 Okay, we're back. We're live and having a wonderful Friday, and we have with us Will Sparrow, State Senator from Ewa Beach. We are so happy to have him here. Will, thank you for coming down. Hello, Haji. And we have Ken Rogers, retired Canadian businessman, our color commentator this week, who's my house guest and visiting Hawaii, and we've known each other since 1962, but who's the county? Someone has to pick on American regulations. It's a role. So Will, you had an interesting experience this afternoon. Before we get to the principal topic, which is marijuana, how are we doing right now? I would like to discuss the hearing that you had this afternoon on the question of suicide in Hawaii. Yes, yes. We passed the House Concurrent Resolution 66 in 2016, and this resolution calls for a working group, a task force, to look at suicide prevention and to work on a strategy to reduce suicides in Hawaii by 25% by 2025. And this is a working group that had stakeholders across the board, government, nonprofit, business, just stakeholders that have a strong interest in reducing suicide and those who help with families and even victims who have tried to commit suicide and have failed. And this is an area, as you know, nationally it's a problem, more so than locally. I mean, there used to be numbers where military personnel were, I believe it was 20, 22 a day nationally committing suicide. And I believe in Hawaii, the numbers around one every two or three days. So it's certainly a problem that we need to address. And there are many avenues to deal with it, including prevention. One thing we certainly need to do is put more resources into it. And this task force will be releasing its findings and recommendations to the legislature, hopefully by the end of the year or early part of January. Very interesting. And you know, I would add, I think that suicide affects us all. It affects our economy. It affects us so disruptive to the families involved. We'd all be better off if there were fewer suicides for sure. Oh, definitely. And there's, people need to just understand, don't give up. Never give up. There's always someone who's out there to help you. There's a suicide hotline. There's even a text line 741 741. I just found that out today. And just for those people who might be contemplating this, please don't because there's always hope and there's always a better future that you can work on. And there's many people that are more than happy to hold your hand and to help you and guide you and be your partner. You do have some control over your quality of life and your mental condition. So what happens now? What's the next thought? I mean, you talked about a report that's coming out. And my guess is that at least some people, including you, are considering legislation to try to deal with this. Yes, yes. And even maybe taking this group and making it a permanent group that's no funding involved, but a group of stakeholders that would meet on a regular basis and talk about what's happening and what needs to be done and making certain that we are on that right path, whatever that path may be. And I know between, they mentioned hope, help, healing, and then evaluation as part of the strategy to look at how we can do better. Well, that good about it is that the wedge is looking at an issue which is really central in the, what do you want to call it, the family and social life of our society. And ultimately the likelihood is there'll be action and some improvement about it. So that's great. Yes, yes. Thank you for being involved in that. Perhaps a little bridge to the next subject, because in Canada we have a severe problem with suicides in our very young native people. And it's very closely related to drug problems and these very remote communities. There's a lot of native villages or towns, whatever you want to call them of, you know, from 500 people to 1500 people in which the suicide rates are absolutely alarming. It makes it a national problem in Canada. But the drugs are a big connection. Is there a fine line between taking drugs like such as, for example, opioids and taking drugs in order to kill yourself? Or as a result of taking drugs you wind up affirmatively killing yourself? Or are the opioids killing you? In other words, it's sort of a vague line between an intentional and an erroneous, you know, judgment and taking the drugs. Well, our drug deaths basically relate more to fentanyl or people who are taking, whether it's prescribed opioids or their opioids that they bought after they've used marijuana as a gateway drug and they've met all the underworld people. And, you know, when the dealer is out of some good BC bud or whatever they were looking for in marijuana, the dealer will say, oh, well, I've got a deal for you. I've got this really neat and wonderful stuff that'll, you know, give you as good a high as THC component of marijuana. So it's an unintentional death that way? Well, if you say somebody is intentionally dealing with an underworld person, yeah, there's the, you know, but everybody's been stupid in their life and people continue to be willing to make dumb moves. Well, you know, it's a good segue to get from this issue to the issue of marijuana. And I was not really aware, but there are places on the mainland, states on the mainland. Alaska, for example, my wife and I found last summer, that have marijuana and are going further actually than Hawaii has. And I wonder, just to set the stage here, what's the legal condition of marijuana in Canada? Well, we have medical marijuana nationally, and that's existed for quite a while. And it's fairly liberal in the methodology of dealing with it, but a little bit like the United States, where you have states with certain rights in the feds, with certain other rights in Canada, our provinces deal with the methodology of distribution. That is, would a dispensary be only from a government-controlled, let's say that many provinces have provincial liquor boards? And the only place you could buy liquor for many, many years was from a government-controlled liquor store. The biggest province in Canada, by far, population-wise, Ontario has decided that the method they're going to allow, the dispensing of recreational marijuana, like recreational marijuana, will become legal throughout Canada next July 1st. But subject to adoption by each province? Well, each province gets to decide the method by which it will be distributed. And a lot of that is political thinking that this is going to be a financial windfall from a tax point of view. But also, there's the health factor of trying to control it and keep it from minoring, et cetera. I'm going to ask you one question. One of the issues, and I'm sure Senator Sparrow can talk about this, is we're in a position right now at a time of watching, of seeing how it works as a medical marijuana kind of permission. And I'm really curious to know whether there have been problems in the medical marijuana state of things in Canada, problems involving, you know, who knows what, accidents, crime, gateway, examples of gateway problems, or has it been relatively benign during this period? No, the experience is almost the opposite, is by liberalizing the use of marijuana, and in some areas of Canada, they do not do any enforcing of recreational marijuana, even though it's illegal, technically illegal. But it really has reduced the use of other drugs and the reduction of the use of things like fentanyl, because if you can access the marijuana for medical purposes, the people that are desperate to have marijuana because it will do magical things for some ailments, you know, for some people if they get the right mixture of compounds, well then they're no longer in the underworld market, the underworld's financing is less. You haven't seen anything in the newspapers where problems have taken place, you know, any reports of difficulties? No, no, no. So this has been, in that sense, it's been a successful, successful development. It's almost like saying how could we have been so dumb not to have done this sooner? You must have some comments about this, Will. Interesting you're talking about Canada, and I am not at all an expert on Canadian medical marijuana arts program. However, I was at a conference this past weekend on Kauai, it was the International Cannabis Business Conference, and it goes around the world. This weekend it was on Kauai, they also have it in San Francisco, Vancouver, and Toronto, and Germany. But I met this gentleman named Sean Dang, he's the CFO and the chairman of MMJ Canada, which is the largest retail establishment with $45 million in sales, and he mentioned there in Toronto, as you mentioned, Ontario as well as in Vancouver, British Columbia. And he was explaining to me that I mean there, the business is growing with the new prime minister and him wanting to legalize that there's going to be a lot of opportunities. But there's still a lot of unknown, it's almost like the Wild West, as Ken said, each jurisdiction, each city, each province, it's going to be able to dictate some of the rules and legislation. So it's going to be interesting to see where Canada goes with this, and that's even sort of like California, because even in California, what they do in San Francisco might be different what they do in LA or in San Diego. So they're allowing the jurisdictions to have a certain amount of control, which is a little different than our medical marijuana program here, which was passed by state law. And basically, you know, all the dispensaries on all the neighbor islands follow the same rules, the same legislation. They do have to go to the counties for their zoning and permitting for their facilities. But outside of that, the counties cannot stop it or be an obstacle in terms of these opportunities and for the dispensaries and the patient's use. You know, a week ago, I almost forgot that this is something we should talk about. A week ago, HPD said that if you have a gun registered to you under the gun registration law, that meant, or rather, if you had a medical license for a cannabis, you could not have a gun. You had to turn in your gun. And then you reversed that a few days later under pressure from people who had guns and wanted to have medical cannabis licenses. So what's your thought about that? Well, for starters, I believe the chief is relooking at that policy and seeing how they will be implementing it or even enforcing it or not. Because one issue is a person can have a medical marijuana card, but not possess medical marijuana, medical cannabis. So just because you have a card doesn't mean you are using, you may use. So with that said, I do feel that there should not be a nexus between guns and medical cannabis that medical cannabis patient can be a law-abiding citizen and can own a gun and their Second Amendment rights should not be traveled. Now, what the attorney general has done, and he did this just recently on the gun permit application, he put a question, are you a medical marijuana patient or user? So with that, he might be looking at a way to screen these individuals so they cannot purchase a gun. But again, that's a discussion that's actually going on right now. And it's possible there could be legislation on this. I don't know. We'll see. I don't know enough on the federal side, but it did get a lot of people riled up when this hit the news. Because nobody was aware that this was happening. And this was, look, these letters were going out as far back as 2016. Interesting. That sounds like an odd. Because nobody says, are you a drinker? Do you drink wine? Do you drink scotch, rum, rye, vodka? Well, the whole issue is the notion that maybe marijuana makes you unqualified or a danger to have a gun. And right after this break, I'd like to ask you, Ken, you've been looking at the cannabinoid issue and the biochemical issue. And I wonder if we could address that. Is marijuana something that makes you irresponsible to the point where a license for marijuana should affect the license for a gun? On a sort of the effect of the marijuana kind of basis. Let's take a short break. We'll come back. And I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. All right. Okay, we're back live. We left you with a cliffhanger question. Is exactly what does the literature say about the cannabinoid issue and how does cannabis affect the natural, you know, natural, the organic process of your body and your brain and what it does to you and whether we should be concerned about that going forward. So what did you find, Ken? Well, when I researched it, one of the compounds in marijuana or cannabis is called THC. And THC is the component that gives you a high like having a couple of glasses of scotch. And the interesting thing about medical marijuana, though, is that each condition that you're trying to treat is different. So that over time, the cultivation of marijuana has has created a whole bunch of strains. So you'll have one strain of marijuana where the ratio of THC is say four to one, where the other key chemical component called CBD. But CBD is the one that provides the majority of the health benefits. However, the experience with the medical marijuana was there's what they call an entourage effect that is the combination of the chemicals together helps do the magical things that marijuana can do, particularly in killing cancer cells. However, that, you know, every person is different and every plant is different. So it's really important to have the labs and what we're really missing is the clinical trials. Yes, well, let's talk about that because that's on the road to recreational. So we've permitted the opening of a lab here in Honolulu and one in Maui recently. And we're pretty scientific about this to determine the contaminants in the marijuana that's being sold at the dispensaries. It's all impressive how careful the labs are and what their testing equipment is like. How's it going? Well, the medical marijuana program is slowly making progress. We allowed up to 16 dispensaries and retailers to open. We only have three. So obviously, we have a long ways to go. But I'm hoping that by next year, most of them, if not all of them will be up and running. And there's eight licensees. So they each have two. And even the labs, we've got two now. And there might be another one coming. But that remains to be seen. Hopefully, it's going to go well for everyone. We haven't heard any. You have no incidents to report. Yeah. I haven't seen anything in the newspaper that's negative. Right. You've read or heard once or twice that they ran out of product. That's not a problem. But that's because they just opened. It's in its infancy. We allowed originally up to 2,000 plants. And we recently passed an additional 3,000. So each dispensary can grow 5,000 plants. I don't think anyone's even close to that. But yeah, we'll see how it goes next year. I think next year will be the indicator where we'll be able to look at some data. But I think there was a report out recently that they said about 1.3 million in sales to date. That's all in about 90 days. Right. So that shows that there's a demand. And I've heard some comments about the quality. But I expect that the quality will go up. I think the price will go down. And the price will go down too. Yeah, that was another comment that the price per ounce right now is a little high. But again, supply and demand and competition will force it down, I believe. Because if it doesn't, then the black market will continue and flourish. Even with quality, lesser quality marijuana. Right. So you're not going to get rid of the black market, but you could make a major dent in it if you have a good dispensary product at a decent price. And hopefully that's where we'll be going. Yeah, just like Ken was saying. But one of the things you guys have been talking about, or you did a minute ago, Ken, is clinical trials. Because if you're looking for a long-term understanding, if you're looking for a sort of scientific look at this, you test like crazy during the recreational periods to see what we got in terms of the quality, what we got in terms of the medical effect. And the doctors can be more confident that way. So the question is, do we have clinical trials going? Will there be? Are there plans for that? No. Will it help? Well, clinical trial may be a bit futile because if I have one variety of marijuana and half the people in the trial are using my variety and the other half are using Will's variety and the compounds in mine are very different than his. And what I found peculiar, especially in California, because they've got more scale there, is that if you go into a dispensary and you pick up a small bottle of oil, let's say, which you want to use for medical purposes, you have trouble on the labeling, you know, what is in it. And if you went back to the same dispensary a month later to get a refill, because what you had worked really well for your arthritis or, you know, as a pain reliever or whatever particular purpose you picked it for, and you bought the same thing again, it won't be the same. Now this suggests it all suggests that maybe the most important thing is labeling and the most important thing is standardization of the product and the way it's built and sold so everybody knows the score and the doctors know the score. Well, it's almost like the labs you have should produce what's being sold in the dispensary. The labs only test though, that's all they do. Yes, but you're going to test to tell what's in it. Well, I think that who's running that? Is this Department of Health? Who's running that? Running the labs or the... Running the standards. Well, as far as the state is concerned, it's run by the Department of Health. But going back to your question on, you know, medical data and clinics and all that, we still have the issue of it marijuana cannabis being schedule one. And because it's schedule one, a lot of people are concerned that the federal government, you know, could crack down or do bad things for people involved in that. So you don't see a lot of research, you know, you get anecdotal information, you hear and read about people who are patients who are using and have great results. One thing I'm going to do this year is introduce the bill for recreational. Well, no, this has to do with research. But start having, if we can get this bill passed, the University of Hawaii collect data from patients. And this would be a voluntary research that they're getting information from the patient. See, the University does not do testing and doesn't want to do any research because they're not going to touch any flower, they're not going to touch any plant because of the schedule one. But if they can at the very least begin a database of patients out there who are willing to tell the University of Hawaii Medical School the dosage they're using, the ailments and the results, at least we can get some preliminary information before we eventually get to full blown institutions, universities, healthcare facilities doing full scale research and development. But because of the federal law and the schedule one, which is really asinine and really ridiculous, it says that you don't have medicinal use when we all know that there is medicinal use. But because this is a political issue and Congress and or the president needs to act and lack of that action and leadership, we're in this funk right now and states are taking the lead. It sounds to me like the federal government is important in the road to recreational because if the federal government continues with the schedule one thing and trying to enforce it in specific oddball circumstances, then stopping for example the payment and the banking arrangements all that, it's slow growing. But if one day the federal government should say, okay, okay, let's take it off schedule one, all these states are passing laws, Canada has passed laws. The whole thing is easing up. There's no point in, as you mentioned, the federal government has a patent. So at least some people in the federal government have believed that this was medicinal. So I'm just wondering. It's the Department of Health, the federal U.S. Department of Health that has a patent that says cannabis is wonderful for certain medical purposes. And they had to make that argument in applying for the patent. So what happened? Anyway, do you have a sense, Will, about where the federal government is going? And I mean to refer to this administration with all of their foibles. No, I don't. But I can speculate that we have eight states today that have legalized and that they're moving forward. The federal government and the president, they've got, they're into their eyeballs on other issues. I noticed. And I wonder, does the federal government want to tackle and get into a fight with the states over cannabis or medical cannabis? Because medical cannabis, we have 29 states in the D.C., so 30. So the majority of the states have medical cannabis. And now eight states and other states are looking at adult use and recreational. So that train is moving. And does the federal government, with California likely leading the way, want to get into a big fight and a major lawsuit and years and years of talking about an issue that both red and blue states are involved in? I don't think this is a partisan issue. When you look at it, really, you get down to the roots of it. This is big business. This is an economic driver. This is an opportunity to raise taxes and to help with many of the issues and concerns that we are dealing with. Right. So I'm hoping that Hawaii might look at it seriously in four or five years. But we need to get our medical cannabis program up and running and make sure that's operating smoothly, I think. If anything, we might look at decriminalization. And that's something that's something the Senate has supported, but the House hasn't. But it's possible that we could look at criminalization first, which is what many of the states did on the mainland. They decriminalized it, and then they legalized it. And that's an option for us down the road. Very exciting times. This issue is alive. This issue is under consideration by many people. We talked to somebody this morning who was here for another show from the state of Tennessee. They said, a lot of people in Tennessee would like to see this happen. So I think we have a sweeping movement around the country. Maybe the world, you mentioned Germany, to go this direction. So after a while, we're going to go there. I was interested in your answer what the federal government in the United States would do. One of the big differences between Canada and the U.S. is health. And so Canadians always think anything to do with health in the U.S. has a cynical touch. You'll never get met in marijuana for recreational purposes, because the big drug law people win out. I mean, certainly if you allow recreational marijuana, and you have people growing 5,000 plants in Hawaii, that's going to take away a lot of their drug business. Like you, the most obvious use of marijuana was for pain. That's the opiates and all of the stuff that they're supporting on drug companies. So I just want to say, when they used to say, plusa change, plusa mem, now they say plusa change, plusa change. It's all changing. This is changing. Good for us. Good for you that we recognize the change that we participated. Thank you so much, Willis Barrow. Appreciate it. Thank you, Jake. Ken Rogers. Thank you very much. Thanks, Senator. Thank you, sir. Aloha.