What commercialization is doing to cannabis Ben Cort
Hey look if you guys are anything like
me you have found it harder and harder
to turn around recently without seeing
words like free-range farm-to-table
organically produced especially here in
Colorado now is we’ve become more
conscientious of the way that we eat in
recent years these once unfamiliar words
have worked their way into our daily
lexicon when we started to pay more
attention to the way that the food we
were eating interacted with our bodies
and with the earth the food industry had
to listen and the results have been
really powerful now those of you out
there from states like Washington and
Oregon and of course my fellow
Coloradans y’all know what I’m talking
about because this is not words like all
natural and homegrown are not just being
used in our diets there’s this whole new
industry using this language now you
guys know it’s weed an industry the
taxes sale of about six billion dollars
worth of product in 2016 so what if I
would have proposed to you that some of
what you think you know about this
legalized marijuana thing could be wrong
listen I get it
talking about issues with legal weed is
a pretty quick way to get uninvited from
the cool kids table I I I know that
better than most but I intend to do it
anyway first before I get started let me
be perfectly clear about one thing my
fight is not against the casual adult
use of marijuana I don’t care about that
what I care deeply about is this new
industry that is working to convince us
that we are consuming something natural
while fixing social ills when we aren’t
so let’s start with a little bit of weed
101 cannabis is a plant that grows
naturally
and has been used within textiles and
even traditional Chinese medicine for
thousands of years Genesis 1:12 even
tells us that I have given to you all of
the seed bearing plants and herbs to use
as such that is the microphone it’s got
a TV preacher sort of thing
now cannabis is made up of hundreds of
different chemicals but what two of
those chemicals are by far the most
interesting that CBD and THC so CBD is
where almost all of the medicinal
properties lie
it’s an incredibly fascinating part of
the plant with real potential to help
people it also is totally non
intoxicating you could take a bath in
the stuff while vaping pure CBD and
drinking a CBD smoothie and you still
couldn’t get high I’ve tried I haven’t I
haven’t that cost a lot of money not now
fur is interesting and remarkable a part
of the plan is CBD is it actually makes
up a really tiny portion of the
commercial market the real money is
being made in that other chemical in THC
so THC is the natural part of the plant
that gets you high and before the 1970s
cannabis contained less than half of a
percent of THC that’s was naturally
occurring over the last 40 years as we
became better gardeners that that
percentage of THC started to slowly but
steadily rise until recently when the
chemists started to get involved so
these guys moved grow cycles I’m sorry
these guys move cultivation exclusively
indoors and they may grow cycles
extremely and unnaturally short they
also started to use pesticides and
fertilizers in some ways that we should
be concerned with in fact I was recently
talking to a buddy who had just left a
job at a commercial grow operation
because he was so concerned with the
chemicals that he was being asked to
interact with some of his fellow
employees were actually encouraged to
wear hazmat suits while they were
spraying their chemical cocktails on the
plants
with that kind of manipulation the
products that are being sold today can
contain above 30% THC and our
concentrates our concentrates can
actually contain above 95% THC a far cry
from the natural plant listen this isn’t
your Grandpa’s weed
this isn’t your dad’s weed like like
this isn’t even my weed
if you’ve ever set foot inside one of
the thousands of dispensaries that have
sprung up in recent years you know that
what we’re really selling in them is THC
all of the weed that you buy
commercially lists exactly how much THC
it contains as do our other much more
popular products like vape pens coffee
ice cream condiments granola gum candy
baked goods suppositories and of course
Lube pretty much no for real pretty much
anything that you can imagine
introducing into the human body the vast
majority of cannabis that’s being sold
today it isn’t really cannabis its THC
in either a pure form or in an extremely
high in unnatural concentration to say
that we have legalized weed is subtly
misleading we have commercialized THC
and it’s happened really quickly now the
reason why the commercial market is so
rapidly exploded is because there is a
hell of a lot of money to be made in
satisfying and increasing our desire to
get high and that money is no longer
really being made by the mom-and-pop
shops so industry groups and
corporations groups like the drug policy
Alliance the Marijuana Policy Project
ArcView investment the cannabis Industry
Association they’ve chased out and
helped to chase out a lot of the
small-time growers so these cats know
that the best way to get us to continue
to or to continue to profit off of us
if they follow the alcohol industry’s
8020 rule as simple as where 80% of the
product is consumed by 20% of the
consumers the problem users the wealthy
white weed lobbyists and seriously they
are almost all rich white men they know
that we will consume more what they’re
selling if they jack up the potency they
also know that we are more than twice as
likely to consume THC regularly if we
earn under twenty thousand dollars a
year then those who are in over fifty
thousand dollars a year in other words
the poorer you are the more likely you
are to spend your money on their
products and in this country income and
race are highly correlated one of the
reasons that we often hear cited for the
legalization of marijuana is that it
will help to stop the disproportionate
incarceration rates among minorities
which is something everybody in this
room should be extremely concerned with
unfortunately we don’t have to look any
further than arrest rates for juveniles
here in Colorado to counter that
argument according to the Colorado
Department of Public Safety since we
opened retail in 2014 almost all of
which are in poor minority neighborhoods
we saw an 8% reduction in the arrests of
white kids for all weed related activity
good on them
during that same time period there’s a
29 percent increase in the arrests of
Hispanic kids for weed related activity
and a 58 percent increase in the arrests
of black kids for weed related crimes
you guys heard that right we are
actually arresting more people of color
and Colorado than we were prior to
commercialization and you’re not reading
that in the post Colorado Department of
Safety legal marijuana coming into focus
another big issue that we have is in
school suspension rates so schools that
are predominantly white
that is they have a minority population
of 25% or fewer in the first full year
of data collection following
commercialization these schools had a
grand total of a hundred and ninety
drug-related suspensions almost all of
which are for THC at the same time
schools with a minority population of
seventy-five to a hundred percent had
801 drug-related suspensions almost all
of which were for THC when discussing
minority populations one that
unfortunately often gets left out of the
conversation is the LGTBQ community now
members of this community are more than
twice as likely to consume THC than
those who identify as heterosexual or
cisgender they also unfortunately have
higher rates of mental illness and
suicide according to a study published
in 2014 called going to pot we see that
the unnaturally high levels of THC found
in today’s products they actually
compound those issues and make them
worse unfortunately that seems to matter
very little to the folks who are selling
these products because as you just saw
clearly this is a good consumer base
listen man I get it and in many circles
legalized marijuana is too much of a
sacred cow to question but we need to
start this conversation because what’s
being sold today is not natural and
lobbyists and industry are using social
justice as a smokescreen so that they
can get richer it’s my own journey to
sobriety that led me to begin
questioning a lot of what I was seeing
that’s kind of one of the things that
were taught to do when I left Boulder
for the Washington DC area at 12 years
old May I was transported into a world
where the kind of shoes that you wore
mattered more than just about anything
else and my family was just too poor to
help me play that game so I was faced
with a pretty real crisis of identity
in this new scene where there’s more
blacktop than treetops man I just didn’t
know who I was so I smoked weed for the
first time when I was 13 and I loved it
I instantly found this social group and
and I also just really liked being high
like I finally found a way to shut this
up I quickly turned to other drugs and
alcohol and something just woke up
inside of my brain I was a daily user
within a couple of months
so my addictive use it mirrors many of
the stories that I’m sure you’ve heard
before it started out as fun it got
scary and then it was just necessary
enough said I got wasted for the last
time on June 15th of 1996 an iron
thank you and I’ve spent the last 21
years trying to both put my life back in
order as well as trying to find some
peace in this world and one of the ways
that I’ve done that is by working inside
of nonprofit drug and alcohol treatment
for the last 10 years with groups like
Phoenix multi-sport the University of
Colorado Hospital and now gap the
National Association for lesbian gay
transgender bisexual treatment providers
and their allies even after all of my
work on the frontlines and is a former
consumer myself I was shocked and pissed
when I started to see what
commercialization was doing to cannabis
because you see our hope for something
pure and natural is making it hard for
us to see what’s really going on and
that is that the rich are getting richer
on the backs of the poor and lying to
our faces the entire time thank you my
friends once again I fear that we are
allowing industry to take advantage of
the most challenged among us in order to
turn a profit much like we saw with
tobacco and food in years past so when
we told the food industry that we
understood the impact our choices were
having and that we demanded better for
ourselves and our families that industry
got in the line so is there any reason
why we couldn’t demand the same thing
from this and from future industries who
are trying to get a piece of our
paychecks what if we made these guys
answer some hard questions
what if we held them to a higher
standard than we are right now because
as it stands for many in our community
the grass isn’t greener on this side of
commercialization
they’ve just been sold a bag of goods
thank you
I know it’s this is a sensitive topic
but a very important one so thank you
for for bringing this up and helping us
explore it you know a lot of folks are
gonna are experiencing health benefits
from marijuana and cannabis what would
you say to that part of the community
I’m actually really glad you brought
that up I think one of the most
important things that we can do right
now is to separate out medicinal and
especially what’s what’s happening in
some of the advances that are being made
using parts of this plant and even some
whole plant medicines from the
commercial market for THC and that’s I
think like crucial we got to stop
putting them together and we got to say
okay here’s the part about getting high
and here’s the part about the medicine
so it sounds like your talks less about
being anti cannabis and more about
raising awareness about aspects of
commercialization is that a fair way to
put it yes so I am NOT the anti weed guy
I’m the pro logic guy for me to cast
stones and listen I’m a drug addict I
don’t get to do that and I don’t want to
do that but what’s bothering me it was
so hard for me
it is to see the way that we are like
we’re just embracing without asking the
hard questions when if this was another
industry we’d be holding their feet to
the fire on some stuff and no I’m not
the anti weed guy I’m the pro thought
guy so think I don’t even care if you’re
smoking when you do it just as long as
you’re an adult so long as you’re an
adult just stink
[Applause]