David Berg, President and CTO of Strainprint, joined me on the latest episode of Impetus Digital‘s Fireside Chat to explore the current state of the medical cannabis industry in Canada and overseas and how Strainprint is bringing innovation to the industry. We also discussed the challenges encountered when building and marketing a company in this highly regulated and stigmatized industry, and much more.
Below is a preview of our conversation:
Q: There’s an area of concern of getting attached to being named–or misnamed–when you’re getting associated with [drugs, opioids, addiction, mental health issues]. How is the Cannabis industry trying to overcome that negative connotation?
A: That’s a really interesting point. I have this discussion quite frequently with pharmacists, physicians, and people that are compounding these products. The reality is the way things are at right now, it’s easier for a physician or a pharmacist to dispense a fentanyl patch than it is for them to recommend a cannabis product. When they are recommending cannabis products, this is certainly the case in the majority of cases, they’re using measures of THC and CBD as the relevant measure of what is working and what is not. Cannabis is a lot more than that.
The reality is the research that is out there, the quality of it, the level of understanding, the way that we’re taught to look at data and interaction, isn’t really all that brand-new, not just towards cannabis but to plant-based medicines in general. What we’re starting to see is more of a shift from a clinical approach to medicine, more to something of an osteopathic or a holistic approach – the whole body, whole mind medicine. That’s what we’re starting to see a curve, but it’s still trumped by 70 years of prohibition and lack of understanding.
I think things like the hand-back, the Farm Bill, providing access to data to doctors, that’s what we are all about. We are analyzing people’s interaction with products and figuring out how and why they are responding based on the products that they’re using. It’s through that observation and through the proper cultivation of that data that we’re hopeful we’re going to change minds…
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with David Berg, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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