounds, which is what 90% of our products in the US do currently, following that reductionist pharmaceutical driven approach, you actually reduce the viability of the medicine by about 75% on dosing. So meaning that if you have whole plant, you can take about 25% of the doses you wouldn't isolate for the same benefits. Isolate also exerts a bell curve response in the body where whole plant is more consistent. It also heightens the side effects and risk factors when you reduce it.

Kirk: So how do you prescribe it? I mean, I can ask you a personal question. How do you use cannabis, consume it? What's your, what's the word I'm looking for? A method of administration. Drops. So they're tinctures.

Prof. Janna Champagne: We put them in capsules so you get the longer duration from the same amount.

Kirk: And so are they pressed, are the extracts, cannabinoids pressed out of the plant? Are they drawn out in cold, cold compresses? I mean,

Prof. Janna Champagne: Yeah, for the raw compounds, they are infused from dried cured flower that has not been heated or decarboxylated. That's how you would get THCA where the acid is still attached. That's the raw form. And that works very differently from when you heat it, the acid falls off, it becomes THC. So THCA is profoundly anti-inflammatory, 20 times that of aspirin, which is about twice that of prednisone for the research. Um, not intoxicating whatsoever, no side effects, very well tolerated. When you heat it, it decarboxylates, you drop off the acid. It becomes THC then is profoundly intoxicating and has a variety of different uses that THC doesn't have. Um, it's also anti-inflammatory, but then you add like it affects your dopamine levels and it can target cancer cells and it could do all kinds of other things. Um, so yeah, and it fills in an Anandamide, which is deficient in autism.

Kirk: So you recommend then cannabis, if you're dosing it, it's raw cannabis.

Prof. Janna Champagne: It depends on the condition. What I do with my patients is take an individualized approach where I assess their situation, I assess their location, I asses what their needs are, help them pick out a product or two or three that might benefit their situation and build a protocol. And because I'm not a prescriber, I'm not a doctor, I can't write pharmaceutical prescriptions, my scope mandates that I have to guide them through an experimental process where they start low, increase slowly, stop where they feel good. Learn how to use the products as needed flexibly, which you can do with cannabis and work around any pharmaceutical interactions.

Kirk: So as a clinician, so your clinician is a herbalist and you apply cannabis in your herbalist practice. So, if someone chooses, I guess I'm trying to look around the law here, someone can go buy the herb from a rec shop by your recommendation, but you're not prescribing it. As a herbalist, you're saying, hey, here are some herbs you can use. This is how I would use it if you were doing it. Okay.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Educate.

Kirk: And do you have other practitioners talking to you? If you've got a patient that you're treating for PTSD, for example, they probably may have a psychologist or phycologist or a doctor. Do you refer back between the disciplines as a clinician?

Prof. Janna Champagne: As long as the patient is approving of it, I do follow HIPAA standards, so I will respect their privacy if they prefer I not speak with their practitioner, but I try to...

Kirk: Of course, of course. To clarify the question, I mean, do they come to you, do your clients readily tell their Western doctors, I'll use that terminology, that they're using cannabis as a therapeutic? And then do the practitioners come to you?

Prof. Janna Champagne: Both. So, what typically happens and how I got started educating medical professionals wasn't that I woke up one day and said, oh, I need to teach medical professionals. It was that my patients, when patients have competent medical guidance of their cannabis therapy, it's really common that they improve their quality of life, they improve their function, and they reduce their reliance on pharmaceuticals, which is part of why they improve the quality of their life and function, because the side effects go away, right? And then they go to their doctors and there are certain medications where if you're taking cannabis with them. You should be really watching because you can get too much of a good thing. Antihypertensive, so blood pressure medications are a good example. You start CBD, it's vasodilating, it's gonna drop the blood pressure, you're combining it with the blood-pressure medication, you can go hypotensive and your blood pressure becomes too low, which is also a risk. You don't want that, you want the balance. And so what I teach my patients is if they're on one of these medications. As they're starting you know my my patient handbook contains a journal where they can write down you know their start with their starting dose how they're feeling before and after and also the parameters of their blood pressure which i say take it every day when you're doing this i mean keep an eye on how it's coming down and when it gets to an acceptable level go to your doctor and say hey can we start reducing my pharmaceutical because because I don't write prescriptions i also can't advise patients on changing them or ending them they have to go with a doctor for that. So just through that interaction, they go back to their doctor and say, I don't need my blood pressure, my diabetes, my opioids, my cancer medications. I mean, it replaces all kinds of different medications very successfully. Well, then the doctor, if they're curious and brave, is going to be I need to talk to this person who guided you and they'll call me.

Kirk: That's great.

Prof. Janna Champagne: That's how I got started. And today I'm mentoring several dozen medical professionals and nurses on clinical application of cannabis therapy in addition to teaching the courses. So.

Kirk: This has been more than I expected. I'm so pleased we got back to you.

Prof. Janna Champagne: I'm writing a book, I swear.

Kirk: Well, do you want to talk about that? I've got about five minutes. I don't want to take too much of your time. I truly appreciate this.

Prof. Janna Champagne: No, I've heard  an author like, we need to write your stories, so we'll see.

Kirk: Well, you've got a good story, and I think it's fascinating. I'm so pleased that we got to talk to you and how the conversation went in different ways. I didn't think we were going to go down these paths. But I mean, in all due respect, you've done this before. And you had my interview done in the first three minutes.

Prof. Janna Champagne: I'm sorry. I didn't mean to blow the whole thing, but hopefully it was a teaser and made people want to listen to more of the details.

Kirk: No, I'm really pleased where we went. This has been a pleasure, true pleasure.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Thank you so much Kirk for having me back with these updates. I  encourage everyone to listen to the first one too. What was the episode number you said?

Kirk: Number 40, episode 40.

Prof. Janna Champagne: Number 40.

Kirk: Take care.

Prof. Janna Champagne: You too. Thanks Kirk. Have a good one.

Kirk: So you can see how the conversation just sort of grew. And grew and grew. And I really tore myself away from her. You know Trevor, sometimes we have these interviews with people and sometimes I just kept interrupting her because I found the conversation so rich and she kept hitting points. Oh stop there, that's an episode in itself. Oh, stop there. That's an Episode in itself and so I apologize for how many times I interrupted her but I was really quite excited as she was telling her story. She is so far ahead of the curve. And just to think...

Trevor: Yes.

Kirk: It's like many of the people we've interviewed, you know, cannabis came to her as a patient. She was a patient of cannabis and her daughter was a patient of Cannabis and through that personal journey, she has now become one of North America's leading cannabis experts. And like she said, she's quiet, she like she's writing papers quietly, but you know, you see her name, it just sort of pops up here and her name pops up there. And yeah, I am I'm so pleased we got the car to catch up with her. What did you think, man?

Trevor: Oh, so much, um, I'm going to throw in that worst case scenario interaction now. So hopefully people forget about it by the end. So I'm so many caveats. So this was the interaction with, uh, cannabis and medication. And specifically this one case study was cannabis and Meloxicam and Steven Johnson syndrome. So, so many, so start with, this is what pharmacists get yelled at by doctors the most, and maybe rightfully so. The doctors just diagnose you, figure out what's going on, figure out good treatment, give you a prescription. You walk to the pharmacy and the pharmacy tells you about some terrible side effect that happens in one in a million people and you go, that's it, I'm not taking my drug. Please keep that in mind that in general, cannabis really safe and really safe with most medications. And even if there are interactions, they can be managed just, you know, keep your doctor and pharmacist and healthcare providers in the loop. But yeah, so we have Meloxicam, which is an NSAID, a drug that does pain and inflammation. Lady's on it. She's on CBD. We'll call it quote unquote regular CBD or whole plant drive CBD, but not. Nothing specials done to it. And then she switches to a one that's got, they're in liposomes, they're on these tiny little fat globs, which makes them get absorbed really well. And I don't know any of us know for sure, but that was at least a contributing factor. So the CBD affects how the Meloxicam is broken down in the body. It changes that. And so now the, Even though you're taking the same amount of Meloxicam, functionally the amount of Meloxicam in your body goes up. And one of the rare side effects of Meloxicam is the Steven Johnson syndrome. And when you have functionally more of it, this lady, older lady who possibly didn't clear drugs as fast got Steven Johnson Syndrome, which is, as we mentioned, the opening is awful and was dead within a week. So, don't make this scare you off from trying cannabis products with your medication but how we'll tuck into the back of your mind is it's nothing is completely benign including cannabis there are some potential interactions and just i think the big thing is keeping your doctor pharmacist nurse in the loop that you're using cannabis and the medication just you know that's the best way to try to avoid interactions like this

Kirk: Yeah, and we've done episodes on this and how cannabis interacts with medicine. So go back in our catalog and you'll find those episodes. Lynda Balneaves episode 104 and Lynda Balneaves Doctor nurse episode 48. The reason why I mention that is because I've talked to Lynda offline a couple of times about the endocannabinoid system being taught at medical schools, at nursing schools, and it's not. And I'm thinking if Lynda's listening to this episode, get a hold of Prof. Janna because you've got a curriculum waiting for you. You know, maybe we need to borrow some curriculum and share curriculum. Back when I was working in the college industry, we sometimes shared curriculums like Red River College shared a curriculum to Assiniboine College, back in Alberta, SAIT NAIT and Portage College in the EMS days when we were the three teaching paramedicines, we shared curriculum. So maybe that's how Canadian schools can get into it, just share curriculum. So I thought that was fascinating. And I stopped, I just stopped and said, let's talk about that. So yeah, she's teaching as a master herbalist. It's a shame that she had to give up her registration as a nurse to do that.

Trevor: Yeah you guys didn't go too much detail about that and maybe we don't need to know too much detail but something about her sort of boycotting something she didn't like about the nursing licensing body and her her part of the world in Oregon

Kirk: Again, it's part of her career and you know, people do that, you know we've interviewed Paul Martin and he had to leave the nursing profession because of some issues. But also, oh an update on Paul Martin, and he's again from a past episode, he's back in nursing. He's back, he is,.

Trevor: Oh, well that's good, nursing,.

Kirk: I should look up.

Trevor: Well, while you're looking that up you know my note my page is just full of notes but you know all the things she was doing you know she was teaching social workers and marriage counselors and pharmacists and nurses and pre-med doctors I thought this was interesting that in the US there they seem to have to do some crackdown on their quote-unquote few bad apples people are using the the hemp derived delta-8 and you know maybe not making it well maybe using some uh solvents they shouldn't be and you're doing actually doing harm to people and that's sort of slowing down access for people who actually need it as medicine and I thought that went nicely into her discussion with you on Full Spectrum versus what she called it which was Whole Plant Spectrum you know from 12 cannabinoids and a few terpenes up to 500 different chemicals what did you think about her distinctions there

Kirk: So once again she educates me right every time we talk to these to these experts that we get on our podcast they always educate me and I try to change my language as I go forward so yeah a Whole Plant Spectrum a whole spectrum versus the plant um yeah I again every one of these every one of these discussions was a whole episode like like getting into the whole THCA and you know and we've done episodes on that, you know about how THCA is a medicine versus just THC. Yeah, it was, again, I would like to have gone deeper, but it was like every one of those little tidbits she gave us was its own episode. So I don't have much more to say than that, Trevor. It's just, you know, I'm going to try to change my language because of it. What did you think of it?

Trevor: And always fantastic and one because you know we each kind of look for our clinical pearl my clinical pearl from this one you know there's lots but one that going oh I don't know if I knew that and I should pay more attention was CBD and vasodilation meaning if you give CBD to somebody their blood vessels might open up a little bit more which might make their blood pressure go down a little and if they're already on a blood pressure pill again, not, we can't do both, but A, we'll have to be a little bit careful and B, on the, on the flip good side, you know, maybe again, this is not a guarantee either. So it's not, I've, Trevor told us all to start CBD and stop taking their blood pressure meds. But we could, if you were on blood pressure, meds and you happen to be starting CBD for something else, it is possible. Your blood pressure med might get to go down or off, but it's just something to watch. CBD and blood pressure mids was a good clinical pearl for me.

Kirk: Well, most of the literature I've read about, you know, cannabis and risks of cannabis have to do with cardiac. And again, we did an episode on that too. So it's, yeah, if you have on your cardiac meds, you have a cardiac condition and you're consuming cannabis, you need to talk to your medical professional, your prescriber. And again this is the frustration that I have with the western side of medicine is that many of your family physicians will not understand the endocannabinoid system and may have to do some studying on this depending on their motivation. I thought one of the pearls was medical cannabis and how medical cannabis in the States is not taxed. And if you remember when I visited the call.

Trevor: Or at least in Oregon, because remember, it's going to be different state by state by state.

Kirk: Yeah, you remember I was in Colorado and they had the medical cannabis corner and.

Trevor: In a different section.

Kirk: And yeah and the reason why medical cannabis wasn't taxed, it was taxed differently. Whereas here in Canada, one of the biggest issues with medical cannabis is that it is taxed. So, you know, governments are always looking for their handout. There's, yeah, again, there was so many parallels in what she was telling us. And I marvel, I marvel at the human interest side of this story about her just finding cannabis. Any other clinical pearls for you?

Trevor: There was so much in there, but no, I'm oh, you know what one more that because who doesn't like a good acronym FLOW criteria for picking your cannabis so flow was F make it flower derived because all or most of the good stuff is in the flower. Not the rest of the the plant Have it tested. I'm not quite sure how that made it L, but it might maybe it was legally tested Organics were avoiding pesticides and whole plant spectrum. So, you know, flow.

Kirk: Yeah, we need to talk to more growers because I guess maybe it's different in the States and that could be part of what she was talking about, the bad actors in the states. Because when we were first doing this podcast, cannabis doesn't need a lot of herbicides. Cannabis doesn't, I mean, it needs nutrients. So, I wonder why people are spraying their cannabis with insecticides.

Trevor: Well, and I won't claim to be an expert, but they talked about it a lot over a year ago now when I was down in Florida. The Delta Eight THC derived from hemp is seems, I'm not saying Delta8 THC is inherently good or bad, but it, there seems to be sort of this truck size loophole for getting things that make people intoxicated onto the market.  So if you make Delta-8-THC... Starting from hemp there doesn't seem to be a lot of regulations and where there's not a lot of regulations there seems to be, a few too many people trying to make a quick buck and so maybe they took hemp that had pesticide on it because it you know maybe was originally intended for rope or maybe they didn't take particularly good care when they extracted it with what what solvents to use and there just seems to just no regulation on this Delta 8 THC and you know even gray market or maybe even completely legal, can sell it in gas stations in the states where it wasn't recreationally legal to get Delta 9 THC. So I think there's just, especially in the US, just this truck size loophole that lets possible fly-by-night companies get things like Delta 8 hemp derived, Delta 8 THC onto the market with minimal oversight.

Kirk: Well, every time I listen to this episode, I did the interview and of course then I came back to it and listened to it again and I just, every time I hear it I get more out of it. So I encourage people to

Trevor: Oh yeah, very, very dense. Listen to this one again. Janna has a lot to say.

Kirk: At the end of this episode, I'm going to tell people maybe go back to the first episode before you listen to this one, but I guess I should have said that upfront just to get an introduction her. So anything more to talk about? We could go on, but we try to keep these things to at least an hour or so.

Trevor: Yeah. So, uh, no, I think I'm, I've said my piece on . Janna, other than thanks a lot Janna. It's really nice catching up.

Kirk: Yeah, and I think I'll be meeting up with her with EduCanNation in the future, another episode we did. This is nice, you know, we've got so many episodes on our webpage, ReeferMed.ca, that a lot of the interviews we do, they seem to be jiving and interlocking with each other. So that's kind of cool, you having 150 odd episodes into the internet there. I am Kirk Nyquist, I am the registered nurse.

Trevor: I'm Trevor Shewfield, I'm the pharmacist. You can find us, our home on the web is reefermed.ca that Kirk spends many hours keeping up to date and looking spiffy, but please also look on your favorite podcasts at, we're on most of them at Reeferred Medness, most of the socials on at Reefer Medness and Kirk has us now up on that there YouTube. Maybe not all of our episodes but now pretty much all of out most recent ones are up there so... Look around, find us, and recommend us to someone.

Kirk: Yeah, find us on LinkedIn. Both of us are very active on LinkedIn. All right, Trevor. I will see you in about 10 minutes as we record another one

Trevor: Everybody else, Kirk and I will have a side thing about another episode, but we'll see everybody else later. It was another good one. Have a good rest of your day.