Episode Transcript

Rene: Welcome back everybody to another episode of Reefer Medness, the podcast. It's Rene here back in the studio. Today's show is going to be a little different. Trevor and Kirk took a walk, took a stroll, meandered through the town of Dauphin, visiting places and recorded their little excursion. So what we're going to do is we're gonna eavesdrop on them. And here's a bunch of audio that they gathered on their walk, and we'll see the town of Dauphin through the eyes of a nurse and a pharmacist.

Trevor: Kirk, We're walking.

Kirk: We're walking.

Trevor: So you're about to leave for whereabouts again?

Kirk: Off to Barcelona, Barcelona on Tuesday. We got a really, we got a really good flight. Brandon to Calgary, Calgary to Barcelona and we get there like 10 o'clock in the morning. So in the sense of jet lag the hope is that I get at least get at at least three hours of sleep or six hours sleep on the plane. It's a nine hour plane ride.

Trevor: And then for our potential next rounds of episodes, one of your first places you're planning on visiting in Barcelona is...

Kirk: Yeah, there's a Th sound apparently. Yeah, our Airb&b, I Googled where it was, and in Spain, medical cannabis is legal, and they have cannabis clubs. So my goal is to, well, I know my goal, I've already done it. I've listed myself.

Trevor: You're officially an international cannabis club member.

Kirk: I guess so, I guess, so there's online, online there's a process and identified myself as a Manitoban coming to Spain and my job is to, I knock on the door and I ask for an individual by name and I go in.

Trevor: Is there a secret Knock?

Kirk: I don't know if there's a secret knock or not, but there is a name I have to say hello to. So I've taken a page. I'm not taking my computer with me on this trip. We're traveling very minimum. So the thought is that we get in at 10 in the morning, we'll find our Airbnb, get ourselves situated, and this club is in the neighborhood. Now of course I'm looking at a map.

Trevor: Is this a walking neighborhood or an Uber? Yeah, well, I think so. And honestly, I don't know. Is Uber a thing in Spain?

Kirk: I don't know. I think I'm more of a walker. So I think what I would do is, I think it's within walking distance because I, I kind of Google mapped it and I think the walk is maybe 20 minutes. So Michelle and I'll just go for a walk and knock on the door, ask for the individual, go in, get oriented and then quickly identify myself and say, hey, what do you think? Can I get a story? And I'm hoping that they say sure. And if they don't, well, I guess I'll try some cannabis in a Spain medical club.

Trevor: That's what I was just going to ask, aside from getting us a story, which we always like, you sign up for, you get accepted as a member of this club, and what, does that get you into a building where you can buy and consume cannabis, or do you know that?

Kirk: That's my understanding because there is a webpage and the webpage has pictures and it looks like a Bedouin tent village.

Trevor: All right.

Kirk: Because there's a lot of tapestries, and they actually list the cannabis's and they actually list to cannabis's. And again, you know, I don't even know if I should be telling you which club I'm going to until I get there. Yeah, no. Yeah. But that's sort of what my thought is. And I mean, I'm I don't know. You know, going to a club, I guess I'll try something and walk home afterwards and Have a... And then do our touristy things. There's things that Michelle wants to see. There is a big church, I guess, that's 120 years in the making and it's still like four or five years away from being completed. Cool. Very famous church. Then from there we go to Madrid. Very quickly from Madrid we go down to Morocco and the goal is to spend three to four weeks in Morocco.

Trevor: So you said a few times, but tell people what the Marrakesh Express and some of these cannabis-related areas of Morocco are all about.

Kirk: Well, Tangiers is known for the beat poets and the beat novelists and those guys got lost in Tangiers and there's a lot of, a lot Hi, hello, but the northern part, the Mediterranean part of Morocco, what are they, the second largest exporter of hash in the world, first or second, okay, and most of the hash goes to Northern Europe, so my goal is to eventually get to that part of of Morocco. So, we are basically going on a trip with friends of ours. They've invited us to go on a trip, and it's their vacation. So Michelle and I are gonna go on their vacation, they've planned out bed and breakfast in Tangiers, bed and breakfast in Marrakesh and bed and breakfast on the seashore, on the Atlantic Ocean. And they're there for three weeks, and when they leave Morocco, we're gonna head towards the Mediterranean side of Morocco, get into Fez and the cannabis growing section.

Trevor: Get on of their fancy hat.

Kirk: Yeah, I think so, but there's a but there is that northern region on the mountains going into the mediterranean that most of the cannabis fields are found And Morocco is illegal for medical cannabis And industrial cannabis, so that's probably what they're talking about is hemp.

Trevor: OK.

Kirk: I'm thinking. So we're going to go there. And from there, Melilla small section of Spain, still is preserved on the African side of the Mediterranean. And from there we'll go into back to Spain and try to pick up on some of the friends that we've met through the podcast and see if I can get some stories in Spain again. And then from there we're going with we're now debating till we go east or west. And so that's where we're at right now. So we're trying to figure out, once we get back to Spain, because I'd like to get to Gibraltar, I'd see Gibraltar. Michelle would like to go see Valencia. And then from Valencia, you can go to Mallorca. So there's all these names, eh? So that's sort of what the plan is.

Trevor: That's very exciting, you know, just as you are leaving on your vacation, I'm coming back from two weeks off doing very little.

Kirk: Oh, you've had your two-week summer vacation? More of less.

Trevor: Yeah Did go fishing with some high school buddies, that was fun. Flying, fishing, northeastern Manitoba-ish. Hung out at the lake, did very little.

Kirk: Oh look, the Bank of Montreal is cleaning things up.

Trevor: They are. I had a very, very low-key vacation and now I get to go try and remember how to get up on time and not have afternoon naps as you guys are flying over to that, there you are.

Kirk: Yeah, so we haven't got our tickets home yet.

Trevor: So you may never come back.

Kirk: Well, no, we got to come back because we got a dog we have to tend to. The dog, you can't just leave six weeks of food for a dog.

Trevor: No, it doesn't work that way.

Kirk: No, they'll consume it in the first day.

Trevor: The first day, puke for the second, and then there's problems.

Kirk: So, we've got to get back in about seven weeks, eight weeks, and Blue Rodeo is playing in Brandon, so I want to go see Blue Rodeo. I'm trying to get a story from Blue Rodeo, their known cannabis Greg Keeler is very much a cannabis consumer, same as Bazil Donovan, the bass player.

Trevor: But we did already get that Desiree Doron story up. That was excellent. I, you know, not just, she was a local and all those other good things, but I thought her and her band did a nice job sort of describing cannabis on the road as a musician.

Kirk: Yeah, so we're just coming up to um just coming up to Payson's Joint. You want to see if we can get a story out of Payson's Joint?

Trevor: Sure How about we pause them and then see what we get. Kirk and I are now walking back now. Before, we've got some nice stories at Payson's Joint. Thank you for everybody there. But before that, Kirk, I don't know about you, but this is my first time watching a Hilti gun get used.

Kirk: Yeah, so yeah we were just an Obsolete Brewing Company which is our local micro brewery and they were building a fence and we were...

Trevor: A pallet fence and the silly, silly people there asked for our opinion because the pharmacist and the nurse are imminently qualified to give construction advice and imminently qualified to say, yeah, I think that's how you use a Hilti gun. For those of you who haven't seen one, it has a literal 22 shell in it to drive a nail into concrete. We had no freaking idea, but no one got hurt, so that was fun to watch.

Kirk: But you actually gave him the right idea.

Trevor: Well, yeah, but 50-50 shot on that one.

Kirk: You would have figured it out.

Trevor: But we were just in Payson's joint and talking to some people there. I think the first person we talked to was Angelina.

Kirk: Yeah, and she's brand new as a bud tender, but she has a background of owning a glass door. I never got too deep into what, Portage La Prairie, and she owned a glass pipe and a sex shop.

Trevor: Yeah, really, honestly, Angelina, I would have loved to have seen your shop. But she had artisans come in and blow glass. She had some of them who made stoneware pipes. And it was also a culmination sex shop. That would have been quite the shop to see.

Kirk: Well, so this is this is her telling us about her shop. So let's go into it. Okay, she goes in this is This is Angelina new bud tender talking about her new job at patients joint.

Angelina: My name is Angelina and I did, I owned a little glass shop. It was actually a glass head shop as well as a sex shop. So it was kind of a little bit of everything.

Kirk: Where was this?

Angelina: This was in Portage la Prairie. Okay. Yeah, and it was wonderful. And it sold lots of beautiful pieces. We had a couple of blowers that would come in and sell us their pieces as well. I had actually made a connection with an old feller that was actually trying to retire and he did the stone pipes. He was part of a community of people that would trade stones and then he would make pipes out of them. They were beautiful.

Kirk: And so these were cannabis pipes or tobacco pipes?

Angelina: They were cannabis pipe, yeah. They were cannabis pipes. Yeah, cannabis pipes, and we actually have a couple here. You can see those little black boxes.

Kirk: Okay.

Angelina: Very, very similar to those, so all different kinds of crystals and rock and they were just beautiful.

Kirk: Nice.

Angelina: And he ended up selling me his entire collection when he retired and I was like, I will sell these. So that was it.

Kirk: So was this pre-pandemic?

Angelina: This was this was pre-pandemic and then the pandemic hit we tried you know tried staying open for quite a while and we did well for a while because there was a lot of influx of money for people at that moment you know it first started so we did well with sales but it just after a few months we just couldn't keep the doors open

Kirk: So what brought you to cannabis? Now we understand you're new to being a bud tenderer.

Angelina: Yes, I'm new to being a Budtender.

Kirk: So tell me about that.

Angelina: I have done it in the past. It was something I did a couple of years ago for another company. They needed some help, and I'm pretty well versed in the industry. I've been a smoker myself for over 20 years. And being that I sold all the paraphernalia, I knew quite a lot about it. So it was just made sense.

Kirk: cool. So how long have you been a budtender?

Angelina: Actually, I was only there for a couple months, and then I moved on with my life. I was doing something different full-time. So, when I moved out here, I'm actually in school full- time, so...

Kirk: At the college.

Angelina: Yeah, I'm back in school again.

Kirk: What are you taking?

Angelina: I'm finishing my counseling diploma.

Kirk: Oh, cool.

Angelina: Yeah, so I'm taking that in trajectory that I'm looking forward to. It's still going to kind of be within the industry, but so far right now. So I needed, I just moved out here a couple months ago. I was like, I need a job.

Kirk: Well tell you what, here's a suggestion, you get your diploma in counseling and go look into some of the episodes we have with EduCanNation and become a cannabis coach and you've got yourself a new, unregulated way to go because your counseling diploma allows you to sort of go that way.

Angelina: It's kind of the way I want it. I want to get into the sexual trauma and counseling and coaching. Because I've sold sex toys my entire life as well, something I've done since I was 18. And something I really enjoy doing. So when I had this shop and it had both aspects of it, it was just my dream.

Kirk: Pipes and sex stuff, it just sort of goes together, doesn't it?

Angelina: It does! It does. It does. It does! It does, it goes hand in hand. It can. So, that's kind of where this has brought me, brought me to Dauphin. And now I was like, I need a job. And I see that they were hiring, so I came and spoke with Kimmy.

Kirk: Or how long you're in Payson's Joint

Angelina: This is my second shift.

Kirk: Well, I'm glad that we introduced you to the Reefer Medness. I'm a nurse, he's a pharmacist, and we can talk about medical cannabis. Thank you. So you can tell people about our podcast and answer medical questions that way.

Angelina: Yeah, you bet.

Kirk: We should let you go to work, but thank you for your story.

Angelina: Yeah, so first, thank you.

Kirk: As we as I shut the tape off Trevor she started talking about.

Trevor: Even more interesting stories.

Kirk: About the sex side of her shop and how we need to research this. Um, what was it High on Love?

Trevor: High on love, and I can't remember if we got on tape or not, but she's actually in school right now to be a counselor. And one of the things she's interested in is helping people, we'll call it sexual dysfunction, but you know, some people have some trauma.

Kirk: I don't know if it's sexual dysfunction, but sexual education.

Trevor: Sexual education. But yeah, no, she's a very interesting person. And then she started talking to Kirk a little bit about this High on Love.

Kirk: High on Love so let's let's get into that. You're just telling us about a cannabis cannabis sex related story. What was that?

Angelina: There's a product out there called High On Love, and I do believe, now don't quote me on this, but I do believe they are out of Toronto.

Kirk: Okay.

Angelina: And they create sex products such as lube, lotions, oils, bath oils. And are all infused? And they're all infused with CBD. So.

Kirk: There's no THC, just CBD. So it's anti-inflammatory side?

Angelina: It's really. For people that have difficulties having sex, essentially, or if you experience any kind of pain or anything like that. These CBD products are geared towards those types of individuals that are, you know, looking to heighten their experience a little bit, not have the pain associated with it as well. So that was a big product. I still, hands down, High on Love. It's a beautiful, beautiful product.

Kirk: Ah yeah, nothing like two older guys talking to a younger woman about, you know...

Trevor: Sex stuff.

Kirk: Sex stuff, yeah. And thank God my professional side comes out every so often. But that was it, that was curious.

Trevor: And then we cornered Mark, who you may or may not have seen before, he was actually featured in a Kirk and I were trying to do some, what are we going to call them, PSAs.

Kirk: We're working on the 60 second cannabis consumer commercials.

Trevor: Yeah, and Mark was a featured budtender in one of those, so this one, we had him give us a story.

Kirk: Yeah, we walked in and said, can you give us a cannabis story? And it's always interesting to walk in a cold call into a cannabis store and ask people for stories. And many times, we've done road stories, and people can go back in our catalog and look at our road stories. But Mark, I just said, Mark, give us a cannabis stories. Tell us about a customer. And he told us about this customer. So let's just go right into it. So what's the most popular product right now?

Mark: Our most popular product right now is a toss-up between some of our mid-range ounces and our 14 grams. Those have been selling pretty quickly as well. Greencraft cannabis also is really good.

Kirk: Green, Greencrafts is selling well.

Mark: Yeah, Greencraft sells really well. They sell out constantly all of the time.

Kirk: Is it because it's local people that buy in or it's just good cannabis?

Mark: It's really good cannabis and the fact that it's local people really want to support the local businesses and stuff like that. So when they're able to come to our store here, which is a locally owned store, and then buy some locally grown cannabis, it really helps them feel like they're contributing back to our community. And we really appreciate it because then we get to come into work every day. Greencraft gets to get growing their stuff and growing their own business and supporting jobs here in Dauphin. So we really appreciated that quite a lot.

Kirk: So you were saying about 14 grams is the most popular, is that most popular weight that people buy or what do you mean by?

Mark: Yeah so 14 grams is a pretty common like it's a half ounce because ounces in stores come in 28 grams and then you can get 14s, 7s, 3.5s those are your common weights that you get in stores and then you also get pre-rolls but yeah 14s have been pretty popular the last little while I've noticed and some of our mid-range 3.50s back 40 has been pretty poplar they're always up from there

Trevor: now mark also again two stories from Mark which was which was cool uh you guys started talking about

Kirk: So I asked Mark for another, again, we turned off the tape recorder and we were just talking. And he said, buddy, that sounds like another story. So we got into packaging.

Trevor: Yeah, so it's been sort of a bugaboo of yours for a bit about how much extra plastic comes with your cannabis now. So let's listen to Mark packaging

Kirk: And packaging, is it less packaging now? Because in 2018, everything was in plastic, you know, is everything still in plastic?

Mark: A lot of stuff is in like these kind of like plastic aluminum sort of bags or they're like a plastic

Kirk: Oh, the bags that adults can't get into. Yeah, those, yeah, but...

Mark: Yeah, the adult proof bags that we can't get into. But yeah, the bag packaging has reduced in size. The ounces, a lot of them don't come in those big 12-inch tall bags anymore. What's an ounce look like? An ounce will come in a small bag, maybe about six to five inches tall by eight inches wide, maybe. It's enough to squeeze the ounce in there, but without crushing the bud and stuff.

Kirk: Okay.

Mark: Um, but yeah, there's some bags like uh, some brands big old bag of buds That's kind of just like their thing is just like a big bag But even they've reduced their stuff on a lot of other packaging has reduced in size. Um, I do appreciate that some of our packaging now is able to come clear So we're starting to get our 3.5 from Greencraft. Okay, they're black to cape We just got in the last two batches of it. Can we see it? Yeah

Kirk: So we're going to go have a look at the packaging for North for Greencraft which is local and is it in a clear bag or clear jar?

Mark: It comes in a cleared jar.

Kirk: Okay so that's okay it's plastic oh it's a jar.

Mark: Oh it's a jar. It's a glass jar. Look at that. You can actually see what the flower looks like.

Kirk: That's amazing. Am I allowed to touch that? Okay, that's a man. That's oh wow. Nice looking bud.

Mark: Yeah, same with them. We just got another one, 3D Genetics by Pure Michigan, that came in a clear bag as well. It's a 7 gram, and we can see that. Customers have been asking for years if we can get clear packaging, when can we get clear packaging, because they want to see what they're buying. That's super important to our customers, and it's important to us too, because then we can also make sure that the quality of the bud is up to what the customer is wanting. Some people are looking for big fluffy buds, some people like the smaller kind of dense buds. And it's hard to tell when all you can do is kind of give it a little shake and that's kind of it.

Kirk: And if you squeeze them, you're breaking the trichomes.

Mark: Yeah, and you don't want to squeeze the bags of them to feel like, yeah, you can give it a little touch to be like, yeah, it's soft, but you don't want to squeeze it to where you're compacting the vines and stuff like that. So it's really nice for the packaging is starting to come clear. It's a big it's a big plus. I'm hoping for the pre-rolls for those to either start coming clear or for them to start labeling what style of roll they are on the packaging, because a lot of people want cigarette style or they want cone style, traditional style roll.

Kirk: Yeah.

Mark: But the packaging doesn't really say so we have to go online and look it up but there's plenty room on the packaging for them to put extra information on which would be really great and pretty beneficial to both the tenders and the customers buying it. It would lead to a lot less confusion and a lot more happy turnout with customers for brands.

Kirk: Very cool. So the most popular is still flower here in this shop. People come with flower.

Mark: Yeah, it's a toss-up for between the formats of cannabis. Yeah, flower is pretty popular. A lot of people pick up pre-rolls during the summer when they can go outside, but when you're stuck inside during the winter, a lot of people tend to pick up flower or like extracts and stuff. Extracts and concentrates don't smell as much as cannabis does. Right. So a lot people prefer to smoke those ones indoors because they don't have the same kind of stunky flower smell that cannabis leaves. Okay. But yeah no definitely um pre-rolls get pretty pretty popular during event seasons right yeah stuff like that anytime we have anything going on in town pre- rolls get pretty popular but generally yeah our 3.5 our 7 grams are popular very cool

Kirk: That's really cool.

Kirk: So this is very cool that that we're now getting the packaging like any Greencraft again, plugs to Payson's Joint, plugged to Greencraft. These are local cannabis businesses in Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada, pretty much the center of the continent. And, uh, but they're doing clear packaging. So now you can look at the bud and that's been one of my bugaboos. And, and it's not that I buy a lot of commercial weed because I do grow my own and, and, and um But one of my bugaboos has always been that you can't see the weed, you can see the cannabis you're buying. When legalization first happened in 2018, a lot of stores had.

Trevor: Sensory chambers.

Kirk: These little things you can go look at and this is what I want. But, but, um, interesting enough. This story we just grabbed as I was walking, we were just coming back from obsolete. We had a couple of beers and we were meeting with the boys making the fence.

Trevor: Before we talk about chocolate fondue you had you had one other guy in in the store one other anonymous you know and if Kirk ever approached you on the street and says you want to give us a cannabis story say yes and you don't have to give your name like this guy

Kirk: Yeah, yeah, this is anonymous, and this is us talking to Mark and Angelina, and a customer said, hey, can you give me a story? And the guy gave us this story, and again, this was just an average guy buying weed in a cannabis store, and it's anonymous talking to us. I'm just sitting in patients' joints talking to a customer, and I was just asking them about cannabis. Do you consume recreational cannabis, or do you use it for medicine?

Anonymous: Yeah, I use it for myself and it's good stuff, it's actually relaxation and everything, it just makes the body feel nice and relaxed and stressful, whatever, it takes all that stuff away.

Kirk: Yeah, do you like your Sativa or your Indica? Do you care? What made you choose what you bought today?

Anonymous: Uh they're all uh pretty much do the same i guess yeah like it it does make your body feel relaxed eh that's the good thing about it especially with stress and anxiety and things like that all right

Kirk: Right on, man.

Trevor: Yeah, we're coming out of anonymous. So we're walking by Payson's Joint again. It's kind of like it's our second home there today.

Kirk: Well, we just we just went and visited.

Trevor: Obsolete.

Kirk: Obsolete and we just visited Stephen and Ryan. They're building they're building a pallet fence.

T With a Hilti gun,.

Kirk: With a Hilti gun. And we're walking by and Oliver don't know from Adam is walking out of Payson's Joints. Hey, can you give me a story? And he gives me a story of chocolate fondue. And he thinks he thinks that he thinks that maybe there is two different types of strains in his ounce that he bought.

Trevor: two or three.

Kirk: Yeah, which is I have not heard that story before, so let's listen to that.

Oliver: My name's Oliver.

Kirk: Okay, and?

Oliver: And when weed first became legal, I went to the weed store to buy something on the day it came legal and the line was out into the parking lot. So I didn't want to wait in line. So I thought I'd come back the following day. And when I came back, all of the small packages, all of one grams and the eights. And the quarters were all sold out and all they had was ounces and half ounces.

Kirk: oh, Man

Oliver: The very best ounce, like the highest potency ounce they had was this one called chocolate fondue. I had just come back from working in the territory, so I wasn't hurting for cash. They wanted $406 for this ounce. So I bought it. Like I said, I wasn't hurt for cash at the time. Three months later, I ended up going back and buying that same ounce, and there was three different kinds of weed in there.

Kirk: Oh really?

Oliver: In the same ounce.

Kirk: That's broken coasts I think, isn't it?

Oliver: The thing about the chocolate fondue is after you would have a hoot and when you would blow it out at the tip of your tongue and right behind your two bottom front teeth it would taste like you just had a sip of hot chocolate or.

Kirk: Interesting.

Oliver: The bubbles hence the name chocolate fondu but uh after three months I like I said I went back I got another ounce and there was three different kinds. And the way I knew it is that I dumped the whole thing out when I got it at home. There was three colors and each color had a different taste and only one, one... The darker green color was the only one that had that original chocolate fondue taste.

Kirk: So you're thinking that they package different strains into one one?

Oliver: I think after all, yeah, like after the novelty of it all wears off, like, back then that was bouncing around between 24 and 29 percent. And after the novelty of it wears off like, you know, the lemon diesel or the, what was that other lemon one? There's another good one that started with the lemon there and I noticed that after a couple months that not only did it not taste the same, but the potency wasn't the same.

Kirk: And I remember chocolate fondue because I think it was also my first weed that I bought and I think its broken coast.

Oliver: Yeah, it was my first legal weed that I bought from the store.

Kirk: Interesting. Well thank you Oliver, I appreciate it. Alright, cheers. Well, we're walking pretty fast.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah, you're dragging me right along making sure I get my steps in today.

Kirk: So this is, this is Reefer Medness the podcast on a day in Dauphin walking around finding cannabis stories. I'm Kirk Nyquist. I'm the registered nurse.

Trevor: I'm Trevor Shewfelt. I'm the pharmacist. Hopefully you can hear that over the traffic.

Kirk: Oh, yeah, we're walking down the street, man, and you can find us at Reefer Medness the podcast at reefermed.ca and

Trevor: on all them there social medias on Reefer Medness.

Kirk: I think my neighbor needs to cut the lawn.

Trevor: Well, you're going to be good neighbors do not complain. And remember, if you listen to us and you should and you are right now, whatever podcast app you're using, leave us a review, say something nice. It really does help people find.

Kirk: Yeah all right cool that was a nice walk Trevor

Trevor: I think that worked well.