Welcome to the Canvas Data Science Meetup Group.
Thank you all for attending.
It's your eyes, your ears,
your attention that's really moving things forward.
Couldn't do it without you.
We've made a lot of progress and I want to really
start formalizing some of the data we've been collecting,
making sure it's accessible to you,
and then let's start crunching it.
Because as I've been alluding to,
there's so many good statistics that can be calculated.
I feel each statistic has a myriad of insights
that you can think about and glean from.
How do you actually value those insights?
Hard to say, but one could argue that knowledge is power,
and what's knowledge,
but maybe knowing about the world,
how do we know about the world?
One could argue we could use statistics.
Potentially, if you follow the logic back,
statistics is power.
What can we do to help out in the cannabis industry?
Can calculate statistics to our heart's content.
Just doing that small, quirky,
sometimes tedious work, even if it seems irrelevant,
I argue is really moving things forward.
Those are my thoughts for today,
but it's a meetup after all,
and I'm not here to steal the stage.
If any of you ever have any good ideas, thoughts, comments,
questions, you're always welcome to put them forth.
Because for example, last week,
Robert had this phenomenal question about lab tests
that really got us thinking.
Then Ruth did an excellent job
about explaining the current state of lab testing,
some of the issues, why they matter,
and we even then began just spitballing solutions.
I wanted to pick up a little bit in that vein this week,
as well as share with some data with you.
But Candice, I know your rig may get put to some good use here
in the short to near future,
as start making some of these algorithms
more generally able to run.
But how are you doing on your work?
I'm doing great. Thank you, Keegan. Hi, everybody.
Yeah, Keegan, that sounds great.
Also too, I could, if I'm going to be filling up my 12 terabyte,
once we get all the data in one place,
I can easily dupe it and then send you the exact,
send you an external hard drive
that you can just attach to your laptop too.
It's so funny you mentioned this.
I should have been keeping my ear a little closer to the ground.
But yesterday, Meta just released Llama 2.
Right.
I've got a good feeling about this.
Because Meta has been in the news lately.
They launched their app,
threads that got to 100 million users in a matter of days.
They're coming out hot.
It's the clash of the Titans.
It's Microsoft has stolen the front stage with OpenAI.
You'd think Meta is probably going to come back strong.
Just from just thinking about the economic incentives,
I could imagine that they may have put a lot of time and effort into Llama 2.
From what I can read, it's licensed under a fairly open license.
I think they've got a custom license, but you can look at it.
I don't know how cannabis friendly they're going to be.
That's how cannabis is in general.
It's such a gray area.
They don't really say for certain in the license.
Because it's basically, you have to do things that are legal.
Then it's, is cannabis operation, are they legal?
The states say yes.
The federal government doesn't really want to,
I guess, technically say no,
but they're not interested in getting involved.
Actually speaking of which, it's the later cake government that we have.
It's really cool Keegan,
because I love it that Meta, Mark Zuckerberg,
he is just rolling over to us this new model.
We don't need an internet connection to run it either.
It just plugs in right into Lang chain.
We should be able to pull in all the external cannabis data,
the CSPs, the XLSs, the YouTube videos, Slack.
All of your data can be put into private GPT.
I'm really excited about this.
I think it's really great that there's so much competitive at
the billionaire level that they're giving us free access.
It's not like an API or anything.
I mean, you just download it and whatever you're doing with it.
I'm sure that if it were getting published or something, it would be different.
But we'll stay within the letter of the law.
But we're just talking about cannabis software.
It's not like we're selling cannabis.
I actually thought about this long and hard the other day.
I think what we're doing is incredibly valuable because whether you use cannabis or not,
you generally want to know what are in these products that people are consuming.
If you're a medical practitioner,
it may behoove you to know what's actually in this cannabis that people may be consuming.
Or there's endless reasons.
In general, like we were saying, knowledge is power.
I generally think it's good at least for the information to be available,
whether you're partaking or not,
what you're partaking or not.
That's good. Oh, yes. Then the other point you raised,
because I always go off on all these tangents,
the principal thing that's important about this is this hopefully is
a comparable model to chat GPT that we can hopefully run on our own computers,
like you said, for the cost of running your computer.
So just a minor amount of electricity.
Maybe sometimes not so minor, but that's all there is.
So make sure to go and get your name in the hat,
because I think you have to request access,
but I did and within maybe two to three hours,
got a download link and I got that last evening.
I always have a thousand things to do.
So today, I will download these.
I think the smaller ones may be around
seven gigabytes and the larger ones around 70 gigabytes.
So hopefully, this is a lot of power in our tool belt.
Basically, why do we need this?
We've got thousands upon thousands of certificates of analysis and just
cannabis data, the cannabis video and audio.
We've had some cool ideas about how we can go about using this data.
So for example, we got all the patents and we found,
oh, you can talk with the patents and you can
parse the data out of the certificates of analysis.
It's pennies on the dollar,
but pennies on the dollar add up.
So we found, okay,
the cost of parsing a certificate may be anywhere from two to 10 cents.
Well, we have like 17,000 certificates that need to be parsed in Florida.
That's not the most money.
Some of these large cultivations and retailers,
they've got much higher operating expenses.
But we're trying to keep our operating expenses to a minimum.
So if we can run Llama on
our own computer and do the exact same thing,
which is what are we after?
We're after the cannabis data.
So if we can get the cannabis data at a lower cost,
then there's more value to be had.
Even with some of the larger models,
because I only have 32 giga RAM and I do have the 3080 Nvidia card.
But if it's in a container too,
there's a way too that you can really instead of just running everything in RAM,
it's pretty interesting.
Even then, if I just get all the external data embedded into the vector database,
then I should just be able to upload because I have two terabyte on the Cloud.
It's just so difficult getting all the data uploaded to Google Drive.
But once I did, then everybody would be able to download it pretty quickly.
Then also too, because it's already embedded,
that maybe you can use,
we'll just keep training it as part of the pipeline.
Then hopefully it won't be as much memory consumption because I really
find the embedding with the GPU,
it just makes it lightning fast.
But not so much,
I haven't really been using it with the prompts yet.
I don't think that it would be such a problem prompting without GPU,
but embedding, you really need GPU.
It really makes that much of a difference.
I love it. All the technical know-how that you've come by,
Candice, is going to be incredibly useful as we,
for lack of a better word,
fine-tune our models and our processes.
Because we've got some proofs of concept,
but I think we're at the stage now where it's
really time to start implementing them in full.
For example, we said, wouldn't it be cool if we could talk with the traceability data?
Let's do that.
We've got Llama now.
This is a lot of data,
so it's really cool.
We've got a 70-gigabyte model.
We've got 45 gigabytes of Washington State data.
We've got Candice who knows her way around some hardware and software.
Like I said, this is where your computer science background really shines.
But like you said, somehow,
super-powered Llama, add the traceability data to it,
encode it, somehow add it to the model.
Then ideally, we could just talk.
We could say, it'll be interesting to find out what questions can we even ask.
It may not be super great at doing statistics,
or it may or may not.
We could say who has the highest sales in Washington State.
Then this will just be new ground in new territory,
because it may be really good or maybe really bad at doing statistics like that,
but then it may be really good at doing other tasks.
You could say, here's a list of product names.
Could you find all the strain names?
That's a common task we have.
That's something that I think the model would be really good at.
Like I said, I think we've done this in the past.
I think these models are going to be pretty good at strain name generation.
If you just need a creative name,
that's low hanging fruit.
But this is actually where all of you have opportunities.
This is untrod ground.
You're pioneers.
This is just this brand open wild frontier.
No one's really trained a large language model
on the entire population of traceability data in Washington State,
and then started to pick its brain.
We can scrape PubMed cannabis data just like everybody else's too.
That's something we really haven't included yet,
but that would really help too.
I love it. That's really where we should be going,
is basically making it a cannabis expert.
Like I said, just basically feed it.
That's what I would love to do if we can pull it off.
Just feed it everything cannabis,
and then they'll see what happens,
see if it becomes quote unquote, like a cannabis expert.
Like I said, we let it read all of the cannabis data science,
meet up transcripts,
and let it read everything about cannabis on PubMed,
let it look at all the cannabis traceability data.
Like I said, at the very least,
it'll just be a fun exercise in computer science.
I was saying at the beginning,
if statistics and knowledge is powered,
we may unearth just an extraordinary amount of
knowledge that, let's face it, the cannabis industry.
I think a lot of people were forecasting
that it would be generally permitted by now.
I think a lot of businesses were structured that way.
I think a lot of businesses were thinking like,
okay, we're maybe in a little bit of a gray market now,
like back in 2018 to 2020 or so,
but things are growing and it looks like maybe one day,
we'll at least be permitted at the federal level,
so that way people can use banks,
and just in general, just operate like a normal business.
Some people were taking out loans
and trying to weather the storm.
I don't think anybody anticipated that here in 2023,
the legal, I don't know,
I guess this is debatable,
but in a way, the legal state is similar to 2018,
where the states have permitted it,
but the banks, I think there's some state banks that allow it,
but I think maybe even some of
the larger banks are maybe even becoming
increasingly frowning on cannabis.
I know some of the big companies,
they're slowly coming around.
For example, LinkedIn has been a little bit cannabis friendly,
and then that had an influence on Twitter.
There are cannabis companies on Instagram,
but I know they always have trouble there.
Anywho, I'm just rambling.
I'll pass it off to any of you
because now's the time to get your thoughts out there.
Then I'll actually share with you
what this big body of data looks like
and what insights a human can find by just scraping the surface,
and then we can just wonder what the large language models can do.
But before I ramble any further, Robert,
any thoughts, comments, questions, anything on your mind?
Just building on last week,
I was curious, let's say,
looking at the different scores from the different labs,
I guess it could be interesting to do some analysis of variance,
and to see if certain labs would skew one way or another
just across the board with different metrics that they report on
and different companies or cannabis companies that they test.
That seemed pretty interesting as an open-ended question.
But it's just something to really think about
that when these various labs have this tendency
to over inflate some of their scores,
it makes for interesting reading material
when you see some of the articles that are out there.
I like a point you brought up today,
where you may have to add condition upon condition in this case,
because the variance,
it's going to be all over the board and for some natural reasons,
and that's where a lot of the hand-waving comes in,
because cannabis,
it's this necure old plant.
Just measuring things.
Awesome. Basically, measuring is the name of the game.
Gosh, I was just hearing something about measuring,
but I haven't ingrained it enough to drive it home.
But measurement is basically at the heart of science.
You get a good scientific question,
or even in engineering, you have to measure.
It all comes down to the measurement.
How people are measuring it,
and then there's variation there.
What are they measuring?
The cannabinoids, terpenes, pesticides, the moisture.
That matters.
When are they testing this?
That's something that I thought was interesting is,
say when is a product tested versus when is it sold?
We've talked about this a little in the past where you can inject your cannabinoids naturally to grade.
You could say, something's been on the shelf for eight months,
and you could estimate that maybe it's a certain percentage of its original concentration.
The original point is, can you look at variance by labs?
Yes. Can you look at variances by analytes?
Yes.
I'd like to add something here.
Yes, please. I don't know where I'm going.
I think this is an absolutely fantastic question, and it's an area that I'm really interested in.
Part of the problem with what you're asking is trying to establish a baseline for what can we expect for a certain strain.
If we look at a strain and we say, we think that it's on average 20%.
If we look at that same exact strain and all the different tests that have been done for it,
we're going to see a variance of probably 15% to 25% or perhaps even more.
The question is, how much of that variance is truly variance in the actual plant versus fudging or bad fake stuff?
Then there's things going on where the lab is testing legitimately.
I know someone who's addressing this issue specifically.
The growers have their samples and they send them to a lab to be tested.
Well, this whole process of which samples do they send, they have a batch of product.
There's different limits in different states.
In California, I believe it's 50 pounds is the maximum size per batch.
Now you have 50 pounds of cannabis and you need to pick a sample from those 50 pounds to send to the lab.
Well, how do you get that sample?
Are you going to pick the low-lying leaf that's very low in terpenoids or in cannabinoids, in trichomes rather,
or are you going to pick the primo bud?
A lot of places are even leasing their samples.
You can legitimately send it to the lab and that normally 20% is now testing at say 35%.
There's so many different factors to tease out there.
This is one of the big questions that I've been wondering is if we can hone in on a particular strain
and look at the variance, how much of that is natural?
How much of it is manageable because from a user perspective, if you're looking to have a specific experience,
you don't want that 15% to 25% variance.
You want the 20% number every time you buy a plant in order to get predictable results.
The industry would like to narrow that down, but so many different things in the process,
including good, benevolent types of things, problems in the procedures, but also nefarious activity.
There's so much in there.
You said it incredibly well, Ruth, and you brought up some good points that I couldn't quite articulate.
I think it was basically like, what are you measuring?
That's where sampling is so incredibly important.
The really good scientists really hammer this home when you're talking to good chemists or good lab directors.
They definitely pinpoint this or even good cultivators.
They definitely pinpoint that as the primary weakness, but it's just not like a glamorous part of the supply chain.
At the regulatory meetings, it's just more glamorous to talk about, oh, we need the mass spectrometer,
and oh, actually, we should actually be testing by GC-GCMS.
Those are the highfalutin conversations.
But really, it's okay, who's driving to go pick up the sample?
Are they sampling it themselves?
It's just not like a glamorous conversation, but it's just the most important.
It's like, who's actually getting the sample?
Is it the cultivator or is it someone at the laboratory?
Because as we just pointed out, if it's somebody at the cultivation,
well, they have the incentive to pick, say, the choicest buds or the choicest flowers.
Once again, this is all just hearsay allegations,
but someone in Oregon was complaining that people would pass pesticide testing,
and then they would just send in the sample that passed pesticide testing
over and over and over again for different batches.
Once again, that may be just entirely just fictitious.
They may just be just pulling something out of their hat.
But I think this is a critical point.
I don't know for certain, but I think some states that are passing newer testing regulations
are taking this into consideration.
So double check me on this, but check out the state of New York.
I've got a sneaking suspicion that they may have samplers there.
I believe they do.
I've talked to someone in New York who, what he does is online education,
but also education in general.
And one of the things that he started with was training samplers
to go out and actually gather the samples that are going to be then sent to the labs for testing.
Obviously, some states allow the cultivators to choose the samples,
and others require an independent sampling person.
So now they might be corruptible.
I don't know, but all of this is very interesting.
And it will be interesting to see how it all plays out and how well the system ends up working,
because there's enough variation in the plant itself
that when we're dealing with all this other stuff on top of that,
I think the problem becomes really intractable for consumers who are, as I said,
trying to get a consistent experience.
Yes, I think this is what we need to spend more time thinking about.
And I mean, just my thought just now is, if you are, say, getting it,
the whole point about the lab testing is you're getting a third party
to independently test your products.
Well, the sampling is part of the test, one could think.
Right?
When we were doing statistics, gathering the sample is the very first step.
So when you're doing an analysis of cannabis, the very first step is getting the sample.
And that's, I think, what people argued in Oregon is,
if the very first step is compromised or untraceable,
then basically the argument is the whole chain of custody is no good.
Right?
Because it's like you said, this is what Candice always reminds me, garbage in, garbage out.
So it's particularly true in this case, except it's the opposite.
It's the same thing.
It's a primo in, primo out.
So if you just think about the economics of it, the only other alternative
is what some people have suggested in Washington state.
And that's just, I've heard cultivators make this argument.
And under the current rules, it's the most economically logical,
is just let people pick the choicest buds.
Because it's basically like, if you're actually letting them pick themselves,
some people are going to be picking the choicest buds.
So why not just have everybody pick the choicest buds?
But then that negates the whole point of this testing,
is to have a representative sample for the consumer.
And I mean, this goes back to statistics.
As you begin taking a statistics course, a nice dry dusty statistics course,
unless you get a fun professor, they're going to really drive home.
The very first principle is sample versus population.
We could test the entire population,
of the cannabis plant. We could take the entire plant, grind it up,
and put it on the HPLC. But then there would be nothing left to give to the consumer.
So you have to just take a sample of it. You have to just take a bud.
And then as soon as you start sampling from a population,
you're going to have a sample of it.
Sampling from a population, you're going to have a residual error.
Things are going to become an approximation immediately.
And so then how do you combat this?
Well, one, you want to increase your sample size.
And I think in California, they're trying this.
And so for example, I don't know how I got looking around at this,
but I started looking around at batch size in California.
It's funny you bring that up.
So it was like, oh yeah, the maximum batch size is 50 pounds.
And I think I was looking at some labs website and SC Labs was saying
that they want you to send in 14 grams.
And so the whole idea behind that is you may only test 0.2 grams or so,
but the idea is they want to increase their sample size.
And then they'll just grind that all up, homogenize it.
And then they'll just pick out a tiny little piece from that.
And think about it, out of that 14, think about this.
Out of the 50 pounds of cannabis, 14 grams were sent to the laboratory.
About 0.2 grams is then put into a tiny little,
I think they call them voids, like I think like vial of analysis.
So this tiny little bottle, 0.2, and then that's put onto a scientific instrument,
like an HPLC, and then just like the tiniest pieces of this
are then sent through the scientific instrument.
So I mean, it's remarkable because these instruments,
talk about standing on the shoulders of giants,
these instruments are truly remarkable.
And that's why I encourage you all to learn more about the laboratory side.
And I'm truly interested in it.
And that's what I'm learning about because we talked about measuring.
These are the instruments that are used in the laboratory.
We talked about measuring, these are people who are measuring the world.
The chemist, with their mass spectrometers,
just about any organic matter or inorganic, right?
They're testing for heavy metals, just stuff, just matter in the world.
They're measuring it and quantifying it.
And the whole idea is, yes, it's an approximation,
but if you actually let the scientists do their job,
they can do a remarkably good job.
Just sending just particles of this cannabis plant through the instrument,
they can determine, okay, there's about, I don't know, 20% of this
of this petrohydrocannabinol molecule in this plant.
And then, you know, that information can then make it to the consumer.
And then once again, then you're, you know, then it's back to approximation.
Then you, oh, maybe you put about a third of a gram in a bomb and let that rip,
or, you know, put it into some butter and make some cookies or whatever you have.
So, anywho, I kind of went on a long-winded tangent,
but I think this is all really cool, instrumentally important.
And yes, there's going to be tons of variance and tons of ways things get wrong,
can go wrong, but as much as possible,
if we can let the scientists actually, you know, do like,
go through the scientific process without, you know,
tying their hands behind their back and saying,
actually, you can't even, you know, sample the cannabis plant.
You know, I think we could get a better outcome.
But any thoughts, comments, questions to piggyback on that before I
pick up with a curve ball from left field?
Please give this.
Well, this is off base, but you know what, Keegan, I am so excited with this private GPT.
I'm already thinking about the CanLivix hybrid data center.
And I even went and kind of was looking at some use racks,
you know, when they some raid and, you know, lots of memory, nice server.
Rack in there too. But this could be pretty big.
I'm really excited, you know, and I really think too, though,
that keeping the CanLivix maybe a bit privatized and the hybrid data center
may not be a bad idea either.
And then, you know, you have your API for access and but I don't know,
you know, but I'm excited about it.
I'm really excited about this llama.
Bravo, Mark Zuckerberg.
I love healthy competition.
I love healthy competition with the billionaires.
I love it when they throw us surf some crumbs, you know,
just makes life so much better for us being able to, you know,
stay in the game without, you know, having to spend so much money to with GPT-4.
And then somebody was telling me on LinkedIn also that GPT-4 actually,
they are using reinforcement learning because, you know, I was kind of thinking of chat GPT-4
is never really having any conscious, right, consciousness because of the fact that I didn't
think reinforcement learning was used.
So, you know what, that's something we're going to need too to add into our pipeline
as we start training our model.
I'm just so excited about it.
And I have some friends too in that technical skills shares group and they do DevOps.
And there's this guy in Boston.
He is a genius with DevOps and Kubernetes, Docker.
Oh my goodness, I'm so excited because I know he's going to want to come on board
with the ML dev ops, right?
And I don't know.
The future just seems so bright today.
I just can't stop smiling.
I love all the things you just brought up, Candice.
One, I love your go get them attitude about setting up some servers and getting this data
to people because I've seen a bright, awesome future there too,
because like you said, maybe of course you may have to earn a few bucks
if you put it together in awesome API and putting everything together.
I'll have to start working for money, yeah.
Because I started looking at the pricing.
Even with used equipment, it's still pretty pricey.
But I would start with a small rack and then just have a server, RAID, the network.
And then we can always build from there.
But I think my laptop will be good for a bit.
We have 12 terabytes.
We have the Nvidia.
We have the 32 gig of RAM.
And it's good to get this into people's hands, right?
This is what people want.
And they need to be able to digest this data because it's undigestible at the moment.
And I can start showing you some of that.
But a quick analogy here and a principle from economics.
And I wish there was a better comparison because I'm not like a soda drinker.
You know, I drink tea and coffee.
But in economics, I think it's the Bertrand model.
But a lot of these industrial organization economists study market structure.
And that's what we started out about was just looking at how many firms are in the market.
But for, you know, say like Facebook and Microsoft and these big technology companies,
the one bright side about this is it's kind of like Coke and Pepsi, where it's not going to be
great if you go and try to sell another soda.
So it's not going to be profitable necessarily to go try to sell a large language model,
in my opinion, unless you're Google or Microsoft or Facebook.
But the good thing about this is the Bertrand model is it argues that it'll push the price down to cost
because it's basically just these two large companies competing for market share.
And they basically both have the same product.
So all they can really compete on is price.
And what ends up happening is they just push price down to cost, which, like I said,
it's not great if you're trying to sell soda, but say, hey, if you're a restaurant
and you sell food and you know, you know, sometimes you put soda in a glass and give it to people.
Well, it's good for you because so it is going to be super, super cheap.
And so it's the age of the restaurants.
But in this case, it's going to be like sort of the age of the data restaurants where
it's all about you kind of packaging this up and delivering it to consumers.
So like I said, I wouldn't recommend you go try to create your own llama.
But I think if we start to use them, we start to use llama and that'll put the emphasis on
chat GPT to lower their costs.
The cost of using these large language models may.
Well, the cost to us may go really, really low, just $12,000.
Really, really low just towards the actual cost of actually running the thing.
Great.
Like in the llama case, it's hopefully just going to cost us the power it takes to power our computer.
And so the long story short is.
I think it'll be it's it'll be good for us.
Great competition is always good, even competition amongst the giants.
So, so anywho, I'm excited, I'm excited.
But before we conclude, I guess.
Do you want to look at some data?
I, I, this is a little bit of a weird insight, but.
If you want, I can show you like what having all this data in your pocket can can do.
So once again, I.
Basically, I'll just share with you some of the data that I've been working with and then show show you where you can help out.
So basically, you know, I've been doing these public records requests for the Washington state data, and I think we can finally start to to curate this and make it accessible.
So basically what I'm doing is.
There is say these 22 giant inventory files.
And what I'm doing is, you know, I'm just adding.
All these data points together.
So that way, you know, we have these pretty complete observations about cannabis products.
You know, so here's some fresh frozen flour and clones.
Some mature plants. I saw something with Mars, some some apple tarts.
So we've got tons and tons of data here.
22 inventory files.
Each one may have about half a million to a million observations.
So, yes, so this is starting to add up here.
And just to kind of show you what a human can do.
But then we have to kind of wonder where the large language model can do.
This is just what I was doing this morning, and I thought that this exercise would be worthwhile showing you.
Because this is what we could potentially do with every state, not just Washington.
If they were a bit more forthcoming with their lab results, because once again, you know, say you're a cannabis consumer and you want to learn something about cannabis.
Let's just see if we can't just let you know, you know, we can just let you know, you know, we can just let you know.
Let's just see if we can't just look at the data and and learn something.
And so I was just going to share with you basically what I learned this morning.
I mean, here are actually my my calculations right here.
But basically, the first thing I was curious about was, you know, how many lab tests are happening, you know,
in the whole country? Well, one thing we could potentially do is just do a.
And this is something that a finance professor taught me one time is if you can do a back of the envelope calculation,
there's, you know, they're they can actually kind of get you in the rough.
OK, he said it for this particular he said, one, it'll get you in the rough ballpark and two, they're they're actually super persuasive.
And so basically, like if you're.
In right, this is why I heard it from a finance professor and not an economics professor.
But I think it's a good rule of thought.
I think it's an interesting, an interesting bit of wisdom or perspective.
But he basically said, you know, if you're in the room with some people and you can do a back of the envelope calculation,
it'll be super persuasive and it'll kind of just move things forward because.
Why do we even do statistics? It's just kind of to get a rough mental approximation of something.
Right. We were talking about in the beginning measurement.
Right. So we're just basically trying to measure something.
Sometimes the back of the envelope calculation can be a beginning point, not saying it's.
The end all be all, but it's just a place to begin.
And that's another philosophy that we have is.
If you at least have a place to begin, even if it's bad, then you can start heading in the right direction.
And this is what we I like to call the real life gradient descent in gradient descent is a concept or mathematical principle.
And people, I think, debate who discovered it, but I think you can point some work back to the new new.
But basically, it's the idea is.
Start anywhere and generally head in the better direction, and you'll wind up at least at the locally best.
So so maybe right there is maybe multiple bests, right?
There may be a lot of different good spots, but you'll at least end up at the best spot in the nearby vicinity.
But OK, so anywho, enough of me rambling, what can we discover from this?
OK, quick back of the envelope calculation here.
So this traceability data has been around for about a year and a half.
So this was an act enacted at the beginning of twenty twenty two.
And we have data through the end of June of twenty twenty three.
So we have about 18 months of data here.
And, you know, we've got sixty one, two, four, nine lab tests.
And so I was saying, OK, you know, how many lab tests per month are there?
You know, so there's around, you know, thirty four hundred lab tests per month in Washington state.
And then I was saying, you know, what is the population of Washington?
And once again, this is not going to be apples to apples because all the states have different testing regulations.
But, you know, so I just looked up the population of Washington.
And then the thing we've been doing is just saying, oh, how many dispensaries per one hundred thousand people?
And so I was I miss you've missed this up. So basically what I'm trying to figure out here is.
You know, on average, how many lab tests per month per one hundred thousand people are occurring in Washington?
So, you know, about 44 lab tests per one hundred thousand people.
And then I realized, well, just once again, it'll be an approximation because every state has different testing rules.
But you could kind of, you know, go through and start, you know, just estimating about how many lab tests would be occurring.
In every state per month. So this is California with thirty nine million people.
And they may be doing right. Right. Just any approximation is better than no approximation.
Because I was kind of wondering, you know, what proportion of lab tests are we even observing there?
Because we've observed a few thousand from a few different producers.
And then I think we observed I don't remember how many, maybe five or six thousand from SC labs.
But that may only be like a drop in the bucket. Right.
We've right. We may have only seen five or six thousand lab results,
but there may be more than one hundred thousand lab results per year in California.
That's a lot. And I mean, that data is out there.
One would assume. Right.
And they've been testing in California and maybe since 2018, maybe not.
But, you know, I mean, what if there's five years of one hundred thousand samples?
It could be five hundred thousand lab tests in California alone.
And then, you know, then there's Colorado.
I'm trying to think of some other states where there's been testing for many years.
But, you know, Michigan, Massachusetts.
And then, you know, all the medical states, you know, they're just just kind of picking some random ones out of the hat.
Ohio and so on and so forth. So tons and tons of data out there.
And, you know, why is this? OK, cool. So there's tons of lab results.
You know, why is this even important? Well, because.
Check this out. What can you even do with this data?
So this is sixty two thousand lab results.
And say you're a cannabis consumer in Washington state.
Well, which I am. One thing I may be concerned about or that's not what we want to do.
I thought I would make the screen large. But one thing that I'm concerned about are our pesticides.
So here I've just identified, you know, all the samples with with pesticides in them.
And so, well. Just today, I'm just going to do this kind of interesting exercise where we basically just.
Look at and to just going to look at products and in the pesticides that are in them,
because that's all I'm really interested in. Right. So if I go to the store and, you know,
all I'm going to see are basically, you know, who produced it.
Right. That'll hopefully be on the bag. And then, you know, what's in it?
And then, of course, you know, you'll you'll see the THC, the THC content,
where the THC content and CBD contents on the label.
Well, the pesticide may not necessarily be on the label.
So now, you know, I basically augmented the information that's available at the dispensary.
That's awesome. Right. I'm now like an empowered consumer.
And, you know, basically.
Let's say I want to avoid pesticides.
Well, you can basically just. You can just sort.
So you can basically say, OK. All these products, whether they may have passed or not,
there's there's some trace amount of pesticide there.
So, you know, so you can just immediately say you were really concerned about pesticides.
You can just start looking for products, you know, here and down.
So once again, this isn't going to be super accessible yet.
But that's where the idea behind these say the large language model comes in.
What if you train the model on this data and then you can just say,
say you're at the the dispensary and you're saying, hey, you know,
does this bubble hash by alpha crux have any pesticides in it?
And it'll just say, no, no pesticides were detected. And then you could say, right.
And this could all just be natural language, right.
It's a natural language model.
So this is what we wanted to make available.
We want to just on your phone, just say, hey, I'm at.
Retailer X, looking at.
This ethanol concentrate.
Were there any pesticides detected?
And they're like, there was a trace amount of by Fennel's eight detected,
but it did pass quality control test.
And so then you can say and it was like, oh, and there was also acetone,
ethanol and isopropanol detected in this concentrate, maybe all at all at minor levels.
And then you're like, I'm going to go with the bubble hash, you know,
and that's that's what I would do as a consumer. Right.
There's two products.
That's all the information you see at the retailer.
And if you ask the bud tender, like you said, like, you know,
maybe they'll get out the certificate, but.
You know.
They may or may not be have all this information,
and that's where we kind of talked about last week where these large language models,
it's like asking thousands and thousands of experts.
Right. The bud is a cannabis expert, so to speak.
But, you know, they only have so much knowledge, so much bandwidth.
So we can augment that.
But so that's the main point I wanted to drive home.
There was other stuff here I kind of wanted to talk about.
Is as far as.
These pesticides go, but what do you think?
Are you interested in me pointing out a sticky issue or just maybe had your heart's content for?
For today, so I'll leave it up to you. Do you want.
More or what are your thoughts?
More. OK.
OK, well, I'll just guide you through my my my reasoning here, and you may call me a data miner.
So this is maybe not how you should the best way to go about it.
The scientific process, right?
Typically, you want the research question first before you just start going and pawing through data.
But basically, my my question was, OK.
What like, you know, what pesticides are being used and why?
And unfortunately, I guess, by who and on what products?
And so we started scrolling through these the pyrethrins, I think, are hotly contested.
So I'm not going to poke into those too much yet because I obviously we can see they're.
They're heavily detected.
I've heard some some debate about whether these are natural or in natural and.
Well, I encourage you to look into this because obviously this is showing up in cannabis products.
And but I think there's more to that more to that story.
So pyrethrins will be for another day.
But what I was scrolling through here and we've we've talked about piper, any old butoxide.
And there's tons of piper, any old butoxide.
And then see tons of it.
And see, this is where just kind of visualizing the data can can really get you a an understanding of it.
I want to say piper, any old butoxide may be permitted.
But once again, not at high levels.
But once again, I started scrolling down here and I started saying, OK,
is there another pesticide that's being used at high numbers?
And look at this. This one's maybe not as much as.
Piper, any old butoxide, but I was just curious.
I just kind of picked one out of the hat like this one looked kind of prevalent.
You know, what what what's pack low butrys all.
And so basically I went over to our our handy dandy chat GPT.
And basically, I just said, you know, what's what's pack low butrys all.
And look at this.
This is something that's been.
That's crossed my radar, but I.
A couple more than once, and I maybe hadn't paid it enough heed.
What I think is going on here.
I've just kind of heard like to talk on the town that people will kind of use this disparagingly,
but these they call them PGR's plant growth regulators.
From my understanding.
Heavy application of the plant growth regulators make the cannabis buds like thick and dense.
Once again, I don't know how much truth this there is to that.
But, you know, if you just look at the quick description here and one thing I love to do with chat GPT is, oh, no.
Can you make this super short summer?
So, right, because chat GPT likes to be a little verbose.
Sure.
So that is maybe too short, but basically it just says, oh, it just results in shorter, more compact plants.
And as I said, I think in cannabis, people use them to get really, really dense buds.
And I think they're they're criticized because it's kind of maybe like kind of like like cheating because it's just.
You know, maybe instead of having, you know, proper technique and really good lighting and, you know, all these different environmental controls to grow a healthy plant, you're kind of just spraying it with this with this chemical that just makes the plant.
Just really dense.
And I think once again, this is where, you know, measurement and science kind of take us like, you know, is this a good thing?
Is this a bad thing?
I think that's up to the debate.
But the point being is.
It's it's prohibited.
And so in Washington, because this is kind of what I was wondering is, you know, in Washington state, they're they're screening for pesticides.
But I was wondering, you know, are these pesticides actually permitted?
And.
And so here's like, and this is kind of what I got to wondering is. I wonder, you know, if licensees are like seeing like this pesticide list here and saying like, oh, you know, here are the action levels for pesticides.
And, you know, maybe as long as we stay below zero point four.
Maybe what's this parts per million?
Maybe if we just stay below zero point four parts per million, you know, we'll be we'll be OK.
But from what I can tell, I don't think you're, you know, you're allowed to use these.
And, you know, I just wanted to to kind of just say, OK, you know, what's going on here?
And so if you look at this.
And see, this is what's what's cool about the Excel is, you know, sometimes an underrated tool.
But she look at this. So, you know, it looks like there may be, you know, a handful of companies here who may be using this plant growth regulator.
But it looks like there's the one company in particular.
And there's actually maybe there's one column here.
They had this failure rate column. See, some of these are failing quality assurance testing, but some of them are passing.
And what I'm worried here is that the ones that are passing, you know, they may be using a prohibited.
And once again, I'm just conjecturing here just from what I've seen looking at the data.
But, you know, it's possible that they may be using a prohibited plant growth regulator.
And, you know, they may just be just willing to accept the fact that, you know, some of their tests will fail quality assurance testing as long as, you know, some, you know, some of them pass.
And so maybe the ones that pass, the buds are so much denser that it that it just makes up for the cost of failing.
And if you look at this, so it once again, not to point any fingers, but this one farm keeps coming up for detections.
And I want to.
If you look at the time stamps of these, it's all from, you know, the past year, year and a half.
So this is all since 2022 and up till potentially the present.
And what you see here, so it's a lot of this farm and they're making flour.
And then what you see down here is look at this.
These companies, right, you've got infused doing concentrates.
JPM doing concentrates, triagonal industries concentrates, you know, these companies may just be sourcing their their cannabis from.
And once again, I'm just conjecturing here, but what it looks like to me is these processors may be sourcing their material from flour that.
That may be contaminated with pack load butyra's all in then, as we know, when you make concentrates, sometimes you concentrate down the pesticides.
And so that's why they may also be getting detections here.
And so you see, once again, some of them pass and some of them fail.
So, so that that's the main thing.
And then I think you could use that data because it's there.
They're collecting information from everyone in the supply chain.
And that's a really interesting hypothesis.
And I bet you could track back and look to see who they're buying from because whoever sold the product had to record that transaction.
Exactly. And so all that data is there.
So we could actually confirm.
And what would be really, really, really interesting is to trace it back and see if the grower passed their test.
But as he said, when it got concentrated in the extraction process, then the less than threshold amounts became greater than threshold amounts once the flour was concentrated into extract.
I love how you're thinking, Ruth. And basically, there's almost like a forensic data scientist.
Yeah. Because the data is there.
But I want to say it's possible.
But sometimes tracing this data, especially between transfers, is ridiculously hard.
But it may be possible. So where there's a will, I'd always like to say there's a way.
But when there's missing data, sometimes that way gets blocked.
But that's I think an interesting... this may have frozen.
But that's I think an interesting... I mean, this is an observation, right?
We've basically observed someone growing flour and it's got Paclobutrazola.
And once again, not pointing any fingers is possible.
It's not their fault. And it's just background.
And then once again, it easily could not be the processor's fault, right?
We could maybe look at the supply chain and say, like Ruth Conjecture, maybe their source flour passed.
And then they just failed their concentrate testing.
And once again, these companies may have already figured this out themselves.
So maybe MFused already figured out why they failed or actually they passed in this case.
But maybe some of these processors like Venns Park, maybe they've already pinpointed, oh, this is the source of our contaminant.
This is why it failed.
But who knows? They may not have figured this out yet.
This is why we like to think that everybody's looking at the data and they know as much as we do.
But a lot of this is untrodden ground.
Technically, the Cannabis Commission should be doing these analyses, but my experience has been that the regulators aren't doing any enforcement of much of anything.
And some of the states are trying to shut down some of the illegal either growers or dispensaries.
But as far as enforcing the regulations like the lab tests and stuff, I don't know how much is going on.
Well, then, too, you're talking about the United States government, right?
You're not talking about a high tech company or even a high tech organization like Cannabis.
But they want to, in Massachusetts, they want to start their own data center.
They want to hire all these data scientists and software engineers.
But you know what? It's the government. It's bound to fail.
And, you know, again, Keegan's really onto something here, Keegan, because, you know, again, if the, what is it, packlobu trazol,
if the boiling temperature is higher than THC, then again, we're going to run into high numbers building up and concentrates, right?
And wow, did you nail it, too, by finding that it's on the do not use list.
And I don't know. I think this is really good data.
And it's interesting, too, because now we have another death in the cannabis industry from trimmer, another trimmer death.
And then they're trying to like blame it on the woman being 60.
But you know what? 60 is a new 40, baby. And, you know, 60 is not elderly.
But she had COPD. Yeah. But you know what? I'm 62. I used to have a pro air inhaler, too.
And, you know, if they had ventilation and that's where those were, because I go to Summit Lounge in Worcester, Massachusetts.
And it's not like I have to even wash my clothes when I get home. The ventilation is not good.
Whereas if I were to go to a bar to watch a Patriots game, my clothes would be disgusting with smoke and I would have to go right into the wash.
Right. That's how good ventilation is. And that's a Worcester, Massachusetts social lounge.
But this is really good stuff. And, you know, since these deaths and the reason I bring it up is because Keegan Florida truly started it.
They're no longer publishing absolute values for pesticides and additives.
And that's since the deaths. I mean, you know, like we can really go and look at it and see like when the death was and then look at when the COAs and compliance certificates changed
to no longer provide absolute values. Right. Because it looks to me, you know, we'll need to get another set of eyes on it.
But it appears to me that they really stopped after Lorna McMurray died. But, again, you know.
I'll just chime in and say the glass half full approaches a never that saying once again, it's a it's a it's a brutal saying.
But it's the brutal saying is never chalk up to malice where you can chalk up to stupidity.
Or in this case, a lack, lack, lack of knowledge. That may be a better way to put it, because it's instead of saying, oh, the say the Washington state trace it.
The Washington state regulators are malicious. Like Candice said, they may just be short of actually they are Washington State.
I think they're malicious because actually Washington State has it all going on by offering open data sets.
I guess maybe I might use this and then the other pesticide, too, that had to build up a concentration concentrates and really try to get Massachusetts to just start providing additives used to patients that purchase state product.
But, you know, I wanted to be safe for patients and workers. But I agree 100 percent.
Basically, you're 100 percent right. I think both of you in that this is a very serious topic and subject.
And that's why we're kind of researching this. Right. We're at the frontier in there's knowledge to be discovered.
Washington State, right. One could argue that, you know, maybe their their regulators should be pawing through this data.
But the governments move slow and, you know, they're they're currently hiring a data consultant.
And, you know, we're just maybe a little headed the curve. We've already got the data set. We've already we've already augmented it and standardized it and have begun analyzing it.
You know, a similar thing in Massachusetts.
Maybe they're just not excited about the public seeing the data because maybe they haven't looked at it themselves. Maybe they're like they have said publicly, Marianne McNeese and that other gal from the one of the other labs in Massachusetts, not the ones that offer.
Coa's right. They were essentially said the public is too stupid to understand the data. And that is just because, you know, they are, you know, the Massachusetts CCC.
They've been I've been seeing the job ads and I really don't know how they expect with the low pay.
It's not even like a true government job either that they're going to get any data scientists worth their salt working for them.
So, you know, all you have to do is just be open with the data. And there's so many people in Massachusetts to do understand data science and high tech that are all raring to go to look at this data, too.
But they choose to keep it close. You know, it's just I don't know. I think it's a way of that.
Everything about cannabis for as far as the regulators goes about control and this is in general, the government has approached cannabis from we're going to if we're going to do this, we're going kicking and screaming and we're going to control everything as much as possible.
So I'm not surprised by any of this.
Well, I've already been telling patients to that you really need to start growing your own or, you know, start finding someone you trust because honestly, the you know, since I've been back in Massachusetts smoking my homegrown and I have no longer been smoking Florida State weed because I'm a snowbird and I have not bought even though I renewed my card.
I have $250 worth of credits. I don't even think I want to buy Massachusetts weed. And the reason why is because my lymph nodes after months of reaction doing Massachusetts cannabis and then Florida cannabis.
I come back here to homegrown that's over a year old, but you know, it's got humidity packs. So it the buds are like I just pulled them on. I just dried them a few weeks ago. Right.
And but I don't really think it's safe. And you know what? It's like I need to I might just start up like a medical marijuana patient group of my own up here in Massachusetts.
And really, because that's who we have to get talking about it, you know, but I don't know. It just doesn't seem right to me because they are that it doesn't feel safe product and it makes me sick when I do it.
So my homegrown doesn't.
I love that you're taking the initiative.
You may want to get in touch with maybe send them a message. The people who put together the Florida medical trees, you could get right when you could join their group and to see, hey, can we start like a chapter in Massachusetts or a similar initiative in Massachusetts?
Because this is what we were talking about last week is, you know, power to the people. Right. In fact, especially now that we've got these large language models, I think it's the opposite. Right. I think it's the public are now the experts.
And so, you know, the public can now fill in the regulators, instead of vice versa.
And the other thing is, I think we're heading in the right direction. Right. And this is one of the reasons why we host this group is.
Even if we can, you know, add one molecule to the picture, you know, today it was.
It was a result, then I think we're moving things in the right direction because, as I said, there's been some talk about this. It's been super informal that just in forums that, oh, you know, you know, people are using plant growth regulators to get dense buds.
And so it makes them harsh. And, oh, you know, some people say that, oh, you know, when they say smoke cannabis flower, they can tell if a plant growth regulator was used.
And so it's not impossible that I mean, once again, I'm just conjecturing. We don't know. But it's not impossible that a large percentage of Florida flower is being treated with plant growth regulators.
And the Wikipedia talk about power of the people. Right. Wikipedia is just a database of human knowledge.
I have a can of Wikipedia. I think there is. I'll have to get some links, but the point being is.
What is my point here? The power to the people.
Well, the pesticides. So does Massachusetts. See, that's the thing, too. See, like at least Florida was telling us the pesticides that they had in their product, you know, up until like around when Lorna died.
And but Massachusetts doesn't provide anything except for like a couple of hokey charts, you know, on their website. And I don't know.
You know, OK, I think basically what I was.
Yes. Just check. OK, I'll just put together my final thoughts and then we can wrap this up.
But the Wikipedia on the pack would be resolved. Right. So chat GPT didn't know yet.
But apparently Wikipedia was saying the boiling point was around four hundred and sixty degrees Celsius. So once again, that's just crowdsourced knowledge from the people.
But once again, that would be too high to boil off for concentrates.
And then, you know, if you do further reading about the substance that, oh, you know, people are spraying it on golf courses.
So it seems to maybe be some sort of. Plants must love it because it seems that plants grow really dense with it.
But I think maybe the research is out about maybe how healthy that is for humans to consume.
But especially medical patients. Right. Because, you know, I don't live on a golf course because also, too, I know that Roundup causes Parkinson's disease is a huge lawsuit over it.
Right. And and then because it's medical. So, you know, I have doctors telling me, you know, start looking for organic, non GMO food.
Be careful what you know you are, what you eat. Even fasting for extended fasting can help, you know, with cancer and and other things, too.
You know, it's just see, it'd be one thing if it were maybe just recreational. Right.
But this is cannabis for medical patients. This is cannabis, too, for cancer patients. Right.
And then you know, I think it's a little bit of a
challenge to have a patient who's got 60 grams in 90 days.
You know, they just really it burns me a bit.
It does. It just burns me a bit, Keegan, that that the state is just ruining it.
It might be hurting patients, you know, all because they want to hoard the data and not share it.
And so you basically raise the point that, oh, you know, you could grow your own and then you could at least control what's in it.
And I think that's that's kind of what it comes down to is you want to know what you're consuming.
Right. We talk, right. You want to measure what you're consuming.
And so if you grow it your own, you can make sure that no plant growth regulators were applied.
But I guess the problem is maybe not everybody can grow their own.
And so exactly. And patients can't grow their own.
I would never have been able to grow my own when I first started it.
I didn't do it until I was 57. And it wasn't until I got better. Right.
That I could actually grow. And but the thing is, it's patient.
So, you know, I'm going to and I can't get this data out of Massachusetts. I couldn't last year.
But this year, because I did renew my card and because I want to be a patient because I'm going to ask purely, I'm going to ask all these MSOs in Massachusetts because, you know, I asked them last year and they blew me off.
Nobody will tell me if the product is even radiated. Right.
So now I'm going to ask what like, do you have anything that's somewhat organic? Right. Or that's organic or that is not radiated.
That might be my first question to everybody. And then I'm going to make a spreadsheet.
There are companies that do not offer any unreaded, un-remediated product. Right.
And then try to find the few that do. And then maybe go somewhere with that with patients.
And but, you know, it's just see when I became a patient. Right. It's like Keegan, they were like to me, they're like, oh, this is so good for you. It's so healthy.
And, you know, when I was a patient, I didn't realize that they were just they're loading it up with chemicals.
They're, you know, they're radiating, you know, probably powdery mildewed weed is getting radiated so it can pass tests.
And then it's been we are us medical patients are smoking it. It's just it just doesn't seem right to me.
It just doesn't. I get the jar half full.
A view of this is all that Washington state data.
It didn't look like there was a lot of culprits for this pack of butyra's.
All right. Right. We saw there was right. That one farm that was really using a lot of it.
And I've pinpointed a few farms that I once again, actually, we do have pretty good data here in Washington.
But once again, I guess you don't know everything in their environment.
But, you know, at least you can see, OK, no detections for pesticides and so on and so forth.
But I think that's what you got. Every consumer cares about this.
But like you said, try to find some licensees that you think are growing in a healthy manner or in a way that you approve of and stick to those.
And like I would my point earlier is you can either grow it yourself or I think the states need to be a bit more open with their data because they because if you grow it yourself, you can control what's in it.
Or if you have to do rely on, say, a medical provider like a medical licensed grower or just like in Washington state, just just generally licensed grower.
If you do have to rely on them, then the states shouldn't be pretty open with their data that way.
Right. Either they should do both or one or the other. Right.
So it's either allow people to have home grow or else let them see the data that way they can actually know what they're consuming.
I think there's there's a larger point here, and that's that you two are both very well informed cannabis users. And my experience has been and I have a friend who's an advocate and has a huge following.
And she tries to educate patients. And when you have people, especially older people coming in to cannabis as medical patients, they're thinking about medical cannabis the same way that they think about other medications.
And they assume that it's safe. It's tested. It's completely transparent. They have no idea what they don't know.
And we can in the industry, they say, well, you need to be safe. You need to make sure that there's no pesticides. However, that's kind of a map and abstraction.
Now that we actually have the data, we can go out there and we can tell people there's evidence that the products have pesticides in them that theoretically they're supposed to be pesticide free because that's what the regulators state that has to be tested.
But there's actual data showing that there's pesticides. You need to make sure that there's no pesticides. You need to ask for your COAs to make and look specifically at the line items, you know, where it says pesticides, because they have no idea how to do this.
They have no idea of any of these concepts or what's going on. They I mean, you are so far ahead of the average consumer.
Well, actually, we get a lot of information from average consumers. You know, it's Reddit medical groves is what they do.
They just turned us on to 18,000 COAs that we could spray publicly right in Florida. I'm telling you, medical patients are pretty savvy.
But then you get the CCC coming to the Worcester Senior Center and telling everybody how healthy state weed is, right? Because they're not giving full disclosure.
I hear what you say. And I know that there's a lot of people out there. And the problem is, is they've been forced to be very proactive.
And the knowledgeable consumers are at the front of the curve trying to push for everyone else.
But if you look at the masses of people behind them who still don't know what they don't know, I would I think it's there's so many amazing people in cannabis,
just like you, who are savvy, who are standing up for all of the other patients.
But again, in my experience, you are not typical.
That's all I'm going to say. I agree with both of you in that probably the people in the forums in say medical trees on Reddit are also kind of probably people like us,
probably the cannabis experts. And I always say we're at the frontier.
And sometimes it may seem a little scary when you see a bear and you're on the frontier. But that's to be expected.
And so one, I think there is there's a it's a it's a long road uphill ahead of us. But I'm willing to keep trudging up, keep trudging uphill.
Maybe I should go on YouTube for senior 55 plus medical patients, right. And then maybe do it, make a presentation and do a little roadshow down to the Worcester Senior Center after the CCC came through.
It said how healthy marijuana will be for you compared to big pharma drugs. Right.
We are you know, there's so many black box warnings on those big pharma drugs that they keep pushing down seniors throats.
And, you know, it just the medications and telling them to take them.
And really, the average person, I and I'm not trying to be critical, but I don't think you appreciate how how educated you are.
I'm educated too because I'm a patient. Right. And I replace that. Yes. That's at a band. My brother is an MS patient and he actually had a stem cell transplant.
And he's been he knows more than any of his doctors because he cares more about his health than his doctors do.
And he educates other people on MS and the treatments and the side effects and everything else. He is not typical.
How does he do it? Does he have like a YouTube video or you know, because that's a website where he's documented his whole journey.
But how does he share it with other patients? He is on. He has a website, as I said, he's also active.
He's in California and there's the Central Coast MS Society and he's active in that.
Yeah. And yeah, but I'm telling you, he's not the typical person.
And he also he's one of the many who actually took charge of his own care because he's not just being a passive member, you know.
But most people, as I keep saying, I so many people, they don't know any better. They're very intimidated.
My dad was a doctor and I've seen how people respond to doctors. They treat them like gods.
And they don't question them. And and this is again, most people, they're very passive consumers of health care.
And you are you come across as being so articulate and so knowledgeable.
And that is not my experience with the average person. And I just I just want to put that out there for you.
Well, like your brother, right. So I'm on Social Security Disability for Parkinson's disease and there is actually some family history.
So, you know, maybe I'm in early stages. But, you know, I tend to think that it was just that the Mass General Hospital went a little too stir crazy, prescribing me on way too many drugs that I never should have had.
And I think that's what contributed to the tremors. And because I was pretty bad. I mean, I couldn't drive and stuff, too.
And cannabis is amazing, like, you know, so the six milligrams of Ativan, you know how I got off of that, like I was on that for decades. Right.
And and I was cold cut. But, you know, garden remedies came over with RSO. So I was doing a lot of RSO.
And that helped me get through that addiction. And, you know, Percocets, that was, you know, after decades of daily use, three times three X a day.
That was the easy drug to kick. But the Ativan, six milligrams a day and the Ativan, I mean, the Ambien, the sleeping pill at night, when they cold cut me from that, the doctors, I was I was not well.
And that RSO was a miracle drug as far as like I can understand how people get addicted because you don't think of it. You know, your doctor's like, oh, yeah, take this. Oh, yeah, they have no harm.
It won't cause dementia. It won't, you know. But I think that I see I've met a lot of people, too, that, you know, that instead of doing something really crazy, because, you know, my doctors were recommending deep brain stimulation surgery.
And one of my other friends with Parkinson, she had it done. And and but I didn't, you know, and I might still. Yeah, I still need medical marijuana. Right.
But I can like dose so that, you know, it's not like I'm stoned all the time and I still can't really do this at Eva like he likes his fever. Right.
And and I should to help with creativity and stuff, too. But I don't know. It's been a crazy journey. But you know what?
I'm wondering, like with what your brother's doing, maybe I should maybe do the same thing, you know, maybe not like me.
Like, oh, my goodness, I'm 62. I'm all wrinkled. I can't do YouTube. But maybe that's what I need to do to to just try to help people understand because they do.
And they need to ask for COAs because, you know, I thought that the medical marijuana was just some beautiful legacy miracle. Right.
With people that really were passionate and cared about humanity. But, you know, I discovered, you know, and then I started late in life. Right. I'm 62.
I started at 57. And although I never, ever smoked pot when I worked the 20 years I worked the Dell EMC or digital equipment, never, never.
And I don't know. I'm so disappointed because it just seems like people are just rushing and corner cutting the state weed.
They don't care about the health of their workers or the patients, whereas the people I have met in the legacy groups, because I didn't know anybody that's sold pot or anything except for the state.
But, you know, I went to some legacy parties here in Massachusetts, some gorgeous houses, too.
And, you know, sometimes you would just kind of like pay for a ticket and then they might have raffles. Right. But it wasn't like about selling pot. It was about education.
And I don't know. You know, I'm just so disappointed with the state, you know, compared to when I first started five years ago.
It's like that in every state. And I think that the state administrators are all corrupt. And if you look at, I've done a lot of writing and speaking about how rec use is squeezing out medical use, medical has just gone down the tubes.
Ruth, are you on LinkedIn? I am. I'll try to find you and I'll send you a, do you want to connect on LinkedIn? Absolutely.
That would be great. I'd love to see, I'd love to read. I actually just got a post because I know I've been involved in the education, patient education.
And I've talked to so many people who are trying to work with patients to educate them and help guide them in their journey.
And this is when I came to cannabis and my brother, I came because of my brother, he found the cannabis worked. We started using it.
He's like, let's develop a technology to help other people do this. So we started developing a tracking technology.
We hit a wall largely because the COA data weren't available and we needed that. But, shoot, where is I going with this?
Oh, so in the meantime, though, so that, that project kind of got tabled, but I've been working with so many people on this education aspect and also the tracking.
And I think trying to find good product is essential, you know, and the right product, it's essential. And information needs to be readily accessible and transparent.
And, OK, so as I said, most patients don't know what they're doing. And I've talked to a lot of people who are setting up organizations to guide patients.
And that just doesn't work because there's no mechanism out there that will reimburse these people to educate the patients.
And I just posted an analysis explaining why you can't get paid to help patients.
And so everyone, many groups have tried this and they've all left the market because they can't get reimbursed for their services.
And this is a huge problem. I forget where I was going with this, but I also I have a very good friend who's a TBI survivor.
Yeah, brain injury. I know that one.
She was a pediatric nurse and she's 50s. And she said before I came to Canvas, if you had told me as a nurse that you were you were using cannabis or giving it to your kids,
I would have called the Department of Child Protective Services on you. She had her injury.
She went from being a nurse and a provider in the system to being a patient. And that just completely transformed her.
She was called a drug seeker. She was she was on dozens and dozens of medications before she came to Cannabis and ended up getting off of most of her for her medications.
And she is pretty much completely self-taught. She's in Buffalo.
I thought you were going to say Nikki Lawley because she's amazing. That's how you're talking about.
That's what I'm talking about. She's a close friend of mine.
Oh, that's who you are talking about, Nikki? She's one of my contacts. She's wonderful.
She started she's in New York. She couldn't get good product. She said she's tried hundreds and hundreds, probably over 500 different strains to find trying to find products that work.
She got a bunch. She's like, I have this product that works. I'm like, what's in it? She's like, I have no idea. I bought it off the black market.
I'm like, send it to a lab. She's like, there are no labs. I said, let me look for you.
And I looked. There were no labs where she could send her product to. So here she has no idea what's working for her.
Now, during COVID, regularly she goes into Canada because she gets better product and better information there.
She goes to Canada regularly. She's right on the border. COVID came and shut down the border.
For several years, she couldn't get access to good product. So she was stuck using black market product and she had no idea what was in it.
And she is out there on the front lines trying to get education, get access, get transparency.
And I asked her, I said, are you advocating because patients want transparency and they want this information?
I said, or are you asking for it on their behalf? And she said it's the latter. She said no one has any idea about asking for any of this stuff.
And she's in Americans for Safe Access, which is, again, trying to spearhead all of this.
But I talked, you know, I went to a, I went to a conference here in San Francisco with psychedelic people and they were all researchers.
They were all pharma people, essentially. And I said, yeah, I'm working on this tracking and the transparency issue, making sure that the information is available.
And they're total blank looks. I'm like, you understand what I'm referring to, right? They're like, no.
I said, patients have no idea what's in their product. And they gave me this, like this look like it just didn't click with them.
So no one in the system, no one in the traditional system understands any of these problems.
And I regularly say, here are all the problems, just basic issues that exist in cannabis that you don't have in the regular health care industry.
And they're not aware of any of it. They're not aware of any of it. The transparency, the fact that no one knows what's in their product, the fact that the doctor says,
OK, you need a product with THC, CBD, CBG, and you want some limonene and, you know, terpenolene, and they go to the dispensary and the patient's like, yeah, this is what my doctor told me to get.
And the budtender's like, yeah, well, we don't have that. Here, take this product and they go home with a couple hundred dollars worth of product that's shipped for them.
It won't work. It won't do anything. The doctor has no understanding that what he's telling the patient to get, the patient's not going to find because a doctor, when he prescribes the medication, the patient goes to the pharmacy.
It's all standardized. And he knows the patient's going to walk out with exactly the medication the doctor told the patient to get.
In fact, the pharmacist isn't allowed to give the patient something different than what was prescribed. That doesn't exist in cannabis.
Yeah, but cannabis is a plant, too. You know, it's not like a petroleum-based pharmaceutical drug either.
And then again, too, with the plants, like, you know, Keegan, you know, it's like there have been, I've seen other people talk passionately on YouTube about how strains will differ, how you can actually get like COAs for Blue Dream, but you'll get like a different chemical analysis across producers.
And then remember, Keegan, we had that wonderful gal with epilepsy that told us that, you know, she bought a strain. It worked great. Then she bought the same strain again, and it was completely different.
And, you know, so I would love to see like instead of a periodic table with just the strain names on it, right, actually more with the chemical balance, you know, and then or make sure that a particular like, you know, Keegan was doing patent, right?
But, you know, if we and then John, you know, with his principal component analysis, he had like, you know, fingerprints for all the strains, right?
So then you can like kind of like look at a Blue Dream and say, well, does it, you know, and see if the principal component analysis is the same with another one and then or actually match it up with a totally different strain and say, oh, this, they're telling Blue Dream, but you know what?
It's really GG4. It's Gorilla Glue, right?
So we're missing a point here. And anywhere else in our economy, the way things work, if you go to the store and if you buy Cheerios, and then you go to another store somewhere else, you know, even like five years ago and you buy Cheerios, those products are the same thing.
In cannabis, anyone can call any product wedding cake. There is no standardization.
That's what I was saying, right? And even at the same time, though, that has pesticides in it, right?
But at the same time, you can take, we can take, and you and I can take the seeds from the same exact plant. You grow them in Massachusetts, I grow them in California.
And what we're going to get is going to be completely different because the soil is different, the environment is different, the climate is different.
Even the same string grown, you can go different microclimates. You can even go to different parts of the same plant and get different expressions.
And this is, again, it's, I'm not criticizing cannabis. What I'm saying is it's different from what you're used to in the way that you consume other types of products.
In the industry, it's trying to apply everything from other products into cannabis and the way they're thinking about cannabis and that fundamentally doesn't work.
They need to consider cannabis and how that works and design the rules around cannabis to get the outcomes they want because they're trying to shove cannabis into a pigeonhole that doesn't fit.
Well, it's a plant, you know, it's not a chemical and it's a plant. God gave man kind of cannabis whereas John D. Rockefeller gave mankind petroleum based, harmful pharmaceuticals, right?
It became a huge industry and you've only seen human health decline and lifespan decline because of the new Western pharmaceutical world.
I digress, sorry.
I first want to applaud you both and then I think I can tie all this together. First, I want to applaud you both for working diligently to spread knowledge because this is going to get super meta.
I think this is necessary. You've raised so many good points here and one was how the governments look corrupt. I think what does this all come down to?
I was thinking the other week, you know, what exactly, there's a great Monty Python movie, The Meaning of Life.
What exactly is the meaning of life? And I think some of the politicians or the regulators, they've got more to learn in life because maybe they think the meaning of life is just pursuing money.
So that's really that base. So that's what some people are doing. So they've got some more growing and learning to do in life and then you can say, oh, you know, maybe the purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness.
And so that would go to, you know, the medical patients, right? They just want to live a happy life, right? They don't want to be debilitated by a condition or they just want to get over that and get back to enjoying their life.
So you could argue maybe it's happiness. And then I was thinking, well, what are we doing here?
Maybe the meaning of life is the pursuit of knowledge. So that's kind of what I kept thinking about as you two were talking or debating this topic is what does this all come down to?
It's really just all of us trying to pursue knowledge. And I was thinking about this in if we knew everything, right? Like say there was actual perfect information like economists like this assume there is.
And the world wouldn't be any fun, right? It wouldn't be any fun if everybody knew everything about everything. And there would be nothing left to learn. And so we live in an imperfect world where knowledge is super limited.
We all have limited knowledge base. And let's face it, different people are knowledgeable about different things. Maybe there's a carpenter who knows a ton about carpentry.
Maybe they just don't have much knowledge of communication or cannabis or this or that. And so just for what just the way life took its turns, you know, Candice and myself and Ruth, we just happen to have lots of knowledge about data and cannabis and statistics and public health.
And, you know, what's the meaning of life? You know, maybe it's for us to continue pursuing our knowledge. You know, maybe share it with others because it sure seems that, you know, the more of this knowledge we accumulate and the more that we spread it around to other people, it seems like they're able to live better lives.
It is a slow, incredibly slow process, right? And it's imperfect, right? We have to go through all these imperfections, right? We have to deal with the regulators who are pursuing money.
And we have to deal with sometimes the medical professions may have imperfect knowledge. Sometimes the bud tenders may have imperfect knowledge. The consumers often have imperfect knowledge.
So it's just the imperfect world we live in where nobody's got it right. We're, you know, we're all just trying to gather information and live better lives.
And that's why I kind of want to applaud you both, because you're both doing just that. Right, Ruth, right? You launched a company that's doing the traceability and tracking for consumers.
You're basically trying to provide people with knowledge in Candace. You said you were going to start an initiative to start educating medical patients in Massachusetts.
And you've already been helping enormously with the collection of knowledge by helping with the cannabis data science meetup.
So I think that's the glass half full is is everything perfect right now? Nowhere close. Is there a lot of improvement to be done? Yes.
Do consumers need more knowledge? Yes. Do medical providers need more knowledge? Yes. Do bud tenders need more knowledge? Yes.
Could everybody in the world benefit from learning a little bit more? Probably, myself included.
So I think we're I think we're on the right path. And I think it does help pointing out the imperfections, because if you don't spotlight them, then there's no way to fix them.
So I think I think it's great. Right. So, Ruth, right. It's awesome. Right. You can point out things like, you know, a lot of consumers have a worryingly little amount of knowledge about this.
And, you know, maybe people have the regulators have worryingly little knowledge about the medical side of cannabis.
So there's and then Candice is right. You know, you know, the consumers worryingly little access to data.
So, well, Ruth is right. You know, you're right, Ruth. It's like it must be because I'm I was born an engineer.
So I just have to know everything about everything. Like, you know, I know how to grow. I can make my own RSO and edibles.
And, you know, I just always you know, it's always curiosity. I'm so curious that, you know, I'm kind of driven to that.
But, you know, we are connected on LinkedIn and I am going to pay more attention, especially to your latest article.
And I'm going to look to and if I can't find anything about what your brother's doing, I might ask you if that's OK.
And because I really do want to learn, I really I'm real interested to and what you're putting out there.
And because, like you said, but I mean, I've just been talking about right.
Education patients, but I haven't done anything about it. I haven't done a YouTube video.
I haven't been doing any blogging. And, you know, I just think it's fabulous what your brother's doing, what you're doing.
You're participating in Reddit forums. I think that you're doing more than you realize.
I do more on Facebook. It's done everywhere. You're providing a lot of information that people really need.
And for that, you're absolutely to be applauded. Thanks.
I need to do YouTube video really, really stick my foot in the really jump into the stream.
I love this. I love the direction we're going in.
And I want to thank you both. So thank you both from the bottom of my heart for coming.
And we've now spent two hours talking about cannabis data and how to help people.
So I'll let you go on and enjoy your days. But I think this was an especially fruitful day today because we pinpointed just the current state of access to data, where we can go with it.
Some of the current pitfalls in the industry. And I think we've got a bright future ahead of us.
Thank you for putting this together very much.
Definitely. And as I said, even if we're only moving things a molecule at a time, we're moving forward.
Moving forward. Thank you.
Too cool, everyone. Thank you for coming.
Have a wonderful day.