Episode Transcript

Rene: Hello and welcome back to Reefer Medness the podcast. I'm Rene, I'm back here in the studio. This is part two of an episode of Reefer Medness about irradiated cannabis and irradiation in general. And Kirk and Trevor are wrapping up their discussion with Dr. Saji George and Mamta Rani from McGill University who are talking about how gamma radiation is used to sterilize cannabis, to rid it of pesticide and fungal contamination. For the full conversation, go back to episode 167, part 1, this is part 2, as we wrap up the conversation and Trevor and Kirk discuss what they've learned.

Trevor:  A little bit outside of what you guys studied, but I know people are going to ask us to have any thoughts one way or the other if irradiation is bad for the cannabis plant. If it blows up cannabinoids, if it gets rid of terpenes, if if it harms the, we'll call it the value of the cannabis plants, by using irradiate at all. We've definitely run into people who are dead set against irradiations ever being or on any cannabis plant, but... I think they are missing the fact that we've got to weigh what what irradiation may or may not do to the plant versus we got to get rid of some of the mycotoxins. So any thoughts about what irr radiation does to the plant or or the compounds in the plant? I know a little outside of your your study but any thoughts on that?

Saji George PhD:  Great, so like I mentioned, there are different methods that the industry is employing to get rid of this mycotoxin and also reduce the pathogen burden on the produce. So there are, for example, awesome treatment. There is this light, like UV light, and there is this kind of gamma radiation.

Mamta Rani: Plasma.

Saji George PhD:  There is a cold plasma. Plasma, there's a new technology that is emerging also. All these techniques, they have their merits and demerits. And obviously gamma radiation. Is we are giving high intensity gamma rays, passing it through the produce, so through the sample, for example, and then actually what it does is basically take care of the DNA, basically causes those degradation of the nucleic acid and that's how the fungus and the spores and also these microtoxin, this as a molecule will be degraded when the gamma radiation is passing through. So that concern about whether it has a side effect on other compounds, it is likely, because this is a high energy radiation that is passing through those chemicals as well. Like, you know, if you're talking about THC or CBD or other flavonoids or terpenoids that are present in, no, no, they can actually cause some of those, they may act on it. I have not done research on itself, but that's a very good point, that is, what is the the compounds that are generated, the secondary compounds that are generated after the radiation is sending, it's an important question if it has any potential in terms of health and effect. Now, having said that, this is all about balancing the risk and the benefit. The question is about, do we get a slightly less THC or CBD at the cost of removing the the fungus and the mycotoxin. So that's how we evaluate the risk and benefit. So at the point and time as of now with our knowledge on the radiation, I would say that benefit is outweighing that kind of risk that are likely there is a reduction in those active compounds and also their secondary metabolites form or secondary compounds that are formed as a result of radiation. As of now, with our current understanding, the benefit is higher, a bit higher than these kind of problems or issues that are likely to happen.

Trevor:  No, that's fantastic. And we are getting close to the end of time, so we don't have to rush. But in case I missed anything, was there anything else you wished I'd asked about the study or any future work? Anything else you think our audience needs to know about what you've been doing with cannabis and irradiation and mycoplasm and mycotoxins, any of those?

Saji George PhD:  I have a couple of points I just wanted to say. One is, if at all you are using cannabis, make sure that it is procured through the proper channel because it makes a huge difference. And if you are a medical practitioner, ensure that the quality of the produce that you are prescribing to the patients is good and you are confident that there is not in these kind, the levels of mycotoxins or the spores are taken care of. So basically obtained through a good quality produce growers. And another thing is, if you are a grower, if you're actually listening to this, I would say, there are solutions. Obviously, once mycotoxin is entering the supply chain, it is very hard to get rid of it or the fungus if you aren't entering them. And so the key is to prevent the fungus from entering in the supply chain and establishing the growth. So we have to do all by your means to actually avoid that kind of thing. At the growing stage, we have solutions that is our future work or the current ongoing work is basically identifying those kinds of bacteria. They are the friendly bacteria that actually are like just now Mamta mentioned, they will reduce the requirement of pesticide and fungicide because there is also a limit on pesticide residues that can be present. And also they promote the growth of the plant. So there is benefits. So basically we are turning to nature itself to find solutions for those kinds of problems. So, there are solutions that nature actually gives us. So it is only us to find out an effective way, a sustainable cost effective way of implementing it. And that's what we are right now working on. We are not just identifying the bacteria that help the plant to grow or control the fungus, but also making sure that And the applicability is feasible, and the cost is feasible. So that's what we are right now working on. And I would ask Mamta to add on something.

Mamta Rani: I will request the regulatory agencies to look more into it. It should not be treated as other food, or other commodities. Also, it needs to be exposure. There should be more exposure route specific, because some people eat it, some people inhale it. So it should be treated like the report should be differentiated. And there should be more, more control on the levels because right now, what we have everywhere in US, in Europe, everywhere, the standards are the same as for other food commondities. It should be treated because the consumption ways are very different and the consumers are different as compared to food items. We cannot keep in the same one. So there should be different regulation and all the toxins, like according to them depending on the limits and depending on the consequences of the exposure, they should be kept in different categories like aflatoxin, is very toxic,  the DON deoxynivalenol should be treated differently. So the all toxins should have different, you know, and there should be for the total yeast and mold, there should zero tolerance. So especially for the- the immunocompromised people. There should be regulatory agencies should prepare like really clear because there is no clear documents on any website. So there should be very clear documentation available for public.

Saji George PhD:  Product differentiation for the stringent quality control and the regulatory framework. Great, thank you. I mean, that's a good way to actually end this discussion there.

Trevor:  Okay Kirk, so I'll do my quick summary and then I'm going to ask you some questions as a grower. So, irradiation works for getting rid of stuff we don't want growing on cannabis. You know, it gets rid of mold, it get's rid of bacteria, it might actually blow up some of the endotoxins that the molds have produced afterwards and definitely can kill them before produces it, gets rid of some of the spores which are tiny little really hard things that molds turn into when they're sort of just waiting and can be sometimes really hard to get rid of. So irradiation works, but doesn't...

Kirk:  Just clarification on terminology, you're saying gets rid of, does it actually rid the cannabis of the mold or does it just detoxify it?

Trevor:  Kills it.

Kirk:  So the dead carcasses of those molds are still on the plant.

Trevor:  Microbes are still there. And my understanding from the paper is some of the endotoxins, so endotaxin is just a poison, a famous one because it sort of came up in the paper because some of them the fungus they found on the mold was penicillium. And yes, you recognize that because penicillion fungus makes penicilin, which is something I use in the pharmacy every day, it's an antibiotic, but penicillium produces penicilin. To kill other living things like bacteria and mold around it when they're fighting for a food source. So you know fighting for food source is one of the reasons that molds produce toxins. So the irradiation and here's my understanding and this gets a little weaker can actually disrupt slash break down some of the the toxin as well. I'm getting a little fuzzy on that one, but it definitely can kill the microbes, especially the fungus that produce these endotoxins.

Kirk:  Ya Ya.

Trevor:  So it kills these, and so, but as we mentioned, why do we care? We care especially for our immunosuppressed people who might be using this as medicine. So, you know, the examples, HIV, cancer chemotherapy, there's several different groups of medicinal patients who, for whatever reason, our immune system isn't working so well. And there's not a ton of examples, but there's definitely have been some case studies of these people inhaling spores and the spores causing an infection in them. Again, it's not an epidemic of this, but it has happened. So my takeaway from this paper is although irradiation works, we should probably do some more, we being probably Health Canada. Some more testing in different ways on the cannabis to see after it's been, you know, hopefully grown in a nice sterile way and then decontaminated with something like a radiation to see if there's any mold and other nasty microbes on it before it goes out to the public especially the medical public. So that's my sort of summary.

Kirk:  Summary. Yeah. It's funny, but every time we see studies on cannabis, it's always that we should do more studies. However, on this one, okay, I'm going to take a step backwards. First of all, gamma radiation, irradiation. What's the difference between irradiating and radiation? Terminology. What is irradiation versus radiation?

Trevor:  An "i".

Kirk:  Okay, it is the same thing.

Trevor:  I think so and someone can call and yell at me. I think radiation is just something that comes out from something like you can be radiating heat etc and I think irradiation is when we sort of focus it at something that but I could

Kirk:  It's the verb, it's the action. Okay. So this is an industry standard. So am I to believe that all commercial weed, medical and recreational weed, gets irradiated in the process of being sold and packaging? Where does this come into play in the whole process of getting commercial weed?

Trevor:  I don't know if you have it, like if you are Greencraft cannabis here in Dauphin, I don t know that you have to get it irradiated, but my understanding is you have pass Health Canada thou shall have less than so many units of mold in your stuff. Like it's going to be tested and they are going to test for this mold and so one of the, you know, you could just grow it in completely sterile conditions. There are uh we've talked to Eric and other growers who sort of unleash other bugs on their product to eat things like mold so there's different ways to get rid of it but irradiation is very effective but I don't think there's any rule saying you have to have it and when would it be done again someone can call I yell at me but my understanding would be there just before or possibly after packaging one of the nice things about irradiation is depending on the packaging, you could put it in the package and then irradiate it. But I am willing to be yelled at about the order if someone wants to send us some some nasty email.

Kirk:  Yeah, that's when I was researching this episode, I could not find a reference to say how often except to say that gamma irradiation is an industry standard for sterilizing medicinal and recreational cannabis. It does not fully eliminate the toxic fungus or their chemical residues. And what this study determined is that that's what they found, is that there is you can irradiate your cannabis, but not, it's not fully effective and again, as you said, if you are a healthy individual, it's most likely not a problem.

Trevor:  But I want to jump in real quick because that sort of reminded me of something is someone might say, well, why do we go with irradiation at all? Because if you think about the other ways to, we'll call it sterilize the cannabis. Well, what could you do? Well, you could heat it. Well, then we start blowing up terpenes and, and other things. Well, he could put a bunch of chemicals on it. Well, that how you get them back out, like getting rid of the fungus and the bacteria off of another living thing is hard and for another industry the spice industry has been used so another sort of natural grown product that might have bad things growing on it is sterilized with irradiation so and they hinted at that a little bit in this that cannabis right now is kind of held to a food standard so like with spices for the amount of other bad things growing on it where they're thinking you know maybe it's there should be a different standard for stuff that's inhaled which i don't know the answer but it sounds like a very interesting point but but yeah the reason irradiation is good useful tool is the idea is and people send hate mail my way is we can get rid of the bad living things on another living thing without destroying the cannabis.

Kirk:  It's, again, it's a small study in the sense of what they did and how they did it. And people can get into the study, we'll have it on the web page. To bring this more home, I was walking my dog, I listening to your interview with the two PhD doctors, and I kept trying to think of how does this relate to my little grow-op, my medicinal cannabis that I grow. And also, how does it affect, you know, the person who grows? So, like, is this something to be fearful? Should I fear this now when I go and buy my rec cannabis? But I guess, in my perspective, to put this into a clinical perspective, as a nurse, of course, I don't want people to have moldy cannabis. And to put into layman's terms. Mold is everywhere, right? If you leave your bread out too long, you'll get mold on it. If you have water in the basement, there could be mold growing in the basements. So mold grows in humidity. One of the faults of my garden is it might be too dry. I don't have a humidifier in my tent, so I'm running a really dry operation, which I have to learn to improve later down the road. But so mold for me, although I do grow in soil, I have an indoor grow and I grow in soil because I like it, it's a little less work for me. But I break some rules. I bring in the compost and soil from my back garden and I might be bringing mold into it. This is what I'm learning from this.

Trevor:  You're almost guaranteed. Just to add,.

Kirk:  I'm  guaranteed.

Trevor:  Mold is everywhere.

Kirk:  Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. So I'm guaranteed to bring mold into my garden. So how do I have to take care of it? This is what I have apply. And I guess I clean my tent, I do all that, I clean everything. And I also have a method of taking, I don't have living soil. I know people that grow in living soil, so this would be a concern for them. So I guess it's the whole point is to just keep the dampness down and be aware of it and how you're curing it. And I guess this is all about using your nose, because you can smell mold. You can't always see it, but you can smell dampness. So I guess as a home grower, I'm going to be very aware of how I cure my stuff, where I cure myself, the humidity of where I cure it, and all this sort of stuff, because it is. It's one of those things where I went, well come on, don't make me worry about this now.

Trevor:  And I think that brings up a really good point. Recreational users, do we care? And honestly, after this, I'm not sure. Maybe if we can find some experts who can tell us if we should care, but if you, again, we're not saying people should go seek out moldy. If you have a moldy a pot maybe throw it out but there's going to be Fungus that you can't smell that you couldn't detect without some of the fancy stuff that was mentioned in this paper If you were otherwise healthy. Do you care? If you are doing a traditional smoking of a joint how much of the mold is just gotten rid of by the fact it is burnt now I guarantee some of spores aren't because that's kind of the definition of a spores,they're really hearty and they resist everything because that is the whole point.

Kirk:  Well, but they don't resist heat, mold can resist freezing, a spore can freeze and come, but my understanding of mold is that they don t resist heat. Right. If you heat mold, they'll kill you.

Trevor:  At some point, but spores, that's kind of their reason for being is when a mold is, some types of mold are trying to reproduce, they form a spore. A spore is a little armored vehicle of mold that should resist, you know, dryness, cold, some heat. So you know if you got, and then when it gets to a nice moist place like the inside of your lungs, it can start doing its thing again. Honestly, if I don't bore everybody with this episode, if I can find some researcher out there who can answer my question of, does it matter if you've got a little bit of mold in your joint, I would love to talk to them because I don't know the answer that.

Kirk:  Yeah, I think the answer to that is intuitively, I'm going to say, no, you don't want mold in your joint. You don't wanna spore in your lung. But again, I've studied this stuff back in the day and again, what I like about some of these geeky papers you bring is it challenges me to go back to my biology and my pathophysiology courses that I, you know, when I was 19, 20, 21 years old, I wasn't always too much into, but now that I've got 40 years of practice and I can relate some of that knowledge to actually clinical situations, you know, it's almost like I wish I'd go to school after your clinical experience, because it's a clinical experience. Anyways, I digress. So I believe, and this comes back from talking to a chef, I used to, I think I've talked about Rick, Rick Harrison. Rick Harrison was probably one of the reasons why I started this podcast with you and I think I told stories about Rick really early. He was a friend of mine that died of cancer. In the early aughts and he was a medicinal cannabis user at the time, he was also a red seal chef and we used to brew together and we talked about spores and funguses, you know, as you do when you're brewing beer. And I do remember him talking about the heat. And yeah, you're talking about spores, but spores are just the seeds of a fungus. I mean, I can remember seeing videos. They're just the seed, right? So I believe heat. So like I said, if someone's out there, they can talk to us. I think if you're decarboxylizing your cannabis as you inhale it, you are killing the spores. I'm going to say that's my understanding. I'm not gonna say it's true, it's just my understanding of mold. But I think if you vape, if you're vaping your whole flower, that might be another issue, because vapes are a little lower temperatures. However, it's a cool story. Here's a question though. There's another paper that you want us to put on our webpage. It's about cannabinoids.

Trevor:  Yeah, so maybe this cold morning in Manitoba I'm just looking for hate mail. When the headline about this study came out and we put it up on our social media feeds, we got a lot of feedback, but the feedback was mostly about irradiation, not whether or not it kills off all the fungus. Fungus was a secondary thing. What people got excited about was whether or not you should irradiate cannabis at all. And the thought that irradiating cannabis destroys, you know, half of the cannabinoids in it. So I threw a paper in and Kirk will put it up on the website that says no, you know, irradiant cannabis does not destroy the cannabinoids. Yes, it's just one paper. And yes, like I said, I'm maybe just bringing on the hate mail, but I think it's important to have for people to, you know,  is irradiating cannabis getting rid of the cannabinoids or terpenoids or flavonoids or is that a myth? Is it something we should really be worried about? You know it's to me it's a bit of an open question but the the study I found to you know share with the rest of you says no but you know if you've got some study or you you even more exciting. If you are a researcher out there who has done studies that says, yeah, radiation is terrible to the cannabis plant, we would love to know more.

Kirk:  Yeah, so here, have they done a longitudinal study of hockey player families in Pinawa who ate cookies that were irradiated?

Trevor:  None of them have hair anymore, I don't know what happen.

Kirk:  Oh, the whole hockey team has no hair.

Trevor:  No, no, no. Very not true. My running joke for many years was the Simpsons were misnamed as really the Shewfelt, growing up next to a reactor. I guess I've had a few different experiences growing up than your average bear because of a nuclear research facility.

Kirk:  It was right in my backyard.

Trevor:  Yeah, and you know, I think also it's a little similar to Stranger Things, you know with that weird facility out in the bush, well we had one of those too, so you know.

Kirk:  It's interesting, I grew up on the west coast and in high school I took environmental studies programs and I can remember the Candu reactor guy came to our class one day and that's what you grew up in near CANDU?

Trevor:  CANDU. Canada deuterium uranium.

Kirk:  Is that what this? CANDU? Well, he came to our class, and it was a good presentation. And to this day, I believe nuclear reaction and electricity is probably the most efficient electricity we can produce, and every house should have a little reactor on its roof. I kind of believe that. However, there's one flaw yet. What do you do with the toxic waste?

Trevor:  I might as well have everyone mad at me, you put it in the ground. Not too many kilometers away from the WNRE, the reactor was the URL, the underground research lab where, no, we didn't actually put any reactive stuff down there, but they were doing experiments of what would happen if you put stuff in. So anyway, grew up next to a research reactor, did a couple summers at URL. Again, hate mail, bring it on.

Kirk:  bring it on. All right, man, this is good. So we're going to irradiate our cannabis now. And even if we irradiated, the conclusion of the story is that it doesn't kill all the spores.

Trevor:  Maybe there should be a back to the actual thing. Irradiation works really well, but it's not 100 percent sterilizing. So maybe Health Canada should consider different testing, different amounts of testing, different types of testing and the other I thought really interesting during our conversation is should there be sort of a different standard for stuff that's inhaled versus sort of the regular food, food amount of fungus and endotoxins allowed in stuff that goes in our bodies. So another geeky one, another geeky one I loved all of it. I'm Trevor Shewfelt. I'm the pharmacist.

Kirk:  I'm Kirk Nyquist, I'm a registered nurse, and we are Reefer Medness the podcast. Both of these papers will be on the episode web page, Reefermed.ca. We have a blog page there. I get to give my opinions about public health, and the healthcare system, and how cannabis is related to well-being, whichever tolerates it.

Trevor:  Storytelling and opinions are good.

Kirk:  And yeah, so go to our webpage and also from our webpage you can hit all of the references. Everything we do is referenced and yeah, off we go. We've got lots of little projects on the go and standby and follow us on social media. We're on LinkedIn and Trevor's been having an awful lot of fun with posting lately and I never know what's going to come up. I even go to the webpage to find out, the social media to find what we're talking about. So it's kind of cool.

Trevor:  Yeah, no, we've been doing a couple new things. Check us out on the social medias and it's been another good one. We'll talk to everybody later.