Kara Ware: Today is the day we finally get to talk about products, but please keep in mind, that each episode builds on the last. So if you haven’t already, go back and listen to the previous five episodes of this season. As we’ve said, whether or not you decide to recommend cannabis in your practice, it is important to be familiar with basic aspects of therapeutic use, like quality, and method of intake, and what to consider when talking to patients about including cannabis in their care plan. So today we’re going to cover the three most important things to know about choosing a product: quality, method of intake and delivery, where to buy, and why.

Nathan Morris: A couple of years ago, I was treating a patient who had high levels of mold toxicity, and this is pretty common in my practice with people that are not getting better. And this particular patient had multiple sclerosis, and we were making some progress. But during my workup, we had spent several hundred dollars on blood and urine testing, and we still couldn’t find the source of the mold. We had her house looked at, and she spent several hundred dollars looking at her home. That came up negative, and so I was kind of perplexed. Where is she getting this mold?

Nathan Morris: So I went back to her living matrix, looked at her history for clues, and focused on her MS diagnosis. And just perchance, I said, “Are you doing anything to help with your symptoms? Are you smoking marijuana, per se?” And she’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m getting it from my cousin.” I’m like, yeah, that may be the bingo moment, right? So cannabis is notorious for high levels of mold, bacteria, heavy metals, and pesticides. The cannabis she was taking was moldy. She was inhaling mold every time she smoked. So something that was probably very beneficial for her symptoms, her neuropathy, and other things she was struggling with was actually maybe hurting her more because it wasn’t clean. And recreational marijuana that people are getting from their cousin doesn’t have universal quality control, of course. They’re not cutting in the right conditions. There’s a lot that goes into it. And who knows where this cousin was getting this cannabis, right?

Nathan Morris: So you don’t want to get your cannabis product from anywhere, is what it comes down to. And so I then told her to go and find a dispensary where I knew that she would get a better quality, a therapeutic product, and her mold went away. So that was just like this huge a-ha moment for me, how important it is when we’re talking to patients about products.