Episode Transcript

Trevor:   Kirk, we're back. I'm still Trevor Shewfelt, the pharmacist. Who are you again?

Kirk:  I'm Kirk Nyquist, still the nurse, registered nurse.

Trevor:  So let's, let's review because I'm old and get confused and you complain, I complain about being old, even though I'm not.

Kirk:  You're the youngest one in the team, dude.

Trevor:  We've been traveling with you and Michelle through Europe, specifically Spain, specifically Barcelona and Madrid. So you toured us through cannabis clubs,.

Kirk:  Social clubs,.

Trevor:  Social clubs and then, uh, cannabis shops, which are legal, illegal, semi gray zones. We're going back to the cannabis shops and then we're going to introduce a, a very special guest named.

Kirk:  Peter, Peter Vermeul.

Trevor:  And then after we get a little introduction to Peter in this episode, Come back for following episodes where we actually get way in depth in what Peter does and some of the really cool extracts and stuff he makes.

Kirk:  Yeah, this, this all happened rather organically. I like the fact that we called the first two episodes of Marijuana in Spain, because in some ways it does reflect the fact that we're going to marijuana clubs in the sense of using marijuana as a, as cannabis, as marijuana, as an intoxicant. So these, these, these social clubs that I went and visited and then we, we, we called this episode Cannabis in Spain because there are Cannabis Shops selling hemp products that have manipulated THC products and I'm still not quite clear what these products are THCX and THCP that we discussed in these episodes. So yeah, let's back into the cannabis being sold in Spain.

Trevor: We are switching gears here, little slash, giving a preview, a little, uh, Peter Vermeul. Uh, do you want to talk a little bit about Peter or how you ran into Peter or how, how do you wanna get into this next conversation?

Kirk:  Yeah, I think Peter was one of the fellows I reached out to before I left Canada. Peter is involved with Biosource Botanicals. He is the breeder and they're using his medicine in their practice.

Trevor: This. Like his plants and so for I don't have the episode number in front of me but look up Bob Hill and you'll find our previous episodes with.

Kirk:  Bob Hill the electric the electric high. And then we also did a panel discussion, which was...

Trevor: I think we actually called Biosource.

Kirk:  Right. And it's actually the first episode where we did video. That's what started us and launched us on EV1, Episode Video Number One. It's on our web page, it's on YouTube, we have a YouTube channel. Peter's an extraordinary man. I'll introduce him, but just to give you some sidelines for his next quote. He is a legitimate cannabis source. Uh... In the sense that he's a man that's been involved with the European cannabis industry since the eighties uh... Any eighties he was selling his homegrown crop from the netherlands to to Britain And he talks about this, this is not something he hides, I'm not giving anything away here to get him in trouble, but he was growing pot back in the late 70s and early 80s to make money. He's called a legacy grower nowadays, but what Peter did is Peter went off and started breeding his own and he was actually breeding his own high CBD products. As the Stanley Brothers were creating Charlotte's Web, he was creating his own. So the Stanley brothers are accredited for coming up with the high CBD strain that helped the Charlotte girl with her seizures. Well, in the meantime, Peter's doing this in Europe. Peter also was involved with people like Raphael Mechoulam out of Israel and he started developing relationships with scientists around the world and started asking questions because he was trying to figure out I mean after, you know, he made his money selling weed and he started developing his own medicine. A family member got cancer and he starting figuring out that cannabis helped them and so he went on his own mission. And without going too deep into the story, Peter has developed a patented process that he's able to take the plant and put the plant essence into a bottle.

Trevor: Right. And just as we mentioned before, but just to reiterate, there are probably hundreds of cannabinoids, terpenes, bioflats, like there's lots and lots and lots of stuff in a flower, a bud of cannabis.

Kirk:  Sugar leaves, even the fan leaves.

Trevor: Right. So there is lots of stuff in there. And we've had this debate back and forth, you know, do you want to extract one cannabinoid and use that as medicine or do you want a quote-unquote whole plant extract where you get a bunch of cannabinoids and terpenes and then it's that better. Peter's definitely on the whole plant extract is better. The acidic forms of the cannabanoids are better. And interestingly, because if you've ever taken a chemistry class, the whole idea about extracting is usually you're trying or or even Kirk trying to make alcohol. There's a whole bunch of stuff in that mash and Kirk wants just the alcohol out, so the whole idea behind extraction is to find one thing in your mash of stuff and take one thing out, so the fact he can take a bunch of things out at the same time is remarkable.

Kirk:  Yeah I don't want to give too much away because I want people to come back and listen to his episodes but essentially just think of what's inside of a cannabis plant. Now remember this man is growing hemp in Spain. So his plants, his breeds are hemp plants, high CBD hemp plants and he also has breeds that are high CBG. And but his patented process and and and again we're gonna we're going to talk about Peter, he was so gracious to Michelle and I and gave us such a great story but he's driving us home. We spent the day with him and his partner at their house, and we sat and had tea with them. We played with their dogs. We walked the property. He's got his genetics on his property, so I was able to look at his genetics growing on the property, and on the drive home, we're talking, I'm recording, and this is his perception of these CBD shops in Spain. And it's quite intriguing and horrifying what he believes is happening in these hemp shops. So, cautionary tale. These shops that are in Madrid and in Barcelona that we've witnessed, and they were selling THCO and THCP, you were telling me that these were products that were hemp flowers that nothing in them but they were Salting with this stuff?

Peter Vermeul:  Most of the time they buy CBD flowers, CBD flowers you can buy for 250-300 euro from one kilo, dry flowers. You can smoke it but it will become not stoned or whatever. They sprinkle it, and first they change the CBD isolate. CBD isolate is very very cheap on this moment, especially in Europe. And they change CBD isolate in THCP, THCO, Delta8 and that kind of stuff. It looks like Delta9. You become stone off the product, but it is legal but it is not official Delta9 and they sprinkle it all over the CBD flowers and then you have the THC-P flower or whatever. But don't understand, it's very dangerous, the THCP is 35 times stronger than normal THC. There are all chemical compounds inside the product. One year ago, AAC, also sold product, looked like a little bit DELTA-8. That was also legal in the Czech Republic, I believe. 270 children are in the hospital after eating gummies with that kind of stuff.

Trevor: So, yes, children, injured, bad.

Kirk:  I did Google it.

Trevor: I was just going to say you were a good journalist and had a look into this.

Kirk:  I did Google it and there is stories about children getting harmed from these gummies in Czechoslovakia I believe is where it happened but again it was very difficult to get down to the specific stories but one year ago AAC, yeah he talks about that. So this is Delta 8 again, it's a chemical analog of Delta 9. It's chemically, it's chemally manipulated. You know, I don't want to be that guy saying, you know, man stay with the plant, but there are so many interesting things happening in the cannabis industry and the ingenuity of humans that they're coming up with all these things. And the fact that they are buying CBD buds and then sprinkling the stuff on it afterwards, I'm sorry, if you're going to Spain and you want consume cannabis, please be cautious when you buy it from these CBD stores, because you're not necessarily getting what you think you're buying. Buyer beware.

Trevor: Right. And just to sort of go back to, we'll call it the economics of it, if you really wanted to avoid Delta 8 THC and its derivatives in both Spain, the US, and other places, you could just legalize the whole plant, including the THC, because people are looking for, or some people, recreational users, are looking for the high from the THC. If they could just get that from the cannabis plant, no one would have to, delta-8 THC might have some interesting medicinal uses or other things, but there would be no drive to try to add the high back to hemp after you've it out.

Kirk:  Yeah. You know, cannabis is, again, we've done 160 odd episodes. I've read, I can't remember how many research papers I've read on cannabis, the conversations I have about cannabis. You know, I'm just sitting here thinking about cannabis, and one of the reasons why I wanted to get these stories from Spain is that I'm curious about cannabis and I wanted to get an international flavor in our podcast. We went down to Colorado a few years ago, we got that story into our podcast, we interview people from all over the world, so we have cannabis science from all of the world in our podcast. My goal with these last two episodes we just did was to say what is happening in cannabis in Spain. And what I'm starting to realize is that, I don't know if you're old enough to know this, Trevor, but Rene probably remembers the 80s when we started doing worm composting and we started doing recycling and the whole world, you were probably in high school at the time Trevor. But the world was getting together and Carter was president and solar panels in the White House and we were going into this recycling world and the world was going to be better.

Trevor: Yeah, that was terrible.

Kirk:  Yeah, that was awful. Yeah, no one made any money off of it. Reagan came in, smashed it all up. But anyways, we had this hope. I think cannabis is there because, you know...

Trevor: Earth Day's a scam, man. Huh? Earth Day is a scam man.

Kirk:  But we all know what's happened to recycling programs. I live in Manitoba, and it's a socialist province. We've had more socialist governments, NDP, not American socialism, but Canadian socialism. We've have NDP governments here. In Alberta, which is, again, another jurisdiction in Canada, it's mostly considered a conservative spot. Well, I can take a pop can in Alberta and get 10 cents for it. In a conservative environment. In Manitoba, my pop can just goes into the recycling bin. I don't get my 10 cents, but I paid my 10-cent premium on the can, right?

Trevor: Because Capitalism works man.

Kirk:  Yeah so I think equating cannabis to the recycling programs I think everyone is really excited you know okay finally the world is lightening up on cannabis right. But what's happening is I think capitalism, big pharma, government is starting to realize that if we just let people grow their cannabis in their backyard, we can't make money off this, right? So I think what's happened now is that the world is saying, well, cannabis is bad for you. We'll let hemp because hemp's not bad for you, but capitalism has come up with the fact, well how do we make money of hemp? How do we get people high off hemp? So, I think... The world was shifting that, you know, cannabis is okay. Let's, let's give people cannabis like we give them alcohol. But not really, because, you know, we still don't necessarily, we need to make money off of it. So I think this is what's happening. I think in Spain, people don't know how to make money off marijuana, so, you know, they create these clubs because we need a place to consume it. And we'll take advantage of the laws by saying, this is a private club, you have to pay private membership fees, and this is private building. So in Spain, you're allowed to consume your marijuana in a private place. So now we have clubs.

Trevor: Yeah, and I agree. I agree, but just because so the other spin way is that this is a unnecessary regulation. So, you know, as a true capitalist get rid of the regulations, you know, get rid get rid over the regulation for not having THC and you get rid of the negative externality. There's my economics word of the day of people want to get high there is a demand for getting high.

Kirk:  Yeah,.

Trevor: And if you don't let them get high It's like alcohol prohibition, etc. They'll find another way and that's where the Delta 8 THC and this, you know THC-X P O,.

Kirk:  Yeah.

Trevor: Are coming from so if you just and you know the whole we don't want to let them grow in their backyard that's just like tomatoes and beer. We can grow tomatoes in our backyard. We can make beer in our basements. Most people are not going to bother. They're going to pay somebody else. That's because capitalism works. I don't have the time or the expertise to make good beer. I'll buy it. I won't have time or expertise to grow cannabis in my backyard. I will buy it, so again, I think we're coming at it again as usual from two different, but you know, capitalism works and capitalism says get rid of the stupid regulation. Sorry, Spain, that says no THC and these other problems will go away.

Kirk:  Well, but it's the same thing, I think, happening in America. I mean, America has more medically and recreational legal states than they do not, because I mean the number is someplace in my head that how many states in America are now.

Trevor: I want to say 38, 39, but we're right, well over half.

Kirk:  More that you can consume it recreationally, but you can't cross borders in the states with cannabis because federally cannabis is illegal. But now I don't know in the last couple of weeks there's been a whole bunch of hemp stuff going through the Congress down there and didn't they just, didn't it just banned hemp now?

Trevor: Hemp is going the wrong the wrong direction

Kirk:  Yeah, I think because people were coming up with these ways of selling hemp products out there now to bypass the whole thing. So it's very confusing. You know that recently in Manitoba, Manitoba was just given permission to grow our four plants indoors. Manitoba does not allow plants to grow outdoors. I have a medical license that allows me grow cannabis outdoors. In Canada, I'm allowed to grow cannabis outdoor with my medicinal license as long as it's not near daycare children etc etc right so one. In May, knowing that we were going to, we're going to travel at the end of August, knowing that harvest was going to be questionable, we did not plant a very big garden this year. We planted some carrots, we put some tomatoes in, and so I had garden space. So I have a license. I'm allowed to grow 10 outdoor plants. And I have, I've set up my garden in such a way that it's, it's protected from the alleyway and is protected. If you get into my yard, there's a fence around the garden because I have dogs. So to get into my garden, you have to go through two fences, and there's no daycares near me. So I threw 10 seeds into the garden and forgot about it. As summer wore on, I nurtured them. I cared for them. They're growing. Uh, so. August, I'm leaving August 27th. So August 25 I go into my yard. I'm preparing my yard because remember I'm coming home in October so I know that in Manitoba October could have snow. So I'm setting up my backyard for winter in August because I'm gone, right? So I look at these plants and I'm going, ah, they haven't sexed themselves yet. They haven't sexed them. So I went into the garden and got out a magnifying glass and figured out This guy's a guy, so I pulled him. This guy I don't know what this one is. I pulled him or her but three plants out of the ten were definitely female. I was 95% sure that they were female. They were just throwing up the hairs. The flowers hadn't been identified but I guessed and again I wasn't worried about it because nothing ventured, nothing gained. So we left home for six weeks. Apparently it was very hot in early September.

Trevor: It was.

Kirk:  We had some huge rainstorms, apparently. I wasn't here for it. We're traveling around. We come home from Barcelona. We get home at three in the morning. Back into the garage. Michelle's tired. I'm tired. First thing I do is get out of the car and go into the backyard.

Trevor: Of course you did. With a flashlight.

Kirk:  Phone, flashlight and just went out there just to see right because just to see and

Trevor: I think of the dog.

Kirk:  Well, I didn't have the dog. The dog was being boarded. But I get in there and I open the gate and I go into the end and it's dark out and I just touch and I got three plants full of flowers, right? The next morning I wake up, we got a frost, right, we've got a frost. You guys got a frost I wasn't here for it. So I go into my backyard I've got three stalks they're sativa plants I had topped them before I left because they were starting to grow above my fence line at that point so I topped them and left them and so I came home the frost knocked all the fan leaves off the sugar leaves protected some of the flower and I had some that had a little bit of frost burn. Cut them, hung them in the basement. I got five and a half ounces of very, and again, medicinal license, because in Manitoba you cannot grow outdoors recreationally. I have medicinal license just clarifying it. Five and a one-half ounces of the best bud I've ever grown. And the only lesson I learned about growing cannabis is that just leave them alone. Don't touch them, right? And, um... These are seeds that a couple of years ago, again someplace in our library we talk about this, Michelle and I took Van Hoot for a spin out to the west coast. You were taking care of my plants for me in my basement and I had stressed the plants out and the plants went to seed. They weren't fertilized seeds, they were stressed seeds. Who knew? So I have this bank of seeds that I draw from, and so I'm growing my own genetics, I guess, and in the backyard. And I have since made salve out of those plants, and I make a lotion for my joint pain. That's a whole different story. And I also, I get in future episodes, because we've got four more episodes of Kirk and Michelle traveling in Morocco and Spain, and we'll talk about how Kirk crosses the border with cannabis.

Trevor: Yes, that's a good tease and we'll say Kirk is obviously here, so it didn't go as badly as it could, but we'll leave that tease for a future episode. But I should probably say at this point, I'm Trevor Shewfelt, I am the pharmacist.

Kirk:  I'm Kirk Nyquist. I'm still a registered nurse who's going out and gathering cannabis stories.

Trevor: Reefer Medness The Podcast. All things Reefer Medness at reefermed.ca or type Reefer Medness into your favorite podcast app, leave us a review and five thumbs ups, because you know, that really does help other people find us.

Kirk:  Yeah. We have a whole lot of stories. I call it a cannabis knowledge library. We have transcripts. All the research is there. That's one of the most important things is that when I talk about cannabis as a nurse, a registered nurse, I have to be confident and I'm speaking facts. So most, most of what I say is fact, some of its opinion, but it's drawn upon the research that we've done on cannabis and that research is on the webpage. This webpage will have lots of pictures, so if nothing else, if you don't want to listen to us, well, you are listening to us. Go and look at the webpage.

Trevor: Pretty pictures.

Kirk:  Pretty pictures! Pretty pictures, I don't think there'll be some video of us in the studio. We're in the Studio today, which we haven't been in the studios.

Trevor: For a while.

Kirk:  A long time. Yeah, ReeferMed, the podcast, reefermed.ca, this is another good one.

Trevor: Another good one.