Episode Transcript

Trevor: We're back. So this is part two of three with Gil Luxenbourg.

Kirk:  Sure, let's do a quick introduction. Who is Gil again?

Trevor: Gil is many things. I guess, famously, medical cannabis patient number seven in Israel. But he's also started a company that does education. He developed most of the cannabis education, it sounds like for the Ministry of Health in Israel, worked with several cannabis companies, did some patient advocacy work, he's done lots of things and in this one we're talking about him doing some stuff outside of Israel, some policy stuff and some terpene stuff.

Kirk:  Yeah, I see this as a revolutionary discussion you're having with this fellow because again we have to remember these experiences go back to the early parts of this millennium and in part two we're going to start talking to how he introduced cannabis into a foreign country and became became notorious for being the first guy to smoke legal cannabis in

Trevor: That one was Czechoslovakia, I believe.

Kirk:  Yeah, that's that in itself is worth listening to this episode that story stepping outside an airport. Your know.

Trevor: All right. So I think we've reintroduced Gil enough. Let's let him talk about him traveling to Europe and into the former Czechoslovakia now the Czech Republic and what he was doing there.

Kirk:  Okay.

Trevor: Let's jump for it to Czechoslovakia. What were you doing there in the 2012-2013

Gil Luxenbourg: Well, it started out with 2009 when they started out reaching out to me the local patient organizations that tried to change the law. And then I went and started working with them and with government officials in a way to try and write the regulatory framework correctly for the Czech Republic with the team that was working there, the amazing team that was working their own. Then in 2012, I was invited to speak Parliament about the process that we've done in Israel and how much I'm like, very satisfied with what they're doing at the Czech Republic learning from the rest of the world and actually implementing also things that we did wrong, they're learning from it and doing it better. And so while I was invited, I kind of went at it saying, okay, but I need my medicine. And they told me, okay. Well, what do you mean you need your medicine? I've got a medicine in Israel that you don't approve there. And I need to bring it with me. If you want me to come to parliament, I never said the word cannabis. I just said medicine. So they gave me this list of documents of what I need to bring in order to bring medicine that is not recognized in the Czech Czech Republic into the Czech Republic as a visitor. And it was a long list and I went through all of the hassle. And I made this one sign it and that one sign, it then Apple style, then everything went back to the embassy to the ambassador to sign it. And she went through the checklist. She just didn't go through the name of the actual, you know, drug, I guess. And she signed it. Maybe she did. Maybe I'm giving her not enough credit. I don't know, but the next thing you know I'm at the Czech airport with about, I think it was 120 grams of cannabis.

Trevor: Not just a little.

Gil Luxenbourg: I came to show them not just for myself. If you're going, you're going. And I brought all the licenses and all the documentation and I'm standing there at the airport and at some point time passes by and you start with a 50-50 chance that you're going to go through or you're gonna get to jail. So I came with a nice suit for the mugshots. But the longer the time prolongs at the airport, at the customs, you're like, okay, the chances are now at 90%, the chances that are now 96%, I'm going to jail, like if they would have let me through, they would've done it by now. At some point they just came to the chief of the, of the customs police came told me that he checked everything, checks out and I'm free to go in and do my thing. The next thing I know, I'm just after I walked off of the, out of the customs, red line to the outside, took the joint out and smoked it and was the first legal cannabis joint it smoked in the Czech Republic, the NEWS loved it and that was a small step, but realistically, we really built the system there in order to be patient centric, not just, um, regulation centric, which is different. I mean, the regulators, they're kind of built the system for the patients. It's not 100%. It's not perfect. No system is perfect. But it was no such But maybe.

Trevor: Many people in Canada will argue that we did not make it patient centric here. We made it regulator centric. So the fact it was at least aimed at the patients is, is definitely a good thing. Uh, let's move on to Bulgaria and you're doing some cannabis research there.

Gil Luxenbourg: I did, for three years, I did cannabis research there. It was funny, I really wanted to change the regulations there and the laws. And I approached the Ministry of Health several times and they kind of led me on to understand that we could do research first and then see. And that there is already a small research license that they're granted to this university and if I collaborate with them, I can build a facility to do the research. So I went through the process and we built a research facility and we got licensed for 42,000 plants of cannabis for research. Now let's be real, we didn't have the space or the capacity for 42 thousand plants at a time. We had 9,300 plants at the cycle and we ran it for three years. And we collected a lot of data. And most of the data we collected showed us that different cannabis strains with under different, uh, stress factors change at terpene appearances. They don't change as much the cannabinoid content based on the stress factors, but they do change the terps, which led us, which let me down the rabbit hole of terpenes and their impact. And for many years, I was sure that I figured it out. And then recently I realized that, well, I had it wrong all these years. So I have to reassess my own thoughts and you know, things you've taught on stages are come becoming wrong because of the math doesn't sit and you have to kind of look at it differently. But such things happen when you're a lot in science.

Trevor: Absolutely, but we can't just let that go because, you know, everybody's got their favorite terpene and thinks it does this, that, and the other thing. What were you thinking the terpenes were doing and how are you thinking now?

Gil Luxenbourg: Well, it started out with a lot of analysis of the published research and the published science and what terpenes impact what what receptors because you know that there is a difference, you know, that there's a difference in the plant and that there was a difference and the perceived effect at least, that we know patients report. We do know to analyze the chemical analysis and to know what's in the flower, but we don't know what goes in the patient. That's a different story. Uh, you know, smoking it reduces it, how much of the bioavailability, how much you're actually absorbing and so on and so forth, but we know to calculate the math and in the beginning, we didn't calculate the math of how much is actually in the flower to attributes kind of different attributes to the flower because it has these turps because science showed, then. For example, that limonene reduces, uh, anxiety of THC and that's excellent. Only you need to have quantities of limonine that don't exist in any known cannabis strain that's been analyzed, not by us or by any known lab in the world, as far as I've known or could trace.

Trevor: Oh no, we had Dr. Russo on a little while ago, he was peripherally involved in one of the studies that was looking at limonene and anxiety and THC and it seemed like a really, really exciting study when it came out.

Gil Luxenbourg: It's an amazing study for pharmaceuticals, for creating pharmaceuticals for pharmacists to make medicine, but it's not natural plant medicine. It's not as most patients get it. So when I'm attributing the fact that, you know, limiting reduces your anxiety in the, in the flower, because the COA shows limiting, it's just wrong. Why is it wrong? Because the amounts that are actually in the flower, even if we take away the fact that you burn it, that there is a bio availability loss, like all of that we disregard and we say 100% of what's in the plant goes in the body, still the quantity of terpenes that we find in the plan are not significant enough to actually occupy the receptors, significantly enough to activate them in any way. So it's not that system, but it still gets us the reaction. I mean, in the end, we still get the results. So how does it work? And I had to cancel out and attack it from different angles, and I won't complicate you with the entire story of how the science works. But basically the only system that we've discovered so far that I could detect and validate that can detect such low quantities of volatile molecules is the olfactory system, which brings us to the nose, or as they say, the nose nose.

Trevor:  Okay.

Gil Luxenbourg: Now, just like in PTSD patients, we know that the nose can trigger because of sense, they can trigger different immediate emotions and responses that are basically kind of rise to our operating system in the brain because of anticipation of something bad. Like it can bring flashes or otherwise immediate responses, physical and emotional responses for PTSD patients, different smells. Same thing goes with the anticipation from the smells from the cannabis effect. So our brain's process smells differently, different smells that attract us are found to be more relevant to how we anticipate the effect of the cannabis to impact us. And this kind of cross interaction between the anticipation and what's in the plan is what's actually combining to the entourage effect. I mean, let's remember the entourage effect equation as it was named by Professor Raphael Mechoulam  before Ethan Russo extrapolated it further. It was, if to simplify it completely, one plus zero is bigger than one. Active pharmaceutical ingredient plus a non-active pharmaceutical ingredient that together create a more impactful impact than just the pharmaceutical ingredient.

Trevor: Okay, yeah, yeah, I agree..

Gil Luxenbourg: Now, he based it on the endocannabinoid system and the anandamide. But if we extrapolate it to using the rough generalization as Ethan Russo named and traced later on, we're still at a place that it's the active compound, the cannabinoids, plus what's non-active because it doesn't get to the receptors and it's an active pharmaceutical ingredient with the levels that it gets there, the terpenes. But it still gets to the nose. So it changes from an additive equation to a multiplicative equation that creates a sinus wave because it could also create a negative effect, not just better impact, sometimes lesser impact like we do with limiting THC on anxiety. It doesn't increase anxiety, it reduces. Other terpenes could increase anxiety. Just saying, because of the way that our brains perceive it, It can change the way that it works. So that's kind of the new hypothesis of the entourage effect and how the terpenes are introduced into it in an impactful way, because we do see that patients report the difference. We cannot ignore millions and millions of reports of differences of the same strain because of the different terpene chemistry that was shown on the analysis that was matching those reports. And we see that there are differences. We just don't know how to calculate exactly how they work on the brain.

Trevor:  Before we leave terpenes because we've got other other things laugh a little bit just because I'm sorry So let's go back to the PTSD. Like if I was in a car accident and there's lots of gas and so later on in my life, I smell gasoline, it triggers my PTSD, that kind of makes sense. But if I wasn't a different kind of thing and I was on a fire and now the next time I smell smoke, it triggers. So I've sort of two different triggers that both sort of go through my smell. Does that mean that, you know, one person, had a good experience with cannabis Limonene dominance. So, you know now when they smell citrusy things that decreases their THC Anxiety where another person really enjoyed Pinene in the past and they have now when the smell pine stuff that would decrease their anxiety Are we saying that it's more like the original time they used the cannabis They formed a trigger with a terpene or is it still always Limonene or reduce the THC?

Gil Luxenbourg: It's not necessarily related to even the first time they use cannabis. Maybe they have a trigger of having lemon associated with relaxation or, you know what, with energized feeling because when they were kids and they went to the beach or the swimming pool, their mother used to put lemon in their water and that smell that came out of this, the smell molecules are associated with a very good fun energized memory and now any any kind of cannabis that has to eliminate it will create an energized feeling for them specifically. Whereas another child that just the same his mother had put the lemon in his water whenever she made him sit and do homework. And now he just hates lemon. It just creates a bad and anxious response for him. And that will create a bad, anxious response with cannabis that has high percent of Limonene in it. It's very interesting, but you know, It's not fully proven. It's a hypothesis, you know, it's it's a working hypothesis. I hope somebody takes it to the next level and actually works with it because the science I've been working on until recently, until I came up with this specific hypothesis and ran it through a professor, Lumiere Hanush. And he was graceful enough to answer me and to support the science behind it, but you know the working hypothesis still doesn't mean proven.

Trevor:  Uh Kirk um I want to start with terpenes um not that the policy stuff wasn't interesting but um this terpene discussion reminded me a lot of our previous Nozzr terpene discussion and Gil's assertion we'll call it because even he like he says it's like a hypothesis more than anything but that not enough terpenes go into your body to do stuff at the receptors we thought they were doing stuff at. He thinks a lot of their effects might just be through your olfactory senses basically through your nose. That I'd never heard of such a thing before that kind of blew my mind a little bit um what did you think about about that.

Kirk:  I, again, I really enjoyed this conversation. I was listening to this walk in my dog River. And this is where my brain started going, ah, the terpene thing comes up again. And you know, one of my best memories I have is, back in the day, 1985, Michelle and I were traveling through Singapore. We were doing our world travels, being hippie wannabes as kids. And we were in Singapore. And to this day, the smell of frying foods, when I smell Oriental spices frying on the night wind or even a barbecue, I flash back to the streets of Singapore. Because in Singapore when we were there, there were open cafes, open booths, everyone was cooking on the streets. And so, my point being in memory, the olfactory... The olfactory memory center is one of the biggest things that we sense. When we smell something, it hits the memory sensor. So I'm not surprised. And as I said to you, when I did the Nozzr, when I did Nozzr or when I took a hit from the Nozzr, it was a really interesting result. The terpenes popped, right? The terpenes just popped with the Nozzr. But then just the reaction to how my brain and how my body enjoyed the cannabinoids. It was a different, I guess the word's high, it was a different high. So I see it. The other thing I find interesting about this is that there is new science out there. There is. Evidence-informed science, that it doesn't matter, Sativa indica, you know, going back to those seeds I bought at Green Mountain Highway there, apparently Sativa Maui Waui seeds, well, they're very short plants that grew with very broad leaves, so I think it's an indica plant, but it really doesn't matter because it comes down to the terpenes and cannabinoid profile. So I think that was good insight on his part.

Trevor: Yeah, no, and everything he said tracked, but I just, you know, going back to, and we mentioned a couple of times, it wasn't Ethan Russo's study, but he was sort of a consultant-ish on it, where Limonene seemed to decrease the anxiety from THC. You know, we've talked about, we had him on the show, and it's a relatively famous study. And you know does is that because the limonene did stuff at like cannabinoid receptors is it because they use way more Limonene than you could get out of smoking the plant is it because you know the Limonene is uh sort of triggering a good thought through your olfaction it's i don't know the answer but those were really really interesting questions

Kirk:  It also reinforces the whole concept of understanding what you're consuming. And again, we've got to equate it to the alcohol industry. We've had alcohol in our culture a long time. When you walk into a liquor store, you have choices. You have choices of whiskeys and you have choices of vodkas. You have choice of gins and beers and wines. Cannabis is the same in many ways. The difference, of course, is a plant has not always grown the same, but yet when it comes down to why you want to consume alcohol, it goes down to the same question why do you want consume cannabis. If you're sitting around a group of friends around a pool, you might want a light Mexican beer or a gin and tonic, whereas if you're sitting in a smoky bar with a cigar, you might want a rich whiskey, right? I mean, if you're allowed to sit in a smokey bar. But the question is, when you're consuming cannabis, what is it you're looking for? If you're look for a lift, like cutting the grass, as I've always said, I love to do yard work, a little Limonene with a balanced THC CBD might just do the trick. You don't need to rock your socks with THC to get a blitz, you know? So this is what I like about it. It just adds more knowledge to the consumer. When you're buying your cannabis, what is it you want to consume it for? And then you choose your cannabis by the profile.

Trevor:  No, that sounds good. But I think just so we can get back to the next one, we have a third one with Gil. I'm just going to say, remember, we're reframed this podcast. I'm Trevor Shewfelt, I'm the pharmacist. You are

Kirk:  I'm Kirk Nyquist the Registered Nurse and I'm back on our reefermed.ca web page, fully searchable. It's academically built so that all types of learners can go to our website. You can read it, you can see it, well I guess you can touch it, but you can't smell it.

Trevor:  Don't lick it.

Kirk:  Don't lick it. Yeah. Anyways, Reefer Medness The Podcast, please tell a friend. Social media doesn't like us very much. They don't promote us. We think we got a very strong product. We think you think so too. So tell a friend.

Trevor:  Sounds good. All right, we'll talk to everybody next time. Come back for number three for Gil's sort of latest project or the culmination of Gil's work where he's training the trainer, training families, training patients about how to use Cannabis better. And the program is called Wisdom come come back for that. It's really cool