Episode Transcript

Trevor: Kirk, we're back.

Kirk:  Hey, Trevor. How's it going?

Trevor: Good. Uh, so Seann Poli.

Kirk:  Yeah..

Trevor: ahhh.

Kirk:  Two N's.

Trevor: Two N's. Seann with two N's, uh, met him on that there LinkedIn. Um, interesting guy. Financier turned,  raising money for, for a cannabis company, turned maybe I'll start an LP on my own, turned well, I'm going to tease and say maybe, and I mean this in a good way, maybe a cannabis pharmacist that I want to be when I grow up. Do you want to say anything about Seann on the way in or do you want just chat on the way back out?

Kirk:  No, let's just listen to Sean's story and we'll chat in a way out because I think you're right. I think there's things that we can pick out of the story but let's let the audience hear the story and then we can discuss it.

Trevor:  All right, here's Sean.

Seann Poli:  Thanks, Trevor. Yeah, it is Seann Poley. I do have that extra N, in case I lose one, I have to give one away. That's a long story, at another podcast. And I am one of the founders of JANrx, along with my wife and my son. JAN stands for Jacob, Anton, Nicholas, our three boys.

Trevor:  And I do want to get to JANrx, but let's go back a little bit. What sort of got you, what got brought you in into cannabis in the first place? I understand it was a little while ago.

Seann Poli:  Yeah, back in 2014 is actually when I first was introduced to the commercial system. My previous life was essentially private merchant capital and a friend of mine wanted to raise money for his commercial location and that was very much a brand new thing back then. And I really had no idea about the science of cannabis. I only knew cannabis as getting stoned. Myself from Calgary as a young man, we usually drank whiskey and there were always the guys that were smoking up as well, but I never got into that. And then when I started to learn more about the signs of it, I fell in love with how the plant interacts with the body. There's a story about Charlotte's Web, which is a strain out of the US, a very high CBD strain. And there was a young girl, Charlotte, who had Dravet syndrome, basically seizures every five minutes of her life. And CBD oil stopped those seizures, which fascinated me. And so in 2015, I thought, well, I know how to raise money. Um, I'll start raising money for my own company. And back then you could raise money, essentially on a business plan, if you had the right connections. I ended up meeting people when I was in Calgary, who lived in the Ottawa area, and I ended buying a vegetable farm, greenhouse farm, converting that, taking it public, going through the whole roller coaster ride. But essentially it was falling in love with the science of cannabis that really made me get involved with it. Still love the science today.

Trevor:  Which is cool and we love that too but back to that sort of original cannabis company was that pre 2018 so it was sort of a medical licensed LP or was it on the rec thing or a little both or what was that first company?

Seann Poli:  We've always been strictly medical. That first company was called Artiva, which was a subsidiary of Livewell Foods. It was a conglomerate of companies under Livewell. We were thinking ahead of our time in terms of thinking we could combine the cannabinoids with food products back then, which really wasn't done right back in 1516. The company actually wasn't licensed till 19. Um, yeah.

Trevor:  Okay, so we're up to you. You've figured out how to raise money and get a company and become an LP. Where do we go next? How does that get us closer towards JANrx?

Seann Poli:  What we discovered was the sheer mass of licenses that were getting approved by the government was making it progressively harder to compete against a lot of the early players that had raised literally billions of dollars. And we eventually came to the realization that trying to compete against Canopy, Tilray, AFRI Aurora, was a very, very expensive venture. And so my wife, Celeste, and I decided that we prefer to not have that constant pressure on us. And we formed JANrx to be a non-possession medical sales license.

Trevor:  Okay, what does that mean?

Seann Poli: That means that we do not inventory cannabis. We do not grow it. We don't extract anything. We have a distributor out of Montreal who inventories our product. So what we'd like to say is we're 100% medical, 100% independent, and 100% Canadian. So all of our shareholders are Canadian. We don t have a board of directors. Um, or controlling shareholders that dictate which brands we have to buy. Uh, we don't have a parent corporation that has another LP that says you have to sell that, uh, brand. So we essentially look across the country at, uh all the providers that do sell into the medical market. And we pick what we feel are the best products for the medical market, uh granted a lot of the brand names do have recreational branding to it. But a 30% THC flower is going to be 30%, whether it looks like in a funky pouch or a plain looking medical pouch kind of thing. So on that side, there's going to be some crossover, but on the topicals, on the oils, gel caps, there are some products that are distinctly medical quality because they don't have the recreational effect to it. Our patient mix is between civilian and veteran. I would say that on the civilian side, the majority are purchasing higher THC products and not as much on the CBD side or non-psychoactive side. That being said, we are bringing in some new brands that have some very interesting formulations on the medical side, which we'll be sending out notices to all of our patients. On the veteran side.

Trevor:  Before we get to that, I just back up. So if I was trying to get something from JANrx, am I strictly going to my doctor, nurse practitioner, getting a prescription, a medical document, sending it to you guys and you guys mail it out? There's no storefront. I don't go into the JANRX store at all, correct?

Seann Poli: Correct. Yeah. So on JANrx.ca There's a register link and a get prescription link. So you don't have to necessarily go to your doctor or nurse practitioner. We have a nurse practitioner, a psychiatrist and a space specialist on our medical team. Okay. And so we provide those prescriptions for free. And it's different between civilian and veterans and we can get into that. And then everything is ordered online and shipped right to one's door.

Trevor:  Okay, so if I used your prescriber they're going to sort of see me virtually, ask me some questions, that sort of thing, without me leaving my house?

Seann Poli: Correct, yes.

Trevor:  Okay, cool. All right, yeah, I want to hear about some of the new things, new products you've got coming out, but yeah, because you seem to sort, of specialize in veterans. Let's talk about that. What first led you to think that you know, well they're obviously a special and interesting group, but what led you down the road of looking after veterans?

Seann Poli: I've got some good friends who are vets, and after my discussions with them on cannabis, I realized that they weren't particularly educated on the different types of products and what the different cannabinoids do for the body. And so after having, you know, those frank discussions, they signed on as patients. That was a pretty steep learning curve in how to deal with Blue Cross, but we are now Blue Cross approved as a vendor and we have a very efficient system with Blue Cross. We enjoy working with them quite a bit. But then that led to referrals to veterans. And then that led to veteran organizations. Where they did not have a cannabis resource. And so they now use JANrx as a cannabis resource where a vet will have questions about cannabis. They will refer them to us. We do donate back to a handful of veteran charities as well out of our gross revenues. We do a lot of sponsorships with other veteran activities. So we try and get involved as much as possible. We do ship nationwide as well.

Trevor:  Cool, and I'll try not to get too geeky, but as a pharmacist, I deal with Department of Veterans Affairs patients all the time. They're not quite as difficult to deal with as non-insured health benefits, otherwise known as treaty, but they're probably a little more difficult than your usual insurance company. But on the plus side, most insurance companies don't want to touch cannabis at all. Talk to us a little bit about what's sort of involved in getting a cannabis product covered for for a veteran. Like Who's doing the paperwork? Is it your is it your provider? Like the prescriber is it you guys is the vet is how's how's that working?

Seann Poli: It's kind of a mix, actually. So initially, Veteran Affairs Canada, once there's a blue cross number issued that qualifies a veteran for medical coverage, then they are automatically covered for three grams per day. There's a certain reimbursement rate, $6 per gram, that the veteran would qualify for. And so when we first onboard a veteran, they will register through that link. We'll get them their prescription, which gets sent directly to me. We also ask for their Blue Cross ID card that has their K number. And we send all of that to Blue Cross ourselves. Typically it takes about two weeks to get an approval for cannabis for that patient. Um, and typically they will also approve that account retroactively to when they first registered with JANrx as well, which is nice.

Trevor:  Yeah.

Seann Poli: When that approval comes in, um, I already have a pretty good idea of what kind of THC tolerance, if any, the patient has, and what type of ailments they're trying to address. And For most of the patients, I actually make the orders myself. So I get in touch with the vets every month. How did it go last month? Did you like that? Not like it, want more or less of something. And we'll produce their next order and just have that shipped out to their door and we bill Blue Cross. So there's as much inconvenience as possible for the vet. Some of the vets make their own orders, which is also fine too. I make sure I look at every order to ensure that It all fits within the Blue Cross budget, within their cannabis allowance, that kind of thing. Then there are some veterans that feel like the three grams is not enough. So I can, depending on whether it says PTSD or sore joints, I would use either a psychiatrist or a pain specialist to meet with the patient. It would be virtually, but still it would be, there would be a very detailed report. That we would then forward to Blue Cross to approve that patient for say five grams or seven grams kind of thing. Usually they go in two gram increments. So from three to five and see how that goes for a few months and then go higher if we have to. We have some patients as high as 10, 10 grams. And then, you know, again, it's just that monthly follow-up. How did things go? Want to try something else? We've got a lot of products that the vets like for sleep as well on the CBN side.

Trevor:  So I just, again, everything about cannabis is a little different than the rest of, we'll call it the medical field. What you're describing is basically what a pharmacist would do in the traditional medication end of things, you know, I'm dealing with insurance companies, I am asking a patient, you know did you like this, did you not like this? If they hated it, you now, is it something I can deal with or do I have to refer you back to your prescriber? So yeah, it sounds like all sort of the rules you're doing for cannabis, and it's good, we need somebody to be doing it, is sort of what a pharmacist would be doing if, you know, this was a traditional cholesterol, diabetes, depression medication. So yeah. It sounds like you're basically filling the pharmacist's role, and that's good. Someone should be talking to the patients about this and helping with the insurance thing. So that's really interesting.

Seann Poli: Yeah. Yeah. And I found almost all of my patients really didn't get proper education on what the different cannabinoids do and the different types of delivery systems, you know, especially when you start getting into the nanosized. Quick absorption type products as well. You know, we will even suggest a combination of products that have the same cannabinoid profile, but different absorption rates. So we have a quick onset, which ends quicker, but then if you've taken a regular product, that will last longer. So you sort of have a stacked feeling kind of thing. And I enjoy every day of it. My wife does all the accounting in the Blue Cross. She's also creating some seminars and webinars for female veterans also. We're also gonna be establishing some holistic products that's less than making to include CBD that are more so on the hormonal balance side, right? So we don't wanna be pigeonholed into just being a cannabis company. When I chat with the vets, we talk about other health things too, like, you know, we talk like we're buddies. You know, have your mineral salts, you now, Try and get more protein in your diet. You know, bone broth and collagen drinks, not a heavy drink, something to have in the morning kind of thing. So we try and establish our relationship with them that just goes beyond cannabis.

Trevor:  No, that's, and since you sort of alluded to it, let's talk about, so are the majority of your veterans using, well lack of a better word, smokable dried flour, or are they doing other products, or what have you been finding?

Seann Poli: No to the answer of smokable flour, not the majority. I would say probably 25%. The majority are using an oil or a soft gel or a topical. We do have some options on the edible side that are sugar-free. I am looking at another company that uses fruit puree for the sugar component of the gummy. There is a lot of sugar in the gummies. And so. We don't like to see veterans taking 200 gummies a month, for example, to get their CBD. There's gel caps, there's CBD isolate, there are oils. Some of the issues with the oils is that the less refined the oil is, the more full spectrum product you have, but the worse that it tastes. So, yeah. An effective, as you know, an effective product is a product that gets taken.

Trevor:  Yes, it doesn't work at all if you don't take it.

Seann Poli: That's right. So it's a constant discussion with with veterans about the oil product specifically, because of the taste factor. You know, we can go from a full spectrum, almost crude, not quite crude, because that's more like tar but to a refined distillate to using an isolate. So each stage has less taste, but then less full spectrum. But I would prefer at least I'm taking isolate versus not taking anything at all kind of thing.

Rene:  Alright, there's the first part of Trevor's Conversation with Seann Poley of JANrx. We're going to stop things here and continue in the next episode to wrap up Trevor's Conversation and then listen to Trevor and Kirk discuss Sean's insights and wisdoms. Thank you very much for listening to Reefer Medness, the podcast, reefermed.ca. Go there. Check out the library. It's insanely great. So much information. And also please tell your friends. If when you hear something that you like, send the link. All the valuable information in our library needs to be shared. So please spread the word. Reefer Medness, the podcast.