 This is St. Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. Hello, I'm Marcia Joyner. This is Cannabis Chronicles. We are on a 10,000-year Odyssey. So tell me, Muse, of that plant of many resources which wondered far and wide the ancient plant of food, fuel, and fiber. Historically, dietary use of the raw cannabis plant brings us back in line with 34 million years of cannabis evolution. Dr. William L. Courtney wrote, while our perception, publication of these properties are new, the phenomenal beneficial effects were there yesterday, last year, hundreds of millions of years ago. And so, thus our Odyssey begins. As we venture past these 10,000 years, we will explore and discover the plant from which the cannabis derives, the many uses of the plant, hemp, cannabis, hashes, cannabis and religion, cannabis and medicine, and dear old cannabis and Uncle Sam. Today, our special guest is Mr. Theo Alexander, MHA. And he's been employed in the field of healthcare administration for 10-plus years and has a professional experience and education that gives him the opportunity, the level of experience to talk about exactly where we're going today. And that is the opiate addiction. Now, it's been all over the news, the opiate addiction is a tragedy. And let's look at the opiate abuse. It's scary sounding, right? Something about 19,000 Americans died of an overdose in, what, the year 2014. There's no telling how many there are since then. Let me tell you a story. This is a story about Christopher Brown, a Marine veteran who served in the U.S. military for 10 years before he was injured in Afghanistan and received a medical discharge. Opiates represented a decade of struggle with pain, a kind of physical and emotional pain that would leave you somewhere between life and death, wondering what could possibly be worse than an existence seems a mockery of the word life. Brown wrote, I was getting about two hours of sleep every few days, not caring about anything except my next dose, counting my pills all day to make sure I had enough of everything for the fentanyl that would wear off, and I would go into withdrawals and wanted to die. In 2012, Brown received a medical cannabis authorization in Massachusetts and waited three years for the dispensary to open stores. He said, I was amazed at the pain relief I got from cannabis. It helped with my migraines, my anger, my depression, and my anxiety. Within five months, I was finished with most of my VA meds. I asked Theo Alexander to come talk to us about exactly what the captain was going through, what veterans and their families go through. And Theo, that's what he does. He works with veterans to assist them with this very issue of PTSD, broken bones, whatever. And as we know, they keep writing prescriptions for opiates, all kinds of opiates. So what is there to say? First of all, welcome. Thank you. Good afternoon. How are you doing? Tell us about these issues that veterans go through. And I must add that it's not just veterans that have opiate addictions, but others also. It's across the board. But your specialty is veterans, so we're going to talk about veterans. Thank you very much. And thank you for having me on the show to discuss this very important issue. This is the issue that's plaguing the majority of the United States. As recently Donald Trump has announced that we have a crisis on our hand for the epidemic of drug abuse when it comes to the opioids. Opioids have a definite day in our medical economy as far as being able to treat people for pain and other things. The problem is, it's gotten out of hand when it comes to overriding of prescriptions, diversion when it comes to the cell of street opioids and things like that, synthetic opioids that are coming onto the market that people are getting readily available. It's a very serious concern in the veteran community. Wait a minute. When we say opiate, is that a class of drugs or is that a single drug? It's a class of drugs. It's a general classification of drugs. And I'm not the pharmacist or an expert when it comes to what the drugs are called in different brand names and things that they come under. But they are prescribed very readily to the veteran community and also to the medical community that suffer for pain and other debilitating symptoms. The problem we're having is the education that most veterans have when it comes to the danger of opioids. Of course, there's always a danger of overdose or a deadly overdose. And this is what we've been experiencing here in the United States. We've been seeing the numbers of overdose, accidental overdose going up. At this point, we have almost 30 a day veterans falling to the epidemic of accidental overdose drugs. Tell me this with... Now, I don't know. So was heroin and oxycodone and Vicodin, are those opiates? So heroin and oxycodone are definitely opiates. Fentanyl, they are a class of opiates that are designated to be prescribed only for a certain ailment, mostly for chronic pain. But where I see the problem is is when people go to the hospital, the veterans go and present themselves for chronic pain, then there, of course, are given maybe four or five different choices of opioids they could do, use or be prescribed to alleviate some of that pain. And so when they're given that prescription, of course, they go and they take it. They build a tolerance for it. If they're on it three or four weeks, they'll build a tolerance. They're here in line as a danger when they go back to their physician and complain about pain. Their pain threshold is either not decreasing or is remaining the same. Oftentimes, the dosage is increased. So the doctor just writes a stronger prescription? After proper assessment of the patient, I'm sure the doctor is acting in the favor of a medical protocol. And yes, sometimes they will increase the dosage to alleviate the pain for the patient as it really originally prescribed for the patient. And sometimes that pushes the patient closer to an addiction point. Now addiction is in the brain, so what is this doing to the brain? Is the opiate telling the brain you don't have pain? Is that it? When I understand the opioids, they interact in the body as far as turning on and off receptors, as far as the nerve endings. So when it turns them off, you no longer have a sensation in that area. Of course, alleviating the pain or subsiding the pain. The danger in that is... But they don't really cure? No, they're not a class of curing drugs. There is no evidence that opioids will not cure. It's only for temporary relief of chronic pain. Oh, so you still have whatever the issue was, you still have it? Yes, well, our bodies are very dynamic. Usually when opioids are prescribed is to reduce the pain level while our bodies are healing. Say for instance, in the case of a broken bone. Of course, it's very painful. You're going to go through that series of healing. When the bone is healed, then of course you shouldn't have any pain. Maybe you'll lose range of motion according to whether the break it was or what not. You have physical therapy for that, but even through that series of treatment, you will still be prescribed some type of pain medication. So now we said that we were going to talk about using medical cannabis with this opiate addiction. So what would medical cannabis do when a person is addicted to one of these opiates? Yes, so hopefully we get into the area of medical treatment where cannabinoids and opioids can be simultaneously prescribed to the patient or recommended to the patient. What we have seen is that with opioids in the overdose mortality, okay, states that have brought about a cannabis program and to their protocol, their medical protocol or option for treatment have dropped as far as the overdoses by 25%. Some states by 33%. So they give it with the opiate or to wean them off of the opiate? It can be done in either case. With the VA of course, the VA does not prescribe or recommend cannabis. The veteran definitely is left out to the community doctors to get their advice and things, but as far as an option to reduce the opioid addiction or even the threshold of increasing a dosage in opioid, as I mentioned before, if a patient is still increasing, their plain threshold has not subsided and they still need a higher dose of medication. Sometimes with cannabis that we've seen in some patients, it reduces that opportunity to get a higher dose of opioid. Okay, so tell me now, I have been prescribed the opiate and I become addicted to it. Does the cannabis, can it help through the withdrawals? Can it help alleviate the addiction? Yes, we have seen that evidence in some of the patients that we treat. Everyone is different, of course, but the overall goal is to reduce the symptoms of withdrawal and an addiction to opioid therapy and we have seen cannabis improve that opportunity for most patients. And sometimes they stop taking the opioid because of course cannabis has the opportunity to decrease pain as well. It's one of the recommending opportunities for us to get the cannabis card through to non-oil access to cannabis. So if you've got your cannabis card and you're a veteran and Uncle Sam is not going to take care of this, so you can go to any one of these doctors that are listed that you've got the card from. So that would get you through the withdrawals. So what happens with the withdrawal? What happens when you take the cannabis? What are the process of getting you through the withdrawals? Yes, so from what I've seen, the withdrawal symptoms when it comes to opioids, I don't know what the technical... The technical way of describing how it would really affect the body. The CB1 and CB2 receptors, it's going to reduce the opportunity for pain. Of course we know that nerve endings is where the pain centers are and when that area is inflamed it causes pressure in that area. And I'm not a medical scientist so I'll do my best to describe how the mechanism would operate. We need to take a break and when we come back, let's see if we can get through step by step by step how this helps and why it should be. Okay, great. Let's take a break. This is Stink Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Stink Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Carol Mon Lee, Stink Tech Hawaii's volunteer chief operating officer and occasional host, and this is Niki. For the first time, Stink Tech Hawaii is participating in an online, web-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000. Here, thanks, Stink Tech will run only during the month of November and you can help. Please donate what you can so Stink Tech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming. I've already made my donation and look forward to yours. Please send in your tax-deductible contribution by going to this website, www.thanksforthinktech.causebox.com. On behalf of the community enriched by Stink Tech Hawaii's 30-plus weekly shows, thank you Mahalo and Shisha for your generosity. Questions after withdrawal. Hi, and we're back. We're talking about opiates, the opiate addiction, the crisis, and medical cannabis. Now my thought is that the cannabis can help you come down off of the withdrawal, through the withdrawals. So I'm talking to Theo Alexander, who is a brilliant young man and my go-to cannabis, because I know nothing. Absolutely nothing. But the president has said that we have a crisis and we know we do. I don't know that he said how we were going to deal with it, but we do. So we've got this crisis and we've got people that are strung out on this stuff. Even long after the medical issue is gone, now they've got another issue, now they're addicted. So if they're addicted and they take the cannabis to get off the addiction, how does that work? With withdrawal symptoms, as we were talking about before we went through the break, you have nausea, you have cold sweats. Some people have nightmare and other things that are wrapped through with that. With cannabis it does subside most of those things. A lot of the addiction symptoms or side effects to getting off of opioids are similar to what people experience in PTSD. Physical pain, nightmares, emotional numbing, things like that. Yield or shame, irritability, memory loss. A lot of those things happen when people get off of opioids. They have an episode of health, of care that may go down. When we put them on, we recommend cannabis to them. The nausea is subsided. A lot of times, appetite is lost when you have a side effect to opioid addiction. You don't really eat a lot. So as far as increasing appetite, cannabis does that as well. With nightmares, we know that it has alleviated a lot of nightmare or it could reoccurring nightmares with veterans with PTSD. A number of different symptoms. It doesn't alleviate everything but our hope is that it is less. So it eases you through. It makes it a little easier to get through the withdrawal symptoms. It alleviates a lot of the symptoms. Like I said, the nausea is totally alleviated when it comes to the administration of cannabis. But it's our hope that the person has a safer opportunity to use something that may be detrimental to their body and to their existence. A safe way of... Now, I don't know any of this, but I've read about methadone, is that it? Yes, yes. Okay. Now, I had one young man tell me the methadone was worse than the oxycodone. I've heard the same thing from some of our clients. And methadone, of course, is administered as a... People addicted to heroin or things like that or some opioids. They use the methadone to curb the side effects. And of course, the methadone is a very harsh drug. It has a potential of increasing suicide, homicide. It's very harsh on the body. Well, that's what this young man told me. And so he said that he wanted to try the cannabis and he needed to get the card and all of this. But in telling me this story, because I'm learning, so I keep asking. And he said the methadone was just worse. And he went back to the oxycodone because... And that's unfortunate because the methadone was put in place to curb the side effects. Well, that's what he said. Yes. And like I said, our plethora of different drugs that are available in the western model of healthcare delivery, they're there to help. So we're dealing with this problem as a medical system. How do we do it? I think cannabis is a choice that we need to look more to than not. Of course, with the state's right situation, with some states, it's coming up. Just the fact that Cory Booker has introduced a bill to be able to take cannabis off the schedule of one of this so that we can have it more readily available. Physicians, researchers, patients would have the opportunity then to clearly look at cannabis as a choice for paying, you know, to manage some of these symptoms that opioids have been administered or prescribed for the patient. Well, yeah, this young man was a veteran and he said that this young man, I was telling you about Brown, Christopher Brown. And he was telling me that he didn't have an addiction before he was prescribed this stuff. Yes. And I mean he got pretty banged up in Afghanistan, but he didn't have, now he's discharged because he's enabled to do his job. Of course. He got a medical discharge. And with the medical discharge, he's got prescriptions for the rest of his life. Yes. And all they're doing is making him worse. Yes. He says it's worse. It's a very convenient program when you're in the VA to get prescription for pain medication. Of course they want to help treat the backlog of victims who have had not been treated before. So I can see where some overcompensation may be come to play when it comes to the physicians or psychiatrists, psychologists looking at the veteran to improve their health outcome. Unfortunately, when it comes to opioids, there should be more of a treatment protocol that extends the health outcome for the veteran. Say for instance, there should be some type of activities that are employed, some type of dietary advice that's given, so that the veteran takes his health care from a holistic standpoint, not being dependent on the opioid itself. If we can give them to use cannabis, to use outdoor activity or outdoor therapeutic opportunities, to kind of act as a combination to help the veteran recover. A lot of times, when they do recover from the accident itself, they still have some symptoms that needs to be rehab, maybe physical therapy or occupational therapy, things like that. But I would say that that's not prescribed as often as the drug itself. It's not as far as opioids. It seems like it's the go-to choice to manage the entire episode of care versus adding other things. So you're saying that along with the cannabis, there should be all of these other things, the physical therapy, emotional therapy, all of this. One of the things that the major Brown said, his poor wife and family was just struggling with him. All he could think about was the fentanyl and not the family. And once he started doing the cannabis, he could think about the family, he could enjoy them. He didn't have all of this other stuff going on. Yes, and we often, as a part of what we do when it comes to cannabis and helping the veteran, wean themselves off of addictive medications or just find a better treatment protocol, is we do refer the veteran to outdoor activities, what we call recreational therapy, whether that's horticultural therapy or getting out in the environment and just planning something. It's very therapeutic to go out in nature, as it is. Doing things like planting vegetables and harvesting, riding horses, which is the equine therapy. It's something we do out in Makaha Aqua Therapy. You know, swimming with the dolphins, there's many programs that we have here. Of course, we're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so there's a lot of things you can do on the beach and stuff like that. So we try to get veterans together who are suffering from addiction or just the result of their accidents in the military or war era. Syndrome, PTSD, Gulf War Syndrome. We try to get them into the group therapy opportunities to go out and experience more recreational outdoor. Take them outside the therapeutic office or the office of the clinician, and it's just a straight line relationship and this prescription given out there at the door. So we try to get them back into an active lifestyle. This is where you start to hear some of the things where children and the spouse would say, yes, we have our husband, our father back, or our mothers. We can now enjoy our mother. She's not as grumpy or disgruntled because of her condition or because of the medication she's taking. So we've seen the evidence of how other therapeutic opportunities will bring the veteran closer to reality of healing. And that's what we can recommend. So even though we have this opioid situation hanging over our head, it's becoming very detrimental. I have all hope that we as a medical community can overcome and utilize things like cannabis, other botanical medicinal aids that would help the person have a better choice for pain management and whatnot. So others, was that the CBD? Yes. What exactly is CBD and cannabis? Okay. So we use them in the same sentence, but they're not. So what is the difference? In a nutshell, we have two variations of medication that's being thrown around a little bit as far as the recommendation. Here in Hawaii, we have the 329 card, which gives you access to dispensaries, which has TEC. A 329 card is, is that the one you get from the state? Yes, it's the Medical Marijuana Registry card program. So any qualifying person can get their card and have access to our dispensaries, which you can go in and purchase on dry herb, oils, tinctures, some topicals. And so it invades as well. But with that, we have the opportunity to have CBD. CBD is not illegal in any of the 50 states. So CBD is a non-psychoactive component of the cannabis plant. So it won't make you high? It won't get you high. Okay. It won't get you high at all. And so, but what it will do is it'll give you the other effects of the medication. All the other benefits? So it's reducing nausea, reducing pain and things like that. Yes. So it'll do all of those things? Yes, it will. But it doesn't make you high? Yes. And so, in my opinion, CBD is a, it's a more, how you say? Friendly. It's a more friendly. Yes. You're right. It's more friendly, but the utilization of CBD is a little better than the TAC. Because TAC, of course, some people still have jobs. They still have livelihood. So you don't have a dirty P test? Dirty P? Your analysis. Yes. And so that's the key with CBD. And also having it available. You can go to smoke shops. You can go to Whole Foods, down to Earth. They have different variations of CBD and different strengths. So you can have that available. So, but yes, I would definitely say CBD is an option when it comes to botanical-derived medications that are helpful for pain and things. Yeah. Well, now tell us, since you're offering these things for the veteran, tell us your webpage or telephone number so we can put it up and anybody, any veteran that wants to come be part of your organization. So give us how we can contact you. Your telephone number and your email address or website, whatever you want. Okay. The best way to get in touch with me, because we like to work directly with the client or the patient so that you get the best advice available, you can reach me at 808-728-3338. Say it again. 808-728-3338. Just ask for a deal. You'll be calling Comforment Alternative Medicines of Oahu or CAMO for short. But me and my staff will be there happy to help you. And I hope I get a couple calls soon. Definitely. Okay. And email? Email. You can reach us at 808-CAMO. C-A-M-O? Yes. 808-CAMO-C-A-M-O at gmail.org. Great. Well, Theo, thank you so much for spending this time with us. And we look forward to coming back. Thank you for having me. It's always good to see you. Thank you. Aloha. Thank you so much. And we'll see you next week. Aloha.