Welcome to the Cannabis Data Science Meetup.
Happy to have you here.
As always, just trying to move the ball forward.
I've got some new code to share with you today and then also happy to brainstorm and just
talk about some of the things that you're interested in here in the cannabis space.
So I've got some cool things to share with you.
But before I do that, just let everybody have a chance to speak.
I know, John, you may have had some ideas on your mind.
So maybe I'll let you go first.
So I was a little distracted at the beginning.
So we'd love to hear you recap.
So what sort of this topic that you're interested in?
Oh, well, let somebody else go first.
Let me find the article.
Okay.
Well, while you find the article, Rula, or please correct me if I mispronounced your
name, but welcome to the group.
Happy to have you here.
We'd love to hear about what you're interested in in the cannabis space, the field so wide,
and would love to laser focus in on some of your interests.
So please feel free to share.
Okay.
Yeah.
And my name is Rula, so you pronounce it correctly.
Yeah, so I just graduated from health informatics and analytics, and I'm interested in the data
science field.
And that was the main motive for me to join today.
I've never worked on a cannabis, like in the cannabis field, but I'm open to learn more
about it.
Simply phenomenal.
I'll show you some interesting things that are going on in the cannabis space, kind of
broaden all of our horizons, and as always, I'll show you where avid data scientists like
yourself can fill in some of the gaps and find your piece in the puzzle.
Awesome having you here.
I'm super interested in the cannabis plant itself and its chemistry, so we'd love to
get to some of the chemical side of cannabis.
And at the moment, we're still in this, in some cases, a literal gray area of cannabis,
where a large number of states have just openly permitted cannabis, whereas some states have
done so in a more restricted manner for more medicinal reasons.
And then there are still other states that just have outright bans on cannabis.
And this has led to a bunch of interesting dynamics because the United States is a federation
of states.
So there are interstates connecting all the states.
It's common to do business in different states.
That's just the name of the game, but things get murky when you start talking about the
cannabis industry, which is kind of just permitted on a state-by-state basis.
So John brought up the point last week, what's even the regulations on, say, money transferring
from state to state?
If you have a business that operates in two states, are you even allowed to use money
revenue from one state to fund operations in another state?
Is that allowed?
The taxes is a whole other landscape because you still have to pay your taxes even on illegal
operations, but you don't get to deduct anything from those taxes.
So the retailers, they can't deduct their cost of goods sold, which is a typical expense
for retailers.
So if you're doing everything by the book and paying all of your taxes and not taking
any deductions, it's hard to imagine you could make a profit or even break even.
But you see companies hanging in there for a long while.
So the tax burden is difficult.
Plus, as we've observed, cannabis is still freely flowing across the states in an illegal
fashion.
How are you supposed to compete in the legal market when people are kind of undercutting
you without following the rules?
So that's the landscape.
John or Brian or anyone, do you have anything to add to this before I kind of expand on
this picture?
No, I put the Bloomberg article from May 8th, illegal cannabis is making California water
problems worse.
So just a little onto that.
That's not the article I was looking at, but that's close to what we're talking about.
Well, I'll review these more and to let you run through these.
But these are, this is a pretty common story that we're hearing right now in that, especially
in say California, there's pretty strict technical regulations.
So if you're actually going to follow the rules, it's going to be difficult, right?
They've got strict pesticide testing.
So you have to make sure your environment's completely pesticide free.
Well, in a legal grower, they're not going to even test for pesticides.
So they may just use pesticides wantonly.
And then, you know, they don't have to do testing.
So I think the California quality control testing may cost anywhere from $500 to $1,000
per sample.
And we saw Raw Garden had 4,600 of those.
So pardon my, see, this is the problem with calculators here, right?
So let's just say they get a deal and they are running tests at $500 a pop.
What is this?
Like maybe $20,000 or so.
Is it $20,000 or $200,000?
Sorry, once again, pardon my math on the fly.
So that's just testing costs.
You know, they may be cutting the corner with pesticides.
I think water use has been a problem.
I mean, everybody knows about water in California.
It's just a, people don't realize it, but technically, you know, Southern California
is a desert.
And then, you know, people have these lush lawns and it's an agricultural state.
So California just uses a lot of water.
Plus they rely, I believe, mostly on tundra melt.
So, you know, the East is interesting, right?
The East has too much water and then the West does not have enough water.
So once again, you know, illegal growers may illegally access water.
That's been a problem.
So you know, a wide number of issues, I suppose.
Okay, so what's this?
Oh, that's two million.
Wow.
That sound right.
Yes.
So it's not impossible that Raw Garden has spent north of two million dollars on quality
control testing in, you know, the past handful of years.
So I don't know about you, but in my book, you know, two million is non-negligible.
So maybe for a company of that size, it may be a drop in the bucket, but that's a considerable
cost.
Okay, so that's what's going on in the United States.
But I realized we're often kind of we've got all of our biases.
And Brian, you actually brought up the fact that you had old lab results or lab results
from a few years prior.
And one thing I realized is I guess this may be a recency bias, but we may be biased to
data that occurred more recently.
And we may discount, say, lab results that happened, you know, a couple years ago, but
that doesn't actually necessarily negate their value.
Just because a sample was tested two years ago, that's still a valid data point.
You know, we may have to take into consideration that time has moved on since then, you know,
people have maybe continued to grow their plants, but we may be overly discounting the
value of old lab results just because of bias.
And then I realized we may be actually missing a bit of the cannabis space because of proximity
bias, right?
So I'm here in Washington.
So my proximity bias has led me to explore a lot of Washington state data, and then eventually
United States data.
However, I realized from looking at this person, James Y., or James E., awesome maps, that
we're actually missing the whole port of the puzzle.
So you know, we've been laser focused here on the United States and, you know, me specifically
in Washington, we've kind of neglected the rest of the world.
And I was actually speaking with someone from South Korea.
There was a contingency of South Koreans at one of these cannabis conferences.
I forget, maybe it was the one in Oklahoma City.
I forget which one, but they were working on a push to allow medical cannabis in South
Korea.
And they were saying they're kind of facing a tough uphill battle because people have
really harsh perceptions of cannabis in South Korea.
And I got in a conversation with them and I said, well, unfortunately, the United States
may be partially to blame for that.
And you know, we kind of have maybe not borne the first-hand effects of this, but the United
States was pretty strong in making sure that, you know, other countries around the world
also curtailed their cannabis production.
I don't know that much about the specifics.
And you know, this is something I may want to read up more on.
But I want to say that there may have been some cannabis eradication efforts in India
that once again, don't quote me on this, but I'll need to double check my sources.
But I feel like, not feel, I've got a vague recollection that there may have been some
marijuana or cannabis eradication efforts in India that may have partially stemmed from,
you know, essentially the United States DEA.
To what extent this has played an effect.
Thought comment question?
No, just a call.
Sorry about that.
Please chime in if you have a thought.
So once again, I may need to research a bit more about this, but you know, it just, it
would just be kind of hypocritical, right?
Because maybe like over the past couple decades, we were maybe influencing other countries
to stamp out cannabis cultivation.
And you know, they may have enacted various laws of their own, in some cases quite strict.
And now you see things are kind of changing in the United States, not in entirety, right?
So there's still a good portion of the country where it's not permitted, but there's, you
know, a good portion where it is permitted.
And then there's, you know, a lot of talk about, oh, you know, will the federal government
ever, you know, federally, essentially, I think what that needs to have, what they would
have to do is just, would they either remove or change its cannabis from the controlled
substance lists.
So that's basically what everybody's waiting on.
And federal regulations are interesting because there's all these different bureaus at, in
the federal government, they all sort of have their different interpretations of federal
law and they don't agree with each other, right?
So for example, the IRS thinks that it's 100% going to pursue tax revenues from cannabis
companies.
The Department of Agriculture, you know, will not issue patents for cannabis plants, even
though, you know, there's other people who think that maybe like hemp should be grown
or should be permitted as long as it's less than 0.3% THC.
So basically, no one's really in agreement.
And they're all just kind of, you know, punting on it and just saying, you know, oh, you know,
it's not our responsibility until Congress changes its status on the controlled substance
list.
So that's, I think, what it all kind of comes back to.
But it's just a, to me, it's, I wouldn't say it's laughable because it's not a funny situation,
but basically, you know, all the different agencies just sort of interpret the policy,
you know, in the way that, in my opinion, suits their agency the best, right?
So the IRS, right, they're trying to bring in as much tax revenue as possible.
So of course, they're going to want tax revenue from cannabis.
So that's enough of me spilling.
So long story short is, you know, maybe we could start looking at some other countries
here.
And so I haven't quite gotten the material together yet for Thailand, but that one is
going to be a super interesting one.
Let's see what other countries here that I know.
And then there's Uruguay.
Oh, look, they're labeled for us because I didn't know what this one was.
So that's Georgia.
So apparently Georgia may allow cannabis.
However, keep in mind that these maps can be misleading.
So for example, Mexico technically has I was I was only briefly reading about this.
I maybe only spent 15 minutes reading.
So I'm going to butcher the actual interpretation of this.
So once again, please read into it more yourself.
But from my understanding, Mexico may technically have legal cannabis, but I don't think they've
issued any licenses.
And then I think there is but there is maybe some kerfuffles over it.
Like maybe there was some medical licenses being issued.
But I think there may have been some complaints about who they were issued to.
So anywho, so it doesn't seem like it's completely sorted out there.
So but technically they're, you know, blue on the map.
And then Canada is actually in a way Canada's almost at the forefront because they actually
have a national cannabis market.
I would just love to to visit and actually see what it's like firsthand, because who
knows really until you see it, see it or where you are there, you know, is there a stigma
in Canada against cannabis?
Is it easy to find a dispensary?
You know, if you're in, say, Toronto or maybe you're out camping somewhere, is it possible
to find a dispensary nearby?
Do you have to jump through any hoops to go access it?
What type of products are even being sold?
Is it good quality cannabis?
What strains can you find?
I don't know the first thing.
So if any of you want to do some some exploration, there is some data published by Health Canada.
And so as always, we're going to start tracking down all the licenses.
That's the first step.
Just find out who's growing it and where.
And then we can maybe, you know, go from there to try to figure out the scale of everything
that's happening.
Well, so I've teased this long enough.
In country that's of interest to me, because I vaguely know software developer there.
Why don't we zoom in today on on South Africa?
How can you even find South Africa licenses?
Well, I'll just start basically letting you in on my coding.
So basically, you know, I don't do anything fancy.
You know, I just say, you know, South Africa cannabis licenses.
And you know, you may have to dig around a bit.
You know, you'll find a lot of news articles.
You may actually have to go to Google.
But I was able to find this government website from South Africa.
So this is the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority.
You know, that's something that's always interests me is who is actually regulating the cannabis
in various jurisdictions.
And you know, this is this is pretty common for cannabis to be regulated by the same body
that's regulating alcohol.
Let's see what else they're regulating.
So maybe imports and exports, various things.
One thing we'll want to check out is the testing laboratories.
So there's actually a good amount of laboratories in South Africa.
Let's do a quick comparison check here.
Wow.
So there's there's more than 61 million people in South Africa.
So that's actually maybe twice the size of Texas, I think.
Yes.
So to South Africa has almost twice as many people as Texas.
So that's actually quite a bit larger than I was I was thinking.
So a good metric to sort of ground these in is per capita or specifically per 100,000
people.
So that way we can kind of get a bit better of a comparison.
So how many laboratories per 100,000 people does South Africa have versus, say, California
or Florida?
As I said, I may be a little interested in the testing laboratories and maybe you are
as well.
And so I think we should keep track of those.
But today we're talking cannabis.
So we actually have a list here of all the cannabis licenses in South Africa.
So I thought, you know, wouldn't it be diligent of us to go ahead and record these?
Right.
We've been recording cannabis licenses from all the various states.
Well, why not go ahead and add South Africa to the list and just keep track of the pertinent
data points, because who knows if one of these companies is just going to vanish from this
list one day, not picking on anybody.
But maybe Telex grow, maybe they just vanish from the list.
We would want to have archived that just to know that, OK, they were around in 2022 and
2023.
OK, so that's phenomenal.
So long story short, let me just actually just, I guess, if you're interested, I can just
show you how you could actually go about getting this data.
And then I'll share with you and just kind of tie this back into the conversation at
the end.
But before I start collecting this, does anybody have any thoughts, comments, questions about
international cannabis or cannabis in other countries?
Is this something that interests you or what do you think?
Just looking at the THC on the South African site, THC and CBD information, there's a page
for it, it's actually on that site.
It's on the news.
How they're looking at it.
So CBD sounds good.
It's non-psychoactive.
And I think governments like, I think people, let's put it this way, are agreeing that the
non-psychoactive is medicinal.
And that's essentially what they're trying to extract from it.
I guess they make it legal.
So the plant has, just like hand pads, it did have rope issues, clothing and stuff like
that.
But it's just used for, in fact, they're saying one of the pieces of currency in the United
States has hemp growers cutting down a field of hemp.
I can't remember exactly what bill it is, but it's on the back of one of the bills.
And it's a big crop until Rayon came in or the plastics.
I still think a lot of these natural plastics that people are pushing essentially are going
to come out of this hemp world.
You raise just an interesting point in that cannabis can be used for so many purposes.
So hemp, it's used for rope.
And then I was reading an interesting article and they were saying some, way back in the
day people used to say things like, oh, I didn't use any drugs or alcohol, but I may
have gone behind the barn and smoked a little rope now and again.
I think that was somebody who lived in the early 1900s.
It's just kind of funny because that was, I think, basically maybe the early history
of cannabis.
It's just, I don't know if I ended up sharing this, but maybe I will in the future weeks
since John, it seems this is of interest to you.
But in Kentucky, apparently in the early 1900s, you used to just have rolling hills of hemp.
And what they would say is in the autumn, in the fall, basically it starts to mature.
And then want to say maybe they either harvested or maybe the hemp that they didn't get around
to harvesting.
Maybe they would just let it go bad or let it go to seeds out in the field.
So maybe if you were trying to replant for the next year, you'd maybe just let your hemp
go.
It turns into seeds.
And they were saying, oh, the birds will eat the seeds and this and that.
But at that same time, that's when the THC levels start increasing in hemp.
And so a great database is the CBD.
Actually what is it?
It's the Midwestern hemp database.
Once again, we have a recency bias.
And I don't know if this database has been updated in a hot minute.
Here, I think we've got some cool charts down here.
Yeah, here we go.
So here we go.
Here's the THC levels in hemp.
This is a hotly debated topic.
So for example, I spoke with a PhD student in Maryland.
And what they were finding was that it's almost a, the THC almost follows a distribution here
where as the weeks of flower go on.
So the THC levels rise.
But they were finding was that the THC levels actually then start to fall maybe in further
weeks.
So what would be interesting is if they kind of followed this study out and looked at the
hemp in week nine, 10, and 11 and see if maybe the THC level starts to come back down.
But basically what I'm getting to is the fact that cannabis produces THC is nothing new.
People used to grow it for hemp.
The ones they left out in the field would maybe have a non-negligible amount of THC.
And some people may have kind of used those buds recreationally.
Like I said, they smoked some rope behind the barn.
So they may have gotten some of these flower buds that had just small amounts of THC and
they puffed on them.
I don't think it was anything new, but I don't think it was super taboo in the early 1900s.
At least you're not like a drunk.
So it's like there's sort of worse, I think people at that time thought there were worse
substances you could be on.
Maybe opium may have been big at the time.
So they were like, oh, well, he's not like an opium addict or he's not a drunk.
It's not the end of the world if he smoked a little rope behind the barn.
Just to kind of start tying this all in, well, as we were mentioning at the beginning, the
status of cannabis in all these countries is really murky and changing.
So for example, there is this article or this press release that this cannabis regulatory
body put out.
And they basically said that, oh, on some radio station, there was a licensee that said
that it was growing cannabis for commercial purposes.
Maybe they misspoke or whatnot, and maybe they meant they were growing for medicinal
reasons or what have you.
All I know is there's a list of cannabis cultivation licenses.
I don't actually know if they're for medical purposes or not.
But based on this press release, also don't know when this press release was issued, but
based on this press release, it looks like maybe they only have medical cultivators.
This is something that we should maybe keep our eye on.
Even this agency is saying, oh, maybe there's a...
They're saying what's going to happen with the possible future of cannabis.
I'd love that you brought that up, John, because it does seem that there's still a pretty strong
stigma against cannabis around the world.
And even say places like South Africa, where they're beginning to license people, they're
saying that this is still...
They're approaching this with a lot of scrutiny.
As I said, I almost feel a little bad about that because they're probably coming at this
from the point of view where it's like, the United States DEA has been hounding us for
decades.
So it's like, maybe they're a little cautious about just permitting cannabis.
They probably don't want these South African cannabis licenses illegally shipping cannabis
all around the world because that would probably be a bad look.
Take a look at the article I put out there on New York, basically, criminalizing illegal
marijuana so it doesn't compete with the legal marijuana.
Yes, in fact...
That's pretty funny.
I should have had this material prepared for you.
Unfortunately I don't think I saved the links.
I don't remember the cannabis...
To me, basically, recreational is an experiment like alcohol.
There's a point, like I said, that the concert, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock I was at,
basically, trying to dig up some business and watching people, especially when I go
through every 15 minutes rolling a joint and smoking it and realizing that he's either
really addicted to stuff like this or this is really ragweed and he can't get hot.
So essentially, if he's got really good marijuana, then essentially, to me, you're not sitting
there for like an hour and smoking a joint every 15 minutes.
So it makes me wonder what the grade is, even though the smell was...
The smell smells similar, like I said, in Texas.
So it smells the same, but is it really that potent?
Because to me, something that's really good, like in the days of old, when people had,
before all the legal stuff going on, people would actually sell their wares and you had
the Colombian variation and you had toxic and you had things that were coming out of
Mexico and you had these one hit wonders and the one hit wonderment, boom, you're done.
You really didn't waste it.
So this is my understanding, John.
This is a pretty good depiction here where we basically looked at someone who was studying
cannabis 35 years ago.
And back then, they were saying the average THC of say a high THC strain was around 8%.
And now we were saying that, oh, maybe the average in Washington state is between 16
and 20% and maybe in other states, it's higher, but it depends on how you measure it.
My interpretation is it doesn't really actually seem like there's a genetic cutoff here.
So it's just this 0.3% THC that was just the legal system.
We know how the legal system works.
They write the law and that's what it is.
From my understanding, these molecules are produced from asynthase, which is basically
a controlled way that a plant makes chemicals.
Depending on the genetics of the plant, they may either express more or less of this synthase.
So maybe the production of THC is either more or less in some plants depending on genetics.
And then that's heritable.
So what we found is you could actually then do, what's the term, selective breeding.
And so you could then select for varieties that either have produced less and less THC.
For whatever reason, the THC synthase isn't very active in these plants.
Or you can select genetics that have a high THC synthase.
And so those are the high THC varieties.
Awesome.
Well, to me, basically, now we're measuring everything.
But say 35 years ago, we had to come into these sources illegally.
How much testing really went on?
Other than rolling a joint or basically smoking a man of marijuana, go like, that's put stuff
and then ship it.
That's a phenomenal question.
And that was actually the question on my mind was, where did they get these lab results?
Because we were looking at, I don't have the book with me.
We were looking at sensimilia tips, which is by Tom Alexander.
And I want to say this was around 30, 35 years ago.
So this was copyright 1988.
And they have some lab results.
They don't say where they got them.
And honestly, my sneaking suspicion is they sent them off to their friend at some university.
From my experience, university professors are really kind of loose with the rules.
Not all of them.
But that's kind of the stereotypical professor.
In fact, one of the earliest cannabis researchers, I don't remember his name.
I think it's Matrulam or something like that.
Raphael Matrulam.
So this was one of the people who discovered the THC molecules.
And there is, or maybe not discovered them, but he did work isolating them from my understanding.
But there was this funny story where maybe he would, I forget if he was arrested or maybe
he was put in handcuffs or something, but he was on a bus maybe outside Tel Aviv with
a large amount of hash.
And he was saying that, oh, he just had it for research purposes.
So he just, and he may have gotten it from the police station or something.
So maybe he was talking to the police and he was like, oh yeah, I need some hash to
do some research.
Mind if I come get some from you?
And then he's on the bus with a big block of stinky hash and they arrest him or something
like that.
And then I'm sure he'd let him go.
That's another thing too.
You're doing the marijuana discussion at THC, but in the creation of hashish, hashish has
been created for a long period of time in a way to squeeze out the oils of the plant
and condense them.
So therefore, what is it, just be blonde, red, black, black laced opium.
I mean, there's all these things you kind of understand that were out on the market
at one point.
Yes.
So I'll try to tie this all together.
So you've got kind of wild professors researching cannabis.
I've got a feeling that in the early days, maybe they just found some wild, wacky professor
like that at one of these universities.
Who knows which one?
Probably my guess is one of the ones in California, like UC Berkeley or Davis or the University
of Southern California.
Who knows?
Probably there's a chemist there who has access at that time to some sort of chromatography.
So that's how they measure cannabis, even to this day, but it just would have been rudimentary
in those days.
So I bet they could maybe do some rudimentary measure.
And so they maybe could get a ballpark of, oh yeah, this has about 8% THC.
Once again, if we measured that exact same cannabis today, it would probably be measured
differently.
So back then, long story short, they probably weren't differentiating between THC and THCA
and today they would.
So various things like that.
But long story short, you can kind of measure the THC, but there's more to cannabis than
that.
We were seeing, oh, there's all these different strains and varieties.
And then that kind of gets into the terpenes.
So there's more to the plant than just the THC.
And so this is, I think, where you're kind of getting into the varieties and the smell,
where say the Columbia Gold or the Thai Sticks, those were just very distinctive strains.
So the Thai Sticks from Thailand and then the Columbia Gold from Columbia.
So these are just, they've got entirely different chemical profiles, but they still have THC
and from my understanding, the Californians are the ones who really pushed this forward
and who really developed some of the real high THC strains.
And now those high THC strains, from my understanding, are being taken to other countries and then
bred in with their local stock.
And so once again, I'll point you to this article, and this may not be the specific
one.
It kind of makes sense.
I mean, if you read up on the French wanting industry, the French imported American plants
and they brought a nematode with them.
And the nematode really just wiped out the French plants.
Couldn't stop it in the time they brought across.
So what they figured, and they do this, all the French plants were grafted onto the American
root stock.
So they couldn't stop the expansion of the nematodes in the soil.
So they basically just grafted their plants on top and they went on from there instead
of trying to stop it.
So it's very interesting what you can do with plants and get away with it.
Exactly.
So from my quick reading, of course, the California strains and high THC, they're going to other
countries.
In Thailand, I don't think they were super thrilled about that because it's a give and
a take.
So I think they kind of want to preserve some of their traditional plant genetics without
it just all becoming just California Kush, essentially, just some OG.
There's a list of names on the 70s strains that were out there.
And you can kind of figure, they came into Vietnam, a lot of this stuff in the 70s.
That's something I was looking at.
And they have something out there called leaf barricade, throwback strains in the 70s.
Some of them aren't available, but it's interesting to kind of see where these might have been
used as part of the base hybrid.
And in fact, John, you hit on some super interesting research that we were interested in, but we
kind of ran into a dead end and realized we have to kind of come in reverse in that we
would love to actually understand the origins of some of these strains.
Like what were those flavor profiles?
So like one of the earliest strains was a strain juicy fruit, apparently, it maybe had
sort of that bubble gum smell.
And so now there's still sort of bubble gum strains out there.
And so what I'm seeing is what if we're able to almost work backwards?
It's going to be a tricky puzzle to untwine and it may be impossible.
But that's, I think, what you're kind of after is what are the flavor profiles we're seeing
today?
What's that smell you're smelling in the air?
You may be able to find out, maybe someone says, oh, I'm smoking on like a gelato.
And so that's a pretty common strain these days.
And that's, in my opinion, what I would call like sort of one of the heavier indicus.
It's going to have a real high THC percentage.
It may have a certain terpene profile.
Well, Canada, when things seem to happen in the 70s and then into the 80s, everything
seemed to go to Canada.
And then Canada became kind of the mecca of the world of strain development, right?
You thought high time to just something to read about, you know, because it was illegal
here and it seemed like Canada had more freedom, the basis of cultivation and hybridization
and creating strains.
And then it kind of backfed back in the United States as those strains came back online and
they could be measured.
I mean, just arbitrarily looking at it being measured and then that selection or that strain
is actually producible and then basically set up for regulation and then the legal market.
I think you're spot on, John.
And I actually sort of had a sneaking suspicion about this just from some of the things I've
observed.
And it may still be sort of that still may be the case to a certain extent today.
But now that the markets are so open in, like, say America, I think people are doing genetic
breeding here.
But I think that's 100 percent right because the genetic breeding, right, it's a tricky
process and there's a lot of trial and error.
So you may not necessarily want to fill out like, you know, a thousand plant room or more
with experimental stuff.
So I think you're right.
I think there is like a subset of basically breeders who are just solely working on genetics.
They're just, you know, doing the selective breeding, the trial and error, crossing different
strains.
I think there are people doing that.
And then I think, yeah, they stumble upon something they think is a winner, a good flavor
profile.
They get a bunch of seeds and then, yeah, those may wind up as a cultivation and then
they just clone it.
So they find a good variety.
Maybe this variety grows at the right height, flowers at the right time.
Maybe it's pest and disease resistant.
You know, there's all these various factors that people look for.
And then, yeah, they just fill out the cultivation with that.
And then I think that's what's being sold commercially.
So once again, I don't need to do more research to confirm this, but that's what I suspect
is happening.
Just to finish here, basically Thailand was even saying that they were, once again, I
don't know how true this is because I've heard conflicting things that California cannabis
isn't actually really flowing all over the world.
But then, you know, here in Thailand, they were saying that they're actually concerned
about illegal cannabis coming in from the United States and undercutting their market.
That is kind of interesting.
Once again, I'll have to dig up the actual articles to actually get the pricing on it.
But I want to say they were saying the price of a gram of cannabis in Thailand was around
$9, which is actually kind of comparable to Washington state.
And then they were saying the illegal cannabis was coming in around $4 to $5 a gram.
And that kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning where cannabis
is just kind of freely flowing and it's undercutting legal markets.
And it's just kind of funny that things have kind of done a complete 180 degree turn where
I'm sure the DEA was originally maybe not super happy with Thai sticks coming into the
United States from Thailand.
And now Thailand's not super happy about California cannabis coming into Thailand.
So anywho.
But if it's all correct, the basic Thai stick came in earlier before the DEA was created.
So that would have been, a lot of this has been interesting.
It's been interesting how the regulatory parties saw a problem, basically tried to address
that problem in the sense of creating an agent and then pulling it under an umbrella of say
what was created, DEA.
But in the same sense, you're right.
If I have a legitimate market in my country, I really don't want your stuff invading it
if you want to cut me.
And then I'll have to, but then again, if my weed's that much better, then sooner or
later, I mean, do you want to keep the indigenous weed, improve it, or basically allow the growers
to grow the imported weed?
Right?
And then does that offer an environmental issue that basically says that the indigenous
weed is more adapted to the environment as opposed to the imported weed?
I think there's two things going on.
One, I think that the people undercutting them, they're just not being traced.
There's no traceability of that.
And then, I mean, there's just so many camps in the cannabis industry.
I bet you there's some cultivators in Thailand that they just like how they've been doing
things.
They've got their seed stock.
They just do their same thing every year.
They're happy with it.
And they like their plant genetics, right?
They don't want change, right?
So those are the people who want stable genetics.
And then there's other cultivators who are saying, like, well, people want high, or maybe
they do, but people want high THC cannabis.
These seeds from California give me some remarkable high THC plants.
I'm going to use those.
So there's some people just doing it, just the simple economics.
Yeah, I just want California genetics.
So there's...
Oh, I'm sorry.
Oh, I was just going to say it's almost just two different issues.
I view it as the reason they're being undercut is they're just not being traced.
And then the strain, the genetics, that's just a whole different thing where it's like,
do people want...
It's more of a cultivator choice.
Well, the thing I was going to say, in India, they were having problems with genetic modified
seeds, right?
And what they would do is they take their seeds from the year and they save their seeds.
And then they basically reuse those seeds next year and the next year and the next year.
And the argument they were having, big problems apparently, were that introducing these seeds,
these seeds belong to me, the corporation.
You're buying the seeds and therefore you can't keep it.
And many people, there were actually farmers over the fact that they couldn't control the
stocks, they were actually growing anymore.
So I can kind of...
Especially in an agricultural society, to us, agriculture is...
Unless you're directly a farmer, it's owned by a corporation in a lot of ways, but other
than independent.
But then again, marijuana too is just a secondary kind of crop.
You kind of hit the nail on the head because that's what's happening in Thailand is it's
real interesting because they have sort of the reverse of what's happened in America
where this is almost like a individual grower app.
So I was thinking this is basically Thailand's version of metric, but it's for small time
growers.
So it's just like if you're just a small time farmer and you want to grow cannabis, you
would just get this app and put some plants in the ground and just make sure you're just
recording your activity.
And I don't know if they have any big licensed commercial grows yet.
I thought this was brilliant because I was thinking that... and I think maybe in Missouri,
they kind of have a system like this, but why can't home growers essentially use the
metric system or a system like that and just say, hey, I'm just going to grow whatever's
permitted, maybe it's four to six plants.
I'll follow all the rules.
I'll put it in the traceability system.
I'll record how much I harvest and this and that.
That way you're still doing everything by the book.
But why couldn't a home grower do this?
And in Thailand, they're showing that they can.
I just kind of wanted to highlight that because this is something that Thailand's doing really
well.
And if you look at their app, it's in Thai or I don't know what their language is.
It's in their language.
They have their own food and drug administration.
I don't know.
I just thought this was a really uplifting positive sign.
Just kind of ties in nicely with everything here.
Real quick, I know we've stayed way over time.
If you want to see some data science for just five minutes, I'll just show you real quick
how we could actually get these licenses because like you said, these are agricultural places.
So let's keep track of these cultivators.
Real quick, how would you actually get these licenses programmatically?
Well, we talked about web automation.
And here you'll actually have to do some automation.
And basically what this script does is it literally just opens this website and then
it just gets all the data from this table.
And then it literally just clicks this next button and gets all the data from that table.
And it just keeps clicking this next button until that button is disabled.
And then it stops.
Right?
So these are the exact actions you would take as a human if you were going to read all the
data from this table.
But here we can just do that exact same thing but with a script.
Click on the cannabis cultivations tab and that will just start going page by page.
So now we just go page by page here and get all of the licenses.
So page 6, page 7, page 8, and page 9.
And then if we want, we can now close the browser since we're done with it.
So bam, that browser is gone.
And now we can look at the data.
So how many licenses are in South Africa?
So there's 88 cultivators in South Africa.
We noted that they have a population of around 60 million people.
You can find out the cultivators per 100,000 people.
So they only have 0.14 cultivators or about 0.15 cultivators per 100,000 people.
And from my understanding, that may be low.
But let's double check that.
So how many cultivators per 100,000 people are there in Oklahoma?
Probably more than that is my hypothesis.
Just to go ahead and visualize this data here, we were talking about states.
And this is basically the state equivalent in South Africa.
So it looks like they're growing mostly in Gwataing.
So let's just see if we can find a quick map of South Africa provinces.
But oh yeah, so Gwataing is this little province right here in the middle.
So that's where there's the most, followed by the Western Cape.
Pazulu-Natal is the third.
My bias was on the United States.
And so that's where I was doing all the data collection.
And just because of my bias, we completely left off an entire country.
And so that's 88 cultivators that we can start to learn more about.
What are they doing?
Are they growing medicinal cannabis?
Are they growing adult use cannabis?
So I'll pass that off to you.
So check out the South Africa.
Check out their regulations.
Maybe start researching some of these companies.
See what are they producing?
And then also check out Thailand.
They've got an interesting market here.
And then also, if you're interested, get some hemp data.
Why don't we kind of pick up this avenue of the conversation next week?
Because I think Brian was interested in the raw garden results.
And so why don't we actually maybe, I'm going to see if we can't find any hemp data with
terpenes.
Maybe I can think of something outside of the box here.
Because I think where this conversation is kind of going is we've talked a lot about
the importance of strains and varieties in the past.
And now we just sort of introduced another dimension where there's also strains and
varieties from other countries.
And then within our country, we've got these two huge different varieties, the CBD heavy
strains and the non-THC, or I mean the heavy THC strains.
Maybe start to map which ones people are selecting over time.
Maybe the chemical profiles people are selecting over time.
Because as I was saying at the beginning, people have their prize strains, right?
The highland, they've got their prize strains.
Columbia, they have their prize strains.
I've heard that Mexico has their prize strains.
And then they're not happy that all the California strains has basically gotten mixed with all
of their local varieties.
The medical market, they may have used a bunch of these recreational or illegal high THC varieties.
I think that's maybe what we can try to get on next week and try to tie it all together
is basically we've got all these different legalities of cannabis, different places where
it's permitted.
Then people are selecting different varieties, whether it's in the illegal market or in legal
markets or medicinal markets, the cultivators are selecting varieties that they can sell
to people.
What if we can't tie it all together?
What if there's some effect of regulation on the chemotypes that people are growing?
There is a reason why they're growing.
I mean there's a reason why they like that selection.
Because either the local neighborhood likes what they're growing.
They like your brand of corn, your era corn, the way it looks and people will buy your
local stuff.
Which is why it's better to buy say local Texas corn.
But if you've ever had silver green corn out of Maryland, it's far superior.
But I don't know if it will have cheap grown Texas.
But they have something similar.
But the idea is that it's a local corn.
You stick it in a nuker and essentially you can heat this thing up and let the butter
or anything on it.
You just cook the juices inside the kernel.
But silver green is totally different corn, it's a different species corn, different terrain.
Yes, and I think we definitely should try to tie this all together because I think this
is what people are super interested in.
I know I've heard talk on the town that basically, let's tie it all together.
At the beginning, people were saying that legal cultivators were having a tough time
in California.
One thing they're looking at to try to give themselves a marketing advantage is, I forget
what they call it, like terra noire or something.
Where it's basically they're saying, what makes our cannabis special is the soil it
was grown in.
It's special because it was grown here in California.
And there's been some interesting genetic research slash microbiology research where
I would want to say that they can basically take seeds and look at the microbes in the
seeds and tell you where, once again, I don't know how accurate this is going to be.
I think there's been complaint suggestions that they can look at microbes in the seeds
and tell you where in the world the seeds came from.
Because microbiology is such an integral part of life.
And that's what makes the soil in California special.
Well, in Sense Emilia Tips, there's a whole article on how you make compost the California
way.
And I'll have to give you the recipe because it is not an easy recipe.
So they're saying, oh, get chicken.
I used to have a garden every year for like eight years.
I practiced something called square inch garden.
What I would do is I had this garden in the backyard.
It wasn't very big, but it's nice size.
And I just composted.
And right before winter, basically just throw all kinds of organic stuff in.
And next thing I know, I let it just ferment during the wintertime.
And as soon as the ground started to break, I broke it all up again and let it sit for
a little bit.
And then essentially added more material.
And then started putting certain plants in.
Tomatoes did well up until a certain point.
If I painted the back wall of this small yard white, the plants would have probably grown
a lot better into the hot season.
But with the temperature, the sun directly coming down and hitting that wall, the temperature
variant went up.
So therefore they produced vine, not fruit.
So it was a bunch of different ways of planting that.
But the idea is getting the nitrogen to be, at least what I remember about some of my
body, the nitrogen fixing bacteria.
It gets around the roots and helps actually help the plant work its magic.
So that's something to go into of how that stuff grows in one California that has its
own brand of compost.
Because I did see somebody do a little bit of compost where he's actually using his own
sepal material.
Okay, well, that's not gross to me, but I understand what he's trying to get to.
But that's something he was doing, let it ferment.
And it broke down.
And that way he could utilize this for something else.
Manure is a big part of it.
So here they're saying 50 pounds of fish meal, 20 pounds of hoof and horn meal, 20 pounds
of blood meal, five to 10 pounds of bat guano.
It's just funny because this is where the cannabis folklore.
So even in North Carolina, I knew a couple of outlaw growers and they were trying to
get bat guano for their compost because it's just cannabis was originally passed down by
folklore.
And so someone like Tom Alexander would say, oh yeah, we're using bat guano in our compost.
And next thing you know, every single cannabis cultivator thinks they need to put bat guano
in their compost.
And I was talking to a cultivator and what they were saying is, remember we were finding
out the other week that my hypothesis was the strains you were smelling in Texas were
really high in sulfuric compounds.
Well, plants are a chemical factory.
They need sulfuric compounds in the compost.
So that's what the cultivator was saying was he was saying make sure your soil is rich
of sulfur, I guess, because that'll get turned that will be converted by the plants.
Well, then that's when you have to start studying.
Because when they did the test, the plants already grown and the idea is they're testing
a certain type of this plant versus this plant.
But the real beauty of all this stuff is in the actual biology of the plant, especially
for the fact of what takes hold in the soil, what you have to do to keep that hold until
the plant gets spread out wide enough.
And then what happens in between the roots, because the head of the root, right, the head
of the root is designed primarily to just drill and search for water, which is why three
roots grow into pipes.
They'll go into small places and expand.
It's just designed there's so many cells on that tip that basically just penetrates anything.
Right.
But in the same breath, there's these fine hairs that go across there.
They're actually part of the chemical absorption.
And it actually if you have a house like your house plant sitting under your desk, eventually
that'll get root bound because the plants eating the soil.
So you'll have to take that and either break it up or replanting into something bigger
with more soil.
And I used to have plants, I used to drag them up in the bathroom, put them in the shower.
And what I would do to get the best growth out of some of the house just half plants,
you basically flush out the acids and all the poisons because of the chemical.
It doesn't drain.
And I flush all the stuff out, then make sure it drained properly and then put this organic
fertilizer in.
Right.
Dr. Scholl's or something like that.
It was like, we're totally organic, but you mix it in and you just pour it in and let
it sit, let the plants rest.
You're cleaning the leaves, letting the stoma be able to breathe.
And there's a whole bunch of functions that the plant goes through respiration in order
to make that uptake happen.
I love it.
And I think we should pick this conversation up next week.
So I actually got to run myself.
But I've got a bunch of cool material to share with you.
So why don't we pick this back up next week?
Because I think we've hit on an interesting vein where we can start tying in things like
we can tie regulation to location.
And what if we can't tie that to chemo type?
Because we've got all these disparate sources of cannabis data.
And if we can start connecting them, then we may be able to draw some really, really
cool insights.
Thanks, that's amazing.
I'm going to get my voice back better and better.
So I've got too much cool stuff to share with you today.
So we will have to wait until next week.
However, thank you.
Thank you for coming to Advanced Cannabis Science.
Until next week, keep your nose to the grindstone, stay productive, and have fun while you're
doing it.
Gotta go make money.