Tapping into many experts who are currently incarcerated could be important to helping the cannabis industry grow and improve, according to panelists who participated in Friday’s JR/Now webinar. (JR screen shot)
While highly educated businesspeople forge ahead into the unknown of the confusing but highly lucrative cannabis market in Oklahoma, many of the real experts in the field are sitting in jail, serving time as punishment for creating a successful cannabis business.
Tapping into that resource could help the cannabis industry grow and improve, according to panelists who participated in Friday’s JR/Now webinar.
Tyrone Russell, president of the Cleveland School of Cannabis; Kevin Greene, vice president of the Cleveland School of Cannabis; Brian Adams, director of education at the Cleveland School of Cannabis; and Sam Liebhart, CEO and founder of Vertical Acres, joined Journal Record Interim Editor Joe Dowd for a lively discussion about what is needed now to advance the medical marijuana industry in Oklahoma.
Buying product and materials in the industry now is akin to the pawnshop business, with buyers and sellers negotiating price based on their best estimate of the product’s value, Liebhart said. Industry players need to build better relationships and learn more about inventory management, manufacture and more, he said.
“There’s a huge range of options out there and there’s very little quality control,” Liebhart said. “That puts buyers and producers in a bind. … There’s a lot of good actors, there’s some bad actors. At the end of the day, they’re creating additional costs in the supply chain.”
Meanwhile, many of the finest cannabis connoisseurs in the state are often sitting behind bars for working in the cannabis industry before the law allowed, their expertise untapped.
“One thing that I would like to see happen in the future is we start to utilize folks that are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated for cannabis to come out as the experts in the field as this market grows, to help provide further education for people who may not fully know about the cannabis industry,” Russell said.
“We have major players jumping into the game who have deep pockets but not a lot of cannabis education,” Russell said. “And then you have these people with a wealth of information locked up behind bars who have information that could help drive this industry.”
Legal issues with cannabis has limited the amount of formal research available to help determine best practices or establish the markers of high-quality or inferior product, Russell said.
But there exists a group of people with a master’s-level education in the product, who’ve been handling growth, supply chain and distribution of the product for years – people who with one look or whiff of the product can determine its best attributes. And a lot of those people are in jail, Russell said.
“If we really start to take this industry seriously we’re going to start to find those experts who we’ve locked up for running super successful businesses or having super successful knowledgeable noses who’ve been buying the best cannabis for so long, and have been thrown away for it.”
Even in the medical industry, there are times when the consumer has greater knowledge of cannabis than the doctor who has the authority to issue a medical marijuana card, Adams said.
“Look at Oklahoma, the biggest medical cannabis market in the country when you look at per capita,” Adams said. “According to Politico, more than 360,000 Oklahoman have a medical card, but they probably went to a physician that only has a few hours of continuing education training.”
Ideally, the industry will find a way to bridge the knowledge of the streets with scientific analysis to create an education curriculum for the industry, Liebhart said.
“That’s going to allow us to run this whole thing a lot smoother,” Greene said, noting that the agricultural industry knows exactly when to harvest certain plants for maximum value and presentation once it reaches the shelves of the grocery store, and the same could be done for cannabis.
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