Episode Transcript

Kirk: Hey, it's Kirk here. We have something special for you. We have a long conversation with Macky from High on Homegrown. You can go back to episode 60 and meet Macky there. We called him a couple months ago, and this is a conversation with Mackey. What was it? It was the pandemic.

Macky:  Yeah, yeah. 2020, I'm sure you was one of our early episodes. One of our, I don't know, within the first 10 maybe. I can't remember. It's been so long.

Kirk:  We're so old, the archives aren't even on the webpage anymore.

Macky:  Yeah, loads of stuff got taken down periodically as we've moved on. We've just been making so many podcasts. We got over a million downloads now.

Kirk:  Very impressive. I was on your web page. Very, very impressive what you guys have accomplished.

Macky:  Thanks man. Yeah, it's been fun along the way as long as you've enjoyed it. It's not seemed too much like work, you know

Kirk:  Well,.

Macky:  How about you guys?

Kirk:  How big is your staff? Like, are you doing this yourself or you?

Macky:  Oh, yeah dude, I am staff

Kirk:  Well, I don't know how you put out three, you must be retired like I am.

Macky:  No, I'm just very lucky to only have to work about 10 hours a week.

Kirk:  Oh, nice.

Macky:  Yeah. And so I get plenty of free time when the wife allows me, but you know how it is when you've been doing it for a while, you kind of just, it's part of your day. It's part of the routine. So it doesn't really seem like too much of a task anymore. So how's things with you guys? How's your podcast doing?

Trevor:  So it's going. We have listeners. We're nowhere near a million downloads yet. We think we have a small dedicated audience. But yeah, that's one of our bugaboos is getting a bigger one.

Macky:  But yeah, you specifically about medical cannabis as well, right?

Trevor:  Mostly just because we're a pharmacist and a nurse that but you know we've had everything to from Kirk was interviewing a traveling band to you know Kirk also you know got one of his his musical idols on before uh before he passed away um all.

Macky:  Right who was that?

Kirk:  Well, that was David Crosby, but we had him on before we talked you.

Macky:  OK, nice. wow.

Kirk:  We were bragging about David Crasby before that. But we sort of, our moniker is Reefer Medness, obviously. But Reefer Madness, because we go after the stigma. And Reefer Medicine and Reefer Mellow. So we go off to all that, right? We talk about the rec market. But all of our episodes put it back to clinical practice. I do in a sense of how I try to, when I interview somebody, how do I put it to clinical practice?

Macky:  Mm-hmm. So is it just you who does the interviews or both of you guys there?

Trevor:  We both do interviews. It'll usually be one of us doing the interview and then the two of us will sort of do an intro and an outro. We've done a few different formats, but 80, 90% of it is one or the other of us doing an interview and then the two us who are doing an intro or an extro.

Macky:  Cool. So you've been doing it for like, so well, longer than.

Kirk:  Eight years.

Macky:  ya, Right. Eight years. Now that's a lot of interviews. How often do you do interviews?

Trevor:  We're, we're getting about two, two up a month because you know, I'm still working full time and Kirk has, Kirk calls himself retired, but he's got many, many things on his plate. So if we get two, to have interviews a month up where we're considering ourselves lucky.

Macky:  That's good. It's good is just good to be consistent and it's fun to interview people get to speak to so many different kinds of people and learn lots of different things.

Trevor:  Oh, absolutely. You know, if it wasn't for the podcast, why would I have an excuse to email, a drop a message to someone and say, Hey, do you want to chat? Cause otherwise I'd just be weird. Just, just a weirdo from Canada.

Kirk:  Well, it really opens doors. I mean, I just got back from Morocco and Spain and I've got six episodes from being in Morocco and in Spain. As you probably do, I get Norml magazine pushed to me in my email and I look for lots of interviews through Norml. We just got a response. I don't know, Trevor, did you see the email from Dr. Robinson from Israel?

Trevor:  No, I just saw I just saw your your message saying this looks exciting. Let's get two episodes out of them. So I'll take your word for it.

Macky:  Nice.

Kirk:  We have an orthopedic surgeon out of Israel that has studies out cannabis, how cannabis helps with diabetes, and he's an orthopedic surgeon, so he's got a whole slew of papers on cannabis and pain. So you know, I want to learn about cannabis and how it works with pain, so I call a guy in Israel and say, hey, talk to us on the podcast.

Trevor:  Mm-hmm. Not that it isn't cool. Cannabis and Pain is cool, but I really, I hope it's a good interview on diabetes because we haven't really got a good diabetes one yet.

Kirk:  But you guys also do you guys by interviewing people I am I like your news you put out three a three a week you have a news section an interview section and then a how to grow section right

Macky:  Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Kirk:  Yeah. And I, um, I learned how to grow from some of your episodes because I, I grow now and, um. But I also learned today, I was looking at some of the thing and I, I learned today that edible cannabis is not all the 100% consumed by your GI. 50% of it goes into your feces and dogs, dogs can eat human feces. And...

Macky:  Whoa!

Kirk:  Yeah, that was on your podcast man

Macky:  Yeah, it's on one of our episodes where the dogs were getting poisoned by cannabis. Yeah, by eating human shit. The festival goers. Yeah, yeah. I remember. Yeah, I remember that. That was a strange... That was some good shit, as they say.

Trevor:  Well Kirk and I both being dog owners as gross as it sounds yeah dogs they everything they want to eat everything so the fact that they've eaten someone's poop unfortunately doesn't surprise me even a little bit

Macky:  Well, I have Labradors, so that's even worse than a dog, you know. They just eat everything. Oh, sweet. They're great dogs, ain't they? They're a great dogs. I love them.

Kirk:  I have a labrador, but he can find food on a sidewalk that's been swept. My dog. But Trevor, this story they put on, I don't know if you heard it, but 50% of the cannabis is metabolized. The other 50% comes out, the cannabinoids come out in the feces. And we know that THC harms dogs because I had a personal experience with my dog getting into one of my cookies, which is a hilarious story. But yeah, I want to get this story as a medical story. I got to find an expert on human feces.

Trevor:  Yeah, that doesn't surprise me because we, like you said, we know how the big difference between we inhale it and we ingest it, how it goes through the body. So we understand a bit of that, but no, I am, but the part that's surprising and cool is I, you know, we know it goes through the liver and you know eventually everything gets dumped into the feces, but I am I'm surprised how much sort of we'll call it active stuff would be left over that, that the fact is there maybe not so much, but so much, yeah, that's, that cool. We've gross, but cool, we need to know more about that.

Macky:  I think I said as well on that show, like, would you dry it out? Would you dry out and smoke it, sprinkle it in with a hash?

Trevor:  No, honestly, no, not me.

Macky:  But somebody's got to be desperate for it one day. You know, I need a joint so bad.

Kirk:  Yeah. Back in the 90s, friends of mine who were growing would give me their old fanned leaves and sugar leaves. So what I would do is I'd take those sugar leaves and I experimented once and I infused them into mead. I keep bees. I used to keep bees and I make mead. So I infused it in some mead, but this was the 90's now. So I just dumped a whole a bunch of cannabis into the mead. Now, with 30 years of cannabis knowledge, basically what I did is, you know, drew out the chlorophyll and possibly some acid forms of the cannabinoids because the meads were about 15% alcohol and aged for nine months. So there was some absorption happening. But I can tell you that when I brought that mead out and took it to a house party in Vancouver three decades ago, the morning when everyone woke up. There was a very fresh smell as people entered the bathroom and came out. And it was a green, fresh odor coming from the bathroom. So this was this was non decoboxylated cannabis product that was in a mead. So I'm sure I'm sure there was some cannabis material in those remains. So when I was thinking about this dog, I was flashing back to that party in Vancouver some many years ago.

Trevor:  Well, I think you guys were the first place that I heard about carbon filters, so I'm not a grower. Kirk's the grower, but cannabis smells, you know, whether you're smoking, whether you growing it, it smells as funny. My, my wife, my wife now goes for coffee. You know, she's the, the 50 something year old young kid in this coffee and a long, long roundabout way, a lady in her 80s was given a cannabis plant by a friend of a friend anyways growing in the backyard and that was all they were talking about was the fact they can just go in the back yard and smell it as soon as they get nearby. But you guys were talking, especially if you're growing in an apartment because that comes up a lot around here is Yes it's now legal to grow even in Manitoba that just happened within the last 12 months but across Canada more or less it's been legal to grow four plants on your own for the last since 2018 ish. But if you're in a apartment condo smaller area if you grow cannabis there's a smell and there's big push about whether or not A condo board is going to let you grow because they're afraid of resale value. So the fact that you could put a carbon filter on your grow tent was a bit of a revelation for me.

Macky:  Yeah, it's definitely important. And even like you said, even if you're growing it legally, still good to have a carbon filter, because you don't want other people smelling it. And they also it can be an offensive smile, not offensive in like, you know, a very bad way. But some people do find it offensive. So you have to cover that smile, man, just out of benefit for everybody else. And it's so pungent. If you do, it so fucking pungant, man.

Trevor:  Well, another silly story. Kirk went away on one of his many vacations, he's semi-retired, and I was checking in on his plants. This was a few years ago when I still had kids in hockey, so I don't even think I touched the plant. I think I went to his little tent thing, looked, everything seemed to be fine. I checked his water level, whatever, closed it up, went back home, and we're supposed to be driving a bunch of kids off to a hockey tournament, including three kids whose parents we didn't know all that well. And we got into the car to go pick them up and Dora said no you're going home so what do you mean you stink like pot. I hadn't touched them I just opened his little enclosure so went home had a shower picked up the kids we didn't know so I have me not smell like pot on the way to go off to the hockey tournament.

Macky:  Yeah, there's a smell. A smell travels. Mm-hmm. It does. Yeah, so how's growing going for you, Kirk? How new are you to it?

Kirk:  Um, how new am I to it? I think I've had probably about seven crops, so three and a half, four years.

Macky:  Yeah, some experience, eh?

Kirk:  Yeah, well, I'm learning, right? I like like the whole carbon filter that I have my house. It's a large it's a large house. And you know, and from the perspective of what I know about Britain and detached, I have a basement. So way in the back, I had this I had this five by five, 10, six by six, 10.

Macky:  Nice

Kirk:  And, uh, but I have, I have a natural flow of air that goes right out into the backyard. When I'm home, I can put the roof fan on, uh. I have fan, I've a fan that pushes it out and into, you know, into the duct, but it doesn't all get out there, right? So yeah, the house, when the, when the flowers are in flower, when flowers are going, um, uh the house can pretty pretty punchy but but but how I'm doing I've made the errors of stressing the plant, so I've had my flowers go to seed by stress, which has actually turned out to be kind of interesting because I got out the old Beatles' White album once it was cured and cleaned it up and I use a lot of those seeds now and so I'm basically growing my own AK-47 from stress seeds. And then I had a friend of mine who we interviewed on our podcast, who gave me a bunch of his genetics about seven years ago. And I have those in my fridge in a dark space. So I've been using his genetics, so I usually grow two or three AK-47s. And then I grow some of his genetics and I cure it. But I've got, I think about eight jars in my cold room of various things. But I'll tell you something, Mackie, I had a really cool thing happen, one of my biggest learnings in May. And of course, you know, we're in Canada, right? So our growing seasons, May to September, possibly October, depending on frost, right. So I- for I had to put in the seeds early because I had the dash off to Alberta. I had do some traveling, which is 11 hours away from here to go to a my mother-in-law's funeral. A different story. But I wanted to get some outdoor stuff going. So I got some bananas, overripe bananas. I chopped them up. I put a seed in each of them and buried them in my backyard and drove to Alberta Um, and I reason I did that because I wanted the potassium and the nitrogen that's in the overripe banana and I wanted, um, I wanted it to stay a little moist and I just, you know, what the hell, just off I go because I w I didn't have the time to sprout them, right? So I go to Alberta, come home, all 12 seeds are popped up and it, well, that's cool. Um, I let them vegetate at the round the end of August. So, you, know, vegetation outdoors, uh, around August, they started showing some flowers. Thank you. Quickly got the males out of there. So I was down to about six or seven and I was leaving for Spain and they still, all the plants hadn't fully showed themselves. So, I had three that I knew were female. I just intuitively could see that they were female and I pulled the rest. So out of 12 seeds I got three plants and left them, just left them. Went to Morocco, went to Spain, and came home after one small frost. Woke up the next morning in my house. I had all the fan leaves were frozen off. The flowers were hard, hard, hard, hard trichome shining in the sun. A couple flowers were burnt by the frost, but I harvested from three plants. I was pleased. I got five and a half ounces off three plants and yeah, I was happy.

Macky:  And you didn't have to do anything you just put them in the ground

Kirk:  What I learned what I learned from this experiment is leave them alone

Macky:  That's right. You just if you could just let nature do its thing, then it will do its thing, you know.

Kirk:  So what's happening in Britain with cannabis laws? What's happening with your medical cannabis program?

Macky:  Gosh, not much we I mean, I'm sure you're aware about we legalized for medicinal use in 2018 in November 2018 he's just turned seven years last week and Nothing's really happened. There's like six people good. We have a socialized health care system like you guys do the NHS I'm a sure you aware of all of it. Yeah But you can't get cannabis medicines on the NHS very easily even after seven years I think there's seven people so we've had one person a year get cannabis on the NHS. You have to go through these private clinics instead, which is strange because we don't buy our medicines in that way in the UK, but cannabis is the exception. So you have to get a consultation with a clinic and that costs about £50. And then after the consultation, if your criteria fits, which in most cases it will, they don't want to turn away a customer, do they? So they'll send you cannabis in the post and it's, it's a decent quality. You know, it's legal, so you don't have to go out onto the streets, the legacy market and deal with potential criminals to get your cannabis medicine if you need to. The reason is you can get it.

Kirk:  I'm sorry, Mackie, are you only you said only seven people have accessed this?  I missed heard.

Macky:  No, that's that's on the NHS.

Kirk:  Okay,.

Macky:  So they're getting a different price because the NHS is paying for that. They're getting like cannabis oils and things like that, but everybody else and it's about 25,000 people now. All of those guys will be paying an exorbitant fee from the the pharmaceutical companies that are in control of it. It's quite bad. Yeah, yeah. Because people can't afford that kind of stuff. We pay a shitload of national insurance to pay for the NHS and the medical system that we have. And as a result, people don't have a lot of expendable cash nowadays, especially in this economical climate. So having an extra, say if you smoke in a quarter every week, which is a reasonable amount, that's just a gram a day, but that's going to be 50 pound a week, 200 pound a month. You know, people usually, if they're using it for medicine, they'll At least twice as much as that So you're looking for 500 pound a month, just on your cannabis medicine, which is just a crazy amount of money.

Trevor:  And that's through a private can you can you grow your own legally?

Macky:  No, you still can't call your own legally, no. Okay. I'm sorry, Kirk, you were saying?

Kirk:  No, my question was, was that through the private clinics that they're paying this fee, or is this through the... So, why aren't people going through the health program then? It gets just too difficult?

Macky:  They just don't allow it. The NHS doesn't give cannabis on prescription.

Kirk:  So how are people getting cannabis on prescription through the private clinics?

Macky:  Because they're allowed to do it through the private clinics. It's like having a private doctor go to

Kirk:  So doctors are allowed to prescribe it.

Macky:  Uh, no, uh, NHS doctors and GPs, the general practitioners, they are not allowed to prescribe it. There has to be a certain doctor in the, the clinics, the cannabis clinics, and you go to them and it's not like you can go to your doctor and the doctor I will write your prescription for cannabis have to go to a completely different doctor, pay him a fee for your consultation or him or her a fee for the consultation. And then you get your description from them. It's a completely different separate... Company, if you like, from the NHS.

Kirk:  So do you, where do you consume your cannabis then? Do people, are there clubs that they can go to or?

Macky:  But there are a few clubs starting up now in different cities, but you have to be very careful with those. You're not allowed to smoke in the UK, you can't smoke indoors anywhere. So you're not allow to smoke medical cannabis in any of these clubs, you could only vaporize it and you have the prescription as well. You show the club, I have my medical prescription, I'm a legal cannabis user in the U.K. And then you'll be able to vaporize your cannabis there. There's still loads of problems. There's a huge percentage of the police force who are still not even aware about cannabis is legal for medical use. So there's patients out there treating themselves. Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous and it's a crazy number as well. I mean, it was 75% but that was a while ago. I hope it's still not that high. I think they should have taught more police officers what the fucking rule is now because there's people use cannabis for medical us here in the UK legally jumped all through the necessary hoops. They're still getting problems with the police. They'll come along, sometimes they'll take the medicine from them, confiscate it, and you have to prove that you are a legal user and all this. That can take a while, so the medicine can go bad. If you don't treat cannabis properly, it goes too dry, or if it's too wet and it's left sealed for too long, you can go moldy, so all this can happen. But there's also rules, like where you live with your landlord or the housing association who owns your house, the people you rent from. You still have that problem in Canada.

Trevor:  Yes, so short answer, yes. So Manitoba is one of the last places in Canada to allow you to grow your own four plants and we don't know but we suspect it was a big push from the provincial government. A lot of the MLAs, Legislative Assembly, the people in government provincially may or may not have actually also been landlords and were convinced that their housing things went will go down, but we've actually talked to allegedly.

Kirk:  You're being kind. You're being kind, Trevor. The conservative government at the time of legalization pretty much said cannabis grow ops deteriorate and lower your value of your house and your neighborhood. So yes, that's our concern. And then the NDP came in, we have a new a new government in

Trevor:  But we've heard similar complaints all across Canada, you know, from famously liberal B.C. Where they've been growing bud forever. We've heard people complaining about it's difficult in a condo, in a apartment setting, it was difficult for them to find a place where they were allowed to smoke. They were concerned about people smoking on their balconies because the neighbor might smell it. So it's not easy.

Macky:  Mm hmm. It's ridiculous, man, because at the end of the day, my neighbor smokes and he will smoke in his back garden and the smoke just blows into my living room and I'm supposed to be there enjoying this smell. I fucking hate the smell of cigarettes. I have to pull up with it. Yeah. So, you know, there's people out there who don't like the smell of cannabis but if  their neighbor wants to smoke it surely it should be okay. Yeah. You know, there's, there's a lot of offensive smiles that drift into your house sometimes and there's nothing you can do about it.

Kirk:  In Manitoba, in Manitobah, you're not allowed to consume cannabis in any public place. If you now if you're a medicinal user, then you you can consume cannabis in public places, but you have to be outdoors and you have to be eight meters away from a walled room. So you have to be out in the cold. So apartment dwellers like I own my own home. I mean, out of respect, I consume my cannabis in my backyard because I don't want smoke in my house at all. But people that live in apartments or condos, the expectation is that they consume outside eight meters away from their building. But what they don't know is that the landlord is obliged to provide a space if the occupants ask for it. But if nobody asks for it, the landlord says no consumption. You know, so we have a law where we have a legal substance and there's nowhere to consume a flower.

Macky:  Crazy, isn't it? Who makes these laws? These lawmakers who do it for a fucking profession, they should know better.

Kirk:  I've written about this, people make laws, so what is it about people that once they get into a bureaucracy, that laws become silly? The people aren't silly because people, I mean, a lot of, no offense to anybody, but most provincial employees, I shouldn't, okay, a high percentage of provincial and federal Be careful. A high percentage provincial and Federal employees are bright people. I mean they-.

Macky:  Allegedly. That's all you have to do. just add allegedly now and then, you know. Well, but then they get into the...

Kirk:  Well, sorry, but then they get into this, no, I agree. But then they get into these bureaucracy and, you know, power playing. And sometimes what comes out the other end is like playing telephone at a, you know, at a grade 11 party where people whisper in your ear. You know, it's not what comes up the other and like our medical cannabis program right now is I mean, our medical cannabis program has has lineage back to about 1999, 2001 about, you So depending on. Which Supreme Court case you wanna talk about. So we've had over 20 years of medical cannabis managed federally. And my hypothesis is healthcare in Canada is a provincial jurisdiction. So you've got a cannabis program that's federal. So provincial systems can ignore it. So they have ignored it, but then, you know, our Prime Minister, Baby Trudeau, came up with, came up his cannabis legalization in 2018. So what's happened in the last seven years is that Health Canada, the federal department that runs our medical program, Health Canada They are slowly ignoring the program because now people are getting their medicine, quote unquote, in sarcastic terms, from rec shops, right? So people are going to rec shops because, you know, it's recreational legally in Canada now. So people getting what they see as medicine from rec shop, our bud tenders aren't allowed to talk about cannabis as medicine. And more and more people are interested, my age, the retired people are more and more interested in getting their cannabis as medicine. And Health Canada seems to just sort of now go on, oh, well, you know, now that cannabis can be getting from the dispensaries, the rec guys, maybe we don't need a medical program, you know, and it's sort of like, so what happens now? So now another excuse for health professionals to ignore it. I just thanks, Trevor, by the way, for that rant. I just listened to our last.

Trevor:  Which we just finished doing a podcast where Kirk went on, but a little different government thing that gives me a little bit of hope is, um, municipalities have more power than I think they think they do if they, you know, if a, a local municipality said, you, know, this bar, this hall, this, this space, you know, it would be okay if you consume cannabis in it, I think things would change quickly and we have talked about this before, but in Just an interesting thing that came up, our pharmacy is having a Christmas party in early December and the guy who's getting all the permits and stuff for the hall got insurance which is a good idea and the insurance agent said, do you want insurance for alcohol, people consuming alcohol? Yeah. Do you want the insurance for people consuming cannabis? And he looked at them, I don't think they can and that's true but even the insurance companies are, now insurance companies just want to sell you insurance but they see the next step where you know if you know this bar this cannabis club this hall was sort of designated by the the municipality is somewhere where cannabis could be you know you could license it for cannabis consumption and well I don't think it would take much to make that last give us somewhere public to consume cannabis thing.

Macky:  That's what a lot of places need now is somewhere where people can consume and not have to be worried about it. We're just a long way away from that in the UK, with it still being illegal. And even the legal users get trouble from the police still. So another thing as well, because I advise people to, if you're in the U.K., you've got to grow your own cannabis. You're not allowed to, but it doesn't make you a criminal. So just grow your on cannabis. It's better, it's safer. And then you get the prescription. From the pharmaceutical companies as you have to do and when it comes you've got it in a little pot and the pot will have a date on it like this should be used before this time then you can just put your own bud in there and then if you don't have to keep buying a ridiculous amount of expensive cannabis then you could just use the tub and keep topping up police officer ain't gonna check and be like hold on this says bubble gum on it and it smells like blue cheese you know he ain't got no difference you know Maybe a big difference between the blue cheese and the bubble gum. Maybe that wasn't a good example.

Trevor:  I know, I like that a lot. Kirk, how about some of our favorite guests that we've done? I'm going to throw out one that was cool for many reasons. We had Dr. Joe Goldstrich a year or two ago, and he was cool that he was a US doc. He did a lot of things. I think he started out as a surgeon and just kept changing. He's now in his 80s, I think. But he eventually, like all, it seems like most of the docs we interviewed kind of sort of stumbled onto cannabis. And now he is, you know, hardcore advocate of why don't, why doesn't everybody on cancer use this because any, he wrote a whole book on it. That's why we interviewed him and, and don't get me wrong, the book was interesting talk, the talk was in interesting is Episode 116, if you all look at it, but He didn't love talking about this part, but the thing that made him the most interesting, he was literally in the room during the Kennedy assassination. He was like a young intern at that point, you know, basically running x-rays back and forth and stuff. But during the kennedy assassination in Dallas, he was in that hospital helping out with Kennedy which just kind of blew my mind.

Macky:  Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, I wonder if you saw anything.

Trevor:  He really really really didn't want to talk about that part and we said okay we'll be nice we'll just talk about the well just his cannabis stuff was interesting but you know i really really really would have liked to ask a few more Kennedy related questions

Macky:  now about that magic bullet right yeah yeah well i suppose he's been asked questions so many times about he's bored of talking about it you know anytime you bring it up to somebody yeah i was at dallas when uh Kennedy was shot, oh wow did you see anything no

Kirk:  But he was also in the movie, wasn't he? They did the documentary that he can beseen in the background.

Macky:  All right,.

Trevor:  It on Amazon. 

Kirk:  But he would not talk to us about it.

Macky:  Maybe he's in on it, maybe he's the one who stashed the bullet.

Trevor:  Yeah, he might be the Magic Bullet guy.

Macky:  Allegedly. That's right. We just like to say crazy things sometimes, but if you say allegedly at the end of it, it makes you go, okay.

Kirk:  Makes it legal.

Macky:  It's in the terms and conditions, I'm sure it is.

Kirk:  So I had a unique North American experience, and I told Trevor this actually on the way back from Morocco, actually way back from Spain. I was filling out my declaration, custom declaration, and you look on the webpage and you're not allowed to bring cannabis, right? You can't travel across borders with cannabis. Now, you guys in Europe with your with your borders the way they are, traveling between countries with cannabis, I don't think you guys get pulled over or stopped anymore, right?

Macky:  Oh, yeah, yeah. Because there's only a couple of countries in Europe that have actually legalized cannabis, Germany being one of those Spain. So I don't think you can go from Spain into France with cannabis.

Kirk:  Nobody's going to stop you like you have open borders.

Macky:  No, no, you, you well, yeah, I suppose you do. But I think you still get, it's like stop checks, random checks. There could be border force at any one of these borders at any time.

Kirk:  Well, in North America, in Canada, we're basically told you must not cross borders with cannabis, right? You just must not. It's been that way since, God, since I started consuming cannabis when I was 15. You just don't do it. Well, I'm in Spain interviewing Peter, and he gives me several vials of his medicine. And I'm looking at it, and it's, you know, it's full plant spectrum extract from, You know, it's acid form. This cannabinoids, but it's not by any means activated cannabinolids. So I had this whole backstory. I was going to tell customs because I was gonna take it across borders. But I was very, very nervous about doing this. And I was almost, you know, I'm doing carry on, so maybe I should just leave it, but so I downloaded the app and it allows you 72 hours before you fly into Canada, you fill out the app, you make your declaration. No, have you been on a farm? All right, do you have more than 200? $10,000, are you bringing alcohol back? Are you, you know, et cetera, et ceteras. So as I'm going down the list says, are you, are bringing in cannabis?

Macky:  Shit, they're asking me now, shit.

Kirk:  They're asking the question. So I said, yes. I said yes. What's the worst case? They're askin' me, yes or no, are you bringing in cannabis? I am bringing in cannibals. I am declaring my cannabis. I get into the Calgary airport and I go to the kiosk and you know, you have to enter your number in and they spit out a piece of paper, you and Michelle, the date you left, what you claimed, et cetera. On the top it says, cannabis claimed. The guy looks at me and goes, taking the cannabis for pain? I said yeah and I was about to launch into you know it being acid form etc and he goes yeah okay tell you what just um you're supposed to go over there but um I'm just going to send you through because your plane's in an hour right yeah we have a connector all right just keep going and I like it was sort of anti it was so anti-climatic right

Macky:  Mm-hmm

Kirk:  Um.

Macky:  Got a whole speech ready, you know.

Kirk:  I had the speech, I had the science, I was prepared to throw it away. I don't, you know, but yeah, but I mean, it could have been a little bit of white privilege, maybe. I don't know, you know, the old white guy.

Trevor:  I was just going to say my favorite part about that whole story is he's telling me this. He just got back from his trip, but we were actually in the middle of doing prep for another interview so we had two guests on Zoom with us talking about what we might talk about with them and they're just pissing themselves laughing at Kirk and one of the guys happens to be a, you know, a rec store owner, Sean, super nice guy, but Sean's black. Sean looks directly at us and goes, well... I think if it had been me, that might have gone a little different.

Macky:  So, yeah, maybe, maybe.

Trevor:  Old old white guy might might have its advantages every once in a while.

Kirk:  But I but I but i declared it, right? So I just I thought that was kind of cool. They're asking the question now. So things some things are improving, maybe.

Macky:  Yeah, the stigma is definitely less over there than for the guy at the airport. She'd be like, yeah, cool. Just go through over there. Yeah. So things are changing for you guys, which is good, you know, slowly, but I think we're getting there just taking time.

Kirk:  So you guys, you guys with, you know, a million downloads, you must be getting some local recognition. I mean, there must be some journalism.

Macky:  No, man, not gonna fucking stay hidden in the UK with no recognition. I don't even tell my mother

Kirk:  Oh, no kidding. So so can I ask a few things on the side then? Like how you like you're doing three episodes a week, man. That's a lot of work. And you got a really cool web page, though. It's not searchable, by the way. You can't search your web page. But but it's but you're doing some really good stuff, man, you know, so you only work in 10, 10 hours a week. That's kind of cool. Where do I get that? Yeah.

Macky:  Well, it's a you've got to have the right context, you know, yeah It's all about who you know what not what you know

Kirk:  Well, I really enjoyed it. I spent some time on your web page today and your YouTube page. And a couple of questions about your YouTube page I have for you here. Cool. Are you now doing mostly live streams with your news component?

Macky:  Well, what we do and this is what it makes it seem like it's a lot of work. But as I said, once it fits into your schedule, it's reasonably easy. So on Sunday evenings, we record the show and we call record the news and the grow guides on the same show on a Sunday, a couple of hours on the Sunday evening to record both and then on Monday morning, I'll edit the news podcast, you know, just add the intro, add some sounds, listen through it. To make sure there's nothing that needs to be taken out because sometimes there is you know sometimes the background noise that needs being removed all that kind of stuff so all i'm essentially doing is listening to the show editing little bits and then sending it out in the late afternoon early evening it only takes a couple of hours to get all that sorted and a lot of the work is done on the Sunday as well like the thumbnail is made on the Sunday and i'll use the thumbnail for the news that i've made on this Sunday for the episode on the Monday And then I have an interview on a Tuesday and a Thursday, you know, that's not both days every week. Sometimes none, you know, it depends on how many interviews are in the backlog. And the same thing again, I'll just listen for it. Add an intro, add an outro listen through it and then publish it. It, it doesn't really take much time anymore because I'm used to it. It used to take, take so much time. Yeah. It used take like three hours for an hour's podcast there. Anytime.

Kirk:  Well, I noticed that your YouTube is posted before your web pages are posted. So are those live streams as you guys are recording? Are you live streaming it?

Macky:  Yeah, yeah.

Kirk:  That's that's risky. You can't edit live screen.

Macky:  No, no, but it's authentic.

Kirk:  Yeah, no, I compliment you. And when we talked to you last, you had you had Chase to Temple Grower and you had Monkey. Are you still got those guys?

Macky:  No, no, no the panel's changed a few times over the years. Yeah right now we have Margaret who's Canadian I don't know if you had Margaret on his show. No, she has a podcast She has a podcast called Bite Me show about edibles. So yeah, it'd be good to get on the show She she's a great lady Margaret is yeah, I'll let her know and I'll send her a message and tell us get in touch Yeah, Margaret, and then there's Billy Barnes as well, another guy from the UK who is a cancer sufferer. He uses cannabis to help treat him with his cancer, so he's a very interesting guy to say the least. Yeah, we won't talk about Billy anymore, you know. We like to troll a lot, so yeah, we have good times. And then there is John Colton as well who's from the USA, he's in the legal state as well. So that's who we have on the show now. And I just do interviews on my own now. Because it's just difficult for people to find time and stuff. And I like the, you know, when I started to, because we used to always have somebody in with me, but I just, sometimes it felt like I would wait for responses from people and, you know, from other panel members and things like that. And it just works so much smoother when it's just me on my own. And I can just chat shit for an hour. We've out there even being a guest, you know, I've done it many times, you know, so. It's, uh, I know it works when it works and I enjoy it. I enjoy all these different conversations I have with people. It seems like it's a lot of work, but sorry.

Kirk:  How do you find youyr guests.

Macky:  Well, sometimes they reached out to me, which makes things incredibly easy. But the thing is now it must be, I'm going to estimate a hundred and eighty ish interviews that we've done with lots of different guests. So finding new guests now is very difficult to find. We've had everybody on the show. You know, most people you can think of in the world of cannabis has already been on the show, and many of them numerous times. So it's difficult to find new faces, you know, that's the big issue.

Kirk:   if you go to our webpage you can search the guests because we have them all listed as well we've we've got 157 episodes up and all the guests are individually listed so.

Macky:  Nice.

Kirk:  But i was just looking at some of your lists i mean i've been trying to get tommy chong invited himself on us early and um and we didn't take him early because it just didn't match what we were working on at the time um i'd like to get back but his people aren't getting back to me.

Macky:  Yeah, he's not doing podcasts anymore. Oh, he started to make his own podcast a year or two ago. And as a result, he stopped going on everybody else's podcast, which is a shame because we had some good times with Tommy.  he was a great guest.

Kirk:  You've had Ethan Russo? Have you had Ethan Russo from...

Macky:  Yeah, we've had Ethan Russo on. Yeah, that was a while ago. We've had so many people. I'm so lucky. Have you had Dr. Bonnie Goldstein on your show?

Trevor:  No, I've talked to her. I saw her at a couple of conferences and have an informal chat, but no, we haven't had her on the podcast yet. She, she would be great, but she's also a little hard to, to pin down. She's a bit, not surprisingly, you know, saving all the world's children. She's, uh, a little bit busy.

Macky:  Incredible guest. I couldn't try and sort that one out for you as well. This is one of the things doing it for so long and being in contact with so many people. I have a ridiculous amount of contacts. I can just reach out to all these, but I'm so lucky. You know, I've got a black book consisting of everybody's names. I've also got Jorge Cervantes phone number in my WhatsApp and I can just message them any time. That's fucking crazy.

Trevor:  It is. And Kirk really enjoyed it. We got him on once and I think he, you know, it ended up being another one of Kirk's sort of favorites going, I read him back when I was 14. I didn't know, you know. So yeah, it was another thing off the bucket list to get him on.

Kirk:  I use his ecycolpedia a lot.

Macky:  You had the purple one?

Kirk:  Yeah,. online

Macky:  Great book, great. But the biggest one i think like the the biggest fish fat caught the one which was most difficult took 18 months of emailing and every month i would send him an email but like are you ready yet ready yet uh can we do it now uh oh no i'm busy i'm only Graham Hankock you know Graham Hankok.

Kirk:  No.

Trevor:  I don't think.

Macky:  Fingerprints of the gods magician is uh it likes to talk about ancient he had the netflix documentary ancient apocalypse He's a cannabis consumer, so I got him on the show at one point. It was awesome, that was a really good guest. Difficult to get, but managed to do it after 18 months of consistency, you know.

Kirk:  Oh, what was the one? I'm just trying. I'm on my web page, Googling. I can't remember the name of the what was the one we did on religion. That was one of my favorite episodes. That was really early. And we listened to the what was his name? Trevor that double X? Oh,

Trevor:  Oh, he used to be a pastor who convinced people not to look at porn anymore and then he moved on to cannabis instead.

Kirk:  Yeah, Greg Gross, it was back in Season three for us. We call it the Pastors of Pot and Prophets. And Chris Bennett, have you researched Chris Bennett?

Macky:  That rings a bell, I think he might have been on the show.

Kirk:  Yeah, I think you may have had Chris Bennett. He goes back to the biblical times. Did Christ, did Jesus actually die on the cross or was he given Kannabosom?

Macky:  Mm-hmm. rights okay.

Kirk:  He's written several, like, researchable, like he went into the Gnostic scrolls and came up with, you know, the burning bush of Moses. Well, Moses was in the temple of tents, inhaling hashish incense. So when he stepped out of the tent, right? So when When he stepped out of the tent and saw a burning bush. Know, it may have been influenced by some hashish. And, and this is all documented, researchable from the original scrolls. So he's something to look into. Chris Bennett, he's on the west coast of Canada. And what was his name? Porn pastor, that's what he was known as the porn pastor. And now, and now he is, he calls his church the Christian churches, He calls himself the Christian cannabis, Christian cannabis. It's his new is his and I've been trying to get him on a follow up and he hasn't. He hasn't been interested, but he was a fun guest.

Macky:  Sometimes it's difficult, isn't it, to get them back?

Kirk:  Yeah yeah you know you get a hook we um i i had Raphael um before he passed and um

Macky:  All good guests, yeah.

Kirk:  Well, he would have been a great guest and he procrastinated with us.

Trevor:  That close.

Kirk:  I was very close to getting him and he sent me to another colleague who got back to me and never followed up afterwards. Probably because Raphael died a couple months later. But the guest I really, really, want is Neil Young, our Canadian-American transplant down there, but Neil's been a big part of my cannabis life forever, and Neil's a huge cannabis guy, so I'd love to get him.

Macky:  Just keep trying man, if you don't get it.

Kirk:  I keep banging away. I have his management company. I keep sending out an email. I've written on my blog, you know, AI says Neil Young should join us and here are the reasons AI says so. So yeah, no, I mean, I'd like to get Neil Young. That would be kind of a fun one.

Macky:  Yeah. It's a big one though. The bigger they are, the harder they are to catch. Well, you say that, but Tommy Chong was so easy to get on the show. Yeah. He's like a big star.

Kirk:  Yeah, I feel sorry that we pushed them away, but if we had gotten Tommy in those days, I would have asked him an awful lot of clinical type questions in regards to, him and Cheech really made cannabis fun in the 70s, but they also created that stoner culture that everyone tags cannabis at. So does Tommy own that? Does he realize that he may not have in the long run done cannabis as service?

Macky:  Hmm. Yeah, good point. Because he stoner a stereo stereotype  just kind of span back to Cheech and Chong

Kirk:  Oh, yeah, man. I mean, I can almost recite the entire up in smoke. I was I think I was 16 when that not when that movie came out.

Macky:  Yeah, what's that? It's Labrador, man.

Kirk:  It's the best shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I got it. When you guys talked about the dog eating shit, I've got it because I mean, they're sitting on the medium rocking back and forth. I had to follow that dog around for a week.

Macky:  Classics man. What's going on with Trevor Trevor? You are the you're not growing at all

Trevor:  But one of the interesting grow things around here is we have an actual grow-up in Dauphin, a full legal thing in our own backyard, like we're a relatively small city in a relatively small province. So the fact we have green craft cannabis in our backyards and we've got to go on a tour of it a couple times has been really cool. So we're hoping they're the best for them, and it's really neat. To go in there, you know, all suited up in the white garb and that, well, over my non-existent hair, but their mother plant was the size of a small tree. I couldn't wrap my hand all the way around it. So that was just, you now, this is a cannabis tree that I'm holding onto. And they were just sort of taking clippings off of that for their next run and the next run. But yeah, just the fact we have that in our own backyards now. We complained about the government enough We're going to do a little bit more. So this is a company that's doing well and trying to, you know, bring more jobs to the area, yada yada, and like everything else cannabis related, the government wants to tax the snot out of them, you make everything just a little bit more difficult, pile on a few more regulations, a little but more tax, because one of the things all the provincial governments found when there's cannabis is they all thought they'd hit the taxation Motherlode! And I forget the latest quote, but it's, it's still well over 50% of what you spend on cannabis in the rec store doesn't go to the grower or the, you know, the seller, the rec store employees. It goes straight back to the government. So it's still way too much tax, which in the end is bad for the grower, bad for the rec store and bad for the consumer, making it more expensive.

Macky:  And people still go to the legacy market because it's cheaper.

Trevor:  Absolutely and yeah so so the legacy market that well we really early on we had a interesting interview that he was right it'll it'll never fly but we had an economist on he he told us about Pigovian tax taxes that we hadn't heard of before but Kirk and I still like pretending we know something he said well that sounds like a Pigovian tax the whole idea is If you did a negative tax on legal cannabis, i.e. Gave them a subsidy, you could actually get rid of the legacy market altogether and have safe, secure supply of cannabis through recreational stores, and it would come out cheaper than the legacy. The legacy market would go away. Now there'll be people who argue it shouldn't but let's assume for the moment it says one of the stated goals when Health Canada came out with their act is to you know have safe supply keep out of the hands of young people get rid of the illegal market and they could do that by literally giving them subsidies but although that makes sense economically there's no way that can possibly fly politically so of course that never happened.

Macky:  ummm

Trevor:  It was a cool interview with the economist.

Macky:  So you guys just do interviews now then you don't just because we do the news and grow guides as well. It's just interviews for you guys.

Trevor:  Yeah um so short answer yes we're just doing interviews you know we have Kirk does more um he does some more blogging and sort of commenting on things in the news uh actually one of the things a side project related that we're trying to is we're try to do PSA's for our our provincial government for basically safe cannabis consumption so we've recorded a couple of our videos you know six little videos we're calling them the uh what is it the one minute cannabis consumer something like that second 60 sec second cannabis consumer and we're trying to convince the provincial government to buy them and and uh air them and we'll see how that goes

Kirk:  In Manitoba, we have a TV station, CTV, and they do a 60 second driver thing, public service announcement, 60 second drivers. So you know, what is a U-turn, what, you know what is turning left on a red, et cetera, et cetera. So we decided to do the 60 second cannabis consumer and the Cannabis Act in Canada, you cannot promote cannabis. So it's very difficult for cannabis businesses to promote their business, right? Because you can't be seen promoting cannabis. So therefore you can promote your cannabis business because you are promoting cannabis so what we've done, we've got this model where we record inside a rec shop. Um, Payson's Joint, local, locally owned rec shop. We're recording inside his shop, his logo is there. We're providing an educational piece on terpenes and, and uh, you know, how to read a cannabis label. And you're looking at Greencraft's cannabis label and Greencraft is our neighbor down the street that's growing it locally. And so we have six episodes where we showcase stuff and businesses. As we provide education as nurse and as pharmacist, right? So we're meeting the intent of the Cannabis Act. So, yeah, we're trying to, maybe we get it into movie theaters. I don't know, we just, that's something we're doing.

Macky:  Yeah, yeah. Let's just keep at it. Like I said, if you don't ask, you don't get just got to keep pushing out there. If you don't push out to anybody, nobody's going to do it.

Kirk:  We were doing we were doing short little going to senior centers or active living centers locally and doing cannabis talks there. So we are trying to get out but Trevor's a Trevor's a full-time employee and a very very busy busy practice and he also plays hockey and

Trevor:  Fat Old Man Beer League Hockey.

Macky:  Isn't that just a standard thing for Canadians? Don't you all play hockey?

Kirk:  Well, I'm a West Coast kid, I skate on my ankles. I have never played an ice hockey game. I played road hockey, I've never played ice hockey. But no, I mean, that's the limitation. I could go a thousand miles an hour just because it's my style. And, but, you know, so, but I'm also trying to enjoy semi-retirement, but I do enjoy learning about cannabis. I mean Like I love, I'm in Spain and I'm knocking on doors saying, hey, I got this Canadian podcast and I'd like to talk to you about cannabis. Okay, so let's talk. So I got my, I may have visited 12 cannabis clubs and I was allowed into three of them. So I went, no, probably more like 20. We went to a lot of cannabis clubs knocking on the door saying, hey, I'm a Canadian podcaster, can I talk to about cannabis?

Trevor:  You mean, so they're crazy rules in Spain. Sorry, Trevor. No, no, no. That's okay. I was just on your news section. So are you just literally finding, you know, latest blip on something on StratCan or whatever and saying, you now, this week Germany legalized something, reading it out and making some comments on it? Or what do you mean by you do a news segment? I just...

Macky:  Well, I do Google search, the panel members bring their own news stories, so they find one which interests them. So but for my method, I would just do a Google search for cannabis news, go to tools, and then change it to one week, you know, the time one week so I'm just seeing all the recent news within the last week, nice and easy. And then you got a sift for all the ones that say cannabis bust. This guy was arrested for growing cannabis. Cannabis grow found in old school. That's what you see constantly you know and then every now again you'll come across something about picture interest like dogs being poisoned by cannabis by eating shit yeah and then you just put it in the show notes and then where we go live uh we read through them and comment on them that's about it really.

Kirk:  I think we should start that

Trevor:  No, that's interesting, like, absolutely, but just thinking we like I've got a Google alert on. Oh, it's something that's like a cannabis scientific medical, something like that. And it does feed me story ideas. But like Kirk says, it seems like 80% of the things that come off this feed are sponsored by someone or a group looking to cast cannabis in a bad light, you know. But that's not just

Macky:  But that's not just cannabis news though, that's all news.

Trevor:  True so so yes they're definitely after you saw these new things that's not the we're well we are a little biased but you know let's filter out everything about the cannabis is addictive and no one should be on it for the you know the interesting slash positive spins on it no that's a good idea

Macky:  Yeah, everything. I mean, like the ones where cannabis is addictive and all we report on those, you know, like, look at this article full of shit, look and explain where it's full of and it's just the old propaganda that we've been hearing since the reefer madness days, you know, it's fucking crazy, man. It's the news is ridiculous when it comes to cannabis sometimes. Most of the time you can find good stories, but sometimes you just find ridiculous news that you just have to bring in. Like we had one, a tragic case just a few months ago. I can't remember what news episode it was. We do it every week. But a girl was killed because her boyfriend stabbed her to death. And you look into it and it's like this guy had a violent history. He was crazy. But because he had smoked cannabis that day, they blamed it on fucking cannabis induced psychosis and he went around and killed his fucking girlfriend in their car just because cannabis was there you've got to use that as an excuse. I've smoked loads of cannabis. I've never wanted to do something like that.

Trevor:  you didnot get to go on a killing rampage, I'm glad to hear.

Kirk:  Have you ever greened out?

Macky:  But after smoking, green down, I had a whitey. Yeah, we call it having a whitey here in the UK because, you know, you go all pale. But yeah, when I was a kid, when it was like 16 years old, not since then.

Kirk:  Oh, I experienced a green out last year at some point.

Trevor:  You and your dog

Kirk:  No, no, no. I got to tell you the dog story too, but the dog story is hilarious. But me, it was what what happened to me is that my wife wasn't home and I was getting bored. So I made some ginger cookies. And ginger, I like I love my ginger bread cookies. So, I made some gingerbread cookies for myself and I made like, I don't know, 14. And Michelle was telling me that the recipe calls for 40 cookies, Kirk, not 14. So I made these 14 cookies and ate one and was gonna take my dog for a walk. I'm in the backyard trying to put the leash on the dog realizing that my eyes and hands aren't working together and proceeded to find a pillow and had the worst six hours of my entire life laughing because I knew what I had done. And I knew that I wasn't going to die. But honest to God, man, I had never been so miserable ever, ever, ever. It was like someone someone had spinned me around at 100 miles an hour.

Speaker 1 Mm-hmm

Kirk:  Put and I proceeded to write a blog piece and I called it when you find yourself on the green out express and the whole I don't you know don't freak out green out don't freak out but the whole point is people are going into emergency departments because they're cannabis poisoning. I believe it's the wrong terminology, and Trevor and I disagree with this. It's not a cannabis overdose, it's not cannabis poisoning, someone just took too much cannabis. Because an overdose- 

Trevor:  But that's an overdose, right?

Kirk:  No, it's not.

Trevor:  That's, Macky, you're on my side. That's exactly my definition.

Macky:  We can change it now, let's go.

Kirk:  In my world, when someone overdoses, I'm looking for the antidote, right? If I get an overdose into the emergency department, I think an antidote. I'm thinking of life support and antidote that's what an overdose is to me. So I'm trying to change the terminology. I don't want health because people don't overdose on cannabis. they take too much.

Macky:  But they do. They have too much. What's the actual definition for overdose?

Trevor:  From the pharmacist's point of view, literally more than was intended. If you overdose on a blood thinner, you bleed out your eyeballs.

Kirk:  But you're going to die.

Trevor:  Well, not necessarily. I think this is the, to rehash an old argument, what I'm talking about is you took more than intended. I think when Kirk hears overdose, being a former emergency room nurse and, and, He thinks overdose means you're going to die.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Trevor:  He resents he resents the fact that no one's going to die if they take too much cannabis like when Kirk said when we go do little spiels and one of the first things we do in our public talks is so the most likely way for you to die using too much cannibis is a bale of cannabis fell on you and that's you know we start from there so but yes Kirk resents the whole overdose implying that you're going to die.

Kirk:  I want to change the terminology, especially in the cannabis industry. It's not an overdose and the medical field has no business talking about cannabis overdoses because it scares the public needlessly. It's needless.

Macky:  But there is an antidote as well right if you're having a bit too much need a nice sugary drink to boost up blood sugar and then

Kirk:  or a hot shower, hot shower or caps and tablets, certainly, or, or take, take a CBD pill because, because you're not overdosing on cannabis. You're overdosed. You're not over so seeing on cannabis, you've taken an excessive amount of THC is what's happened.

Macky:  So what would you call it instead of an overdose?

Kirk:  You've taken an excessive amount of THC.

Macky:  Didn't roll off the tongue like over those three syllables.

Trevor:  You need to market your term better Kirk.

Kirk:  Well, I'm watching a new television show called The Pitt, and the very first episode has this kid coming in with a cannabis overdose, and I go, fuck. So let's scare everybody about cannabis overdoses on children, right? I'm trying to get people to, and obviously you're not helping me, I am trying to change the vernacular. No.

Macky:  Well, we are helping you, we're the Devil's Advocate, so you can...

Kirk:  You can't overdose on CBD, right?

Macky:  But it's no detrimental effect, right? Because I will consider in my definition of overdose, it would be to take too much of something to the extent where there's a detrimental effect. Whether that's unconsciousness or, you know, just being slightly inebriated or something, an undesired effect because you overdosed on it. Like we've saw the psylocibin mushrooms. You can take too much of that. That would be an overdose. No, no, but you'd be tripping balls for days if you have too many mushrooms. Maybe not days.

Kirk:  But you're not dying from it and you don't require medical intervention.

Macky:  That would be a toxic dose rather than overdosing, right?

Kirk:  It's not even toxic because it doesn't harm the body.

Macky:  If you die from it, if you die for me, that's tough.

Kirk:  The magic mushrooms? No, my understanding is that's tough.

Macky:  No, no, but anything, anything.

Kirk:  Well, if you step out in front of a truck, you can die. If you decide to fly off a building, you could die, but.

Macky:  There's overdose on truck contact.

Kirk:  You can't, but you can't die on, you can take, you cannot take too much cannabis and die because it there's nowhere for your, I mean you can, while stoned you can be stupid, but There's nothing in the body, like opiates, there's an actual, it actually stops you breathing. Opiates will just stop you from breathing. And because you stop breathing, your heart will eventually stop too, because your heart kind of needs to kind of work together. So you die. So you can overdose on opiate. But cannabis, you've just had a very bad day, you're going to have a very, very bad day.

Macky:  So, and I hate to be at this dead horse, but it's, it's also,.

Kirk:  You're saving me time, I appreciate it.

Macky:  Is this the criteria then for you to consider it to be an overdose, then somebody has to die on it.

Kirk:  Yes, for me in my world, if you have overdosed on something, I'm looking at ABCs and antidote when they use that kind of terminology. And then I say, what have you overdosed on? Well, ibuprofen. Well, okay, you can't really die from ibuprofen. You can hurt your kidneys.

Macky:  And then your liver is going to pack up and...

Kirk:  Yeah, we have beat that one to death. But anyways, if you want to read my blog, it actually explains it much better.

Macky:  They've explained it fine. This is a good thing, right? When you do these live streams on YouTube, we get like between 60 and 80 viewers live on the show, and we can put a poll up. And right now, if we was live on The Main Show, we had these, I'd be like, right, is Kirk wrong about overdose? Yes or no? And I'd love to see the results. I'd love to hear the result.

Trevor:  Yes, we would too.

Kirk:  It won't be the first or last time I've been alone at the microphone.

Macky:  The way it goes sometimes, but it's always good to have these discussions. I like having fun discussions like that. You know, just the, I think an overdose doesn't have to kill you. Like if you took too much of a pill and it made you blind, is that an overdose? Because you didn't die, but you had the extreme detrimental effects.

Kirk:  Yes, because your eyes and your digits and your genitalia are very, very important parts of your body. So if you come into my emergency department with eye, genitals, hands or toes, this is an emergency. It's a red immediately just because of that. So yes, I would say you've overdosed on a medication that has harmed your eyes. It's like Overdosing yourself.

Trevor:  I like that you immediately went to genitalia.

Kirk:  I did digits first

Macky:  Did you first it was not in order of importance

Kirk:  No, there's just the algorithms, my brain works in algorithms.

Macky:  So what's your growing method, Kirk? How do you do you grow in hydroponics, living in soil?

Kirk:  I grow in living soil actually to the detriment of one of my fellows. I use a peat moss and I have bottom waters and I put vermiculite in it. But this next batch, what I have out there is that I've been using that soil outside and I brought some soil inside. So my next batch will be live soil. Right now I've got some sticky stuff in the in the tent to gather some of the bugs that are flying around, so I'm catching those right now. And I put a couple beetles in there to go eat the flies as well. They're just little fruit flies, I think. And, I've got the seeds right now on top of my refrigerator in some tissue paper to get them to sprout, and I'll probably put them in soil, probably on Thursday, I think.

Macky:  Nice nice yeah great way to grow yeah we've got some real good interviews you should definitely check out the interviews with Marco we have uh we've had him on the show a couple of times he's uh a grand champion grower. He's won awards for producing extremely high quality cannabis with lots of terpenes and he grows uh uh somewhere in the USA. I can't remember the state uh i wouldn't make a guess, ya expert grower knows his shit man. And he does, he makes all his own nutrients for his plants. He he's built his own soil. He grows it in the horizontal source. So there's like stones, then sand, then soil, and then an organic layer that breaks down and feeds the plants, genius way of growing. And he doesn't, uh, Korean natural farming methods as well. So makes his own nutrients out of old plant matter and, you know, compost teas, lactobacillic acid.

Kirk:  That just seems like a lot of work man, that just seems like a lotta work.

Macky:  That's what I say to him, you know, but I think collectively, it's the same amount of work as what hydroponics would be. Should you do it at different times?

Kirk:  Well ya, My mentor lives up the street from me, I call him Sensei, he's also the classic cannabis guy from the 70s who's still, even though cannabis is legal, he is so paranoid and I guess, you know, I don't live in your world where paranoia is actually life-saving, but so he grows hydroponics and I've tried to get him to interview with me but he's interested. But he keeps wanting me to get into hydroponics and I don't want to work that hard. I've been brewing my own booze for, you know, wine, beer, mead, and you know you make it, there's some intensity and then you let it sit in under the stairs for nine months, right? So I want to be able to go into my plants. Once they're in the vegetative state and they're surviving, I'll go in every day. I'll talk to them, I'll trim them, I'll water from the bottom. I'm using bottom water. And the idea is to get the roots to grow downwards.

Macky:  In the super pots.

Kirk:  And, uh, but I don't want to be measuring nitrogen and potassium and calcium and measuring stuff and pouring in, you know, five milliliters of that. I don't want to do that. I, I'm retired. I just want to get some water. I'll put some budding nutrients in there. And when, when, When I changed the light switch and they're starting to throw flowers, uh I love, I love trying to identify flowers. You know, those males show early and I'm starting to get to know them. Um, and then I just wanna be able to water them that way. And, uh... And like Trevor said, you know, sometimes I travel a lot. So, you, know, here I am in the middle of a grow and I, you know, I'm going to go take my van and go caravanning off in the West coast and God, the girls are in flower. Gee whiz. So I don't want to have, I don't want to say, Trevor, you know, you got to go spend an hour with my plants.

Macky:  Know. What we like to say on this show because we like to get classic sayings and mix them up so they barely make any sense and what we say is there's many ways to go swimming with a cat all right so you just got to find find out which method works best for you and just roll with that.

Kirk:  But I'll tell you one thing, I think years ago I went out and one of our guests was from a laboratory. So I sent my flower out and got analyzed. And I think it came back, this seeds that I'm still growing from the stress plant. And I, think it's maybe 21% THC and maybe a little bit, four or 5% CBD. And to be honest with you, I don't know enough about it, these stress seeds, I didn't even know if they were gonna germinate or not. Uh, and if they germinated and so I'm getting it, but I have measured the cannabinoids in these, in these plants for forever, you know, but when, when I do get around to hanging out with, you now, being at a safety meeting with a bunch of their friends and you know some of the sons, some of the younger generation comes in with their commercially bought cannabis. Um, I know it lays me out. Um, very careful. You know, I can, I could smoke a reefer of mine and have a really nice glow on. I just feel so wonderful. So mellow, no pain. I'm happy. They bring one of these commercial things and it's gone. I just, Jesus, what the hell happened?

Trevor:  Yeah, it does infuse reefers, infuse cannabis, a thing in Britain because Kirk and I both talked about this. People younger than us like their 20, 30, 40, 50, 60% THC, which you can grow to a certain and then they add to it. I was on a fishing trip and you know someone gave me one of these and you know I could barely hold on my fishing rod for the the rest of the day it wasn't fun didn't enjoy that at all and like Kirk was saying you know his 20% THC that he grows is fun the the things that the kids these days are smoking That's not fun, not enjoyable. Like is that a thing in Britain or?

Macky:  Yeah, definitely. But it's also you to get you get used to your own shit. You smoke that stuff that you bought off the street and your first few times you're going to get really smashed because you're not used to that specific cannabinoid and terpene profile. But after a few days of smoking it, then it's going to kind of settle and you get use to it. So it's not so, you know, mind blowing when you first smoke it. But it is definitely this. I quit smoking like three years ago. I only vaporize cannabis now I used to consume a ridiculous amount of cannabis like a quarter a day because when you're a home grower you can just smoke as much as you like there's nothing stopping us you just used to smash a ridiculous amounts and never be high and I would smoke three joints before midday and and not be fucking high I'd just be chilling just like yeah that was a delicious spliff let's roll another one but now if I even just take three draws of a play for a joint I be Fucked man like way too strong for me way too. Strong. So you get used to that shit So you get used to that shit.

Kirk:  Are you vaporizing flour or? Yeah.

Macky:  Yeah. Yeah. In a mighty, you know, mighty from stores and Bickel have one of those delicious, incredible cannabis. And that's how I prefer to consume now. But you know you just get used to it. You get used your own stuff and you don't get high so much. And then your tolerance is different. These weeds out there now with 25% minimum you're looking 25, 28 average. And then I reckon they can get right up to 32 maybe, but then it starts to get a little less believable. Like, are you trying to tell me a third of this thing here is just THC. It's a bud. All that flower and it doesn't make any sense.

Kirk:  No, no, it's not though, Mackie. It's not see you don't have the recreational market. Um, I Once a year I go out and I do road trips and road stories And I purposely go to rec shops and and interview people at rec shops because I want to know what's happening in the rec marketplace.  I was out in the west coast and, and I don't know if you caught what Trevor said, but infused pre rolls. In Canada of course you buy your bud, but you can also buy pre rolls. So what happens is that a lot of the flake gets rolled up and sold, but what the, what the cannabis companies are doing now is that they'll be putting a little hash in there. They'll, they'll roll it in crystals.

Macky:  In Keefe, yeah, yeah.

Kirk:  Yeah Keff and all sorts of stuff. So you get this I think one of them was 80% THC

Trevor:  Something ridiculous, yeah.

Kirk:  Like, like it.

Trevor:  Now Mack, you might be right, the label said 80% isn't really, but the point is, Kirk.

Kirk:  Well, the point is, it's like, holy Christ, that's a lot of THC. Yeah, that is crazy, isn't it? But going back to the whole overindulgence opposed to overdose, because I'm not going to let that one go. But what we've also learned...

Macky:  We're going back there again.

Kirk:  But what we've also learned is that most people that have psychological problems or insecurities with cannabis or anxieties with cannabis, it's coming from the THC. So if we're encouraging these people in rec shops to start consuming these high THCs, of course anxiety is going to go up, of course, like a full spectrum homegrown flour grown in soil. I mean, I go into my jars and I've cured cannabis opposed to dried cannabis. I mean the cannabis we buy recreationally, probably cured, but when you get it out of the container, it's dry, it breaks. You don't even need to, you don't need to put it through a, what do you call those things now, a grinder, right? Yeah. So my homegrown stuff, it is cured. And when you open that jar and it's like, oh my God, look at that. It's a garden and I have to grind it and it's so moist, it's fluffy, right? But it's cured and it tastes good. It's just, I like my stuff.

Macky:  Homegrown is the best. Homegrown, it's crazy. Home grown is the best. Even now, with all these professionals growing large amounts of cannabis, homegrown is still the best, the best cannabis you're going to consume is the stuff you make yourself at home.

Kirk:  Completely agree with you, man. Absolutely. And, and yeah, I'm proud of it. And like I said, now I've got this abundance of stuff that I grew outside that's just blowing my mind.

Macky:  You're gonna make some hash then. If you've got abundance, can I get some?

Kirk:  I'll move into that. I'll move into that. But right now I'm learning how to make salves. And what I did, I took an ounce of homegrown flower, and I took two different varietals, mixed them together. I got some extra virgin olive oil because from my research, it's the best oil to actually draw out the... Can't say the words. Yeah, that's the word. I'm going to take some out And, and, um, and then I mixed a little coconut oil, a little bit, but I had Argon oil from Morocco, Arnica oil from Marocco and menthol from Morocco and beeswax, local beeswax and put it all together and I'm now using it on my arm and I smell like a cannabis garden.

Macky:  Sweet. And this thing, you know, and obviously I don't know about you guys because you're in that profession, but the majority of us ordinary folk, not saying you're ordinary, you know what I mean? We're very skeptical of big pharma. And when you see people treating themselves with their own homegrown medicines, you'll know that's going to be a problem for big pharma. They lose out a lot of money when you're not getting your medicine from them. And it's one of the reasons why cannabis has been prohibited for so long. One of the many, No.

Kirk:  But it's also there's not a lot of medications that you're completely in control of as the patient, right? And that's the thing about cannabis is that doctors aren't in control of it. Prescribers, all prescribers can say is I'm going to prescribe you cannabis. I'm gonna say you can take 10 grams a day. That allows you to grow X amount of plants and you decide how much you use. That's contrary. I mean, I think Trevor's used to it now, but in the old days, you were quite uncomfortable with that. What do you mean people decide how to take their own meds?

Trevor:  Well, I was and, but to push back on that though, the, the problem with that is a lot of the people we talked to anyway, and I don't think we're alone is older people. So take your cutoff 75 plus 70 plus want to try cannabis for their miscellaneous aches, pains and ailments. And they don't want to, you know, I've obviously generalizing you know there's going to be some who want to you know experiment on their own but in general they want to have you know the doctors say take this capsule or take this oil for your sore knee and and they don't they don't want to figure it out on their and it's strangely like Kirk said a lot of the doctors we think are kind of abdicating the responsibility and just saying well just go down to the rec store and pick something out which is so wrong in so many ways like the the bud tender is legally not allowed to give them medical advice. The budtender of course doesn't know about the 150 other problems that they have or the medications they're on so i think there really is a spot for medical professionals slash standardized cannabis slash you know not having people figuring it out on their own, because there's a good chunk of the population, the older chunk in particular, who really would like something closer to, we'll say their traditional trip to the pharmacy. Where I have a prescription from the doctor, I hand it to the pharmacist, they give me exactly what the doctor wanted, and I check back in the doctor in a month or two to see if it works. That's what a good chunk of the population is looking for and weirdly in a legalized country like Canada, that doesn't happen very often.

Macky:  It's another thing with, like you say, with the patients finding the right dosage, it's hard to be consistent with cannabis. You can't always take 10 milligrams if you're smoking it, at least. If it was in an oil or some kind of extract, then it'd make it easier. You have to get it right, don't you?

Trevor:  Yeah, when we get a conference, I went to a couple times. They held in Florida, I think this year, they went, moved to Puerto Rico. That's not the important bit. So CannMed, interesting, lots of cool people there, but sort of along these lines, there was a definite split in the people who were there, the very pro, pharmaceutical and you know people from the pharmaceutical industry who really want to break cannabis down into its individual constituents and make a billion dollar drug on it and the whole plant people and they didn't agree on very much which is fair but I it's cool in my opinion I think it's going to have to be a something between the two of them. Like the pharmaceutical people, one of the reasons they want to break it down to its individual constituents is that's how things get licensed. That's just how, how it works is you can't license a drug that has 150 different constituents, like a cannabis plant does, but on the other hand, for the whole plant people, like you said, it's really hard to be consistent batch after batch of whole plant. And so, you know, if you don't know the exact dose of what you're getting, it's hard to say, you don, if I felt better or worse this month, What was it? My disease change or the medication. I don't know quite where that's going to end up, but I think there's got to be some sort of happy medium between the 100% pharmaceutical people and the 100 percent whole-planet people, but i don't quite know where that is going to go.

Macky:  I think so too, a balance between the two, that's it, it's going to be hard to get there.

Kirk:  Even as a guy that, you know, I'm aging and I'm now I am truly using cannabis medicinally for for my for my joint pain. Even I am reluctant to believe it, because, I mean, when I broke, I broke six ribs a few years ago, pretty much every rib that's attached, I broke them and spent spent six weeks miserable sitting in an upright chair, sleeping in an up right chair, but I used cannabis for pain relief. And It didn't always work. It helped me sleep. So I supplemented it with ibuprofen very cautiously, but I got through that and associated injuries are that I blew out some tendons. Well, now I'm using lotions on that. I don't have any pain. So I'm reluctantly asking myself, well, am I just healing now? Because, you know, as you, the healing process, or is it the cannabis working? I mean, so I'm even myself. I use it as medicine. I'm reluctant to believe if it's really working, but I can tell you. That stuff Peter gave me, unbelievable, just unbelievable. So it must be working, right? And then you start getting studies and people are saying cannabis works, but do we have double blind placebo studies? No, we don't. We just got people's words for it, right.

Macky:  Yeah, it's just not right. It needs real studies, like double blind everything to make sure you know that it's working, but it's doing the job it says it does on the tin.

Kirk:  But yet, if you say anecdotally that I got no pain using cannabis. You know, so what's working?

Macky:  Still need them proper studies and hopefully they'll get done soon you know if the USA changes down to their uh brings it down to schedule one rather than schedule no schedule three rather than schedule one in it yeah because it's prohibited to even do experiments on cannabis in the USA there's still countries that are doing work Israel's doing work and they Israel is coming up with some good cannabis yeah we

Trevor:  We think Israel is still kind of the world leader in research. Canada was doing some, weirdly as Kirk's pointed out several times, is sort of since since legalization even the cannabis research seems to have gone away in Canada where there used to at least be some doing here and now it just seems to fall off the map here too. So yes, like the rest of the world we do we do look to Israel for what they're doing.

Kirk:  The first five years of legalization, recreational legalization in Canada, if you wanted to study cannabis as a substance of misuse, there was money available for you. If you wanted the study cannabis is medicine, the money didn't flow. My understanding now, slowly, the money is going towards cannabis medicine. But I think most cannabis, Canadian cannabis experts believe we dropped the ball. We could have been so far ahead of the research and we went into it thinking that cannabis is a substance of misuse. I was just saying to Trevor in our last episode, like again, I did a quick scan of the professional colleges in Manitoba and professional colleges of nurses, professional colleges of respiratory therapists, physical therapists, all the medical fields we have colleges we report to. And nursing and respiratory. Respiratory were the only ones that had policies, but the nurse's one was cannabis as medicine. The respiratory one was, cannabis as a misused substance being used by therapists. So the studies in Canada are now, as a health care provider, I'm supposed to be looking at cannabis as the substance of misuse, not as medicine

Macky:  Well, there's always so much research to be done. I'm glad I hope to be part of it one day. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's been a good conversation.