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This month’s Healer webinar, led by Dustin Sulak, DO, explores new medical cannabis research including potential benefits for cancer, wound healing, ALS, Alzheimer’s, and terpenes like alpha-pinene.

Medical Cannabis Research Update: Cancer, Wound Healing, ALS, Alzheimer’s, and Terpenes

An examination of survey data finds state cannabis laws strongly shape delta-8-THC use, with highest rates in prohibition states.

New Study Links Delta-8-THC Use to State Cannabis Laws and Marijuana Restrictions

Here, we bring you our top five recent articles covering federal hemp ban, an interview with Reginald Gaudino, PhD, the reintroduced MORE Act, Delaware cannabis sales and rezoning, and restricting intoxicating hemp-derived cannabinoids. 

Best of the Week: August 29 – September 4, 2025

Recent research highlights the potential of cannabinoids as alternative treatments for atopic dermatitis, showcasing their anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.

Effects of CBD, THC, and Minor Cannabinoids Studied for Atopic Dermatitis

THC drinks are shaping a new drinking culture. A recent report dives into market growth, state regulations, and the challenges facing the industry.

THC Beverages: A Look at the Rapidly Growing Market

In our Higher Education: Research Initiatives That Deepen Our Understanding of Cannabis supplement, 

 interviewed Carrie Cuttler, PhD, Co-Director of the Center for Cannabis Policy Research and Outreach (CCPRO) at Washington State University.

In this video clip, Dr. Cuttler explains the barriers to research on the acute effects of cannabis, including the Schedule I classification of cannabis, administrative hurdles, cost, and more.

 to read the full expert interviews, including an interview with Reginald Gaudino, PhD, Director of the Cannabis Research Institute, Discovery Partners Institute.

In this interview clip from our Higher Education: Research Initiatives That Deepen Our Understanding of Cannabis supplement, Carrie Cuttler, PhD explains the administrative hurdles, strict regulations, and other barriers to cannabis research.

Challenges to Cannabis Research: Interview with Carrie Cuttler, PhD

: What would you say are some of the challenges cannabis education and research faces, and how are they being overcome?

: The biggest challenge is the difficulty stemming from that Schedule I classification of cannabis. It's extraordinarily difficult to do any research on the acute effects of cannabis. So it's pretty hard to educate people about those effects when it's so difficult to do the research. Getting a DEA license alone can take upwards of 18 months, and before that, you need approval from the IRB or ethics board, you need approval from the FDA, and those approvals are not easy to get at all.

So that's the number one challenge, is just actually being able to do research on cannabis and its acute effects. And the other issue is that until recently, the DEA has only allowed cannabis researchers to use cannabis sourced from the National Institute of Drug Abuse drug supply, and it is notoriously low quality, low potency cannabis relative to what we have in the cannabis dispensaries being legally sold.

And the DEA did change their policies, and they started to approve other producers that produce cannabis. It's a little bit more akin to market cannabis, but the problem is that a lot of those companies don't have the R&D done to support an IND from the FDA, so you can't get cleared through the FDA to use that cannabis, and if it is cleared, then they charge an exorbitant amount for it. So I've seen companies trying to charge researchers $20,000 for what would retail for, like, $200 for very, very small amounts. So it makes it very cost prohibitive.

All these factors make it really, really difficult, which is why our study is the first approved in the State of Washington, because most people are kind of scared off by all the administrative hurdles, paperwork, logistics, and cost associated with all of it.

: I can imagine they'd be frightened away. That's really interesting that this research is just now happening, because I know cannabis has been legal, medical and recreational, for a long time in Washington, but it still hasn’t reached the point of a lot of research.

: No, really, the Schedule I classification is really just keeping cannabis out of the hands of scientists and not keeping it out of the hands of the consumer, because in most states there's some level of legal access to cannabis, and that is a really unfortunate situation that is not protecting public health at all.

: Would you say if there was no Schedule I classification, would the floodgates open on research?

: Yeah, if people could just go into legal dispensaries, purchase cannabis, and give it to people in their labs, then the floodgates would open. There'd be a ton of people doing this research.

Videos

In this video clip, Dr. Cuttler explains the research she has completed at The Health and Cognition (THC) Lab at WSU. The studies have focused the effects of chronic use and acute use of cannabis.

In this interview clip from our Higher Education: Research Initiatives That Deepen Our Understanding of Cannabis supplement, Carrie Cuttler, PhD, describes results from a recent placebo-controlled FDA-approved clinical trial on THC’s impact on memory.

Research at The Health and Congition (THC) Lab: Interview with Carrie Cuttler, PhD

: Can you tell us more about The Health and Cognition Lab at WSU, how did you first become involved, and how have you seen the program evolve?

: Yeah, so this is my lab. I established this lab when I first came to Washington State University in 2014. When I first arrived at WSU, the legal cannabis dispensaries were first opening their doors, and so I really thought that cannabis research in our state especially would be critically important and very much needed. I established The Health and Cognition Lab, and I really started back then just looking at the effects of the regular chronic use of cannabis, due to the legal barriers surrounding the acute effects of cannabis. Because cannabis is a Schedule I drug, according to the federal government, and we are a federally funded institution, so we have to abide by federal law, it's very difficult to do research on the acute effects. So I started by just looking at the effects of chronic cannabis use when people are entirely sober. Looking at effects, for example, on cognition and memory and things like that.

Then I started to find and use some legal workarounds to try to understand more about the acute effects of cannabis. So I was analyzing big app data from a medical cannabis app, looking at symptom ratings before and after use as a function of different products and doses and whatnot. I also developed a Zoom method where we randomly assign people to purchase and use specific products sold at legal dispensaries, bring them home, use them at home on Zoom when we observe them, and then we would look at various outcomes, again, predominantly focusing on cognition, and those acute effects on cognition.

Now I'm actually running proper placebo-controlled laboratory investigations of THC and some minor cannabinoids, collaborating with Dr. McLaughlin, who has a Schedule 1 license with the DEA, and we have FDA approval. We're actually currently just about to finish this week, the very first FDA approved clinical trial of cannabis in the State of Washington.

: Are you able to tell us some of the significant results from the research?

: Yes, I mean that study we largely devised and designed to look at the acute effects of a lower dose, 20 milligrams, a higher dose, 40 milligrams of THC, on various aspects of memory relative to a placebo group. And I was trying to figure out which aspects of memory are impaired and which aspects are spared by acute cannabis intoxication, because most research on memory is just focused on verbal memory, and some studies have looked at things like working memory, but they really haven't looked at the entire like gamut of different kinds of memory, including prospective memory, temporal order memory, false memory and all this stuff. And what I'm finding is that cannabis just broadly negatively impacts basically every aspect of memory. We're not seeing much evidence that anything is very spared here. We're finding pretty robust effects on every aspect of memory.

Because we have to keep people in the lab for a full four hours after they inhale cannabis to make sure they're entirely sober, and we can only test their memory for an hour, we have them for an extra three hours. So for three hours, they spend their time in a chill out room, and it's filled with snacks and entertainment, PlayStation, but also a movie theater concession stand of snacks, essentially. And we observe them through a one-way mirror, and we're looking at the munchies phenomenon as well, and we're finding very robust evidence for the munchies phenomenon that when people are acutely intoxicated, they're eating about double the calories of people who are on the placebo.

: Are you going to do more in the future?

: Yes, we would. Hopefully, this is just the first of many, we're currently planning the follow up study where we're going to also look at various aspects of cognition, but then we'll also use EEG to look at brain activity.

In this video clip, Dr. Cuttler shares the goals and projects of the CCPRO, as well as the impacts of the cannabis research seminar series. 

 Carrie Cuttler, PhD explains the goals of the Center for Cannabis Policy Research and Outreach at Washington State University

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Cannabis Research: Interview with Carrie Cuttler, PhD

: Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us. We're here today with Carrie Cutler, the co-director of the Center for Cannabis Policy Research and Outreach at Washington State University. She is also an associate professor with the Department of Psychology, and thank you so much for joining us today, Carrie, we're excited to hear more.

: Could you tell us more about the Center for Cannabis Policy Research and Outreach at WSU in terms of the four themes, various goals, and some of the research projects currently being conducted?

: Yes, thank you. So the CCPRO was established by Washington State University to support cannabis research at our institution, so we really provide practical support, guidance, as well as grants to investigators at WSU to support cannabis research. Our center receives funds through Initiative 502. Basically, we get a small percentage of the excise tax dollars from the sales of legal cannabis in our state, and we distribute those funds through various grant competitions, including a faculty seed grant competition, we have a graduate student summer research grant competition, and we also provide some financial support to students to share their research at cannabis conferences. So as you indicated, there are four themes. These are health and well-being, public policy and safety, agricultural research and economics, just to broadly support all the various research activities that are happening surrounding cannabis.

So with respect to health and well-being, WSU faculty conduct translational science as well as basic science related to the impact of cannabis on health. This ranges from animal studies on the impact of cannabis on brain development, impact of THC and CBD on pain, impacts of cannabis on mental health and stress, and even prevention of problematic cannabis use.

With respect to public policy and safety, we have researchers doing research on roadside detection, workplace safety, and cannabis use impacts of decriminalization on crime and the justice system.

With respect to agricultural research, we have faculty who are doing ag research on industrial hemp that's grown for CBD textiles, food, fiber in compliance with state and federal law, as well as looking at strong crop production and pest management practices.

And then with respect to economics, we have faculty conducting research on issues related to the cannabis industry: taxation, banking, economic impacts, cannabis, workplace issues, and so forth.

: Wow, that's a huge variety of topics, and covers a lot there, but all very significant.

: We have a lot of cannabis researchers at WSU, in part because cannabis is legal in our state, and so it really it falls on us, especially as a land grant institution, to make sure that we are on top of the science of cannabis.

: So what does the cannabis research seminar series entail?

: This is one seminar series. It's sponsored through the CCPRO. It's a monthly seminar series that we sponsor, and it's a graduate student named Jeremy Boutin and who really runs the seminar series and helps to get speakers to give monthly seminars on cannabis research at WSU. It's usually grad students and faculty who are doing the research, they present their findings to other people at WSU who are interested in learning more about the cannabis science that's happening. So it's just an outlet for some of our findings and a way for us to get together, chat, network, and potentially find collaborations within the system as well.

: Nice. Those are super important as well. Collaborations, especially in this industry, are crucial.

In this interview clip from our Higher Education: Research Initiatives That Deepen Our Understanding of Cannabis supplement, Carrie Cuttler, PhD, explains the goals and projects of the Center for Cannabis Policy Research and Outreach at Washington State University.

Daniela Vergara, PhD, explains her work with the Cornell Cooperative Extension.

Cornell Work, Research, and Educational Resources: Daniela Vergara, PhD

Can you tell me a little bit about kind of your current work with Cornell University. How you've kind of applied your past with genetics into there, and how it's different from what you've done previously?

Yeah, so I work for Cornell Cooperative Extension, and that's kind of extension and is a part of the university that extends beyond the university. So I am the person that helps the industry and the person that goes and figures out how to troubleshoot or how to help farmers. Somehow, I've learned a ton. It has been a hard role, because I am only allowed to work with hemp. However, there is not a ton of hemp going on, right? Like, really people are growing marijuana. So, there's an issue there. I try to provide reliable information without getting the university or myself in trouble. I have learned a lot because I am the one that helps people navigate to any issue. So, I get phone calls all the time, or texts all the time. So my phone doesn't ring, it doesn't make any noise. Whenever I pick it up, I figure out whether there's something going on, because otherwise I would go crazy. And there's some people that can text you at four in the morning, or there's others that can text you at midnight, right? Farming really does not have a time, like the plants do not know that it's a Sunday. 

I really like the interactions with people. I feel that my job is very fulfilling, because I feel that I am helping people, but I at the end of the day, I think that they are helping me, because I've learned so much about legality. I get calls about how do I interpret this regulation, or how do I read this COA, or what do I do with my soil. And I do not have that background, so I've had to learn, or I have to self teach myself many things. Or, I have people at Cornell that I can rely on, you know, like, there's about ton of people that know a lot about soil, my boss included. But it's like, okay, what do you do when you have heavy metals in your field? Like, what do you do with that? Or how do you read the soil analysis and so whenever someone needs, okay, I need a processor. Okay, I'll give you the contacts that I have. So it's very contact. I text people, I'm gonna introduce you to so and so. Oh yeah, I have that contact information. Let me do you know so and so. 

Because I covered the entire state, I know people everywhere. Took me a while to realize that the people in Buffalo know the people from Buffalo, they probably do not know the people from Hudson Valley. It took me a while to figure that out. Believe it or not. yeah, That's kind of my role, and I'm trying to figure out productivity. How much is the state producing? The governmental entity should know, and they should have the data out there. But here we are trying to guess, and I'm trying to know how to improve the growing conditions for people.

So wonder if you could maybe elaborate on, kind of the some of the things that you've learned in your time at the Cornell Cooperative Extension, kind of about productivity in the hemp space in New York in particular, and what you're hoping to continue to learn and grow with that research.

So what have I learned about productivity? I guess that it depends on what size operation you have. If you are a one man show you need to be very careful about what you grow and when you grow it. For example, perhaps it is not a good idea to grow photo period starting on June 1st, because then when you are going to harvest them in October, they're going to be huge, and perhaps you're not going to be able to do it alone. So maybe, if you're going to grow photo periods, maybe starting them in July would be a better idea. They're going to be smaller, probably they're going to have less yield. I cannot tell you exactly how much less, because we don't have those numbers, but they're going to haveless yield. But you're going to be able to do it alone, and probably you won't have to spend money on other workers, right? I think that auto flowers provide good alternative as well. And with auto flowers, perhaps you're not going to get as many a buds, but you don't have to trellis them. You don't have to prune them. You kind of like, in a way, I mean, I know that is, this is not the way, right? But you kind of just set them and forget them. And so it depends, are you going to go for processing, or are you going to go for for flower, right? I am kind of in the mindset a little bit with my work at Cornell. 

I'm also in the mindset of processing right now. So we have developed several free resources for growers. We have a manual that we released in 2023 that I led. That was my first big job, when I got at Cornell. Then we translated that manual into Spanish. Then we did a guidebook in 2024. In the manual we have one page post harvest, it's one page. And so now I wish, I want to expand that one page into what's harvest and post harvest, which is a ton. And then processing, and processing, I want to make it very biochemistry-oriented. I realized when I moved to the US that I would have had a minor in Chemistry, because in Colombia, the undergrads are at that time, at least, were five years and I took, I don't know how many chemistry classes, but many, for some reason. They were required. It's not that I chose them. No, they were required. So I took a ton of chemistry classes. I would venture to say that I understand it a little bit, although I think it's kind of arrogance, because, hopefully there's not a chemist that is, but in any case, I would like to know more about processing. Why would you process with, butane or propane instead of ethanol? What are the advantages of these advantages? What do you need? Is it more profitable? Are you producing more or is it better quality? I don't know, all of those things. And then you can produce resin, rosin, diamonds, butter, shutter, etc. Can you do a more through ethanol? Can you do it more through solvent and solventless? That's all of those questions are right now, where I'm kind of going, everything is collaborative. Everything that I do is collaborative.

Cornell Work, Research, and Educational Resources: Interview with Daniela Vergara, PhD

Daniela Vergara, PhD, discusses the high genetic diversity of the cannabis genome and data legal challenges.

Cannabis Genome, Diversity, and Legal Challenges: Daniela Vergara, PhD

Now, when you started kind of researching cannabis genomics, what were some of the kind of takeaways, what were some of the things you learned from that? What are some of the things you know, what were your goals as you were kind of studying the genomics and, you know, the work that needed to be done in cannabis at that time?

That's a loaded question, because so first, it was actually my husband's idea to work with cannabis. He was like, "when we moved here all the way, because cannabis is legal and and why sunflowers? No one cares about sunflowers. Why not cannabis?" So in any case, that's how it started. This was a Friday night, and so that weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I went online and I looked up the resources that were available. And for me, kind of this has always been a plant that is so common, right? And everyone uses it, so at least that's what I thought back then. Now things have changed, but the way everything should be known about this plant, which was totally not true, because of illegality, right? 

Then there was a genome that was sequenced by a group in Canada that was led by Jonathan Page, who's one of the big cannabis researchers. He had a paper, where he was a senior author, I believe, van Bakel, et al, 2011 where theysequenced the genome, and they had an assembly. Assembly is when you kind of put the genome together into, you know, like a puzzle, right? You take all of the little pieces after sequencing, and you kind of build a puzzle, and the puzzle was very fragmented, right? So just imagine that your puzzle is just little pieces, but it's not close together, it has a ton of gaps, so it was very fragmented. 

So there was something that could be done there, and we did. I started working with Steep Hill, they wanted me to work with the cannabinoid gene. So first, I was working again in host parasite coevolution when I was in Indiana, and that there's a big question in evolutionary biology in general that Darwin himself posed, which is, 'why do organisms reproduce sexually,' right? Why are there males and why are there females? Why do females not clone? 

One of the answers, which was the one that I was related to, is because you need diversity to escape from parasite pressure, especially if you have a very virulent disease. A disease that kills you or a disease that castrates you, and your fitness is going to be zero. One of the reasons to have variation, and guess what? Males provide that diversity, right? That's why you and your brother are different. Unless you're identical twins. 

So, I was coming with that mindset, and I was really intrigued by the fact that cannabis has males and has females, but it also has malicious individuals. And in plants, you don't see that, that often. Plants are usually, you have the perfect flower where you have the male parts and the female parts. 

But in cannabis, you don't have that. You have something that is called dioecy, where you have males and females. And I just got a paper published on that, actually, on a review on on dioecine cannabis and what's out there. So, that was what intrigued me the most. I did not realize that working with cannabis was going to be such a hassle, right? That one of the first things that I had to do was meet with lawyers. It's like, well, we're downloading data from the internet, right? This is DNA. Could be an elephant. It could be a palm tree. You just see on the on the screen ATGCs, millions and millions of them. 

In any case, I didn't realize that it was gonna be a legal issue, that everyone had opinions. Everyone has opinions, right? Everyone, like your neighbor, probably has opinions. And not only that, but also, well, the legality, but also that it was an entire industry. This was an entire industry where you have accountants, architects, engineers, and marketers. I had never met a marketer in my life before, until I started. I didn't realize that it was an entire industry. For me, it was a plant, and instead of growing a tomato or like your plant in the living room, it was cannabis. All of those things started shifting while I started working.

It's really interesting. Like, when you think about genetics particularly, I mean, it exists in other spaces, but particularly in cannabis, genetics is a really, like, a lot of it is about branding, right?

I think it's interesting. I think it's funny because at the end of the day, for me, the names do not mean much, right? And then it's like, okay, so what strain is this? And it's like, well, it's the strain Pepe Le Pew. Doesn't really matter. Do you want to change the name? You can change it. Sure, change it. Then when I say these things out loud to people, because throughout my research, we've found that many of the strains are misnamed. So you have a blue dream that's more closely related to something else. 

People are very attached to their names. And I kind of in a way I understand it because your name's Sebastian, and you're not named John, and your parents named you Sebastian, right? And if your middle name is John, because your grandfather was named John. So that name means something to someone. That doesn't mean that you're related to another Sebastian, at all. You are not related whatsoever. And in cannabis, is the same situation. 

There are some strains that you do see that. Maybe these were clones because they're closely related, but for many, I participated in, 'let's name this strain'. And then it's like, 'Oh, it smells like mango. Let's call it Mango Tango', right? That's how the name was born and then the best name gets a t-shirt. At the end of the day, those names really do not mean much. When people ask me those, I'm just like, 'Yeah, sure. Is this an indica or is this a sativa? What do you want it to be?' I said, 'Well, it's a hybrid'. That's exactly it. It's a hybrid. And I tell people rename, it. You won the High Times Cup last year. Just rename it and rebrand it. And then sometimes people take this as I'm being offensive. I'm like, No, doesn't mean much. Just rename it and then win it again.

How does that in terms of, like, genetic diversity of cannabis is like, I mean, that must be interesting from a genetics perspective, but then, like, does it like become a hassle as a researcher and how you study it?

Yes because there's a lot of diversity. So according to my rough estimates cannabis could have as much diversity as I mean, there's other species that have as much diversity, but probably two times or three times as much as the human species. So it is pretty diverse. It does make it difficult, for example, to put the assembly, the puzzle together, because sometimes you don't know, it's hard to differentiate whether these are two different alleles, right? So these are two different forms of the same gene. It's the same gene, but the two different forms I want from mom and from dad are so different from each other, that you think that they are two different genes. So it's like, 'okay, so this is one gene, this is another gene'. And then you can see that in the assemblies that are out there. There's probably 15 right now that are that are out there. And since 2011, well, I started working this in 2013, 2014, since then to now. There's been a ton of new resources and the assemblies have gotten so much better. So, so, so much better. There's still a ton of work to do, but, there's really good assemblies now. 

If you see the assemblies that are right now, you can see how the improvements have been done. But I was with Steep Hill, for example. We tried to assemble a male, a pineapple, banana, Baba Kush. Back in 2017, or so around that time, and we depended on a grower that was growing it for us. Because we're in a university, so we depended like it was, many things were out of our hands. Then when we sequenced it and we tried to assemble it, it was a mess. It turns out that the guy had decided, he told us that it was a fourth generation inbred, which makes it easier when you have inbreeding to do an assembly. But it turns out that he had decided at the last time to cross it with something else, so it was a mess. It was out of our hands. Until then, we did the best we could do, but at the end of the day, that assembly is a very fragmented assembly for that reason, so it is what it is.

Cannabis Genome, Diversity, and Legal Challenges: Interview with Daniela Vergara, PhD

With many years of experience in the cannabis industry, Steve Fuhr, Director of Sales at 

, offers a unique perspective in extraction laboratory development and product innovation.

, Fuhr discusses the potential impacts of cannabis rescheduling, explaining the need for standardization of extraction methods manufacturing to produce high-quality products. He predicts a shift towards nutraceutical-grade products with Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) certification that will allow for new delivery methods. He also highlights cold extraction methods, new compounds, and Nano emulsification, while acknowledging the paradox of obtaining cannabis research and data due to its illegal status.

Watch the video, read a partial transcript below, and 

In this interview, Steve Fuhr of SciPhy Systems, discusses the upcoming impacts  cannabis extraction.

Advancements in Cannabis Extraction and Concentrate Production: An Industry Expert's Insights

What innovations are you envisioning for the future?

: The biggest innovation I'm seeing is the stripping down of the concentrated oils to their constituent parts. And what I mean by that is using various forms of things like liquid-to-liquid chromatography or HPLC chromatography, to separate THC from CBD, and in fact, separate THCA from THC as separate chemicals. To separate the terpenes, the myrcene, the pinene, the limonene, and then putting them back together again in very specific doses so that they can really start to study very specific doses and really call them medicine.

The other thing I see, we talked about this briefly, and I didn't hit on this enough, is extraction methods that are better at capturing those acidic cannabinoids—the THCAs, the CBDAs—where you need to have a process that's very cold and the same is true for terpenes. This is where hydrocarbon is starting to become the dominant extraction method is because it's very cold. The other thing you're going to see is isomerizations, and in fact, there are sub chemicals in cannabis, one in which they're studying, which is supposedly 100 times more powerful than morphine. It's not a cannabinoid, by the way. It would enable us to create pain medicines that are non-addictive and still very powerful. So I think that's what you're going to see, is the breaking down of the plant into its constituent parts, teasing out those elements that we don't even know the name of them yet in many cases, and making them true medicines.

And then the last thing I've seen that's exciting is this concept called Nano emulsification, which is certainly not a new process, but there are new surfactants, new coding systems that will enable edibles, which normally take 30 to 45 minutes, to hit you almost immediately. So that's kind of what I see on the horizon.

I will leave you one last thought, is you have the FDA and many other federal organizations saying we want more data, but on the other hand, it's illegal to do studies. We've had college professors lose their tenured positions because they actually got grants to study cannabis and ended up getting fired by the Board of Education at the college they worked for. And yet, with those two paradoxes, cannabis is the most studied drug on Earth. There's more peer reviewed reports written on cannabis than any other drug worldwide, and so I'm looking forward to these studies coming out and real data being provided. It's a much safer drug. It's got some great potential, and we're looking forward to bringing that potential to the public.

In this interview, Steve Fuhr of SciPhy Systems discusses the upcoming impacts  cannabis extraction.

, offers a unique perspective in extraction laboratory development and innovation.

, Fuhr discusses his experience and predictions in the world of cannabis extraction. In particular, he explains challenges and opportunities faced by cannabis companies in the real estate sector with securing proper permits, properties, and dealing with restrictive banking regulations. Fuhr also highlights the importance of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) regulations for enabling recalls and exporting products to countries with stricter standards.

Watch the video, read a partial transcript below, and check out 

In this interview, Steve Fuhr of SciPhy Systems, discusses cannabis extraction methods, products, and research.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Future of the Cannabis Extraction Industry

Why do you feel 9 out of 10 extraction facilities will shut down in the next 2 years?

: It's interesting. I've made what we call “armchair predictions” on what's going to happen, and now suddenly, a lot of other people making the same predictions. There are three reasons. The first is this whole issue of cannabis companies having been relegated to the worst pieces of real estate, most markets, most of the time. And the problem that creates is when rescheduling occurs and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) starts to enforce GMP guidelines, they're in buildings that will never practically be GMP or they'll have to spend $1.6 million fixing the $1 million building that they don't own, right? And because of current 280E taxes, and all the issues facing cannabis, competing with black markets. People think cannabis owners are making millions of dollars. They're really losing millions of dollars. They don't have that money. So it's that building quality issue that's going to hurt a lot of people.

The second is going to be that when the interstate commerce barriers come down and cannabis entities are able to sell interstate. The bigger, more efficient players are going to start to take big market share very quickly. I'll be one of them in New York, where I'll be able to produce a liter of oil for $33, call it $35. Most people on the East Coast—I know because I work with them—are spending $3,000 and $4,000 to produce that same liter. They will not be able to compete with me—they might, but they're going to have to spend a million and a half on their facility.

And an interesting side point to that: to my knowledge, New York is the only state that is requiring processors to be GMP out of the gate, and that's significant. No other state that I know has mandated that. New York's going to have an edge, even though it's in a very difficult situation right now with licensing, they will have a huge edge over the other players in the country. By most people’s guess, much less than 1% of current processors are GMP.

So, you're going to have real estate issues, you're going to have problems competing with GMP, and you're going to have competition issues, which are going to really force people to scale up, not only make their facility GMP. I'll give you an example, working with a group in Colorado right now where they have a column that's a three-pound column. So they put three pounds of biomass in that column every time they do a run. They can't compete with somebody that does 50 or 150 pounds per run. They just can't. So, those would be the three big reasons.

As keynote speakers for Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024, Drs. Allison Justice and Riley Kirk will take us on a deep dive into their multiyear study, the Science of Smokeability (SOS), a multiphase experiment into the variables that contribute to the cannabis smoking experience. Dr. Justice conducts photobiology research and co-founded the Hemp Mine, an innovative hemp farm and product manufacturer. Dr. Kirk is a natural product chemist with a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences. She previously presented on 

ongoing cannabis education and psychedelics at Cannabis Science Conference Fall 2023

Check out the video, read a partial transcript below, and 

Drs. Allison Justice and Riley Kirk share a preview of their research project that will be presented at Cannabis Science Conference Spring 2024.

Research

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