December 6, 2024 • 26 mins
Check out this episode from my interview with Tim Johnson 🎥
Legislative Advisor in the State House - 9 years 📝
Co/author to House Bill 523 - > Medical Cannabis Program🪴
Co/author to Senate Bill 57 - > Precurser to 2018 Farm Bill & Hemp Program ☘️
Ohio cannabis reform advocate - Issue 2 ⚠️
It's safe to say that Tim is working in the (real) trenches to make cannabis legal everywhere and he deserves alot of credit for doing work most "supporters" wouldnt even consider. 👨💼🚧
Whats impressive to me is that he has been going against the grain for so long...
Check out his group: Cannabis Safety First on Facebook.
Take a peek at Only the best herbs podcast, community & store next episode
Sponsored by Surgeons, LLC
👀
#cannabisbusiness #cannacommunity #Politics #Ohio #history
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You can't be disturbed when you're listening to only the best herbs.
(00:12):
A main topic, I would say cannabis reform.
We have a lot of people who are cannabis advocates in our community rather than be medicinal,
THC, CBV, CBN, you know, the range of cannabinoids that there is.
Right.
In some capacity, but tell me a little bit about what you do for people who aren't familiar.
(00:38):
What I do is I'm a legislative advisor at the state house for like the last nine years.
I was in 2015 a co-author on the white paper that led to the medical cannabis program,
the House Bill 523.
In 2019, I was a co-author on the white paper that led Senate Bill 57 to our hemp program.
(00:59):
As we know it today, and then as far as issue two in Ohio, I've been a legislative advisor
with drafting up amendment language to fix the loopholes in that.
Primarily my focus is on advocating for the betterment of all three of those programs.
Also to advocate for the protections for patients and consumers, their protection rights to
(01:27):
make sure that they get, you know, a fair time in the game.
So to say, the reason I say that is if we look across the America and all the programs
that have been for every state, there's two things they do out of three.
First they draft up the rules and guidelines for the regulators to protect them.
(01:49):
And they draft up rules and guidelines for the license holders to protect them.
What we leave out is in the middle.
License and consumers.
Criminal justice reform.
We don't do that.
That's one of the big things I focus on pretty much my whole thing is about criminal justice
reform, being retired law enforcement, understanding, you know, working the streets for 20 years,
(02:11):
understanding how, you know, what happens on the streets and the courts, just simply around
drugs as a whole.
Cannabis specifically being that, you know, cannabis is like finding chocolate in a candy
store.
Yeah, if I'm like chocolate in a candy store, it's all over America.
So yeah, that's kind of what I do is I look out for, you know, protections, patients
(02:34):
and consumers such as housing rights, employment rights, child custody rights, firearm rights.
The rights as anybody else would have if they were taking pharmaceutical medications, use
an alcohol, tobacco, have owned a firearm, whatever, they've got rights to protection.
So I fight for those people.
That is awesome.
(02:56):
That is like exactly what we're pushing for as well.
It's a good alignment and I'm glad we're getting to connect.
I've seen something to do with Ohio State University.
You kind of touched upon that a little bit.
Cannabis safety.
(03:16):
I'm assuming that's kind of like courses or some type of education towards, you know,
people in college, you know, entering college landscape.
So I'm kind of interested in what that's about.
Yeah, this started back in 2016 when we had several colleges across the country.
(03:38):
I think most of them have dismantled now or they've lost interest and so forth.
It's called the SSDP, Students for Sensible Drug Policy.
As we know, the largest denominator in incarceration in America is drugs.
So we don't try to help people with drug issues.
We try to penalize them and criminalize them, which is backfired on us tremendously.
(04:01):
So we see what this happens.
It costs lives.
It costs mass amounts of money, mouse amounts of time in court tied up, mass amounts of
times in hospitals, etc., etc., because of the way that America approaches it.
So Students for Sensible Drug Policy, you know, these were college students in 2016.
They wanted to be a part of legalization of cannabis.
(04:25):
We said, that's fine.
But it seemed like that particular group, all they wanted to talk about was hard core
illicit drugs.
And we tried to explain to them, you know, we appreciate your input and all this, you
know, but it's more of a cannabis thing.
So we've seen a group of them.
And I worked with that group for years.
I spoke many times at different events they had participated in everything.
(04:48):
I got to know quite a few of them, some great college kids, some just fabulous minds of
what they wanted to do.
So the group that broke off and says, Tim, we want to do cannabis.
I said, okay, well, let's start something.
So they created the Ohio Cannabis Club, assuming that a lot of students would follow that more
(05:09):
so than follow the other types of drugs.
Now the goal behind SSDP was kind of like the organization LEAP, law enforcement action
partnership was to legalize all drugs.
And it does make some sense.
It's not to promote them, but it's to take away the criminal, criminalizing people that,
(05:33):
you know, get addicted on the drug.
It may start, you know, legally in a doctor's office with prescriptions of pharmaceuticals.
The next thing, they're not getting them from their doc anymore.
So now they're looking on the streets for them and so forth and addiction can be a very
serious thing.
So anyways, we took and said, yeah, let's work together here.
Let's create some social media pages and we did some events and tried to help get them
(05:55):
going, you know, generate them, give them a little boost and so forth.
And we were successful or they were for several years and then they've kind of faded off a
little bit.
I don't think they have the membership following that they used to have.
But I'm hoping to, I've been myself and others have been putting stuff on their social media
pages, trying to spark some energy back into them.
(06:17):
I think it was more of, okay, well, the medical programs created, there's the hemp program,
there's adult programs, there's nothing else for us to do.
There's a lot for them to do.
So as you probably know, one of the biggest problems on campuses across the country, if
you receive any federal funding, then cannabis is, even though it's legal in your state,
(06:39):
it's still illegal on the campus.
And that's from a criminal aspect.
And so that's kind of what with them is there's another aspect.
I don't know, I mean, keep talking about called an OSU Drug Enforcement Policy Center.
And we've seen the Koch brothers years ago, the professor Doug Berman down there was a
(07:03):
law professor received like $4 million from the Koch brothers to create this new drug
policy center to do, collect data and do research.
That is about what they do.
They collect data.
And then they had the Menard family, Menard's retail store gave them like $10 million a
couple of years ago too.
(07:23):
So they've been blessed with a bunch of funds to do it.
I've worked with them on several different projects down there.
And we've tried to again revitalize the student participation, but hey, let's be honest about
it, you know, if you're a student there and you're on a federal grant and you get caught
smoking a joint or something, you can lose that federal grant, you know, get kicked off
(07:45):
a campus and everything.
But we still keep pushing forward.
So OSU is trying to, you know, here in Columbus, Ohio is trying to make strides to for the
betterment of legalizing.
If that's what we want to call it, I call it regularizing like regulatory legal, even
when you make illegal, it's still illegal.
(08:05):
You guys just passed a right, you just got the hit not too long ago, Ohio.
It's like was in the last year, right?
November or November of last year.
Okay.
Yeah.
Past issue to for adult choice program here in Ohio.
And we're still, it's a year later, but we're, you know, what the language said.
(08:27):
Our legislators have been very respectful in allowing the timeline to play out.
And now it's a point, of course, we're about at the end of session and next year we'll
start a whole new general assembly.
So we will see some, a lot of language.
I know I've introduced a lot of language to the issue to to clean up the, the loopholes
(08:47):
in the gray area to provide protections for consumers 21 and over.
Yeah, that we actually went.
We voted in November, went into effect in December and personal cultivation and possession
limits and stuff for the main things at the time.
So that's kind of where we're at.
August, we opened up our first adult dispensary.
(09:09):
It's actually a combination dispensary.
We used our brick and mortar for the medical program that were already there.
And we just, you know, put in a POS system for 21 and over.
Everybody gets the same products.
It's the same store.
And rather than create all these other facilities and it made business sense to the owners as
well.
So instead of just selling the medical patients, I can now sell to 21 and over.
(09:33):
So you know, we're, we're living along.
I'm in Michigan.
So I'm right above you.
So we've, we've had our, you know, we've been legal for a minute.
And man, is it a, I mean, is it a war zone?
That's like the best way I can put it.
(09:54):
What I've noticed and I don't know how to put it.
Because cannabis has been such an illicit black market thing sold to this day in many,
many places that kind of follows into the legal side of it as well.
(10:18):
You know, it's just something that kind of I've noticed that happens, you know, so it
helps in some aspects with like, in some aspects, I don't know, it's just really interesting
to see the dynamics, I guess, the progression of how things develop after these laws are
(10:39):
passed and I'm a huge advocate of just make it legal, make cannabis legal.
Like we're so, we're so far beyond, wait so far beyond like actually we're, we are far
behind, but we're so much farther beyond like we've had, we have so many bigger issues.
Like you said, I'm not, how do I say this?
(11:05):
I'm familiar with the court systems and how all that works and that side.
And cannabis doesn't belong there, you know, at 100% agree.
It's interesting when you look at, you know, Ohio and Michigan and Ohio has a cap industry,
(11:27):
Michigan has an open industry.
Therefore, that's why you see the amount of facilities that you see in Michigan, the prices
that you see, but you can also, you know, get taken on some Michigan product.
Not all Michigan product is good.
Get them out there, grow it just to get rid of, you know, make money or whatever it may
be and understand that.
(11:47):
The unique thing about Ohio is that our state house, the main runway out in front of our
state house is called High Street.
High Street turns into 23 and 23 turns into Detroit, Michigan.
So I always tease the lawmakers there that, you know, we don't really need a cannabis
program.
What we just need is for you to stop criminalizing us because we can produce our own cannabis.
(12:12):
We've done that for years without your help.
You've just criminalized this mass incarcerated us, destroyed our lives.
For the simple fact of cannabis being illegal based on a false promises.
Where Ohio is now with their adult program, you know, we have reciprocity just like Michigan
does for 21 and over for the adult program.
(12:34):
Our medical program, there's no reciprocity.
If you're not a medical patient in Ohio, you can't purchase in Ohio.
So we're trying to change that, but for adults, if what people aren't taken into effect is
in Ohio and we think $52 million a month is really fantastic for adults.
Well that's with six other states purchasing around us.
(12:54):
So it's not just all Ohio ones.
The ironic thing is when we're doing $52 million adults in Ohio, in Michigan, from my connections
there, per Ohio receipts, we're still spending $60 to $70 million a month in Michigan.
Ohio people are.
So we're still spending more money in Michigan on their adult program than we spend in our
(13:18):
own state.
And that's because of the way the regulatory framework is set up right now.
Yeah, I know from certain people who own dispensaries that that has been a huge marketing thing,
putting the dispensaries right by the border of Ohio.
Yep, especially recently because of the law changes, but it's cool to hear it's cool that
(13:43):
you have that you are a part of this.
Like yeah, you know, that's awesome.
You go to work every day and you fight for this and it's pretty inspiring.
It is inspiring.
So about the future.
What about the future?
What do you guys got?
What do you guys got cooking up right now?
Right now, they're actually I left the state house a little bit early so I could get home
(14:06):
for this, but we have a Senate bill 326 that in essence they want to ban retail hemp in
Ohio.
Probably not going to happen.
What they're going to go after and I did introduce the bill, I find it kind of funny
that all of a sudden, I mean, you understand the politics.
I'm sure you understand the politics in Michigan.
(14:27):
The politics in Ohio is the can of the licensees and the cannabis program don't want the licensees
and the hemp retail to survive.
They basically want to do away with anything, any consumable hemp in Ohio, they're fine
with industrial hemp, but you know, we want to get rid of the, there's like 10,000 stores
(14:49):
in Ohio that, you know, from gas stations, the mini marts to straight up hemp stores
to Walmart to Kroger's and call all these stores that sell all these hemp products.
They're unregulated.
We don't know what the products are that are in there.
They come, a lot of it comes from overseas.
There's no child resistant packaging or guidelines to say it can't be child attractive and all
(15:15):
this type of stuff.
So and then we've got some of the hemp places saying we sell THC here.
You don't need a medical cannabis card.
We got medical cannabis right here for you.
And rightfully so by using some of the loopholes in the, you know, Agriculture Improvement
Act 2018 and the Ohio's laws and stuff, there's loopholes that they pretty much you can walk
(15:39):
in and you know, get the same thing in the, in a wide open hemp store that you can go
to a dispensary and get it.
And what's happened is it's, it's a lot of it and I'll be testifying in a couple of
weeks here, but you know, part of my testimony will be the failure of the legislative body
in Ohio to follow through with a regulated hemp program.
(16:02):
Cause when we created our hemp program, we regulated everything except for the retail
stores.
So we let them go.
So in the cannabis, everything's re is regulated from testing, cultivating, processing to dispensaries.
Well, where they didn't do that in the hemp program.
So the hemp program was able to take these loopholes and basically become an open market
(16:24):
dispensary.
So, they hurt themselves by, you know, crying to the politicians.
I'll just put it out there and saying, Hey, you know, we want to sell our products in
the dispensaries.
And my comment to them was, well, why would you want to sell, we got 127 dispensaries in
Ohio.
Why would you want to sell be limited to 127 and regulated when you got 10,000 stores
(16:48):
out here that you could market yourself to and you're not regulated yet.
So then next thing we got all this stuff plastered all over the windows.
License holders started snitching on them to the state regulators.
Parents started crying about it, brought to the governor's attention.
And so now we're at the state house with this Senate bill 326 that wants to, you know, kind
(17:10):
of ban retail hemp in Ohio.
I think the simple thing is to put some regulatory guidelines in there, but we also need to permit
the cannabis license holders.
They need to have rights that we're still fighting for, such as marketing rights.
You guys are blessed up there with big billboards with weed all over it.
(17:31):
You ain't gonna see that in Ohio yet.
It might be a couple of years.
We're fighting for it.
But, you know, just like any other industry, the cannabis and hemp industries both should
have the right to market their product and their services under, you know, guidelines
that are ethical and so forth.
So in 2025, what you're gonna see is several bills introduced addressing to cleaning up
(17:58):
some of our medical program, which been going on for seven years now.
We'll hopefully see some corrections there.
We'll see some cleanup language and protections put into place in the adult choice program.
And the hemp industry side of it, they'll get their selves together legitimately.
(18:18):
And they'll sell, you know, they'll have the sticker on the door that say they've been
state inspected by the Department of Agriculture, Enforcement, whoever they choose to do that
with.
And we'll see, you know, them selling what they're supposed to be selling and the dispensaries
selling what they're supposed to be selling.
So we don't want to take and totally ban an industry that already contributes billions
(18:43):
of dollars to the economy, thousands of jobs to the economy.
But unfortunately, the license holders and the cannabis side, kind of adamant about
wanting to go after that, but I don't see them getting their way on it.
You know, I think if, as I said, if we give them some, you know, some regulatory guidelines
(19:06):
of how they can produce their increase their bottom line, that's what it comes down to.
And a lot of it comes down to just not just not having the right to market, but an ignorance
of what kind of business am I really in?
You know, because I got millions of dollars and I was able to buy a cultivation center
processing and I got three dispensaries.
Well, that doesn't mean you know what to do in the industry or the cannabis community.
(19:32):
But some of them feel that way and so and some of the product, you know, and pricing
has got a lot to do with everything.
Being a business owner, I have a hemp company that I run or that I own and it's called
surgeons with CBD surgeons, but due to online reasons, we had to take the seed and we took
(19:54):
the CBD part out.
So now we kind of interchange it a little bit, but you're 100% right.
There was a time where we were thinking about selling the THCA flower that was before there
was like a whole bunch of research that was done into that.
Like, you know, THCA flowers is just, you know, THCA hemp flower.
(20:18):
I mean, there's like literally no difference.
I mean, THCA is like, you know, the crystals, I mean.
Yeah.
Yeah, once you put in fire to it, it's all THC.
Right.
So, you know, there was that big whole thing.
And like you said, exactly.
I mean, it's like Texas area, Ohio, you know, at that, you know, when you guys weren't legal.
(20:41):
It's crazy though.
There is a lot to look forward to in that industry.
Yeah.
I'm excited.
I think we've covered just a lot of stuff.
I think myself, what it comes down to is politicians should have went to specialists to create laws
(21:09):
rather than try to be politicians that are shoe salesmen, bread makers, wine distributors.
And now all of a sudden they're in the lawmaking.
They don't even know the difference between cannabis, marijuana, and hemp.
And they want to make laws for this stuff.
In the first place, if they would have went to the scientists, you know, the people that
have been around doing this, bless this old Ralph Michiel and people, you know, I could
(21:35):
go on and on with all kinds of names.
NIDA and 23 categorized 32,000 cannabis studies, research papers, and peer review papers.
32,000.
So, it's not like there hasn't been research done on anything.
It's there.
Do we need more research?
I always need more research on anything to see, you know, how much better you can get
(21:56):
out of them and so on.
So I think that across America, hopefully this year, we'll see a lot more states go
legal.
I know we've got hit at the polls real hard.
We didn't get what we wanted to with the Dakotas and Florida and so forth.
But you know, as long as the advocates in those states stay at it, it's going to happen.
(22:20):
We actually had a threshold, what's called national nullification for medical states.
At 37, you can file a national nullification request and they have to change national laws
and then every state becomes, you know, technically legal then under their own programs.
(22:41):
So that's something we have to look at.
We have to look at, I have a saying that legalization is not legalization until we're
free from prosecution.
And what I mean by that is we've technically entered a new era of prohibition.
So we went from total black market cannabis in the United States to we started creating
(23:02):
programs, state programs.
Well, all we really did was we still have criminal statutes, but now we have regulatory
statutes.
So it's like, you know, we're being watched twice now.
So if we get outside of either one of the outside of the legal, what they call legal
program, you get outside of it in Ohio, it's two and a half ounces of flour.
(23:25):
If I get caught on the streets with three ounces of flour, now I fall under the old
criminal statutes that still exist.
So is there really legalization if I can still be prosecuted?
No, there's not.
So do I ever see it going federally, federally, I guess nationally legal, such as we're hoping
(23:46):
you know, DEA and HHS will get their shit together on this schedule three.
Probably going to be a couple of years since they canceled the December meeting.
That means bureaucracy has gotten away.
So it could be a couple of years before they address that, but it would be nice to see that
happen.
It would open up a lot of doors, but in the same respect, again, it's still like, you
(24:06):
know, people here in Ohio, you know, I've had people reach out to me, I work with a
lot of law firms as a consultant.
And Tim, I got caught with this and this.
I says, well, you're outside the program rules.
Well, I thought it was legal.
I said, yeah, if you're inside the program, it's kind of like alcohol dudes, you know,
if you're 18 and you're buying alcohol and you get caught with it, you're outside the
(24:27):
21 year old rule.
So you guys, you know, you have to still abide by that.
Is it good?
It has been somewhat good for criminal justice reform, the legalization I've seen.
But as I said in the beginning, I think that we leave out that third piece of the whole
pie and that's the most important.
(24:48):
I think that's what attracts people.
If you tell me that I'm protected, then I will, you know, go into a dispensary and purchase.
But if you're not going to protect me, then I'm going to keep going to Johnny on the corner
where I've been going for 20, 30 years and where I still feel safe.
Only a few people know that I consume, you know, my neighbors or whatever the church,
the employment, you know, nobody knows anything about it.
(25:10):
And if I go into a program, or what are they all going to say if I'm so, yeah, I can go
to the dispensary and buy it now.
Well, there's still a lot of stigma that we have to deal with in there.
So we'll see.
Let's cross our fingers and hope some good things happen in 2025.
I'm just, I think most people would just say, and myself included is we're just happy to
(25:31):
see some progress.
Yes.
You know, baby steps is cool, you know, as long as we can get there.
I mean, we're not trying to get, you know, five years, five years is a little pushing
it, you know, I would say, but like you said, we got to play with the cards were dealt.
It's terms is like in terms of what you guys do, you know, so I appreciate you, man.
(25:54):
I really appreciate you, Tim, talking with me.
We'll have to, we're going to stay in touch.
Yeah, stay in touch.
Appreciate the invite and, you know, hey, if the buck eyes ain't winning, go blitz.
They're terrible this year.
Absolutely terrible, but we won't talk about that.
I appreciate you.
(26:17):
Have a good rest of your night.
When it comes to cannabis, we're all one family.
For sure.
For sure.
I agree.
Have a good rest of your night, Tim.
You as well, Ryan.
Let's play or?
(26:37):
That's serious.
You can't be disturbed when you're listening to only the best herbs.
(00:12):
A main topic, I would say cannabis reform.
We have a lot of people who are cannabis advocates in our community rather than be medicinal,
THC, CBV, CBN, you know, the range of cannabinoids that there is.
Right.
In some capacity, but tell me a little bit about what you do for people who aren't familiar.
(00:38):
What I do is I'm a legislative advisor at the state house for like the last nine years.
I was in 2015 a co-author on the white paper that led to the medical cannabis program,
the House Bill 523.
In 2019, I was a co-author on the white paper that led Senate Bill 57 to our hemp program.
(00:59):
As we know it today, and then as far as issue two in Ohio, I've been a legislative advisor
with drafting up amendment language to fix the loopholes in that.
Primarily my focus is on advocating for the betterment of all three of those programs.
Also to advocate for the protections for patients and consumers, their protection rights to
(01:27):
make sure that they get, you know, a fair time in the game.
So to say, the reason I say that is if we look across the America and all the programs
that have been for every state, there's two things they do out of three.
First they draft up the rules and guidelines for the regulators to protect them.
(01:49):
And they draft up rules and guidelines for the license holders to protect them.
What we leave out is in the middle.
License and consumers.
Criminal justice reform.
We don't do that.
That's one of the big things I focus on pretty much my whole thing is about criminal justice
reform, being retired law enforcement, understanding, you know, working the streets for 20 years,
(02:11):
understanding how, you know, what happens on the streets and the courts, just simply around
drugs as a whole.
Cannabis specifically being that, you know, cannabis is like finding chocolate in a candy
store.
Yeah, if I'm like chocolate in a candy store, it's all over America.
So yeah, that's kind of what I do is I look out for, you know, protections, patients
(02:34):
and consumers such as housing rights, employment rights, child custody rights, firearm rights.
The rights as anybody else would have if they were taking pharmaceutical medications, use
an alcohol, tobacco, have owned a firearm, whatever, they've got rights to protection.
So I fight for those people.
That is awesome.
(02:56):
That is like exactly what we're pushing for as well.
It's a good alignment and I'm glad we're getting to connect.
I've seen something to do with Ohio State University.
You kind of touched upon that a little bit.
Cannabis safety.
(03:16):
I'm assuming that's kind of like courses or some type of education towards, you know,
people in college, you know, entering college landscape.
So I'm kind of interested in what that's about.
Yeah, this started back in 2016 when we had several colleges across the country.
(03:38):
I think most of them have dismantled now or they've lost interest and so forth.
It's called the SSDP, Students for Sensible Drug Policy.
As we know, the largest denominator in incarceration in America is drugs.
So we don't try to help people with drug issues.
We try to penalize them and criminalize them, which is backfired on us tremendously.
(04:01):
So we see what this happens.
It costs lives.
It costs mass amounts of money, mouse amounts of time in court tied up, mass amounts of
times in hospitals, etc., etc., because of the way that America approaches it.
So Students for Sensible Drug Policy, you know, these were college students in 2016.
They wanted to be a part of legalization of cannabis.
(04:25):
We said, that's fine.
But it seemed like that particular group, all they wanted to talk about was hard core
illicit drugs.
And we tried to explain to them, you know, we appreciate your input and all this, you
know, but it's more of a cannabis thing.
So we've seen a group of them.
And I worked with that group for years.
I spoke many times at different events they had participated in everything.
(04:48):
I got to know quite a few of them, some great college kids, some just fabulous minds of
what they wanted to do.
So the group that broke off and says, Tim, we want to do cannabis.
I said, okay, well, let's start something.
So they created the Ohio Cannabis Club, assuming that a lot of students would follow that more
(05:09):
so than follow the other types of drugs.
Now the goal behind SSDP was kind of like the organization LEAP, law enforcement action
partnership was to legalize all drugs.
And it does make some sense.
It's not to promote them, but it's to take away the criminal, criminalizing people that,
(05:33):
you know, get addicted on the drug.
It may start, you know, legally in a doctor's office with prescriptions of pharmaceuticals.
The next thing, they're not getting them from their doc anymore.
So now they're looking on the streets for them and so forth and addiction can be a very
serious thing.
So anyways, we took and said, yeah, let's work together here.
Let's create some social media pages and we did some events and tried to help get them
(05:55):
going, you know, generate them, give them a little boost and so forth.
And we were successful or they were for several years and then they've kind of faded off a
little bit.
I don't think they have the membership following that they used to have.
But I'm hoping to, I've been myself and others have been putting stuff on their social media
pages, trying to spark some energy back into them.
(06:17):
I think it was more of, okay, well, the medical programs created, there's the hemp program,
there's adult programs, there's nothing else for us to do.
There's a lot for them to do.
So as you probably know, one of the biggest problems on campuses across the country, if
you receive any federal funding, then cannabis is, even though it's legal in your state,
(06:39):
it's still illegal on the campus.
And that's from a criminal aspect.
And so that's kind of what with them is there's another aspect.
I don't know, I mean, keep talking about called an OSU Drug Enforcement Policy Center.
And we've seen the Koch brothers years ago, the professor Doug Berman down there was a
(07:03):
law professor received like $4 million from the Koch brothers to create this new drug
policy center to do, collect data and do research.
That is about what they do.
They collect data.
And then they had the Menard family, Menard's retail store gave them like $10 million a
couple of years ago too.
(07:23):
So they've been blessed with a bunch of funds to do it.
I've worked with them on several different projects down there.
And we've tried to again revitalize the student participation, but hey, let's be honest about
it, you know, if you're a student there and you're on a federal grant and you get caught
smoking a joint or something, you can lose that federal grant, you know, get kicked off
(07:45):
a campus and everything.
But we still keep pushing forward.
So OSU is trying to, you know, here in Columbus, Ohio is trying to make strides to for the
betterment of legalizing.
If that's what we want to call it, I call it regularizing like regulatory legal, even
when you make illegal, it's still illegal.
(08:05):
You guys just passed a right, you just got the hit not too long ago, Ohio.
It's like was in the last year, right?
November or November of last year.
Okay.
Yeah.
Past issue to for adult choice program here in Ohio.
And we're still, it's a year later, but we're, you know, what the language said.
(08:27):
Our legislators have been very respectful in allowing the timeline to play out.
And now it's a point, of course, we're about at the end of session and next year we'll
start a whole new general assembly.
So we will see some, a lot of language.
I know I've introduced a lot of language to the issue to to clean up the, the loopholes
(08:47):
in the gray area to provide protections for consumers 21 and over.
Yeah, that we actually went.
We voted in November, went into effect in December and personal cultivation and possession
limits and stuff for the main things at the time.
So that's kind of where we're at.
August, we opened up our first adult dispensary.
(09:09):
It's actually a combination dispensary.
We used our brick and mortar for the medical program that were already there.
And we just, you know, put in a POS system for 21 and over.
Everybody gets the same products.
It's the same store.
And rather than create all these other facilities and it made business sense to the owners as
well.
So instead of just selling the medical patients, I can now sell to 21 and over.
(09:33):
So you know, we're, we're living along.
I'm in Michigan.
So I'm right above you.
So we've, we've had our, you know, we've been legal for a minute.
And man, is it a, I mean, is it a war zone?
That's like the best way I can put it.
(09:54):
What I've noticed and I don't know how to put it.
Because cannabis has been such an illicit black market thing sold to this day in many,
many places that kind of follows into the legal side of it as well.
(10:18):
You know, it's just something that kind of I've noticed that happens, you know, so it
helps in some aspects with like, in some aspects, I don't know, it's just really interesting
to see the dynamics, I guess, the progression of how things develop after these laws are
(10:39):
passed and I'm a huge advocate of just make it legal, make cannabis legal.
Like we're so, we're so far beyond, wait so far beyond like actually we're, we are far
behind, but we're so much farther beyond like we've had, we have so many bigger issues.
Like you said, I'm not, how do I say this?
(11:05):
I'm familiar with the court systems and how all that works and that side.
And cannabis doesn't belong there, you know, at 100% agree.
It's interesting when you look at, you know, Ohio and Michigan and Ohio has a cap industry,
(11:27):
Michigan has an open industry.
Therefore, that's why you see the amount of facilities that you see in Michigan, the prices
that you see, but you can also, you know, get taken on some Michigan product.
Not all Michigan product is good.
Get them out there, grow it just to get rid of, you know, make money or whatever it may
be and understand that.
(11:47):
The unique thing about Ohio is that our state house, the main runway out in front of our
state house is called High Street.
High Street turns into 23 and 23 turns into Detroit, Michigan.
So I always tease the lawmakers there that, you know, we don't really need a cannabis
program.
What we just need is for you to stop criminalizing us because we can produce our own cannabis.
(12:12):
We've done that for years without your help.
You've just criminalized this mass incarcerated us, destroyed our lives.
For the simple fact of cannabis being illegal based on a false promises.
Where Ohio is now with their adult program, you know, we have reciprocity just like Michigan
does for 21 and over for the adult program.
(12:34):
Our medical program, there's no reciprocity.
If you're not a medical patient in Ohio, you can't purchase in Ohio.
So we're trying to change that, but for adults, if what people aren't taken into effect is
in Ohio and we think $52 million a month is really fantastic for adults.
Well that's with six other states purchasing around us.
(12:54):
So it's not just all Ohio ones.
The ironic thing is when we're doing $52 million adults in Ohio, in Michigan, from my connections
there, per Ohio receipts, we're still spending $60 to $70 million a month in Michigan.
Ohio people are.
So we're still spending more money in Michigan on their adult program than we spend in our
(13:18):
own state.
And that's because of the way the regulatory framework is set up right now.
Yeah, I know from certain people who own dispensaries that that has been a huge marketing thing,
putting the dispensaries right by the border of Ohio.
Yep, especially recently because of the law changes, but it's cool to hear it's cool that
(13:43):
you have that you are a part of this.
Like yeah, you know, that's awesome.
You go to work every day and you fight for this and it's pretty inspiring.
It is inspiring.
So about the future.
What about the future?
What do you guys got?
What do you guys got cooking up right now?
Right now, they're actually I left the state house a little bit early so I could get home
(14:06):
for this, but we have a Senate bill 326 that in essence they want to ban retail hemp in
Ohio.
Probably not going to happen.
What they're going to go after and I did introduce the bill, I find it kind of funny
that all of a sudden, I mean, you understand the politics.
I'm sure you understand the politics in Michigan.
(14:27):
The politics in Ohio is the can of the licensees and the cannabis program don't want the licensees
and the hemp retail to survive.
They basically want to do away with anything, any consumable hemp in Ohio, they're fine
with industrial hemp, but you know, we want to get rid of the, there's like 10,000 stores
(14:49):
in Ohio that, you know, from gas stations, the mini marts to straight up hemp stores
to Walmart to Kroger's and call all these stores that sell all these hemp products.
They're unregulated.
We don't know what the products are that are in there.
They come, a lot of it comes from overseas.
There's no child resistant packaging or guidelines to say it can't be child attractive and all
(15:15):
this type of stuff.
So and then we've got some of the hemp places saying we sell THC here.
You don't need a medical cannabis card.
We got medical cannabis right here for you.
And rightfully so by using some of the loopholes in the, you know, Agriculture Improvement
Act 2018 and the Ohio's laws and stuff, there's loopholes that they pretty much you can walk
(15:39):
in and you know, get the same thing in the, in a wide open hemp store that you can go
to a dispensary and get it.
And what's happened is it's, it's a lot of it and I'll be testifying in a couple of
weeks here, but you know, part of my testimony will be the failure of the legislative body
in Ohio to follow through with a regulated hemp program.
(16:02):
Cause when we created our hemp program, we regulated everything except for the retail
stores.
So we let them go.
So in the cannabis, everything's re is regulated from testing, cultivating, processing to dispensaries.
Well, where they didn't do that in the hemp program.
So the hemp program was able to take these loopholes and basically become an open market
(16:24):
dispensary.
So, they hurt themselves by, you know, crying to the politicians.
I'll just put it out there and saying, Hey, you know, we want to sell our products in
the dispensaries.
And my comment to them was, well, why would you want to sell, we got 127 dispensaries in
Ohio.
Why would you want to sell be limited to 127 and regulated when you got 10,000 stores
(16:48):
out here that you could market yourself to and you're not regulated yet.
So then next thing we got all this stuff plastered all over the windows.
License holders started snitching on them to the state regulators.
Parents started crying about it, brought to the governor's attention.
And so now we're at the state house with this Senate bill 326 that wants to, you know, kind
(17:10):
of ban retail hemp in Ohio.
I think the simple thing is to put some regulatory guidelines in there, but we also need to permit
the cannabis license holders.
They need to have rights that we're still fighting for, such as marketing rights.
You guys are blessed up there with big billboards with weed all over it.
(17:31):
You ain't gonna see that in Ohio yet.
It might be a couple of years.
We're fighting for it.
But, you know, just like any other industry, the cannabis and hemp industries both should
have the right to market their product and their services under, you know, guidelines
that are ethical and so forth.
So in 2025, what you're gonna see is several bills introduced addressing to cleaning up
(17:58):
some of our medical program, which been going on for seven years now.
We'll hopefully see some corrections there.
We'll see some cleanup language and protections put into place in the adult choice program.
And the hemp industry side of it, they'll get their selves together legitimately.
(18:18):
And they'll sell, you know, they'll have the sticker on the door that say they've been
state inspected by the Department of Agriculture, Enforcement, whoever they choose to do that
with.
And we'll see, you know, them selling what they're supposed to be selling and the dispensaries
selling what they're supposed to be selling.
So we don't want to take and totally ban an industry that already contributes billions
(18:43):
of dollars to the economy, thousands of jobs to the economy.
But unfortunately, the license holders and the cannabis side, kind of adamant about
wanting to go after that, but I don't see them getting their way on it.
You know, I think if, as I said, if we give them some, you know, some regulatory guidelines
(19:06):
of how they can produce their increase their bottom line, that's what it comes down to.
And a lot of it comes down to just not just not having the right to market, but an ignorance
of what kind of business am I really in?
You know, because I got millions of dollars and I was able to buy a cultivation center
processing and I got three dispensaries.
Well, that doesn't mean you know what to do in the industry or the cannabis community.
(19:32):
But some of them feel that way and so and some of the product, you know, and pricing
has got a lot to do with everything.
Being a business owner, I have a hemp company that I run or that I own and it's called
surgeons with CBD surgeons, but due to online reasons, we had to take the seed and we took
(19:54):
the CBD part out.
So now we kind of interchange it a little bit, but you're 100% right.
There was a time where we were thinking about selling the THCA flower that was before there
was like a whole bunch of research that was done into that.
Like, you know, THCA flowers is just, you know, THCA hemp flower.
(20:18):
I mean, there's like literally no difference.
I mean, THCA is like, you know, the crystals, I mean.
Yeah.
Yeah, once you put in fire to it, it's all THC.
Right.
So, you know, there was that big whole thing.
And like you said, exactly.
I mean, it's like Texas area, Ohio, you know, at that, you know, when you guys weren't legal.
(20:41):
It's crazy though.
There is a lot to look forward to in that industry.
Yeah.
I'm excited.
I think we've covered just a lot of stuff.
I think myself, what it comes down to is politicians should have went to specialists to create laws
(21:09):
rather than try to be politicians that are shoe salesmen, bread makers, wine distributors.
And now all of a sudden they're in the lawmaking.
They don't even know the difference between cannabis, marijuana, and hemp.
And they want to make laws for this stuff.
In the first place, if they would have went to the scientists, you know, the people that
have been around doing this, bless this old Ralph Michiel and people, you know, I could
(21:35):
go on and on with all kinds of names.
NIDA and 23 categorized 32,000 cannabis studies, research papers, and peer review papers.
32,000.
So, it's not like there hasn't been research done on anything.
It's there.
Do we need more research?
I always need more research on anything to see, you know, how much better you can get
(21:56):
out of them and so on.
So I think that across America, hopefully this year, we'll see a lot more states go
legal.
I know we've got hit at the polls real hard.
We didn't get what we wanted to with the Dakotas and Florida and so forth.
But you know, as long as the advocates in those states stay at it, it's going to happen.
(22:20):
We actually had a threshold, what's called national nullification for medical states.
At 37, you can file a national nullification request and they have to change national laws
and then every state becomes, you know, technically legal then under their own programs.
(22:41):
So that's something we have to look at.
We have to look at, I have a saying that legalization is not legalization until we're
free from prosecution.
And what I mean by that is we've technically entered a new era of prohibition.
So we went from total black market cannabis in the United States to we started creating
(23:02):
programs, state programs.
Well, all we really did was we still have criminal statutes, but now we have regulatory
statutes.
So it's like, you know, we're being watched twice now.
So if we get outside of either one of the outside of the legal, what they call legal
program, you get outside of it in Ohio, it's two and a half ounces of flour.
(23:25):
If I get caught on the streets with three ounces of flour, now I fall under the old
criminal statutes that still exist.
So is there really legalization if I can still be prosecuted?
No, there's not.
So do I ever see it going federally, federally, I guess nationally legal, such as we're hoping
(23:46):
you know, DEA and HHS will get their shit together on this schedule three.
Probably going to be a couple of years since they canceled the December meeting.
That means bureaucracy has gotten away.
So it could be a couple of years before they address that, but it would be nice to see that
happen.
It would open up a lot of doors, but in the same respect, again, it's still like, you
(24:06):
know, people here in Ohio, you know, I've had people reach out to me, I work with a
lot of law firms as a consultant.
And Tim, I got caught with this and this.
I says, well, you're outside the program rules.
Well, I thought it was legal.
I said, yeah, if you're inside the program, it's kind of like alcohol dudes, you know,
if you're 18 and you're buying alcohol and you get caught with it, you're outside the
(24:27):
21 year old rule.
So you guys, you know, you have to still abide by that.
Is it good?
It has been somewhat good for criminal justice reform, the legalization I've seen.
But as I said in the beginning, I think that we leave out that third piece of the whole
pie and that's the most important.
(24:48):
I think that's what attracts people.
If you tell me that I'm protected, then I will, you know, go into a dispensary and purchase.
But if you're not going to protect me, then I'm going to keep going to Johnny on the corner
where I've been going for 20, 30 years and where I still feel safe.
Only a few people know that I consume, you know, my neighbors or whatever the church,
the employment, you know, nobody knows anything about it.
(25:10):
And if I go into a program, or what are they all going to say if I'm so, yeah, I can go
to the dispensary and buy it now.
Well, there's still a lot of stigma that we have to deal with in there.
So we'll see.
Let's cross our fingers and hope some good things happen in 2025.
I'm just, I think most people would just say, and myself included is we're just happy to
(25:31):
see some progress.
Yes.
You know, baby steps is cool, you know, as long as we can get there.
I mean, we're not trying to get, you know, five years, five years is a little pushing
it, you know, I would say, but like you said, we got to play with the cards were dealt.
It's terms is like in terms of what you guys do, you know, so I appreciate you, man.
(25:54):
I really appreciate you, Tim, talking with me.
We'll have to, we're going to stay in touch.
Yeah, stay in touch.
Appreciate the invite and, you know, hey, if the buck eyes ain't winning, go blitz.
They're terrible this year.
Absolutely terrible, but we won't talk about that.
I appreciate you.
(26:17):
Have a good rest of your night.
When it comes to cannabis, we're all one family.
For sure.
For sure.
I agree.
Have a good rest of your night, Tim.
You as well, Ryan.
Let's play or?
(26:37):
That's serious.
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