 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Michelle Daigle. And I'm RB Kelly. In our show this time, we'll take a look at the beginning of a brand-new medical and business phenomenon in Hawaii, the sale of medical marijuana. We'll visit the Steep Hill Testing Lab, recently opened at an undisclosed location on King Street to see how they are testing for antigens in medical marijuana. There are many applications of cannabis as a medicine to provide palliative relief from glaucoma, cancer, AIDS, arthritis, rheumatism, and inflammatory disorders. Its use is on the rise in many parts of the world and in a growing number of states around the country. That includes Hawaii, which is now rolling out the Medical Marijuana Initiative adopted two years ago by the state legislature. For this show, we visited the Steep Hill Medical Marijuana Testing Lab, recently licensed by the Department of Health. It's on King Street. For security reasons, if you don't know where it is, you won't be able to find it. Because of the risk of robbery or burglary of the marijuana or the cash for it, the lab is and must be a very secure place. We talked to the owners, Wendy Gibson and Marilyn German Carter. Wendy is a medical marijuana educator and Marilyn is a registered nurse. They showed us how their lab works and how they do their testing there. In fact, the lab had already started doing its testing. The supply chain is from the grower to the lab, from the lab to the dispensaries, and from the dispensaries to the public. Each part of the chain is designed to assure that the product is fit for human consumption. They showed us what they do with the marijuana after it comes to them from the grower. They weigh and test it for contamination, pesticides, heavy metals, mold, and other antigens. The lab has millions of dollars of testing equipment. To be sure that the medical marijuana you buy will be pure. Each testing station had different technologies, testing for different antigens, and each was staffed by a technician, skilled in testing for those antigens. We walked around the lab, talked to people, and looked at the testing equipment. Contaminants and molds are some of the most dangerous things that you can have in, yeah. What happens with the mold? Well, a little bit is probably going to be found in all plant materials, but it can cause respiratory problems, it can cause fungal infections in the lungs, and that is, if you have an immune-compromised patient, you might kill them. That's one of the contaminants that they're testing for, absolutely. Yeah, we need to know. Where's the plant grown? For the medicine, the medical cannabis, everything that will be available in the dispensaries has been grown by one of the licensees, and it has to be grown indoors. Well, each dispensary is allowed to have two grow sites with up to 3,000 plants. They can have two manufacturing sites, and they can have two dispensary, the retail outlet stores. What has been legal since the program's inception in 2000 is patients are allowed to grow their own medicine, and now they're allowed to grow their own up to 10 plants. And once the dispensaries open, then they will have access to the dispensaries. They'll be able to buy the bud, the flowers. They'll be able to buy concentrates, lozenges, and I think there's a couple of other things as well, but they'll be able to buy up to four ounces of the usable product, the flower, every 15 days. There are many forms that you can use it in. Edibles will not be one of those. That is not something that is allowed in the law, but patients will be able to buy concentrated oils and tinctures and be able to take it orally that way. They'll be able to vaporize or smoke the flower or the bud, but none of the smoking materials like vaporizers or pipes will be available in the dispensaries. The two main classes of chemicals that are in cannabis are cannabinoids and terpenes, and they'll be testing for both of those. You're probably familiar with the cannabinoids, some of them THC, CBD, but there are others as well that are therapeutic. And then the terpenes also have some therapeutic value and also are responsible for some of the side effects. My education is in analytical chemistry, and so I was approached to help set up this laboratory and get it functioning and certified and accredited and everything goes along with it. How long was all that process to get it set up and accredited? How long did that take? It was a two-year process, you know, from beginning to end. We've been in this location now for a little over a year. We receive samples from the dispensary, okay, and they usually we have to go do the sampling to make sure we have a statistical sample, and then we bring the samples back to the laboratory here, and there's a tracking program that the dispensaries use to track how much they gave us, and we get here and we put in that information saying that we receive that amount of the cannabis here at the laboratory, and then we start to do the test. This is where you would, this would be the first step where the sample would come in. You would weigh the sample and put the data into the computer. Everything's here is cloud-based on the on the limbs, they call it, laboratory information system, and that would give you barcodes for each of the tests that you need to do, right, and the tests that we do are the tests that are required by the Department of Health, right, which is standard cannabinoid profile, tells you how much of your different cannabinoids are in the cannabis, and we have to do pesticides. It's an Oregon list of approximately 60 pesticides. We have to verify that they're not in the material, and then we do heavy metals, four heavy metals, and let's see, and then the whole biological aspect of it where you're looking for yeast and mold and certain biological organisms that could affect people with compromised immune systems. We, the laboratory personnel, there's a few of us here that have the background clearance to go pick up the samples. You go pick up the samples, you got to pack them, do some manifests, chain of custody to make sure, you know, like I said, everything that you pick up and sign for when it gets here is the same and it's accounted for, and so, yeah, it's all the laboratories actually going sample, picking a statistical sample, bring it here to the lab, and then dividing it up so we can analyze it for all the different tests that the state is requiring. The people that are growing it have no affiliation with us. They just bring it to us so we can test it to assure that it's medical greater, etc. We can test edibles and oils and basically any marijuana product, but the state doesn't allow the dispensaries to sell edibles, right? But if you're a card holder, a 329 card holder, and, you know, you take the cannabis and you make it into edible so you can ingest it, they can bring those edibles here and we can test those edibles to tell them how much of the cannabinoids are in the edibles. So they can have a dosage, understand what the dosage is, what they're taking, so it's not just kind of like trial and error. The dispensary can't sell edibles because it's against the law, so you could buy the product and then go home and make your own edible. Where is the dispensary? Well, there's one located about a block away here on King Street, which is Aloha Green, and I believe there's one that's not open yet over in Kapahulu, and there's another one that's going to be opening shortly right here on Young Street. We test immediately, basically, because as soon as you get the sample in, you want to test it the way that it was given to you. So the faster you can test it, then there's no chance of something contaminating it or some microbials growing on it. So we test it as soon as we get it. Will there be labs on the neighbor island? Yeah, currently there's a laboratory that's attempting to get their certification from the Department of Health on Maui. It still needed to be worked out how these outer islands are actually going to get their samples to Oahu to be tested without breaking the law. Cannabis, of course, has many unique properties. You have the terpenes, the flavonoids, and the cannabinoids, and so that's why cannabis is such a medicinal medicine. And from here it goes to each of the tests throughout the lab. So, I mean, this is pesticides. Every time for the heavy metals, it'd be another sample he would prepare for the cannabinoids, it'd be another sample. So that's why we need a little more than just this. We have the bag full, so we have enough to do each of the tests that are required. This instrument separates out the pesticides and then runs the pesticide through a mass spectrometer that looks at the size of the molecule and the fragments and then identifies the pesticide by how long it takes to come out, right? Go through the machine and come out to the detector, as well as the ion fragments that it produces as it's being smashed apart in the detector. This machine can run a hundred samples at a time. It's all automated. So, for example, as Caleb was over there preparing the sample for pesticides, basically if we had 20 to do, we would prep all 20 samples. This is where the samples would be loaded. And then through the software that controls the machine, we tell it what to do, whether to test for pesticides or cannabinoids. If we were to find pesticides, there's a certain level that are allowed. It's one part per million per one gram. So, we would test a gram and it would determine if it was above one part per million, then that marijuana or cannabis would not be sold. We're searching for heavy metals inside a cannabis. So, what we're doing here is we're basically taking the sample and we're throwing it on a graphite furnace and then we're lighting that graphite furnace at 3,000 degrees and basically it's exploding that cannabis substance and we're able to shine a certain element light through that. We're able to see how much amount of arsenic lead or cadmium is inside that cannabis matrix. So, there's levels that the state requires that. We'll say that it's safe for human consumption. So, basically, if it passes then we would have to alert the dispensaries that that batch has over the state limit and therefore it's not safe for human consumption. You can have some heavy metals in there, but you reach a certain level of heavy metals and then it becomes considered unsafe for consumption. And it's the same thing with anything like the pesticides or the microbiological yeast and mold, bacterias, everything. It can be present, but it has to be in a very small amount. Once it gets above a certain level then it's considered unsafe for the consumption of people because a lot of people that use the cannabis are using it because they're for illness, for some medical purpose, and sometimes they have a compromised immune system so you want to make sure that they're not being harmed by the cannabis. When we test the samples, we take the sample results and put them into Biotrack. And Biotrack, the dispensary on the other side is able to see what we put into Biotrack as well as the Department of Health. So, everybody knows what's in that lot of cannabis. And so, if it fails any of the tests above a certain level the dispensary has to destroy it. They can't sell their product if it fails. So, everybody's incentivized to make the cleanest product possible. During our validations, all the hoops, we had to jump through in order to get certified Department of Health. You know, a lot of times they wanted us to do these certain experiments. So, we needed clean cannabis that didn't have any pesticides in it. So, we could do the experiments on the pesticide. So, we would go around and get product off the street and test it. And that's when we realized that, you know, 90% of the product on the street has pesticides. I mean, a lot of it's at lower levels it would pass, but still it still has the pesticides in there. Well, since 2000, we've had a medical cannabis system that had no dispensary attached to it. And patients have always had the right to grow their own medicine. And we just passed a bill so that they can now grow 10 plants instead of seven. And now they also have access to the testing labs so that they can find out what's the chemical composition of their medicine. And like he said, whether or not there's some pesticides in it. We started working on getting a dispensary system back in 2014. I was part of a task force that looked at the feasibility and recommendability of having a dispensary system in Hawaii. We had to look at whether or not we actually needed one. And then we looked at other states to see what they had done to try to take the best methods from each of those. And if you want to read all about that, that's all online at the Public Policy Center of Hawaii at UH Manoa. The recommendations that came out of that task force became the dispensary bill, House Bill 321, which passed and became Act 241. And so you can read all about that if you read the bill. You can also learn about Hawaii's medical cannabis laws if you go to the Drug Policy Forum's website. And you can read this booklet that they produced. And this outlines the laws. It was made for physicians and patients specifically, but also for law enforcement. Many of our patients are interested, however, because the process of getting a card, they don't have a lot of knowledge on cannabis. So it's pretty intimidating for them. And a lot of them feel like, well, by the time I apply for a card and get my card and figure out what's going on, the patient could probably expire in that time. I would like to see a shorter path for some of our patients. I've been working on helping create that path through its Act 230, the Legislative Oversight Working Group. And we have identified that need to expedite hospice patients' applications. And the Department of Health doesn't have a system to expedite those yet. But we're working with them to try to create that kind of a system where we can just have a check-off box on that application so hospice patients' applications will go through quicker. How long does it take to get a card? It's been fluctuating. It used to be 10 working days turnaround time. And now the Department of Health has gotten it down to five. A lot of physicians who don't want anything to do with it, it's not prescribable five milligram pill. And that's all they're comfortable with. There's a difficult time finding a doctor who will assess you and get you a card. I have found a few doctors that I know do it and I've been leading patients that way. The Medical Cannabis Coalition of Hawaii can help patients find the providers. They just have to email me us at info at mcchi.org. And we will send you a list of providers that allow us to give out their contact information and a letter explaining the process and links to the Department of Health's website to help patients navigate that. If a patient is sick, can their caregiver help? Caregivers can grow for patients and they can also visit the dispensaries I believe to pick up the medication. We've been talking about cannabis and hemp and hash for what 10,000 years or more. Tell us about the history of the plant itself. I think they found some cannabis in some of the tombs in Egypt, you know, when they when they unearthed some of those tombs. So it's been in use by humans for several thousand years. We have records going back to up to 10,000 years, China, Siberia, Egypt, and of course India. It has always been a medicine. At one point it was legal and then it wasn't legal. What happened? There's a lot of history and mostly starting in the 1930s and it was largely due to racism and industrialists who were who changed the name from cannabis to marijuana and got rid of marijuana. What marijuana is what a Mexican name? It came from the Mexican immigrants, the racism against them. And so it was largely targeting, I believe hemp and because that is another form of cannabis sativa. Those are both cannabis sativas, the medicine and hemp. You had one that you were talking about. Yes, with Hearst and Hearst, the publisher? Yes, he at that time they were using hemp for paper and he owned Forrest and a newspaper and he wanted them to use trees and basically in his paper he started the marijuana issue. He blurred the lines between hemp and marijuana. He came up with that and then attributed it to Mexicans and African Americans saying they were smoking it and raping white women and people slowly turned. He also had a son-in-law that was in law enforcement and that's how they started all of this craziness we know today. Schedule one, that was actually the final nail in the coffin of the medicine was in 1970 with the controlled substances act and that was also based on racism and targeting hippies and blacks who Richard Nixon did not care for. So they created this scheduling where all medications or non medications, all drugs are placed in this controlled substance act and schedule one drugs are those with high risk of abuse and addiction, no medical value whatsoever even under the supervision of a physician and we know it was very unscientific. It doesn't meet any of those criteria, it does not belong in a schedule one drug category but that's the most highly illegal category you can and effectively shut down research to find any beneficial effects for it and started the mass incarceration that we see today. We would like to get it out of the schedule one drug category, there is some legislation Congress has introduced that would do that it would get it out of the schedule one drug category at a federal level which is what we need to do. It would help with a lot of issues including banking. How are they going to pay us right because we'd rather be paid by check or you know some way to keep track of all our accounting issues and so some of the ways people are getting around it is using the cryptocurrency so everything is you know you do a transaction let's say with bitcoins and then you just convert your bitcoins into cash in your bank account so there's no actual schedule one illegal transaction involved. That's one way people are getting around it or I mean I know in the mainland some people are using community banks you know that aren't regulated so much by the feds but I know here in Hawaii some of the banks already have issues. People are used to getting pharmaceuticals to fix their illnesses so I mean that's it's hard for them to accept that maybe this plant that they've heard that was you know the gateway drug and all these things bad things about it is actually a medicine and it takes them a while to get past that. Is it a gateway drug? Oh I don't think so I think alcohol is the gateway drug for everything you know there's a lot of people that that use cannabis that don't use it to get high they're using it just to help them help their body and help themselves get better. Yesterday's paper there was a poll that said did you approve did you not approve or did you not understand the majority was in the middle they didn't understand the whole about medical cannabis what it does what it doesn't do. Right and that's typical because most people think of weed as or cannabis or marijuana whatever you want to call it is something that you know people use to get high they don't see it as a medicine and it's it's I more people are are starting to change their mind on it and but most of the time it takes a personal experience or somebody has a family or somebody they know that's going either dying or having something that only cannabis is helping with or helping a lot more than the pharmaceuticals and that usually is what changes their mind. Younger people have a different attitude and older people usually don't change their minds until like he was saying until somebody needs it. Anybody who wants to learn about cannabis as the medicine please contact me in my 30 years of working in health care I have never seen a medication that has such a great safety a broad margin of safety and a great therapeutic index. I'm a little distressed to hear that a lot of public don't understand how the system is going to be working and I feel we've been lied to for I don't know how many years 80 years about the the true dangers of this medicine and I would really like to help people understand what the true dangers are and it's not what we're being told. Now that we're doing business for the legal production and sale of medical marijuana what issues or obstacles will emerge and how will the path to recreational marijuana be affected. This is an important story it will affect many of us in one way or the other think tech will follow the story and let you know the sea changes going forward. If you want to know more about medical marijuana in Hawaii you can follow our think tech talk show on the subject it's called the cannabis chronicles and it plays bi-weekly on thinktech hawaii.com on alternate Tuesdays at 11 a.m. hosted by your own Marcia Joyner and now let's take a look at our think tech schedule of events going forward think tech broadcast its talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and some people listen to them all night long if you miss the show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows they're all archived on demand on thinktech hawaii.com and youtube for our audio stream go to thinktech hawaii.com slash radio and we post all of our programs as podcasts on iTunes visit thinktech hawaii.com for our weekly calendar and livestream and youtube links or better yet sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows thinktech has a high tech green screen studio at pioneer plaza if you want to see it or be part of our live audience or if you want to participate in our programs contact shows at thinktech hawaii.com if you want to pose a question or make a comment during our shows call 808-374-2014 help us raise public awareness on thinktech go ahead give us a thumbs up on youtube or send us a tweet at thinktech hi we'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands we want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us let's think together we'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of thinktech but first we want to thank our underwriters that wraps up this week's edition of thinktech remember you can watch thinktech on spectrum oc 16 several times every week can't get enough of it just like rb does for additional times check out oc 16.tv for lots more thinktech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on thinktech visit thinktech hawaii.com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and volunteer to help us reach and have an impact on hawaii thanks for being a part of our thinktech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification and globalism in hawaii and of course the changes in our quality of life you can watch the show throughout the week and tune in next sunday evening for our next important weekly episode i'm michelle daigle and i'm rb kelly aloha everyone