WILLAMETTE WEEK | WIZARD OF WEED | APRIL 2018

6 Ways Oregon is Building a Better Cannabis Industry

The honeymoon is cashed.

For the first few years of legal cannabis in Oregon, the simple, surreal experience of being allowed to walk into a building, buy a gram or two of weed, and go home to smoke without fear of legal reprisal was enough.

Now comes the hard part.

With the dust kicked up by the initial Green Rush beginning to settle, a view of the nascent cannabis industry is coming into focus. And like any industry, it's got some problems.

Thankfully, there are also a lot of people within the industry committed to solving those problems before they become entrenched. Here are six innovative ideas that are helping build a better cannabis industry.

1. Portland's ""Wizard of Weed"" wants to make medical marijuana as reliable as ibuprofen.

With most cannabis, what you feel is what you get.

A nug of Blue Dream from one grower might make you feel energized, while another might help with your insomnia. If you're looking for a specific effect, especially a therapeutic one, you might be subject to a long process of trial and error, with no guarantee of consistency. And since cannabis was outlawed for so long, there's precious little high-level scientific research to help guide your decisions.

Portland's Jeremy Plumb is trying to change all that. He wants to help make cannabis every bit as reliable and predictable in its effects as ibuprofen or caffeine. Plumb, often cutely called the ""Wizard of Weed"" in stories by national outlets, is a ubiquitous presence in Portland marijuana. He's the co-founder of Farma dispensary, the WW-sponsored Cultivation Classic cannabis competition, and the Open Cannabis Project, dedicated to documenting the cannabis genome.

But last June, Plumb inaugurated yet another role: director of production science at high-tech Portland-area grower Pruf Cultivar. At Pruf, Plumb is trying to use tightly controlled growing experiments to attain results that hadn't previously been possible: He wants to map the genetic and environmental factors that give cannabis specific therapeutic effects.

The problem Plumb is trying to overcome at Pruf is also the thing that makes cannabis so promising as a therapeutic drug: the almost unrivalled complexity of the plant. Even when amounts of THC and CBD are the same, the therapeutic and psychoactive effects of a given cannabis plant are greatly affected by a vast number of chemicals called cannabinoids and terpenes, which can vary widely from plant to plant.

""The kind of diversity in this one species of plant is really extreme,"" he says. ""It's like growing tomatoes and tobacco in the same facility.""

Even if you give the same seed to four different growers, Plumb says you're likely to end up with four plants with radically different chemistries, which arise during growing because of differing light wavelength, temperature, humidity and carbon-dioxide density in the air.

""The different chemistry will have pronounced effects,"" he says. ""There will be subtle differences. These states are subjective in many cases, and human physiology is diverse.""

This variability also affects medical doctors' willingness to prescribe.

""If you talk to many doctors,"" says Plumb, ""the key to being taken seriously is to have consistent attributes. So long as there is a huge range of effects, doctors don't want to make referrals. Leading hospice providers believe in the therapeutic benefits but are concerned about the ways it can provoke anxiety and have negative and harmful effects.""

The key to cataloging therapeutic benefits more consistently, Plumb believes, is the ability to conduct controlled, reproducible experiments in growing.

This isn't a new goal for Plumb—he began this work at a now-defunct farm called Newcleus Nurseries two years ago, and his Farma dispensaries test for individual terpenes rather than just display CBD and THC percentages. But at Newcleus, he didn't have the resources he has at Pruf.

""At Pruf, one of the great things is that we have controlled environments,"" he says. The team at Pruf can modulate temperature, light, humidity and other factors and record the effects on the chemotype of the plant. ""I was the luckiest guy ever to find this team that had all kinds of other talents: operational capacity, technical capacity.""

Plumb and his team hope to help pinpoint the mix of cannabinoids and terpenes that help bring about the desired therapeutic result. There's still a lot of ground to cover, but Plumb is optimistic about harnessing cannabis's medical potential.

""If we can nail this down, in controlled environments with many different [growing] chambers, we're really creating a revolutionary supply chain. Long-term, quality-of-life improvement programs can begin,"" Plumb says. ""In a time of commercial recreation, people have become jaded about medical cannabis. We're hoping to help the poor and the sick and the dying—not just the new, hip recreational customer."" MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

2. The Open Cannabis Project is tapping the public to protect cannabis from corporate monopolization.

Finding a strain or particular genetic attribute that works for your specific needs is a uniquely satisfying triumph.

If I catch a whiff of that familiar, funky scent of Girl Scout Cookies, I rest easy knowing it will give me a boost of cheery motivation for my gloomy variety of stress. I don't know how every strain will taste or feel just based on smell, but I do know that some mix of those GSC genes gives me exactly what I need to unwind worries without turning my brain off.

I also know that one day, the wrong company could patent the Girl Scout Cookies strain and I wouldn't be able to find anything other than a watered-down copy. The actual growers who invented the strain wouldn't be allowed to cultivate it without infringing on some corporation's rights. Thinking about the corporate monopolization of cannabis makes me need something heavier than GSC.

Fortunately for us Girl Scouts, local cannabis genome lab Phylos Bioscience has collected samples from more than 50 varieties of Cookies, which are to be posted publicly by the Open Cannabis Project. Now if someone wants to file a patent on any of these varieties, those genetic reports serve as ""prior art,"" or evidence that the strain existed already.

This open-sourced approach to a comprehensive scientific cannabis database could not only save the soul and botanical integrity of the industry, but also show that we can take control of the scientific progress we believe in—proof that we have a chance at maintaining accurate and ethical databases in a post-algorithm world.

After founding her own open-source mapmaking website, Beth Schechter, executive director of the OCP, is optimistic about the potentially radical difference these efforts could make.

""I see design, technology and community engagement as tools to unfuck the world,"" says Schechter. ""Our job [at OCP] is to help protect people from facing unwarranted cease-and-desist orders for growing the same strain they've been growing for decades.""

It's not about filing your own patent faster than your competition. It's about getting as much info into the public so that we're collectively free, not just individually protected.

There are thousands of patent applications on cannabis-related products and processes currently pending. Since the prior-art approach has a two-year window, this public database also cuts any illegitimate patents already in process ""off at their knees.""

""If we do our job well, we can create one of the largest and most robust open-source, scientifically verified collections of cannabis data that the world has ever seen,"" says Schechter. ""And that's rad for all kinds of reasons.""

Schechter points out that without a baseline for cannabis data, ""there's not a great way to parse through all of the new information being introduced to the public. We want to aggregate as much data as possible so that we can truly understand what's new or anomalous and what's not.""

If you grow cannabis, have ever gotten a sample tested and still have a copy of that lab report, visit the OCP website at opencannabisproject.org to reach out about contributing your data to the database.

""The older the better,"" Schechter says. ""Anything to prove that x or y genetic or chemovar reading has been around for a long time. Some patents have been on the books since 2013.""

Expired or not, your crinkled, 4-year-old Sour Diesel test result from a lab that doesn't exist anymore is one piece closer to ruining some patent-hungry ghoul's day and protecting that strain for decades to come. LAUREN YOSHIKO.

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