[CLIP] Ben Cort: The Truth About the Marijuana Industry and the Effects of High-Potency THC

So, the industry in itself in North America is $30 billion this year. The estimates are by 2030, it'll be worth mid $70 billion, or they'll do mid $70 billion in commerce. To contextualize that, if we sell $30 billion worth of cannabis this year in North America, we will sell $24 billion worth of books in this country. So we're buying more weed than we are books. We are talking about tens of billions, if not ultimately hundreds of billions. The international market is certainly controlled by several big players, but I can tell you that almost 85% of the dispensaries in Colorado are owned by 14 men. Wow. So ultimately, is it just this legalization or decriminalization, legalization, coupled with these commercialized bills, such as the one in Colorado, that essentially created the reality or incentive structures for this? Is that what you're seeing? Absolutely. The numbers for THC potency were steadily rising, steadily rising, and then we open retail and they do this, because there's nobody looking over their shoulder, making sure that what they're presenting to the public is safe. There are no limitations on what they can put out there. They can put any potency they want. So things that five years ago we thought were absolutely impossible to produce, I mean, five years ago, the idea of getting more than 30% THC in a plant was laughable. And now we're in the mid-40s. Where we are right now, these products we're consuming, if your viewers want to see something interesting, Google something called a distillate, which is making up a huge portion of the market in recreational states. This is THC separated at the submolecular level, just to isolate the delta-9 THC from it. One protein spike is isolated to pull this stuff out. So we gave this industry absolute free reign with no guardrails at all. Science takes time, and certainly science around cannabis takes real time. And so we gave them unrestricted access. The more you can sell, the more money you're going to make. The stronger it is, the higher the rates of addiction. And boy, did they take advantage of that. The thing that's always made me laugh on my good days, cry on my bad days, is why we thought this would be different than every other vice substance we have tried this with in this country. Alcohol. 80% of the booze in this country is consumed by 20% of the consumers, the problem users. Tobacco. It wasn't until we started adding eight times the nicotine to tobacco that we really started bumping into the problems that we've got with it. The opiate crisis we are in today was caused by huge pharmaceutical companies pushing their products on us in order to make more money. Never in this country have we appropriately regulated a vice substance. And the idea that we would do it on this one, with less infrastructure, no FDA involvement, always made me scratch my head. It's fascinating because one of the themes common on this show over the last few years has been regulatory capture, essentially. How big industry has huge influence in agencies such as the CDC and FDA, like shocking levels that many of us weren't aware of at all. But here you're saying that there actually is no regulation. Is there any? There's certainly regulation on the books. The enforcement, there is absolutely none. There was an open records request that demonstrates the difference between how many checks the marijuana enforcement did versus the alcohol division did in Colorado. I mean, it's like 80 to one, even though the marijuana enforcement division has twice the employees. The idea that in Colorado, we're the thought leaders, everybody will say, you guys are the best, you've built this regulatory infrastructure. Colorado hasn't independently verified a single test for potency or purity since 2015. We reached out to Colorado's marijuana enforcement division, the MED, to verify this. We are currently in communication and have not yet received a definitive response. The whistleblower's name was Sarah Ufer, who's become a dear friend, and I hope someone gives her a lab again, because she did amazing work, but she decided to tell the truth and the state shut her down. The things that we find in these plants, from the growth accelerators that they use, the pesticides that they use, and no one's making sure this is safe. There are pesticides that we find regularly inside of cannabis plants that are not safe for topical animal use, and this is being inhaled by human beings. I've written about it, there are a lot of other people who've written extensively about it, but we just don't have the infrastructure to test for potency or purity, because that's done at a federal level, that's FDA. States are not equipped to do that. If we want to get them there, we need to make a very serious investment in infrastructure. You just said that it's double the infrastructure in Colorado than the alcohol enforcement or regulation. What are these people doing? They're learning on the job so that they can go and work for the cannabis industry. Colorado's first cannabis czar held the job for a year and a half and then started a huge consulting firm teaching people how to take cannabis companies into different states, Andrew Friedman. The amount of nepotism that has gone from the Marijuana Enforcement Division into the industry is enough to make absolutely anybody shake their heads. Marijuana Enforcement Division is well-funded. Marijuana Enforcement Division sits on their hands because they want to make friends with the people inside of the industry. Thanks to my friend Don Reinfeld at Blue Rising in Colorado, a great deal of this has been publicly published. Shannon Gray, the MED's Marijuana Communications Specialist, told us that any state licensing authority and any MED employee is prohibited from working for or getting money from the industry for six months following their employment with MED. Ms. Gray also noted that Andrew Friedman and other cannabis czars technically work for the governor's office, not the MED. However, a quick search on LinkedIn revealed a surprising number of former MED employees who currently work for private marijuana-related business. What has been the response of the industry to your work? I once got offered a significant contract by a company that said that they'd like me to consult with them on how to do things the right way, which I interpreted as stop talking. I didn't take that contract. The marijuana industry in Colorado and nationwide is playing a very simple and predictable game. The slippery slope argument, something I've always thought is pretty silly. Any threat to what we do now ultimately will lead in taking away all access to this again. They won't be checked. They won't allow any sort of rational lawmaking. For example, House Bill 1317 in Colorado, which passed last year, was an attempt to put any kind of potency cap on THC in Colorado. We would have taken 80%. We would have taken 95% just because it was a cap. And the lower the potency, the fewer the problems we have. Conversely, the lower the potency, the lower the addiction rates. So they had no interest in that. House Bill 1317, in the end, what we were able to do was to get the School of Medicine in Colorado to do a review of all of the data that's out there and then suggest what could be a cap down the road. There was no cap associated with it. They even fought back, I mean, tooth and nail, they fought back on the warnings that went on the concentrate packages, including, here's an interesting one for you, the warnings that come with every purchase of concentrate, which was what I was talking about before, those distillates, those intense forms of THC. Easy way to think about it. Concentrates are to cannabis what crack is to coca. It's a highly refined byproduct.