The Cannabis Boomer Podcast is for baby boomers and all adults who are interested in the science of cannabis. Key words for the podcast, in general, are: baby boomers, cannabis, boomers, marijuana, THC, CBD, health, wellness, science, and aging.

For this particular, episode key words are: cannabis and marijuana testing, marijuana consumer protections, and cannabis business law.

The cannabis industry faces challenges in consumer protection due to the nature of cannabis as an “experienced good,” where quality can only be determined after consumption. This creates a situation of asymmetric information, where manufacturers know the product quality but consumers do not. Experts highlight issues such as inaccurate labeling, fraudulent testing practices, and the need for improved regulations and consumer protections.

Cannabis testing fraud is a significant issue, with inflated THC percentages and pesticide contamination being common problems. The lack of proper regulations and oversight allows labs to manipulate test results, benefiting cannabis companies at the expense of consumers. To address this, a system like METRC could be used for batch testing at the shelf, eliminating the business relationship between labs and cannabis companies.

There is a lack of sophisticated reviewing of cannabis products, with many reviews being overly positive and lacking professionalism. Concerns are raised about the use of organic pesticides, such as neem oil, which can be harmful when used on cannabis plants. Choosing cannabis products can be challenging, especially for those unfamiliar with the market, and it is important to consider trusted brands and packaging regulations.

Overtaxing the cannabis industry can drive consumers back to the black market, undermining the benefits of legalization. States like Missouri, with lower taxes, demonstrate a thriving market, while high-tax states like those on the West Coast face challenges. The cannabis industry is complex, involving medicine, recreation, and various product categories, making regulation difficult.

Cannabis Boomer podcast aims to educate users about cannabis and its effects, emphasizing the importance of informed consumption.The Cannabis Boomer interviews a diverse panel on consumer protections in the cannabis industry.

 Dr. Ruth Fisher PhD is an economist and cannabis industry expert. She is Co-founder of CannaDynamics. Dr. Fisher is the co-author of The Medical Cannabis Primer: Ushering in the Golden Age of Marijuana.

 Ryan Carlisle is a senior banking consultant to the cannabis industry and one of the first bankers in that industry. Ryan has over 10 years’ of specialty banking experience supporting cannabis businesses. Prior to his banking career, he worked in both medical and adult recreational cannabis businesses.

Trent Hancock is a grower with 30 years of experience and a frequent commenter on consumer fraud in the cannabis industry.Trent is a passionate advocate for cannabis testing reform.

Jeff Rawson, PhD is a Harvard-trained biochemist and founder of the Institute of Cannabis Science. The Institute of Cannabis Science aims to normalize cannabis with labels that accurately report contents.

Chapters in this episode include:

00:00:10 Introduction: Consumer Protection in Cannabis with Four Experts

00:01:27 Dr. Ruth Fisher: Cannabis as an Experience Good & Information Asymmetry

00:03:48 Ryan Carlisle: Banking Perspective on Testing Fraud

00:05:39 Trent Hancock: 30-Year Grower Exposes Testing Manipulation

00:06:57 Dr. Jeff Rawson: From EVALI Victim to Consumer Advocate

00:08:08 Personal Stories: Why These Experts Fight for Cannabis Safety

00:09:38 THC Fraud: Why 30% THC Claims Are Impossible

00:11:42 What Testing Should Look Like: Solutions & Standards

00:13:46 METRC System: How Technology Could Fix Testing

00:16:21 The Coming Litigation Tsunami in Cannabis

00:17:59 How Consumers Can Protect Themselves

00:19:24 Choosing Cannabis: Trust Your Nose vs Lab Results

00:22:35 Why Accurate Testing Matters for Legalization

00:24:19 Green Tax: Why Cannabis Businesses Struggle

00:27:56 Regulatory Failures: 80% Effective Tax Rate

00:31:10 How Consumers Actually Choose: THC Numbers & Cool Names

00:34:13 Rescheduling vs Descheduling: What's Coming Next

00:34:53 Conclusion & Consumer Safety Resources

The Cannabis Boomer Podcast is for baby boomers and all adults who are interested in the science of cannabis. Key words for the podcast, in general, are: baby boomers, cannabis, boomers, marijuana, THC, CBD, health, wellness, science, and aging.

For this particular episode, key words are: cannabis and marijuana testing, marijuana consumer protections, and cannabis business law.

And here is our team of experts!

Dr. Ruth Fisher PhD is an economist and cannabis industry expert. She is Co-founder of CannaDynamics. Dr. Fisher is the co-author of The Medical Cannabis Primer: Ushering in the Golden Age of Marijuana.

Ryan Carlisle is a senior banking consultant to the cannabis industry and one of the first bankers in that industry. Ryan has over 10 years’ of specialty banking experience supporting cannabis businesses. Prior to his banking career, he worked in both medical and adult recreational cannabis businesses.

Trent Hancock is a grower with 30 years of experience and a frequent commenter on consumer fraud in the cannabis industry.Trent is a passionate advocate for cannabis testing reform.

Jeff Rawson, PhD is a Harvard-trained biochemist and founder of the Institute of Cannabis Science. The Institute of Cannabis Science aims to normalize cannabis with labels that accurately report contents.

And now, your host, Alex Terrazas, PhD, The Cannabis Boomer.

And the issue that you have here is that cannabis is what's known as an experienced good. And what that means is you can't look at it and tell what the quality is. You have to actually buy it and consume it in order to know whether it's good or not, whether it works or not. And you could also call it a faith good in that there are a lot of things that you really will never know.

Anyone who's taking say vitamin C or vitamin E, they're taking it on faith. They don't know it's working, but they just kind of hope it is. So cannabis is an experienced good and it's a faith good, which means they need to rely on the manufacturer to communicate to them and tell them what's in the product they're getting.

And this is called a situation of asymmetric information. The manufacturer knows what's in the product and what the quality is, but the consumer doesn't. And this is nothing new. Experience goods exist in a ton of different markets and there are very clear mechanisms that have evolved in order to address the fact that the consumers don't have enough information to make a good decision.

In the rest of the world, you have things like money back guarantees warranties, you have certifications, certified organic and whatnot. You also have the government creates regulations that require, for example, information disclosure, that when you buy a pharmaceutical product, you get that insert with all the information that's required. A really important mechanism for inducing the manufacturers to make quality products is legal liability. If they make a crappy product, they can get sued. So that mitigates or minimizes. The probability that they're gonna make a bad quality product.

When a consumer goes into a store, if I used a metaphor when I go into Kroger, here in Nashville, I don't ask Advil or Tylenol a COA. I trust that what's on the label is, is what's in there. I don't ask the cashier to show me the growth chart for all the hops that are in the IPA, I grab the strongest one that's on sale. But as a metaphor, consumers do that as well. Not everybody is a a craft cannabis connoisseur. Many of them, we're all on a budget these days, many of them go into a store and they want the cheapest pre-roll at the highest percentage.

Well, turns out a lot of those percentages are being fudged, blatantly lied about. And some testing labs seem to be offering. Higher percentages knowing that they're not accurate for a higher cost. And I, I think that's an issue for safety that goes against everything advocates of the industry are for, but many people are doing it.

Consumers deserve to know what they're getting, and if you're lying about results, I don't think you should be protected.

If I know something tests high, has great term profile and is high in thc, it's clean, I can show that to the lab over and over and over again and send toxic product to the store. And so, 'cause knowing it'll never be tested again. And so that's the root of the problem. If you compare it to OSHA, for example, this would be like if you privatized OSHA and you had 10 OSHA's competing for the construction companies' businesses, and the construction company decided when and where, what job site they're gonna go to, what time, and if that OSHA starts writing them up, they can just hire a different OSHA and fire them. That's essentially what's happening in cannabis today.

Then I went back to my life as a research chemist at Harvard and ended up doing research about electronic cigarettes for cannabis. Along the way I learned about how cannabis testing labs work, how it's such a new business that, it doesn't necessarily work that well. I recognize that there, there was no consumer protection really at all in cannabis. And there are nonprofits that do consumer protection in other areas of commerce. So I saw the need. I felt the need.

I know this story that I've heard so many times in cannabis, it's not unique. But at some point he came to me and he said, you know, I'm using cannabis. And I'm like, really? And he said, and I'm getting some results. And I'm like, really? He said, but I have no idea what I'm doing. And if I understood what I was doing, I think I would be getting better effects. Can you help me figure this out?

He came to me and he needed help. So I just started reading and that's why I'm in cannabis, how I came to cannabis and I started reading in it. As you know, I fell off my chair when I learned about the endocannabinoid system. That was life changing.

Medical cannabis had no testing back prior to recreational passing in Colorado. And so I was already writing articles saying, "Hey, we have a problem with people having. Serious health conditions being given products that are being sprayed with pesticides," and so I started writing about the need for testing, when testing happened, I was really excited.

You know, but I'm a grower and I'm seeing on the ground what's happening on the growing level. And I've consulted a lot of companies. That's what I started doing, consulting the very first cannabis businesses in the country. And so I was telling 'em, Hey, no, there's a serious spraying problem and testing's not addressing it.

And then all of a sudden, Josh Swider came out with an article in California. He owns Infinite Analytics. They started buying product off the shelf. Finding pesticides in the product, finding it was all fraudulent THC scores, and then writing to the regulators and saying, "Hey, I'm finding it in these batch numbers." I think a lot of the stuff going on with testing fraud, say they give somebody a 35% THC, well, when it's tested off the shelf and it's a 20%, they'll say, "This has been degraded over time and all of these things." And yes, it can degrade like that, but I think the more likely version is that they're giving really inflated scores to get the business from the cannabis company.

It would be great to see more testing labs in medical states. I think a big part of the problem is that labs, in banking terms, they're auditors, and nobody's auditing the auditors. So we're now seeing the effects of that. People are now talking about it. And I'm sure a lot of cannabis brands don't like that. They may not like this podcast, Alex,

So the metric software, once product starts hitting the store shelves can determine what dispensary it's gonna be tested at and what lab's gonna test it. So there's no more relationship between a compliance lab and the cannabis company. And as a grower I don't know what store it's gonna be tested at, but I know it's going be tested.

And so I have no relationship with the lab. I can't keep it secret, so I'll hire a lab to make sure it's clean before I send it to the store but that's not a compliance lab, that's just a lab making sure it gets tested on the shelf in my opinion, that solves it and it keeps all the labs in business, keeps the high volume testing, but it eliminates the main problem, and that's the business relationship between the labs and the companies.

Ryan Carlisle noted that testing mistakes do occur and advocated for cannabis operators to have a second chance.

And one of the reasons that. So much can happen is because there's no mechanism to force people to play by the rules. Normally you have government coming in and enforcing the regulations they're not enforcing the accuracy of that labeling.

When you're talking about monitoring a company to try and enforce compliance, there's two separate pieces there. So imagine you're a producer, a cultivator, whatever. You're growing a product and putting product on the shelves, and it comes to the point where you're deciding whether or not to be honest or to cheat.

If you're a rational person and we're not always rational, but if you assume you're rational and you're trying to decide, do I obey the law or do I cheat, there's two separate pieces there. If I cheat, what's the probability I'll get caught? And the second piece is if I get caught, what's the magnitude of the punishment? So if they make the penalty high enough, they don't actually have to monitor that much. If you get to the point where it's like, oh no, you know, there's only a a 1% chance that I'll get caught, but if I do get caught, I'm done.

I think that a lot of people that are going to the doctor right now and being, Diagnosed with CHS, I believe a lot of them actually have pesticide toxicity. I can't prove it yet, but we do know that they've been smoking very high amounts of pesticides .

You're going to remember that. Okay. Like a diesel gives me a really. You know, good. It relieve my back pain and things that I got. So if I smell something that's decently, I know that that's gonna have the effect. But when you're looking at just terpene profiles off of test scores, I, I believe it's way more complex than that. You have to know like what, what aromas do more to you. Like citrusy strains give me anxiety, for example, so I don't smoke citrusy strains and, um. But I would never look at a terpene profile and judge it through that I would, I'd wanna smell it to determine if I actually am gonna want to consume it.

There are a lot of things that the companies are not allowed to say. Because of the FDA labeling laws, they're not allowed to say helps with sleep because you can only make those types of claims if you've actually done clinical studies that show that your product does that. So this is why the product is called Dream because they can't say it helps you sleep. They'll get busted by the FDA for that. So if it has those types of claims, that's probably not legitimate. I would also look at the packaging. According to all the labeling laws, you're not allowed to have any sort of like cartoon characters, okay. Or anything that most people consider fun or entertaining on the package because they're. They wanna make sure that the packages won't appeal to kids.

Certain states are more prone to tax heavier than others. If you tax a product. Heavier and it increases the prices. If a consumer, goes to a, a rec store, maybe a consumer that was buying from the black market, if he goes into a store and says, want $40 for a gram, that's astronomical. That's ridiculous. Well, I know a guy down the corner who I've been getting it from, from years. I'll just go back there because why, why wouldn't you? As advocates push politicians to approve medical or adult rec, we have to be careful not to overtax the industry just out of greed. And oftentimes, I believe that's how we get politicians to say yes, especially in red states where they're more conservative. states like Missouri, for example, that have a lower tax. And I believe a capped tax where they're not overtaxing the industry of the cultivators and the processors. Therefore, the prices at the stores should not be astronomically high. if you look at Missouri's market, it's thriving. It's not even that, old or seasoned and it's thriving. It's one of my personal markets. You can go to markets like Las Vegas or many places on the West Coast and. The prices can be pretty high. So to your, your question, yes, you can over-regulate, you can overtax the industry and drive people back to the black market, which is a shame. 'cause then going back to testing, they don't know what they're getting. They think they do, but they, they don't.

I have a couple of like pretty general criticisms and then also a couple of like more specific thoughts about like the textures of it. I would say that the general criticism that applies to many states is that. they legalized cannabis for adult use, in particular, the main argument in favor of it that they focused on appeared to be, that it's gonna bring in lots of tax money. They put it under their Department of Treasury, who also manages like the lottery and gambling. They slap a big tax on it. big excise tax. And they assume this is like an industry that makes money hand over fist. They have a bunch of magical thinking like what this is gonna be. But the fact is these businesses can't deduct any investments in their business their federal taxes. They handle millions and millions of dollars, and spend millions of dollars building their facilities and their logistics and everything, and getting their licenses and then because millions and millions of dollars have gone through them, they owe really large tax bills to the federal government and they can't deduct any of it. I've read that their effective tax rate, they're effectively taxed at like 80%. Who the junk is gonna make money with that in their business with that tax rate. Man.

They're effectively taxed that much. And then you hear about a state looking to raise their cannabis tax, you're like, whoa. Come on. There's no pi, there's no pie left, right?

Then cannabis is actually one of the most complicated things you could ever imagine trying to regulate and commercialize because it's medicine, it's substance that's fun. It's a huge pop culture image. It's hardware electronics in vapes. Manufacturing. Chemicals manufacturing. It's food. It's in drinks, it falls into so many different categories. Right? How many regulatory agencies would you usually have to regulate all those different products? And you're calling them all the same thing now GI and giving this hastily assembled group of state level workers. task of figuring all of this out really fast and making the top priority, getting tax revenue in the door as quick as possible, right? So they always open the stores first before they've even figured out all these questions.

What we see is state by state, every regulatory group, has some learning curve and they progress along that learning curve based upon their humility. And the ones who are the most arrogant and the least open to any input do the worst.

We generally notice is a trend where a brand new emerging market, the prices are quite high because there's built in demand. There's lots of people who wish that they could buy weed more easily than they can.

You can also take an example from beer that beer like pretty much all the same and kind of a monoculture, and people couldn't really tell the difference very much, or care very and I think that partly that was because percent of the beer advertising was not about the beer. You had Spuds, McKenzie, the Swedish bikini team, bud Bowl, like frogs. That was how you marketed beer.

A craft brew movement started. So some people became like actual experts. At least the experts slightly smartened up their friends, right? So like, so they kinda like, fertilize the ground and gradually this craft beer like thing sprung up and started eating into the big companies. And like I've got great diversity of beer. It's a dynamic space with lots of creativity from the consumer perspective, like I want consumers to have choices of products. I want everything to be really transparent about it. I want people to be able to figure out when they're buying the good weed and when they're not

You know, I actually tend to think about the reviews in terms of the cultivator. Buy weed from the people who put out really best product and buy whatever they're selling.

I can tell you that the two main ways that people buy weed is by looking at the THC and picking a name that looks nice.

A whole bunch of my messaging has actually been really important in shaping the way that decision makers look at this. And that, that's really, I think, that's been where my personal forte has been so far. And you know, at this point, like we're at this point with the Institute of Cannabis Science where we've been refreshing all of our filings and we've refreshed our board. And we're, scaling up from what has been largely a one person organization and show to a, a more organized team effort that we hope can reach more consumers with direct communication.

It's, all of the restrictions to advertising for cannabis and talking about cannabis on social media also impact my media and my consumer protection communication.

If I make a social media post about a product that was horrible and I'm warning people to stay away from it, that post gets throttled. They tell me the reason they throttled it is because it's like endorsing an illegal substance or something, and I'm not endorsing, I was telling people to stay away. 'cause this one sucks.

The alternative is to deschedule. I will be releasing a podcast on this topic very soon. In the meantime, don't be fooled by ridiculous claims of high THC and try to buy reputable brands from reputable dispensaries.

You can always find us on Instagram and X under at Cannabis Boomer. People who choose to use cannabis need to be aware of what they consume. This podcast is intended to make users better informed about cannabis and its effects. The information shared on this podcast is meant as current opinion in science and should not be considered medical advice.