Episode Transcript

Rene: And we're back. Welcome, it's Rene back here in the studio. This episode is part two of a conversation that Kirk had with Dr. Patrick Neary at the, literally at the University of Regina. They've been talking about cannabis and concussions and we're going to have a listen to the rest of that conversation and then Trevor and Kirk going over what they've learned about cannabis and concussions.

Kirk:  Okay, so here we are. So you've done the first study where you have demonstrated that you can give athletes high doses of CBD without any ill effects.

Patrick Neary PhD:  Correct.

Kirk:  So now the next step is to use it prophylactically. The next step, the next study is where do you take the study next? Or are you into it already

Patrick Neary PhD:  We're into the next study now. So again, you know, we've been very, very fortunate. We've got Health Canada approval to do our second study, and we're calling this the Neural Protection Study. And based on the results that we got and the high amount of CBD that athletes could take, we began thinking, well, a lot of literature has actually come out to support what we call the entourage effect. Right? You know, the plant.

Kirk:  Full Spectrum.

has over a hundred cannabinoids, over four hundred or five hundred total components including the terpenes and the flavonoids and of course the cannabinoids. So we began thinking, well can we create a formulation that has other cannabinoids and terpenes in it as well that could be as beneficial as CBD alone. And if you look through the literature, there's more and more research coming out on the minor cannabinoids and how important they are for neuro protection and anti-inflammatory. So that's what we've done is we've designed what we call a broad-based formulation because it doesn't have any THC in it. And it doesn' have any thc because we're working with university athletes.

Kirk:  Sure, sure. So you're doing isolates. Or any combining.

Patrick Neary PhD:  So we combine them all into a gel capsule. Yeah, all right in in a medium chain oil,.

Kirk:  Okay. So that's all that's happening now.

Patrick Neary PhD:  So we put that into an oil. Happening right now.

Kirk:  So you've proved that it doesn't harm them. Now so now is this going to be like a 10-year study are you following these kids for 10 years like what what do you like i mean how how do you find out if it prevents a concussion

Patrick Neary PhD:  So what we've done with this study, that's an excellent question, so what we have done with this study is the football season, the university football season is about eight weeks long.

Kirk:  Right.

Patrick Neary PhD:  Alright. So for half of the season they're on the formulation, CBD formulation. The other half of this season they flop over and they do the placebo. Ah! And then there's that. So You might start with a placebo. And then halfway through, you'll switch over and take the cannabinoids. I might start with the cannabinoids, switch over and take the placebo. And so before and after each of those interventions, and it's a double blind crossover design, nobody knows what you're getting, all right? You wouldn't know, I don't know as a researcher what you are being prescribed. And so, before and before each of those formulations, we do our physiological testing. We again, we monitor the brain for blood flow and oxygen, the heart response, blood pressure, and we're also using something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. And this is with my colleague, Cameron Mang, and he's a neurophysiologist. And what it does is it's a coil, it's magnetic coil that stimulates the neurons in the brain. And it can give us an indication of whether there's an excitatory response or an inhibitory response. So now we're even looking at that in the brain. Is CBD creating any changes in the excitatory and inhibitory response when you're on it, even before or after a concussion? Anyway, so we've started this study. We've already put through 10 of the University Rams football players and some of the university hockey players, the Cougar hockey players as well. Of course, their season is a little bit longer, so all we simply did is we went back to our ethics and to Health Canada to say, hey, we want to increase our subject pool. Ice hockey is also contact sport, all right, they have a longer season, we're going to give that to them for a longer period of time, they're still going to do the crossover and we'll take a look to see what happens.

Kirk:  This is very cool. So, okay, so now you've got this team of kids, I'm going to call them kids, right? Athletes, you got a team of athletes. You've got them, you've gotten double blinded, you got them taking these capsule pills, you formulated it. So I'm playing hockey and I go into the boards and I get my bell run. I go back into the change room and the team athletics support says you got to concussion man. So now, do you treat that guy differently now? Do you pull him aside and say, this guy's been diagnosed with a potential concussion, now we're gonna test him? 

Patrick Neary PhD:  Yeah, so what we do is we follow up with testing.

Kirk:  Okay.

Patrick Neary PhD:  We don't change anything and so, if for example, that...

Kirk:  So you don't anything at all, just the guy got his Bell rung.

Patrick Neary PhD:  We just bring them back more often.

Kirk:  That's what I'm saying. So there's been a box checked, right? Yeah. Because the whole point of this, this whole point is it's you got to track the concussions.

Patrick Neary PhD:  Yeah. Yeah,.

Kirk:  Okay.

Patrick Neary PhD:  Exactly. So so what we do is we what I meant We we don't change anything is is that they if he if he happens to be on the placebo We just say can go you to take your your medication if he happened to be in the CBD. We say just continue taking medication,.

Kirk:  you dont know that.

Patrick Neary PhD:  But we don't know that right.

Kirk:  Just carry on but now we've tagged you Yeah, saying you were a guy with a concussion.

Patrick Neary PhD:  Yeah, and then so what? We do then as I say Kirk you need to come back on day one or day two. As soon as we can get you back into the lab do exactly the identical testing blood as well. We're taking blood samples as well And then we say okay, we want you to come back in three days. Because we want to look at the what goes on over that time period so we might get you Back on day one. We might get your back on day four Then we're gonna have you come back on Day seven and we're going to monitor symptoms All right using what we call our scat test. Sure. All right sport concussion assessment tool, you know, what kind of symptoms do you have? And then we'll just continue to follow you. And let's say even after seven days, you're still not back and you're not feeling well. Well, that's okay. We're still gonna continue to monitor you on day 10, day 14, all right, until you are actually back.

Kirk:  That's very cool. That's pretty cool.

Patrick Neary PhD:  So that's our second study. And so, as I said, we've got 10 guys that have come through already. And then, so it's gonna go over two seasons. So we've already done the one season. The 2004-2005, (error: 2024-2025) right? So now we're going to move into the (error: 2026-2027) 2006-2007 season. So in July and August they'll be coming back to us. We're also going to approach our junior football here, you know, the Thunder football. You know, it's very similar to the Hilltops which is up in Saskatoon. You know there's a variety of teams out of Winnipeg as well.

Kirk:  This is varsity level football?

Patrick Neary PhD:  It's varsity-level, but there are students that are really either not going to university and they just want to continue to play.

Kirk:  Okay, so right now the NFL is sponsoring a group of Canadians to study Canadian football players and the rules of the game don't change

Patrick Neary PhD:  No, no. And so that's what they want to know. They want to know, you know, in contact sport and more specifically football. All right. But again, as I said, we're extending it into ice hockey because it's still a contact sport. 

Kirk:  Sure. Makes sense. Makes sense. So when, so the NFL is not necessarily involved with their players. This is, they're funding you to say, what can you figure out that we can apply?

Patrick Neary PhD:  Exactly.

Kirk:  So eventually somebody's going to say, okay, pick a team and let's do it with the NFL guys. So how many like, so from what you're telling me already, so in the next 10 years, you think all contact sport players will be taking vitamin CBD?

Patrick Neary PhD:  I believe so.

Kirk:  Yeah, yeah,.

Patrick Neary PhD:  Yeah. If not already, you know, a lot of them are involved with it. You know, even when you look at the CFL, all right, our rules and regulations are certainly much different than they are in the States. And although the NFL has loosened their restrictions and requirements, quite a bit actually, at one time you had had almost minimum amount. All right. Of the THC in your system and then of course now you know the relaxation of their regulations are much better. So that's the second study or the second yeah second study of this whole project and again we're going to run it again this coming summer and then into the fall and into the winter as well with our hockey. We're going to use as many football teams as we can. We may even make a trip up to Saskatoon to see if we can get the University of Saskatchewan, their team, the Huskies involved. We have colleagues also part of this, you know, they're cerebral vascular physiologists and probably some of the best in the world, in my opinion, at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna. And a good friend and a colleague, Phil Ainslie, has been looking at cerebral vascular function forever. And him and I just looked at each other and we stumbled upon, you know, there's been more than 40 years of this research out there which I knew nothing about until I met Lester, right?

Kirk:  That's the thing that always bothers me about cannabis politics is that every the Western medicine says not enough studies And I'm thinking but there are studies and all the studies suggest that you we should be looking at this.

Patrick Neary PhD:  Yeah,.

Kirk:  We we just interviewed a doctor Robinson out of Israel And he did a longitudinal study with 50, 50 diabetics for five years Followed them and he the conclusion was, he thinks it might just be unethical not to suggest that diabetics should not be smoking their flower because he found that glycemic indexes fell, neuropathic pain fell. It's like, why aren't we giving these guys cannabis...

Patrick Neary PhD:  And you know, Kirk, that's the next study as well. So study three, which I'm, as I mentioned, I'm putting together a clinical trial application right now to submit to Health Canada. And we're very positive that, you know it'll go through, just based on the fact that there's more and more research coming out. And if you look at the clinicaltrial.gov website, right in the United States, they're showing that they're starting to use more minor cannabinoids, including THC. So our next study is going to use, again, a formulation, but it's also going to include a very small amount of THC, all right? It'll be less than the 0.3%, all right, that most people will allow researchers, really, to give their participants. So in that study we're going to look at neuropathic pain, we're going to at orthopedic pain. We're going look at ex-professional and junior hockey football players. That unfortunately, maybe on prescription medications, some of them may be taking opioids as well, with the whole idea is can we can we help in the pain management area? And so the third study is going to be just call that pain management and they're gonna, again, it's going to be a what we call a Latin square design. And right now, we have four different products that we want to put into that. And every individual will actually get one of those products. So there will be a THC only.

Kirk:  OK.

Patrick Neary PhD:  There will be CBD only.

Kirk:  OK.

Patrick Neary PhD:  There will this full spectrum only. And then there will the plocebo. So if you and I are in the study, we would have to go through all of those. Yeah, yeah. And then you'd be on it for a month, and then there's a two-week washout. And then, you're on the next one, all right? And it's randomized. we randomize that.

Kirk:  We allow the endocannabinoid system to reboot, give that two weeks.

Patrick Neary PhD:  Yeah, during that two weeks. And then again, all of the same physiological and blood tests and the the transcranial Doppler stuff and magnetic stimulation, all of the same tests that we're doing.

Kirk:  thats very cool.

Trevor:  Kirk, you know they ask you who is your favorite podcast guest and you know it's like my children I can you know, they're all my favorite. They're all fantastic. But you know secretly Neary might be my favorite He's he's just that combination of Super positive and super pleasant and super knowledgeable. He's a great guy to talk to

Kirk:  Yeah, and it was very casual. I was in Van Hoot. I was traveling down the Trans Canada Highway and we started texting. I parked. I pulled over.

Trevor: You're safe, good.

Kirk:  Yeah, I was safe and he directed me to the campus and went to the Tim Hortons, he got himself a cup of coffee, we stepped outside, sat down and talked. One of the things that really popped for me was how he got into cannabinoid therapy through Lester Grinspoon.

Trevor:  Yes.

Kirk:  And the quote I loved that I pulled out was, I want to be able to see our world where mom and dad say that Johnny and Sally, take your cannabinoids or your flavinations and go out and play. Sort of like Dr. Turner saying seven years ago, go take your vitamin CBD.

Trevor:  Yeah, no, I like that this one, this one episode touched on so many of our other ones. So like you said, we talked to Lester's son, Peter Grinspoon, who's also now a cannabinoid physician at E66. We actually talked to Dr. Neary before. E85.

Kirk:  Yeah, episode 85. We forgot to mention that.

Trevor:  That was before any of these studies, when they were just kind of an idea, the NFL had just said, yeah, we'll give this guy Regina some money. And, and so it's cool that it's still going. I kind of forgot until I was flipping back through it. Genester Wilson King. We've talked about a lot of, we will call it women's health perimenopausal, endometriosis stuff with her over a few episodes but back into E145. She was working with Peter Grinspoon so again another Grinspoon thing and then just football in general back in episode 95 Taurus Baptiste was an actual football player who was you know this close to being in the NFL and stuff happened didn't work out but you know football players and cannabis it comes up and it and like you were saying during the episode Lester Grinspoon i don't know if i knew this story before Lester Grinspun had written an open level letter to the NFL saying you know you gotta let these guys smoke cannabis because this protects their brains so Yeah, just so many things all come together.

Kirk:  Yeah, that's the thing that sitting there and listening and to this conversation and thinking back of how much we've known about cannabis for so long and how people are, how the current today's scientists are getting into it. I mean, Lester was the first, I guess, what we would call first generation cannabis advocate in prohibition. And his influence is affecting today. And it just kills me because the other day I had a conversation with a young man who was, and we're gonna have him on here eventually, but I met him in Winnipeg as a budtender, 21 years old, Trevor, and I'm talking to him, doing one of my cold calls, and what I found fascinating is that during the interview or during the comments, it dawned on me, this kid's 21, He's never known illegal cannabis Right? So you so you look back at the Lesters of the world or, you know, the 60s when people, David Crosby and the Beatles and Bob Dylan, those guys all using cannabis and it was such devil's weed back then. But even the scientists back then knew there was benefits, of course, because, you, know, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Hader's novel came out, a novel book came out. And it's just here we are, we're in this sort of, I guess, first generation of legalization and finally we're getting some studies done but yet from what we've learned from our past interview with Dr. Kelly, we just had the conversation about research and how difficult it is to have research in Canada.

Trevor:  Right, it is, but I just want to, and not that, but I want to do a yes and on that, but yes and Neary and his team are doing some really good stuff, really good and interesting and you know, not namby pamby stuff on, on these athletes' brains. They're measuring the blood flow in the brain, they're measuring oxygen in the brain. Like you said, his, his team, and I'm going to miss some of them, but they have heart specialists. They have like neurologists, brain specialists, they have people looking at the immune system. They have, of course, you have to have a good.

Kirk:  Multi-disciplinary team.

Trevor:  You've got to have a good pharmacist and they're doing the pharmacokinetics. So those are the people who check your blood later to see what the CBD broke down into at what time. Like this is not a, you know, man, I took some cannabis and my brain feels better. No, this is the science that they're doing a really cool job on. It's going to be very interesting to see you know broken down all the different stuff they found. I'm not surprised when he he didn't say we have a paper coming out on study one they have papers because there's going to be papers who are coming out. On this stuff because they're getting just a ton of data. 

Kirk:  Yeah, I agree. It's interesting though about the liver studies, I mean we've been reading about CBD and how it affects the liver, but I guess I was reminded, I was talking to Ted Smith about my interview with Neary and about the livers, because also the Victoria Buyer Cannabis Club, they also do high doses of cannabinoids.

Trevor:  Damn it's like the Ted Smith from it'll be a couple episodes by the time people hear this, that was that was a drug interaction thing so.

Kirk:  Correct.

Trevor:  So you know Ted's patients not surprisingly they've got a lot of stuff going on with them so they're on a lot of medication and CBD especially in some of the other cannabinoids you go back to Dr. Lindsay Anderson I don't remember a number but people have looked into this a lot cannabinoids and sometimes especially CBD effects some liver enzymes that break down other medications, so if you take CBD and other medications at the same time, basically you have to be careful, AKA call your pharmacist. But it's not, making the liver work differently isn't quite the same as liver damage. I know, I'm being pedantic.

Kirk:  No, no, no. But that was, you stole my punchline. That's exactly what I was going to say is that in this case we're dealing with young athletes and it's a reminder, we're not quite into the NFL yet. This is a study supported by the NFL for future use in the NFL, but this is now university varsity athletes hockey players contact sports, right? So yeah, that's what I'm thinking. They must have healthy livers. These are healthy young people.

Trevor:  Yes,.

Kirk:  And So so this is well good and the other quote that I liked about it is one of the core findings was that they were able to show that CBD does not have negative effects on the cardiovascular system. Nor does it have negative effects on

Trevor:  Chances of strokes are cerebrovascular stuff.

Kirk:  And function, yeah, at high doses, yeah. So we're getting away from the stigma, we're getting away from, you know, the stuff that we've been told how these things are gonna, you now, the devil's lettuce is gonna hurt you.

Trevor:  Yeah and just because it's fun throughout the big numbers they had some of like you guys were saying big boys so 140 kilograms can't quite do that in my head but that'll be north of 300 pound linebackers I'm presuming on some huge doses of CBD and they were fine yeah you know. It might have bothered the tummies a little bit but they were fine.

Kirk:  Yeah, I think him and Dr. Neary and his team are going to do great things with breaking the stigma of cannabis and how more athletes. We've done several episodes on athletes now and how cannabis has helped athletes. And it's time that professional leagues and that is not a performance enhancing drug, right? I mean, it may be actually more of a healing drug than a performance-enhancing drug. You know, it's stigma. There's a lot of stigma.

Trevor:  Yeah no absolutely and I don't have it here but if you go back and oh we had talked to someone about the Olympic athletes back in the catalog. If I can find it I'll try and put it in the notes but yes this this athletes and cannabis has come up before. Yeah no this was a really good one without me sort of I've I've got two pages worth of notes but honestly I think Dr Neary sort of covered most of them better than I'm going to. Anything else you want to talk about with Neary?

Kirk:  No, just that we're going to have to keep track of him because I think he's having a lot of fun and again he's a friend of the show. This is our second interview with him and he's doing great things. He and his team are doing great things

Trevor:  Canadian cannabis researchers, go team.

Kirk:  This, I was looking back on our webpage, when we did the episode with Dr. Neary before the cannabis is for headbangers, we didn't put a lot of his papers. So on this page, I'll have his papers linked, because he's got, if you Google him on Scholar, he's go lots of papers up.

Trevor:  Uh, another good one. I really like the episodes with Neary. Maybe we'll still get one or two more as the papers keep coming in.

Kirk:  and tell a friend.