 So you're going to want to sit up close up in the front to make very good. Five times more swollen than they were this morning. So that's a good sign. I know everyone that I spoke with today just was really amazed with all the wealth of information and experience our teachers were sharing. So I want to ask our teachers once again as we're filtering and just to stand up and let's give our teachers a big round of applause. So we wanted to take a moment as everyone's gathering to share our voices again in song. I know some of you that haven't been to Rosemary's Herbal Conferences before aren't used to singing fun songs and doing hand motions with 300 other adults. But at the same time, it really moves us into that place of childhood and curiosity and joyfulness that I think this sacred plant that we're all gathered for really embodies and inspires in us. So Patty and I, this is my friend Patty from Florida. And we wanted to share a song today that was offered to us by an herbalist in the southeast, Mother Turtle. Some of you may know her and it's another call and response song. And so we're going to sing a line and ask you to respond back to us. And it's a nice song full of movement. So if you're feeling like you've been sitting in class all day and want to let your blood flow a little bit, get your circulation moving, you can stand up and wiggle around with us a bit. But I want to share the words with you and then we'll sing a line and ask you to respond back and roll with it like that. We'd love you to stand up if you're feeling it. Yeah. Get us going. That's right. I know we've been sitting all day, so thanks for taking some time to get that circulatory system moving. And so the words of the song, the people of the world are gathering. Together, we're creating a world unafraid of feeling. We're initiating healing. So we'll sing a line and ask you to call back to us. You can take a seat or you can keep standing. However you feel. All good. Thanks, y'all, for singing along. We want to share a couple more bits of news and ways we can keep our flow going well in the next couple days. I just want to ask any of you that are joining us and haven't yet visited Sophia and I to register and get your fancy name tag and packet, please do check in. We'll be loitering around at the social with extra name tags. And especially if you checked in with the college last night and got your key, but haven't yet checked in with us, please do come by and see us before you go tonight. We have set up a message board in the noble reading room, which is also the exhibit hall with the vendors. And on that board, we are having folks post if you have a seat in the intensive, but your schedule changed and you can't make it, you want to offer it up, or if you are looking to share a ride to Burlington on your way out, you can leave any kind of messages there you want with your name and cell phone and just try to connect with one another at the conference. We also want to ask any of you that will be checking out from the dorms that need to deposit your key outside of our check-in times, which are posted on each hallway in the dorms. Do tonight come by and see Sophia and I if you haven't yet, just so we can make sure to get your key return and deposit coordinated before you go. We have just a few seats left in two of the Monday intensives. I know it was a struggle to choose which one to get in and a lot of them had filled up, but we have a little bit of space left in Rochelle Baca's intensive and a little bit of space left in Jody Noe's intensive on Monday. So again, please find Sophia and I on that note if you want to stop by and see us tonight, but we'll be more equipped at the table tomorrow to help you out with that. Also in the exhibit hall tomorrow, you can visit Helen and Heather and Dylan, which together would be Helen, I guess. Heather and Dylan of Tree Farm Communications will be in the vendor hall tomorrow. And again, the chance to have these recordings is really awesome. So we want to thank them for coming all this way and doing the work so that we can take home the classes. I love to get the whole package so that I can listen to it on my commutes and get the classes that I wasn't able to take in person at the conference, but also, as you all have experienced today, so many of these classes are so dense in information that it's hard to really capture and integrate it all just through one sitting so you can listen to them over and over. So check out Heather and Dylan's table in the exhibit hall. And those of you that are on the meal plan in the morning, I want to mention that the breakfast buffet will be served from seven to eight a.m. and then they'll start to clean it up and take it down around eight o'clock. So if you have that pre-order breakfast buffet in the morning, stop by between seven and eight a.m. to visit the buffet. We wanted to also take a moment to give some special shout-outs of thanks. I mentioned our sponsors earlier. If any of you are in the room, CBD, Champlain Valley, PAM, and Mark with Plant Spirit Healing, CBD, Vermont, AeroMed, Ancient Ways. If you could all just stand again and wave so we could give you our praise and gratitude for all of your support. Thank you again so much for making this conference possible. It takes a lot for organizations to start a brand new conference, especially with a controversial subject like this. And the support of our sponsors has been really incredible, as has the support of the Vermont College of Fine Arts who have really tended and held to us as organizers and hopefully all of you immaculately yesterday. And today we want to give special thanks to Justin and Eric over here who have held down our AV so tremendously today. I also wanted to give another round of thanks to our work-study crew and our staff. I especially wanted to give big thanks to Lazarus and Sophie. I don't know if y'all are in the room, but if you could stand up and let us give you a little love today. There's Lazarus in the back. Sophie is maybe around somewhere, again working her tail off as is normal. So if you see Sophie, give her a big hug and just tell her thanks so much for everything she's taken on this week. I also wanted to just ask us, invite us to take a moment of silence and prayer for all the folks in the Southeast, a number of participants this weekend were not able to make it here due to the hurricane and lots of folks, as you know, about a million people are without power and are dealing with flooding right now in the Carolina Basin. So if we just want to take a small moment to honor them and send some love and prayers their way. Thank you so much. All right, the queen be Rosemary herself to the stage. I can't believe I'm nervous, but Jane says, just channel the plant. I got so high today. I'm just walking around. Just walking into the noble reading room, right? It was amazing. That's such an incredible buzz. So what a fabulous day, right? It's just amazing. And yeah, I actually, yeah, really, thank you so much. Thank you for all of you for coming and just helping to create the magic here. And I actually even went to workshops, which with all the other conferences I organized, I don't even go to. So I was learning so much. It was pretty awesome. So we have a wonderful evening planned. After our fabulous keynote tonight, we have a social and we have some wonderful snacks back there, make sure you read the labels well to make, so you know what you're snacking on. No, they're labeled. It's mostly just really healthy sandwiches and vegetables and snacks. So it'll be some nice music and it'd be just a chance for us to just mingle and visit and meet one another. I really want to thank my dear friend, Dr. Nabucco Kingsley and her host of helpers. Boo, are you here? Yeah, there she is. So she's, yeah. Yeah. Wonderful family practitioner who spent all day making sandwiches for you. Thank you so much, Boo. Yeah. And after David's talk with us tonight, we also are going to have the opportunity to actually hear the plant. So for a lot of people in the herbal community, we have been able to really visibly hear the plants communicating. And Pam is, for those of you who are not familiar with that, she's going to provide an experience. And I want to thank Buzz for providing this beautiful weed plant here for us who's gonna be our token singer. I actually had to ask Buzz, is it legal for us to have this plant up here? And he just laughed at me, yeah, that's really great. So yeah, and then just the other thing I wanted to mention, I just, I have to say, you know, we are in an amazing changing time. And I know so often in the world, there's so much weight right now that's bearing down on us, but there's so much to celebrate. And this is a great moment of celebration when we can come out about another amazing medicinal plant that's been so long repressed. And as I called this plant always the warrior rebel plant, because no matter how much it was pressed down, it continued to rise up and we're all rising up with it. And I had to laugh when my friend Pat Crocker and Ellen Novak handed me a book. They wrote, she writes mostly cookbooks on really healthy, great food. And she has one on cannabis edibles, but we are coming of age in the herbal community. So thank you, Pat. Yeah, so yeah, thank you so much. So it's with great honor that I get to introduce our keynote tonight. It's our Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman. I can't even say it. Thank you so much for joining us. I was talking to my good friend Amy Goodman, who knows David quite well, and she goes, he's just good people. Just good people. And what we know about him is he's completely committed and dedicated to causes that most of us really advocate and believe in. He's been a long-term advocate for the cannabis reform and legalization of cannabis in Vermont. Thank you, David, for that. He's more than anything, I want to say, he's an organic farmer. So we know he's a good guy. Yeah. He and his wife run a full moon farm, which is an organic certified farm in Heinsberg, Vermont. He's been awarded so many awards and recognized for so many different things that he's done in the state of Vermont that includes things like livable wages, affordable housing, health care for all, equality in marriage, choice of life at the end of life, a choice of life at the end of life, that's a good one. And so many other things. So it's just really, really an honor that he's taken time to join us this evening. So thank you so much, David, for being here. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate being here. I just got to let you know that one of our sows is literally flowering as we speak. My wife called me as we were headed up the hill and she said, Ruby's having another? She just had the first one out. I'm going back to check. So farming, love it. Thank you for that kind introduction. I'm gonna just mention one other piece of legislation I've worked on for well over a decade. And I'm sorry for the suit. It's one of the things you have to do as Lieutenant Governor. So sorry I overdressed everybody. But one other piece of legislation I've worked on for well over a decade and we passed in Vermont, I think people across the country were very excited about it until the federal government after $120 million of lobbying from the seed industry and the chemical agriculture industry lobbied Washington to override our GMO labeling law. But for those of you that have seen some products on your shelves that say made with or partially made with some of those companies like Campbell's and General Mills, they added those labels before the federal government changed it and they've kept those labels because they know consumers want it. So if you're from other parts of the country and you see that label, you can thank your Vermont legislature for helping make that happen. So when I first was active as a young person in the activism world at UVM, I thought the whole political scene was a load of crap. Too much corporate money running both major corporate parties totally not interested at all. And back in 1992, I learned about this incredible congressman we had and those of you from other parts of the country may not have heard about him much before three years ago but a guy named Bernie Sanders was running as an independent for Congress. And he's the one that really inspired me to engage in the electoral system. And so after working on his campaign and then some other local folks campaigns, someone asked me to run back in 1994 for the Vermont House. I was still a student at UVM. I did lose by 59 votes but I came back and ran again in 96 and I've served 18 years in the House and Senate since and now two years as Lieutenant Governor. And I was just visiting a friend in Virginia. Well, I was actually visiting Charlottesville because my mom was in the hospital. She's out for the time being which is good but I saw an old friend from college and he showed me my old button from the 1994 campaign. And on that button along with his 1994 Bernie button, my button under my name, Zuckerman, was a green, yellow, red stripe of colors. So I tell you that just to let you know that of all the issues I've worked on, this is actually the one that I initially really highlighted in my campaigns back 24 years ago. So it's an incredible pleasure to be here in front of you speaking about this topic because I know many of you have also either known about, utilized, shared, worked with patients and others and known the incredible potential and usefulness of this plant. And the fight we've all been fighting to break down the propaganda started back in the 1920s and 30s due to economic interests of the paper industry and the pharmaceutical industry and the cotton industry is something that if any of you don't know, you should do a little research on it because the Hearst Paper Company, also associated with Hearst Argyle News Media is really where the propaganda started to demonize this plant and has banned the now 80 year propaganda machine that we are now all working to counter. And truth does ultimately prevail over alternative facts. So we do have an opportunity, we are winning this battle and we will win the next one. Now for those that don't know, along with the propaganda history to crush this plant so that pharmaceutical companies like Purdue can get people fixed on opioids, which is killing our youth and individuals far beyond youth all over this country. We have to remember that when they talk about the problems with this plant that the pharmaceutical industry is happy to have this illegal because it would compete with their opioid opportunities. But along with that history is an incredible racist history around this plant. And the propaganda of the 30s was all about the our Latino brothers and sisters, Mexican born brothers and sisters from the South who were demonized in part with the term marijuana. And I don't know how many people here regularly use the term marijuana versus the term cannabis. I suspect many of you use the word cannabis, but for those that don't haven't yet converted to using the word cannabis as your regular wording for this plant, I just want to make sure you're aware of that piece of history and that it was the word marijuana was associated with the hemp plant in order to pull the wool over the people's eyes who had been growing hemp, four paper, four fiber, four rope, and by associating it with folks from the South, that's part of what they did to make the political power to pass the laws back in the late 30s. So I'm not gonna run through every year of history from the 1930s to today, but I just wanted to cover that piece because I think it's important for everybody to know. So in Vermont, well, thank you. And there's plenty of information out there on that. So in Vermont, I started introducing bills around cannabis reform, pretty much right from the get-go. And in 2003, in a Democratic legislature with a Republican governor, we passed one of the first, if not the first by legislation, medical laws in the country. It happened to be one of the most conservative medical laws in the country. You could only get a, well, not a prescription, but a medical card for chemotherapy, glaucoma, and one other arena of multiple sclerosis, I believe. And the issue, of course, was that the sky was gonna fall and this horrible plant was gonna take over our world and we're all gonna die. Well, it didn't happen. And after about three or four years, we expanded the law to allow for chronic pain and a broader range of illnesses so doctors could have a broader range to make the recommendation for the card. They couldn't make prescriptions, obviously, because of the DEA and so forth. We're still dealing, obviously, with that because of the Schedule I nature of this drug, which also, if you don't know, is due to an act of Congress, not the FDA. Again, many of you probably already know this, but whenever you hear, oh, well, it has no medical purpose, look, it's Schedule I, that's because of the political forces voting that through Congress, not through the scientific forces at the FDA, which granted, they're not exactly the purest, unadulterated organization either, but it is Congress, so we will not have a medical application under federal law until Congress acts, in case you didn't know. So we expanded it in 2006. In 2012, we allowed for, we passed decriminalization so that, again, it was no longer a criminal issue if you possessed small quantities. It was a misdemeanor and a ticket, like speeding. And then in 2014, maybe it was 15, we passed a hemp law, which at first was called Industrial Hemp. We removed the word industrial a couple years later, and Vermont has a fairly thriving, growing, cannabinoid hemp plant business growing in Vermont. And as of July 1st of this year, for those of you not from Vermont, Vermont became the first state through legislative action. Again, we don't have initiative here to legalize possession of cannabis. And so now you can have up to one ounce right here on your body, and you are legal, and you can also grow your own plants. And I would say we have yet one more step to go, which is a fully tax-regulated legal market, as well as the ability to grow your own. But we don't have that final piece yet. I'm working towards it, and certainly would like to hear from you some knowledge, especially those of you from other states that have legal adult use cannabis, what works and what doesn't work so we can have the best crafted law when we tackle this starting in January of this coming year, which I hope to be a part of if I'm returned in November. That's my one campaign comment. But there's so many different issues here. From a medical use perspective, I will also just mention that my spouse, while heading back to the barn to check on Ruby, has severe chronic Lyme disease, and she went over 10 years undiagnosed. And so she is unfortunately one of those poster children with this horrible, horrible illness. And hemp is one of the things we have used, cannabinoid oils and rubs and salves to try to alleviate some of the joint pain and the ramifications from Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses. It does not stop with just Lyme for anybody who doesn't know, but that's also another seminar for another day. Our government has a lot of problems. Let me just put it that way. And one of the continuums between both of those is the medical establishment and a real understanding of what ailments are and how do we treat them. And many of you are here to learn more about the cannabis plant, how it can be used medically, the hundreds of cannabinoids that are in the medical plant and the plant and what it can do and how they work in synergy. Our medical system is so linear. One drug does this, one drug does that. It's almost like our discussion about the environment. Oh, each of these chemicals in our environment doesn't hurt us. Well, we're in a toxic soup in our air, water and soil. Each one maybe wouldn't harm you over time, but as you add them all together, they do. Well, in medicine, they seem to think one pill or one drug or one line of medicine is what will cure you. There are hundreds of cannabinoids and we're just barely beginning to understand how each one can help a child with epilepsy or someone with joint pain or someone alleviating their digestive challenges while they're on chemotherapy. We don't even know or maybe some of you do know all the reasons why these things work, but it's so exciting to have these minds coming together here in Vermont to share the information with each other, the herbalists in this room who are truly the medicine worshipers that we have had in our human culture for thousands of years, the people that know the plants and know how plants help us cure all of our ailments. I mean, you look to so many of the pharmaceuticals and what they're synthesized out of is to try to mimic something that already existed in nature, whether it's rubbing jewelweed on your poison ivy through to all the potential of cannabinoids. So you all are the ones that we should be turning to for the answers. And so I'd actually ask many of you who are herbalists or trained in the contemporary medical world who are supportive of changing these laws, that we also need you to lead the way because in the conversations that I have with political colleagues, both in the state and around the country, is really thwarted by the medical community that says, you know, this is dangerous or this is bad and so forth. When again, looking in this parameter going, this is gonna get young children hooked on drugs, they're gonna be heroin dealers next year. Well, the heroin dealers are the pharmaceutical companies. And that is where that has started. And in fact, that mentality is so 180 degrees from what the potential of this plant is to help alleviate our opioid addiction problem. The use of opioids for pain medication and the speed with which they can create addiction versus the ability to alleviate the majority of those pains with cannabinoids and not create that kind of addiction and lifelong challenge for folks who get those addictions is just mind boggling to me. And when the medical profession says, you know, you're gonna be making our children into drug addicts, I say, you know, one of the most powerful conversations I've ever had with young people about this drug, not even really, well, it's a drug, but this plant, is that every year in the legislature, we have 13 year olds who are sort of the note carriers through the building, they're called Pages. They had more of a job before cell phones, admittedly, but they come into my office, three groups of 10 for six weeks, so they come into my office to meet the Lieutenant Governor and I talk about what their goals and aspirations are as Pages and that my office is always available if they need and this last year, one of the groups had a young woman in the group whose sister and four friends were essentially annihilated in a car accident on Highway 89 here and the person who was driving the vehicle the wrong way on our interstate at 75 plus miles an hour had numerous drugs in his system. Just so happened that one of the substances with blood detection after the fact was THC and so the headline newspapers on all newspapers was cause of course we talk about cannabis a lot in the political arena, so it's all about this guy was stoned, this accident happened because he was high. Now thankfully enough people spoke up and it is critical that you speak up and I'm gonna go back to the doctors and the medical professionals, I need you to speak up about the benefits of this and why it's not the scourge but people spoke up and the media changed the headlines cause it said, you know, driver was stoned when the reality was they had, I don't think it was fentanyl, but they had opioids, they had Benzo, something or others, they had all kinds, he had all kinds of drugs in his system and the reality was his partner actually said with his PTSD he had often used cannabis to calm himself and he had none and that was one of the reasons he was a little more manic potentially and so in fact it was quite the opposite of the story that maybe this would not have happened if he had not run out of cannabinoids to help him with his PTSD but this young woman was in my office with the group, her sister had just passed away within a few months in high school, this girl's 13 year older sister in high school and I said, you know, what's the message you get? It's all about, if you try this, I grew up with the Nancy Reagan stuff, just say no, the egg frying in the pan, who remembers that one, right, right? So the reality is if you talk to young people and you feed them a load of crap, they know it's a load of crap, they're not gonna believe it and then they're not gonna believe anything else you say. So then when you tell them the truth about some of the more serious drugs, you've blended them all together, not you but the society has and blending them all together is exactly what creates the problem and I said, what if the message to you all was not, you know, this stuff's gonna kill you and then you're hanging out at a bonfire out back of a friend's house and a couple people are maybe drinking a beer, you know, some of the 16 year olds are 13, hopefully you're not doing any of this stuff yet, hopefully they're not either but you see it anyway or a few of them smoke a little cannabis and you see them in school the next day and they're fine or later that week. The story that this stuff was gonna kill you turns out not to be true. So that is not the right messaging but what if I told you the reality that if at your age you drink alcohol, you smoke cannabis, you do any of these other potential drugs that people offer you that statistically it is very clear later in life you are more prone to addiction and you just heard the message, wait, wait, and later in life you may be able to use these things more responsibly and you won't end up down the road of addiction and the challenges of addiction would that be changed what you do? And they were, you could see in their faces and in their bodies that they were absorbing that information, they weren't ready to say, yeah you're right Mr. Zuckerman I'm not gonna do any drugs till I'm 18 or 21 but you could see that the message was heard so much more clearly. So facts matter and they can see through the smoke when the adults in the room feed them a line. So with the medical community, I'm gonna keep coming back to this and with teachers and with engineers and with professionals out there who many of whom sometimes go home and have a martini, sometimes go home and have a great craft brew from Vermont for those of you that aren't from Vermont you better try something. If you drink, if you don't drink that's perfectly okay. If folks who are not supposed to be the ones that do utilize cannabis speak up and point out that it isn't just long-haired hippies like the Lieutenant Governor who actually hasn't smoked in a really long time even though people think I smoke all the time. But it's people that folks see every day as professionals that they see every day that occasionally consume cannabis either for medical purposes or for adult recreational purposes and their responsible adults in society. Then these laws will change but when people are afraid to speak up because of their profession or their reputation we won't get these laws changed. And I'm asking you as someone who stood up as an elected official and could easily have either not gotten elected or been unelected any number of the last 14 campaigns or 12 campaigns, I can't remember how many campaigns it is now. We all have to stick our neck out a little bit if we're gonna make progress. I grew up with a poster, it's funny, my mom was a New England Yankee wasp descendant, pretty conservative family line but for some reason we had a very hippie-dippy thing on the wall which was this turtle montage with its neck getting longer in the painting and underneath it said, behold the turtle who only makes progress when it sticks its neck out. And my neck's out there and I don't want it to get chopped off so I need some other people to stick their necks out a little bit. So where are we going from here? And is really the next question. And we have an opportunity in Vermont to create a regulated system that is not overly onerous but also protects our consumers. That isn't gonna be massive corporate-owned like CORE's starting to make a cannabinoid beverage and I think Canada to billionaires and former speakers of the houses getting involved in the cannabis industry. Anybody know John Boehner? You ever heard that name before? My mom calls him John something else but I'll just stick with Boehner for now. You know, they see the money and Vermont is a little state and we can do it right. And I hope we do. And when we move beyond the recreational sort of libertarian view of you can grow your own and you can have your own but you can't get your seed anywhere and you can't buy it from anybody and sort of this no person's land in between. The real question is where are we gonna go? And I would like to see us have unlimited small cultivating licenses so the limitation is on the scale of what you can produce and allow for cooperatives to also form so that if you're a local producer today who for the last 30 years you made your living in the underground market responsibly with a small subset of clients that you don't get lost in the shuffle either because a lot of Vermonters rely on this to help pay their property taxes or to pay their bills and they shouldn't be left behind either. And you know when you as a organic farmer who sells 75% of my product direct to consumers through my CSA and the farmers market when you know your consumers you don't wanna poison them. So if you're a co-op and whether it's a 50 member co-op a 20 member co-op or a 100 member co-op we have to figure out what that number is going to be. But when you know your customers and you know their children and their parents and you swim in their pond or you play hockey with them or whatever it is you do maybe you don't need quite as much regulation as the wholesale producer who's gonna sell to the retail store that's gonna sell to the tourists or to the people that don't have that connection. And so we have to make sure both of those systems are available because not everyone's gonna know a grower in their community or the tourism which would be a whole another piece of the economic pie that seems to be left behind in all of the conversation. Those folks do need to know just like we have regulations on food not good enough regulations on food but even though, you know so people can know what's in it and we can say no we're not gonna spray herbicides and pesticides on our cannabis that then you're going to consume and put into your body. We can do it right here in Vermont but I need your ideas, your input both to me maybe today and to your for those of you from Vermont your local representatives and your local senators because the time that you have the most impact on them is when they need your vote. Just happens, just so happens that a lot of them need your vote right now. So if you live in Vermont or frankly if you live anywhere in the country ask the people who are running for office what they know and always ask first. You know, none of us like to be told what to do whether you're a politician or not, right? Who likes to be told what to do, right? Communication is the first piece of it. Ask them if they even know the facts because they probably don't and so you can be the resource of fact that can then help them make the right decision and take the right position because once they feel empowered with the facts they will be a better voice for these issues. So, let me just double check but I think I've covered most of it and I would certainly love to answer a few questions if there's any out there. If you wanna raise your hand I'll call on you and then I'll repeat the question or we do have a mic so I'll call on this one and then who's the second person, raise a hand so that she knows where to go after the first one. All right, well, in the back after this one, okay? Yes, sir, ma'am, please. Yeah, David, thank you. So my question is the retail, going to retail, that's the right term. You said about people coming from out of state and each know what's in it. To me it feels revolutionary and it feels all about community to be legal to grow and you talked about cooperatives or something. So I don't, it seems like the retail is getting into the debt of thieves. It's getting into the very wolf path for the reason for capital gain, for revenue, so can you share your comment on that? Sure. I think that's a really good lens to view retail through which is why we have to do it right but I do think we have to do it and here's why. It is an incredible privilege to either have the land to grow your own or be lucky enough to know someone who is growing enough that they could give it to you. If you don't have a legal market that's regulated for the purchase of cannabis, then you continue to create an underground. The market will exist. So it'll either be retail above ground or it'll be retail below ground. It is there right now. And maybe I'm just really conservative but as a farmer who works 60, 80 hours a week tending the land and trying to produce food well for people to afford and what farmers get paid for what they do, almost anybody who works in the underground market, whether it's cannabis, whether it's anything, carpentry, I don't really care. I do get frustrated like others that I pay my fair share of taxes and other people aren't. Now primarily the wealthy aren't paying their fair share. Don't get me wrong. When America was supposedly great in the 1950s along with being incredibly racist and a lot of other problems, the marginal income tax was 70, 80% and wealthy paid their fair share back into the system that gave them the roads and gave them the education system that gave them the employees to exploit to make all their money. But they paid their fair share taxes and everybody else did too or not everybody but the underground market also means, people not participating in that aspect of society that I think everybody should pay but the biggest reason is the privilege factor. Those people with land, those people with a place where they could produce it or the money to go out and buy grow lights and everything else and produce it inside with appropriate ventilation and all the things you need, that's not cheap. So not everybody can do that. And so for me, I think both are a piece of it but that's why in the regulated market we need to be really on top of scale and accessibility and who's running those businesses. Please. I'm an acupuncturist and I work quite a bit with veterans and so just one of the suggestions, I'm an acupuncturist but I work quite a bit with veterans. Veterans, thank you. And so one of the points that I'd like to make and you'll probably see me and some other cannabis supporters and growers and people in healthcare since you said that coming to the state house because one of the issues that I think is really important is that veterans who are receiving benefits from the federal government because they serve their country, many of them are really afraid to go for their medical cannabis card even though it is illegal, I just want to cry because it's really upsetting as a healthcare professional. You want to help them and they want to do it and it would really help them and they're just getting opiates mailed to them after they have their first appointment with the VA. They don't even have to go in person and see someone. They can just make a phone call and you'll start getting mailed and the mail will have opiates. So one of the things I wanted just to put out there and maybe we can all kind of start thinking about ways to word this but is there a way that we can make it so that people who are somehow under a federal pension can protect them, their state of Vermont can protect them if they do want to use cannabis as medicine, they can somehow protect it from that so that they're not afraid of doing that. Thank you for bringing that up and that kind of issue and reality is one of the things that pains me most as a publicly elected official is when people ask me if I can fix something that I can't fix. You know, folks look to people like me as hopefully part of a team. I hope you don't look up to me although I suppose I'm standing higher than you right now but the power, even if I was governor, there's nothing I could do with respect to the federal law. Unless we had enough money in state to say we will provide all of your equivalent medical benefits that you're getting from the VA and we would take that all over but a state like Vermont, the difficulty of that would be tremendous and so for those of you from all over the country, this goes back to contacting your congressional candidates and delegations because it is, it's, you know, these folks have put their lives on the line for us regardless of whether we agreed with the policy that put them there. That's a whole nother discussion for another day but these folks have put their lives on the line, many argue by choice, I would not necessarily phrase it that way given the economic circumstances that drive a lot of people into this but certainly these folks have put their lives on the line and yet we are restricting their access to a beneficial plant and instead hooking them on other drugs. There's no doubt about it and I hate that reality and there's really pretty much nothing I can do, we've got a great delegation, we have a U.S. Senator who ran for president saying we should legalize cannabis in case you didn't know that and unfortunately I don't have a great answer for you. Yes, I don't know where the mic went. Hi, I got the mic over here tonight. There we go. Hi, David, good time going. This is Bridget Connery, I'm with the Champlain Valley Expansory and I just wanted to respond to Mark's question about business and I think that we need to really get between good business and bad business and one of the things that is really important in the state of Vermont is that people are looking for jobs and there's a lot of people who want to work in the cannabis industry and if it's good business, then it's good business for Vermont. We operate a business where we have 70 people on our staff, we have full benefits, I think we're gonna be one of the first companies in the state that actually gets to a minimum wage of $15 an hour and that's our goal and so we're able to provide jobs, it's not just the jobs for people that work for us, but we're putting a lot of money back out in the community because we depend on all kinds of businesses around us to do what we do and I think that's something that people don't think about when they have this conversation and yes, people who grow at home have always important facts where it starts to need to understand the plants nor to understand the medicine that dispensers or retail outlets provide so there needs to be both so I just wanted to offer that out to the community. Yeah, and we've got a couple up here, I don't know, there was a couple in the back, I'll let you find them and then I don't have to decide because we might not get to all of them but we can talk a little more over a quick snack, unfortunately I'm gonna be leaving to another event after this one but the economic potential is something that I have certainly spoken quite a bit about as well and I think you're absolutely right. Vermont is a rural state like many other rural parts of this country, we are losing our young population, we are depopulating from our rural areas, our rural areas are struggling economically, for anybody out there who pays attention to politics, it has absolutely nothing to do with being a blue state or a red state, you go to rural counties across this country except for a rare exception, they're having trouble economically. This, if we do have multiple or unlimited, small, grow independent operations producing our cannabis, we could have a diversified economy across the state that would bring 35, 40, 50, $60,000 jobs to anywhere from two to five, seven people on each of these businesses throughout the whole state and Vermont needs that and yet my political colleagues continued many of them to be under the fear banner and fail to recognize what our own joint fiscal office said a year ago which is that the economic impact which is not just cannabis sales but the economic impact, tourism and others, they estimate at 360 to $370 million a year which for Vermont is a very big number but I actually still think they're underestimating it by a long shot because for those of you that are familiar with the recreational cannabis world, Vermont, Colorado, Northern California and Alaska, maybe a couple other pockets so I don't want to insult anybody out there but that's where some of the finer quality product has historically been produced and Vermont had an opportunity and I think it's slipping us by to stay at the forefront and not only have the grower experts here and the quality products produced here but then have the early consulting businesses, the testing facilities, all the different ancillary businesses that would be related to this industry we could have had and maybe could still be on the front dish edge of the growth of those businesses as well where folks could live here and consult with people all over the country or the world bringing other dollars into the state as well so there's a huge economic piece from the businesses that already exist like your own as well as the potential that's out there. I don't know where she went, there she is. Hi, my name's Chris Kiehler, my research medicinal plants. Just to follow up with a comment about veterans, I do believe that actually there is something you could do in Vermont if you could pass. I don't like the term recreational and if you could pass the recreational law that would effectively undercut any surveillance of veterans by the feds unless they're doing urine tests and that would mean that people could get big stuff for not having to worry about applying for a car. Well, yes and no, certainly just our own law right now sort of meets that as well if they were to produce their own they could have it but many VA folks are in VA hospitals or work with VA doctors and if they even mistakenly mention to their doctor that they utilize cannabis for pain or anything else, potentially that could cut them off from their benefits so no matter how we change our law, they are still in jeopardy of that sanction. That's not to say they would absolutely suffer it but we do now have legal and I'd like to keep moving forward but it's not gonna resolve, truly resolve that issue. I'm being told one more question here, I don't know what you all think running the show so you decide. Okay, I guess, and I'm sorry, this is the last question. I just wanted to, and from Colorado, I know quite a number of veterans and they are actually threatened. When they go to the doctor's office, they don't even get any, the physician's assistant, they will do spot urine tests to check for pot, meaning so we had no more beds so we've been through time back and they're petrified, they're so afraid of losing their benefits. And this, I mean, Congress is so quick to, or presidents are so quick to send these people into war, it's despicable that we treat them this way. So anyway, we need a solution. The other thing I just wanted to ask, I heard there was a new law concerning Canada, since Canada, Vermont border, something that, and I didn't know what it had to do with it, if you succumbed, you go to Canada, you buy cotton, come back, or you vice versa, that they can keep people out of the country. Do you know, did you hear about this? Well, is that a US law or Canadian law? It's just a new US law. Well, okay, so a couple things, if sessions put it through, it is not law. So they certainly can change the policy if it's within whatever laws do exist to restrict people. I have not heard specifically about that one, although I wouldn't put it past them. But you can't lose your citizenship. The government is not, can't do that to you. Now they could certainly put you in jail, they could do lots of nasty things to you, but they can't take your citizenship away. But this president, and supposedly the president is favorable to this, although clearly he hasn't really done anything about it. And obviously, Attorney General Sessions is about as awful on this issue as one could get. But certainly at the border, if you're coming into the country with cannabis, it is a federal violation no matter what the state law is, and they can do all kinds of mean, nasty, and ugly things, as a musician once said. Anybody know the quote? Just checking. It's not a new law, but I will, so I'll close actually referencing our Logathria Analysis Restaurant, that for those of you that, actually, even before that, I apologize, my wife did text me and Ruby's actually having some trouble. So if you all can send some good vibes towards Ruby, she's a great sow, but she's having some trouble birthing. So if we can just send her some good energy, I'd appreciate it. So I'm sorry for checking, but when my wife texts me about the farm, I check. But- Can I just say, do you use herbs? Because I use herbs with horses, like swallowing and everything. I'll texture that. I don't think we have any squavine on hand because we're not, pigs are usually pretty, pigs, birthing a pig and birthing a foal are two very different scale matters. Pigs usually can get them out, but in any case, to the matter at hand, which is Alice's Restaurant, which is much more on topic than birthing pigs for some reason, two things, you know, obviously if one of us goes out there and fights for it, they're gonna think we're crazy. And if two, they're gonna think we're both crazy and kick us out. But when 50 people a day sing a bar or Alice's Restaurant, they're gonna think it's a movement. Now on top of that, because this is really, that's right, and this is a movement. The last little factoid for you, and he's gonna kill me for telling you this, but for those of you from Vermont or anywhere in the country, there's a position in government called Auditor of Accounts. It's like the most boring job you could ever possibly have, but it's critically important to make sure your dollars are spent well. Vermont's Auditor of Accounts, Doug Hoffer, was a Mater D at Alice's Restaurant. Thank you very much.